The Dragon Griaule (50 page)

The black woman tapped Snow’s arm and whispered in his ear: ‘If she is not Jefe’s woman, why is she crying?’

‘She was Jefe’s prisoner for most of her life,’ Snow said. ‘When you’ve lived with someone that long, even as a captive, your emotions become confused.’

She nodded at this lie, or half-lie, as if she understood him, but her expression was perplexed.

More women joined the group, swelling its ranks to four times its former size. Some carried garden implements, others pointed sticks and fist-sized rocks – a young girl in chartreuse satin pajamas brandished a pair of sewing shears. They seethed closer to Jefe, their voices a chorus of vituperation, yet did not attack, wary of their tormentor, though he looked to be done with flying. Positioned on all fours amidst a large puddle, his head hanging down, slathered all over in reddish muck, his hair caked with mud, blood oozing from splits and gashes, strings of ruby-colored drool depending from his lips – he might have been an animal of the village, a pariah dog gone rabid, exhausted by fever, his world narrowed to a hideous reflection in murky water. Snow had no pity for him, no disgust, no anger. If he felt anything it was the temper of a functionary compelled to discharge an unpleasant duty. He stepped forward and rested the edge of the blade on Jefe’s neck. The women fell silent and Jefe’s guttering breath could be heard. He sought to lift his head, perhaps to inquire of Snow, perhaps simply alerted by the blade, but either his head was too heavy or else he lacked the will to see, to know what this cold, sharp object was. Perhaps he knew and no longer cared. Summoning his strength, Snow swung the machete in a savage arc. The blade sliced deep, burying itself to the bone, yet Jefe’s reactions were minimal – he gave forth with a grunt and shuddered and listed a degree or two, but remained upright. Frustrated at his inability to finish the job, Snow yanked at the blade, but once again it was stuck. He planted a foot between Jefe’s shoulders, pushed down and wrenched the blade free, shoving him face-first into the puddle. A tide of blood sluiced from the wound.

As Snow prepared to strike again Jefe’s breath blew a bubble in the mud and, with a choking cough, he flipped onto his back, his entire frame coming off the ground and twisting in mid-air – it was such a physically adept movement that Snow
feared Jefe’s strength had been miraculously restored, but then he understood that it had been a lizard-ly reflex, a final surge of vitality, for Jefe was clearly close to death. His limbs jerked and twitched, and a horrid slackness overlay his features and from his throat there issued a repetitive glutinous clicking, indicative of a disruption in some internal function and not an attempt at speech . . . though his eyes yet held a glint of the poisonous hatred that had infected the world for thousands of years.

The women descended upon him, first Itzel with a hoe, blood welling from the trench she dug in his chest, and then the rest, stabbing and cutting and pounding, exacting their vengeance for rape and murder and innumerable humiliations. They swarmed over the body, blocking it from view, and shoved one another aside in their eagerness to share in his destruction, announcing their fury and delight with orgasmic cries, until a puff of heat and rainbow-colored light (no more impressive to see than the flash powder of a second-rate magician) bloomed from the rags of meat and splintered bone, causing them to fall over backward, to scramble and crawl away yelping with fright, spattered by the same amalgam of mud and thick, dark blood as their ancient enemy, some bearing slashes and bruises received during the melee, inadvertently gotten at the hands of their sisters, and some nursing curious burns they seemed to obtain from some melting process, deriving from the paltry magic of Jefe’s death. Snow glanced up at the sky, fearful that rippling lights would manifest in the clouds like those seen above the village of Chajul thirteen years before, the beacon of the dragon’s rebirth – but none materialized. Jefe was dead. Utterly and irrevocably dead.

At the last an elderly woman brought a gasoline can and emptied its contents upon his corpse, which had been rendered unrecognizable as life of any kind, like a red meal that had proved indigestible and been spat forth by the thing that consumed it. She lit a twist of paper and dropped it thereon. The flames yielded were low and of a ruddy translucence in the decaying light, and were whipped about by a cold north wind that soon would bring the storm. An oily smoke arose and was quickly dispersed. All the women of the village had come
forth, and those of the pink house as well, and they huddled together in small groupings, somber and silent in that shabby, inglorious place, occasionally exchanging whispered comforts and assurances. When the blaze had burned down some retreated to their homes, but more gasoline was brought and many stayed to watch a second burning, and to stir the coals now and again so that a wisp of transparent flame licked up, signifying the immolation of a crumb of intestine, a scrap of cartilage. The sky darkened. Drops of icy rain began to fall, yet the women covered their heads with shawls, violent nuns at a ritual observance, and kept to their sentinel stations until they were shadows and the wind stiffened, carrying the taste of grit to their mouths, and all that survived of the dragon Griaule and his human avatar were nuggets of charred bone, which they would later collect and grind into meal for a mystical supper, and a cinereal residue indistinguishable from the dusts that had blown across those hills since time was in its cradle and the sky still bright with creation fire.

VI

It was raining steadily by the time they drove out from Tres Santos in the late afternoon, heading for Nebaj and the north in one of the battered yellow mini-trucks. The women of the village expressed no interest in having them join their celebration. They wanted a swift return to normalcy, to their traditions, and they treated Snow and Yara, despite their service, with disdain, there being no place amongst them for a gringo and his pale, crippled woman. As for Snow, he had no desire to linger in Tres Santos a second longer than was necessary. He suspected that these women would be forever at their burning, whether in dreams or by means of some surrogate or effigy. Their new husbands, if husbands they took, would be lucky to survive such passion.

Yara had barely spoken since Jefe’s death and she was not given now to speech. As they jounced over ruts and potholes, Snow jamming the gears in order to gain traction in the mud, she rubbed his leg every so often – whether to reassure herself or him, he could not have said – and offered neither commentary nor advice. In truth, he would have had little in the way of response, preoccupied by the gusting wind and the rain driven sideways against the windshield, and by the precipitous drop-off to the right of the narrow road. They were past the halfway point to Nebaj when the storm broke full upon them. In those regions it would not have been considered either an especially fulminant storm or one of great duration, unremarkable as to its apparitions and thunderous concatenations and lurid bursts of lightning that illuminated sections of the pine forest, bleaching the separate trees to bone-white and shrouding them in purple-haloed effulgence like sainted relics set to burn on the
mountainside, charms and admonitions against some ghastly form of predation. It sufficed, however, to persuade Snow to shut down the engine and switch off the useless wipers. He cracked a window to prevent the glass from fogging over with their breath. Rain washed down in spills thick as gray paint, its drumming increased to deafening measure. He had wanted to talk to Yara, but now he thought the storm with its progeny of light and sound was a blessing, for there was too much to be sifted through and digested and mulled over before they could begin to discuss what had happened and what would be. And yet to sit there encysted in that musty cab, blind to the world, surrounded by spirits real and unreal, separated one from the other by silence, by a gearbox and a divider with receptacles for drinks and maps and such, that was no better solution to the moment. His mind pulled ahead, worrying about how they would negotiate the border crossing and where they could live and what he would do with a woman as damaged as Yara at his side, all the demeaning practicalities and shameful concerns that would inevitably dissolve the bond they had forged anew, a bond already once broken. He wished he could resist these dour thoughts, but they were ingrained in him – he had too long cohabited with the idea that love born of illusion would never prosper, and the principle that every truth could be fashioned into the lie of itself. It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that – despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death – it would be in the end as though nothing had happened.

The rain abated and the worst of the storm moved toward the lowlands. Snow started the engine. Yara reached a hand across the divide and he warmed her chilled fingers. In her face was a serenity he could not fathom. He thought she must be drawing upon some secret female provenance to which he had no access, but something stirred inside him, sparked to life by her expression, and he had then a fresh recognition of what they had accomplished together, the destruction of a monster,
the killing of a thing that could not be killed. And although it went against every negative of his former faith in nothing, he submitted to belief and believed . . . believed in alchemy, in the marriage of souls, in accomplishment and noble obligation, and believed also that he would never fail her again, nor she him.

Static spat and crackled on the radio,
salseros
lamented about injustice and pop divas celebrated the endlessly trivial. In a thin voice Yara sang along with those songs she knew and they talked of inconsequential things, favorite bands and bad movies, touching one another often to reaffirm their connection, for they were their own country now. When they turned onto the highway they lapsed into silence, Yara gazing out the window and Snow focusing on the traffic, each alone with their thoughts, each striving to ignore the outposts of doubt and fear that flashed at them from the darkness, as vivid in their enmity as the gas station-hotel-brothel where they stopped to fill the tank – a big, ugly, raw building englobed in lemony radiance, like the local headquarters of evil and sons, and out front a string of six short-skirted women standing brazen and hipshot along the road, shadowy figures who bared their breasts for speeding cars, watched over by a chain-smoking devil with gold incisors, who strode back and forth, cursing the cars, the women, cursing everything in sight, pimping the apocalypse. Some drunken teenage soldiers, Indian kids with AK-47s, lounged by the entrance, giving people a hard time. In a spirit of playful menace, one lifted the hem of Yara’s skirt with his rifle barrel – upon seeing her disfigured legs he let the skirt fall, made the sign of the cross, and held conference with his friends. Snow hustled her into the truck before they could decide to investigate further and drove away quickly. After that they kept to the back roads, to blue highways and unmapped trails, driving north and west into the realms of the ordinary, ordinary monsters and ordinary seductions, past towns whose sole reason for being was a refusal to die, making for a land of cynical enchantments and marathon sales, of lap dancers for cancer and political doctrine based on new wives’ tales, the Great American Salmagundi in all its glorious criminal delirium, with nothing to sustain them, nothing certain, only the strength of their imperfections and
hope reborn a dragon in their hearts, while behind them the old world trembled and the light caught fire and roared.

STORY NOTES

THE MAN WHO PAINTED
THE DRAGON GRIAULE

The seminal idea for Griaule occurred to me when I was stuck for something to write about while attending the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. I went out onto the campus of Michigan State University and sat under a tree and smoked a joint to jog my brain. I then wrote down in my notebook the words ‘big fucking dragon.’ I felt exceptionally clever. Big stuff, I thought, is cool.

The idea of an immense paralyzed dragon, more than a mile in length and seven hundred feet high, that dominates the world around him by means of its mental energies, a baleful monster beaming out his vindictive thought and shaping us to its will . . . this seemed an appropriate metaphor for the Reagan Administration, which was then busy declaiming that it was ‘Morning In America,’ laying waste to Central America, and starting to rip the heart out of the constitution. That likely explains the political content carried in one degree or another by the stories. So in a sense, the Griaule stories concern two mythical beasts, a dragon and an addled president whose avatar is an undying monster . . . or vice versa.

I don’t know what it is that has brought me back so many times to Griaule. Generally speaking, I hate elves, wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity. Perhaps it’s because I saw a list once of fictional dragons ordered by size and mine
was the biggest. This caused me to think that I might make a career of writing stories about the biggest whatever. The biggest gopher, an aphid the size of a small planet, a gargantuan dust bunny, and so forth. Fortunately I never followed up on the idea.

When I returned home to Ann Arbor from the workshop I asked my brother-in-law, James Wolf, an artist and the guitarist in my band, if he would make me a drawing of the dragon – I wanted something to meditate upon while working out the story. I expected something rudimentary, but he did the dragon in water colors on flimsy, oversized sheets of paper and taped them together, thereby creating a rendering eight feet long and three feet high, complete with all the vats and ladders and etcetera that were part of my conception. I tried to preserve it as best I could, but eventually it became tattered and unsalvageable. Anyway, I stared at the painting for a year or so, endured a thoroughly unhappy love affair that formed the emotional core of the story, and eventually wrote it all down.

THE SCALEHUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER

This story had its genesis in the notion that Griaule might be infested with parasites. It was an interesting notion and I envisioned the plot to be more-or-less an excuse for doing a taxonomical survey of the dragon’s interior, something that would have suited a more novelistic approach to the subject. Indeed, ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’ was initially intended to be a portion of a novel, or rather a series of stories linked by excerpts from fictive works about the dragon, but I soon realized I had little desire to read such linkages and even less to write them.

Then, too, I wrote the story during a stressful time. My mother was dying and I was living in her cramped Ormond Beach condo, assisting in her care, a grim business. The movie theater in the mall close by showed nothing I wanted to see (
Yentl
had played there for more than a year). I had no friends
in the area – I was the youngest person in the condominium by three decades – and I had no money to speak of, no car, nowhere to go for a break except for the Denny’s down the street. Thus I was inclined to write a sunnier story (by my lights, anyway), more of a straight-ahead escapist fantasy than I might have done otherwise.

I roughed out the story while drinking coffee at Denny’s, usually in the early morning hours, writing in bursts of fifteen, twenty minutes and then running over to the condo to check on my mom. Not a lot of happy people come into a Denny’s at three o’clock in the morning, at least this was my observation. Most of the ones who seemed happy were drunks whose happiness would be short-lived, and the rest were loners, addicts, insomniacs, hookers, cops, sour-looking old men who’d had a bad night at the dog track, and losers of various stripe.

The star of the graveyard shift at this particular Denny’s was Fred the short order cook, a swarthy black-haired guy about my age who cracked wise-ass jokes through the serving window and carried on a sardonic and often amusing dialogue with the regulars. When cops stopped by for take-out he would surreptitiously mimic their radio calls – he did this with such authenticity, static and tinny voices and all, the cops would grab their walkie-talkies and respond. One night two cops went back into the kitchen and gave him a stern talking-to. Thereafter the fake radio calls ceased and, possibly as a result of this restraint upon his comic stylings, Fred’s commentary grew increasingly hostile and embittered. He started yelling at customers and soon was let go. He was rehired a couple of months later following a breakdown and a stay in a mental health facility, or so I was told. Whatever the facts were, he had lost his edge. His jokes provoked polite laughter, not legitimate mirth, and he took to offering advice that was patently the product of time spent in group therapy and was not well received.

The world of Denny’s became my world and, as tragedies like Fred’s (seemingly minor compared to my own) played out around me, I sat there drawing dragon heads on napkins, scribbling in my notebook, canoodling with one of the waitresses, living as best I could in the jaundiced light . . . the kind of light
that might have shone from a cracked and dusty lantern that illuminated some claustrophobic and hermetic fissure deep within Griaule’s mountainous bulk.

THE FATHER OF STONES

I remember little about the creation of this story, mainly because I was under the influence of the neighborhood where I wrote it. I lived during the early and mid-eighties in the Georgetown area of Staten Island, the neighborhood closest to the ferry terminal, on Westervelt Avenue, a street that aspired to be a crime wave and was populated by drug dealers, hookers, smalltime monsters, a few brave souls who considered themselves the vanguard of a movement toward gentrification and would talk rebar with you for hours, and, oddly enough, a handful of genre folks: the horror writer Craig Spector, Beth Meachem and Tappan King (at the time, editors at Berkley and
Twilight Zone
respectively), me, and Maureen McHugh, all living within a block of one another.

Two townhouses down from me was a crack house, its front yard littered with rusted lawnchairs and motorcycle parts, run by a fake Rasta guy from Brooklyn, Nicky, who had dropped a dime on someone higher up the food chain and in exchange had been given carte blanche by the cops. Every morning the schoolkids would stop by for their rocks and sometimes the cops would pass the house and wave to Nicky, who – the soul of expansiveness – would return the salute. He also ran an illegal taxi service and maintained a string of hookers who operated out of the abandoned cars along New York Bay, and most nights would get into screaming fights on the street out front of my house. Drug dealers wearing Just Say No T-shirts made plaintive cries beneath my window at every hour of the day. I hand-wrote most of a novel called ‘Kingsley’s Labyrinth,’ stopping only when I realized I had filled eleven notebooks with an indecipherable script that resembled seismograph readings, and I hung out with people whom I would normally run from – Uzi-toting Cubans and so forth. There were frequent gunshots
and each morning when I walked out, my footsteps crunched due to the empty crack vials littering the sidewalks – it was as if a kind of glassine hail had fallen during the night.

My downstairs neighbor, a beautiful black transsexual named Renee, constantly fought with me over her right to play Connie Francis albums on her deck beneath my bedroom window at 6 a.m., an argument ended when someone cut her throat, broke all her LPs, slashed her pretty blouses, and put bleach in her fish tank. These and other neighborhood tragedies came to occupy my attention, and I grew increasingly paranoid and unsound. The then-New York City mayor, Ed Koch, would once a month herd together a bunch of the most deranged homeless people in Manhattan and ship them over to Staten Island on a late-night ferry – his way of cleaning up the city. We’d wake the next morning to find a fresh crop of schizophrenics wandering the streets, talking to the CIA, to aliens, making phone calls to heaven. Most drifted back to Manhattan, but a few took up residence, including this one guy who was given a home by someone and built a life-sized, authentic-looking electric chair and every Fourth of July weekend would drag said chair out onto the traffic island on Victory Boulevard, strap himself in, and grin at the commuters. No one to my knowledge tried to stop him – it was as if the authorities accepted this as an appropriate commentary. To top it all off I began dating a businesswoman who appeared at the outset to be level-headed, stable, but three weeks into the relationship started breaking into my apartment to clean it and one night announced that she was a ninja and capable of starting fires with her eyes. We didn’t make it very long. In my mental state, the last thing I wanted was a woman who could incinerate me on a whim.

Good times.

Somewhere in the midst of all this was a dragon, but it seemed quite mundane when contrasted with the vivid weirdness of the gangster fantasy in which I lived.

LIAR’S HOUSE

For much of the ’00s I lived in Vancouver, Washington, essentially a bedroom community for Portland, Oregon, a gigantic strip mall with an endless supply of unprepossessing, unattractive people embarked upon the consumption of corn dogs and reality TV. This was my initial take on the town, at any rate, because, having grown up in a suburb, having steeped in its flavorless juices, I tend to loathe such places. But at the same time I firmly believe that the human species does not encompass a great range of intelligence, that the difference between an Einstein and an idiot is much less than we might imagine, and I am certain that people who are inarticulate and stolid and apparently thick often have interior lives every bit as complex and eccentric and rich as those of showier models. ‘Liar’s House’ received some criticism at the time of publication for the literate interior life of its ox-like protagonist. The criticism may have been deserved, yet this narrative tactic is not without precedent – there have been countless incidences of savant narrators throughout literature and, for my part, I’ve known plenty of uneducated people who were incapable of expressing themselves in precise language, yet had other means of self-expression and were extremely precise in their comprehension of the world, of what was going on around them. In any case, the character of my protagonist was informed by the people with whom I was surrounded. I suppose you might think of him as the personification of Vancouver, WA.

Even a paralyzed dragon must grow and change, and for this story I decided during the course of writing it that Griaule would want children – how then would he go about it? I assumed that he wanted children due to the natural desire to procreate, to create a legacy, but it might have added to the story if I had thought the matter through, because when I did so several years later I came up with an idea that would have made the link between this story and the last more apparent. I was tempted to go back in and rework the story, but decided to let things stand,
figuring that it would be more honest, more illuminating as to how a writer’s style evolves, to let the story stand as written.

Then perhaps I was just being lazy.

THE TABORIN SCALE

This story was a premature attempt to kill off Griaule, but the odd thing about these stories is that each one seems to breed a multitude of possibilities . . . and even in the final story,
especially
in the final story, it seemed every few pages there was the germ of yet another story. It was as if the dragon didn’t want to die and was offering up intriguing possibilities, tempting me to spare him. Now I suspect that Griaule won’t be done until I am.

I began writing these story notes while saddled with an apocalyptic case of the flu, and so had no clear idea of what I was about . . . though it seems that a main thread running through the notes is the relationship of writing to environment. However, in the case of ‘The Taborin Scale’ I have nothing salient to say on the subject. I was living in Portland, Oregon, where I now reside. My life was basically untroubled, comfortable, the writing went easily, the story just popped out. The only thing remotely interesting about the story from a background perspective is the guy upon whom the main character, George, was based – a spindly punk rocker I knew casually in New York City who made a living by going to garage sales in upstate New York, searching for antique collectibles, which he then resold. This struck me as a very organized activity for someone who by night wore his hair in spikes and howled demonically into the mike and would spit up into the air and try and catch a loogey on his face. I’m going to have to assume that this is the way writers feel who have an office and a regular home and don’t leave their possessions in storage lockers scattered across the country – I live in constant anticipation of seeing my stuff on one of those reality shows that focus on a small group of auction buyers who bid on abandoned lockers, watching the winning bidder paw through my junk, gazing with perplexity at a Hugo or a Howard or some such, wondering about what kind of loser
bothers to store empty cigarette packs in a box of scribbled-in books and dirty laundry.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

THE SKULL

One night I was playing pachinko in a crowded arcade on Avenida Seis in Guatemala City and, as sometimes happens, I got so into the game that I lost track of what was happening around me. When I looked up I discovered that not only was the arcade deserted, the proprietor preparing to roll down the metal door, but the street was devoid of traffic, with only a few frightened-looking pedestrians scurrying for cover – Avenida Seis was like Broadway in New York City, busy at every hour, and I knew something bad must have occurred to clear it so quickly. (Unbeknownst to me, a group of left-wing students and Indian activists had taken over the Spanish embassy, where an ex-president of Guatemala was being feted, and were holding him and the embassy staff hostage, their purpose being to initiate a dialogue on land reform.) I began running, heading for my hotel, seeing military vehicles (Jeeps, armored anti-personnel carriers, etc.) moving along the side streets – but my hotel was a long ways off and, since I was a gringo and paranoid, fearful of being picked up and beaten, or worse, when I saw a man slip into a doorway I ducked in after him and found myself in a gay nightclub. In addition to a lot of young guys ranging the bar, there were several dozen attractive women seated at the tables. They were all partying as if nothing untoward were happening out in the streets and so, feeling relatively secure, I stuck around for the next several hours, learning from the bartender that the women were ‘
loritas’
(parakeets), upper class wives and mistresses who cultivated triviality as an armor against reality, and that their presence in the club served to protect the gay men from harassment. He went on to say that if I were so disposed it would be easy to get laid – many of the women were promiscuous to a fault – but there would be risk involved, since
their husbands and boyfriends were mostly right-wingers and/or associated with the military.