Don looked around, unreassured. The two of them were in another room in the basement of the chapter house, much smaller than the big one with the indoor-outdoor carpet, only large enough to hold a card table and two folding chairs. The plasterboard walls and ceiling closed in on them, painted with stripes and dapplings of sulfur yellow touched with black and gray; even the inside of the door was part of the swirling, oppressive pattern.
Parisi picked up the stack of posterboard rectangles on the table like a giant's deck of cards, lifted the one on top to show the picture pasted to its underside. It was a color picture of a steer hung upside down in a slaughter-house, blood still coming from its throat, eye frozen in dumb terror. A bit disgusting, but what was the point?
Then Parisi showed the next card, and Don's stomach turned over. A bleak hardcore photo of a woman making it with a German Shepherd.
Just what had he gotten himself into?
Next came an accident victim embedded in what was left of his windshield. Don was used to this from high school safety programs, except this was a Polaroid original.
A homosexual (or at least a masochist) who smiled and posed with rings through his pierced nipples.
Don recognized the next image because it was famous: a screaming Vietnamese girl running toward the camera, clothed only in flames.
Charles Manson grinning.
A faded photo of a face half-skull and half-char that was staked down with split bamboo at the collar bones (Don's best guess was a Japanese soldier captured in World War II and gone over with a blowtorch.).
A crazy dark painting of a huge goat who sat up like a man in a circle of hags.
A newsphoto of a suicide just clearing the rail of a bridge. A collage where the Virgin was a flasher—one of Khoumeni and the Pope embracing—a color glossy of a female mantis eating the male in the act of love—an engraving of a mixed-sex daisy chain from some antique porn novel with every organ meticulously and naively delineated—
Then Parisi put the last card of the devil's deck face-down. "So what do you think of our pretty pictures?"
Don's gut had calmed down, but still roiled. Even if it drew flak, he had to say it: "You want my honest opinion? I think they're sick."
Parisi chuckled. "Don't lose your cool. We just want to toughen you up, make you a man of the world. And get you ready for the initiation. Let's go through the stack again."
Don looked away for a moment, but the senseless pattern on the wall was worse than the pictures.
They went through the stack two more times. The last time Parisi said, "And here's the joker in the deck, jarhead," and turned up a sheet with a mirror glued to it.
Don barely recognized himself in the tiny glass.
▼
Sam almost whispered. "It's not going to be so bad."
Don lowered his voice too. "What?"
"The initiation." They didn't need to be loud, sitting next to each other on the edge of Don's bunk in the early morning light. "So how do you know?"
"Ralph Bishop told me."
Don made a dubious noise. "He's only a pledge."
"Yeah, but this elder brother—he wouldn't tell me who—anyway the brother saw how scared Ralph was, told him what to expect."
"And?"
Sam giggled "It's going to be heavy. They'll talk as if they're going to rape us like in jail, screw us in the ass, you know."
"Afraid I do."
"Anyway, we'll be blindfolded. But they won't screw us—just let us worry awhile, then give us an enema."
"That'll really be fun."
"We've had enemas before."
"Never volunteered for 'em."
"Me neither. They were always my mom's idea, or maybe some nurse's. Still, would you rather try the alternate—um—should I call it consciousness-raising experience?"
Don nodded uncertainly "Guess it's good to know what we're in for tomorrow night. Otherwise they might scare us shitless."
Sam tried to grin "That could mess up their plans. Or at least jump the gun, if you know what I mean."
Don grinned back, even if unreassured. Maybe the brother had lied, maybe Ralph was in on the trick—like the trained goat slaughterhouses were supposed to use to sucker the sheep in. But he kept his doubts to himself: mentioning Judas goats to Sam would be just plain cruel.
▼
Next day Don watched what he ate at the Commons, in case the scenario Sam had relayed was true: macaroni and cheese at lunch, mashed potatoes at dinner and afterwards a disgusting custard dessert, lots of bulk without much fiber, whatever he could pass without strain.
Then Don tried to study at the library awhile. Because it was Friday he was alone, with the only noise in the basement stacks the sighing of the ventilation system. When the ducts started talking, Don gave up and went back to the room.
Sam was standing at the west window, silhouetted against the dusk, the shadows of the new leaves on the tall branches beyond moving in the wind. He looked around. "Hi."
"You OK?"
"Sure," Sam said. "Why not?"
"Another half-hour."
A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. "Come in."
It was Ralph Bishop. "Only a little while now."
Don was glad to see Bishop because it gave him a chance to ask for himself. "Sam told me what you said about the initiation. Fake rape but really just an enema. Did an Alpha brother actually give you the word on that?"
"Swear to God."
"You think he was telling the truth?"
Ralph nodded earnestly. "I wouldn't be going through with it if I didn't. It'll be a bit gross is all."
"Yeah," said Sam, "but then we'll be brothers."
▼
Don hoped Ralph was right, because this was scary. Even with all the black candles burning, the big room was chilly when you were naked, which is why the brothers had bathrobes on. Don wondered whether his goosepimples came from fear or cold. Sam looked calm enough but on his other side Kearney was green with fright.
Don could understand why. The brothers had put on a great act—it had to be an act, though it was awfully convincing—of drawing lots for the pledges. They'd explained that was so they wouldn't fight over the best-looking boys, and afterwards Stein the quarterback had strutted over to Kearney to whisper. "Now that's what I call the luck of the draw—I just love blond guys with tight asses."
Now Stein was back with the other brothers, terrycloth robe open, pulling his foreskin back to stroke himself erect as he winked at Kearney. And Walker had his hand moving inside his blue and white robe.
Still Don suspected Ralph's story was true. Not just because he wanted it to be, but because he was standing on a vinyl tarp. Why would they have pledges standing on a tarp unless enemas were involved? Anal rape wouldn't be likely to get the indoor-outdoor carpeting dirty.
Walker leered, the plum-colored tip of his organ thrusting between the sides of his robe. "Down on all fours," he yelled, and Don and the rest threw themselves flat.
"Blindfold the pledges." A brother wrapped a black scarf over Don's eyes and pulled it tight, scaring him even more until he realized that it fit best with Ralph's story of a fake, because they wouldn't want you to see what was really happening.
"Get their knees wider." Hands touched the inside of his thighs, pressed outwards.
"K-Y Jelly time, jarheads," Walker gloated.
Don tried to keep from shuddering while a finger forced a glob of lubricant in, fearful Ralph had been a Judas goat after all.
People were moving around. He could hear a heavy pair of feet approaching and stopping behind him.
"Fun time, guys!"
Walker himself. Don's skin tingled, his whole self contracted. Then he felt the hard little nozzle easing its way in, and could breathe again.
Ralph was right. He was safe, it was just an enema.
Yes and no, Don realized as the terrible joy invaded him, climbing up his spine hot and electric, better than love or religion, more monstrous than
rape, making him instantly powerful, frighteningly intelligent. Most of him gave in, collaborated ecstatically with the invader, loved the brightness taking him over, merging with him, but one trapped part of him resisted, walled off, screaming forever.
Don pulled off the blindfold, stood up with the others. While they were blindfolded, a serving cart with an aquarium tank on top had been wheeled in. In the tank seethed milky luminescence, the larger specialized cells big as grains of rice. A pupilless eye formed on its surface, rose on a translucent stalk to look at them.
This was what Jack Martin had brought out of the Guatemalan jungle hidden inside his body.
The Father Thing began to talk to them. Without words, because part of him was in each of his new sons. Telling them how special they were to have been chosen, how they would rule.
This was what brotherhood meant.
The Sixth Sentinel by Poppy Z. Brite
One of the more commented-upon stories of Borderlands 1 was "And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" by Poppy Z. Brite. At the time of that story's publication, Poppy was relatively unknown other than for her appearances in some small press magazines. During the past two years, her richly textured stories have been found in the most prestigious magazines and anthologies, and have garnered many award nominations. Her first novel, Lost Souls, was published by Delacorte/Abyss in the Fall of 1992, and Borderlands Press will publish Swamp Foetus, a collection of her short fiction, in early 1993. She writes that the following story, set in her native city of New Orleans, "is a kind of companion piece to "...Wormwood." It is only appropriate, then, that it appears herewith.
I first knew Hard Luck Rosalie Smith when she was a thin frayed rope of a child, twenty years old and already well acquainted with the solitude at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Her hair was brittle from too many dye jobs, bright red last week, black as the grave today, purple and green for Mardi Gras. Her face was fine-boned and faintly feral, the eyes carefully lined in black, the rouged lips stretched tight over the sharp little teeth. If I had been able to touch Rosalie, her skin would have felt silky and faintly dry, her hair would have been like electricity brushing my face in the dark.
But I could not touch Rosalie, not so that she would notice. I could pass my fingers through the meat of her arm, pale as veal and packed like flaky fish flesh between her thin bones. I could wrap my hand around the smooth porcelain ball of her wrist. But as far as she was concerned, my touch went through her like so much dead air. All she could feel of me was a chill like ice crystallizing along her spine.
"Your liver has the texture of hot, wet velvet," I would tell her, reaching through her ribs to caress the tortured organ.
She'd shrug. "Another year in this town and it'll be pickled."
Rosalie came to the city of New Orleans because it was as far south as her money would take her—or so she said. She was escaping from a lover she would shudderingly refer to only as Joe Coffeespoon. The memory of his touch made her feel cold, far colder than my ectoplasmic fingers ever could, and she longed for the wet kiss of tropical nights.
She moved into an apartment in one of the oldest buildings in the French Quarter, above a "shoppe" that sold potions and philters. At first I wondered whether she would be pleased to find a ghost already residing in her cramped quarters, but as I watched her decorate the walls with shrouds of black lace and photographs of androgynous sunken-cheeked musicians who looked more dead than alive, I began to realize I could show myself safely, without threat of eviction. It is always a nuisance when someone calls in the exorcist. The priest himself is no threat, but the demons that invariably follow him are large as cats and annoying as mosquitoes. It is these, not the intonations and holy water, that drive innocent spirits away.
But Rosalie only gave me a cool appraising look, introduced herself, then asked me for my name and my tale. The name she recognized, having seen it everywhere from the pages of history books to the shingles hanging outside dubious "absinthe" houses in the French Quarter. The tale—well, there were enough tales to entertain her for a thousand nights or more. (I, the Scheherazade of Barataria Bay!) How long had I wanted to tell those tales? I had been without a friend or a lover for more years than I could recall. (The company of other local ghosts did not interest me—they seemed a morbid lot, many of them headless or drenched in gore, manifesting only occasionally to point skeletal fingers at loose fireplace flagstones and then vanish without a word. I had met no personalities of substance, and certainly none with a history as exotic as mine.)
So I was glad for the company of Rosalie. As more old buildings are demolished I must constantly shift about the city, trying to find places where I resided in life, places where a shred of my soul remains to anchor me. There are still overgrown bayou islands and remote Mississippi coves I visit often, but to give up the drunken carnival of New Orleans, to forsake human companionship (witting or otherwise) would be to fully accept my death. Nearly two hundred years, and I still cannot do that.
"Jean," she would say to me as evening fell like a slowly drifting purple scarf over the French Quarter, as the golden flames of the streetlights flickered on, "do you like these panties with the silver bustier, Jean?" (She pronounced my name correctly, in the French manner, like John but with the soft J.) Five nights of the week Rosalie had a job stripping at a nightclub on Bourbon Street. She selected her undress from a vast armoire crammed full of the microscopic wisps of clothing she referred to as "costumes," some of which were only slightly more substantial than my own flesh. When she first told me of the job she thought I would be shocked, but I laughed. "I saw worse things in my day," I assured her, thinking of lovely, shameless octoroon girls I had known, of famous "private shows" involving poisonous serpents sent from Haiti and the oiled stone phalluses of alleged voodoo idols.
I went to see Rosalie dance two or three times. The strip club was in an old row building, the former site of a bordello I remembered well. In my day the place had been decorated entirely in scarlet silk and purple velvet; the effect was of enormous fleshy lips closing in upon you as you entered, drawing you into their dark depths. I quit visiting Rosalie at work when she said it unnerved her to suddenly catch sight of me in the hundreds of mirrors that now lined the club, a hundred spangle-fleshed Rosalies and a hundred translucent Jeans and a thousand pathetic weasel-eyed men all reflected to a point of swarming infinity far within the walls. I could see how the mirrors might make Rosalie nervous, but I believe she did not like me looking at the other dancers either, though she was the prettiest of a big-hipped, insipid-faced lot.
By day Rosalie wore black: lace and fishnet, leather and silk, the gaudy mourning clothes of the deather-children. I had to ask her to explain them to me, these deathers. They were children seldom older than eighteen who painted their faces stark white, rimmed their eyes with kohl, smudged their mouths black or blood-red. They made love in cemeteries, then plundered the rotting tombs for crucifixes to wear as jewelry. The music they listened to was alternately lush as a wreath of funeral roses and dark as four a.m., composed in suicidal gloom by the androgynies that decorated Rosalie's walls. I might have been able to tell these children a few things about death. Try drifting through a hundred years without a proper body, I might have said, without feet to touch the ground, without a tongue to taste wine or kiss. Then perhaps you will celebrate your life while you have it. But Rosalie would not listen to me when I got on this topic, and she never introduced me to any of her deather friends.
If she had any. I had seen other such children roaming the French Quarter after dark, but never in Rosalie's company. Often as not she would sit in her room and drink whiskey on her nights off, tipping inches of liquid amber fire over crackling ice cubes and polishing it off again, again, again. She never had a lover that I knew of, aside from the dreaded Coffeespoon, who it seemed had been quite wealthy by Rosalie's standards. Her customers at the club offered her ludicrous sums if she would only grant them one night of pleasure more exotic than their toadlike mind
s could imagine. A few might really have been able to pay such fortunes, but Rosalie ignored their tumescent pleading. She seemed not so much opposed to the idea of sex for money as simply uninterested in sex at all.
When she told me of the propositions she received, I thought of the many things I had buried in the earth during my days upon it. Treasure: hard money and jewels, the riches of the robbery that was my bread and butter, the spoils of the murder that was my wine. There were still caches that no one had found and no one ever would. Any one of them would have been worth ten times the amounts these men offered.
Many times I tried to tell Rosalie where these caches were, but unlike some of her kind, she thought buried things should stay buried. She claimed that the thought of the treasure hidden under mud, stone, or brick, with people walking near it and sometimes right over it each day, amused her more than the thought of digging it up and spending it.
I never believed her. She would not let me see her eyes when she said these things. Her voice trembled when she spoke of the deathers who pursued grave-robbing as a sport. ("They pried up a granite slab that weighed fifty pounds," she told me once, incredulously. "How could they bear to lift it off, in the dark, not knowing what might come out at them?") There was a skeleton in a glass-topped coffin downstairs, in the voodoo shoppe, and Rosalie hardly liked to enter the shoppe because of it—I had seen her glancing out of the corner of her eye, as if the sad little bones simultaneously intrigued and appalled her.
It was some obsessive fear of hers, I realized. Rosalie shied away from all talk of dead things, of things buried, of digging in the ground. When I told her my tales she made me skip over the parts where treasures or bodies were buried; she would not let me describe the fetor of the nighttime swamp, the faint flickering lights of Saint Elmo's fire, the deep sucking sound the mud made when a shovel was thrust into it. She would allow me no descriptions of burials at sea or shallow bayou graves. She covered her ears when I told her of a rascal whose corpse I hung from the knotted black bough of a hundred-year-old oak. It was a remarkable thing, too—when I rode past the remote spot a year later, his perfect skeleton still hung there, woven together by strands of gray Spanish moss. It wound around his long bones and cascaded from the empty sockets of his eyes, it forced his jaws open and dangled from his chin like a long gray beard—but Rosalie did not want to hear about it.
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