The Place of Dead Roads Read online

  "I know you."

  In a dream they get up and rub on the chigger lotion. There are other people in the room, a whole family, and Kim gets an erection but he and Den seem to be behind an invisible barrier. He is packing the sulfur candles and the guns and shells into a backpack and out into bright sunlight that is somehow dark like an old photo with the silver darkness of underexposed film so he can see only a few feet in front of him.

  They are walking up a steep path between raspberry and blackberry vines. A whiff of empty house, smell of nothing and nobody there.

  Kim is lighting the sulfur candles, a tray for each bedroom, two trays for the living room, dining room, kitchen, one small tray for the outhouse, musty smell of shit turning back to the soil. Blue smoke curls from the cracks. He plants blue morning-glory seeds from a packet and watches the flowers grow from the smoke. In the barn they lay out the guns on an old millstone and set up targets.

  Kim dances around the stone, rubbing the gun in his crotch. He greases his ass and rubs the grease on the gun handle.

  "Racooo-ooo-ooo-ooon?"

  He stands up, moving his hips in fluid gyrations...black powder smoke and the musky zoo smell. A chorus of frogs croaking...

  "Frog you, Kim?"

  Kim gasps and his legs pull apart spasmodically as he squirms rectum exposed legs kicking in the air throat swelling. They are both croaking like frogs in a green underwater sperm smell.

  Was he awake looking at Den's face ghostly and transparent in the dim light? Den says something about seeing to the horse. Then he was gone. Kim slept.

  Now he stands facing the target, the gun in both hands pulsing to his heartbeats while Den dances around him beating the tambourine and singing a little tune in a high-pitched voice childlike and evil, gypsy music with a smell of circuses, animals jump through hoops to that music he slides in behind Kim who is leaning forward, his lean naked buttocks parted.

  "I want to pump you, Kimmy."

  One hand on Kim's flat stomach, the other shakes the tambourine above his head. With a fluid grind of his smooth white hips like moving marble he flows into Kim, shaking the tambourine as he sings in Kim's ear.

  Kim feels a tight smile baring his teeth and a wet dream tingle in his crotch and suddenly there is a smell of black powder and semen in the hot still air of the barn as the bullets group within a two-inch circle over the heart. He wakes up just before ejaculating with a sweet ache in his crotch, Den's hand on his chest. Late afternoon shadows in the room. He must have slept all day. He squirms under Denny's hand and shows his teeth.

  Denny stands up and shakes his tambourine. Smell of circus animals. "Shall we camel?"

  He gets down on all fours on the other bunk with a phantom Kim under him. Kim can feel the dry heat outside, the drawn blinds, the smell of hashish and rectal mucus. Somewhere a voice is singing a desert riding song...

  "Shall we alligator?"

  He lies on his stomach with a slow wallowing motion, his teeth bared in a depraved reptilian smile. A reek of swamp mud.

  Scarf like rust on marble. Stagnant slate-green color in houses shut in by trees and gardens. He smells a whiff of brimstone and carrion in the late afternoon light red hair and the sun washing a windowsill and the rust of freckles red hairs washing legs red brown rectum sudden raw hard-on.

  There is an emptiness. Breath comes in with that incurious gaze like ice on fire in the light. I can. Sweet dry wind clothes are paper. A naked youth about sixteen. Breath came in with his reflection. Rubs his crotch and grins. Quien es?

  "You dry enough to turn? Rubbing the cream up you."

  Carbolic soap lean buttocks a dead green sunlight. Puff of orange knees. What ass kicking hi? The light. I can. Sweet thirst. Quien es? Stagnant slate-green color a flash of violet light. Sweet clean feeling of trees and gardens he smiles with the leaves late afternoon sunlight red hair his feet through dead leaves washing legs. Face to the west. My picture in the light. I can. Old paper. A naked youth about somehow his timeless enchanted reflection.

  7

  Kim woke up with the impression of a wide, white grin and a whiff of carrion erased in light. Early morning. He lay naked on his bunk, looking at the shiny white paneled ceiling, listening to the sound of running water and a mourning dove calling from the woods.

  He stretched and arched his body, looking down at his erect phallus. He only wished there was someone here to take his picture like that, one on the bed with his back arched up, stretching and mewling like a cat and squirming around on his ass, and now one sitting on the edge of his bunk, gun, shells, kerosene lamp and Confessions of an English Opium Eater visible on the night table, and now Kim, still naked with a hard-on, levels his gun at the camera. This would be a tasteful series called Summer Dawn, to appear on bedroom walls throughout America, yes all over the world too...he collapsed back onto the bunk, kicking his feet in the air in an ecstasy of exposure, sighting the gun between his knees as he sings:

  "Einer Mann, einer Mann, einer RICHTIGER Mann."

  Finally he sat up with a petulant expression and reached for his pants. Why wasn't Denny here when he wanted to get fucked? Why, it could be a deluxe special edition for naughty old gentlemen in rooms lined with yellow silk and lampshades of tattooed human skin. Oh well, he could always walk up to town, only four miles. He touched his cock lovingly as if to say "later," pulled his pants up, drew water at the sink in an enameled basin with roses on it, and washed his face and neck with carbolic soap.

  On the porch he got three eggs from the icebox, with a jug of cider, cold with the mellow slightly rotten juiciness of Missouri apples and a few yellowjackets crushed in for tartness. Smell of bacon, eggs and coffee. Young Boy Eating Breakfast for the dining room. Kim knew what he was doing. He had read about it in a yoga book. It was known as Vipassana, being aware at all times of what you are doing.

  Kim washes the dishes. Everything shipshape. He decides to pack the guns and the sulfur candles into his "alligator." It will be much more like coming back to the old homestead after a long mysterious trip, like his father used to make. Of course, he keeps one gun out to wear. Young boys were sometimes carried off and raped by Indians. The 44 Russian, he decides.

  The path is littered with red flint chips and winds steeply upward through blackberry vines. Kim stops here and there to pick a particularly luscious blackberry with cool deft fingers to avoid the thorns. He deliberately smears the red purple juice around his mouth, "like a whore's makeup."

  Over a rise, and there is the house at the top of the hill. It is fairly large, two stories and a balcony running across the front from which there is a view of the river. At one time there had been a narrow-gauge railway along the river, which is now overgrown with weeds and brush. The bridges over the swamps and tributary streams remain, and there is always good fishing under them for rock bass and perch. Kim walks up to the door under the balcony and knocks three times. He opens the door.

  "Anybody home?"

  A musty smell of the empty house is the only answer. Kim walks inside.

  The house had originally been planned on rather a grand scale, suitable for the manor house of a plantation. What had been intended as the downstairs drawing room is now a sparsely furnished living and dining area. The downstairs back rooms, intended as servant quarters, were simply not used except in the summer, when his father used them as extra studios. He liked to paint all over the house in different lights. There had been plans to install a flush toilet with a regular bathroom, but this had never been done. Kim walks from room to room, selecting things he wants to take down to the boathouse, calculating the number of sulfur candles he will need and putting them out ready to light in metal trays set on bricks.

  And now upstairs, rather an impressive staircase with banisters of polished walnut. Lovingly Kim runs his fingers over the smooth brown knots—like rectums, he thinks with a depraved smile, posing for a shot of the boy remembering how good it felt sliding down the banister as a child, the smooth wood rubbing his
crotch. Upstairs there are two back bedrooms, one used by Kim and the other by his father. The front of the house upstairs had been converted into his father's studio.

  Now Kim turns left down the hall to the studio. Like an empty stage set. A sofa and an armchair covered in green satin, a workbench littered with brushes, palettes and tubes of paint, a rack for canvases and paintings. The easel is empty. Kim sits down on the sofa, looking down to the river.

  Kim's memory of his past life is spotty. Sometimes he feels he is getting someone else's memories. There is an incestuous episode with his mother in a seaside hotel. He is standing on a balcony in his bathing trunks. His face is clouded and sulky. His mother appears in the doorway behind him, dressed in a blue kimono...

  "I want to sketch you. Cuppy."

  He twitches irritably..."Oh not now, Mother, I want to

  take a bath and change for dinner..."

  "I want to sketch you naked, Cuppy."

  "Naked, Mother?"

  But that couldn't have happened because Kim had never been to the seaside. Actually his mother was a bit dotty, into Ouija boards and tarot cards and crystal balls and she drank six bottles of paregoric every day and her room reeked of it.

  His father seemed remote and veiled with an enigmatic sadness. He traveled frequently on "company business." Expense account suggested illness. Illness was radium poisoning.

  He remembered the occasions when he was allowed to shoot his father's 36 cap-and-ball revolver. It was kept in a mahogany case with silver clasps and hinges, all lined with green felt and a place for the revolver, the conical bullets covered with thick yellow grease to prevent multiple discharge, the percussion caps, the bullet molds. The revolver had a double trigger, the lower one cocking the weapon and the upper one, which had a very light pull, fired the shot.

  On his twelfth birthday he hit the target six times, death in his hands, grinning through the smoke. His boy grin lit up, dazzling, radiant, portentous as a comet, smelling immortality in powder smoke.

  Kim is with a boy of about his own age. He can't see the boy clearly but they have known each other for a long time. They are standing on the railroad bridge over Dead Boy Creek. The water runs still and deep here and they can see fish stirring. The boy is teaching Kim to fly. He soars over the water and lands on a path. Kim stands poised, thinking he can't, and suddenly he is in the air, sweeping in to land on the path. Now they crisscross back and forth across the stream, higher now over the trees, they can see the field leading up to the house on the hill where Kim lives. There is a balcony that runs across the front of the house facing down toward the railroad and the river. The balcony is supported by two marble columns which his father had acquired when the old courthouse was torn down. Against the darkening sky it looks like a painting. The House on the Hill...He is in the house now, in the hallway that leads to the studio, telling his father how he has learned to fly...

  "We have no such powers, my son," his father says sadly.

  They are on the balcony. A smoky red sunset over the river. Now an engine comes in sight, two black men are stoking the fire and pounding each other on the back...Kim can make out the name Mary Celeste...Slowly like a parade of floats another ship moves by...The Copenhagen...Kim smiles and waves...

  His father watches with the sad eyes of a guardian whose role it is to nurture and protect a being greater than himself. He knows that the boy must go and that he cannot follow. The track is overgrown with weeds now.

  Kim puts out two trays of sulfur candles ready to light, closes the french doors leading onto the balcony, and caulks them as best he can with paper. My father's bedroom. Enter. The room is empty except for the bed, a chair, a dresser, a pair of workpants stained with paint hanging on a wooden peg. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I remember, I remember, into his own bedroom the little window where the sun came peeping in at morn. He sets out the tray.

  He had once found a scorpion crawling on his bed, and a boy from a neighboring farm, Jerry Ellisor, had been bitten by a brown recluse. A few days after being bitten, Jerry came to visit Kim, and Kim asked him up to his room.

  "Where did it bite you?"

  The boy giggles. "Well, uh, it's in a kinda funny place."

  "Show me," said Kim firmly. He knew this boy was very tractable and would do whatever anyone told him to do if he used the right tone.

  The boy blushes and drops his pants. He is wearing no shorts. He sits down on the bed and points to a spot on his inner thigh near the crotch, a sort of crater of red-purple flesh, black toward the center. Kim sits down beside him and touches the bite gently. The boy licks his lips and slips Kim a startled glance. Kim can see the blood rush to the boy's crotch.

  "Did it hurt?"

  "Not until later. I was sick all over."

  "Well, it's a good thing he didn't bite you here." He touches the crown of the boy's cock, which is already slightly tumescent...

  "Or here." He turns the boy's cock over and touches the spot just below the crown in front. "Or here." He touches the boy's tight nuts. The boy is getting a hard-on. He leans back on his elbows, his cock arching up and pulsing.

  "Hey, let's see you naked too."

  "All right."

  Kim strips and stands naked in front of the boy and looks at him appraisingly through narrowed eyes. His cock is getting stiff. He sits down beside the boy, who feels his cock and says, "Be careful a Brownie don't bite you here." Kim rolls him back on the bed tickling him and the boy rolls around laughing uncontrollably.

  He lights the candles in the two back rooms, picks up the canvases in the studio, and lights the candles there and downstairs, shuts the doors and puts signs on with skull and cross-bones.

  danger do not enter, fumigation in progress

  He puts the 44 back in his bag, takes out the 38, picks up his "alligator" and walks down to the outhouse, stopping to put six small condensed-milk cans on top of a stone wall opposite the door of the outhouse, feeling the slow movements of his intestines, rather like a great brown river he thinks, like I had the Amazon inside me—liquid gurglings and seeps and slops. The outhouse is under an apple tree. His father said it would make the best apples and Kim used to plant morning glories to climb over it. He opens the door. Inside are two seats side by side with covers. He lifts the covers, running his hands lovingly over the smooth yellow oak—he'd sandpapered it and waxed it himself. He looks down into the pit and there is just a faint rotten smell of lime. He puts the "alligator" in front of the other seat, takes off his shirt and hangs it on a peg. He drops his pants and sits down on the seat with the gun in his hand. He poses for a picture entitled The Long Journey. Kim waves.

  Now he waits until he doesn't have to push at all, his ass lets go and he starts shooting and with every shot a can flies off the wall and powder smoke drifts back across his face with a faint smell of fresh excrement. The sensation is intense. He leans back and stretches and reloads the 38. He knows that people often lose control of their bowels when they die so to shoot right from his opening asshole is powerful magic. He pulls up his pants and picks up his "alligator" and lights a sulfur candle, staying just long enough for a whiff of brimstone before he closes the door. So many smells are nice if you don't get too much, like skunks and cyanide and raw meat and carrion.

  He walks down to the barn, where he finds the millstone of the dream sunk in the dirt again. He pries it up with a rusty crowbar and leans it against the wall. An exposed scorpion sidles about, tail raised. Kim draws his 38 and the scorpion disappears in a smoky flash, writhing fragments around a black hole. With a rope and pulley he lifts the millstone and lowers it onto the two sawhorses to form a table where he lays the guns out at the cardinal points of the compass. With drawing paper from the studio he draws four man-sized targets and tacks them to a backdrop of heavy oak planks thirty feet from the table.

  Now to mark out targets. The classic gunfighters mark just above the belt. Three-inch circle. Kim taps his solar plexus, remembering the feeling of being hit the
re once in football practice. He draws a three-inch circle. And now the heart, which is right in line if you are facing somebody. Hollow at the base of the neck in front where the collarbones converge. Spot just below the nose. Spot between the eyes. He stands back and looks at the targets. If you want to be sure of no recovery...He draws a three-inch circle over the liver.

  He selects the 22...inside belt holster that fits down behind his fly, the rosewood handle just under his belt buckle...Lightest pistol, easiest to shoot. Must hit a vital spot vulnerable to this load...Heart, the two neck shots, and between the eyes. Not enough shock for below-the-nose shot.

  With a smooth unhurried movement he drops his hand to his belt and sweeps the pistol up to eye level, steadied with the left hand, and fires six shots aiming for the heart. All shots within a three-inch circle..."a heavier powder load with this accuracy...I'll ask old Anderson..."

  He sits down and runs through the draw-aim-fire sequence a number of times, seeing the bullets hit the target, imprinting the sequence on his "alligator brain," as he calls it, that part of him that knows just what to do and does it with a depraved reptilian smile.

  Now the 44 Russian. He touches it with gentle precise fingers as he would touch Denny's cock, oh he'd love to have little tiny naked boy cameos cut in opals and rubies, set in mother-of-pearl handles. His holster, oh not a vulgar tie-down, is a flap of leather that clips onto the pants. Relax completely and don't trigger the action. Now smooth, deliberate, both hands, a solar-plexus bull's-eye. Paralyzing shot. Now up to the hollow of the neck...Now up to the middle of the forehead just for jolly before he falls. Now belt-buckle shot up to the heart. The gun is so easy with the adjustable hair trigger, almost shoots itself...Need a double-action Russian...I'll ask the Old Man...Kim saw himself in a sleigh picking off wolves with the 44. But there are too many wolves.