The Western Lands (23 page)

Come drunks and drug takers . . . come perverts unnerved.

Receive the laurel given, though late, on merit.

To whom and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners, true blues.

Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.

It is Deathless and it is not for you.

(Louise Bogan)

The road to the Western Lands is the most dangerous of all roads and, in consequence, the most rewarding. To know the road exists violates the human covenant: you are not allowed to confront fear, pain and death, or to find out that the sacred human covenant was signed under pressure of fear, pain and death. They can keep their covenant in case of being caught short with a million years of bullshit.

To enter the Western Lands means leaving the covenant behind in the human outhouse with the Monkey Ward catalogues.

The town of Waghdas covers a vast area around the lake, shading into suburbs and semirural districts, and there are a number of adjacent centers with a wide variety of life styles. Neph made frequent random trips, often deciding his route by the toss of a coin.

He is accompanied by Neku, a youth of blazing vitality, and by Mekem, with a body like living marble and the quiescence of stone. They come to a crossroads, and Neph catches a whiff of the centipede smell, like rotten spices on a hot wind that blisters the skin and rasps the lungs. They retrace their steps and turn at right angles.

At sundown they come to a town on a swampy lake. He feels the lake wind on his face as he rounds the corner . . . a clean, clear blue smell. In this area of Waghdas there are old red brick houses with slate and tile and copper roofs, surrounded by trees and gardens. Lawns stretch down to the lake and the jetties.

The house on Pershing Avenue is well back from the cobblestone street, worn smooth by centuries on the march. He finds his key. The lock turns. Inside he stumbles over a heap of toys . . . one Christmas after another in layers . . . a .30-.30 rifle at the top with a box of shells. A crust of broken ornaments crunches underfoot like snow.

He moves forward through the dining room, stacked with dirty dishes, into the pantry and the kitchen, pushing his way through mounds of garbage. He steps out onto the back porch overlooking the back yard and the alley. The garden is a jumble of weeds. The apartment building facing Euclid Avenue is falling in ruins, the windows broken, long deserted . . . the whole area has a smell of emptiness and absence.

Carrying the rifle he walks out through the garden and the cracked concrete of the alley into the street. For twenty or thirty years no one has walked this street. You can hardly see the sidewalk for the weeds and vines and small trees.

What happened here? Nothing happened. Cause of death: totally uninteresting. They could not create event. They died from the total lack of any reason to remain alive . . . decent Godless people.

You need your dreams, they are a biologic necessity and your lifeline to space, that is, to the state of a God. To be one of the Shining Ones. The inference is that Gods are a biologic necessity. They are an integral part of Man.

Consider the Pharaohs: their presence was Godlike. They performed superhuman feats of strength and dexterity. They could read the minds and hearts of others and foretell future events. They became Gods, and to be a God means meting out at times terrible sanctions: cutting the hand off a thief or the lips off a perjurer.

Now imagine some academic, humanistic, bad-Catholic intellectual as God. He simply can't bear to cause any suffering at all. So what happens? Nothing. There are no horrible accidents. Not even an elderly woman killed in a rooming house fire. No hurricanes, no tornados, no opposition, no pain, no decay. No death. So the decent Godless people, who could neither accept any God nor assume the prerogatives of a God, simply crumbled away like a cookie dunked in Postum many years ago . . . the last tremulous Ovaltine. A long pause did not refresh.

"Professor killed, accident in U.S." This is an old cut-up from
Minutes to Go
(1960), waiting all these years for the place in the Big Picture jigsaw puzzle where it would precisely fit.

He levers a cartridge into the chamber and shoots out a dusty shop window . . .
ping
 
. . . a hole with dust drifting out into the stagnant air. Nobody has breathed there for many years. Not a breath of air . . . where the dead leaf fell, there it did rest.

He walks west to Maryland Terrace and right up to King's Highway. Phantom luggage covered with dust. The front of the Park Plaza Hotel has caved in, looks like a bomb exploded there, and the lobby is full of decayed leaves and dirt with grass growing and vines. The bronze statue of a boy is green with verdigris and streaked with bird excrement.

He crosses King's Highway and walks by the huge houses of marble and red brick, the dusty, shattered greenhouses, plants cascading through jagged holes in the dirty, shattered glass. Not a skeleton in sight. A glass pane falls from a window and shatters . . . another . . . another. Now I can see the putty crack and break away, the wood rots before my eyes. Best to get out of here while I still got flesh on my bones.

Across Lindell at a run, into Forest Park . . . a little pond there where he used to come with a net and catch frogs and little fish to put into a bucket . . . keep moving . . . head for the Zoo and Forest Park Highlands.

Here is the St. Louis Zoo, overgrown like some ancient ruin. You can just make out the paths, a few rusty fenceposts here and there, a pool green with algae, but limpid. You can look down into the green half-light where the skeleton of a bear stirs slightly as a breeze ripples the water, wafting out a black stink of carrion.

He moves forward cautiously... a sudden reek of elephants.
Sput
. . .
ping
. . .
silencered bullet. He drops to the ground and rolls. The cages here had housed small animals . . . wolves and foxes . . . the musky smell.

He sprints for a drinking fountain. There is a building in front of him . . . the shots are coming from the roof.

"He was caught in the zoo for position and advantage." (Old cut-up.)

This is the Berlin Zoo. Back in his Waffen SS shoes. He was foolish to agree to this meeting, where the list was to be turned over for $50,000 in U.S. currency.

He searches the roof. A flurry of movement. He edges his .30-.30 forward. The shot is loud and a jet of flame shoots out the muzzle. It takes out the agent there with the silencered rifle. Probably English.

"Halt!"
A 9mm bullet whistles past him. He pivots and shoots the cop, knocking him backward as his gun flies into the air.

He can see the German cop in his black uniform with the neat black Heckler & Koch P-7 he cleans every night, the cop reeling back and the gun flying out of his hands as if it were too hot to hold. Then he is gone, fallen from sight, and the gun hits grass with a dull plump. People are shouting and pointing from further and further away, as if seen through a retreating telescope.

When you kill a cop you make a door, he reflects smugly. He did not want to reflect philosophically. Could "As Allah wills" be far behind? And it is written by a writer, reeks of nepotism at least, if not blatant fraud.

A fence . . . he hates that precarious springy barbed wire under his crotch. So he takes wire cutters from his tool chest and cuts the wire and walks through, down a steep mud slope onto the highway. How they do fall apart . . . blocks of concrete forced up by tree roots . . . they'll grow through all our bones in the end . . . and the gravel road up to the entrance ... a blast of heat from the Midway, smell of popcorn and elephants and big cats ... he can hear trumpeting and sullen snarls. It's hot and the cats are restless.

The Lion Tamer, the Great Armand, is hitting the sauce heavy and suddenly he's scared, and the cats can smell his fear. An elephant tramples a three-year-old child down to pink jelly. Looks like the show is cursed.

A thunderstorm on the way, the air is heavy and sullen with violence. Groups of youths, silent faces blank with a sucking hostility, looking and waiting. No laughing, very little talking.

"Any minute now they'll take the place apart . . . seen it happen before," says the old barker. He barricades himself in his boxcar and takes a fix.

"HEY RUBE!"

Next thing this pot-bellied aborigine is charging him with a tent stake and he shoots him where his shirt spills over his belt and he goes down screaming like a castrated pig.

He runs on. He has a plan. The Great Armand, the cat tamer, is in a state of abject funk, drinking Georgia lightning out of a Mason jar.

"I can't go in there. They'll tear me apart."

"You don't have to go in. Just let the cats out."

They is running this way with tent pegs and fence posts, knives, guns and axes. Then the cats come out snarling. So the rubes in front is shrinking back, screaming, and the pressure of those behind catapults them right onto the cats and there is a pile-up like a football scrimmage and the cats go full crazy and jump into the thrashing, squirming arms and legs and bodies, biting and clawing.

Now rain sluices down from darkening skies.

Joe retained fragmentary memories of the Land of the Dead: stone streets streaked with oil patches ... a green haze of palpable menace and evil. . . tornado green. But this is a static tornado, a heavy, sucking emptiness. Faces in the street swim by in the heavy green medium, faces pressed and pulled out of all human semblance by hatred, evil and despair . . . faces torn by hideous unknown needs and hungers. Winds of searing pain sweep the dark streets in waves of screams and moans, whimpers, and the wild, maniacal laughter. Eyes glowing and sputtering blue flame . . . the streets slope downward, people slip on oil patches and plunge screaming into the green black darkness.

CHECK POINT . . . the terrible Death Police are checking, sifting. Arrest can only mean the Second and Final Death. A boy is dragged away with a thin, discarded cry of despair.

Joe's Ka, quick and light as a shadow, slips through. A Death Cop catches a fleeting glimpse and raises his death gun. It looks like a pinball death ray. Joe's Ka takes him out with a heavy air pistol, the microscopic projectile squeezed out under tons of pressure. There is only a hole where the cop was, a sucking black hole.

Run for it. Behind them the hole has sucked in the police patrol. They are running through a vast, abandoned amusement park overgrown with rank thistles and thorn-covered vines. Now he can smell the Duad, a reek of rotten citrus and burning plastic.

A shattered, burning grain elevator ... a roller coaster bursts into flames, throwing screaming passengers like rockets across the Midway. Oil gathers into black pools ... a reek of mineral excrements. There are eerie eddies of calm that can only be experienced in a context of total danger. For this is
it.
You are on your own. You are facing the Second and Final Death. The swampy banks of the Duad are just ahead.

The Duad winds through a vast carnival to the skies, Ferris wheels, tunnels, rides . . . whirlwind riots spring up, leaving a wake of severed limbs, blood, guts and brains ground into the oily streets . . . sinuous, weasel-like creatures with huge eyes snake through the corpses, lapping the blood and eating the brains . . . garish and deadly-real danger behind crude simulation, and seemingly-real danger that covers harmless illusion.

Hall of Mirrors, Tunnel of Horrors, merry-go-rounds, Midways, shooting galleries, animal acts, freak shows, floods, fires, explosions, cheap hotels and eating places, bars, bathhouses, tricksters, steerers, guides, pimps, bright glaring colors, pink and orange and cherry red and purple and pea green, blaring bursts of music, fireworks . . .

Joe is caught in a shower of rockets and Roman candles, a searing pain. Kim's face swims into focus.

"He could just make it."

On this scene fell a sudden chill, as the temperature dropped fifteen degrees . . . freezing sweat, and the sky turned bright green around the rim and then the big cats left their prey to slink whimpering under the boxcars and the rubes fled the stricken field, screaming down the Midway as the hail pelted down big as hens' eggs, knocking holes in the tents. The elephants trumpeted frantically, and then the sound: like a low-flying jet, as the boxcars were tossed about like matchboxes, screaming cats thrown into the air with snakes and freaks and the great tents whipping into the sky, tent pegs whistling like arrows . . . bleachers and seats and rifle ranges, Kewpie dolls and screaming railway cars, caught in a black whirlpool and pulled up into the sky.

A suburban couple, entertaining the Boss, were appalled to see a lion dropped into their rose garden, from which he leapt with a roar of rage to attack a frigid matron, Mrs. Worldly herself. She put up a hand . . .
"Ohhhhhhhh!"
. . .
the lion caved her head in like a thin-shelled, rotten egg. Her brittle old bones shattered on the stone terrace as the caterers and servants fled precipitately, some taking refuge in the house, others scurrying off into the garden.

The cat has caught a fleeing fag who runs an antique shop.
"Help,"
he screams. Now his young lover, son of the host, rushes up with a double-barreled shotgun and blows his lover's head off with one barrel, kills the lion with the other.

"I didn't know what I was doing," he explained to police. "He was my best friend," and threw himself into the stony arms of an old desk sergeant, sobbing wildly.

    Socialite Slays Tornado Lion

   While trying to rescue a friend attacked and thrown to the ground by the Tornado Lion, William Bradshinkle III accidentally shot and killed his friend, Greg Randolph.

   Bradshinkle said he tripped as he rushed to the scene with a double-barreled shotgun. One barrel was discharged, hitting Randolph in the face. The lion ran toward him and he fired the second barrel, killing the lion.

   The youth stated: "I feel terrible about this. He was one of my best friends."

Drawing room of the Bradshinkle home. It is an unfashionable district of north St. Louis, near Forest Park Highlands. However, the property is large, on a limestone hill with trees and gardens, an island of tranquility in the middle of an area of warehouses and factories and blocks of poor workers living in ramshackle frame and old brick rooming houses.

From where they are sitting they look out across a garden and a fish pool to the smoky horizon and a red sunset, a real Turner. The house seems to float over St. Louis like a magic carpet.

Billy is a strikingly handsome young man: dark hair, blue eyes, and a petulant expression of continual discontent.

("Is this supposed to be
life?
How do they dare to serve me such wretched fare? Shit, piss and stink until you get to like it. Life, my dear, is fit only for the consumption of an underprivileged vulture. What am I expected to
do
here?")