The Book of Duels Read online

  THE BOOK OF DUELS

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, and any real names or locales used in the book are used fictitiously.

  © 2014, Text by Michael Garriga

  © 2014, Cover and interior art by Tynan Kerr

  Ledger art for “A Scalping” © Megan Garriga

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  www.milkweed.org

  Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Rebecca Lown

  Cover illustration by Tynan Kerr

  Interior illustrations by Tynan Kerr and Megan Garriga

  14 15 16 17 18 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Foundation; the Driscoll Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Garriga, Michael Christopher, 1971–

  [Prose works. Selections]

  The book of duels / Michael Garriga ; illustrations by Tynan Kerr.—First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-57131-886-2 (ebook)

  I. Kerr, Tynan, ill. II. Title.

  PS3607.A77335A6 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013043097

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Book of Duels was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

  For Robert Olen Butler

  Table of Contents

  PART I: OFFENSE

  Slouching toward the Land of Nod: Abel v. Cain

  Children of the Sun: Miyamoto Musashi v. Sasaki Kojiro

  First-Called Quits: Josiah Pelham v. Luke Vanderhosen

  Founding Fathers: Alexander Hamilton v. Aaron Burr

  A Scalping: Wiley Thompson v. Asi-yahola

  Steel Hole by Hole: John Henry v. Conor MacKenna

  Into the Greasy Grass: George Custer v. Ptebloka Ska

  Fiesta de Semana Santa: Sueño de Fuego v. Ignacio Lopez y Avaloz

  Night of the Chicken Run: Charles Summers v. George Scarborough

  Dueling Banjos in the Key of A: Billy Redden v. Ronny Cox

  Peleas de Gallo: Caesar Julius v. I Am

  PART II: CHALLENGE

  A Saint and His Dragon: George v. Dragon

  Judicium Dei or Trial by Combat: Jacques Le Gris v. Jean de Carrouges

  Tilting at Windmills: Argus Nicholas v. Don Quixote

  On Moses’s Failed Insurrection: Unbada v. John Cantrell

  A Black Night in the South: Ezekiel Ackers v. Alexander McCarthy Sr.

  Slap Leather: James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok v. Davis Tutt Jr.

  The Black Knight of the South (A Gothic Romance): Cadet Moran v. Alexander “Lex” McCarthy Jr.

  Catfight in a Cathouse: Cora Carol v. Vivian LaRouche

  Shanks in the Courtyard: Miguel Ramirez v. Muhtady Nu’man

  Code of Conduct: “Big” Mike Frato v. “Unkillable” Danny Greene

  It’s a Family Affair: Danyelle Sellers v. William Sellers

  PART III: SATISFACTION

  Delivered into His Hands: David v. Goliath

  Dueling Visions of David: Donatello v. Michelangelo v. da Vinci

  A Prediction Come to Pass: Gabriel, Comte de Montgomery v. King Henry II

  Old Hickory: Charles Dickinson v. Andrew Jackson

  Man above Challenge: Emile Dauphin v. Dale Culver

  Pistols at Twenty Paces: Philip Lacroix v. Etiene Thigpen

  Check, Mate: Arthur John (Jack) Johnson v. Gregori Rasputin

  Me and the Devil Blues: Robert Johnson v. Charlie Trussle

  Custody Battle for Chelsea Tammy: Tyler Malgrove v. Sam Bowling

  The Magic Hour: Megan Garriga v. Jaume Garriga

  Occupational Hazard or Ars Poetica: Shoulder Angel v. Shoulder Demon

  When challenged to a duel, do much or nothing at all.

  Casanova, The Duel (paraphrase)

  “Duels were demonstrations of manner, not marksmanship; they were intricate games of dare and counterdare, ritualized displays of bravery, military prowess, and—above all—willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s honor. A man’s response to the threat of gunplay bore far more meaning than the exchange of fire itself.”

  Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor

  In one of the most famous duels of early New Orleans, Bernard Marigny challenged James Humble, a Georgian who stood almost seven feet tall, to a duel. Humble told a trusted friend, “I will not fight him. I know nothing of this dueling business.”

  “You must,” his friend protested. “No gentleman can refuse a challenge.”

  “I’m not a gentleman,” Humble retorted. “I’m only a blacksmith.”

  Humble was assured that he would be ruined socially if he declined to meet the challenge of the Creole, who was a crack shot and noted swordsman. However, his friend pointed out that as the challenged man, the blacksmith had the choice of weapons and could so choose to put himself on equal terms with his adversary. Humble considered the matter for a day or two and then sent this reply to Marigny: “I accept your challenge, and in the exercise of my privilege, I stipulate that the duel shall take place in Lake Pontchartrain in six feet of water, sledgehammers to be used as weapons.”

  Since Marigny was less than five feet and eight inches tall, and so slight that he could scarcely lift a sledgehammer, this was giving Humble an equal chance with a vengeance. Marigny’s friends urged him to stand on a box and run the risk of having his skull cracked by the huge blacksmith’s hammer, but Marigny declared it impossible for himself to fight a man with such a fine sense of humor. Instead he apologized to Humble, and the two became firm friends.

  Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter (paraphrase)

  Inspired by movie gunfights, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr first suggested the intentional act of drawing and shooting is slower to execute than the reactive response. He once did an impromptu research project to find out why good guys in movies always win quick-draw duels. After many mock gunfights in university hallways with graduate students, Bohr concluded the villain always tries to draw his gun first (and so must consciously move his hands), while the hero always reacts and draws by reflex as soon as he sees the villain moving. There is good evidence from imaging scans that our brain system uses different messaging routes depending on intentional and reactive movements, but this is the first time the two speeds of thought have been calculated.

  Welchman, et al., “The Quick and the Dead” (paraphrase)

  “I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a d
uel with deadly weapons within this State nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God.”

  Current oath of office for Kentucky State officeholders

  To avert an all-out war, the vice president of Iraq, Taha Yassin Ramadan, suggested the following on October 2, 2002: “The American president should specify a group and we will specify a group and choose neutral ground, with Kofi Annan as referee and use one weapon with a president [Saddam Hussein] against a president [George W. Bush], a vice president against a vice president, and a minister against a minister in a duel.”

  Associated Press

  “In the freshly minted United States of America, the punishable-by-dissection category was extended to include duelists, the death sentence clearly not posing much of a deterrent to the type of fellow who agrees to settle his differences by the dueling pistol.”

  Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

  “Some people stop living long before they die.”

  Drive-By Truckers, “The Living Bubba”

  “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now, I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot, and kill him.”

  Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

  “On February 5, 1897, Marcel Proust challenged the literary critic Jean Lorrain to a duel after the latter, a homosexual himself, alluded to Proust’s sexual affair with a man of means, suggesting this was how his novel Pleasures and Days came to be published. Both men fired shots and missed and, in this manner, Proust’s honor was restored. It has been apocryphally noted that, years later, Proust would say that when he fired his pistol, the smell of the gun smoke was so strong, it sent a series of flashes roiling through his brain to an ultimate moment when, as a child, he’d first sat in front of an open fire eating, but what else, a madeleine.”

  Michael Garriga

  “Those are people who died, died / They were all my friends, and they died.”

  Jim Carroll Band, “People Who Died”

  “Another study found only one duelist in fourteen died. Most duelists escaped unscathed, or with minor wounds, at worst. It had become fashionable among some writers to portray these affairs as more farcical than fatal.”

  Thomas Fleming, The Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America

  THE BOOK OF DUELS

  PART I: OFFENSE

  Slouching toward the Land of Nod: Abel v. Cain

  Just East of Eden, Once upon a Time

  Abel, 17, Shepherd

  How easy it must be to sit beside a fig tree and let the wind turn your soil and the rain bury your seed and the sun pull your wheat and bean from the field, while here I hold a lonely vigil, watch over the hillside speckled by sheep, wary as ever of hound and hawk, because even though the lion may once have lain with the lamb, as Mother always says, it now devours them as prey—yesterday, I witnessed three lionesses bring down a gazelle and tear its flesh from the bone—it is little wonder to me why Holy Father loved my offering more than his, but not Mother, never Mother—she who loves Cain more than me, loves Cain more than Father, loves Cain indeed more than Holy Father—she strokes his hair and hums as she eats his lavash and lentils and ignores the cheese and yogurt I bring to our table—sometimes in the heat of early morn I smell her in the lambs’ wool as I milk them—last night I dreamt I took a wee one by his hind feet—him jerking and bleating ’gainst the sweat of my arms and chest and I held him up to the heavens and sank my teeth into his throat, the first man ever to taste blood, instead of the flesh of berry and herb and grain—I tore his muscle loose from bone and my jaw ached from the chewing, and when I woke, I ached still and so slaughtered a firstling and rendered his fat and brought it unto the Lord, Who smiled and said it was good, and if it was good enough for Him, then why not for me as well?

  I herd my sheep toward his field and my strange brother, tall and gangly and talking to himself, cries unto me, Your sheep are eating the crops and they are drinking the needed water, and I say, Shut up, shut up, shut up, you goddamn bleating baby, and I shove him hard and he falls to all fours and I jump on his back and oh it feels good to spit the khat from my mouth and drive my teeth into his neck.

  Cain, 19, Farmer

  With the wind in my teeth I howl the first poetry of the world and call each unnamed and new experience the thing it shall be called and I bring forth from the very earth the fruit of my labor conjured so by song—and so it is and so it is good—and I break the earth that God hath made and I plant the seed that God hath given unto me and I adore the sun and I adore the rain and I adore the wind and cry: You, you shall be called emmer and you shall be fava and you, barley, and this the scythe and that the harvest, and I will continue so, even as God shuns my offering and even as my brother turns on me and pushes me into the earth where I spin and smash his head, over and over, until he lies in the dirt and there he dies and I call it murder.

  As I stand in the sun, the flint blade still red in my hand, my own blood runs down my neck and soaks my tunic and my brother’s blood seeps into the mouth of mother earth and my dark skin begins to throb and brighten and glow an ungodly white and I hear His voice again, There is thy mark upon thee, Cain, for all to know thee by thy deed.

  God, Eternal Witness

  Children of the Sun: Musashi v. Kojiro

  On the Island of Funajima, Japan,

  April 13, 1612

  Ah, summer grasses! All that remain of the warrior’s dream.

  Matsuo Bash

  Miyamoto Musashi, 28,

  Ronin & Future Author of The Book of Five Rings

  My katana cut through his kimono and armor and flesh and when he dropped his steel I turned to the boat and motioned for my team to leave—his seconds surely would have killed us all—and we’ve timed it just so, the tide pulling us out as we paddle steady with the waves, the salt in my beard and the wind in my dress, and we rise and fall with the water, we rise and fall, and the sea carries me back to my village where I am a child, the snow falling softly outside, and I sit with my legs beneath the kotatsu, the coals warming me, and I am crying in my mother’s arms—she squats next to me and strokes my back and says, Shhhh, Saru-chan, shhhh, as I try to describe the dream I’ve just had of sitting by a pond whose surface is covered with lotus leaves, in the middle of which is but one lone bloom, orange and pink and far removed, and I reach for it with tiny fingers and I am stretched long and thin and then topple and splash into the water, beneath whose surface all is darkness and dry, and though I know my father was killed in the Battle of Sekigahara, he now stands before me in a doorway, his hand reaches out to me, yet the closer I move, the tinier he becomes and so I stand still as a mountain and stare for a long long time calling to him, Tousan! Tousan! until he fades into an ultimate light and vanishes, yet I cannot find the words to tell her this, like a flower that blooms at night can never wish for a thing as miraculous and needed as the sun.

  I wake on the boat, the wind blowing us to our destination, and I remember another dream in which I was a warrior who’d been slain in a duel, though perhaps that was no dream—perhaps I am truly the dead man and this voyage but my final dream.

  Sasaki Kojiro, 27,

  Samurai & Founder of the Kenjutsu School

  The heavy rain has soaked my robes and it weighs down my body and my blood is leaving me and so I sit in the moist sand and watch my footprints fill with water, my life being erased one drop at a time, and when I am gone who will remember the things I’ve seen—as a child in my father’s orchard, an albino fox in the branches of a cherry tree, its pink blossoms hiding all but his eyes and we stared at each other motionless till the sun quit the sky; in a still body of water, two snakes gripping a carp in their mouths, one by its tail
and one by its head, the three joined into a new self-devouring creature; in Master Toda Seigen’s dojo, him tossing, like a sumo, a handful of purifying salt and catching each grain on the flat blade of his nodachi—and I know I will die now on this island and I try to stay calm, relax my mind, and let my spirit leave this crude vessel, but we all in our folly think we will live more years—even an old man on his deathbed can believe he has ten more—but my days are through and only my foolish pride, and the many years preceding this very last day, have allowed me to believe that tomorrow was ever offered, because there is, of course, no tomorrow—there is only this moment—I recline to my elbow and, with my last strength, lower myself flat and cross my hands over my chest, listen to my own breath become the crashing waves, open my mouth to catch one last drop of this world, acknowledge the weak and thankless sun, a dull white hole burned in the gray sky, and close my eyes forever.

  Master Lee, 23,

  Tanka Poet & Disciple of Sasaki Kojiro (with apologies for the poor translation)

  Cherry blossoms in full bloom—

  Sunrise above water burns high—

  man and fruit to fall too soon

  at Noon, pale sun sits on high—

  challenge! duel!—both day and we await

  near Sunset he arrives, disheveled, late, insulting—

  I say not his name—

  look: wind in robes like dragon wings

  mad, my master overplays his hand—