Swamp Foetus (15 page)

But it was garbage, he was eating garbage
. The wire trashcan was crammed with ripening refuse. A redolent juice seeped out at the bottom, a distillation of every disgusting fluid in the can, moonshine for bluebottle flies. Ghost felt his mind stretching, trying to accommodate something he had never had to think closely about before. There were poor people in Missing Mile, sure. Most of the old men who played checkers outside the Farmers Hardware store were on some kind of government or military pension. Lots of people got food stamps. But were there people eating out of garbage cans? Were there people so desperate that they would band together and attack you for the change in your pocket?

You bet there are. They’re everywhere. Your life has been just sheltered enough, just sanitized enough, that you didn’t see them. But you can’t get away from it here… this city chews up its young and spits them back in your face.

Ghost looked up, startled. He wasn’t sure what had just happened; it felt as if the world, for an instant, had split and then reconverged. As if someone had had the exact same thought as him, at the exact same time.

He saw a young black man leaning on the low concrete wall nearby, also watching the old drifter. The young man was handsome, trendily barbered, dressed in casual but expensive-looking sport clothes. He wore gold-rimmed glasses with little round lenses, carried a radio Walkman in his breast pocket and a copy of Spy tucked under his arm. In his face as he watched the old man chewing was an ineffable sadness, not quite sympathy, not quite pity.

The hearts that would swell with rage back home - if you could call them hearts -to see a black man looking upon a white man with anything resembling pity…

(Get outta that garbage, boy.)

The man shifted on the wall and looked straight at Ghost, warm mocha eyes meeting startled pale blue. And suddenly Ghost knew many things about this man. He was from a tiny town in south Georgia - Ghost didn’t get the name - and his family had been crushingly poor. Not trash-eating poor … but there had been a man in the town who was. Ancient and alone, black as midnight, brains pickled by half a century of rotgut wine. He was a no-town hobo of the sort people laughed at but looked out for; he had no colorful nickname, no family, no history. He was a smelly old wino who pissed his pants, and most of the whites in town, if they were aware of him at all, called him Hey Boy. As in
Hey, Boy, get outta that garbage.
As in
Hey, Boy, I’m talkin’ to you.
As in
Hey, Boy, get off my property before I blow your nigger guts to Hell.

And this young man, as a hungry scrawny child in this stagnant backwater of a town, had seen that happen.

Ghost saw the blood exploding through the air, smelled flame and cordite, redneck sweat and the raw sewage odor of Hey Boy’s ruptured, blasted guts. He felt the giddy terror of a child hiding - where - he couldn’t get it -viewing death up close for the first time, afraid its twin black barrels would swing his way next. He could not move, could not look away from the young man’s calm brown eyes, until Steve touched his shoulder. ‘Somebody just gave me directions to the club. It’s real near here. You want to go check it out?’

Ghost glanced back over his shoulder as they left the park. The young man was no longer looking at him, and Ghost felt no urge to speak. They had already had the most intimate contact possible; of what use were words?

They crossed a wide traffic-filled avenue and turned east. Ghost wasn’t sure just where the Village began, but the streets seemed to be getting narrower, the window displays more fabulous, the crowds decidedly funkier. People wore silver studs in their noses, delicate hoops through their lips and eyebrows. A boy in a black fishnet shirt had both nipples pierced, with a filigree chain connecting the rings. There were shaved and painted scalps, long snaky braids, leather jackets jangling with zippers and buckles, flowing hippie dresses of gossamer and gauze. The streets of the East Village by day seemed a shrine to mutant fashion.

Steve pulled a joint from his sock, lit up, took a deep drag and passed it to Ghost. Ghost grabbed the burning cigarette and cupped it gingerly between his palms, trying to hide it, expecting a big cop hand to fall on his shoulder at any second. ‘Are you
crazy?
’

Steve shook his head, then blew out a giant plume of smoke. ‘It’s cool. Terry said you could smoke right on the street up here, as long as you’re discreet. He gave me this as a going-away present.’

Terry owned the record store where Steve worked, and was the best-travelled and most worldly of their crowd; also the biggest stoner, so he ought to know. But Ghost could not stretch his definition of discreet to include walking down one of the busiest streets in New York City with a cloud of pot smoke trailing behind. Still … He looked thoughtfully at the joint in his hand, then brought it up to his lips and took a cautious toke. The spicy green flavor filled his throat, swirled through his lungs and his brain. New York probably imported every exotic strain of reefer from every country in the world, but Southern homegrown had to beat them all.

A few blocks later the crowds thinned out. The streets here felt older, grayer, somehow more soothing. More like a place where you could actually live. There were little groceries on every block with wooden stands of flowers and produce in front. Ghost smelled ginger and ripe tomatoes, the subtle cool scent of ice, the tang of fresh greens and herbs. Sage, basil, onions, thyme, sweet rosemary and soapy-smelling coriander. As long as he could smell herbs he was happy.

New York, Steve decided, was a city bent upon providing its citizens with plenty of food and information. In other parts of the city there had been hot dog carts everywhere, pizza parlors and cappuccino shops, restaurants serving food from Thailand, Mongolia, Latino-China, and everywhere else in the world; news-stands on every corner carried hundreds of papers, magazines, and often a wide selection of hardcore porn. There were radios and TVs blaring, headlines shrieking. In the first part of the Village Steve had seen more restaurants, comics shops, and several intriguing bookstores he planned to check out later. Here you had the little groceries, though not quite so many restaurants. For information, there were the street vendors.

Steve had started noticing them a while back, though he’d been too busy noticing everything else to pay much attention at first. But here they were more frequent and less obscured by the flow of the crowd. They set up tables or spread out army blankets, then arranged the stuff they wanted to sell and sat down to wait until somebody bought it. There were tables of ratty paperbacks, boxes of old magazines, tie-dyed T-shirts and ugly nylon buttpacks, cheap watches and household appliances laid out on the sidewalk like the leftovers from somebody’s yard sale.

But as they walked farther, the wares started to get a little strange. At first it was just stuff that no one could possibly want, like a box of broken crayon-ends or a shampoo bottle filled with sand. Then they passed a man selling what looked like medical equipment: bedpans in a dusty row, unidentifiable tubes and pouches, some jar-shaped humps covered with a tattered army blanket. In the center of his display was a single artificial leg that had once been painted a fleshy pink. Now the paint was chipped, the limb’s surface webbed with a thousand tiny, grimy cracks. The toeless foot was flat and squared-off, little more than a block of wood. At the top was a nightmarish jumble of straps and braces meant, Steve supposed, to hold the leg onto a body. He could not imagine walking around on such a thing every day.

‘Where is this club?’ Ghost asked nervously.

‘Well … I know we’re near it.’ Steve stopped at the corner, shoved sweaty hair out of his face, and looked around hoping the place would appear. ‘The guy who gave me directions said it would be hard to find in the daytime. We’re supposed to look for an unlit neon sign that says
Beware
.’

‘Great.’

‘WHAT PLACE YEZ LOOKIN’ FOR?’ boomed a voice behind them. It took Steve several seconds to realize that the vendor had spoken and was now motioning them over.

‘Yez look like gentlemen in search of the-unusual,’ the vendor told them before they could say anything about clubs or directions. He was a white man of indeterminate age, dishwater-brown hair thin on top but straggling halfway down his back in an untidy braid. His eyes were hidden behind black wraparound shades, his grin as sharp and sudden as a razor. Steve noticed a strange ring on the second finger of the guy’s right hand: a bird skull cast in silver, some species with huge hollow eyesockets and a long, tapering, lethal-looking beak that jutted out over the knuckle. It was lovely, but it also looked like a good tool for putting an eye out or ventilating a throat.

‘Well, right now we’re looking for this club -‘

‘Something UNUSUAL,’ the vendor overrode. ‘A collector’s item maybe.’ His hand hovered over his wares, straightened tubes and straps, caressed the artificial leg. ‘Something yez don’t see every day.’ His face went immobile, then split back into that sharp crazy grin. ‘Or rather - something yez DO see every day, but most of the time yez can’t take the fuckers HOME WITH YA!-

His hand twitched back the army blanket covering the jar-shaped humps. A small cloud of dust rose into the air. Sunlight winked on polished glass. Steve cussed, took two steps back, then came forward again and bent to look.

Ghost, who had never in his life felt so far from home, burst into tears.

The man had six big glass jars arranged in two neat rows, sealed at the tops and filled with what could only be formaldehyde. Inside each jar, suspended in the murky liquid, was a large, pale, bloated shape: an undeniably real human head.

The necks appeared to have been surgically severed. Ghost could see layers of tissue within the stumps as precisely delineated as the circles of wood inside a tree trunk. One head was tilted far enough to the side to show a neat peg of bone poking from the meat of the neck. Several had shaved scalps; one had dark hair that floated and trailed like seaweed. Parts of faces were pressed flat against the glass: an ear, a swollen nostril, a rubbery lip pulled askew. Blood-suffused eyeballs protruded from their sockets like pickled hard-boiled eggs.

‘How much do you want for them?’ Steve asked. Ghost sobbed harder.

The grin seemed to throw off light, it was so wide and dazzling. ‘Two apiece. Ten for all six of ‘em.’

‘Ten
dollars?

‘Hey, I’m in a hurry, I gotta unload these puppies today, yez think this is
legal
or somethin’?’

As if on cue, sirens rose out of the general distant cacophony, approaching fast. A pair of police cars rounded the corner and came shrieking up the block. Revolving blue light flickered across the lenses of the black wraparound shades. The grin disappeared. Without even a
good day to yez
the vendor scooped up the artificial leg and took off down the street. One car roared after him. The other slammed to a halt at the curb where Steve and Ghost still stood staring stupidly at the heads,

‘You weren’t really going to buy one, were you?’ Ghost whispered.

“Course not.’ Steve snorted. ‘I don’t have any money anyway, remember? The bums got it all. I’m lucky to have an ID to show this cop.’ He dug out his wallet and flipped it open. ‘We’re just a couple of hicks from North Carolina, Officer. We lay no claim to these jars or their contents.’

*

Minds like butterflies preserved in brine, trapped under thick glass...

It seemed that their friendly vendor, a gentleman whose given name was Robyn Moorhead but who was known variously as Robyn Hood, Moorhead Robbins, and (aptly enough) ‘More Head’, had robbed a medical transport truck en route from Beth Israel Hospital to the Mutter Medical Museum in Philadelphia while it was stopped at a gas station. The truck’s door had not latched properly, and More Head and an unidentified girlfriend had simply climbed in and cleaned it out. He had already sold several items before Steve and Ghost came along. The artificial leg, though, was his own. He used it for display purposes only, to call attention to whatever shady wares he sold; it was a valuable antique and not for sale; he carried it everywhere.

No
, Ghost told himself.
You did not feel their minds beating against the jars like dying insects. You did not feel the raw burn of formaldehyde against your eyeball, the dead taste of it in your mouth; you did not feel the subtle breakdown of the molecular dream that was your brain. They were not alive. You could not feel them.

‘I gotta know,’ said the cop as he finished writing up their statement. ‘How much did he want for ‘em?’ Steve told him, and the cop shrugged, then sighed. He was a decent sort and the affair seemed to have put him in a philosophical mood. ‘Man, even’f I was a crook, even’f I was tryna sell yuman heads, I’d’t least be askin’ more’n ten bucks. Kinda devalues the sanctity a’yuman life, y’know?’

Jewelled wings, beating themselves to powder against thick glass…

*

They had overshot the club by five blocks. The cops pointed them in the right direction and ten minutes later they were descending below street level again, past the unlit neon sign that said not Beware but Be Aware, though Ghost guessed it amounted to the same thing, and into the club. The poster they had sent was plastered everywhere: TONIGHT - LOST SOULS? They were too tired to consider doing a soundcheck yet, but it was just the two of them, Steve’s guitar and Ghost’s voice, and they didn’t really need one. At any rate they wouldn’t be going on till midnight. Right now they needed sleep. One of the bartenders was out of town and had left them the keys to her apartment, which was just upstairs.

Too tired for the stairs, they rode the ancient, terrifying elevator up seven stories. Steve had bummed two beers at the bar. He guzzled most of one as they rode up. ‘New York is pretty interesting,’ he said.

‘No shit.’

Steve snorted into his beer. And then at once they were both laughing, losing it in a rickety box suspended from an antique cable in a building that was taller than any building in Missing Mile but small by the standards of this magical, morbid, million-storied city. They fell against each other and howled and slapped high-five. They were young and the one had a voice like gravelly gold and the other could play guitar with a diamond-hard edge born of sex and voodoo and despair, and it was all part of the Great Adventure.