Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (18 page)

She hefted the wooden staff, felt its heaviness, turned it in her hand, felt the satin finish sliding against her palm. The head of the stick was a tapered, phallic knob; somewhere near the middle it evolved into a snake with its tail coiled around the throat of a woman. Although she was being strangled, her face wore a look of serene contentment …

“Did he tell you what it meant?”

“No. He doesn’t remember carving it. He was … you know, under the spell.”

She handed the stick back to him. “Go on. What happened then?”

“Well … looking back, I remember that period as a time when we were really together. Like we lived at the center of the universe, and everybody else was skulking around in the outer darkness. I guess we ignored our community relations. We started getting heat from the locals. There was a group came through—not our tribe, a bunch of assholes from California—and according to local gossip raped a girl from one of the ranches. They were long gone by the time the soldiers got here, all gringos look alike, I guess—anyway they took off with one of our guys who fit the description. He never got back, we never found the body, never found out which group of soldiers took him away. Figure he got blown away in the jungle
somewhere. Danny just got cold and quiet for about a week. Then he told me, The machine has a long arm. We’ve gotta destroy it.’ “

“I see. He blamed the United States.”

“Well sure, where do you think the pressure comes from? To keep you gringo cunts fresh faced and innocent, they gotta purify the whole fucking world, stop the Turks from raising opium, stop the Andeans from raising cocaine, stop the Indians from eating peyote, stop the Mexicans from raising mota—Jesus, it wouldn’t be so bad if your motives were pure. But you’re just substituting your laboratory junk for the junk that nature provides. You take a man off heroin by putting him on methadone, which is ten times more addictive. The only trouble is it’s a government monopoly, and believe me that’s something they’re gonna have to worry about—” He shrugged. “But later. Anyway about this deal … it wasn’t enough that they blew away one of our guys. They came back later and pulled us all in. In the jug, Danny started doing meditation. He’d just go out of his body and leave it sitting there, all on its own. He also got the idea he could communicate by mental power. We played with it—nothing else to do. Like I’d send him a mental picture, a clump of coconuts in a palm tree. Shrunken heads is what he’d get, hung up in the top of a grass hut. Well, he’d picked up my subconscious thought—not what I actually saw, but what it signified to me. That’s one of the common problems you run into with telepathy, you don’t know what level you’re connecting with. A novice sender—or say an untrained mind—will send a confusion of images, all piled up and superimposed. But somebody who’s mastered mind control filters out the subimages and sends just what he wants to send. It’s like somebody is telling you something, and while he’s talking you hear his gut-rumbles, you pick up his heartbeat and the squirt of blood in his veins. Or say you’re dealing with somebody who hasn’t made it—so you’re always making contact with the answering service, and you never get in touch with the man in charge. Most people I talk to, I
just talk to the guy in the front office. God is my copilot, that’s a bunch of bullshit. God is not only the pilot and copilot, he is the whole plane and the air through which it flies and the ground underneath and the flames which will consume you if you crash …”

Another long silence, then:

“Anyway his sister came down and sprung him—she sprung all of us, actually, though I don’t think she ever told her old man that. I think if Danny hadn’t gone back with her she’d have stayed. But for some reason he didn’t want her in our group. He told me he wanted to see if he could go and live right in the middle of the machine, and not be noticed. I thought if anybody could do it, maybe he could, No, I take that back. I suspected he had a naive idea of what he was up against. One of the interlocking wheels of the machine would catch him, crunch him up into fine sausage, and turn him into one of their pattymen. You don’t have a melting pot up there, you’ve got a meat grinder. Anyway I guess that’s what happened, isn’t it? He got his anatomy caught in the machine, and he couldn’t get out. Now it’s gonna chew him up …”

He paused, using the end of his walking stick to push a charred butt end into the fire. “I went up to visit him while he was in the woods. He was uptight, doing his yoga six hours a day, meditating the rest of the time. I didn’t know where his head was at anymore. He’d gone off into some alleyway I couldn’t follow. Things he was doing with his body—it was like flagellation, you know. Punish the flesh for these horrible,
sinful
desires it gives you … I started sending chicks up to see him, figuring they’d pull him out of it, but …” He stood up suddenly. “I think I’ll walk down to the beach. Care to come along?”

The steep path was treacherous, splotched with inky patches of moon-shadow. He took her hand and guided her, talking as he walked …

“I went up there, planning to help with his trial. The minute I saw what the legal system had turned into … Jesus, I’d been out of the country for ten years! You
can always tell which side is losing, because they’re the ones who get nailed with the blame for starting it. That’s why we get the idea that justice always triumphs, you know. Because you gotta have
power
to handcuff a man and drag him up in front of the judge. Then you gotta have all these cops hanging around making everybody be quiet. Without the cops, what’s a judge? Just an old man picking his nose. And even the cops are nothing without their guns …”

“You said you went to the trial. Did you talk to him?”

“No, but I saw him while they were taking him in to hear the verdict. Bollinger, the Cabin Slayer. Young kids with cameras crowded up close. Teevee trucks, two deputies in front and two behind, and the state patrol crowding around in their blue stetsons. Everybody wanted to get in the picture. He got to the top of the steps and somebody yelled, ‘Give us a smile, Danny!’ He turned and I saw his hands were cuffed in front of him, with the chain running through his belt. He looked out over the crowd, and I thought he recognized me—but no. He was locked in, sitting up inside his mind, unaware that his body was chained up and surrounded by the dogs of law who would keep the sheep at bay while one of their number is led to slaughter … and not one of them would even
think
about the injustice of it, but would go home feeling warm and secure inside because he wasn’t the one who’d been caught …”

They reached the beach, and walked along the ridge of sand thrown up in front of the coconut grove. The surf unrolled in luminescent coils, the ripples flashed and glittered in the moonlight. She sat down in the sand, still warm from the day’s sun, and looked at the sky which was not dark, but a deep glowing purple.

The Learned Doctor began asking her about the place where Danny was being kept, what his fellow patients were like, what provisions were being made for his health and exercise. His questions were those a father … no, correct that, questions a MOTHER would ask: What kind of food was he getting? Was it hot or cold when delivered,
how often did he see the shrink, how good was his medical care, were there any windows in his room, what hours did the shifts change, how often was he allowed visitors …?

“Tom,” she asked finally. “Are you thinking of busting him out?”

“Busting
him out?” He chuckled as he lit a twisted cigarette. A spark of glowing paper flew away in the wind. “You’re trying, Liza. I give you credit.”

“You are the most exasperating person I ever met. Don’t you ever answer a direct question?”

“In my own good time, by a labyrinthine process of logic which you could understand instantly, if you chose …”

He held out the cigarette. She started to shake her head, then decided there was no way to break through the shell; she would have to get inside the egg with him. The first hit caught in her throat; she broke into a fit of coughing, tears streaming from her eyes. She took a timid drag, and felt the smoke fill her lungs. She took another, slightly larger, and wondered what she was supposed to feel, telling herself: The mind will carry you through.
Analyze, reconstruct, examine, and this way you will remain intact …

Intact. Intact. The word sounded strange in her brain. Could she have it reversed? Tact-in. No, that wasn’t right …

“Hey, don’t Bogart the thing. That’s heavy stuff, kid.”

She looked over at him. He looked sinister, wolfish. Wanted his cigarette back. She felt impish, perverse. She took another long pull and held it out to him. “How long’s it take this stuff to come in?”

He blurted a laugh. “If you could hear yourself you wouldn’t have to ask.”

“I can hear myself.”

Self-self-self … The sound echoed around her, as if her head had been shoved in a barrel. She looked at the sea, and it seemed to be a many-toothed beast, white dentures flashing, chewing at the sand on which she sat.

She felt a lurch, like the shifting of some great mass beneath her buttocks. She stood up and gazed around her in amazement. Everything looked light and airy, all was surface without substance. She could feel the earth tilting beneath her feet, she looked up at the stars spread out like a jeweled fan, like diamonds on velvet, palm trees fluttering. She looked down at Tom, who sat with his hands folded over the head of his walking stick, his chin resting on his knuckles. He was aware of her; she knew without hearing the words that he wanted her, and the knowledge did not displease her …

She walked toward the surf not wondering why, aware only that her feet had started moving. Her flesh seemed swollen and tender; the wind in her face was an excruciating caress. The sinuous waves of the sea, the sway of the palm leaves overhead, all movement stirred ripples of force which penetrated her body in waves of sensual feeling. The sea was a great black organism which had crawled up from the ocean depths and was eating up the land, gnashing its teeth and growling. She decided to give herself up to the foaming beast, walked out into the surf, felt it frothing, hissing, swirling around her. A dark wall towered over her, thundered down, knocked her off her feet, filled her nose and mouth with unbreathable substance, dragged her helplessly across the rippled bottom.

Someone seized her belt, lifted her, set her on her feet, helped her stagger up through the surf. She fell forward, plunged her arms into the sand, and rolled over, looking up at the sky and laughing, crying, unable to stop …

She felt something pluck at the snap of her jeans, reached down and caught his hand.

“Just getting these wet clothes off. You’ll get a chill.”

“I’ll do it.” She stood up and unzipped her shorts. “I’m not doing this to entice you.”

“Fucking is like any other human activity. You get out of it what you put into it.”

She pondered that while she took off her shorts and unbuttoned her shirt. It made a lot of sense, the more
she thought about it. She lay back and let her shoulders sink into the warm sand, spread out her legs and watched the moon drift through the fringing palms.
Follow the bouncing ball, sing along with Mitch
… She looked over at Tom, saw that he was sitting looking at her. He was in no hurry. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live here one year, not to mention ten, but found it impossible to imagine more than the moment. It was totally full and overflowing. She sat up and looked at the bay, the palms, the sea and the little huts peering over the dark cliff. They were all part of a scene inside a little glass ball filled with transparent liquid. She lifted her arm and saw that her movements left bubble tracks in space. She got up and began dancing, whirling and leaping in the sand. The patterns of her movement left a glowing tracer of blue lines which curved, interlocked, blended. Another figure joined her, his lines were red, spiraling and blending with hers, forming a coruscating brilliance of purple. She knew exactly where to put her feet, and where he would put his; she felt herself seized by the pattern of force, whirling in circles which grew smaller and smaller until at last they were locked, and she and Tom fell together on the sand.

Afterward she asked: “Is it always this impersonal?”

“How impersonal?”

“I don’t feel that I made love to anybody. Just that … I made love.”

“Good.” He held out another cigarette but she shook her head. She sat up and felt the wind against her bare flesh. It felt cold, but the chill didn’t penetrate her body. Inside she was still hot, the sensual currents moved, swirled, twisted in gyrating patterns. She looked at the beach and saw their footprints in a vast spiral which narrowed down to the plot of pummeled sand where their bodies had at last met and interpenetrated …

“What were we into?” she asked.

“The main current. Heaven’s hotline. Life-force. It’s got a lot of names.”

“Is it always there?”

“Here, there—wherever you find it, that’s where it is. I used to be in it all the time, but somehow I drifted out, got caught in some kind of eddy. I can sit for a whole day and not do a damn thing. And I remember that’s the way my Aunt Mabe did the last ten years of her life, just sat by the stove and kept the fire going. I guess that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years. Tending the fire.”

“You talk as if nothing had happened since Danny left.”

“Well, nothing has.”

“And while he was here, what?”

“Most of the time, nothing. But he had the spark. He asked me questions, and I looked for answers. Nobody asks me questions anymore, so I don’t try to find the answers.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I’m just not curious any more.” He got up, brushed the sand off his buttocks, picked up his shorts. “Listen, we’d better get off the beach. You may not have noticed, but the bugs are eating us alive.”

She jumped and pulled on her damp clothes. She felt calm and infinitely relaxed as they walked along the beach, but a nagging horror seemed to hover, just beyond her Consciousness. They stopped at the well, and only then did she realize that her mouth was parched and dry. He talked as he hauled up the rope.