William S. Burroughs (11 page)

He straightens up
and sees a face not tears at first
...
part
of the bushes
...
boy advances
...
you
can see the heavy revolver crusted with the smells of all
humanity at his belt
...
searching for
that long past love is a thin silver flute
...
a
fawn face thickening in puddles of ink
...
Kim,
our roles, their rich breath...a pressure
...
excitement
ran through me floating sensation...the ruined railway dappled green
shirt and pants
...
lost lonely boy cries
with a hard-on his face fading into the inky clouds hot meaty rush
pulling him in picture puzzles recognizes the soft slow dog on the
other side eyes arching forever
...
darkness
was gathering behind me whose breath will never warm you
more
...
pointed ears and yellow eyes filled
my head a tingling slackness
...

"I want to pump
you, Kim."

Standing on the
sandy bank of a stream moves Kim with his right hand around
...

"Steady
on...Take it easy."

Left ear phantom
train whistles boy rubs his crotch from trestles and pools
...
this
animal teeth
...
Kim stands there wiped by
the summer sky.

Kim is sitting on a
yellow toilet seat, his cock pulsing and lubricating in sunlight
that glitters through iced twigs making them tingle and glow. The sky
is pale blue and the snow has a thick cake crust...In moonlight he
eats a melting white peppermint. The moon catches it and makes it
sparkle and there is a runny green center that drips onto his
shoulder and a boy with huge vacant blue eyes is licking it
off...Early morning rosebud on his tray like a cannon mouth the
crimson hole goes right to its heart. A boy with rose-colored
genitals on an empty beach makes a jackoff gesture.

Carl and Kim leap
and snort and gambol, Kim soars up and parts his buttocks..."I'm
a cloud. Seed me." He seems to float down and Carl is fucking
him on all fours in a rank goatish smell Kim writhes feeling the
horns burst through his head splitting open he screams and
whinnies as blood spurts from his nose...

"Show you
something."

Carl straps on his
45
and proffers a bandanna.

"Blindfold me."
He faces the targets which are six cardboard boxes each with a circle
drawn in the middle. He makes a motion and little click of the tongue
and the gun leaps into his hand, six shots all in the inner circles.

"Now you try."

Kim tries to
memorize the target positions and keep them in his mind's eye. Carl,
standing behind him with his hands on Kim's hips, gently guides him.
One direct hit in front of him, two others outside the circle but in
the box.

"With more than
one player you need to know exactly where everyone is. Practice
naked, practice at night." He picks up his clothes. "Now I
must go."

"Can't I come
with you?"

"Not now.
Later."

He walks down the
tracks toward the big thicket in the setting sun where the
tracks seem to melt together. In the distance he turns and waves and
smiles, fading into the trees and the sky.

Kim drops by Kes's
occasionally to buy fresh eggs milk and marijuana and meets an Indian
boy named Red Dog, who helps around the place from time to time. Red
Dog is about Kim's age or a little older, very tall and straight with
jet-black hair and a smooth red-brown skin and one eye is slate-gray
and the other brown. Kim is very much taken but Red Dog is aloof in a
friendly way.

Kim starts dropping
by the saloon in the evening for a few drinks before dinner. Mostly
the saloon is empty. Kes carries on a trade with the people of the
Big Thicket, exchanging supplies for gold and certain herbs and
woods. But the thicket people, little men with flaring ears, drink
only milk, and hastily fade away as soon as their business is done.

One night Kim is in
the bar looking at Red Dog, who is bending to lift a beer keg. Kim is
getting a hard-on and the ruttish smell is drifting off him, an
underwater smell it is, and suddenly he is aware of being
watched by hostile and alien eyes. A man sitting in one corner with a
beer, strange Kim hadn't noticed him
...
sort
of a smoke screen there...As soon as the man feels that Kim has
spotted him he coughs, covering his face with a handkerchief, puts a
coin on the table and slides out. Kes watches him go and points
across the river.

Saturday night and
maybe somebody from across the river comes into Uncle Kes's saloon
looking for trouble. He won't have to look far
...
the
short-barreled double-action
44
tonight,
Kim decides, and his
22
backup in a boot
holster. This would entail going into a graceful fluid crouch. Kim
rehearses in front of a mirror.

As soon as Kim walks
through the swinging door, he knows this is it. Two men at the bar by
the door. One is tall and thin, with a dead, sour, wooden face; the
other tall and fattish and loose-lipped, with lead-gray eyes. They
fan out, blocking the door. Loose-Lips smiles, showing his awful
yellow teeth.

"Now I don't
like drinkin' in the same room with a fairy
—
do you, Clem?"

"Can't say as I
do, Cash."

They want to bat it
around for a while. Kim doesn't.

"I don't want
any trouble with you gentlemen
...
let me buy
you a drink."

Kim is still talking
as his hand sweeps down to his belt and up, smooth and casual, as if
he is handing Clem a visiting card, and shoots him in the stomach.
Clem doubles forward and his false teeth fly out, snapping in the
air. Clem's
45,
barely clear of the
holster, plows a hole in the floor. Kim pivots, both hands on the
gun, and shoots Cash in the hollow of the throat. The heavy slug
tears through and spatters the wall with slivers of bloody bone.
Cash's gun
chunks
back into its holster. Clem is weaving
around, trying to recock his
45
with numb
fingers. Taking his time, Kim shoots him in the forehead. Both
assholes are dead before they hit the floor.

Kim's arduous
training has paid off in hard currency. As Kim looks down at the two
bodies crumpled there, spilling blood and brains on the floor, he
feels good
—
safer. Two enemies will
never bother him again. Two lousy sons of bitches, melted into air
and powder smoke.

Kim remembers his
first adolescent experiment with biologic warfare. Smallpox was the
instrument, the town of Jehovah across the river, his target. Their
horrid church absolutely spoiled his sunsets, with its gilded spire
sticking up like an unwanted erection, and Kim vowed he would
see it leveled.

It was dead easy.
The townspeople were antivaccinationists
...
"polluting
the blood of Christ," they called it. Around the turn of the
century there were a number of these antivaccination cults, a
self-limiting phenomenon since all the cultists contracted smallpox
sooner or later.

So Kim simply jogged
the arm of destiny, you might say, by distributing free illustrated
Bibles impregnated with smallpox virus to the townspeople of Jehovah.
The survivors moved out. Kim bought the land and used the church to
test his homemade flamethrower. He found the plan in
Boy's
Life
...
a weed killer, they
called it. Well, rotten weeds, you know...

T
rain
whistle
...
Clickety
clickety clack
...
Kim
is swaying and jolting on a train seat...

dodge
city

A sketch done in
black green and sepia India ink exudes the somber brooding menace of
El Greco's
View of Toledo
...
transparent
horses and riders, phantom buckboards and buildings, dead
streets of an old film set.

lee
yen chinese restaurant

Kim walks to the
back of the restaurant and pirouettes gracefully, checking the booths
along one side of the room. A fat drummer with a red face and black
mustache, napkin tucked into his collar, looks up at him over a bowl
of chop suey with surprise and fear and hatred, as if Kim is the last
person he expects to see and the last person he wants to see.
Kim raises his eyebrows, looking back until the man drops his eyes,
coughs, and dips into his chop suey. Kim sits down facing the door
with his back to the man who is shuffling around and moving the
booth. Kim glances over his shoulder with a petulant expression. His
eyes snap back to the door and he goes for his gun in a slanting
cross-body holster he uses when sitting down. A bullet spangs into
the booth behind him. The drummer coughs, spitting blood down
his napkin, and falls forward his face in the bowl of chop suey.

Scene shifts to Bat
Masterson's office. Bat is a calm gray presence. He lights a
cigar and studies Kim through the smoke.

"Who were
they?" Kim asks...

Bat picks up a
file..."Guns. Hired guns. Plenty more where those came from."

"Meaning I
should move on?"

"Big country,
small towns. Talk will catch up with you sooner or later. You want to
get lost, go east. Chicago
...
Boston...New
York...Now, I could use a deputy...
"

"No thanks. I
promised my father on his deathbed I'd never wear a lawman's
badge."

"In this life
you have to fit in somewhere. There's some safety in a badge. Some
safety in working for one of the big ranchers...
"

"Taking care of
sodbusters?"

Bat shrugs. "You
gotta fit in somewhere. You're not even an outlaw...At least not
yet...
"

Bat, years older, is
talking to a reporter in New York City..."Fast? Well he didn't
seem
fast. Took his time. Always used two hands on the gun and
he didn't miss. He had some special guns too, double-action with a
light smooth trigger-pull and dumdums that would mushroom to the size
of a half-dollar...And he had a smoothbore 44-caliber that shot six
buckshot in each load...Something else: he never telegraphed his
draw. Didn't bat an eye and there wasn't any movement of his hand
before the draw...
"

"Is it true
that he was a fairy?"

"I never saw
that side of him. Figured it was none of my business...
"

"Is it true you
run him out of Dodge City?"

"No. I just
asked him to leave as a personal favor...
"

"Where'd he
go?"

"Lots of
places, I reckon. I'd hear from time to time...
"

Kim is standing with
his back to the bar. There is a life-sized female nude behind him. A
thin-faced blond kid, his eyes spinning in concentric circles,
backs away, hand vibrating over his gun. The boy's hair stands up and
pimples burst on his face as he goes for his gun and fans off a shot
that hits the nude right in the cunt, above Kim's head. With a smooth
movement Kim draws, both hands on the gun, and shoots the kid in the
stomach just below the belt buckle. The slug slams him back like a
fist and he falls across a cardtable, scattering chips, cards and
glasses on the floor. The cardplayers stand up and raise their hands.
They are looking at something behind Kim: the bartender is holding a
sawed-off shotgun six inches from Kim's back, his florid face smug as
he winks at the cardplayers. His eyes flutter coquettishly. He slumps
forward across the bar. The shotgun slides to the floor, overturning
a spittoon. A meat cleaver is buried in the back of the bartender's
head. Framed in the service panel between the bar and the kitchen a
Chinese youth grins impishly. He makes a riding motion with his
hands and points to the side door. Kim backs out slowly. One of the
cardplayers, with an arrogant hawk face and pale gray eyes, still has
his cigar in a raised hand. As Kim disappears through the door he
slowly puts the cigar in his mouth. It is Pat Garrett. The two boys
ride out together, crisscrossing streams, keeping to rocky ground but
still leaving a trail that a posse can follow.

They rein up, take
saddles and bridles off the horses. Kim looks at his horse. The horse
lays its ears back and shows its horrible yellow teeth. Kim cuts it
sharply across the rump with his quirt and both horses gallop off,
Kim's horse in the lead. Carrying the saddles they carefully wipe
their footprints away with a pine branch as the Chinese boy hums a
little tune. They come to a deserted hogan.