Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Page 4

  “Whatever you remember most vividly.”

  He looked up at the ceiling and squinted his eyes. He could see Craig strumming his guitar while the firelight flickered on his burn-scarred forehead. The Learned Doctor plunked the African thumb harp and passed the roach, coughing up phlegm from his rotting lungs. And there was Frog, six-feet-four of friendly fat, filling his pipe with cinnamon-red Kona curls. Three puckered scars like rooster’s assholes ran diagonal across his bloated belly and you wondered how the slugs went through without killing him. Lona floated up out of the lagoon with water hyacinth in her hair, I laid her in the warm sand and her skin was cool but inside she burned …

  “Let’s go on to the next question.”

  “All right. Why did you leave?”

  “Wo got rousted.”

  “What?”

  “Busted. Popped. The greasers gave us the heave-ho.”

  “Do you remember well enough to describe the scene?”

  Yes, he remembered. The Mexican Secret Service raided the camp, guns drawn and fingers itching to blast holes in gringo-meat, the L.D. stood in the door of the hut, toking up on a final joint and passing it down, saying, “Make it last, Danny, it’s gonna be a sweaty scene.” And Oh, Man, he was right, sixteen weeks in a potato cellar, you had to stand in a crouch, there was no room to sit down, and every time you breathed you took in a lungful of farts because there was nothing to eat but beans and tortillas. And then Debra came down looking stiff and pale, telling me it cost her husband a thousand bucks and why didn’t I settle down and make something of myself—for mama’s sake if nothing else. Mama’s dead, I told her, and her eyes got that cold oyster look and I knew it was time to quit talking because she’d quit listening …

  “Debra?” the psychiatrist asked. “Who—?”

  “My sister.”

  “I see. What was the age difference, exactly?”

  “Three hours.”

  She lifted her brows. “Oh. I didn’t know you were twins. I got the impression she was … older.”

  “She was, physically. She developed a couple years before I did. Could be that’s where I got hung up in pubic hair.”

  “Could be. Go on.”

  “Well, my brother-in-law had a hundred and sixty acres of woods in the Ozarks. I saw myself as the Old Coyote, you know, silent shadow of the forest. I camped in a lean-to until Boots—my brother-in-law—started coming up with ideas on how to improve my living standard. He figured anything I did would add to the land value. So I built a cabin and got a bulldozer in to dam up the creek so I could bathe. When it froze over I used to wade in slowly and break the ice ahead of me with a stick—”

  “Why did you—?”

  “With my asshole clenched up like a knotted rubber band. Excuse me. You had a question?”

  “I was wondering why you didn’t heat water for bathing.”

  “Oh, well—I was trying to kick. I mean, the reason i got into dope was to stop the pain. So I figured I had to learn how to endure … Does that make sense? I wasn’t exactly flying blind, you know. I was into Yoga, not one of those heavy guru-worship scenes like they get into here, but I studied the books and did exercises.”

  “I was under the impression that one had to have a guru.”

  “Yeah well, that’s guru-propaganda. They try to create jobs for themselves. Like the Jesus people say you gotta go through Jesus to make contact with God, which is totally pure unadulterated shit—look, this whole thing is pointless.” “How do you mean, pointless?”

  “Talking about God. Talking, period. What can it possibly accomplish? You couldn’t spring me from this place, could you?”

  “I’m only a staff psychiatrist. I couldn’t get you out without a staff conference, and even then—you know why you’re here, don’t you?”

  “So I won’t endanger society by smoking dope out in the woods by myself.”

  “You’re here because the circuit court—”

  “Because the judge wants you to turn me into an institutional robot so I’ll sit quiet in court and not wake up the jury. Shit, what’s the use? Talking to your goddam machine. Or even to you. You’re telling me you’re just one of the gears. You sit there smiling and pretty as all hell but you’re no more responsive to me than those steel bars they’ve got on our quaint little homelike cottages—”

  “Would you like to go back on Thorazine?”

  “Right. We’re having a nice informal conversation and the minute I start expressing myself off comes the velvet glove.”

  “It wasn’t a threat. You seem agitated.”

  “How can you say that? I’m smiling. You want me to act the way I feel?”

  “You can’t avoid it, in the long run.”

  “So if I feel like killing somebody, I should go ahead and do it?”

  “No, but you should recognize the urge and deal with it.”

  Recognize the urge and deal with it. The phrase rolled around his mind while he looked at her. “Suppose I had an urge to grab the lapels of your neat white clinical blouse and pull ‘em apart? And spilled those beauties right out into the light. And then hooked my fingers under the waistband of those creased flared slacks and jerked them down to your knees? And then grabbed your ankles and held your feet in the air while I shove about eight stiff ones right up your juicy twat? How do I deal with that?”

  The pencil she held between her fingers was flexible; instead of snapping, it bent into a broad V. She got up and walked to the window, stood with her back to him. A squirrel chittered in the fork of a pin-oak tree. He saw smoke from a diesel rig pluming up through the cut of the interstate a mile away.

  “You know what’s going to happen to you?” She turned. “You’ll be staffed next Wednesday. You’ll be returned to the county jail, and you’ll stand trial. I don’t know what will happen in court, but the paper said they found two hundred and seventy-some pounds of marijuana growing not far from your cabin.”

  “They weighed it wet. With dirt on the roots.”

  “Never mind that. They’re going to try you on a felony charge. You could get ten years.”

  “Whaddaya mean, I could get ten years? You mean I I could lose ten years. On top of that my whole life is fucked up, I don’t vote, I don’t get a passport, I don’t get a decent job, and on top of that I get a bunch of fat-assed jock-strap smellers coming around every month to find out why I can’t make it in this wonderful society—”

  “That’s exactly my point.”

  “What is your point? I missed it.”

  “Just that it’s time you took some responsibility for your life. Don’t you think so? All the things you’ve done since coming here—stirring up the patients, faking amnesia, refusing to participate in our rehabilitation program, and this last rather pointless, vulgar outburst—none of this is going to make any difference. It happens all the time. We’ve got a name for it.”

  “Name for what?”

  He was smiling, his lips tilted, mocking.

  “For that kind of activity—faking psychosis in order to escape responsibility.”

  “So what is this name?”

  “Ganser’s syndrome.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got labels on everything, haven’t you” Got one on me yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Schiz?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ve got the symptoms. Separation of mind-body. I go out through my right ear. Then I float around in the air and look down the front of women’s dresses. Like I’m looking down the front of yours right now, Elizabeth. You’ve got nice boobs, you know that?”

  She clamped her lips into a tight line, walked back to the chair and picked up her pencil. “I’ve only got a few more minutes. Let’s try to use it productively. You were … uh, wading into the pond, breaking ice ahead of you with a stick. Would you like to proceed from there?”

  “You know, I never heard anybody your age talk so square.”

  Her head came up sharply. “What age do yo
u think I am?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “I’m thirty-one.”

  “And still a virgin.”

  She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Hardly. I was married for three years.”

  “And you divorced him?”

  “He died.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” That’s a lie, he thought, but what should I say? So what? He cleared his throat and draped one knee over the other. “Well, those first months in the woods I didn’t miss dope because it took all my mind to stay alive. But then I built the cabin. I can identify that as my first mistake. Then the Learned Doctor came up from Mexico, carrying my books and records and everything else he’d salvaged from the bust. Pretty soon I was reading Yoga instead of practicing it. And to get music I had to bring electricity into the cabin. When I got high I’d see that black wire and realize I’d done the very thing I’d gone to the woods to avoid. I’d plugged myself into the machine.”

  She looked up from his folder. “You got high? I thought you were trying to kick.”

  “I was. I did. This was just weed—some very highgrade grade stuff from San Luis Potosi. The Learned Doctor had a bag which he split with me. There wasn’t much, so I used it very sparingly. Weed’s no problem anyway.”

  “It isn’t?” Lifting her brows.

  “Well I mean, it’s not a hooker.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Psychologically maybe, but … look, do you mind if we just go on? I always get a sense of futility trying to explain it because it would be so much easier to, you know, just hand you a joint.”

  “All right. Let’s go on. Everything was going fine until the Learned Doctor came. Why did you call him that?”

  “Well he’d get into that pose, you know—deliver these educated opinions on matters. I think he had some degrees in the medical field, I dunno. His real name is Tom … something. We never went in for last names. I guess I’ve heard it but I forgot. I’ve forgotten a lot of things.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know you’ve forgotten if you don’t remember?”

  “Jesus, that’s a tricky one. Well, I have these gaps in my memory. Like when you cut a piece out of a roll of wallpaper and then try to put it back together. The flowers don’t match, you know?”

  “I see. Well, suppose we just take it in sequence. After Tom left … then what?”

  “After that I began heating water for my bath, doing my pranayama in a supine position, cutting meditation time to three hours a day so I could work on my Japanese bridge. By spring I had it finished. I got an electric pump which carried water up the hill and then let it run down over a cataract of stones. About this time Boots got interested. He saw the cabin as a great place to bring a broad. He brought out some phony leapard skins which I threw in the ditch. He’s too busy for minor things like foreplay, wanted the chicks to start pulling down their pants the minute they stepped inside the cabin …”

  “Your sister, did she know?”

  “About Boots playing around? I doubt if she cared, really. She’s got her own scene. Her house was written up in Better Homes and Gardens. She brought a tear sheet out to the cabin. All I did was ask if it made her happy. I imagine she’s happy now.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh … she always expressed a great admiration for my brain, like it wasn’t really mine, but some kind of family heirloom which had mistakenly come into my possession. Now I’ve blown my inheritance and she’s still got hers. That’s the way she’d look at it.”

  “You mean because you were sent here?”

  “I mean the whole balance sheet. Medical discharge. Deported from Mexico. Busted for grass. She’ll feel quietly happy that she hasn’t got the kind of finely tuned sensitive brain that blows up under stress. I’m just telling how she sees it.”

  “How do you see it?”

  “I see it like when you’re walking across a barnyard and you don’t watch where you put your feet, you step in shit. Though it’s hard for me to figure exactly what I did wrong. I didn’t have much to do with the local Citizens—maybe that’s it. Citizens don’t like to be ignored.”

  “Didn’t you have visitors?”

  “Sure—out-of-town freaks I’d known here and there. They’d find out where I was and drop by for two or three days.”

  “Girls?”

  “Sometimes there’d be an extra female with the bunch, and if we made it together, fine. Sometimes one would stay on after her bunch left—but sooner or later they all thought of something they had to do elsewhere. So they moved on. I usually didn’t give them another thought. It was the way things were, casual.”

  “But did you wipe them completely from your mind? I can’t believe that.”

  “Well, I remember Christina. Shall I tell you about her?”

  “Please do.”

  “She came to my woods a couple of summers ago with a college bunch from Colorado. It wasn’t exactly a love idyll. She was a large girl, heavy on sentiment. Called her acid trips ‘divine madness.’ I don’t know what kind of place she went into. When the summer ended she walked through the woods breaking sticks in her hands and trying to decide whether to go or stay. She wanted something from me, but I couldn’t give it to her. So she went away and never came back.”

  “You know what she wanted?”

  “I think—some kind of roseate vision of the future. Or … I’m not sure. Forgiveness, maybe. She came to me pregnant and she dropped acid because she’d heard it would make her miscarry. She didn’t take it with her group, or even with me, but a week after they left she took it alone and went off in the woods. I found her with a dead baby between her legs and milk spurting from her breasts. I spent half the summer trying to pull her out of that … no, I don’t want you to think my motives were altruistic. I wanted to help her, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. I was into the Tantric ritual and I needed a female partner, a yogini.”

  “I don’t quite understand that.”

  “Well … you make it through sex.”

  “I see. What is it you accomplished?”

  “Never mind.”

  “No, really. Orgasm?”

  “No. Yes—in a sense. The orgasm. The big awakening. Realization, enlightenment, satori …

  “I see. And did it work?”

  “Well … almost. I remember one day we were lying out on the bridge and I was in her all the way and she had her yoni clamped down like a trap and we’d been slow breathing for fifteen minutes, our minds centered on the root chakram. I was making it and I think she was, at least I could hear that long, even rise of her breathing, and felt the waves of slow fire rising up my spine, knowing that if she moved her hips one fraction of a centimeter the whole scene would blow. I’d had a helluva time teaching her not to wiggle her ass, because it went against all her education—but she was doing it right, and I felt the linkage down low, two fires, one inside her and one inside me melting together, and then the fire wasn’t down there anymore, it was burning a track up my spine to the back of my skull … I use the possessive case but it wasn’t my skull anymore, it was just a skull somewhere which I didn’t need anymore because I was out—but then she moved those big earth-mother hips and I felt the physical orgasm sucking me back inside. I was lying on my left side and she on her back with her left ankle gripped between my knees and my arm sort of twined around under her right knee. This locks you up tight and helps you break up the habit pattern of the everyday fuck. The big orgasm wasn’t what I’d had in mind, you’re supposed to clamp down hard and force the reproductive energy up your spine and into the brain, and even if you start to come you can sometimes pull it back and lift it up the spine by concentration. That’s if you’re not too far out, which I was. When it was all done and we were both lying there giggling … It was okay this time, and maybe next time—it’s never a failure, you know—I said something like, I was out for a minute, and she said, she was sorry, but they surprised her. Who? The
people. And I look to see my sister trying to get her two kids up the hill—they’re looking over their shoulders at our scene on the bridge, and my sister isn’t making much time because she’s trying to see too. I started to yell at her but then I saw another woman with her wearing a white dress and white gloves. I had my labels ready and pasted it on her right quick, Church lady, and the yell fell back down between my tonsils. I could make it with my sister, I mean, within a few minutes she’d be laughing, even though she had some weird, square ideas on how to raise kids. It was the other lady who loused it up; they’ve got nothing to do in that suburb where she lives but swill coffee in the morning and booze at night and talk about who’s balling whom, and my sister’s got this terrible hangup about being talked about. So I let her go rather than walk up to her and her friend wet dick a-dangle, and we never really got tight again, until after my bust. Even then behind all that weepy wet-eyed shit there was the hard glitter of worry about what the fucking neighbors would think. I doubt if all this detail on my sister is pertinent. Do you think it is?”

  “Obviously, since you brought it up. What was your childhood relationship with your sister?”

  “… Normal.”

  “You had intercourse with her?”

  “Oh for God’s sake—!”

  “Well, you said normal.”

  “That’s normal?”

  “You’re the one who used the term. I don’t know what you consider normal.”

  “Normal in our case … we did things together, sure.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, like …” He shifted his legs and scratched his ear. “I remember there was this family that lived down the road from us. Two boys about my age and a younger sister. I was about nine. We made a little house in a brush pile. Covered it over with dead grass. The girls … we made it up that if any of them joined the club they had to fuck. We were just playing grownup games. So this neighbor girl and my sister … they said okay. We let ‘em inside and I remember this other girl … her name was Ethel, didn’t know what was expected of her. We kind of had a rule, no brothers and sisters. So I got Ethel and my sister Debra was supposed to take care of the neighbor boys. Actually the younger kid was too young to even consider seriously. But she wouldn’t. This was after Ethel and I had—”