Sloughing Off the Rot (2 page)

Santiago sprung from John and reverted to his defensive wrestling stance, hands out in front and clawed for another attack. His unblinking eyes locked on John’s. “Are we done with this nonsense? Are we cool?” asked Santiago. “Can we get on with things now?”

John rose unsteadily to his feet and wobbled, almost falling back down. Backing away from Santiago, John said, “You ate my ear. You ate my fucking ear. You’re crazy. Just leave me alone.” He continued to shrink back from Santiago, shaking his head in disbelief. “You ate my fucking ear.”

Thin, dry lips parted, revealing Santiago’s moldy smile. “Come on, man. It doesn’t matter. Your ear will grow back. And besides, I warned you that I was hungry. I’m always hungry, man. You should have said uncle.”

“What do you mean my ear will grow back?” John held his hand tightly to the side of his head to stanch the bleeding and felt the
thub, thub, thub, thub
of the injury throbbing on the palm of his hand.

“That’s the way things work here.”

“Where is here?” asked John, waving his free hand about around himself.

“That’s what you need to find out,” said Santiago as he climbed back atop the balanced rock and sat, Indian style.

“I need to be anywhere but here,” John said. He turned and started to walk. “I certainly don’t need to be attacked and chewed on.”

“Wait up, man,” Santiago shouted from the rock as John continued to walk away. “Don’t you want to know what our purposes are before you split?”

And John paused his retreat, stopping but not turning back. “Why should I believe that you have any answers for me?”

“Because I’m spiritually allied with the desert, Jack. I’m spiritually allied with the scorpion and the wolf. You live in your physical realm. But, I’m in the spiritual, baby. I walk and talk and do all the physical things. But that’s only because I want to. Dig? If I don’t want to do something, I don’t have to. I’m not stuck on that trip. See?”

“No, Santiago or whatever your name is, I don’t see,” said John, flapping his arms about spastically as if slapping Santiago’s words from the air before they could reach him. “You don’t make any sense. If you have some answers for me, please just give them.”

“I have no answers.”

“Then why did you ask me to stop?”

“Because I know where your answers can be found.”

“Well, tell me then,” said John.

“You must climb the mountain and seek the counsel of the burning thorn bush.”

“Okay, so you’re just talking nonsense again. I get it. Thanks for nothing.” John turned and began walking again. Almost immediately, Santiago appeared at his side, grabbing his arm to stop him.

“For real, man,” Santiago said. “Just turn around and look.”

With the last of his patience, John stopped and turned around. Santiago’s buggy whip arm extended his hand and pointed toward the mountain from which John exited. A stone’s throw above the cave entrance sat a thorn bush, alight with great blue and orange flames, but the bush itself did not burn.

Flames flicked and swirled about the crucifixion thorn. Flares from the fire licked at John’s face and clothes, cauterized his wounded ear, the intense dry heat applying a natural rouge to his skin but not drawing blisters. “I am the god of hellfire. And I bring you fire,” boomed the voice from the bush. “You are lost, and I am found. You are death and I am life. I am rubber and you are glue. I’ll be your mirror, reflecting your life back at you.”

The voice and its words gripped John’s throbbing curiosity and rubbed at it in a most stimulating way. With his desire to know now aroused and standing at full attention, John spasmed and spurted his words, “Tell me. Who am I? What is happening? Why am I here?”

“All in good time, my son. All in good time.” The bush flared and threw off sparks. Then, resuming a low burn, it continued, “For now, you are just John. A blank slate. Tabula rasa. An uncarved block. To tell you too much about your past would condemn you to relive it. To tell you too little would be doing too little. For now, just be. Your history will be revealed to you in due time. For the time being, suffice it to say that in your previous life you were a miserable son of a bitch. An emotional cripple. A user and an abuser. A destroyer of hope and happiness and all that is good. A loser and a wuss and a whiner. But that is not you now. This is your rebirth. You, rising from the ashes and becoming.”

“Becoming what?”

“Yes. That is the question, isn’t it?”

And the flames flared up again and forced John’s eyes shut. He cringed back and away from the bush. The light burned his retinas through the thin, clenched eyelids.

“What do I do?” John shielded his face from the fire. “How do I get home?”

“You follow the trail.”

“What trail?” asked John.

“Look toward the heavens.”

A westerly flowing river of bright, white clouds cut through the sky, flowing faster than the other cumulo fracti hanging in the air. Looking from the heavens, and to the ground and back again, John saw that the river of clouds traced the same path as a red brick road on the ground.

“Follow the red brick road, El Camino de la Muerte. Follow the trail. He who follows the trail is at one with the trail. He who is virtuous experiences virtue. He who loses the way is lost. When you are at one with the trail, the trail welcomes you. Follow the trail.”

“Where will the trail take me?”

“To a man who will help you get home.”

“Where is home?” asked John.

“That is the question. Isn’t it?”

The red road swerved and swayed for miles, tapering off to a point at the top of a slight rise. John sat at the mouth of the cave, leaning back on his hands with his legs splayed out before him, tracing the path of the clouds above and then looking back to the crumbling brickwork path. The shift of his eyes from the ground to the sky and back again enhanced the optical illusion that the road was slithering like a snake to its sharp culmination miles in the distance.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Santiago squatted in front of John, arms wrapped around his knees, and wiggled the furry caterpillar above his bulbous eyes. “Your journey can’t start until you take the first step. So let’s do it, pal. Put one foot in front of the other. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know that I’m going anywhere. This doesn’t make sense to me. I know I must be dreaming, or hallucinating, or something, because none of this makes sense.” John waved his hand, indicating the arid landscape in front of him. Scanning the horizon, John noted two crescent moons in the sky. “Oh boy. None of this makes any sense.”

“It don’t have to make sense, Johnny,” said Santiago. “If you hadn’t noticed, you ain’t in Kansas anymore. This is your reality. It’s as real as the infection that is already setting in on your ear.”

John pressed his palm to his ear and winced. “Ow. How the hell can an infection set in so quickly?”

“Two reasons,” Santiago held two fingers up in a reverse peace sign. “One,” he curled his pointer finger toward his fist, leaving the middle waggling in John’s face, “you were talking to that bush for a hell of a long time. Much longer than you probably realized. And, two,” the middle finger curled in to make a fist that Santiago waved much too close to John’s nose, “bites from humans are far worse than those from other animals. I mean, who knows what the hell kind of diseases I might have. Right?”

“Great,” snapped John. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I can feel my ear throbbing and getting hot. It really hurts.”

Santiago said, “There’s only one thing to do about an infection like that.” He pulled the leather sack from around his neck. His thin fingers uncinched the sack’s rawhide tie and dug around. “Alright, open your eyes wide and look toward the sky.”

“What are you going to do?” asked John, looking upward as he was told. “Why should I trust you?” Directly above him, a blood red sun tossed off great orange flares. The direct glimpse of the burning star heated John’s retinas and caused temporary partial blindness, leaving him with only a glowing halo of peripheral vision.

John did not see Santiago dangling plump grubs just above his head. He did not see that the larvae were pale, moist, and wrinkled, or that they had disproportionately large, fierce pincers that reached for his eyes as the maggots wriggled and tried to escape Santiago’s grasp.

Santiago said, “You should trust me because it doesn’t matter. It’s all a dream, right? So just go with the flow as it washes you along. Follow the trail where it takes you. And, brace yourself, Sonny, because this is going to pinch a little.” Santiago released the grubs from his grasp, dropping them directly into John’s eyes. “It might even be excruciating.”

And John screamed. He rolled on the ground and clawed at his eyes, but to no avail. He shouted the names of fifty different gods in vain, but the gods paid no attention to his cries. Upon making contact with the sclera, the grubs locked their pincers on the whites of John’s eyes and pulled themselves under the lacrimal sacs and into the sockets. John felt the creatures squirming behind his eyes, into his head, tearing at him and feeding as they explored his skull. And then he felt numb and dumb. Absolute blackness that began to shift again toward light. From the blackness, the ten thousand things reappeared. His vision returned with great clarity, as if a curtain had been lifted from his eyes. A warm, satisfied, and safe feeling caressed him.

At some point during his ordeal, it rained. John lay on the rock, feeling the natural sauna of sage scented vapor leaving the rock, warming him, opening his pores, cleansing him. As he tried to sit up, Santiago placed a hand on John’s forehead and another over his ear. Santiago said, “Not yet, Johnny. Stay down on the ground and look toward me.”

John looked in Santiago’s direction. Detachedly, he watched Santiago raise his hand and smack down at his uninfected ear. John remained calm and accepted the slap as if it were expected. With another whack to the side of his head, John felt something stretching and a wiggling in the canal of his infected ear. Santiago cupped his palm to the side of John’s head and left it there until the discomfort in John’s ear ceased.

“Wow, look at those babies,” said Santiago, pulling his hand away and looking at the engorged, thumb-sized larvae in his hands. Their now-black bodies oozed an oily substance. Their horns tore at Santiago’s palm. Their bodies squirmed and mutated abruptly, sprouting legs. Brown armor and wings, tinged with the virescent hues of death, formed around the previously fleshy bodies, metamorphosizing the creatures into fierce, enormous beetles. Santiago shook the scarabs from his hand and they skittered away along a zigzag path toward the red brick road, the chitinous clinking of their tiny feet tap-tap-tapping out their retreat. “It’s a good thing they cleaned you out because there must have been a lot of mung in there. I’ve never seen them grow so big.”

“What the hell were those things? What did you do to me?” said John.

“What the hell were those things? What did you do to me?” Santiago mocked, and then laughed nervously. Twisting at a tangle of hair hanging in his face, and then rubbing his beard, Santiago grinned and said, “Those were lunkworms. A miracle and a curse, depending on your general makeup. The question and the answer. They can cure what ails you. They can be the worst things to ever happen to you. Just depends on how you deal with them. Those two babies I dropped on you, they gorged on your infection. You are clean and not infected with any defiling mold or fungus.”