The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead Read online

  El Mono has been Tío Mate’s Feather Bearer for five years. He sits for hours on the balcony until their faces fuse. He has his own little charts and compass. He is learning to shoot a vulture from the sky. A thin agile boy of thirteen he climbs all over the building spying on the vecinos. He wears a little blue skullcap and when he takes it off the vecinos hurry to drop a coin in it. Otherwise he will act out a recent impotence, a difficult bowel movement, a cunt-licking with such precise mimicry that anyone can identify the party involved.

  El Mono picks out a pimp with his eyes. He makes a motion of greasing a candle. The pimp licks his lips speechless with horror his eyes wild. Now El Mono is shoving the candle in and out his ass teeth bare eyes rolling he gasps out: “Sangre de Cristo…” The pimp impaled there for all to see. Joselito leaps up and stomps out a triumphant fandango. Awed by Tío Mate and fearful of a recent impotence, a difficult bowel movement, a cunt-licking, the pimps fall back in confusion.

  Tío Paco now mans the upper balcony with his comrade in arms Fernández the drug clerk. Tío Paco has been a waiter for forty years. Very poor, very proud, contemptuous of tips, he cares only for the game. He brings the wrong order and blames the client, he flicks the nastiest towel, he shoves a tip back saying “The house pays us.” He screams after a client “Le service n’est-ce pas compris.” He has studied with Pullman George and learned the art of jiggling arms across the room:

  hot coffee in a quiet American crotch.

  And woe to a waiter who crosses him:

  tray flies into the air. Rich well-dressed clients dodge cups and glasses, bottle of Fundador broken on the floor.

  Fernández hates adolescents, pop stars, beatniks, tourists, queers, criminals, tramps, whores and drug addicts. Tío Paco hates their type too.

  Fernández likes policemen, priests, army officers, rich people of good repute. Tío Paco likes them too. He serves them quickly and well. But their lives must be above reproach.

  A newspaper scandal can mean long waits for service.

  The client becomes impatient. He makes an angry gesture. A soda siphon crashes to the floor.

  What they both love most of all is to inflict humiliation on a member of the hated classes, and to give information to the police.

  Fernández throws a morphine script back across the counter.

  “No prestamos servicio a los viciosos.” (“We do not serve dope fiends.”)

  Tío Paco ignores a pop star and his common-law wife until the cold sour message seeps into their souls:

  “We don’t want your type in here.”

  Fernández holds a prescription in his hand. He is a plump man in his late thirties. Behind dark glasses his eyes are yellow and liverish. His low urgent voice on the phone.

  “Receta narcótica falsificado.” (“A narcotic prescription forged.”)

  “Your prescription will be ready in a minute señor.”

  Tío Paco stops to wipe a table and whispers … “Marijuana in a suitcase … table by the door” … The cop pats his hand.

  Neither Tío Paco nor Fernández will accept any reward for services rendered to their good friends the police.

  When they first came to live on the top floor five years ago Tío Mate saw them once in the hall.

  “Copper-loving bastards,” he said in his calm final voice.

  He did not have occasion to look at them again. Anyone Tío Mate doesn’t like soon learns to stay out of Tío Mate’s space.

  Fernández steps to the wall and his wife appears at his side. Her eyes are yellow her teeth are gold. Now his daughter appears. She has a mustache and hairy legs. Fernández looks down from a family portrait.

  “Criminales. Maricónes. Vagabundos. I will denounce you to the police.”

  Tío Paco gathers all the bitter old men in a blast of sour joyless hate. Joselito stops dancing and droops like a wilted flower. Tío Pepe and Dolores are lesser demons. They shrink back furtive and timorous as dawn rats. Tío Mate looks at a distant point beyond the old waiter tracing vultures in the sky. El Mono stands blank and cold. He will not imitate Fernández and Tío Paco.

  And now Tía María, retired fat lady from a traveling carnival, comes out onto the lower balcony supporting her vast weight on two canes. Tía María eats candy and reads love stories all day and gives card readings the cards sticky and smudged with chocolate. She secretes a heavy sweetness. Sad and implacable it flows out of her like a foam runway. The vecinos fear her sweetness which they regard fatalistically as a natural hazard like earthquakes and volcanoes. “The Sugar of Mary” they call it. It could get loose one day and turn the city into a cake.

  She looks up at Fernández and her sad brown eyes pelt him with chocolates. Tío Paco tries desperately to outflank her but she sprays him with maraschino cherries from her dugs and coats him in pink icing. Tío Paco is the little man on a wedding cake all made out of candy. She will eat him later.

  Now Tío Gordo, the blind lottery-ticket seller, rolls his immense bulk out onto the upper balcony, his wheel chair a chariot, his snarling black dog at his side. The dog smells all the money Tío Gordo takes. A torn note brings an ominous growl, a counterfeit and it will break the man’s arm in its powerful jaws, brace its legs and hold him for the police. The dog leaps to the balcony wall and hooks its paws over barking, snarling, bristling, eyes phosphorescent. Tía María gasps and the sugar runs out of her. She is terrified of “rage dogs” as she calls them. The dog seems ready to leap down onto the lower balcony. Tío Mate plots the trajectory its body would take. He will kill it in the air.

  Tío Pepe throws back his head and howls:

  “Perro attropellado para un camión.” (“Dog run over by a truck.”)

  The dog drags its broken hindquarters in a dusty noon street.

  The dog slinks whimpering to Tío Gordo.

  González the Agente wakes up muttering “Chingoa” the fumes of Mescal burning in his brain. Buttoning on his police tunic and forty-five he pushes roughly to the wall of the upper balcony.

  González is a broken dishonored man. All the vecinos know he has much fear of Tío Mate and crosses the street to avoid him. El Mono has acted out both parts.

  González looks down and there is Tío Mate waiting. The hairs stand up straight on González’s head.

  “CHINGOA.”

  He snatches out his forty-five and fires twice. The bullets whistle past Tío Mate’s head. Tío Mate smiles. In one smooth movement he draws aims and fires. The heavy slug catches González in his open mouth ranging up through the roof blows a large tuft of erect hairs out the back of González’s head. González folds across the balcony wall. The hairs go limp and hang down from his head. The balcony wall begins to sway like a horse. His forty-five drops to the lower balcony and goes off.

  Shot breaks the camera. A frozen still of the two balconies tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle. González still draped over the wall sliding forward, the wheel chair halfway down the upper balcony, the dog slipping down on braced legs, the vecinos trying to climb up and slipping down.

  “GIVE ME THE SIXTEEN.”

  The cameraman shoots wildly … pimps scream by teeth bare eyes rolling, Esperanza sneers down at the Mexican earth, the fat lady drops straight down her pink skirts billowing up around her, Tía Dolores sails down her eyes winking sweet and evil like a doll, dog falls across a gleaming empty sky.

  The camera dips and whirls and glides tracing vultures higher and higher spiraling up.

  Last take: Against the icy blackness of space ghost faces of Tío Mate and El Mono. Dim jerky faraway stars splash the cheek bones with silver ash. Tío Mate smiles.

  The Chief Smiles

  Marrakech 1976 … Arab house in the Medina charming old pot-smoking Fatima drinking tea with the trade in the kitchen. Here in the middle of a film to find myself one of the actors. The Chief has asked me to his house for dinner.

  “Around Eight Rogers.”

  He received me in his patio mixing a green salad thick steaks laid out by
the barbecue pit.

  “Help yourself to a drink Rogers.” He gestures to the drink wagon.

  “There’s kif of course if you want it.”

  I mixed myself a short drink and declined the kif.

  “It gives me a headache.”

  I’d seen the Chief smoking with his Arab contacts but that didn’t give me a license to smoke. Besides it does give me a headache.

  The Chief’s cover story is an eccentric old French comte who is translating the Koran into Provencal and sometimes he will pull cover and bore his guests catatonic. You see, he really knows Provençal and Arabic. You have to study for years on a real undercover job like this. The Chief wasn’t pulling cover tonight. He was expansive and “watch your step, Rogers” I told myself, sipping a weak Scotch.

  “‘I think you are the man for a highly important and I may add highly dangerous assignment, Rogers.’ You fell for that crap?”

  “Well sir he is impressive,” I said cautiously.

  “He’s a cheap old ham,” said the Chief. He sat down and filled his kif pipe with one hand. He smoked and blew the ash out absently caressing a gazelle that nuzzled his knee.

  “ ‘Gotta stay ahead of the Commies or everybody’s kids will be learning Chinese.’ What a windbag.”

  I endeavored to look noncommittal.

  “Have you any idea what we’re doing here, Rogers?”

  “Well, no sir.”

  “I thought not. Never tell them what you want until you’ve got them where you want them. I’m going to show you a documentary film.”

  Two Arab servants carry out a six-foot screen and set it up ten feet in front of our chairs. The Chief gets up turning switches adjusting dials.

  A jungle seen through a faceted eye that looks simultaneously in any direction up or down … close-up of a green snake with golden eyes … telescopic lens picks out a monkey caught by an eagle between two vast trees. The monkey is borne away screaming. I can feel a probing insect intelligence behind the camera, pyramids ahead fields and huts. In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate. Satisfied with the inspection the camera moves back to observe group patterns of the workers. They are moving through a three-dimensional film of the operation that covers them with a grey sheen. Occasionally the overseer adjusts a slow worker with his eyes.

  Next take shows a room in the temple suffused with underwater light. An old priest naked to his pendulous dugs and atrophied testicles sits cross-legged on a toilet seat set in the floor. The seat is cushioned with human skin on which are tattooed pictures of a man turning into a giant centipede. The centipede is eating him from inside legs and claws grow through screaming flesh. Now the centipede is eating his screaming mouth.

  “Criminals and captives sentenced to death in centipede are tattooed with those pictures on every inch of their bodies. They are left for three days to fester. Then they are brought out given a powerful aphrodisiac, skinned alive in orgasm and strapped into a segmented copper centipede. The centipede is placed with obscene endearments in a bed of white-hot coals. The priests gather in crab suits and eat the meat out of the shell with gold claws.”

  The old priest looks like a living part in an exotic computer. From festering sockets in his spine fine copper wires trail in a delicate fan. The camera follows the wires. Here in a little copper cage a scorpion is eating her mate. Here the head of a captive protrudes through the floor. Red ants have made a hill in his head. They crawl in and out of empty eye sockets. They have eaten his lips away from a gag. A muffled scream without a tongue torn through his perforated palate showers the floor with bloody ants. In jade aquariums human rectums and genitals grafted onto other flesh … a prostate gland quivers rainbow colors through a pink mollusk … two translucent white salamanders squirm in slow sodomy golden eyes glinting enigmatic lust … Lesbian electric eels squirm on a mud flat crackling their vaginas together … erect nipples sprout from a bulbous plant.

  “They know an aphrodisiac so potent that it shatters the body to quivering pieces. The Sweet Death is reserved for comely youths and maidens. This wonderful old people had a rich folklore. Well I happened onto this good thing through a Mexican shoe-shine boy … Yoohoo Kiki … Come out and show Mr. Rogers how pretty you are …”

  Kiki stands in a doorway smiling like a shy young animal.

  “Now that lad … he’s a doll isn’t he? … is one of the best deep trance mediums I have ever handled. Through him I was able to teleport myself to a Mayan set and bring back the pictures. The whole thing was so frantic I cooled it all the way in my reports. All I said was it looks like a lovely WUP. That’s code for Weapon of Unlimited Potential … He’s hotting up now.”

  The old priest rocks back and forth. The wires stand up on his spine and his eyes light up inside. His lips part and a dry insect music buzzes out.

  “It’s known as singing the pictures. The principle is alternating current. That old fuck can alternate pain and pleasure on a subvocal perhaps even a molecular level twenty-four times a second goading the natives around on stock probes in out up down here there into the prearranged molds laid down in the sacred books. A few singers can deliver direct current and they are only called in an emergency. The control system you have just seen broke down. This happened quite suddenly a whole generation was born that felt neither pain nor pleasure. There were no soldiers to bring captives from other tribes since soldiers would have endangered the control machine. They relied entirely on local criminals for the pain and pleasure pictures. As a last resort they called in the Incomparable Yellow Serpent.”

  The Serpent is carried in on his amber throne blue snake eyes skin like yellow parchment two long serpent fangs grafted into the upper jaw. As the current pulses through him he begins to rock back and forth. He shifts from A.C. to D.C. A thin siren wail breaks from his lips now open to the yellow fangs.

  DEATH DEATH DEATH

  The pictures crash and leap from his eyes blasting worker and priest alike to smoldering fragments.

  DEATH DEATH DEATH

  A thin siren wail rises and falls over empty cities.

  “This secret of the ancient Mayans which few are competent to practice.

  When comes such another singer as the Old Yellow Serpent?”

  “Now the Technical Department think we are all as crazy as our way of life is reprehensible.

  “ ‘Bring us the ones that work* they say ‘facts, figures, personnel.

  ‘“Put that joker DEATH on the line. Take care of Mao and his gang of cutthroats.’

  “I was privileged to assist in a manner of speaking at the Yellow Serpent’s last broadcast in Washington D.C.”

  Room in the Pentagon. Generals, CIA, State Department fidget about with that top secret hottest thing ever look open line to the President Strategic and NATO standing by. The Old Yellow Serpent is carried in by four marine guards. He begins to rock back and forth. He breathes in baby coos and breathes out death rattles. He sucks in wheat fields and spits out dust bowls.

  “He’s just warming up,” says the CIA man to a five-star general.

  The Old Serpent shifts to D.C. blazing like a comet.

  DEATH DEATH DEATH

  The pictures lash and crackle from his eyes.

  DEATH DEATH DEATH

  A wall blows out and spills screaming brass eighteen floors to the street.

  DEATH DEATH DEATH

  And now the Serpent swings his whip in the sky.

  Here lived stupid vulgar sons of bitches who thought they could hire DEATH as a company cop … empty streets, old newspapers in the wind, a rustle of darkness and wires.

  In the night sky over St Louis the Mayan Death God does a Cossack dance shooting
stars from his eyes. The Chief smiles.

  Old Sarge Smiles

  The Green Nun has stopped the unfortunate traveler in front of her red-brick priory set among oak trees, green lawns and flower beds.

  “Oh do come in and see my mental ward and the wonderful things we are doing for the patients.”

  She walks with him up the gravel drive to the priory door pointing to her flowers.

  “Aren’t my primroses doing nicely.”

  She opens the door of the priory with a heavy brass key at her belt. Down a long hall and flight of stairs she opens another door with her keys. She shows Audrey into a bare cold ward room crayon drawings on the wall. A nun walks up and down with a ruler. The patients are busy with plasticene and crayons. It looks like a kindergarten but some of the children are middle-aged. The door clicks shut and her voice changes.

  “You’ll find plasticene and crayons over there. You must have permission to leave the room for any purpose.”

  “Now see here …”

  A paunchy guard with a tin helmet and wide leather belt stands beside her. The guard looks at him with cold ugly hate and says:

  “He wants Bob and his lawyers.”

  At six o’clock there is a tasteless dinner of cold macaroni that Audrey does not touch. After dinner the night sister comes on.

  Cots are set up by the patients and the ward room is converted into a dormitory.

  “Anyone want potty before lights out?”

  She jangles the keys. The lavatory cubicles stand at one end of the dormitory. The sister on duty unlocks the doors and stands in the open door watching coldly.

  “Now don’t try and play with your dirty thing again Coldcliff or you’ll have six hours in the kitchen.”