His savage injuries receded to a dull curtain of pain in the back of his ever more distant mind as he stood over the cringing form of Usef, the man who he once credited with his redemption, the slithering snake in the tangled crabgrass that he once equated to waving fields of grain. As he stood and mused at the news that the noble white devil named Noble had returned with a coven of devils in tow, he heard the deep rumble of a distant voice, a voice that would have once caused immeasurable pain to the broken ribs above his bruised kidneys, if their owner were still somehow part of the suffering world of pain.

"Satan has walked on leathery wings into your house, Usef."

"No!" whined the blubbering serpent at his feet, "the militant portion of my heart has long ago turned pale and embraced them. I'm a good boy, Akbar. I've done nothing wrong—they have nothing on me. Motherfucker, I'm set, you scary-ass murderin' negro. Don't you be ruinin' ma shit up in here!" screeched the clawing thing as it's manicured nails pawed helplessly at the booted feet of that vengeful cipher which it rightly feared.

Unbelievably the sissy form of Usef had come screaming after him, whimpering like a woman, whining about losing his place under the White Devil's ever-curtained tent. The blow that had sent him to the floor in the narrow hall above the spiral stair down to the gym—where Gans could be heard working the speed bag like old Big Cat Johnson himself—had not been of the physical kind, but of the reflecting eye of The Pit, the glare that beams the plight of the wicked back into their own doomed souls.

He bent and caught the suited serpent up by it's starched collar, picked it up with the winning right hand—now forever broken—that had ever bedeviled opponents, and spake clearly into its face, "This is the Children's house and Poet shall not defy the Devil in their safe den, but stroke his forked beard. For Poet is the Devil's own dog, as is Usef, the bitch cur of Howard Street. Rest easy, woman, Poet shall turn on the Devil in some lonely place—not here, not ever."

Usef shivered as he hung by the starched collar, scraping the floor with his shame-stained snakeskin shoes, his eyes wide and glazed, seeing in them the far away place of warriors he was a stranger to. "Yes, yess!" he stammered.

Poet, an incarnation of damnation that had more of the panther about him than his uptight predecessor, who had been so vested in the artifice of the righteous knife, then set the fragile creature on his feet and whispered, "We, both of us, have some shame to wash away—you from your pants and shoes, and Poet from his hands. Go wash up, Brother, so that we might appear in The Pit in style. Kismet has hungered for us longingly and so we shall go properly garnished."

Usef looked into his eyes with the wide amazement of the fool who has not seen the Far Side, the meat-hung skeleton that has yet to come to grips with his Looming Dissolution, of the Devil-marked man who does not yet know he Is Dead, and fancies that he sees before him a man gone mad, when in fact, the man before him was finally, terminally sane for the first time in his long, violent life.

To his credit, Usef managed a sentence, "Go, Brother, conduct that Devil Train, while I make ready the Shaykh of Fake. Take up the Devil-taming tune," Usef said, as they clasped hands, as they oft had way back in the day, the weakling having found a token of strength in the old 'good negro/bad negro' scam they had once, way back in their youth, used upon the minions of The Man.

Usef's hand even seemed momentarily free of his sissy sweat as they patted shoulder with palm and turned to go their separate ways, to the same dreadfully appointed task.