Cocky the Fox (10)
By:
September 23, 2010
HILOBROW is proud to present the tenth installment of James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky the Fox, a serial tale in twenty fits, with illustrations by Kristin Parker.
The story so far: Cocky the fox, a handsome specimen of Vulpes vulpes living on the edge of an English town, is in trouble. His mentor Holiday Bob, top fox in the Borough, is dead. His family life has collapsed, and he’s moved in with his friend Champion, a distressed albino rabbit. His enemies are everywhere. And he’s been drinking a lot of aftershave.
Fit the Ninth found our friends in a post-fungal daze, roaming sweetly from field to field and tasting all the summer’s pride. They talked of their plans to start a commune or a new race. The countryside, however, had other ideas: Cocky was headbutted by Shakes the badger, and then nearly murdered by two Northside foxes. The intervention of Champion, speaking garbled words of prophecy, turned Shakes against the Northsiders and allowed Cocky to kill one of them. Champion then instructed Shakes to go and finish off the other one.
‘Now look what you’ve gone and done.’
‘What, Cocky?’ Champion’s sniffing and blinking into the afternoon, the usual display of rabbity nescience. Something’s changed though. A glimmer about him. The faintest veneer of… irony? Surely not. From the wheatfield we hear blunderings, tearings, the squawking of the fox Maurice as Shakes the badger gets after him.
‘Nicking my lines like that,’ I grumble. ‘Pronouncing death sentences. Thumbs down for Maurice! Why’d you do that anyway? It’s not strategic.’
‘Northside scum must die.’
‘Well yeah but… Wow.’ I give my head a quick rattle. Sometimes he really nails it, the Champ. Sometimes he’ll say something as clean and curative as the smell of cow parsley. Northside scum must die. They must die like Gibby here, who lies sans vitamins or electricity, teeth feebly bared, lost in the secret world of death. I killed him, but death owns him. Poor Northsider, poor doomed snout. It was me or you. It was me and you. Now let the maggots commence their rites.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay. But — what are we going to do about this fucking badger? I mean clearly he thinks you’re some kind of talisman or great spirit. He’s probably going to want to hang around with us now.’
‘Big badger, Cocky,’ suggests Champion.
‘I don’t like him.’
‘Don’t like him?’
‘I dunno. Too badger-ish. Badgers are weird.’
‘Rumpy’s a badger.’
‘Rumpy’s weird too. Rumpy’s Rumpy. You saw what Rumpy’s like. Fucker won’t come out of his hole… Listen, seriously — why don’t we just bugger off? Quick, now, before he gets back. Let’s go!’
Reluctant as I am to spend any more time with him, I’ll give Shakes credit for one thing: the bastard knocked some sense into me! That headbutt of his, in its offhanded vehemence, its blunt badger-power… Two minutes ago Champion and I were on a New Age bender. We coursed with enlightenments; we babbled to each other of a golden land. I think I was on the point of becoming a vegetarian. But then Shakes landed that headbutt on me, and sense arrived. Sense, which lives outside the skull, buzzing in mid-air like a family of hummingbirds or a mathematical proof. I saw it. I saw sense.
Right now, for instance, I perceive with unwonted clarity that the thing for us to do is scram, vamoose, blow this joint. Shakes might have helped us out of a tight spot, but he’s no friend to Cocky and Champion. We don’t want him on our bandwagon. A goon in the country is worth two in the town. Who said that? Whoever it was, he’s wrong. A goon is a goon is a goon — and Shakes is a goon, notwithstanding his freakish pieties towards the rabbit. I’d see him off but, truth be told, I’m not sure I can handle him one-on-one. It’s not just the weight difference — badgers have an elemental advantage over foxes. They draw strength from the ground. It’s like getting attacked by an oak tree.
‘Come on!’ I say. ‘Quick!’ And then, ‘What?’ because Champion is bunching, bracing himself, hunkering back into his haunches. He’s made his mind up about something.
Sheer intransigence in those pink eyes!
‘Oh no,’ I say. ‘Don’t tell me. Killer badgers think you’re legendary, and you love it! You like the attention. You want more!’
The Champ makes no reply — he never does, when we’re having these little showdowns — but only densens his field of oppugnance, fur in chunks, ungroomed rabbit-claws gripping the ground like he might fall off.
‘Unbelievable! It’s all ego with you, isn’t it? Me, me, me.’
He won’t move. And I, oddly, am out of ideas. There’s a new bottom to Champion out here. What am I going to do, fight him? I could grab him by the scruff, but… Sunlight thrums blandly off the wheat. From deep in the twittering crops, Maurice the fox gives his death-yodel. Shakes has got his man.
‘Well, there we are,’ I say. ‘Another fine mess, and so on.’
Cocky frowns. Champion frowns.
A combine harvester corners at the edge of a distant field, changing the pitch of its noise.
‘AND… SCENE!’ says a nasty voice from above. Wings, thick syllables of downdraft: Champion’s ears flatten. I leap, tail crackling, to his side. Shadows collide about us and I just have time to mutter Oh-you-are-fucking-joking before — with an oily clatter of pinions, with derisive snorts — the Du Noir brothers touch down.
Both of them! Weasel Paul and I once discussed the possibility that Randall and Corvin Du Noir were really two halves of the same raven — no one had ever seen them together, after all. A split personality kind of deal, we conjectured: the sane part and the loony part. But here they both are. Randall, sleek as a butler, and the bulkier Corvin in his cloud of psychic cinders. How keenly I miss the Weez right now!
‘Lovely, everyone, lovely,’ drawls Randall. And then, looking up: ‘Thank you, Hatchet-Face!’ The hawk overhead cries out, banks, and pinpricks away into the curve of the afternoon. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Guts,’ says Corvin, who has begun to poke at the corpse of Gibby. He’s pushing at the muzzle with his beak, seeking to widen the rip in the throat. ‘The money shot.’
‘That’s not the money shot, you turd. The money shot is the blood on the rabbit.’
‘Eh?’ Their movements have a weird organic dissonance, these two, as they strut about. Tweaks and jolts and tugs of energy — it’s like watching a nervous system in freefall. ‘Keep cool,’ I whisper . Next to me the Champ is clenched so tight he may never shit again.
‘The crimson droplets on the white, laced there delicately. That says it all. That’s your money shot.’
Corvin rotates his gun-turret head, zeroes in on Champion.
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Too arty.’
‘It’s exquisite,’ says Randall. ‘How many times have we had this conversation?’
Corvin has a think. ‘More blood, then,’ he says, and noisily dunks his beak inside poor opened-up Gibby. ‘Get some more blood on there. Punch it home.’
Randall sighs, and levels his scorched gaze at me, appealing as if to a fellow auteur, a brother in sensibility. Fucking hell!
‘If you must,’ he sighs.
Well, this is looking very bad indeed, isn’t it? I mean this is looking terrible. Corvin advances upon us with clockwork steps, with dripping beak, intent apparently on daubing the Champ with fresh gore. It’s a desecration, an offence in about fourteen different categories. My high-rev growling and the deep drone of terror inside Champion have combined into a single scandalized chord.
But Corvin’s head suddenly clicks to the side. Randall, too, has hopped about to face something. Badgers! Three of them — Shakes plus two — doing that quaintly constrained, don’t-look-at-me-I-know-I’m-fat badger-canter towards us along the edge of the field. The ravens are airborne, instantly, without a word, as if sucked up a chute.
‘Did they touch him?’ Shakes is breathing hard from his little run. And also no doubt from the slight effort of murdering Maurice, whose last mortal spurtings are all over the black-and-white visor of his face.
‘No they didn’t touch him,’ I say with some irritation. Champion, by the way, has fainted.
‘And who the fuck are these two, anyway? They’re even uglier than you are.’
‘Piece of town shit,’ says one of the badgers (a male).
‘Raven-licker,’ says the other (a female).
Where are those ravens? Oh yeah… Half a mile away now, with strains of mockery fluttering in their wake like black tinsel. Amazing how they seem to hobble in mid-air.
‘This is Brutus,’ says Shakes. ‘And this is Brunelle. And they’re gonna keep us company. We’re going into bandit country.’
Keep us company, I think, or hold us hostage?
‘Rabbit’s dead,’ says Brutus. ‘Look at him.’
Champion opens his eyes.
‘Say something,’ says Brunelle.
‘Killer badgers think I’m legendary,’ says Champion.
‘See?’ says Shakes. ‘This is the one. Now let’s move out.’
Are the Du Noir brothers making some kind of movie?
Where are the badgers taking Cocky and Champion?
And just what is the deal with this rabbit?
Find out in the next episode, on Thursday, October 7.
SAME FOX-TIME!
SAME FOX-CHANNEL!
Read the tenth issue of The Sniffer, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by HiLobrow’s Patrick Cates.
Our thanks to this project’s backers.
READ MORE ORIGINAL FICTION on HiLobrow.com.