Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die

by Charles Runyon

  She stood up, bracing herself against the aluminum mast until she realized the boat was motionless. Wisps of fog curled up from a nearby cove; trees marched down to the shoreline. The night was so still she could hear the slap-slap-slap of water against the hull.

  She untied the drawstring at the bottom of her pajama blouse, pulled it over her head, then pushed down the pants and walked to the edge of the cabin deck. She dropped to her knees and bent over to peer into the cabin. A gentle snore issued from inside. She sniffed the fruity-rich fragrance of Jeff’s pipe tobacco, mingled with the plummy scent of the wine they’d drunk after launching.

  She rose and walked to the low aluminum railing, felt the light craft sink slightly beneath her feet, then dived. The cold water stung her face; she pulled herself down to icy depths which never changed temperature from winter to summer. The shock sent her blood churning through dilated veins. She surfaced and gasped for breath, then swam with vigorous strokes around the boat. A shadow loomed on deck; Jeff, clad in pajama bottoms wrinkled below the knees, leaned over and watched her. His tousled hair shone in the moonlight.

  She swam to the side, scissoring her legs rapidly to keep from shivering. “Did I wake you up?”

  “Hell! I thought you’d rolled overboard.”

  She caught his hand and let herself be hauled up, catching her toes on the side. The cool air puckered her flesh into a sharkskin of goose pimples. She clutched the towel which Jeff threw across her shoulders and walked down the short gangway into the eight-foot-long cabin. It felt warm and musty. She sat down on the foam mattress of the bunk, still warm from his body, and began blotting her hair.

  He took the towel from her hands and knelt in the narrow space between the bunk and the stove, rubbing her legs with the soft nap. She leaned back and looked up at the dark mahogany paneling; the brass trim glowed in the moonlight which speared through the five-inch portholes. It felt good to turn her body over to somebody else. She decided not to expect too much from Jeff. He was a typical Leo, blinded by the glitter of things. She knew what marriage to him would be like. Comfortable. Jeff would succeed, and she would get a dedication in the front of the book, To my wife and colleague, Elizabeth, without whose help, etc. etc.

  And at the end, a pair of neat matching gravestones, His and Hers …

  Gravestones! It was like the dream.

  It would always start like a movie, as if trying to lure her in by pretending it wasn’t real. Once a solid cliff had rushed toward her and exploded in white light, and she realized later she’d experienced Noel’s death. Another time she’d been slashed to pieces with flashing, whirling knives, and she. remembered a great-uncle somebody who’d fallen into a threshing machine …

  Why, she wondered, why must I ALWAYS be the victim?

  Why can’t I just watch?

  Tonight had been the worst. The bright glittering lights had started as pinheads and swelled up into a sheet of coruscating brilliance. Then came shrieks and savage screams and writhing whips flipping droplets of bright blood round a dim redlit room. And suddenly a sheet was thrown over her head, and she felt herself lifted up, spun around and around and down …

  Into a hole that was blacker than space, blacker than coal, blacker than anything she had ever seen or imagined. She felt her body stretched out on a rack, arms pulled from their sockets, legs torn from her hips, her skull pierced by shrilling drills and her brain pulled out of her skull like taffy, squeezed and pulled and pummeled and finally stretched to the thinness of a transparent membrane. Through it she could see … OH! The glittering light …

  A distant voice said: She’s dead.

  She isn’t. (A small girl’s voice, calm and confident.)

  She’s six feet down, in a box. Don’t you understand that? She’ll never come up. We’ll never see her again. So lets just forget about her, why don’t we? Oh God …

  Sound of a man weeping. Then a voice, closer than her own breath, more intimate than her own heartbeat, said: It’s all right. I’ll always be here.

  “Jeff …” she said finally.

  He sat back on his heels and looked up at her, resting his forearms on her knees. “Yes, Elizabeth?”

  “What about dreams? I’ve been having some strange ones.”

  “Drink a glass of warm milk before going to sleep.”

  “No, really. Do you believe … oh I know you’re familiar with the Jungian idea of the collective subconscious. But do you believe that dreams could be a form of contact on that level?”

  “You mean between individual persons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alive or dead?”

  “Yes … I mean, both.”

  He looked at her curiously. “You must have had a strange one.” He looked down, squeezing her knee thoughtfully. “Well I guess I believe that—in the same sense that I believe in sorcery, levitation, metempsychosis, poltergeists, telepathy and divination.”

  “In other words, not at all.”

  “No, I believe that others have experienced what they regard as proofs of these … phenomena. I never have, personally. If I did I couldn’t doubt their existence, any more than I doubt the existence of paper clips or the kitchen sink. They would be a part of reality, and I would have to accept it. Otherwise—” He crossed his eyes and waggled his tongue at her, “I’d go crazy, wouldn’t I?”

  Liza laughed and nudged his shoulder with her foot. “Go on with what you were doing.”

  Later, lying beside him in the narrow bunk, she said: “I can’t help thinking there must be one of those girls left alive somewhere.”

  “You mean one of the girls he’s supposed to have murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “Dear, it was a national sensation. I would say that probably fifty per cent of the people in the country could have named Bollinger, at least for a few days. The reason none of the girls turned up is because they’re dead.”

  “They were the type who cut themselves off from society for weeks at a time. Look at the fact that they stayed with Dan. Why not assume he’s innocent, just as an exercise in theoretical democracy?”

  “Because he’s been found guilty in a court of law.”

  She sat up and swung her feet to the floor. “It would raise hell with your book if he turned out to be innocent, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it’s a very great risk. Where you going?”

  “Up on deck. I feel the need for fresh air.”

  The fog had slid down the hills and blanketed the shoreline. The air smelled pungent and left an odd brassy taste in her throat. She remembered that smell in the air only twice before, once just before a tornado ripped through a nearby village, and then again in the ravine below Dan’s cabin. Smelling it now brought back all the strange feelings which had come to her when she stood in the sunken living room and looked at the six-armed god on the wall.

  And now, even as she watched, the fog-bank shifted, some parts slid up and others down. They formed a whirling spiral, and far down at the end of the tube she saw the God of the Cabin with his red petaled crown, the stymen of his sex rising up in front, the grinning teeth, the mace of skulls …

  Jeff came up behind her and slid his hands under her arms, cupping her breasts lightly. “You mind if I say something? You ought to take a vacation.”

  “Funny … I was just thinking I might go to the seashore … a tropic sea. I dig palm trees.”

  Deep in our minds we are all fetishists. We search for signs, believe in good days and bad days. We have private ways of insuring good luck and evading bad breaks. We propitiate those gods whom we feel have a special power over us—and nobody knows them better than ourselves, for these are merely forms of our own lust and greed. We call them “Higher Powers” for no better reason than to deny our knowledge that they reside within us …

  Dan’s writing trailed off into squiggles as the car rumbled over a ripple in the pavement. He lifted his eyes from the shorthand pad and looked out between the clean clipped sku
lls of the two deputies who sat in the front seat. Wendell had turned off the highway and was taking the pitted blacktop road which approached the state hospital from the rear. Dan wondered why they were bringing him in the back way. He could think of one or two logical reasons, but he didn’t have much faith in the sheriff’s logic.

  At least it would be a step up from jail. And a quantum jump from the gas chamber. The threat of death which had quickened him during the trial was gone now. Once he was sure of a wall at his back he could lower his guard, take a couple of deep breaths, and decide what to do.

  He felt calm now, relaxed. Passive? He didn’t like the sound of that word in his head. He looked around the car, noted the screen of wire mesh separating the front seat from the back, the lack of door handles, the presence of three guns and none of them his own, the fact that his belt, shoestrings and money—all his possessions—were in a paper bag up in the glove compartment. Having reassessed the futility of trying an escape, he relaxed again, and looked over at the sheriff sitting next to the window. “You know, man, your troubles are just beginning.”

  The sheriff turned and fixed him with a cold oyster-eye. “At least there won’t be any from you.”

  “No—not from me. From the dude who really off ed those chicks.”

  Tapping his finger on his knee, the sheriff turned his face back to the window. Dry weeds rattled against the fenders. Dan glanced out the window and saw dust boiling up behind. He realized they’d passed the turn-off to the hospital and were now headed south on the gravel. Uh-huh. Gonna get me one of the sheriffs five-knuckle lectures on law n’ order.

  Dan looked out through the screen of mesh and saw the wide comb-marks in the back of Colley’s hair. He recalled how the deputy had prodded him out to the car that morning with the gun in his back; he had felt the trembling of his gun-hand and sensed his eagerness to shoot.

  He felt his cells draw tight—yet another part of him looked forward to the possibility of violence. He had an irresistible urge to tease the beast … “Hey Colley, didja read about that dude who won a medal of honor in Vietnam? They busted him for growing grass in his old man’s greenhouse. Poor old one-legged vet. You guys are really great patriots, you know that? I bet the President’s gonna hang a medal on you, Colley. Course if you tried to get close to his daughter the SS would blow you away. Only rich kids get a sniff of that snatch.”

  Colley said: “You better just shut your suck, Bollinger.”

  Dan looked out the windshield and saw the purple-pink dawn blooming in the south. Cotton-candy clouds floated in a turquoise sky. A granite butte rose above the forested hills like a decaying molar. He pictured his little cabin lying just behind it.

  “You guys wanta stop at the Riverside Tavern for ham and eggs?” asked Dan. “I’ll buy.”

  Wendell’s hands twitched on the wheel. “You ain’t got any money.”

  “I’ll put it on my charge account. Doctor Jeffrey Kossuth is gonna make me a millionaire.”

  “Bullshit,” said Colley.

  “You better believe it, man. I won’t forget my buddies. I’ll buy you dudes a whole fleet of police cruisers, so you won’t hafta ride all cramped up like this.”

  Wendell glanced over his shoulder at the sheriff, who shook his head without turning from the window. Dan recalled a conversation he’d heard through the walls of his cell. Several prisoners had been hauled out to the sheriff’s farm to spread gravel on his driveway. Colley had been in charge of the detail, and was called in by the sheriff’s wife to help move furniture. He wasn’t seen again for the rest of the day …

  “Sorry you guys had to get up so early to haul me around,” he said. “Friend of mine use to sell magazines door-to-door, told me this was the best time to make out with housewives—you know, just after her old man gives her one last feel and goes off to work. This friend used to fuck himself into a stupor before noon. Then he’d hit another heavy demand between three and four in the afternoon. This was after the broads had their naps and before they started swabbing out their twats for the old man.”

  “You’re the foulest-mouthed motherfucker I ever met,” said Colley.

  “That’s funny, you know, because before I went to jail I was pure. Shows how you law enforcement types corrupt the nation’s youth.”

  The sheriff sighed. “Knock it off, Bollinger. We heard enough of your mouth.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry. I just haven’t had much chance to talk to respectable people lately. Nothing but criminal types. I guess if I’d gotten married I would’ve had some incentive to clean up my language. Like if I’d married one of the Simpson girls—”

  The Sheriff’s head turned slowly, as if it were on a windlass. “What about the Simpson girls?”

  “Well, the oldest one had nice tits but you couldn’t play with ‘em on the first date. The second, maybe. But you didn’t get your finger in the pie until the third time out—oh hell, I forgot you married one of ‘em. Was it the oldest? Sorry, I was just repeating what I heard in jail.”

  “Stop here, Wendell,” the sheriff grunted. “I gotta take a leak.”

  Danny assumed they would let him start running. Ley fuego, the old Mexican custom, had filtered across the border during the great drug war. “Somehow, señor, we never get home weeth our prisoners. They insist on trying to eescape.”

  Dan felt his skin pucker up when the sheriff stepped out of the car. The big man walked to the side of the road, turned his back, and planted his polished boots wide apart. The arching stream knocked dust from the weeds along the roadside. The steel mesh partition slid back and Colley came over the seat with his eyes bulging like those of a mouse caught in a trap. Dan just had time to get his manacled hands over his head before the club whacked his wrists. Blows rained down on his skull, his neck, and finally pummeled his lower spine. Dan smelled sweet and cheap aftershave lotion and thought, Oh yeah, Colley, I’ll smell your stink until the day I die …

  … In the car again. Dan breathed in short gasps. Fiery flashes of pain shot through his chest. Stopping now. His legs felt boneless, the crotch of his pants was warm and wet. The two deputies crowded close, walking him up the rust-streaked sidewalk, holding him erect with their bodies. The old weathered brick building was overgrown with English ivy.

  His knees gave way as he climbed the narrow concrete steps. The sheriff caught his waistband and heaved him up to the landing. The three officers herded him through a peeling green door, into a dim anteroom which reeked of urine and disinfectant. Ahead was a steel door. A single brown eye peered out of a mesh-covered square the size of a memo pad.

  “Zat Bollinger? How’d I know he’s okay?”

  ‘Tell him, Bollinger,” grunted the sheriff behind him.

  “You sick sadistic sonovabitch!”

  “How do you like that for gratitude? Moves outa the county jail into this nice country-club atmosphere and still he bitches. You gonna sign for him or do I take him back?”

  Muttering, the attendant unlocked the door and stepped out, pulling it shut behind him. He towered three inches over Danny’s head, but his body was a shapeless mass, like warm putty crammed into a once-white uniform. Now the smock was grimy and splotched with yellow stains.

  His small eyes watched with concern as Colley unlocked Dan’s manacles. Dan rubbed his wrists, glanced off to the left, and saw the sheriff tuck the signed receipt into his shirt pocket. One prisoner, slightly used. I’ll piss blood for a week, you filth. He saw himself move with dreamlike slowness, his arm looping wide, his fist exploding against the sheriff’s jaw like a puff of talcum powder. He felt a flare of agony in his chest, then the light faded out …

  His cheek grated against slimy concrete, his eyes were fixed on a forest of moving legs. A needle bit his hip, and he felt a sudden lassitude ooze over him like cold mud. Oh when am I gonna get out of this?

  It’s all right, Danny. I’ll always be here …

  Eleven

  It seemed to Elizabeth that the entire citizenry of the United
States had left the country and come to Mexico, stopping at the border only to buy gaudy shirts and straw hats, and have a yellow Sanborn sticker slapped on their windshields. And every Gringo that spent more than a week in the country seemed willing to serve as her personal guide—”take you anywhere you wanta go, baby”—so long as she paid the tab and shared her bed.

  By the time she reached Mexico City, she was wishing Dan had been less vague about the location of his hideaway. “Little town called Las Catas, on the beach north of Acapulco” In a dimlit bar near the bus station, she had a diaquiri with a tanned, blue-eyed man in early middle-age who wore wrap-around aviator sunglasses and carried an intricately carved walking stick. “Yeah, well that particular beach happens to be several hundred miles long, and it’s got more nameless little fishing villages than a beggar’s got lice. Best thing for you is to go to Acapulco and get on a tour going north …”

  He was smooth, relaxed, and spoke fluent Spanish, and while she waited in line for her bus ticket she decided he could be useful. But he had left when she returned to the bar, so she continued her solo trip.

  By the time she reached Acapulco she knew she’d have to get out of the tourist stream to make contact with Danny’s people. She asked a woman at a beach restaurant where the long-hairs hung out, and was told to try Zihua-tanejo, a few miles up the coast. It turned out to be more than a hundred; she rode the bus past endless miles of sun-warmed beaches, past Pampanoa where the big blue waves came curling in. Zihuat was beautiful, with its wide placid bay and its beaches of yellow sand and white coral. But the town was filled with plastic types, runaways and college kids dropping out for the winter, laid-off auto workers drawing compensation while they drank Corona beer and toked up on Guerrero Gold. By now she’d begun to learn the language of the subculture; she knew that family names were rarely used among hardcore heads. She didn’t know Danny’s nickname, so she asked for the Learned Doctor. It was a little like asking for Christopher Columbus; many had heard of him and a few had met him, but nobody knew where he was at the moment. She rented a hotel room and took up beachcombing. As she was eating lunch one afternoon on an isolated spit of white coral, a pair of bearded surfers came out of the jungle and told her they had heard, yeah, that she sought the whereabouts of one who called himself the Learned Doctor, who lived in a place called Las Catas. This was indeed true, but—