The Enemy
In a two-horse carriage galloping east across the Texas prairie, three travelers—a mother, her nine year old son, and her once-estranged, frontiersman brother—rode in silence.
None of them said anything because no one quite knew what to say after they had exchanged pleasantries. Family tensions had separated the siblings twelve years ago. Each had—in spirit—died to the other; now they sat an arm’s length away. How suddenly fate and empathy had reconnected them made them both squirm.
To the mother, her brother looked like everything she prayed her son would eschew when life eventually asks him whether he be hero or villain. Suspicious scars. Stained clothes. Wild, oily hair. He spit on the carriage floor. She held this in contempt, compared to her powdered skin, pressed dress, neat braids with ribbons, and thin, crossed legs. But what could she expect from a teenager who fled from home to the Texas frontier to fight Comanches?
To his credit, he didn’t write like a frontiersman. All his letters had come on clean paper. He wrote with eloquence. His penmanship outdid even her lawyer’s. In their letters, they’d traded the years in short; she told him of her husband, her son’s desire to wrangle justice as a Sheriff, of the distinct mole that marked his left cheek, and their parent’s deaths. He told her of the frontier—and his wish to reconnect: “Time has reached into my past and overwhelmed me with my family's absence.”
The passengers watched bluebonnet fields fade into blue sky, until the boy broke the silence with a boyish question:
“Uncle… Can you tell me another Indian story?”
Before his uncle could answer, his mother shook him off with a look that said no. The brother saw this and chuckled, because he agreed.
“Sorry, stud, not now—”
But the boy persisted:
“Please, Uncle? Just one more and I won’t ask for another. Last one, I promise—”
The brother turned to his nephew with a tilted head and tight grin that said: the nerve on this boy. But men that have lived can’t resist an opportunity to impart themselves on the next generation. However, he couldn’t think of any more Indian stories fit for a nine year old boy, at least not for one rubbing shoulders with his mother.
“Sorry, stud, I have no more Indian stories for you till you grow a few more inches. But I have something else you might like.”
“What is it?”
“Well… you know how Indians hate Texans, and Texans hate Indians? We’re each other’s enemies. Tell me—do you have any enemies, stud?”
The Boy thought about it, as if he really might at his tender age:
“... No, I don’t.”
“... Oh but you do, young stud. You do have an enemy.”
Intrigue widened the boy’s eyes. A lick of fear dilated his pupils. He made no retort. The brother assumed a cool air that defied the Texas heat.
“An enemy of the highest caliber, too.”
As he said this, his hand creeped into his dusty coat’s pocket and came out a closed fist. He had something. The boy’s eyes turned into x-rays.
“Now, you’re not yet a man, but you’re also more than a little boy, so I best inform you in an honest fashion who you’re up against in this life.”
Coldness crept over the boy’s face. His mother, meanwhile, held a stern parental face until her brother saw it. But the brother shot a comforting look at her that said don’t worry, sis, I’m just pulling his leg. He continued on:
“Now this enemy, boy, doesn’t work like other enemies, like the kind you might read in books or hear in tall stories. He doesn’t want anything you have, and his weapons don’t concern themselves with your flesh. He won't hold you up on the trail with a Colt, like an outlaw, and take all your money. You don’t have to worry about him marching an army over the Rio Grande, like General Santa Anna, and seizing all your land for Mexico. And he won’t thunder into your camp on horseback—like a long-haired, paint-faced Comanche—whooping with his lungs, cursing with his eyes, and piercing you with this bow just to see what the white man’s blood looks like.
No—this enemy is different. He comes from a place you can’t see or touch, a place where Colts cannot shoot and arrows cannot fly. He doesn’t seek your cash, land, or blood, for no such material thing has any use to him. He has no debts to pay, he doesn’t have a territory he can expand, and, for whatever reason, he doesn’t much value your physical suffering. Your enemy has but one aim: to break you as a man—to bury your spirit while it still lives.
But how could this enemy break me, you no doubt wonder, if he only exists in the shadows, and cannot shoot me or scalp me or seize what is mine?
Like any devilish manipulator: with words. A man that can convince doesn’t need to coerce, young stud. And your enemy wields a silver tongue. With it, he aims to persuade you from what does you best and toward what destroys you. In this way, he can achieve your complete annihilation without lifting a finger.”
The brother paused, and let his head fall backwards to rest on the carriage wall. After a moment of silence just long enough to inspire discomfort in his listeners, he resumed:
“Does the dark scare you, young stud?”
“... yes. Outside. When we put the fire out and—”
“—Ah! Just as I feared… he’s already hard at work… tell me, young stud, what has the dark done to you to deserve your fear?”
“... Well… there’s… one time I fell and… there’s… snakes.”
The boy’s ramble trailed off. He couldn’t answer the question. Shame lowered his face. The brother anticipated this, and charged on:
“You can bury a man’s spirit while he still breathes by smothering him in three things, young stud: fear, doubt, and desire.
Your enemy, young stud, will smother you with fear, because a man scared of the world will not find a place for himself in it. Each time you encounter something new or unknown or uncertain, he will whisper into your ear with his silver tongue: “be afraid.” He has already turned you against the dark. Think with me for a moment, stud: did you ask to be afraid when the fire goes out? Did you ever make that choice? Of course not. When darkness falls the fear just… comes. That’s his whisper. And in convincing you that darkness deserves your fear he has cut your world in half.
Your enemy’s second trick is doubt—you want to be a Sheriff one day, am I right?”
The boy nodded, with a glint of enthusiasm and surprise.
“But you’re also not sure if you can muster it”, The brother deciphered.
The boy gave a defeated nod.
“You’re not sure if you can muster it, because what kind of Sheriff lets the dark spook him?”
The boy did not answer the rhetorical question.
“Another one of his whispers, young stud. From the moment a dream sprouts he tries to persuade us to rip it up at the roots: “you cannot do it”, “give up”, “your ambitions have no place in this world”. He knows that a man not planting for the future rots in the present. He conspires endlessly to persuade you against your own dreams.
The last trick your enemy keeps in his bag is desire. When a man fears all things and doubts his every dream, we can do one final thing to boot him to insanity: make him want for the world. For what can a man do when he wants everything—money, ladies, fame, approval, friendship, love, anything and everything—but cannot muster the courage to get it, and doubts his every effort to transform himself into a man who can? Roll over and die, perhaps.
Fearful. Doubtful. Desirous. That’s what your enemy wants you to be.”
The boy’s posture held no hope. His hands hid under his thighs. His head slouched forward like a bully had just kicked it over.
“Break ‘em down, build ‘em up”, the brother thought to himself. The frontier had taught him that.
“But good news, stud, I can give you the secret to defeating him—”
At this, the boy's eyes flicked upward and met his Uncle’s; hope, it seems, still had one foot in. He managed a single, sheepish word:
“How?”
The Uncle didn’t answer. As the carriage jostled the passengers in its plod, his attention returned back to what he concealed in his right hand. He brought it forward a bit on his thigh, towards his knee, so the boy would notice.
“Don’t give the mother fucker an inch.”
Under normal circumstances he knew such profanity would have stunned both of them, but he had them locked in. More silence followed. The boy now sat upright with his neck clenched, revealing its tendons and muscles. Just as the boy moved his lips to fill the silence, his Uncle continued on:
“To fear the world, stud, you must first fear the dark. To fear the dark you must first fear what might lurk in it. What I’m saying is: to convince you of big things—the shit that breaks a man—your enemy must first convince you of small things. His strategy only works when you cede to him the small ground you don’t think is important, the stuff not worth fighting for. We say ‘oh well, the dark doesn’t have much for me anyway,’ or ‘I can’t be a Sheriff, I’ll just have to do something else’. But all the while, he takes that ground—every last dirt clod—and piles it up at our feet, until one day you must lift your chin to not choke on earth. By then it's almost dusk, and your chances at digging out run slim.
But that means the opposite holds true as well. The less you give him, the easier it is to fend him off, to stay ahead of him. Don’t give him an inch.”
Neither the uncle nor his nephew had blinked for a moment. The uncle’s eyes moved toward his fist, and the object it contained. His knuckles clenched white.
“I can show you his face, if you’d like, stud.”
The boy choked. His head and neck recoiled a full inch in fear; his eyes, wide in dilation, seared into the cursed first and betrayed his doubt; all who saw him could tell he desired least of all to know this enemy.
But then his features relaxed. The uncle clenched his teeth to contain the proud smile bursting from this chest.
“What I have in my hand here, stud, will reveal your enemy. Are you afraid, stud?”
“Yes… But I’m doing it anyway.”
“And do you doubt yourself, stud?”
“Yes… But I know that that’s what he wants.”
It was settled.
“Stud, I need to tell you one more thing before I show him to you: you can’t defeat this enemy. You cannot win; you can only not lose. For he will live so long as you do, and not even God can cleave in two the single road you and he share. Forever you must watch your back. Forever you must plot against this man.”
The boy nodded.
The uncle leaned forward toward his nephew and came to a knee in the carriage. With his free left hand, he took his nephew’s right, so that the boy’s palm faced the ceiling. The uncle then put his closed fist on top, slowly opened it up.
The boy expected heft, but instead felt only a tickle in his palm. His uncle took his hand away; a piece of paper, crumpled and soft from many folds. On it, he saw a sloppy, charcoal sketch of himself.