Queer

by William S. Burroughs

  Lee's muscles ached from the long walk. He was very tired. He put one arm across Allerton's chest, and snuggled close to the boy's body. A feeling of deep tenderness flowed out from Lee's body at the warm contact. He snuggled closer and stroked Allerton's shoulder gently. Allerton moved irritably, pushing Lee's arm away.

  "Slack off, will you, and go to sleep," said Allerton. He turned on his side, with his back to Lee.

  Lee drew his arm back. His whole body contracted with the shock. Slowly he put his hand under his cheek. He felt a deep hurt, as though he were bleeding inside. Tears ran down his face.

  He was standing in front of the Ship Ahoy. The place looked deserted. He could hear someone crying. He saw his little son, and knelt down and took the child in his arms. The sound of crying came closer, a wave of sadness, and now he was crying, his body shaking with sobs.

  He held little Willy close against his chest. A group of people were standing there in convict suits.

  Lee wondered what they were doing there and why he was crying.

  When Lee woke up, he still felt the deep sadness of his dream. He stretched out a hand towards Allerton, then pulled it back. He turned around to face the wall.

  Next morning, Lee felt dry and irritable and empty of feeling. He borrowed Cotter's .22 rifle and set out with Allerton to have a look at the jungle. The jungle seemed empty of life.

  "Cotter says the Indians have cleaned most of the game out of the area," said Allerton. "They all have shotguns from the money they made working for Shell."

  They walked along a trail. Huge trees, some over a hundred feet high, matted with vines, cut off the sunlight.

  "May God grant we kill some living creature," Lee said. "Gene, I hear something squawking over there. I'm going to try and shoot it."

  "What is it?"

  "How should I know? It's alive, isn't it?"

  Lee pushed through the undergrowth beside the trail. He tripped on a vine and fell into a saw-toothed plant. When he tried to get up, a hundred sharp points caught his clothes and stuck into his flesh.

  "Gene!" he called. "Help me! I been seized by a man-eating plant. Gene, cut me free with the machete!"

  They did not see a living animal in the jungle.

  Cotter was supposedly trying to find a way to extract curare from the arrow poison the Indians used. He told Lee there were yellow crows to be found in the region, and yellow catfish with extremely poisonous spines. His wife had gotten spined, and Cotter had to administer morphine for the intense pain. He was a medical doctor.

  Lee was struck by the story of the Monkey Woman: a brother and sister had come down to this part of Ecuador, to live the simple healthful life on roots and berries and nuts and palm hearts.

  Two years later a search-party had found them, hobbling along on improvised crutches, toothless and suffering from half-healed fractures. It seems there was no calcium in the area. Chickens couldn't lay eggs, there was nothing to form the shell. Cows gave milk, but it was watery and translucent, with no calcium in it.

  The brother went back to civilization and steaks, but the Monkey Woman was still there. She earned her monicker by watching what monkeys ate: anything a monkey eats, she can eat, anybody can eat. It's a handy thing to know, if you get lost in the jungle. Also handy to bring along some calcium tablets. Even Cotter's wife had lost her teeth "inna thervith." His were long gone.

  He had a five-foot viper guarding his house from prowlers after his precious curare notes. He also had two tiny monkeys, cute but ill-tempered and equipped with sharp little teeth, and a two-toed sloth. Sloths live on fruit in trees, swinging along upside down and making a sound like a crying baby. On the ground they are helpless. This one just lay there and thrashed about and hissed.

  Cotter warned them not to touch it, even on the back of the neck, since it could reach around with its strong, sharp claws and drive them through one's hand, then pull it to its mouth and start biting.

  Cotter was evasive when Lee asked about Ayahuasca. He said he was not sure Yage and Ayahuasca were the same plant. Ayahuasca was connected with Brujena—witchcraft. He himself was a white Brujo. He had access to Brujo secrets. Lee had no such access.

  "It would take you years to gain their confidence."

  Lee said he did not have years to spend on the deal. "Can't you get me some?" he asked.

  Cotter looked at him sourly. "I have been out here three years," he said.

  Lee tried to come on like a scientist. "I want to investigate the properties of this drug," he said. "I am willing to take some as an experiment."

  Cotter said, "Well, I could take you down to Canela and talk to the Brujo. He will give you some if I say so."

  "That would be very kind," said Lee.

  Cotter did not say any more about going to Canela. He did say a lot about how short they were on supplies, and how he had no time to spare from his experiments with a curare substitute. After three days Lee saw he was wasting time, and told Cotter they were leaving. Cotter made no attempt to conceal his relief.

  Epilogue:

  Mexico City Return

  Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the course of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetical to geometrical progression seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.

  A smog of bum kicks hangs over Panama in the wet heat. Everyone here is telepathic on the paranoid level. I walked around with my camera and saw a wood and corrugated iron shack on a limestone cliff in Old Panama, like a penthouse. I wanted a picture of this excrescence, with the albatrosses and vultures wheeling over it against the hot gray sky. My hands holding the camera were slippery with sweat, and my shirt stuck to my body like a wet condom.

  An old hag in the shack saw me taking the picture. They always know when you are taking their picture, especially in Panama. She went into an angry consultation with some other ratty-looking people I could not see clearly. Then she walked to the edge of a perilous balcony and made an ambiguous gesture of hostility. Many so-called primitives are afraid of cameras. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. I walked on and shot some boys—young, alive, unconscious— playing baseball. They never glanced in my direction.

  Down by the waterfront I saw a dark young Indian on a fishing boat. He knew I wanted to take his picture, and every time I swung the camera into position he would look up with young male sulkiness. I finally caught him leaning against the bow of the boat with languid animal grace, idly scratching one shoulder. A long white scar across right shoulder and collarbone. I put away my camera and leaned over the hot concrete wall, looking at him. In my mind I was running a finger along the scar, down across his naked copper chest and stomach, every cell aching with deprivation. I pushed away from the wall muttering

  "Oh Jesus" and walked away, looking around for something to photograph.

  A Negro with a felt hat was leaning on the porch rail of a wooden house built on a dirty limestone foundation. I was across the street under a movie marquee. Every time I prepared my camera he would lift his hat and look at me, muttering insane imprecations. I finally snapped him from behind a pillar. On a balcony over this character a shirtless young man was washing. I could see the Negro and Near Eastern blood in him, the rounded face and café-au-lait mulatto skin, the smooth body of undifferentiated flesh with not a muscle showing. He looked up from his washing like an animal scenting danger. I caught him when the five o'clock whistle blew. An old photographer's trick: wait for a distraction.

  I went into Chico's Bar for a rum Coke. I never liked this place, nor any other bar in Panama, but it used to be endurable and had some good numbers on the juke box. Now there was nothing but this awful Oklahoma honky-tonk music, like the bellowings of an anxious cow: "You're Drivin'

  Nails in my Coff
in"— "It Wasn't God Made Honky Tonk Angels"—"Your Cheatin' Heart."

  The servicemen in the joint all had that light-concussion Canal Zone look: cow-like and blunted, as if they had undergone special G.I. processing and were immunized against contact on the intuition level, telepathic sender and receiver excised. You ask them a question, they answer without friendliness or hostility. No warmth, no contact. Conversation is impossible. They just have nothing to say. They sit around buying drinks for the B-girls, making lifeless passes which the girls brush off like flies, and playing that whining music on the juke box. One young man with a pimply adenoidal face kept trying to touch a girl's breast. She would brush his hand away, then it would creep back as if endowed with autonomous insect life. A B-girl sat next to me, and I bought her one drink. She ordered good Scotch, yet. "Panama, how I hate your cheatin' guts," I thought. She had a shallow bird brain and perfect Stateside English, like a recording. Stupid people can learn a language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.

  She wanted another drink. I said "No." She said, "Why are you so mean?" I said, "Look, if I run out of money, who is going to buy my drinks? Will you?"

  She looked surprised, and said slowly, "Yes. You are right. Excuse me."

  I walked down the main drag. A pimp seized my arm. "I gotta fourteen-year-old girl, Jack. Puerto Rican. How's about it?"

  "She's middle-aged already," I told him. "I want a six-year-old virgin and none of that sealed-while-you-wait shit. Don't try palming your old fourteen-year-old bats off on me." I left him there with his mouth open.

  I went into a store to price some Panama hats. The young man behind the counter started singing: "Making friends, losing money."

  "This spic bastard is strictly on the chisel," I decided.

  He showed me some two-dollar hats. "Fifteen dollar," he said.

  "Your prices are way out of line," I told him, and turned and walked out. He followed me onto the street: "Just a minute, Mister." I walked on.

  That night I had a recurrent dream: I was back in Mexico City, talking to Art Gonzalez, a former roommate of Allerton's. I asked him where Allerton was, and he said, "In Agua Diente." This was somewhere south of Mexico City, and I was inquiring about a bus connection. I have dreamed many times I was back in Mexico City, talking to Art or Allerton's best friend, Johnny White, and asking where he was.

  I flew up to Mexico City. I was a little nervous going through the airport; some cop or Immigration inspector might spot me. I decided to stick close to the attractive young tourist I had met on the plane. I had packed my hat, and when I got off the plane I took off my glasses. I slung my camera over my shoulder.

  "Let's take a cab into town. Split the fare. Cheaper that way," I said to my tourist. We walked through the airport like father and son. "Yes," I was saying, "that old boy in Guatemala wanted to charge me two dollars from the Palace Hotel out to the airport. I told him uno." I held up one finger. No one looked at us. Two tourists.

  We got into a taxi. The driver said twelve pesos for both to the center of town.

  "Wait a minute," the tourist said in English. "No meter. Where your meter? You got to have a meter."

  The driver asked me to explain that he was authorized to carry airline passengers to town without a meter.

  "No!" the tourist shouted. "I not tourist. I live in Mexico City. ¿Sabe Hotel Colmena? I live in Hotel Colmena. Take me to town but I pay what is on meter. I call police. Policía. You're required by law to have a meter."

  "Oh God," I thought. "That's all I need, this jerk should call the law." I could see cops accumulating around the cab, not knowing what to do and calling other cops. The tourist got out of the cab with his suitcase. He was taking down the number.

  "I call policía plenty quick," he said.

  I said, "Well, I think I'll take this cab anyway. Won't get into town much cheaper. . . . Vámonos," I said to the driver.

  I checked into an eight-peso hotel near Sears, and walked over to Lola's, my stomach cold with excitement. The bar was in a different place, redecorated, with new furniture. But there was the same old bartender behind the bar, with his gold tooth and his moustache.

  "¿Cómo está?" he said. We shook hands. He asked where I had been, and I told him South America. I sat down with a Delaware Punch. The place was empty, but someone I knew was bound to come in sooner or later.

  The Major walked in. A retired Army man, gray-haired, vigorous, stocky. I ran through the list crisply with the Major:

  "Johnny White, Russ Morton, Pete Crowly, Ike Scranton?"

  "Los Angeles, Alaska, Idaho, don't know, still around. He's always around."

  "And oh, uh, whatever happened to Allerton?"

  "Allerton? Don't believe I know him."

  "See you."

  "'Night, Lee. Take it easy."

  I walked over to Sears and looked through the magazines. In one called Balls: For Real Men, I was looking at a photo of a Negro hanging from a tree: "I Saw Them Swing Sonny Goons." A hand fell on my shoulder. I turned, and there was Gale, another retired Army man. He had the subdued air of the reformed drunk. I ran through the list.

  "Most everybody is gone," Gale said. "I never see those guys anyway, never hang around Lola's anymore."

  I asked about Allerton.

  "Allerton?"

  "Tall skinny kid. Friend of Johnny White and Art Gonzalez."

  "He's gone too."

  "How long ago?" No need to play it cool and casual with Gale. He wouldn't notice anything.

  "I saw him about a month ago on the other side of the street."

  "See you."

  "See you."

  I put the magazine away slowly and walked outside and leaned against a post. Then I walked back to Lola's. Burns was sitting at a table, drinking a beer with his maimed hand.

  "Hardly anybody around. Johnny White and Tex and Crosswheel are in Los Angeles."

  I was looking at his hand.

  "Did you hear about Allerton?" he asked.

  I said, "No."

  "He went down to South America or some place. With an Army colonel. Allerton went along as guide."

  "So? How long has he been gone?"

  "About six months."

  "Must have been right after I left."

  "Yeah. Just about then."

  I got Art Gonzalez's address from Burns and went over to see him. He was drinking a beer in a shop across from his hotel, and called me over. Yes, Allerton left about five months ago and went along as guide to a colonel and his wife.

  "They were going to sell the car in Guatemala. A '48 Cadillac. I felt there was something not quite right about the deal. But Allerton never told me anything definite. You know how he is." Art seemed surprised I had not heard from Allerton. "Nobody has heard anything from him since he left. It worries me."

  I wondered what he could be doing, and where. Guatemala is expensive, San Salvador expensive and jerkwater. Costa Rica? I regretted not having stopped off in San Jose on the way up.

  Gonzalez and I went through the where-is-so-and-so routine. Mexico City is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not stuck there; by the fact of being there at all, you are travelling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body.

  Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in the muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof.

  That night I dreamed I finally found Allerton, hiding out in some Central American backwater. He seemed surprised to see me after all this time. In the dream I was a finder of missing persons.

  "Mr. Allerton, I represent the Friendly Finance Company. Haven't you forgotten something, Gene?

  You're supposed to come and see us every third Tuesday. We've been lonely for you in the office. We don't like to say 'Pay up or else.' It's not a friendly thing t
o say. I wonder if you have ever read the contract all the way through? I have particular reference to Clause 6(x) which can only be deciphered with an electron microscope and a virus filter. I wonder if you know just what

  'or else' means, Gene?

  "Aw, I know how it is with you young kids. You get chasing after some floozie and forget all about Friendly Finance, don't you? But Friendly Finance doesn't forget you. Like the song say, 'No hiding place down there.' Not when the old Skip Tracer goes out on a job."

  The Skip Tracer's face went blank and dreamy. His mouth fell open, showing teeth hard and yellow as old ivory. Slowly his body slid down in the leather armchair until the back of the chair pushed his hat down over his eyes, which gleamed in the hat's shade, catching points of light like an opal. He began humming "Johnny's So Long at the Fair" over and over. The humming stopped abruptly, in the middle of a phrase.

  The Skip Tracer was talking in a voice languid and intermittent, like music down a windy street.

  "You meet all kinds on this job, Kid. Every now and then some popcorn citizen walks in the office and tries to pay Friendly Finance with this shit."

  He let one arm swing out, palm up, over the side of the chair. Slowly he opened a thin brown hand, with purple-blue fingertips, to reveal a roll of yellow thousand-dollar bills. The hand turned over, palm down, and fell back against the chair. His eyes closed.

  Suddenly his head dropped to one side and his tongue fell out. The bills dropped from his hand, one after the other, and lay there crumpled on the red tile floor. A gust of warm spring wind blew dirty pink curtains into the room. The bills rustled across the room and settled at Allerton's feet.

  Imperceptibly the Skip Tracer straightened up, and a slit of light went on behind the eyelids.

  "Keep that in case you're caught short, Kid," he said. "You know how it is in these spic hotels.

  You gotta carry your own paper."

  The Skip Tracer leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. Suddenly he was standing up, as if tilted out of the chair, and in the same upward movement he pushed the hat back from his eyes with one finger. He walked to the door and turned, with his right hand on the knob. He polished the nails of his left hand on the lapel of his worn glen plaid suit. The suit gave out an odor of mold when he moved. There was mildew under the lapels and in the trouser cuffs. He looked at his nails.