The Place of Dead Roads Read online

  8. They are more at home occupying women than men. Once they have a woman, they have the male she cohabits with. Women must be regarded as the principal reservoir of the alien virus parasite. Women and religious sons of bitches. Above all, religious women.

  We will take every opportunity to weaken the power of the church. We will lobby in Congress for heavy taxes on all churches. We will provide more interesting avenues for the young. We will destroy the church with ridicule. We will secularize the church out of existence. We will introduce and encourage alternative religious systems. Islam, Buddhism, Taoism. Cults, devil worship, and rarefied systems like the Ishmaelite and the Manichaean. Far from seeking an atheistic world as the communists do, we will force Christianity to compete for the human spirit.

  We will fight any extension of federal authority and support States' Rights. We will resist any attempt to penalize or legislate against the so-called victimless crimes...gambling, sexual behavior, drinking, drugs.

  We will give all our attention to experiments designed to produce asexual offspring, to cloning, use of artificial wombs, and transfer operations.

  We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate populations at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap.

  They were down in Mexico, hiding out in the hacienda of the Fuentes family. They did some hunting for the table. Kim tamed a peccary and it would follow him like a dog. There was an old family assassin named Tio Mate, who could shoot vultures out of the sky with his 44 tip-up Smith and Wesson.

  Kim procured some sacred mushrooms from his Indian lover, which he brewed in a clay pot and crooned over it and spit in it and just before sunset we all take the potion and Kim's spirit guide leads us to a room we had never seen before huge house anyhoo and we find trunks full of female clothes so we dress up and camp around Kim calls himself the Green Nun, and Tom does the Pious Senora, and Boy is the blushing Senorita. The Green Nun rummages around and finds a brace of double-barreled twenty-gauge shotgun pistols perfectly balanced with rubber grips and her loads it with number-four shot.

  And a belt with holsters, the guns slide out smooth as silk, the whole equipage hide under his nun cape. Boy, who has been vulture shooting with Tio Mate, opts for the 44 Smith and Wesson, and Tom has a weird Webley semiautomatic revolver, with a shield over the cylinder to protect his hand from sparks and a hand grip that folds down from the barrel.

  So attired and armed we get in the buckboard and drive down to the village, where the Chief of Police and his asshole cronies is getting drunker and meaner by the minute...They know something is going on up at the hacienda.

  "Brujeria..." (Witchcraft...)

  "Y maricones."

  The Jefe is a strain of blond Mexican with reddish hair, little red bristly eyelashes, blue pig-eyes, and a pug nose with red hairs flaring out like copper wire. Strong and heavyset, his whole being exudes animal ill-temper and menace. He is conspiring to displace the Fuentes family, who opposed his appointment. Kim had seen him shortly after his arrival and it was pure hate at first sight...

  The four boys sweep into the saloon. The Jefe swells with rage.

  Kim smiles at him and touches the huge silver crucifix at his throat, in the same moment tossing his nun cape aside.

  "CHINGOA!" the Jefe screams and goes for his pearl-handled 45 automatic. Kim slides the gun out and points for the Jefe's pig snout and there is a bloody hole where the Jefe's nose and eyes were. He spins backward into the man behind him, a gaunt wooden-faced man with a black coat and black bow tie.

  Kim lines up just under the tie and opens his throat to the spine. He drops to the floor to shift guns...

  Boy and Tom are dropping them like ducks in a shooting gallery. I see a stolid farmer type lining up on Tom with a 30-30 and I shoot up from the floor just below the rib cage where the Aztecs cut in to pull the heart out. He rocks back, his eyes open and close like a doll. The gun falls from his hands.

  Twelve of those lousy macho shits died in the shoot-out. We lost one boy—a sad quiet kid named Joe had got himself up as a whore in a purple dress slit down the sides. Had his gun in a shoulder holster and it caught in his strap-on tits. Hit five times.

  When we get back to the hacienda with dead Joe, Tio Mate takes us in to see the patron, a courtly old gentleman with black clothes and silver braid all over.

  "It gives me much pleasure to see boys earn their keep."

  We all recognize the voice of Kim's spirit guide.

  The boys smile.

  "Can I pet the skull?" Kim asks. "Certainly. You all can."

  Tio Mate steps to the door and calls the Skull Keeper. And he brings the skull in on a silk pillow and sets it down on a table of polished petrified wood. And we all crowd around to pet it. I can feel the tingle run up my arms, a soft burn, and the smell of stale flowers and jungles and decay and musky animal smells...Kim draws the smell deep into his lungs.

  "When I touched it I felt itchy prickles run up my arm in rhythmic pulses. It's a living thing, warm and resinous to the touch, like amber.

  "I am stroking out a smell of stagnant swamp water, gardens turning back to jungle, and a sharp rank animal smell."

  Smell of some creature so alien Kim feels queasy trying to imagine the creature that would smell like that. He knew that the skull came from the planet Venus. He had experienced vivid dream visions of Venus and he intended to write a guidebook...He did sketches and sometimes he would tell Tom:

  "Take a picture of that. It's pure Venus, my dear..."

  And Uranus where the Uranians sit in their blue slate houses in cold blue silence...Kim wanted to explore them all...He longed for new dangers and new weapons, "for perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." For unknown drugs and pleasures, and a distant star called HOME.

  11

  The Family has set up a number of posts in America and northern Mexico. They are already very rich, mostly from real estate. They own newspapers, a chemical company, a gun factory, and a factory for making photographic equipment, which will become one of the first film studios.

  Their policy is Manichaean. Good and evil are in a state of conflict. The outcome is uncertain. This is not an eternal conflict since one or the other will win out in this universe. The Christian church, by calling good "evil" and evil "good," has confused the issue. The church must be seen as a dedicated instrument of alien invasion.

  Kim has set out to organize the Johnson Family into an all-out worldwide space program. He soon finds himself in conflict with very deadly and powerful forces:

  Old Man Bickford, cattle, oil, and real estate. He owns a big piece of a big state. He is one of the poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old men who run America. To these backstage operators, presidents, ambassadors, cabinet members are just jokes and errand boys. They do what they are told to do, or else.

  Bickford's subordinates never know why they have fallen from favor. That is for them to figure out, when his displeasure falls heavy and cold as a cop's blackjack on a winter night...

  "Just step in here, Jess,...I want to talk to you." The Old Man steers him into a little side room containing one chair. The Old Man sits down and smiles.

  "You know, Jess, I have an intuition about you: I think you'd make a mighty fine president."

  Jess turns pale. "Oh no, Mr. Bickford, I don't have the qualifications..."

  "I disagree with you. I think you do have the qualifications: a good front, and a big mouth."

  Now Jess knows: he talked too much at the wrong time and the wrong place.

  "Please, Mr. Bickford...I got a bad heart. It would kill me."

  Bickford's smile widens. "T
hink about it, Jess. Think about it very carefully. I wouldn't want to see you make a mistake."

  Mr. Hart, the newspaper tycoon, is on the surface quite different from Bickford. Bickford enjoys complex relationships with his subordinates; Hart doesn't like any relationships. Other people are different from him, and he doesn't like them. He can only tolerate their presence under controlled conditions. More introverted than Bickford, he is simpler and more predictable, since he has an overriding obsession: Mr. Hart is obsessed with immortality. The Tightest right a man could be is to live infinitely long, he decides, and he directs all the iron strength of his will to that end. He sets up a house rule that the word death may not be pronounced in his presence.

  Once, just for jolly, Kim wangled an invitation to Hart's showplace, and appeared at dinner in a skeleton suit. Hart didn't think this was funny at all.

  Bickford laughed. Oh, not in front of Hart. He wasn't there. He had his own reasons for fomenting ill will between Hart and Kim. And Hart, predictably, conceived a consuming, relentless hatred for Kim Carsons and his Johnson Family, as a deadly threat to his immortality. On one point Hart and Bickford agree: neither of them wants to see the power of life and death in unpredictable hands.

  Kim remembers the words of Bat Masterson: "A man has to fit in somewhere."

  And that was what was wrong with Kim. It wasn't anything he actually did, or might do. He just did not fit. He wasn't even an outlaw anymore. From the proceeds of several carefully planned jewel and bank robberies, he was well on the way to being wealthy. The last of his illegal diamonds nestled in his vest pocket. Kim didn't fit, and a part that doesn't fit can wreck a machine. These old pros could see long before Kim saw that he had the basic secrets of wealth and power and would become a big-time player if he wasn't stopped. That his dream of a takeover by the Johnson Family, by those who actually do the work, the creative thinkers and artists and technicians, was not just science fiction. It could happen.

  Kim wonders naively why they don't deal him in. The answer is that they will never accept anyone who does not think and feel as they do. It wasn't the Johnson Family itself that bothered them or at least it wouldn't have bothered them if it had been just another Mafia-type criminal organization. What they didn't like was to see wealth and power in the hands of those who basically despised the usages of wealth and power. This was intolerable.

  "He must be stopped!"

  Soon Kim will have enough money to implement the first stage of his plan—Big Picture, he calls it—his plan for a Johnson Family takeover. He will set up a base in New York. He will organize the Johnsons in Civilian Defense Units. He will oust the Mafia. He will buy a newspaper to push Johnson Policy, to oppose any further encroachment of Washington bureaucrats. He intends to strangle the FDA in its cradle, to defeat any legislation aimed at outlawing liquor, drugs, gambling, private sexual behavior or the possession of firearms. He will buy a chemical company with research facilities where he will develop sophisticated biologic and chemical agents. He will start a small-arms factory, reserving the special weapons for the use of the Johnson elite.

  "HE MUST BE STOPPED!"

  Waghdas, the City of Knowledge, is denounced by Hart through newspapers of the world as "the most dangerous place on earth! A festering sink of subversion, luring gullible youth with false hopes and fool's gold..."

  Constantly under siege, Waghdas changes location often. In houseboats and caravans, burnt-out tenements and ghost towns...now you see it, now you don't. One thinks of knowledge as a calm remote area of ancient stone buildings, ivy, and languid young men, but knowledge can be an explosive instance. Ever see the marks wise up and take a carnival apart?

  Hey Rube echoes through the monumental fraud of Planet Earth...the forbidden knowledge passes from Johnson to Johnson, in freight cars and jails, in seedy rooming houses and precarious compounds, in hop joints and rafts floating down the great rivers of South America, in guerrilla camps and desert tents.

  "The game is rigged! Take the place apart!"

  Already the first crude weapons are being forged in lofts and basements, barns and warehouses...weapons for a new type of warfare, weapons aimed directly at the driver instead of the craft, the soul instead of the body. And all physical weapons have their soul-warfare equivalents...there are soul knives and guns, soul poisons and mass bombardments that can leave a city of empty bodies milling around—from time to time one stops and falls, he can't never get up, so they keep walking around and around in a clockwise direction as one after the other drops...

  Kim doesn't want to keep thinking about the ambush since he isn't ready to take action yet, but it keeps playing over and over in his brain like a stuck record...Late afternoon and the sun came out...the town shimmering in the distance like the promised land. Just riding into town for supplies...and the next thing bullets and shotgun slugs is coming from every side.

  Kim found out later that Mike Chase had tipped the sheriff that the Carsons gang was going to rob the bank. He didn't tell the sheriff about the special price Old Man Bickford has on Kim, figuring to take that for himself. That was Mike. Let others take the chances, then he picks up the eagles.

  Kim had an anthology of poetry, leather-bound with gilt edges, and a slim volume of Rimbaud, so he distracted himself with reading.

  Yes, he had an account to settle with a certain bounty hunter named Mike Chase. "Bookkeeping," he called it. Vengeance is a dish best savored cold...with dewy fingers cold.

  Kim had a pint of cannabis tincture with him, as he was off morphine, and the cannabis made everything so much sharper. Kim would have been the first to concede that it also made him silly in an eerie, ghostly sort of way. Now he strapped on the gun with the silencer in its special holster, fits like a prick up an asshole and slides out with a little fluid plop.

  His Sperm Gun, he called it. Spitting death seed, it would father the Super Race. They are out there, waiting to be born...millions of Johnsons...Certain uh obstacles must be removed...

  The little toy dog is covered with dust,

  But sturdy and stanch he stands;

  And the little toy soldier is red with rust,...

  Awaiting the touch of a little hand,...

  "Hello, Mike," he trills, a ghostly child voice from a haunted attic.

  Awaiting the touch of a little hand.

  Kim's face darkens with death. He goes into a half-crouch as his hand drops and sweeps the gun up to eye level in a smooth, unhurried movement.

  A tubercular cough from metal lungs. The gun spits smoky blood. White dust drifts from a hole in a cow skull Kim has set up on a fencepost. Now that cow got bogged down, used to be quicksand here. Kim can imagine its despairing moos...He does a hideous imitation of the stricken cow, throwing his head back, rolling his eyes and bellowing to the sky: "MOOO MOOO MOOOO...as drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds." Kim reads the poems over and over..."verses trill and tinkle from the icy streams, and the stars that oversprinkle all the heavens seem to twinkle with a crystalline delight." He didn't think of it as vengeance, it was just keeping the ledger books, "as dewy fingers draw the gradual dusky veil." Verses whisper and sigh from grass and leaves, "old, unhappy, far-off things/And battles long ago." Sometimes some lines of verse would light up a scene from his past, like a magic lantern: "A violet by a mossy stone/Half hidden from the eye!—"

  A whiff of stagnant pond water, and he remembered Old Mrs. Sloane. She had a greenhouse full of fish tanks with tropical fish, and a big garden. After supper they used to go over and look at the fish and watch them eat fish food. Mrs. Sloane was a fat, wheezy woman who was always fanning herself, and she had two fat wheezing asthmatic Pekingese dogs.

  "Foink foink foink," they would wheeze out.

  "FUCK FUCK FUCK."

  Fireflies are coming out in her garden, among the roses and iris and lilies. A frog plops into the fishpond. The Evening Star floats in a clear green sky. Two fireflies light up the petals of a rose, cold phosphorescent green, delicate seashell pi
nk, a cameo of memory floating in dead stale time.

  It has the garish colors of a tinted photograph. Kim feels a little queasy looking at it. He can see it on a Japanese screen in a whorehouse.

  Killed in the Manhattan Shoot-out...April 3, 1894...Sharp smell of weeds from old westerns.

  Christmas 1878, Wednesday...Eldora, Colo...William Hall takes a book bound in leather from a drawer and leafs through the pages. It is a scrapbook with sketches, photos, newspaper articles, dated annotations. Postscript by William Hall:

  The Wild Fruits, based in Clear Creek and Fort Johnson, control a large area of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Like latter-day warlords, they exact tribute from settlers and townspeople and attract adventurous youth to their ranks.

  Mr. Hart starts a Press campaign.

  QUANTRILL RIDES AGAIN

  How long are peaceful settlers and townspeople to be victimized by a brazen band of marauding outlaws? Wallowing in nameless depravity, they have set themselves above the laws of God and man.

  Wires are pulled in Washington. The army is called in to quell this vicious revolt against the constituted government of the United States.

  In charge of the expedition is Colonel Greenfield, a self-styled Southern Gentleman, with long yellow hair and slightly demented blue eyes. He has vowed to capture and summarily hang the Wild Fruits. His cavalry regiment with artillery and mortars has surrounded Fort Johnson where the outlaws have gone to ground. The Colonel surveys the fort through his field glasses. No sentries in the watchtowers, no sign of life. From the flagpole flies Old Glory, a cloth skunk, tail raised, cleverly stitched in.