by Nick Mamatas
The fat old tramp sucked on his gums then, and gave the little tuft of hair on his gut a scratch. "And he had just one word for me. He looked at me, his eyes so round like a frog's, opened his lip less mouth and said 'Wait.' Just like that: 'Wait.' An eviction notice for the West."
Neal laughed at that one. "Oh, that is rich, friend! That is going into the book! Finally, the big one will hit and California will fall into the sea. I read all about that when I was a kid. The whole state will fall to pieces. Fissures of fire tearing apart the streets!" he said, and without another word, he was back in his pages, composing paragraphs on the spot.
My stomach shifted uneasily, and not due to the shit in the air. The road had taken on a little downward slope, and the tramps and I all gave into it and slid like little kids a foot or two down the length of the flatbed. Neal stayed rooted in his full-lotus, notebook in his blossom lap, writing away. He even ignored the inevitable ritual of the bottle. Cheap rye burned my throat but eased the electric jangle of my poor nerves and muscles. My whole body was hungry, every pore was pulsing and crying out for something. A lay, a pill, a bath of gin and slippery little fingers, a damn plate of spaghetti in a West Village dive, something of this world in me. Rye would do it, but if it wasn't for the rye, I'd be ready to eat pages from Neal's journal just to know that my insides were still there. At least, I thought to myself (as opposed to the dharma itself, which I now realized one could also think to, so I also thought to my last memory of Marie, her naked body falling like silks and leaving only a hovering bee behind) I was hungry for something rather than hungry for nothingness.
I was hungry for Neal, for our old conversations, for the big times we had and for all the folks who'd get caught up in our wake. I thought I was going to lose him to the crucible of prison or to the workaday world of dandling rugrats and frowning over report cards. But it wasn't that. Neal was lost to some darker matter. We were the little eddies of life in the frothing wake of the horrible Nothing that had wrapped around the Earth. The pull was an inversion of gravity; I couldn't turn my face from the sky even had I wanted to. I looked over at Neal, the buoy on this dark and writhing sea, his nose buried in his book, his fingers red and wrapped around his ball-point pen. He didn't feel the pull, he had let those tentacles wrap around him and pull him up into the mad and starry space. But he came back, seemingly unscathed, and now he just sat and wrote whispered prophecies and pulp fiction like one of his rugrats scribbling with a wax crayon--I couldn't believe he wouldn't show me even a sentence of his book. As we rolled into the heat of tiny Goodland, Kansas, he silently decided to nap, and used his notebook as a pillow. The tramps smiled at him, not mean or with malice, but like Neal was their very own babe in arms.
The citizens of Goodland weren't so sweet and gentle. When the truck pulled up to the weigh station and waddled out, nobody noticed his thick beetle jaws, or the head of writhing maggot hair that dripped into a squirming trail behind him, like the tramps and I did, but they just didn't like him anyhow. Or they didn't like us, the friendly old joes who had taken advantage of the somnambulant shuffle of the missile corps to get a ride into their quiet little oasis in the hot fields of this very square state. I even got a pair of frowns from the little birds who were working summer jobs behind the lunch counter. A blonde with hair piled high on her head and held there with bobby pins thick as handcranks flicked her wrist to toss a plate with an underfed sliver of pie on it in front of me. It spun and rang against the counter before settling down into the silence of the little establishment. The cook, a big old slab of pork, kicked his way through the swinging kitchen door and held up the far wall, just to stare at Neal and me. Except for a telltale coating of rancid sweat, he was a human, and so were the girls, and so were the grumbling farmers (even the fellow who must have lost four fingers to a thresher still had his soul intact, if gray and withered).
Neal noticed the nasty human stew we sat in and said a bit too loudly, "Whooee, now here is a town of people who go to church on Saturday nights too, isn't that right?" It was too hot for a fight, so we didn't end up in one, but I made sure to eat my pie in double forkfuls. (I'd been eating so much pie, just like last time I was on the road, but now the cherries were all strangely bitter.)
"You're all going to die you know," Neal said, not to the room. He sat on his stool and talked to an imaginary waitress, the casual flirtation of a madman. "Don't think you'll be allowed to survive, it just isn't up to you. Specks of meat and time." He quickly undid the buttons on his left cuff and rolled up his sleeve, fingers twisting and spinning quick like snakes. "Look, see?" he asked the air (and the air grew hotter and darker as the patrons' grousing tainted the whole scene--it was the mumbles of war). "Look, do you see this? Do you see this FLAKE of skin? Does it get a vote if I throw myself into a wood chipper? No." Calm again, he rolled his sleeve down and took his elbows off the counter. The big cook, preceded by his majestic paunch, was right up against us, his breath a furnace, all rotten beef rounds and huffs of steam. Neal slid off his stool and hugged the old bastard. It was a gentle, liquid hug too, around the fellow's pear belly; cook's meaty arms were still free, he could have crushed Neal's head, or pushed him away or even just returned the hug in his manly little way, but he didn't.
He started to cry. Neal smiled his own mother's smile at the cook and then buried his head in the old man's chest and squeezed. The murmuring and shifty-eyes of the few customers faded into the ogling of comic-strip slackjaws. Slowly, like continents drifting, the cook's arms moved up and out, a shift with all the grace of Martha Graham but without the effort. Like his arms were made for this and nothing else, up and out. There weren't a million lifetimes of cracked flint and strangled pigs and bricklaying and murder behind the design of cook's limbs, there was just his embrace of Neal, bones and sinews all forged for just one hug.
"I'm sorry you're going to die," Neal said, soft like a child. And the old cook nodded his elephant head. "Don't feel bad." He was solemn, wistful, and his accent sounded like a steel-pedal guitar's plaintive wail, the song after last call. "You're going to die too." And with that I cut to the door but it was chained shut. Behind the counter my waitress pulled the key to the thick old padlock from her cleavage and offered up a sad little pout. Sorry to see us go, I guess. Neal and the old cook still embraced as the others collected their hats or dug in their pockets for tipping dimes. Everyone seemed pretty bummed out; they were the folks who didn't get the last piece of cake, or maybe the Little League team lost to their rivals in tiny Goodland Junction. These folks weren't murderers or slaves to the red stars of Azathoth (how many threads of fate did the new constellations burn in their nuclear fire?), they were just suncrazy and pulled a short straw or two somewhere along the line. Me too.
"It's okay, Jack," Neal told me. He was still hugging his new friend. "Everyone dies. The soul is immortal. This isn't even real; it's an illusion. The world, it's a mad dream of a blind god. These poor fools do not know what they are in for." For a moment, the truth was enough. The stasis of the roadside diner collapsed into the shimmying of spinning atoms, of the spirit wave chi made flesh and stone through nothing other than half-wit conception. We beg for the world of matter, then weep when we get buried under it. Didn't stop my heart from rattling around my rib cage like a crazed rat though, and two strong men had to grab my arms and twist them around my back while the waitress opened the door. She grabbed Neal's gun from the inside pocket of his jacket when he passed, arm in arm with the cook.
They marched us across town (Kansas isn't flat; we dipped and soared, crippled birds being put out of our misery by some tom cat) and tried to explain themselves in low tones. It wasn't them, not them at all. It was the others, the folks who work in town at the bank and the insurance company, the mayor and the police, they were to blame. They were the ones with beetle lips. One day they just surrounded the little brick schoolhouse and would let the kids come home. "They're safe now," they said, mandibles clicking between words, a sound loud as an axe s
ent into rotten wood. The big farmers on their outskirts of town were no good either; they had their kids safe and sound except for the greenish-black taint on their skins; like those damn kids and their folks who drank too much swamp water. Jimmy Barber went down to the school with his rifle to get his little girl back, but he didn't make it within a hundred yards of the place before the air turned to razor wire and cut him into luncheon meat.
And all the new town fathers and mothers wanted was a pair of drifters of our peculiar description, down at the square, to be sacrificed at dusk. The old cook, speaking conversationally enough to Neal, told him that he had been a butcher boy back before the war ("Which one?" Neal asked. The coot just laughed and said "The war to end all wars." Neal asked if he meant World War II then, and the cook just laughed and said "Nope, prior to that 'un.") and that he'd do well by us. "No pain, no muss. Your wallets won't even get damp. I'll do you boys in a slice and send you to a better place than this. I'm terrible sorry about all this, but I know you'd do the same."
And Neal said, "Oh yes. I'd do anything for my children too, I know it. Lord knows I should have settled down much sooner than now. They'd be better off, and damned if I don't know that I would too." I wondered about little Jan but felt nothing but death in my chest. I didn't see her but for a few minutes last year--moon face and dark hair, that was her. What do you say to some little person like that? "I'm your poppa, well, see ya around!" That's what I said, I guess, and would have left it at that, but my own blood told and my agent cuts checks on account of me cutting out.
I raised my head and looked about. We were heading to the town square. The same old clapboard houses and storefronts that pimple this land, but different. Weird, like Dalí, some of the buildings were melted around the edges, huge drops of wood puddling on the corners. The dirt blowing 'cross the road was redder than rubies, and the road, damn. To use a cliché, it really did flow like a river. The men yanking me along didn't even move their feet, but just floated and bobbed as the road took us where we were headed, our final reward I bet.
"Where are the beetlemen?" I asked.
"Too close to sunset. They only come out under the sun." He chuckled. "Maybe they're scared of the dark," and for that, the lump of a man on my right shoved me into the talker. I made a pretty fair elbow, because the talker returned the favor and pushed me into his pal. Like two kids, they started jerking me around as he we flowed down towards the center of Goodland, yukking it up and snorting. Finally, the old cook turned around and barked, "Hey! Respect for the dead!"
And we were there, the sky just about to purple. Neal went right up to his stake and smiled at the old woman with owl-eye glasses who tied him with old twine. I got smacked up against mine, and the Bobbsey Twins tied me real tight with thicker rope; it burned as they tugged and yanked on it, as they played with each other like I was already dead. When would Neal act? When would he dance out of the ropes and tear a vengeful hole in the sky, one that would just swallow Goodland up and leave the two of us here alone by our stakes? I looked over at him, and he wasn't smiling any more--he had the look of a saint about him, the poker face of a master bluffer who actually has a royal flush, but wants you to think he doesn't.
"Last requests?" It was the waitress. Behind her, a scattering of townsfolk, all human and oh so sad for it. None of them could stand to even give me a decent look; they all either cast their eyes at the ground, or turned to check out the setting sun. It couldn't sink too soon for them.
"Whiskey ought to do it," I told the girl. Neal just smiled like a saint and said, "Peace."
"Sorry," she said, then sighed. "Goodland is a dry town." The creak and whirl of a sharpening stone started up behind me. In my mind's eye I could see the cook pedaling with one foot, and maybe raising one of his steely knives up to the sky to see it glint, perhaps chuckling at the thought that this town was dry. His basset hound eyes told a different story; in basements, at night, 'round stills or poker tables full of beer bottles driven in from the next town over by the sheriff's son, he drank his fill more often than not. He drank just enough, I hoped, to keep him from crying too much after he killed us. He didn't drink so much, I prayed, because I didn't want his hand to shake when he laid the blade against my neck. Car tires squealed in the wind, someone escaping with a school kid bundled up in the back, or just another tourist who'd curse an empty diner and drive right on past our scene and find the highway. "Dry town, that's so funny!" Neal suddenly said, and he laughed with a stutter. "Oh yes, it'll be wet in a minute though, wet with blood!" His eyes were wild, and his tongue flicked across his lips. Behind us, the cook said, "Settle down, son" and the scrape of his wheeled stone died down to nothing. Even the waitress turned away from us now. She didn't see a thing when the shooting started, but fell right over, the top half of her head beating her to the ground by an even half-second. The cook went next. I knew because I felt his blood hit my hands and hair and I heard him thump down like a pig he'd just stuck. Most of the others managed to run off, but a few got picked away, heads blooming with blood, legs managing to run a step or two before getting the news that they were already dead and finally folding like a marionette with cut strings. The streets of Goodland echoed with the reports of gunfire; my old friend of a thug ran the wrong way and into a bullet, one that sunk right into his forehead. He fell cross-eyed, trying to see what just did him in.
Finally, after the crack and thunder of guns stopped ringing in the street, Bill Burroughs walked up to us, his face still hangdog and sallow like I remembered. His hair was swooped over and damp from sweat, the peculiar sweat of the junky that Burroughs always looked like he had just been dipped in. In his hands, he carried a pair of long pistols. Bill hadn't shaved in a few days and didn't smile when he saw us. He U-turned and said "Fellas?" More a question than anything else.
Neal smiled. "The Old Bull! I knew you'd make it. I tried to tell these fine upstanding--well, they're downbleeding now--but I tried to tell these citizens that they were going to die. They just didn't believe me. Not even old cookie."
"Burroughs, untie us please," I said. Haven't had much use for Bill lately, but I was ready to hug the old queen. He shrugged and tucked his guns into his waistband like an old movie cowboy (or like someone who wants to be sure that he shoots his pecker off--if one don't get it, the other gun will) and untied us silently, like he was waiting. Neal was just pleased as punch, as happy that Bill came in and blew away seven people who were ready to carve us to pieces as he'd be if he just saw old Bill half on the nod and staggering down the streets of Frisco.
So I asked, "Damn, how did you know? How did you know to come out all the way to Goodland, armed for bear, just in time to save us from some sort of sacrifice." My binds fell and Bill threw the ropes to the ground. "Neal wrote me a letter a few weeks ago, telling me to meet him here. He said there was something important for me to shoot. Doesn't seem like it, really," he said, his voice just like a frog who can't swing. He took it slow, wandering more than walking over to Neal, and untied him too. I looked around for the old lady; she wasn't among the bodies. I guess she got away somehow--did Bill even aim at her, or was she lucky? Real lucky, yeah, like all God-fearing folk of Goodland, who just want to live their little lives under the spiked and hooved boots of their horrible alien overlords. "How'd you like the old William Tell routine?" he asked, but if he meant that question in dark humor his voice didn't betray it. Bill really wanted to know. I didn't want to tell him, I wanted to think of something else--anything other than those poor fools falling to the power of the gun.
The kids, I thought, and that surprised me, because I thought it the same time Neal said it: "The kids!" And in the space of one horrible breath, another gong sounded in the distance and I saw the truth. There were no hostages, just a school full of little bodies, all wrinkled and thin from the rot. They'd just been locked away and starved, wailing and whining for mama. Then they got nasty with each other, the boys holding down the girls and eating their hair and biting their skin, j
ust to have something to eat. The beetlemen didn't have to torture the little tykes, those sweet cherubs with their cheeks rosy and slick with tears. They already knew the tango of life and death. They ate their own crap, and the paper, and chalk, and drank pee and then just upped and died, bodies so little and so desperate to grow that they burned themselves out.
"We have to save them!" Neal said, frantic again with the wave of a new idea. "They took my pistol, Bill, give me one of yours." He reached for Bill's pants, but Bill sidestepped and held up his hands, "Neal, really. I passed by the school. Remember? It was in your letter too. You already know."
I knew too, thanks to the buzz of Marie-bee, the demon who told me everything she felt I needed to know just days ago in Big Sur. The Goodland cult got no pleasure from those kids; they didn't torture the third-graders for secrets, they didn't drink sweet young blood like nectar; the mayor and the fire chief, the banker and the librarian, they just surrendered their souls to the Dark Dream and forgot. They forgot that babes need to eat, that they need hugs and baseball and to be told to wash behind their ears or else they won't do it. Some demon impulse told them to collect the kids and trap them behind a spell that could turn the air to a wall of whips. And then, nothing. The cult knew its place was in the stars; they spent their days dancing under the writhing invisible tentacles that filled the sky in their offices--every paper pushed a celebration. And their nights, oh the nights. Evenings the cult spent in their homes, puppets acting out a shadow life, just to make sure everything looked normal. Act natural, the bleary-eyed god from the sea told them, and the good folks of Goodland don't step outdoors at night. So they stayed in, and nobody even thought to bring the children food, and the kids burned with hunger and then with rage, then they howled and died.