The Place of Dead Roads Read online

  Wenn scheissen Blut von Messer spritz

  Denn geht schon alles gut

  (When shit blood spurts from the knife

  Then everything is good)

  Quite stirring, he thought...

  And the Song of the Vagabonds could be adapted.

  Sons of toil and danger

  will serve you a stranger?

  Sons of shame and sorrow

  will you cheer tomorrow?

  Kim stands resplendent in his Shit Slaughter uniform with a cobra S.S. on each lapel, they glow in the dark. Johnsons to the sky, all in S.S. uniform. They roar out the Johnson marching song.

  Kim raises his hand and silence falls like a thunderclap:

  "We're not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It's ours and we're going to take it.

  "And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."

  Kim sees himself as the legendary raccoon who killed a whole pack of dogs before he succumbed to his wounds...The raw red reek of deadly combat...his eyes light up inside with green fire, the hairs on his back stand up and crackle...his claws lash out with the speed of a striking snake to rip out an eye, tear off a screaming muzzle...A dog sinks its teeth into his flank. He rolls on his back, whimpering piteously...Two inexperienced young dogs rush forward sincerely. You know the type...volunteers...the old coon tears their steaming guts out with his hind claws and makes a break for the river. Here he takes out three more dogs, sitting on their backs and clawing their eyes out. He takes time to eat one eye with his dainty paw as the drowning dog sinks out from under him. He is losing blood. He swims for shore and confronts the last dog on a sandbar, a huge brute composite of mastiff and Irish wolfhound. As the dog's teeth close on his throat the coon's deadly claws go to work. He leaves the dog spinning in circles and snapping at intestines as they spill out. The old coon walks fifty feet and drops dead bleeding from twenty-three wounds...That coon weighed fifty pounds.

  And Kim was trying to re-create a story he had read somewhere years ago...he couldn't remember where or when, title or writer, just a flash of pulp paper and lurid illustrations. The hero, John, was on a mining expedition somewhere in Central or South America. They cross a frontier...a twang like an invisible bow that vibrated through him with exquisite pain...

  He and his companions find themselves in a beautiful lush landscape, flowering shrubs, vines, and trees, rivers and meadows, but there is something overripe, a whiff of rottenness and corruption, a dark undercurrent of menace and evil. His companions, it seems, are utter dolts, crude grasping creatures rooting about for gold and gems. He hears strange wild music. And now a creature bursts into view with a horrible unknown stench. It is a man from the waist up and below that a giant spider covered with red hairs. The creature looks about, grinding its mandibles in panic. Now the Hunters appear, led by the Lords in red satin robes with gold threads. They float just above the ground. The spider man is hiding behind some bushes on the edge of a great cliff. One of the Lords takes an ivory wand from his belt. The wand twitches like a dowser stick pointing to where the spider man is hiding. The Lord glides forward and touches the spider man with his wand, dislodging the creature's hold, and the spider man plummets into the abyss with a despairing scream that raises the hair on our hero's head. Then the Lord turns and looks at him. The face is smooth and yellow like amber, encrusted with layers of cruelty and corruption and a cold dead evil that freezes the blood.

  Now the beautiful lady appears wrapped in an orange cloak that glows with cold fire.

  "The Lords have lived here since time began. To go on living one must do things that you Earth people call 'evil.' It is the price of immortality."

  They walk on and come to a vast ruined amphitheater. John hears a sound like bees. The guide whips out a wand.

  "Stay close to me. I cannot save your companions."

  John can see in the air transparent creatures with humanoid heads and black insect eyes. A long pink proboscis protrudes from each mouth. They hover on vibrating rainbow wings, jabbing their proboscises into his three companions, who swat and scream and run.

  "I am sorry," she says. "But they are already dead...Worse than dead. They are already eaten."

  "Eaten?"

  "Eaten. Body and soul. The same would have happened to you had I not been here."

  At the center of the amphitheater is a huge golden Moloch that seems to stir with slow metal peristalsis. His three companions rush toward the idol in a shambling run, grunting like animals. They clamber up the idol and dissolve into gobs of liquid gold.

  John somehow gets back to present time. "It is better so," she tells him gravely. But in the end he plans to return: "No danger to body or soul can keep me from her."

  (Kim will change her sex of course.)

  Kim was walking along the edge of a cliff with a drop of three thousand feet to the valley below. Looking down through the clear still air he could see the glint of water, cities of red brick, trees and moving figures, but no sound reached him. On the other side away from the cliff, he saw woods and glades and rolling hills. His step was very sure and light and he moved in slow effortless strides, taking ten feet at a step. The path was strewn with wild flowers and flowering shrubs, and vines grew along its edges overhanging the cliff. The air was heavy with perfumes that swirled about him as he moved.

  He catches the sound of distant flutes and horns growing steadily louder. Kim stops on the edge of a glade, the sky a deeper blue than the sky of earth, with a suggestion of perilous depths. He is trembling with anticipation. On the other side of the clearing he sees a smear of red as a creature breaks from cover.

  It is a giant spider covered with fine red hairs like copper wire growing on its shiny body. The creature has the torso and head of a man. The arms end in insect pincers. The spider man pauses, looking around desperately with his faceted eyes, grinding his mandibles and salivating with fear. A horrible odor drifts across the clearing. Kim doubles over retching and when he looks up the creature is gone. The sound of horns and flutes is closer and now a procession of hunters moves into view led by tall thin figures in red robes, floating just off the ground as if riding on invisible skateboards. Bounding around them, leaping ten feet into the air, naked boys with heavily developed thighs and buttocks are playing flutes. Other boys are riding huge crabs and playing horns. They wear headdresses of shell through which the music vibrates. The boys are inside the crab creatures up to their waists. The huntsmen stop, the flute players poised and silent. The shell boys freeze and Kim can see that they have something like a tuning fork jetting from their foreheads and translucent pink disks for eyes. They converge, pointing with the tuning forks like dogs, to a cluster of bushes and vines that projects over the void. Kim can see now that the spider man is clinging to the underside of the ledge, hidden by the bushes. One of the red-robed figures glides forward with an ivory wand. He leans down and with a touch of the wand loosens the spider man's hold and sends him plummeting into the void screaming and trailing a wake of red excrement.

  The Lord turns now and looks where Kim is standing, not looking at Kim but letting Kim see him. The eyes are like shafts of dead water leading down into black depths, devoid of feeling or even of thought. The nose is pocked with tiny holes. There is no mouth. The hands are smooth and yellow, semitransparent with red insect claws at the fingertips. Kim notices youths in the procession with wings flaring from the ankles and the sides of the head, casques of bright red curls growing from pink marbly flesh.

  The procession is moving back through the clearing, the flutes and horns trilling out a song of victory so vile that Kim retches again. One of the winged youths stops and looks
at Kim. The eyes are green, completely immobile, with slitted pupils and bright red lashes. The boy touches Kim's arms and a shock of alien recognition burns through his body. The boy is naked, his body smooth as marble. Over his genitals is a cupped red seashell translucent and pulsing. Kim realizes that he is also naked, his phallus erect and pulsing. He runs his hands down the boy's stomach, which is like flexible marble, and touches the covering shell which glows and dissolves in light. The boy's phallus stands out smooth as polished coral.

  His eyes shift from green to deep blue with a purple pupil that glows like an amethyst crystal. He leads Kim toward the edge of the cliff. They stand poised on a jutting ledge. His wings quiver and he follows his closed fist in a half-turn, so that his back is to Kim, and bends over.

  Kim feels himself pulled forward by the boy's long sinuous arms hooked behind his buttocks and he slides into the smooth pink opening, a soft mollusk. The boy's wings vibrate, pulling him forward and over the edge. They move down in a slow dream slant. A rush of wind carries them up into the sky. Kim is „ steering the youth through the wind, his head back, teeth bare, the wings whistling against his ears...

  Portland Place...empty houses...yards overgrown with weeds...out through the west gate...Joe Garavelli's...roast-beef sandwiches and spaghetti...Skinker Boulevard...a pond...the farm at Saint Albans...Tom leafing through Field & Stream and Boy's Life...

  They land by a stone road worn smooth from centuries of passage.

  5

  Kim considers these imaginary space trips to other worlds as practice for the real thing, like target shooting. As a prisoner serving a life sentence can think only of escape, so Kim takes for granted that the only purpose of his life is space travel. He knows that this will involve not just a change of locale, but basic biologic alterations, like the switch from water to land. There has to be the air-breathing potential first. And what is the medium corresponding to air that we must learn to breathe in? The answer came to Kim in a silver flash...Silence.

  Kim knew he was in a state of Arrested Evolution: A.E. He was no more destined to stagnate in this three-dimensional animal form than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. Newts and salamanders have gills in their early life. At some point they shed the gills and come out onto the land, or most of them do. But this one salamander, the Axolotl, which lives in sluggish streams in Mexico, never sheds its gills. Why not? a researcher asked himself, and he gave an Axolotl an injection of hormones, whereupon Axolotl shed his old gills and crawled up onto the promised land...Perhaps this would be as simple, Kim mused...just put it in the Coca-Cola and the reservoirs and we all mutate one way or another...

  If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

  Kim knows that the first step toward space exploration is to examine the human artifact with biologic alterations in mind that will render our H.A. more suitable for space conditions and space travel...We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium. The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where we are going. Kim reads all the science fiction he can find, and he is stunned to discover in all these writings the underlying assumption that there will be no basic changes involved in space travel.

  My God, here they are light-years from the Earth, watching cricket and baseball on Vision Screens (can you imagine taking their stupid pastimes light-years into space?). Yes sir, the fish said, I'm just going to shove a little aquarium up onto the land there, got everything I need in it.

  You need entirely too much. To begin with there is the question of weight. A raw H.A. weighs around 170 pounds. This breathing, eating, excreting, sleeping, dreaming H.A. must have an entire environment essential to accommodate its awkward life processes encapsulated and transported with it.

  "One wonders..." Kim goes into his academic act, letting bifocals slip down onto his nose as he launches a well-worn joke..."One wonders, gentlemen, if this H.A. doesn't have perhaps a pet elephant essential to its welfare."

  The concept of space travel finds people rushing around to build rocket ships.

  Kim raises an admonitory finger.

  "Think, my little Earth slobs, about what you propose to transport. I have brought up the question of weight. We have at hand the model of a much lighter body, in fact a body that is virtually weightless. I refer to the astral or dream body. This model gives us an indication of the changes we must undergo. I am speaking here not of moral but biologic imperatives and the dream gives us insight into space conditions. Recent research has established that dreaming is a biologic necessity. If dream sleep, REM sleep, is cut off, the subject shows all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much dreamless sleep he is allowed: irritability, restlessness, hallucinations, eventually coma and death."

  Kim sees dreams as a vital link to our biologic and spiritual destiny in space. Deprived of this air line we die. The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

  Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods. In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way. He has a number of patents: the Carsons spring knife, an extension of the spring blackjack principle; a cartridge in which the case becomes the projectile; an air gun in which air is compressed by a small powder charge; a magnetic gun in which propulsion is effected by compressing a reversed magnetic field. "Whenever you use this bow I will be there," the Zen archery master tells his students. And he means there quite literally. He lives in his students and thus achieves a measure of immortality. And the immortality of a writer is to be taken literally. Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers. So every time someone neatly guts his opponent with my spring knife or slices off two heads with one swipe of my spring sword I am there to drink the blood and smell the fresh entrails as they slop out with a divine squishy sound. I am there when the case bullet thuds home—right in the stomach...what a lovely grunt! And my saga will shine in the eyes of adolescents squinting through gunsmoke.

  Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!

  Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn't something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another.

  The most arbitrary, precarious, and bureaucratic immortality blueprint was drafted by the ancient Egyptians. First you had to get yourself mummified, and that was very expensive, making immortality a monopoly of the truly rich. Then your continued immortality in the Western Lands was entirely dependent on the continued existence of your mummy. That is why they had their mummies guarded by demons and hid good.

  Here is plain G.I. Horus...He's got enough baraka to survive his first physical death. He won't get far. He's got no mummy, he's got no names, he's got nothing. What happens to a bum like that, a nameless, mummyless asshole? Why, demons will swarm all over him at the first checkpoint. He will be dismembered and thrown into a flaming pit, where his soul will be utterly consumed and destroyed forever. While others, with sound mummies and the right names to drop in the right places, sail through to the Western Lands.

  There are of course those who just barely squeeze through. Their mummies are not in a good sound condition. These second-class souls are relegated to third-rate transient hotels just beyond the last checkpoint, where they can smell the charnel-house disposal ovens from their skimpy balconies. "You see that sign?" the bartender snarls.

  maggotty mummies will not be served here

  "Might as well face facts...my mummy is going downhill. Cheap job to begin with...gawd, maggots is crawling all over it...the way that demon guard sniffed at me this morning..." Transient
hotels...

  And here you are in your luxury condo, deep in the Western Lands...you got no security. Some disgruntled former employee sneaks into your tomb and throws acid on your mummy. Or sloshes gasoline all over it and burns the shit out of it. "OH...someone is fucking with my mummy..."

  Mummies are sitting ducks. No matter who you are, what can happen to your mummy is a pharaoh's nightmare: the dreaded mummy bashers and grave robbers, scavengers, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes. Perhaps a mummy's best friend is an Egyptologist: sealed in a glass case, kept at a constant temperature...but your mummy isn't even safe in a museum. Air-raid sirens, it's the blitz!

  "For Ra's sake, get us into the vaults," scream the mummies, without a throat, without a tongue.

  Anybody buy in on a deal like that should have his mummy examined.

  6

  No mistaking that gray shadow moving up the face as the gray lips move.

  "Stay out of churches, son. And don't ever let a priest near you when you're dying. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you'll never wear a lawman's badge."

  Last words of Mortimer Carsons, father of Kim Carsons. As it turned out the house on Olive Street in Saint Louis was heavily mortgaged and nobody came forward with help or advice. His father had not been popular around town and Kim was even less so. He wrote poetry and when a sonnet to another boy was intercepted he found himself ostracized by his schoolmates and with his father's permission withdrew from the school. He had no intention of remaining in Saint Louis. His entire legacy amounted to about $2,000 and a farmhouse near Saint Albans.