The Place of Dead Roads Page 5

  Here is Kim in his father's study. He is trying to decide what to do. He could go to New York. He knew from a brief liaison with an antiques dealer on a buying trip that there was a place for "people like you and me" in the big city. Why he might become a famous artist or go on the stage. His father's words came back to him:

  "When you have a decision to make, get all the factors in front of you and look at the situation as a whole. Just look. Don't try to decide. The answer will come to you."

  Running away and living on sufferance in a ghetto? And always somebody to spit in his face and call him what the boys called him at school? And the others...Colonel and Mrs. Greenfield and Judge Farris...

  Rotten killing corpse

  stinks like a polecat.

  Kim decides to go west and become a shootist. If anyone doesn't like the way Kim looks and acts and smells, he can fill his grubby peasant paw.

  Train whistle...Kim gets off at Saint Albans junction. The town of Saint Albans is a cluster of red brick buildings along a stream, a little postcard town five miles from the train station.

  Kim alights from a buckboard in front of the general store, carrying an alligator-skin Gladstone. He makes an arrangement to rent the buckboard to take him out to the farmhouse with the gear and supplies he will need.

  "Right here at six tomorrow."

  He stands for a moment looking up and down the street. Nothing has changed...a secret place that time forgot...He smiles, noting and savoring the difference between Saint Albans and any other small town. It isn't the tree-shaded streets, the clear stream and the stone bridges, the gardens and vines and the fields, all so perfect it is like a picture on a calendar. There is something missing here. An absence that Kim breathes deep into his lungs: no church steeples. No churches.

  Mr. Scranton shakes hands and glances at his bag. "Sorry to hear about your father..."

  "Thank you...I'll be spending the summer out at the farm...Be needing quite a few items..."

  He walks around pointing...broom, mop, bucket, disinfectant, tools, kerosene stove, kerosene, lamps, candles, canned goods, bacon lard...

  "Here's something you can use." Mr. Scranton points to sulfur candles. "Scorpions and black widows is bad to get in empty houses...And outhouses they dig special. The Farris boy got stung on the ass and he was bedfast for three days...Good line of fishing gear here."

  Kim selects fishing poles, line, hooks and plugs and a fish trap...He looks around.

  "Where are the guns?"

  "Sold off my stock to a gunsmith name of Anderson. Got his shop just past the hotel and over the bridge..."

  Kim walks slowly past the hotel. Two old men in rockers on the porch wave to him. Looking down from the bridge he can see perch and bass in a deep pool.

  william anderson...guns and gunsmithing

  The shop is back from a tree-lined street. A man behind a counter looks at him with eyes the color of a faded gray-flannel shirt.

  "Like to see some guns."

  "You come to the right place, son. What kind of guns you have in mind?"

  "Handguns."

  The old man is looking down across his case of handguns...

  "Now a handgun is good for one thing and that's killing at close range. Other folks, mostly. Worst form of varmint. Quite a choice here...Now this gun"—he brings out a Colt Frontier 45-caliber, seven-and-a-half-inch barrel—"a best seller...Throws a big slug...But it isn't throwing the biggest slug that counts, it's hitting something with the slug you throw. I'd rather hit someone with a 22 than miss him with a 45...Now this little 22 here...hammerless, two-inch barrel, double-action smooth and light...a good holdout gun you can stash in your boot, down in your crotch, up your sleeve...I knew this Mexican gun, El Sombrero, with a holster in his hat. Dressed all in black like an undertaker...'Ah senor, I am so sorry for you.' Then he'd sweep his hat off like he was standing over a coffin, and blast right through the hat...You'll be wanting something heavier of course."

  He brings out a Colt Frontier with a four-inch barrel. "This load is sweet-shooting and heavy enough...32-20...Winchester chambers a rifle for that load and some folk wants a rifle and handgun shooting the same load. Well, a rifle and a handgun are not made for the same purpose...the 32-20 is a good pistol load, accurate and hard-hitting, but it's a piss-poor load for a rifle...Too heavy for rabbit and squirrel, too light for deer, just enough to aggravate a bear. There's no good rifle load between a 22 and a 30-30. Here's a double-action 38 with three-inch barrel. I done some work on that gun, lightening up the double-action trigger pull, close to a hair trigger. You can keep it right on target for six shots...Let me show you a trick with a double-action gun..." He puts a glove on his left hand. "Now you hold the gun with your left hand above and below the cylinder...You can spray six shots right into a silver dollar at thirty feet...Don't ever try it without the glove...

  "And here's a custom-made beauty...Smith and Wesson tip-up...built like a watch. Chambered for the 44 Russian, a target load for trick shooting. You can put out a candle with this gun at twenty feet. It will teach you how to shoot...And this"—he brings out a Smith and Wesson 44 special double-action with three-and-a-half-inch barrel—"is for business. I can see you have the makings of a real shootist and that's why I'm talking to you...A real shootist don't start trouble. He just don't want nobody to start trouble with him. These punks go around picking gunfights to get a reputation are no fucking good from the day they're born to the day they die...You'll be meeting plenty of their type. When they come in here I just sell them the worst-shooting gun I got in the shop and I got some real lemons, Annie Oakley couldn't shoot with..."

  Kim is making a selection of holsters..."Don't ever use a shoulder holster...awkward movement, and it can't mean anything except reaching for a gun. The less movement the better. For the 22 or the 38, if you want to carry it concealed, use the Mexican style: holster clips over the belt and goes down inside the waistband. Just open your coat and drop your hand to your waistband like you was hitching up your belt or scratching your crotch, and come up shooting...Drawing your gun should be an easy flowing casual movement, like handing someone a pen, passing the salt, conveying a benediction...

  "I knew this gun called the Priest who would go into a gunfight giving absolution to his opponent...Lots of ways to create a distraction and discombobulate your opponent just so long and long enough. This one gun kept a tarantula in a spring box at his belt. He could push out his gut in some key way and the tarantula flew right in the face of his adversary...Don't pay to get too smart. They lynched him for a spider-throwing varmint..."

  Kim packs his purchases. On his way back to the hotel he stops off at the drugstore. An Old Chinese behind the counter nods at each item. Bandages, tincture of iodine, snakebite kit, two ounces of laudanum, medicine glass, and eye dropper...

  "Do you have hashish extract?"

  "Velly good. Velly stlong."

  Unhurried and old, with no wasted movements he assembles the items, writing out dosages for the medicine bottles, packing everything into a wooden box. As Kim opens the door to go out of the druggist's shop someone comes in with a puff of fog and cold air. Boy about eighteen, angular English face, blue eyes, red scarf. Rather like the younger De Quincey, Kim thought. The boy's eyes widened in startled recognition.

  "Good evening."

  Kim's greeting came back like a muffled echo.

  The hotel clerk looks up through hooded gray eyes. He looks a lot like the gunsmith, Kim thinks, and a little chill rustles up his spine. He hands Kim a key with a heavy brass tab. "Room eighteen on the top floor, Mr. Carsons."

  He takes a gold watch from his vest pocket and flips open the lid. "We'll be serving dinner in about thirty minutes. Wild turkey tonight."

  Kim walks up three flights to his room. It looks familiar but he can't remember when or where he may have seen such a room and once again he feels the chill as he looks around at the red-carpeted floor, the rose wallpaper, the copper-luster basin, the brass bedstead, a
picture of Stonewall Jackson on the wall. He unpacks the 38 and loads it and slips it into an inside belt holster. He buttons his coat and combs his hair in a mirror with a gilt frame that reflects the bed behind him.

  At seventeen, Kim is quite handsome at first glance: tall, slim, with yellow hair and blue eyes. On closer inspection there is something feral and furtive in this face, a mixture of shyness and cunning. It's a face a lot of people don't like on close inspection. He doesn't care who dislikes it tonight. The gun feels so good, a warm glow just below his liver. He rubs his crotch and grins at his reflection. He adjusts his tie, gives his hair a final pat and down the red-carpeted stairs and into the bar, where he orders a dry martini.

  There are two drummers at the bar drinking beer. The one nearest to Kim is a heavy florid-faced man with a black mustache. He seems on the point of making some rude remark. Kim polishes his nails on his coat lapel and looks at the drummer steadily, feeling the gun, and the man feels it too. He turns away and coughs. Kim finishes his drink and walks past them into the dining room. The room is almost empty. He sees the buckboard driver and the hotel clerk, and a man he recognizes as the doctor. Kim orders wine and gives attention to the turkey, gravy, stuffing, hot biscuits, creamed onions, asparagus, and turnip greens. He glances up between mouthfuls and is gratified to notice that the drummers do not come into the dining room. Apple pie and coffee. Still no sign of the drummers.

  People I don't like should stay out of my way, he thinks with a contented belch. As Kim walked out into the sunlight carrying his "alligator," as he called his Gladstone bag, he saw himself as a mysterious world traveler, travel-stained and even the stains unfamiliar— "for he on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of Paradise."

  Ah there was the buckboard ahead, in front of Scranton's Store. A lithe youthful shape was bending over to pick up a crate, the lean buttocks tightly outlined under blue denim in the morning sunlight that seemed to dissolve the cloth, and Kim was looking at parted buttocks and the red-brown rectum. He licked his lips, lust naked on his face.

  The boy straightened up, swinging the crate into the buckboard, and turned in a smear of red. A casque of bright red hair, the face a dead shiny white with here and there a sepia stain, like rust on marble. The eyes of stagnant slate-green color took in Kim's crotch and he smiled a slow enigmatic smile of the dead, an ambiguous invitation from beyond the tomb. A phantom buckboard...old photo with a flickering silver caption...as Kim held out his hand he caught a whiff of brimstone and decay.

  "I'm Denton Brady...Your driver."

  "I'm Kim Carsons."

  The boy laughed, showing teeth smooth and white as ivory.

  "I know who you are...all loaded and ready to go."

  He swung himself up onto the buckboard seat with a smooth lithe movement that was curiously inhuman without being exactly animal. Eggs, bacon, hot biscuits into the buckboard. Kim swung up beside him, putting his bag under the seat. The boy jerked the reins and clicked his tongue and the horse ambled down a red clay road that wound along the bank of the stream through oaks and elms, maple, and persimmon.

  Flint chips glint in the sun. Kim takes off his jacket and folds it across a crate. He takes his belt holster and a box of shells out of the Gladstone. The holster slants slightly backward. While Kim transfers the gun the boy does not seem to notice. He sits relaxed on the buckboard seat, his eyes fanning out to both sides. He seems to have no need of talking. Kim finds the silence and the proximity at once exciting and unreal, rather like a phantom hard-on, he thinks. The boy reins up the horse, swings down, and comes back with a beautifully chipped arrowhead in pink flint. He passes it to Kim without comment. They crest a little rise from which they can see the valley and the stream stretching down to the river. The boy points to the farther bank, which is still shrouded in morning mist.

  "When the fog lifts you can see their fucking church sticking up...The cutoff to the farmhouse is just ahead, but I guess you'll want to go to the place on the riverfront."

  "You know it?"

  "Of course."

  The farm was about a quarter-mile from the river on higher ground and the property line stretched down to the riverfront. This had been cotton country but had reverted to subsistence farming. Kim and his father had converted an old loading shed on the pier to use during the summer since it was a lot cooler there over the water.

  The stream is widening out. There are marshy ponds on both sides of the road and a sound of frogs croaking, smell of stagnant water. Flat ground, the river just ahead. Long low building with a galvanized iron roof: brady's store. An old man sits on the porch.

  "Uncle Kes, this is Kim Carsons."

  The old man speaks in a dead, dry whisper: "Your hand and your eyes know a lot more about shootin' than you do. Just learn to stand out of the way." Now his eyes, old, unbluffed, unreadable, rest on Kim, as if tracing his outline in the air. "City boy, did you ever see a dog roll in carrion?"

  "Yes sir, I was tempted to join him, sir."

  "Did you ever see a black snake pretend to be a rattlesnake?"

  "Yes sir, he coiled himself and vibrated the tip of his tail in dry leaves: brrrrrp."

  "Kim, if you had your choice, would you rather be a poisonous snake or a nonpoisonous snake?"

  "Poisonous, sir, like a green mamba or a spitting cobra."

  "Why?"

  "I'd feel safer, sir."

  "And that's your idea of heaven, feeling safer?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Is a poisonous snake really safer?"

  "Not really in the long run, but who cares about that? He ust feel real good after he bites someone."

  "Safer?"

  "Yes sir. Dead people are less frightening than live ones, t's a step in the right direction."

  "Young man, I think you're an assassin."

  Along the riverfront the road is overgrown with weeds and rush that scrape against the bottom of the buckboard. And there is the shed at the end of the pier, gleaming white in the sun like a moored ship. Kim opens a heavy brass padlock. Inside, the shed is paneled in oak and painted white like a ship's cabin. Two narrow bunks, side by side to the right of the door, a long bench that runs along the north wall with a hinged top segmented for storage space. A table, three stools, a two-burner kerosene stove with shelves above it and a cabinet under it. A sink with a faucet from a fifty-gallon drum on the porch. The shed as two doors, one facing the shore, the other facing the river, and a screened porch. On the south side of the shed by the porch is a privy with a hinged cover that also serves as a haman in the Arab style, consisting simply of a bucket and drain in the floor. The water is supplied by another fifty-gallon drum on the porch that can be heated with a kerosene burner. There is an evaporation icebox on the porch, covered with burlap sacking, a rum above it that drips water on the burlap.

  They look around silently, deciding exactly where everything will go...moving now with speed and precision as every object slides into its assigned space...canned goods and cooking utensils on the shelves above the stove and the cabinet under it...buckets over the side filling the drums and the drip for the icebox, towels, soap, paper in the bath cubicle, double seats of smooth waxed oak over the green water, wooden pegs in the wall for clothes.

  The currents of movement have carried them to a quiet eddy, sitting opposite each other on the bunks, knees touching as they examine the contents of the medicine box, having selected a drawer of the night table between the bunks as the ordained place for these items. Denny looks at the laudanum.

  "Good to have around. I was bitten by a copperhead once..."

  He looks at the bottle of hashish tincture and lays out a rolled cigarette on the table.

  "This is the same thing. Uncle Kes grows it."

  He picks up a jar of dry-skin cream. He looks at Kim, his eyes drooping, his head on one side.

  "You have dry skin, Kimmy?"

  Kim blushes, remembering the time he used the cream to stick a candle up his ass. "Uh sometimes."

&nb
sp; "We'll leave it out in case."

  Kim picks up a bottle of chigger lotion and shakes it. He looks at Denny and licks his lips.

  "We'll have to rub this all over ourselves to go anywhere."

  Den nods, slipping off his boots and socks. He takes off his pants and shorts and tosses them onto the bench. Kim has imitated his movements as if he were sitting in front of a mirror.

  "Let's smoke this first." Den lights the cigarette, inhales deeply three times, and passes it to Kim. Kim inhales the smoke and feels his nuts crinkle and tingle; mouth open, breathing heavily, he looks down. It's happening. Den grins and brings his finger up in three jerks. He is getting hard too. Kim watches Den's cock grow from the bright red pubic hairs like some exotic flower and the ruttish red smell fills the room mixing in layers with the smell of new boots, sweat and feet. Kim feels his flesh melting and flowing off his bones into Den, a choking red tide of lust pulling him forward. Den grins and spreads his thighs, dropping a folded blanket between his legs as Kim kneels between his spread thighs his heart pounding his fingers on Denny's crinkled red nuts feeling the velvet ache running his fingers up the pink shaft to the translucent red purple head like a ripe cherry the slit parted as pearly lubricant oozes out now he is sucking the head up and down the still hot red smell filling him feeling Denny's toes in his crotch a gush of sweet metal taste in his mouth that burns down to his crotch. He is ejaculating on Den's feet and calves, semen dripping down the glittering red hairs.

  A choking red tide of lust and sweat socks. He smiled an ambiguous invitation travel-stained by a phantom buckboard a crumpled figure general store. Lithe youthful flickering silver bending over to pick up the crate.

  Kim could see a pool of black blood reflected in a dusty storefront. As Kim drew closer the lean buttocks outlined a whiff of brimstone and morning sunlight. Looking at the parted buttocks Kim felt his breath quicken and the boy laughed.