Boom-Boom Bishop

The cutlass that hangs in my study in Tucson has not tasted honest killing in near on three hundred years. I keep it oiled. I keep it sharp. One does not let a tool go to ruin merely because the need has passed.

Let me tell you about the last time it was needed.

The Sanguine Judge was not Mango’s ship any longer by the time the night in question came upon us. Mango had moved on to other enterprises. He had a talent for appearing and departing; it was perhaps his finest quality. I had a talent for remaining. The blood-bound captain who held the wheel held it in name only, which was an arrangement I found agreeable, so long as his shares were paid.

The crew were practical men. They did not inquire too closely after the particulars of authority.

One man, however, was a different order of creature. I have long since forgotten his name, which tells you precisely how much he mattered. He watched the workings of the ship more closely than his share required, and in time he worked it out.

He worked out the lesser thing. A woman with the captain’s ear. He understood well enough what that meant to a man of his experience.

He said it plain enough. Before the crew. “I know what you are.”

There is a simplicity I have always admired in a man who names his error at full volume, so that every witness may have the benefit of it.

He had named the least dangerous secret aboard that ship. He had not named the half of it.

I took his head off with the same cutlass that hangs on my wall now. One stroke. The blood came up very prettily over the deck, and the body stood there a moment in some disagreement with the facts, as bodies sometimes do. The crew stood there likewise.

I was already wiping the blade by the time any of them thought to breathe.

No ceremony. No particular feeling in the matter. He had mistaken one thing for another, and the distinction had resolved itself, as such distinctions tend to do. That is the nature of confusions: they find their end whether or not the man at the center of them has yet understood what sort of confusion it was.

The cutlass has hung in the same place in my study for some years now. On certain evenings I look at it and wonder if those who visit look at it and wonder what it has done.

No one has ever asked.