by Edward Lee
Hull knew shit when he smelled it. Were they playing with him? The black guy watching his back and Casparza’s grinning, porky face in front was about all Hull’s nerves could stand. But just as he became convinced that this whole thing was a mistake, Casparza stood up, his shadow engulfing the table. He offered his fat hand.
“We have a deal, Mr. Hull. Ten keys a month at thirty-five a key.”
Hull jumped up. He shook the fat man’s hand, suppressing the abrupt gust of relief. “I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Casparza. It’s an honor to do business with you.”
“Just remember what I said”—the fat grin beamed—“about spirit.”
Hull could think of no response.
Casparza laughed. His eyeballs looked like marbles sunk in fat. “We make arrangements in the morning. Until then, make yourself at home.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Janice will show you around.”
The fat man lumbered off. He’d been sitting on a packing crate—Hull noticed now—since no chair on earth could accommodate his girth. Rolls of fat hung off his sides and wriggled like Jell-O.
“Ready for the twenty-five-cent tour?” Janice inquired.
“Sure,” Hull said. He was elated. He’d done it; he’d made his deal. But impulse dragged at his gaze. Hull turned his head in tingling slowness.
Raka, the black shadow, was gone.
“You’re either very stupid or very desperate,” Janice said. She led him past the pool. Several girls—blondes—frolicked nude in the water, while a few more lay back in lounge chairs, taking turns freebasing. None of them could have been older than sixteen.
“I’m probably a little bit of both,” Hull answered her. “But what makes you think so?”
Janice lit a cigarette. “You’ve got balls coming down here. Alone. An independent with a small order.”
Hearing this prim and proper woman say balls was oddly erotic. “I’ve got a business to run,” Hull pointed out. “A direct deal was my last resort. You wouldn’t believe what the States are like since the crackdown. I hate to think how many times I’ve driven around all night with a suitcase full of hundreds and no one to give it to. But your boss guarantees delivery. I had to give it a shot.”
Now the girls who’d been freebasing lay back in grinning stupors. Two more climbed out of the pool for their turns, one so young she scarcely had pubic hair. Hull did not feel even abstractly responsible. Loss was always someone else’s gain. Why shouldn’t he be in on it? He was just a purveyor to a need. Supply and demand, kids. It’s not my fault the world’s a piece of shit. If I don’t sell it, somebody else will.
One of the blondes smiled at him, her white legs spread unabashed on the lounge chair. A blow job maybe, but there was no way Hull would want to fuck any of the pool girls. Too young; kids weren’t his style. See? he thought, a comical testament to God. I’ve got morals. A drug marketeer, Hull was no stranger to lots of sex; he liked nothing more than breaking a couple of nuts per day into a nice, hot box. But seasoned women were more his bag. Women with experience. Women who knew themselves, and were sure of themselves. Like—
Well, like his escort, for instance.
He tried to catch glimpses of Janice as she led him out of the court. Great figure, great legs. Not age but more like a refinement had crept into her model’s face, tightening the mouth, etching tiny lines at the corners of the eyes. Her eyes, he contemplated again. They were probably once very beautiful. Now they looked lackluster. How long ago had she been one of the girls in the pool? Her eyes showed all the broken pieces of her dreams, but Hull didn’t feel particularly guilty about that either. Why should he? He wouldn’t mind fucking her, though—no, indeed. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Humping a good one off up her slot. He could imagine it in his mind: wet and ready, and a gorgeous dark-blonde thatch. Then maybe he’d turn her around and treat her to a second load up the backdoor. Hmmm. A nice thought, at least. He was probably even entitled to it now that he was Casparza’s client.
But what the hell was that goddamn little thing around her neck?
She took him down the hill. As before, she ignored the lit cigarette in her hand. “Here’re the works,” she said.
Casparza ran an impressive operation. This was no cokehole in the jungle; it was a complex. Whole warehouses were devoted to maturation and wash-trenches. Dump trucks one after another roared down from the fields, their beds stacked high with coca leaves. Processors in more warehouses treated and pulped the leaves to new paste. Further treatment and desiccation reduced the paste to purified powder, which would then be distilled to crack once it got to the point people in the States.
Then they passed the camp.
At first Hull thought it must be where the field laborers slept. Rows of camouflaged tents lined the field. In the middle of it all stood a single, much larger tent.
Hull spied several men in business suits walking down the tent rows. They were Americans, obviously.
“What’s with all the Americans here?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Janice told him.
A pair of bent laborers dragged big plastic garbage cans out of the central tent. They disappeared around the side. Standing at the tent’s posted entrance was Raka, the black.
“Okay, what’s with him, then? What’s Raka’s story?”
“You ask too many questions, Mr. Hull.”
I guess I’ll take that as a hint. Hull felt entrenched by the sudden weirdness. Americans in business suits? Some black stone-face in a mojo costume? This was a coke factory in the middle of Peru. But the girl was right; he mustn’t make waves. Don’t look a gift blimp in the mouth. As long as Hull got his order, Casparza could have his mystery. He could have his truth and his power and his spirit.
The tour was over. Evening came early here; the jungle darkened in dusk. “I’m impressed,” Hull admitted.
“You should be.”
Hull kept looking at the camp. More men in suits filed out of the big tent. He saw women, too, dressed like Janice. All clearly Americans.
“Don’t worry about it,” Janice repeated. It sounded like a warning. “The world is more diverse than we think, Mr. Hull. It’s really not a world at all, but a whole bunch of worlds.”
“Meaning?”
“This—this place here—is not your world.”
Hull stared at her.
“Just remember what Casparza said, Mr. Hull. Remember it well.”
Her cigarette had grown an inch of ash. Hull’s eyes darted from the pendant at her bust to her eyes, always back to her eyes. For a fractured moment he felt seized, or rather bound. He felt tied up by his own confusion. Her eyes, he pondered. There was something about her eyes.
Her eyes looked dead.
Janice fingered the makak; it seemed to give off heat.
But Janice felt cold.
She raised her nightgown and rubbed the jelly into her sex. K-Y, the tube read. She barely felt it. The night air steamed around her, but she barely felt that either. She did not sweat. She looked at her hand and saw the cigarette burns encrusted between her fingers.
Moonlight eddied in through the window. Hull lay asleep on the bed. Janice drifted in, still not sure what she was doing. So much was instinct now—habits that sat perched behind her life like ghosts. She envied Hull in his sleep. Real sleep, she thought.
Hull reminded her of home, whatever that was. He reminded her of life.
“Mr. Hull?” she whispered, leaning over his bed. She shook him gently. What am I doing? she wondered. Why am I here?
Hull stirred, then his eyes snapped open. “What…?” he murmured. A pause ticked like dripping wax. Then: “Janice?”
She queried him with her eyes, as if viewing not a person but a notion or an idea only partially interpretable.
“Come here,” he said.
She pulled the sheet off and lay beside him. What could she say? I’m lonely, Mr. Hull? You remind me of things? Her fingers closed around his penis. It grew st
iff at once. The reaction pleased her; it made her happy: flesh coming to life at her touch. She flinched when he kissed her. His hands felt her body through the nightgown. Again, she wondered if it was the memory of being touched that registered, or the actual sensation. It was like being touched by a ghost.
“You remind me of things,” she whispered.
“What things? Tell me.”
Janice wanted to cry. Possibly she was, though tearlessly. She hitched her nightgown up and straddled him. His penis slipped right into her sex—another ghost.
He reached for the nightgown. “Take this off.”
“No!” she said too quickly.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Janice. I want to see you.”
Beautiful. Woman. See you. But she didn’t want him to see her. She instead pushed the straps off her shoulders and let the gown slide down to her waist. He began to pump slowly in and out. The makak bobbled between her breasts.
“Christ, your pussy feels good,” he panted. But even this crude remark pleased her, complimented her. My pussy feels good. It made her feel real.
“I’m gonna come so much in you…”
Come. Sperm. Fucking. Yes, you remind me of things. What, though? She could remember only in snatches. Each thrust of his penis into her sex pushed a little piece to the surface of her mind. How old had she been? Fourteen? Fifteen? Not an uncommon story. Her father had sodomized her for years. Then she’d run away only to be sodomized by worse people, but by then the drugs held the reins of her life so she didn’t really care. She’d been passed back and forth—for anything. Lots of gang bangs and bondage. Lots of fletching. Many times, her man—his name was ’Rome—brought her up for what he called the “Champagne Special.” She’d have to blow a roomful of men, spitting each ejaculation into a champagne glass; upon completion, of course, she’d then consume the contents of the glass in one gulp. Dog shows were another regular entertainment for ’Rome’s dealer friends. Some of the dogs they brought up were quite large and frisky. “Make Fido happy, Janice,” ’Rome had ordered, “or it’s no froggie for you.” The little white rocks were all the motivation she needed, her treasure at the end of the rainbow, day in, day out. Eventually she’d been sold.
And ended up here.
She’d been sold to Casparza as part of a favor. Casparza liked them young, before they got too beat. He owned many girls. He was too fat to effectively have intercourse, but he liked blowjobs and hand jobs. He’d lie on his back and hold his massive belly up as the girls took turns. He also liked tongue baths. “Ah, my little lovers,” he’d mutter while several girls slowly licked the greasy sweat off his entire lardacious carriage. Casparza didn’t wash much, which made it worse. Sometimes he’d lie on his belly, two girls holding apart his buttocks as others licked his testicles and anus. Occasionally he would defecate on a girl’s chest—a squatting human whale—and it always seemed to be poor Janice who received the privilege of eating the spicy excrement.
Once a girl got old—twenty or so—he didn’t want them anymore. Many were given to the merc camps that patrolled the fields, others simply disappeared. But the lucky ones were saved for special duties. For Raka.
Raka, she thought, riding up and down.
Hull’s rhythm steepened. “You are one hot box, Janice—Christ.” Her sex made a wet, crinkly noise, like someone eating food. The sensation of motion, of heat and impact, made Janice feel dully elated. Being penetrated—now—was a transposition of sorts, a crossing of matrixes. It put flesh on her memory, life in the space where her heart used to be.
Hull groped for her; he pulled her down, hugging her, as he ejaculated. She could feel his semen spurt into her sex. It felt warm. It was a warm gift he’d given to her, a deposit from one world to another.
She lay back beside him. His finger traced around her breast, then tapped the makak. “What’s this?”
My life, she wished she could say. “A makak—a good luck charm.”
“Superstitious, huh? I’ve seen a lot of people around here with these things. At that camp. What is that place, anyway?” When she didn’t answer, he pushed her back. “Let me go down on you. I want to eat your snatch.”
“No!” she objected.
He pulled at the nightgown rumpled about her waist.
“No!” she said, grabbing his hands. “Please don’t.”
“You don’t have anything to be self-conscious about.”
“Just…please…don’t.”
Hull let it rest. He was an attractive man, unabashed in his nakedness. He looked clean-cut and professional. He didn’t look like what he was, and she supposed that’s why Casparza liked him.
“How does he do it?” Hull asked her.
“Do what?”
“How does Casparza get his shit out? He can’t be doing it with boats; the U.S. Navy’s all over the coast. And surveillance planes are IRing the major land routes twenty-four hours a day.”
“He mules the orders.”
Hull leaned up, astonished. “What, commercial air flights?”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy. Customs checks every plane inside and out, and they fluoroscope and sniff every single piece of luggage and hand-carry on every flight. Casparza’s probably moving a thousand keys a month. He can’t possibly be muling through airports, not in this day and age. He’d lose everything.”
“Just don’t worry about it,” she wearied. Her hand returned to his penis; it was hard again in moments, hard and hot and pulsing with life. “Do it to me again,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do it to you, all right. You’ll like it.” He turned her over, pushed her on her belly, and spat between her buttocks. Yet another memory, not surprising. Then he plugged his penis into her rectum, humping her hard.
’Rome, Daddy, all those other men—no big deal. It made her feel good because it reminded her of things.
She hung partway off the bed. The moon seemed to bob up and down in the window with Hull’s frenetic thrusts. Janice’s hair tossed; the makak danced dangling about her neck. Each impact beat more memories into her head, more life. The ferocious sodomy seemed to verify something to her. This is what people do, she mused. Hull’s penis was proof of life. She wanted him to come in her again; she wished he could come in her forever, for every time he did was another validation that she was something more than a shadow, more than a ghost.
He shuddered, moaning. Janice felt happy. The warm spurts felt thinner and hotter this time, spurting into her bowel, and she was so happy she wanted to cry. But then—
—she froze.
The face bled into her—black as obsidian and utterly blank.
Raka’s face.
The priest’s voice, an echoic chord, marched across her mind.
Now, it commanded.
Still penetrated, Janice slammed the lamp down on Hull’s head.
The warped words oozed, spreading. Truth is power. Spirit is truth.
The mist of Hull’s consciousness trickled up into the light. His eyes lolled open. Blurred faces hovered like blobs, then sharpened, gazing down. Janice and Casparza. He’d been fucking the girl, hadn’t he? Yes, and then…then…
Goddamn, he thought when the rest of the memory landed.
He tried to get up but he couldn’t.
“Ah, Mr. Hull.” Casparza’s face loomed. “Welcome back, amigo.”
Hull glanced around. The fuckers had tied him down to a table. He was nude. The hissing light from a dozen gas lanterns licked about drab canvas walls. The camp, he realized. The tent.
He was in the big tent.
Janice stood beside the table, wan in her nightgown. Casparza stood opposed, the avalanche of flab straining against his huge shirt.
Standing by a canvas partition was Raka.
“We gain power through spirit, Mr. Hull,” Casparza cryptified. “Raka is an Obeah priest, a papaloi. He was bred to harness the spirit.”
The black priest stood in total lack of movement, the staring
face bereft of life as a wooden mask. He wore a necklace of human fingers, or perhaps pudenda, and the thing that hung from his sash was a shrunken baby’s head. But from his hand something else depended, swaying: one of those little bags on a cord, one of the makak.
“I thought we had a deal,” Hull moaned.
“Oh, we do, Mr. Hull,” the fat man assured. “But you want to know my secret, don’t you?”
“I don’t give a fuck about your secret. Just let me loose.”
“In time.” Casparza’s grin seemed to prop up the bulbous face. He nodded to Janice.
I’m fucked, Hull realized. He squirmed against his bonds. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that they were going to kill him. But why? He hadn’t crossed any lines. It didn’t make sense. Had some new mover back home put a contract on him? Had someone fingered him as a stool?
“Look, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t know what’s going on. Just let me go. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
Casparza laughed, fat jiggling.
Janice pushed in a wheeled table like a gurney. Holy motherfucking shit, Hull thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, and the least human. His eyes felt stapled open. On the gurney lay a corpse: a man, an American. It was pale and naked.
“Janice will show you,” Casparza said. “The power of spirit.”
Hull grit his teeth. Janice very deftly slit open the cadaver’s belly with a heavy-gauge autopsy scalpel. She plunged her hands into the rive and began to pull things out. First came glistening pink rolls of intestines, then the kidneys, the liver, stomach, spleen. She tossed each wet mass of organs into a big plastic garbage can. Then she reached up farther for the higher stuff—the heart, the lungs. It all went into the can. By the time she was done, she was slick to the elbows with dark, oxygen-starved blood.
“We can fit six or eight keys into the average corpse,” Casparza informed.
Hull frowned in spite of his dilemma. “You’re out of your mind. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Customs has been wise to it for years.”
Casparza smiled. Now Janice was packing sealed keys into the corpse’s evacuated body cavity, then stuffed in wads of foam rubber to fill in the gaps and smooth things out. She worked with calm efficiency. Finished, she began to sew up the gaping seam with black autopsy suture.