The Bully of Order by Brian Hart

cousin?”
    â€œHave whatever you want. You’re like the Indians with all your cousins. Everybody a cousin. I’m probably your cousin.”
    â€œNo fuckin relation.”
    â€œThat hurts.” Bottle swash and cringe. “If you’d left it alone for another week or so, these woods would’ve swallowed all of this. You’d never know it was here.”
    â€œThere’s potatoes in this garden.”
    â€œI brought a few pounds of Fortneau’s finest stew meat. Puppy steaks. You got a pan?”
    â€œSure.”
    The wind brought in the rain, and soon they were indoors with the woodstove. Bellhouse told his story about stabbing his old friend Julius Beddington in the neck with a farrier’s file.
    â€œStuck him with the rat-tail and the blood shot into my open mouth and gagged me and I was puking up everything from the bottom of my fucking boots while Julius bled out.”
    Tartan obediently bobbed his head, smiled, and waited. “You couldn’t a done anything for Nitz and Burheim, then?”
    â€œNah. Had to let it play. I get in the middle, and I’d be with them. It wasn’t like they were fine or smart or worth fucking saving, either one.”
    â€œThey were boys, is all.”
    â€œHardly. Those two were born full-grown in a downpour and died too stupid to get out of the rain.” Bellhouse began nibbling at the loose skin hanging off his thumbs and fingers, as was his habit.
    Tartan opened the stove and pitched in another mossy hunk of hemlock. “If it’s gonna be a real fight over our hall, I don’t see how we’d win. There’s not ten of us that work or even really give a shit about who pays what regardless. Do you care about gruntin away for eight versus ten or twelve hours in a day? I think not.”
    â€œYou might be wrong about that.”
    â€œWell, I don’t see the upside of starting a war with the mills. Let the labor unions do it, and we’ll work the angles off em, just like now.”
    â€œWe are the labor union.”
    â€œThe fuck we are. Sailor’s union. We’re less for labor than the fuckin mills.”
    â€œWatch it.”
    â€œBetween the two of us we haven’t worked a wage job for decades.”
    â€œYou can’t just wait for these men to straighten themselves out,” Bellhouse said. “We aren’t the only ones telling them what to think. They’ll need someone to lead them, to set them on a course so they’ll get what they deserve.”
    â€œThat stray bullet must’ve battered yer senses if you think you’ll lead anything but a raid on a fuckin timber scow.”
    Bellhouse turned to face Tartan, and his eyes settled on him, as dead and unnerving as a doll’s. “You have to stir the pot, son, or you’ll only get broth.”
    Tartan didn’t know if they were talking about the union fight any longer. His blood was up, and he wanted to test the fence on Bellhouse, see if the injury had shortened his scope, maybe even weakened his knees a little. We’re just dogs in the traces, after all, overtake and trample is the name of the game.
    Tartan sweetened his tenor. “Hank, you ever noticed that I don’t tell you stories? Never give you the history of my life, or the big-time adventure I had back then, wherever the fuck I was?”
    Bellhouse sucked in a deep breath and then fairly squirmed with anger. “I offer you the recollections, the gathered insights of my days, because you’re a big dumb goon and you require education.”
    â€œI’d say I’m smart enough not to stab my friend with a file and have to tell the story every five minutes to feel better or not forget. I don’t know why you do it. I heard that story a hundred times if I heard it once.”
    â€œYou’re drunk.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œThen keep talking and I’ll take you outside and pummel you.”
    â€œYou