Sloughing Off the Rot (3 page)

Santiago dumped his sack into his palm, shaking out a handful of the lunkworms for John to see. The small mound of larvae wriggled. Maggots unsuccessfully strove to crawl to the edges of Santiago’s cupped hand but ultimately tumbled back into the squirming clump of grubs. John watched in horror as Santiago threw his head back and dropped several worms into his own eyes. As John did before him, Santiago clawed at his eyes when the worms locked onto the sclera and tunneled behind the eyeballs, back into his head. The madman tore at his hair and rolled about on the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust and shrieking at the heavens. There was much weeping and gnashing of the teeth. When it looked as if he could take it no longer, as if his heart or his brain or some other major organ might explode, Santiago stopped and stiffened, his arms locked straight and to his sides, his legs extended and motionless.

John stood above the thin, petrified form and looked down, wondering if Santiago died. Not a muscle on the little man moved. His chest did not swell and fall with respiration. His body froze in a pose. His eyes remained closed. And then they opened, flipping from side to side. Santiago laughed nervously, tugged at his beard.

“Holy moly!” said Santiago. “I just flipped my friggin’ wig, Johnny.” His face rapidly contorted and cycled through his range of expressions.

John sat again, right next to Santiago, looked over the little man, and said, “I get it that the worms ate my infection. I understand why you gave them to me. But you’re not ill. Why did you drop the worms in your eyes?”

Santiago sprang to his feet and raised his voice, almost yelling, but not in anger, “It’s not all about infection. Those that are whole don’t need no doctor. Yeah? It’s about reflection and introspection, baby. It’s about inflection, detection, rejection, and the house of correction. It’s about injection and the violin section. It’s about my erection.” Santiago grabbed at the swelling in his loincloth. “It’s about perfection.”

With a startlingly stunning clarity of mind, John understood Santiago’s rant. John noticed everything. He marveled at the shape of the individual grains of sand. He was amazed at the points on the thorns and the spikes on the cacti. He scanned the world around him and noted the slightest of color variations in the rocks and the sky and found novelty in everything he saw. He gawked at the trail in the sky and felt its movement. “Trails,” he murmured. The sounds of insects on the rocks and small desert animals chittering registered in his head and took on new meaning. John studied the dirt-clogged pores on Santiago’s cheeks and forehead, the strands of beard as they intertwined and knotted into an intricate mess.

“I see you digging on the cut of my jib, Johnny. You’re starting to understand my jive. I can see it in your eyes. Well that’s all just great and groovy. But you still don’t really dig it yet. Do you?”

“I think I do,” said John, tearing his eyes away from an intriguing clump of discolored skin on the side of Santiago’s nose. “You gave me those worms. They made my ear feel better. Thanks for that. I’m just glad that we’re done with the worms.”

“You ain’t done with nothing, brother. And those worms ain’t done with you.” Santiago’s voice rose to urgency again and he flailed his arms about wildly. “They’re still a coming at you. It’s a coming at you. A big wave is coming and you better lash yourself to something strong cause we’re gonna be tossed about and it’s gonna be a hell of a night.”

Santiago flung himself backward toward the ground. His words spat rapid-fire from his mouth in a frothy logorrhea and fluttered about in front of John’s face. He saw the madman’s random utterances taking physical form, spelled out in the air in great bold, thick, capital letters. The word LAPIDATE shot from Santiago’s beard-crusted orifice and pinged off John’s forehead, leaving a welt and a small scrape. Next BLOOD spewed from Santiago’s mouth and soaked John’s face and chest. BIRD flew from his mouth, coasted on the wind currents above John and dropped a SLOPPY SHIT, which bespattered his shoulder. MIGHTY FIST OF RAGE hammered the side of John’s head and knocked him on his back, right next to Santiago.

John closed his eyes and shielded his head. And though Santiago continued to rave, his words no longer physically assaulted John. Without open eyes to give them power, the words dropped and thudded on the ground, became two-dimensional lower case phrases, and expired. A tugging at his belly, like a hook on the end of a rope pulling at him, yanked John into the air. He dangled there, looking down at his supine, motionless body. His tall, thin form, arms outspread, looked as if it were welcoming the abusive words as they rained down upon him. His eyes clenched. His stubbly face twisted up in a smile. Next to his body, John saw Santiago, still flat on his back, his mouth erupting a gush of unconnected, bolded words into the air. Many of the words were emphatic and given great force by gargantuan exclamation marks. Still, with his eyes closed, the words did John no violence. They merely bounced off of him, scattered about his body on the ground.

And then, John saw both his and Santiago’s bodies lifted from the ground as if they were marionettes on strings. Their bodies jerked and lurched about awkwardly, as if trying to fight off some outside force that was making them move. As they moved, their bodies gradually took on more fluid, lifelike movements. The men jumped and ran and flailed about. John watched on from above, feeling detached from the action. With a powerful whoosh, he felt himself sucked back into his body, felt the strain of his muscles and the compulsion to move forward, to run and jump and dance. No longer a spectator, John felt the frenzy of random emotions and the need to groove.

Red and gold brick roads, starting at a center point and spinning outward, expanding as they swirled, set out two separate paths, the red opening up to the west and the gold spreading out in the opposite direction. And starting at the center of the two-toned swirl, John and Santiago bounced and jumped and kicked up their heels and allowed themselves to be washed along with the wave that pushed them down the red brick road. They whirled down the road, spinning madly, pulled by the current of the river of clouds above them.

Along the road, they encountered other men and boys. Santiago plucked an everlasting supply of worms from his bottomless bag and dropped them in the people’s eyes. And the men and boys joined them and danced along the road, spinning and circling around John, as planets orbiting a sun. The dancers, their arms raised to the sky and grooving to some cosmic jam, spun and jumped and kicked up dust, ushering John and Santiago along.

The road curved and swelled and welcomed the frenetic swarm of dirty, sweaty bodies. Along the way, members of the crowd picked up instruments and began to play. Bouzoukis and baglamas plinked and sang and dueled feverishly, the three-stringed instruments reverberating and complementing each other, driving the pace of the dancers faster. Flutes fluttered frenetically above the din. Those without instruments picked up sticks and clinked them together or beat on drums or jars. Some chanted and moaned in unison. Others clapped their hands until it hurt. Still others just danced.

Santiago, in a trance, ripped a leather belt from the robe of one of the dancers. In time to the beat, Santiago whipped the strap at his own bare back. The scourge drew welts and blood and exclamations of joy. Some of the dancers ventured too close to Santiago and felt the sting of the leather that he flung about. Following Santiago’s example, some of the dancers stripped off their shirts and beat and slashed at their own backs with belts and branches and straps made from the hides of goats. The rhythm of the music urged the flagellants on, driving their self-abuse to greater extremes. Occasionally a spent and bloody dancer dropped by the side of the road, his body still twitching despite the lack of energy to continue on, left to watch helplessly as the surging, spinning, dancing crowd of men moved away down the road.

The men danced through the night, following the red brick road. Above them, where the trail of clouds flowed during the day, a river of fire mirrored the snaking road. The star Wormwood winked a hypnotic green strobe down on the crowd. And the road welcomed the throng of sweaty, dirty, beaten and bloodied men. It drank their sweat and blood and gave back its own energy to urge the crowd on. It worked in concert with the river of fire, reflecting energy to the trail and receiving the rebounding aura. El Camino De la Muerte drove the clamoring mass through small villages and over hills picking up more bodies along the way, sweeping the men along treacherous mountain roads, sometimes tossing weakened and useless husks of men off the side of the road and down the steep drops. All the while, John spun and leapt and moved forward, and Santiago followed, dropping worms in the eyes of newcomers and providing John with lunkworms when his energy waned.

After three days and two nights of manic dancing, the crowd dwindled to nothing. A trail of broken and spent bodies, some dead but most not, littered the brick path for miles and miles behind John and Santiago. And the two men found themselves alone on the road again and lacking the energy to go any farther. After three days in the desert fun, John’s face began to turn red. After three days in the desert sun he was looking at a riverbed. He threw himself to the ground and lay on his back in an area where the red brick road crossed the dry riverbed, staring up at the flickering light of Wormwood millions of miles away. From his peripheral vision, he saw Santiago walking around their stopping point and pissing a circle around them.

“What the hell are you doing?” John asked.

Santiago shook off the final drops of urine that he could muster and answered, “Setting up a perimeter. And I’m dry. I need you to finish up wetting the circle around our camp here.”

“For what? I’m too tired to stand.”

“To save our lives. To make it through the night. To keep us safe, man.” Santiago walked in a circle around John’s unmoving body. “You need to get up and finish the circle that I started to keep us safe. And I ain’t gonna let you sleep until you do.” He poked at John’s ribs with his big toe and jumped back when John swatted at him.

“What is our piss going to keep us safe from? This is ridiculous. I want to sleep.”

Santiago nudged at John again with his foot. “Get up and I’ll tell you. Otherwise I’m gonna pester you and not let you sleep.”

With a great effort, John rose to his feet. “I’ll try if it will shut you up. But, I don’t think I have enough piss to complete a circle around us.” Much to his surprise, John loosed a high-pressure flow of urine that more than finished Santiago’s protective ring around the men. He shook off several times, giving it an extra effort so as not to dribble on himself. “So what is our piss going to protect us from?” John returned to his resting position on the ground and resumed his gaze at Wormwood’s green flicker.

“Lunkheads, baby. Lunkheads,” said Santiago. He settled in on the ground next to John and stared at the green star, too. “If you wanna make it through the night, don’t step outside of that piss-circle. Don’t put a hand or foot or any other body part outside of the perimeter or you’re likely to lose it.”

“What are lunkheads?” John asked.

Santiago sat and scratched at his beard momentarily, putting together an acceptable answer to John’s question, and said, “Lookie here, man…”

But, before Santiago said any more, John fell fast asleep on the ground beside him, mumbling incoherently to himself.

And John awoke with his eyes gummed up and a rotten mouth. A low drone of grunts and groans and snarls and moans stirred him as the flammeous daylight broke. Just outside of the piss-perimeter stood a shifting, stinking wall of men and boys, their skin greenish and pocked with sores. Their soulless eyes passed over John and Santiago but looked right through them, the giant dilated pupils having taken over most of the whites of their eyes and showing as stagnant pools of numbness. Those black eyes betrayed no emotions. No feeling showed itself on the lumbering creatures’ faces as they remained just outside the circle and shifted slowly back and forth on their feet. But there was a hunger, an urgent need for something that was clear from how their numbers were pressed in on each other around the circle but held back only by some invisible barrier.