Piotr Oprządek 

Centauromachy

It was a proper gangster beanfeast. The old guard was celebrating the boss’s birthday. In a private venue, a trusted cook was slicing slabs off a whole pig roasted in a convection-steam oven, and the tables was groaning under the weight of the spread. Pork aspics, ham salad, cold-cut rolls, vodka chilling in ice buckets. Servings of cocaine on a discreet tray. 

Guests were still arriving. You don’t see faces like that often. Not out in the free world, and not in such agglomeration. There was Face – ugly as last year’s root vegetable, a certified bone-breaker by trade – and Armando, hair slicked back like Seagal, a smooth operator wearing a tracksuit by Emporio… Ah, Money! The dark-skinned twins, Blud and Loco, were already a few drinks in, but kept their wilder urges in check, even though, as the boss’s relatives, they’d get away with plenty. The Grim Reaper – terror of snitches and extortionees – spiritually absent, and bothered by no one, squinted as he sunk into the depths of criminal nirvana. 

At the honorary spot sat the boss himself, Pippy, an old-school predator and a very dangerous man. He received signs of respect and scanned the room with a cold stare. To his right sat the General, basically his right hand; to his left, a married pair of lawyers who earned their keep during a legal saga dragging on for over a quarter of a century. The withdrawn attorney acted as if among fellow legal theorists, as if the poor chap forgot he wasn’t drinking with the bar association, but with violators of law. His wife, decked out in gold, but tasteful and understated – a clearly hard-working woman – was far more direct and sharper than him, unlike her husband – she savored the coloration of the party. Besides them, few other representatives of the “legal world” stood out, exotic and irrelevant in this time-space. The few women that were present were sipping tipsy juice at a separate table. Meaning the guests’ real women, because at the main table they had stationed, as one might say, “ladies of the night.” They giggled, sniffled, and served looks – in the eyes of the crowd – looking more like assets thank people. The room’s conversations swung from dirty jokes to tearful trips down memory lane, from cursing the crown witness to mourning brothers doing life. The friendly feast was only disturbed by an uneasy stir whenever someone glanced overtly openly at the tall buffet tables – beyond human’s reach, unless on stilts – where steak tartare was served. 

With each new toast, the atmosphere loosened and the dancefloor filled. The loyal DJ was serving bangers from back in the day of their arrest. Everything, wrinkles aside, looked just like the day they got picked up – even the venue, like it had waited a quarter century for them to get out. If anyone carried a phone, it was out of habit only a tiny cellie, swallowable in case of a raid. Only the General mastered the black magic of online banking and other modern wonders but even he accepted a smartphone only after several tries, and even then just one and no other: a BlackBerry with physical keys, apparently designed by the manufacturer for wealthy repeat offenders, recommended to him by a tech-savvy lawbird. Swiping a finger across a flat surface was unmanly, no doubt. 

- You’ve got personal charm!

Armando grabbed that blonde – Monnie, that Monica – by her jaw like a horse by the bridle and kept shouting cheerfully, turning back to his buddy every few moments to clink glasses with him. The girl, whenever nobody was looking, powdered her nose with her personal snuff-bullet and chased Armando’s advances down with chilled vodka. Blud and Loco were flashing their peepers, the General was consulting with the boss, and only the Grim Reaper didn’t say a single word to anyone.

- Please tell your wife she looks beautiful…

- But I can hear you perfectly well!

Face got flustered. For a moment he spoke to Lady Counsel directly, but quickly slipped back into the persona of a man unaccustomed to interacting with unrelated women outside of prostitutes or the judge. 

“Sherry, Sherry Lady, goin’ though emotion…” – the dancefloor lit up. Fixed-up chicks, modest wives, old bulls, lawbirds, goldfinches from the extended family, basking in the glow of their legendary uncles from the city – everyone spun pirouettes as equals, then danced the Macarena, then the duck dance, until it was time for the partner-swap. 

- One dance with you is worth more than a thousand with those whores!

This time it was Lady Counsel who blushed as Face led her into a tango. Unexpectedly skillful. 

- Where did he learn to dance like that?

He rolled up his sleeves, but in the whirl of the dance she couldn’t make out the blurry tattoo on the inside of his elbow – and later she stopped even trying; her husband was prancing nearby with “those whores.”

- If I had a woman like you by my side, I’d slaughter every CID cop in this city with a samurai sword…

Boss and the Grim Reaper were the only ones not dancing. The former savored his court having fun, and the latter kept meditating. Only after the waltz from The Godfather – looped once, twice, and a third time – did the boss finally descend to join the birthday singing, and the Grim Reaper stood up and sang the loudest. The General noticed an anomaly – the weather was fine, yet from outside came a sound like hail hitting the ground. 

It was hooves. Centaurs marched into the hall. At the front, Brutal, with s dozen behind him, all different ages. The singing died. For the first time since the beginning of the party, silence fell. But Brutal intonated “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”  and everyone quickly join in the wishes. 

- What’s up, you old horse!

Hugging Brutal, Pippy was already back at the height of the main table. He couldn’t allow the other to lean down over him publicly while they kissed each other’s rough cheeks. 

For as long as the city remembered, they’d done business together, bound by mutual debts of gratitude. But their underlings tolerated each other only because of their bosses’ authority. No one dared to oppose the boss, but if it were up to anyone else, the centaurs wouldn’t have been invited. And even if they had, without Brutal they would never bother coming to a human drive. Well, they had to stomach it somehow. They took their place by their wooden scaffolding contraption and tore into the steak tartare with their bare hands as one. 

The General, staring at the bulging thigh muscle of the skinniest one, thought with envy that a regular bloke with a swole leg like that would wipe the floor with Mister Olympia in the States – and these horses were built like that by nature. On top of that, hooves like brass knuckles, four of them at once, mugs out of punching range, and in case of trouble they could flee the scene with the speed of a Polonez car. And they fear nothing – despite human intelligence, their brainset is in wild-animal mode, like the Russkies or the Arabs. They dominate even without trying, with their frame alone, and nobody likes that. And they are probably juiced to the gills, because where else would those wired-up pipes, blocky jaws, and mood swings come from? They are definitely pinning their rumps, at least some of them. One of them looked more like a horse than a man, with his wide-set eyes and jacked-up domino teeth. He neighed, and even his human torso and neck were covered in sparce hair, while the rest had fully human upper halves, but even then the shape was on point. What a bizarre hybrid it is. They had his back – he was family – but never let him speak around humans, too embarrassing. So he ate raw meat, snorted, and neighed. The General looked at the brute with resignation, but Blud and Loco were boiling inside. They had hated those horse-spawns since forever, ever since growing up with a centaur family in the same yard, doomed to lose every confrontation because of the horses’ genetic dominance. But Pippy and Brutal fraternized happily, and their will was sacred. 

- You haven’t aged a day, my dear Pippy, my guy, my brother and friend.

- Hell yeah! The can preserves you. I’ll never forget your help when so many so-called people turned their backs on me. 

For a long time, the General wondered about the closeness between the Boss and Brutal, until – having only a School Atlas of Geography as company during solitary – he figured out that hipo meant “horse,” since hippo-potam meant “river horse” in ancient tongues, because potam is “river,” like in Meso-potamia, because mezo means “between,” like in Mesoamerica, which is that America between North and South, Guatemala-Belize-Honduras-El Salvador-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama. And phil means “to like,” like biblio-phile, he who loves books, easy, or pedo-phile, may  that fucking  beotch choke on a ragged cock, yuk, death to him. So Pippy is short for Philip, meaning Phile-Hip – horse-lover. Simple, sneaky, and logical.

With grey hair down to his shoulders and deep wrinkles on his sun-burnt face, from the waist up Brutal had a bikerish look, like an old Harley one-percenter, but neither he nor anyone from his group wore leather cuts like some centaur gangs in the West. He was a chip off the early Polish People's Republic block, when they galloped through forests with no human trinkets, no horseshoes, no chains, no tattoos, no literacy – living wild and separate, not even trying to adapt to the rules of the two-legged. He kept that spirit among his own (though he allowed himself one small weakness). 

Hated and proud, they treated the entire human race with superiority as a matter of principle. The world over, nobody had ever seen a centaur in any state service, so they saw police elements even in the stiffest of outlaws. Brutal, however, held Pippy in estimation like few others. Maybe because he didn’t sense much “human” in him. 

They met under late-Gierek times. Brutal, mercilessly terrorized anyone who stumbled into his stamping ground even before the war, as a colt, and the occupation awakened a real monster in him. Many years passed before he finally emerged from the backwoods, drenched in blood. He never stayed anywhere long, drifting between loafing and doing time in horse cans – from which he escaped, dodging the authorities, hating the world, living like the beast he half-was. Over time, he started to gather around him two-shapes suffocating in the ghettos built “in the brotherly gesture”, like the Stable Estate in Nowa Huta, Centaurville near Warsaw, and the mine-owned stables scattered all around Silesia, where they slogged for ten men on the verge of collapse. The rest is history. 

When he jumped young Pippy, he had been the terror of the hood longer then the kid had been alive, and Pippy didn’t flinch. He nearly threw him using a judo grip and forced a longer struggle, though he stood no chance. And Brutal, if he respected anything human, it was audacity and ruthlessness. In the pale moonlight, they sealed their fates together in an act of mutual self-injury and helped each other from then on whenever the time was right. 

Brutal crouched on his hooves and leaned his elbows on the table. Looking from the other side, you’d see four blokes. The rest were going wild on the dance floor. 

- … too risky… They’ll have us on a plate.

The General advised against it. Pippy pushed. He wanted the centaurs – for dollars – to rip apart the crown witness. He (“she” – corrected Pippy) stopped even bothering to hide and was openly running a construction company two voivodeships over. Brutal was waiting for their decision. He’d rip the snitch apart for fun; for money, he’d turn him into tartare. But he didn’t have to do it – he didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn about the clusterfuck. It was Pippy who would take a swing for the executive perpetration. As a centaur, Brutal was unaccountable ex officio. 

The Grim Reaper echoed the boss even when he contradicted himself. Brutal despised that grey figure. His blind obedience, sluggishness, slave-like servility, and not even so much his cruelty – which he respected after all – but the slimy sadism, like defenestrating a debtor in front of his crumb snatcher over some petty debt. Yet Pippy kept the executioner at the table, no idea why, since if at all, he only consulted his decisions with the General, and if anything, the executions were the horse-people’s domain.

The centaurs were finishing the “tater,” as they mispronounced it, and started drinking. Five minutes, and they were cooked. They sniffed up all the powder like it was oats from a sack and went berserk as “Redneck Joe” blasted through the speakers. With minced meat on their faces and under their fingernails, towering two and a half meters tall, smelling of stable, bug-eyed, wired and bombed-out, they could terrify even ancient convicts, and certainly the civilians. They were considered the most brutal group in Poland, and one of the last so wholly unassimilated in Europe. The one who neighed kept neighing; others stomped, pounded their chests, clashed heads, smashed bottles, and danced arm-in-arm. The neighing one grabbed the roast pig from the pan and, still neighing, pressed it overhead several times, then bit into it and spat out a chunk of meat flying right up under the disco ball hanging from the rustic ceiling, while the others stomped approvingly and reared up, forcing everyone to clear the floor – they raised hell beyond human comprehension. 

The trusted cook got flattened by the pig carcass – the neighing one had thrown it at him. Pippy stopped pushing the plan. He looked at Brutal. Brutal shrugged. Pippy grimaced. Brutal whistled sharply. The more lucid centaurs shot him a glance. Brutal rubbed his thumb and index finger as if striking a lighter wheel. The centaurs left. The neighing one stayed, but his brothers returned for him so they could smoke a cancer-stick outside. 

Pippy sized up the mess, The Grim Reaper looked at Brutal. Brutal grimaced. The air vibrated with bad tension between them. The General intervened. 

- Tell me, Brutal, one more thing…

The old centaur didn’t like his nickname among humans. They gave it to him because of the spicy scent he was emitting, but since he actually rinsed his mane with Old Spice, not some cheapo knock off, he suspected mockery. He answered the General in a similarly artificial fashion as he had addressed him – his voice lined with a multifaceted irritation rather than gratefulness for the diffusion of tension. 

The expressions and the faces were mismatched. Armando, Face, and others looked as bewildered as some respectable townsfolk. Only the women didn’t seem to feel any more pressure than usual. Their reputations weren’t at stake so they had nothing to worry about. Or at least that’s what they thought. That blonde – Monnie, that Monica – taking advantage of the spotlight finally shifting elsewhere, mixed the contents of her snuff-bullet with the leftovers on the discreet tray and snorted a line that even the Lord of the Gates – a long-vanished meathead built like a two-by-two meter square, who once stayed awake for a thousand nights straight during his legendary binge, getting more voluble with each one, at least until he entered the mystical phase – wouldn’t be ashamed of. Her eyes flamed up, the bitter drip twisted her full lips. 

And then the neighing primitive burst back into the hall. Dazed by substances and lust, dripping with clotted fat and foam from his own maw, he trotted across the dancefloor like a madman before reaching his paws toward the main table and throwing Lady Counsel over his shoulders!

- What are you doing, you horse-face?! – Face leaped at him.

In response, the creature landed two punches straight into Face’s noble chest. Face staggered… and backed away to the cloakroom without a fight! The primitive hybrid neighed triumphantly. The others ran in, drunk on their own savagery, and threw themselves at the women as if they were their own property. 

The more senior gangsters hesitated to react. They sat like pillars of salt. Even Pippy was weighing his words under his tongue. They’d forgotten what it felt like to be challenged. The last time anyone questioned the position of any of them was at most in the first decade of their bird. A monstrous test slammed down on them like a ram battering a door at six in the morning – you could sense it coming earlier, but when it finally hit, nobody was ready. The venue echoed with screams. Instead of fleeing with their prize, the centaurs kept provoking. They rampaged through the room, presenting the women taken hostage in a barbaric display.

This wasn’t an ordinary kidnapping, nor even an insult you could patch up with a cabbage compress, like when Face’s third wife, that whore, cheated on him – with Armando, no less. The General found solace in a memory from the previous century. Whether he wanted it or not, they dragged him into the basement of a residential building. Face priced his broken heart at fifteen hundred, and the collegial disloyalty at three and a half grand Polish zloty, and for the total of five thousand Armando bought his way out elegantly. That very same evening, they drank together and snacked, and even the wife escaped consequences – nobody slashed her face. But now, they had taken a wallop right in the core of their humanity. They had to fight. Maybe for the last time. 

Armando instinctively reached for the empty seat beside him – not a trace of Monica. Blud and Loco howled with rage.

- They took our women!

A web of shadows arranged itself on their faces like sharp black fur. They looked like miniature werewolves, both barely one-sixty tall, yet few bigger psychos had ever been born on Polish soil. They were the first to go for revenge, hurling plates and bottles – moments ago serving the feast, now weapons of war and murder. Silver platers struck the centaurs, playing the prelude to the bestial battle that was about to devour the banquet hall. 

The neighing primitive lifted the frozen figure of Lady Counsel over his head and neighed again – when suddenly a flood of blood gushed from his gob, and his brain seeped out from his nostrils. Face hadn’t even drawn his samurai sword from the sheath; he smashed the creature’s skull bluntly, like cracking a pistachio. The Grim Reaper shot Brutal a brazen stare. 

- And what do you say now, you horse spawn?

Brutal stayed silent. They locked eyes, as if waiting to see who’d blink first – though Pippy and the General knew the Grim Reaper was already dead long before Brutal turned away from the table and with a kick of his hind leg he smashed his face in so brutally that the nose was punched into the palate. With a single leap Brutal jumped over the body, tossing Pippy a cursory glance in mid-air: they would tear into each other only when there was not a single other enemy left. 

The horse-men, in the face of battle, hurled the yentas into the corner, and the women vacated the premises without delay. The centaurs run after them – which looked like a cruel game – but the target turned out to be the trees. Strong as cranes and boosted with adrenaline and the death of their primitive kin, they ripped them out with roots like broccoli. Always eager to fight, driven by vengeance they would’ve pummeled the sky, the moon, and the stars if only they could reach them. They returned to the hall and crushed the youngsters with the tree trunks – the wannabes who’d run out to counterattack holding chair legs for weapons. They wanted to impress their uncles… Blood splattered the walls. Not a single centaur got scratched. 

Lady Counsel crouched on a chair. Her husband thanked them for “the help rendered to his wife.” Face drew the samurai sword, Pippy pulled out a Czechoslovak Skorpion submachine gun. The General tore off his shirt like Hulk Hogan. Supposedly the most civilized one – and yet the first to switch into “kill or die” mode. The centaurs pushed toward the human stronghold behind the overturned table. Blud and Loco ambushed two hybrids, leaping guerilla-style onto their backs and, riding them like cheap hacks, choked them from behind with neck locks. Cracking windpipes sounded like music – two centaurs down. Blud repeated the feat. Crack – that made three. It seemed like they’d discovered a method – until Loco got grabbed. A chestnut-colored centaur tore him apart like a rag. Nothing but scraps remained of Loco. Blud let out a howl. I could have sworn that he grew fangs and claws, if it weren’t impossible. The fella went completely feral. Alcoholic lycanthropy tripled his strength; his thirst for revenge put him on equal footing with his enemies. He was sashing away left and right with abandon, slicing at legs and stomachs, dodging strikes like a shadow. He carved himself a path to Loco’s killer – the chestnut centaur whose name no human knew, but whom they called Fuckhead, because aside from the neighing primitive, he stood out with his volatility and the dominance of the beastly element. The faces of the less bright centaurs always looked strange – their human features driven by an animal brain, with no softening of any kind of civility, even criminal civility. You never knew where such a creature was looking, what it was thinking, or what to expect – and with Fuckhead, even less so. Blud thrust the blade into his side, where the man half merges with the horse half. Fuckhead collapsed to his knees, bleeding from a severed artery. Blud was savoring his agony and howling. He was staring into Fuckhead’s fading eyes and howling. Soon he was trampled and howled no more. They said he lost caution and stopped checking his flanks – but I think he didn’t want to live without Loco and just waited to be stomped, so he could join his brother in the afterlife. 

Pippy aimed his Skorpion… Not that he was choosing which enemy to shoot – he was just trying to avoid hitting Brutal. Even though Brutal had personally finished off Armando and was more or less coordinating the assault with the gestures of his arms. The boss grimaced, squinted one eye, took a breath… The Skorpion exploded in his hand! A rusty old piece of junk! He cursed ad checked if he still had fingers. Technically he did, but his right hand was out of commission, and with his left he had to stop the bleeding. The twins were avenged only later – by Face. With a samurai sword. He dove into the turmoil and butchered three horse-men – slash, slash, slash – guts flying everywhere, and he enjoyed every second of it, he’d missed that kind of thrill, finally feeling alive again… until he too fell, struck by a hoof right at the base of his nose. The centaurs seized the katana. They whooshed it through the air, delighted like brats with a new toy or monkeys with a razor. Lady Counsel, risking decapitation and being trampled, dragged the dying Face out from between the hooves and tried to revive him in the corner of the hall, but he never regained consciousness. His heavy head pulsed with weakening breaths on her lap. She finally deciphered the tattoo on the inside of his elbow – as I turned out, a message for a nurse” IF YOU STICK ME CLEAN, I’LL LICK YOUR PAN PRISTIN.”

The General, shirtless, was falling centaurs with bare fists. On his shoulders, he had inked the insignia of the General of Death: epaulets with skull instead of stars, because he escaped the gallows before the moratorium on executions was announced. Contrary to the old saying “the bigger the man, the bigger the surface to stab,” no weapons touched him. He was so hardened that you couldn’t cut him even with a samurai sword. The blade slid off, and the General knocked them out – with elbows, fists, every limb he had. 

- If steel won’t do it, then wood will!

The General got smacked in the temple with a birch tree. He dropped like a log. He wasn’t immune to that kind of weapon. They buried him under trees and smashed furniture until he disappeared under the pile entirely. The protocol later stated that “as a result of the beating, no trace of him remained,” but I, crouched behind the DJ booth, saw with my own eyes a swallow of freedom fly out from under the heap. 

Then I lost consciousness. From fear, or from a ricochet – I don’t know. I have no idea how, but  Lady Counsel and her husband survived – I saw them now in the corridor. Only Pippy and Brutal remained on the battlefield. Fading hoofbeats echoed from outside the building. The two bosses stood across from each other, exhausted by the massacre. Two fingers on Pippy’s right hand dangled by the skin. They stared at one another as if they had just woken from a dream, surprised at what had happened, realizing there was no turning back, that they now had to face the consequences of other people’s decisions. They delayed the confrontation. They didn’t want to fight, despite the deaths of so many underlings. They had matching scars on their shoulders. 

Then I heard sirens, and the police stormed into the venue. I am absolutely certain they weren’t called by any participants – unless the lawyers.  Brutal galloped far away after the rest of the herd. Pippy, as you know, was arrested. That’s exactly why nobody wants to

The witness has been instructed on criminal liability for giving false testimony or concealing the truth pursuant to Article 233 of the Penal Code. 

After personally reading the protocol , I sign

XYZ

Nickname bank: 

Brutal – Brutal (after the cologne)

Buźka – the Face

Filipek – Pippy

Jucha – Blud; 

Monia, ta Monika – Monnie, that Monica

Pani Mecenas – lady Counsel

Pierdolnięty- Fuckhead

Ponury Kosiarz – The Grim Reaper

Wariat – Loco;

Władca Bramek – the Lord of the Gates

Piotr Oprządek, author based in Cracow, Poland. Gradute in screenwriting in Łódź Film School, has published short stories in few Polish literary magazines. Currently working on his second

book.