The following is an excerpt from Smith’s forthcoming acid western novel.
Clem is a worldly fella, but he’s not much for talking so I get fragments here and there. Got to the West from Russia the long way, rambling in the South Seas, dealing in all manner of bunkum, hokum, and high strangeness. Hodgepodge tales of benevolent shapeshifters and evil medicine men. Cackling headshrinkers. Hunting mythological monsters at dusk with elephant guns. Boiling pots of coffee at dawn on Easter Island. He had sailed into the vast Polynesian Triangle in a dinghy, nothing but rum and the stars above, somehow landed himself on Easter Island. He won’t tell me how he did it. He knows exactly who those big Easter Island heads are supposed to be, too. And how they were built.
“I met them,” he once told me.
That’s all the Russki sonofabitch said about it. He says things like that then imposes a deep silence that only grows with time. Hard to like a man of such omission. But unlike the overzealous goldheads in this town, he keeps his cards close. By the time he arrived on the shores of Baja, he was tinged in tiki horror. Yeah. He’d probably know whether Death was just some headshrink john or not and never say a word about it.
Then he presses me about how I got here, where I came from, how I floated into this strange little town. I don’t answer. He thinks I’m being cagey. He thinks I’m as mysterious and withholding as he. I don’t tell him it’s because I don’t know.
We’re staying in a room above Doyle the Undertaker’s place on the west end of Main Street. Quiet place, Clem says. Looking out the window, I can see the grassy hill that rolls down to the river, whose rushing white noise would typically denote peaceful company. But this here river ain’t right. It possesses a lurid sparkle in the moonlight. During the day, the noise of its rapids too closely resembles the whispering and muttering of human voices. At night, it sometimes utters piercing screams and howls and groans. Horses and dogs won’t go near it. It even gives off a strange, faint odor that mixes with the formaldehyde wafting up through the floorboards. Clem’s a goddamn dog and doesn’t mind the smell, neither does the dame he usually has in his bed humping away. And when their panting and squeaking becomes too much I roll over and say, “Clem, you goddamn dog.”
Pieces of my old life come to me in dreams. Like some lonely amnesiac who’s gold panning in a river, I pick my memories out like gold pieces glittering against the black sand of eternity. They play on vision screens like the movie house. Last night, I dreamt of gun powder and banks as big as cathedrals and cold cash stuffed in burlap sacks. My arm vibrated with tommy gun screams and a man I murdered disappeared in a smoky-bloody flash.
I usually don’t like to stay on Main Street, always too much heat in these gambling hells, and always bad leers from Sueño Saloon regulars passing me on the street, but Clem loves the clamor. Me, I like setting up camp on the outskirts of town, up on the mesa of colorful rock overlooking everything, with a warm fire, hot beans, coffee, close enough to still hear the “civilized” brouhaha but far away enough to sense the looming silence of Void beyond. I’d call it Nature, but I’m not sure that it’s Nature out there. No flora that grows, no fauna that roams. No wild animals, nothing to hunt, nothing. Only thing that flies in the sky is the sacred ibis, it’s always only one—white body, black head, long slender beak, drifting over the rooftops gazing down on us, wings spread, never flapping. Just the one.
Ain’t that strange? What the hell kind of frontier is this, anyway?
Didn’t know what the infernal thing was at first glance. “Sacred ibis,” the gypsy fortune teller mutters as she saunters past me on the street on her way to work. “Millions were sacrificed to Thoth in Ancient Egypt. Had the head of an ibis. God of magic . . . god of judgment of the dead . . . god of writing.”
Curious watchers—as above so below—drunken gunslingers try shooting at the bird when they run out of glass bottles to throw into the air, but the thing never goes down.
Only other creature ’round here is cat. Oh, yeah. This town is lousy with feline. Cats got their own stake here. Not sure how or to what end, but they strut around like they own the place, cake-dusted, eyes godly and jaded and glowing in the dark, sometimes adopting humans, sometimes not, but all the time catching monarchs. Oh, yeah, monarch butterflies flutter a-plenty too. Sometimes they’re the only color around. Deep red-orange wings flutter in the pale cake dust and miasma of cow shit and stale sex and miner sweat hanging in the pre-dawn wake of all-night salooning. A beacon of beauty. Then some feline comes along and snuffs out their freedom. Imagine that. You start as an egg, and then become a caterpillar, then you spin yourself a fine chrysalis, hang upside down in metamorphosizing repose for two weeks in the summer heat, emerge as a butterfly, migrate your rejoicing ass hundreds of miles west over the Rocky Mountains, all for some furry, slit-eyed, fanged fucker to come along with its claws and rip your wings to shreds for its own amusement.
Unspeakable horrors . . . regular as bowel-moving or church-going . . . fit for the alien humor of unseen watchers. Freedom ain’t ever what we want it to be. And not every pilgrim lives to see the golden West. I see dead monarchs shredded in the streets and cats napping up on balconies peacefully. Frontier justice is cosmic justice.
Even Death itself has its cat companion. Bones clack along the wood in front of the dark windows of the closed General Store. Always in the hunting position, the skeleton cat sniffs out living flesh. Passing folk always silently praying they aren’t the one Death’s cat zeroes in on. The dead are always more present than you or I. Death struts cool, cooler than you’d think, more provocateur swagger than a whore on Sunday.
“That ain’t no Death,” an old blind man named Roger Jolly says. “That ain’t no Death. Just a poor soul with no damn skin.”
Maybe Death is just the world’s best headshrink, I think. Collecting shrunken heads ’round his belt and bragging he’s got Ramses II right here in the palm of his hand.
“Death’s a snake oil salesman. Sellin’ ya horseshit,” Roger bellows, sitting at his spot at the end of the bar. “Any man believes that he’ll die is a rube. HA! Death. Sucker. Grim Reaper brown-noser.” Roger growls into his beer mug, giggling, choking, maybe trying to drown himself, “Ruuuube.”
Everyone who’s ever died is right here in this town, or they have been. Or they will be. The dead do not come back . . . necessarily. They just never go away.
Clem and I are tooling along Main Street. Clem’s smacking his lips on penny candy. I can’t get my cigar to light in the evening breeze. The fog’s getting high before it eventually disappears altogether. The fog always starts heavy at dawn but slowly rises as the day progresses and your shadow stretches, before it gives way altogether to the black endless.
We pass the cul-de-sac where the street dead ends at the rotting Opera House, and there, in the grassy center, a public hanging is taking place. The preacher’s wife stands on the gallows next to some poor bastard wearing a noose like a necktie. The executioner stands with his hand on the lever, wearing a black hood as well.
The preacher’s wife is Esther Salter. You’ll do well to remember that name. I don’t know the preacher’s name, no one really does, we all just call him preacher. But everyone sure as shit knows Esther’s name. Poster child for the purity movement here in town. The holy rollers. They call themselves The White Glove. I don’t know how old she is, her visage is one of old and young. Her squinted eyes are in a state of constant rebuke. Her brown Victorian dress matches all the other women in the congregation (you’d often see them praying on their knees in front of a hell on any given night—perturbing customers and enraging barkeeps). Her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun, stretching her skin, wide part down the middle. Between her looks, dress, and temperament, I’m not sure what the preacher ever saw in that caterwauling broad.
I remember a small poem my brother Victor would recite whenever he had to shake hands with a religious sonofabitch.
I never see my rector’s eyes;
He hides their light divine;
For when he prays—he shuts his own,
And when he preaches—mine.
I lean into the ear of some old-timer eating popcorn.
“What’d he do?”
“Huh?”
“The feller on the gallows. What’d he do?”
“Gettin’ hanged for coming back from the dead,” he tells me.
“He’s already been dead?”
“Yep. And came back.”
“Didn’t they hang someone last week, too?”
“Yep. For swearin’ too close to the church.”
I look a few doors down at the Sheriff’s office. A wooden sign saying “out to lunch” hangs in the window.
“What’s eatin’ them, anyway?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“Goddamn White Glove. What’s eatin’ them?”
“They got a vision of Heaven on Earth, Mack. And you and me are the ones standin’ in their way.”
Esther raises the Bible into the air.
“The eye that beholds me will no longer see me!” she hollers to a large group of her pink pig-skinned flock standing up front. “You will look for me, but I will be no more! As a cloud vanishes and is gone, so he who goes down to Sheol does not come back up!”
“What’s that mean, you reckon?” I ask Clem.
“Book of Job. Sheol is abode of the dead . . . underworld where souls go after body dies.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Oh, Mack! Ple-ase,” he says, holding his face in his hands. “Deeply spirrritual man I am,” he grins through his Russian accent. “I believe very much in zis Bog!” He points up at Esther, who glares back at us from the gallows.
“Bog? You mean God, you dumb Russian.”
“Yes! Bog. Aren’t you spirrritual man, Mack?”
I just look at him. I never could tell whether Clem was sincere or when he was a wise guy.
“ . . . Only when the fuzz is hot on my trail,” I answer.
Everyone calls me “Mack” here. I don’t remember my name. I don’t remember giving anyone permission to call me Mack either. My real name was probably something mundane, like Fred or Arthur, as plain as the Midwestern plains from which I surely came.
Esther doesn’t give the poor dead man a chance to speak any last words. I guess when you’re supposed to be dead, you’ve been given all the chances to speak that you’re gonna git. POP goes the trap door and down goes the dead man, struggling against the pull of the rope until, finally, he’s dead again.
♥
Oooooo. Our witching hour valentines arrive. Dolly for me, Juanita Springs for Clem. It’s 3:15 a.m. when I look at my pocket watch. Still half-asleep as Dolly climbs into my bed low and hungry like a mountain lion. She’s dressed down, a meager gingham dress and brown wig of long straight hair that brushes her hips. Probably to conceal her identity from leering White Glove eyes on her way through town. Nothing on now but her lace-up kitten heel boots and black silk stockings covering her knees. The thought of dead bodies lying in wake in the basement below arouses her morbidly. She mounts me and grabs the stiff bulge in my trousers. Buttons unbutton. Throbbing purple snakehead in feminine hands. The wet pearl that forms on the tip. Lost in her blonde pubic hair. The ache of her velvet grip. With the fluid grind of her white hips glowing in the waxing moonlight I slide in deep. She falls naked on top of me, the wet of her lips on mine. I get wafts of rose water. “I ain’t the only cowboy you seen tonight, is I?” and “Shut your fuckin’ trap, Mack,” she moans, with tighter, faster thrusts against my pelvic bone. She’s hissing with mechanical desire, locomotive strong and steady. The smell of hashish tincture and bourbon they brought in with them and leather boots and sweat and feet hang in the air. I look over to see Clem’s silver torso on top, Juanita’s nothing but an open, gasping mouth in the sheets. Clem’s eye comes out of the shadows and meets mine in the moonlight. I can see his beastly grin. Dolly’s squeezing tighter so I turn back, grip and spank Dolly’s ass and spread it wide and she cries out in red-hot pain loud enough to wake the dead. I feel her gush and she floods me and the bed and drips down my sack. She pulls off me and sucks the head up and down and I die a little in a waft of saliva and metallic warmth. The other bed is still rocking violently. Juanita eggs him on. Clem growls scarily and I get the sense of a third party in that there bed. Something between man and woman. Something coming alive. Clem’s eye comes out of the shadows and meets mine in the moonlight. The river outside the window screams.
