Dead Babies (10 page)

It had taken Giles the last two-thirds of this peroration to crawl the five feet to where Andy lay spreadeagled on a blanket. On arrival, Giles poked Andy's shoulder.

"What?" said Andy.

"Hey, Andy," Giles whispered loudly. "What's that chap saying?"

Andy stretched. "Says he's got drugs'll do anything. Anything you like. You tell him what you want to happen to you and he'll make it happen.”

"What, anything? He—he could even make you stop worrying about your . . ."

"Anything, man," said Andy, searching for a more delicious posture in which to drowse. "Anything."

When Giles had removed the swimming green of the gin bottle from his lips and settled himself also on the ground, there lingered in his mind the afterimage of what had snapped into focus from the smoke between everything and his eyes, the three smiling faces of the Americans.

15: meandered up
america

The Americans constituted a "triad," a "troy," which meant, more or less, that they got to fuck and bugger one another indiscriminately. It was their habit, too, to rope in another personage to form a "rectangle," or another couple to make up the full "star." And are we to believe that sexual excursions outside the group were censured? On the contrary, they were encouraged, applauded as adding further imaginative declensions to normal activity. The threesome had flourished for two years and showed lively signs of continuing to do so.

Their story went something like this.

Skip's father, Philboyd B. Marshall, Jr., a horrible human being, used to run a hot, dirty garage on the outskirts of Tara, Tennessee. Philboyd had done so many appalling and traumatic things to his son that anyone who heard about them spontaneously congratulated Skip on his apparent sanity. Philboyd had once
raped
him, for instance—not (we hasten to add) in a libidinous spirit, but because he had caught Skip emptying the latrine with a shovel rather than with his bare hands, as Philboyd had requested, this being itself a punishment for an earlier mischief. "Kitch you at that kind of non-sense again, boy, and you're in real trouble."

Father and son relations worsened. What with the gas station not doing so good these days, the way all the guys were moving out of Tara and all the niggers moving in, the fact that a man couldn't take a beer at Kramer's without getting

jostled by the longhairs . . . Philboyd's life became a

depressing series of grousing sessions, drunk bends and violence jags. The old mechanic died a little every time a Rican or a Jeeew pulled into his station, expecting gas what's more;
:
every time he saw the boogies come across the railway line, seemingly unharmed; every time the sun went down over the Coke sign back of the house, causing his evenings to be dimmed by a premature vault of shadow. When Skip became physically unable to take more of his motiveless beatings, Philboyd bought from the glue factory a three-legged mule, which he installed in an enclosure and went out to visit torments on twice daily with kitchen knives, meathooks, branding irons. This helped some, but not for long. The animal fell down dead on him two months later.

And so then of course some Vanderbilters get along from Nashville and Skip starts to hang out with them. They're all between twenty and thirty and Skip hasn't seen seventeen yet, but he has this peculiar facility with older boys. For Skip is what used to be called a "slag": he'll do anything; there's nothing he won't do. "Skip, see if you can dive from the cooling tower into that tank right there." "Every time." "Skip, take the shit buckets down to the trash pile, willya?" "Uh-huh." "Skip, go steal us some beers from Kramer's, okay?" "Right on." "Skip, eat that slug." "No sweat." Certain menial sexual chores fell also to the lanky boy, which he performed with care and avidity. As a student once remarked, "Skip'd rim a snake so long someone held its head." There were lots of drugs, too.

One day Philboyd motored past the Kampsite in his dump truck, saw Skip lying on the grass with a crew of whores and hippie fags. To his hopelessness and grief, Philboyd could not act immediately; time was—when there'd been enough tubby little rednecks like himself still living in Tara-—they could have pitched right in there and whomped up a storm. This reflection saddened him further. As it was, on Skip's return that night Philboyd clubbed his son around the kitchen with a frypan for three-quarters of an hour. "Ah, let the boy be, Philb," came Mrs. Marshall's sickly voice from the adjacent bedroom. "Trying to get some rest in here." "Shut the fuck up," replied Philboyd, who had in any case decided to take his wife's advice, being too old and fat to go on. "Skip, next time I see you which those queeahs again," he panted, "I'm

goan bust your head."

And, to be sure, the next time he saw Skip with those queers again Philboyd attempted to keep his promise. He could hardly believe his good fortune. There was Skip with a
solitary student, drinking beers in a downtown penny arcade. Philboyd slapped open the door and strode over to them, eagerly unhitching his belt. "This is it, son. I'm gonna kill your ass." Without reaching any kind of decision, Skip rose, made a circling motion with his right fist and then offered it up to Philboyd's chin at high velocity. Philboyd seemed to stay perfectly still for at least two or three seconds, his face frozen in unbelieving disappointment, before being snatched up into the air and cannonaded against the wall, down which he easily slid to collect in a fat puddle on the floor. With slow-motion fear his son scooped him up and straightened him against a fruit machine. "Dad . . . ?" Skip's hands were shrugged off. "Ah, let me be, son." Philboyd stumbled home, hair matted with sawdust, blood, and beer, and dejectedly hosepiped his wife to death.

Seemed like Skip's life had fallen apart all around him. Ma was dead. Philboyd had a manslaughter charge to face. Marshall Mekanix was closed down. The authorities didn't appear to give a shit what he did. And he had always hated Tara anyhow.

Skip found employment in the automobile plant on the far apron of the second cloverleaf off the third spaghetti junction along the subsidiary expressway running westerly out of Nashville, Tennessee. He worked sixteen hours a day, without ambition and without boredom, taking off in borrowed cars at weekends for St. Louis, Memphis, Oklahoma, 'Pulco, Mexico City, where he participated in various nihilistic debauches, scrogging and getting scrogged, taking large quantities of mescaline and cocaine, the roller of middle-aged cowboys, the occasional witness of optimum sex tortures and genital mutilation profiles, a blank figure in the tumescent heat-hazed carscape, silent, unreflecting, and alone.

After two years of punching out automobile steering-column shroud toggles Skip threw everything he owned into a beatup '75 Plymouth, meandered up America just rolling like a stone nobody throwed—
and
Omaha,
and
Minneapolis,
and
Salt Lake City—until he hung an impulsive right off the interstate thruway and idled toward the fine town of Prescott, Arizona. Halfway there he killed a bottle of paregoric and blacked out in a rest stop; he awoke a buckled mess at the bottom of the roadside ditch, his car and money gone, his nose, ankle, and five ribs broken, his left pinkie missing, a
: portion of his right ear bitten off, and a bad hangover. It took him forty-eight hours to regain the road.

"The first time we saw Skip?—enough to make a maggot gag. Roxeanne and I are out researching locations in Arizona for an existential Western I never got together, we're making for the nearest town to pick up some food, come around the bend in the Chev, and there's this sort of twitching heap by the side of the road. We slow up. Never in my life seen a human being nearer the state of nature. We pull over. Clothes half ripped off, face a pool of blood, body broken, random. I still have the photographs."

"Mar was cool but I was shaken up. Kept thinking, uh-oh, Popeye, some Trogs have been having fun, let's get out of here before they have some more, but Marvell said we'd better get him to somewhere and he was right. I put a blanket down for him in back and we like shoveled him in? We thought he might go stiff on us right there but then he started to groan and struggle, even saying things—like, 'I'm all fucked up ... I'm all fucked up.' Marvell gunned it into Prescott, see what they could do there, said we could go on to Phoenix if his condition necessitated it. Bastards in Prescott Casualty said they couldn't even take his fucking temperature without State Reg.—and this guy doesn't have anything, no ID, no cash. He was like nobody. So it was LA, not knowing whether we'd have a stiff in back when we got there. LA they kind of roped him together again but they still wouldn't take him in. So we had to."

"I got some medic friends along. No problem. Skip was delirious for days, wriggling around in bed, moaning about his father and beer cans and stuff. When he came to he didn't appear to have any recollection of what had happened to him or of anything before it—found myself in there explaining that we were on the planet Earth, a spherical body revolving around the sun. The Sun? big fire in the sky? Most of it returned to him, though the stuff about his father comes and goes. It was strange, you know? Like bringing a new human being to life, like creating something. You feel strong things

then. And, Christ, if you'd seen the way that guy responded to

affection. Made you sick to think what his life had been."

"He used to tell these positively prehistoric stories about his father? Some animal. Skip's eyes would practically come
out of his head when we told him about our parents—you know, mine are all house-on-the-hill and Marvell's used to be very heavily Yiddisher—that they were rich, affectionate, indulgent. Totally alien to his thought-style. He was kind of relieved when we told him they were all divorced now and that we only saw them for cash. Marvell explained to him about control, about how you don't need parents for much or for long, that you phase them out soon. If only Skip could have."

"Right. I don't think he thinks about his earlier life at all now. The father's still around, however. The authorities forwarded us a letter when we put Skip on Californian Reg. just before we came out here. Shit, what a document. I'll show it to you. We never handed it on to Skip. It would wreck his head to be taken back to those days again. Want to see someone go really wild? Ask Skip about his father. I don't recommend it. Anyhow, so it goes. It was no sweat for us; we had the cash and the space, he helps around the apartment, helps me on projects, fixes the car. . . . He's happy."

"We're like his mother and father as well as his lovers." "Yeah, and he's . . . let's just say he does things for us."

16: a heavy fire
OF
eyes

Whitehead had just drained his first glass of Pouilly Fume", had just turned down Celia's disdainful offer of a piece of crispbread topped with smoked salmon and, alas, butter, had just agreed with Roxeanne that Capricorns seldom got along with Leos (a proposition that Andy, a self-elected representative of the latter sign, began to pooh-pooh), when a ghastly bark sprang from between his lips, bringing all conversation to a halt.

In a tone of mock-heroic formality Keith begged the picnic's pardon, and the conversation cautiously resumed, what time awful quickenings started to occur inside his stomach. It hissed, whooped, spat—Keith whistled popular tunes in an attempt to drown its loud awakening; he was moreover obliged to squirm about on the blankets in order to contain the balloon of air that romped friskily around his colon. As the picnickers began actually to raise their voices to
:
make themselves heard, little Keith decided that he wouldn't wait to see what his metabolism was going to pull on him next. Hardly caring what sort of spectacle he made of himself, he slipped some paper napkins into his pocket, stood up, and looked quickly about him.

"Saw some interesting—I've got to go, to see . . ." No one stirred as Keith took his leave, as he trotted down the hill under a heavy fire of eyes.

Whitehead picked his way through the outskirts of the thicket, wading through not particularly long grass, his trousers creaking in alarm every time he lifted a foot to clear a log, his high heels wobbling and bending on each anthill and tuft of grass. He walked a tormented half mile, becoming ever easier to please as regards possible sites, but only after he had twice been brought to a kneeling position by the wedge of pain that rocketed from his coccyx to his perineum did he turn and stare back through the tent of nervous leaves. First removing his boots, then his trousers (which required him to lie on the ground and wriggle out of them like a snake shedding its skin), Keith crept in between two dense bramble bushes and melted backward against a severed trunk. A tight-chested grunt was followed by a moan of ecstasy.

"Hi."

Emerging silently from the trees Skip had come to a halt about five yards away. He now closed that distance and un-elongated himself into a crouch, his knees almost touching little Keith's. A grass stem remained motionless in the corner of his mouth as he said, "You like threes, Keith?"