William S. Burroughs (16 page)

Hey Rube
echoes
through the monumental fraud of Planet Earth
...
the
forbidden knowledge passes from Johnson to Johnson, in freight
cars and jails, in seedy rooming houses and precarious
compounds, in hop joints and rafts floating down the great rivers of
South America, in guerrilla camps and desert tents.

"The game is
rigged! Take the place apart!"

Already the first
crude weapons are being forged in lofts and basements, barns and
warehouses
...
weapons for a new type of
warfare, weapons aimed directly at the driver instead of the craft,
the soul instead of the body. And all physical weapons have their
soul-warfare equivalents...there are soul knives and guns, soul
poisons and mass bombardments that can leave a city of empty bodies
milling around
—
from time to time one
stops and falls, he can't never get up, so they keep walking around
and around in a clockwise direction as one after the other drops...

Kim doesn't want to
keep thinking about the ambush since he isn't ready to take action
yet, but it keeps playing over and over in his brain like a stuck
record...Late afternoon and the sun came out
...
the
town shimmering in the distance like the promised land. Just
riding into town for supplies
...
and the
next thing bullets and shotgun slugs is coming from every side.

Kim found out later
that Mike Chase had tipped the sheriff that the Carsons gang was
going to rob the bank. He didn't tell the sheriff about the special
price Old Man Bickford has on Kim, figuring to take that for himself.
That was Mike. Let others take the chances, then he picks up the
eagles.

Kim had an anthology
of poetry, leather-bound with gilt edges, and a slim volume of
Rimbaud, so he distracted himself with reading.

Yes, he had an
account to settle with a certain bounty hunter named Mike Chase.
"Bookkeeping," he called it. Vengeance is a dish best
savored cold
...
with dewy fingers cold.

Kim had a pint of
cannabis tincture with him, as he was off morphine, and the cannabis
made everything so much sharper. Kim would have been the first to
concede that it also made him silly in an eerie, ghostly sort of way.
Now he strapped on the gun with the silencer in its special holster,
fits like a prick up an asshole and slides out with a little fluid
plop.

His Sperm Gun, he
called it. Spitting death seed, it would father the Super Race. They
are out there, waiting to be born
...
millions
of Johnsons...Certain uh obstacles must be removed...

The
little toy dog is covered with dust,

But
sturdy and stanch he stands;

And
the little toy soldier is red with rust,
...

Awaiting
the touch of a little hand,
...

"Hello, Mike,"
he trills, a ghostly child voice from a haunted attic.

Awaiting
the touch of a little hand.

Kim's face darkens
with death. He goes into a half-crouch as his hand drops and sweeps
the gun up to eye level in a smooth, unhurried movement.

A tubercular cough
from metal lungs. The gun spits smoky blood. White dust drifts from a
hole in a cow skull Kim has set up on a fencepost. Now that cow got
bogged down, used to be quicksand here. Kim can imagine its
despairing moos...He does a hideous imitation of the stricken cow,
throwing his head back, rolling his eyes and bellowing to the sky:
"MOOO MOOO MOOOO
...
as drowsy tinklings
lull the distant folds." Kim reads the poems over and
over
...
"verses trill and tinkle from
the icy streams, and the stars that oversprinkle all the heavens seem
to twinkle with a crystalline delight." He didn't think of it as
vengeance, it was just keeping the ledger books, "as dewy
fingers draw the gradual dusky veil." Verses whisper and
sigh from grass and leaves, "old, unhappy, far-off things/And
battles long ago." Sometimes some lines of verse would light up
a scene from his past, like a magic lantern: "A violet by a
mossy stone/Half hidden from the eye!
—
"

A whiff of stagnant
pond water, and he remembered Old Mrs. Sloane. She had a greenhouse
full of fish tanks with tropical fish, and a big garden. After
supper they used to go over and look at the fish and watch them eat
fish food. Mrs. Sloane was a fat, wheezy woman who was always fanning
herself, and she had two fat wheezing asthmatic Pekingese dogs.

"Foink foink
foink,
"
they would wheeze out.

"FUCK FUCK
FUCK."

Fireflies are coming
out in her garden, among the roses and iris and lilies. A frog plops
into the fishpond. The Evening Star floats in a clear green sky. Two
fireflies light up the petals of a rose, cold phosphorescent green,
delicate seashell pink, a cameo of memory floating in dead stale
time.

It has the garish
colors of a tinted photograph. Kim feels a little queasy looking at
it. He can see it on a Japanese screen in a whorehouse.

Killed in the
Manhattan Shoot-out
...
April
3, 1894...
Sharp smell of weeds from old westerns.

Christmas
1878,
Wednesday
...
Eldora,
Colo...William Hall takes a book bound in leather from a drawer and
leafs through the pages. It is a scrapbook with sketches, photos,
newspaper articles, dated annotations. Postscript by William
Hall:

The Wild Fruits,
based in Clear Creek and Fort Johnson, control a large area of
southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Like latter-day warlords,
they exact tribute from settlers and townspeople and attract
adventurous youth to their ranks.

Mr. Hart starts a
Press campaign.

QUANTRILL RIDES
AGAIN

How long are
peaceful settlers and townspeople to be victimized by a brazen
band of marauding outlaws? Wallowing in nameless depravity, they have
set themselves above the laws of God and man.

Wires are pulled in
Washington. The army is called in to quell this vicious revolt
against the constituted government of the United States.

In charge of the
expedition is Colonel Greenfield, a self-styled Southern Gentleman,
with long yellow hair and slightly demented blue eyes. He has vowed
to capture and summarily hang the Wild Fruits. His cavalry regiment
with artillery and mortars has surrounded Fort Johnson where the
outlaws have gone to ground. The Colonel surveys the fort through his
field glasses. No sentries in the watchtowers, no sign of life. From
the flagpole flies Old Glory, a cloth skunk, tail raised, cleverly
stitched in.

"Filthy
fruits!"

The Colonel raises
his sword. Artillery opens up, blowing the gate off its hinges. With
wild yipes, the regiment charges. As the Colonel sweeps through the
gate, horses rear and whinny, eyes wild. There is a reek of death.
Crumpled bodies are strewn about the courtyard. From a gallows dangle
effigies of Colonel Greenfield, Old Man Bickford, and Mr. Hart. From
the crotch of each effigy juts an enormous wooden cock with a spring
inside jiggling up and down as the dummies swing in the afternoon
wind.

"They're all
dead, sir."

"Are you sure?"

The Sergeant claps a
handkerchief over his face in answer.

Colonel Greenfield
points to the gallows.

"Get that
down from there!"

A cloud of dust is
rapidly approaching...

"It's the
press, sir!"

The reporters ride
in yelping like cossacks. Some even swing down from balloons as they
swarm over the fort, snapping pictures.

"
I
forbid..."

Too late,
Colonel...The story was front-page round the world with pictures of
the dead outlaws...(Hart and Bickford managed to kill the gallows
pictures.) Seems the Wild Fruits had died from a poison potion, the
principal ingredient of which was aconite. A week later the whole
thing was forgotten. More than forgotten
...
excised
...
erased
...
Mr.
Hart saw to that. The effigies had accomplished the purpose for which
they had been designed.

Rumors persisted
...
soldiers had found an escape tunnel
.. .
the bodies found were not Kim and his followers but migrant Mexican
workers who had died in a flash flood...

From time to time
over the years stories bobbed up in Sunday supplements:

MASS
SUICIDE OR MASSIVE HOAX?

The outlaws had
disbanded and scattered. Colonel Greenfield, unable to
accomplish his mission, faked the whole suicide story and buried
fifty mannikins...Kim, Boy, and Marbles keep turning up from Siberia
to Timbuktu.

Cloning was in an
experimental stage at the time of the Big Jump, when the fifty
original Wild Fruits committed suicide at Fort Johnson. We had actual
biologic cuttings stored in refrigerated vaults. Pending the
solution of residual technical problems, we set out to match voice
and genital patterns with existing replicas. Everyone has not
one but many approximate doubles. It is simply a matter of implanted
voice and genital prints. Then the subject is slowly led to remember
the former life of his guest and the two beings merge into one.

Kim Carsons, age
twenty, was one of ten clones derived from Kim Carsons the Founder.
Since he was in contact with approximate replicas of himself and
with other clone families like the Graywoods, the Dahlfars, the
Wentworths, the Summervilles, the Gysins, the Joneses, the Little
Rivers, the Yen Lees and the Henriques, he was under no pressure to
maintain the perimeters of a defensive ego and this left him free to
think.
He was stationed in New York, such assignments being
arranged informally at the family gatherings.

To say Kim Carsons
still lives is to pose the question: what does this mean? His thought
patterns live in a number of different brains and nervous systems,
his speech and genital patterns, all of which are distinctive. No two
people have the same voice or the same cock. The clones exist in a
communal mind in which the bodies are at the disposal of all the
others, like rotating quarters.

As the guests arrive
and are met at the train by the driver, we see how varied the Carsons
Family actually is. There are blonds and redheads and
oriental-looking youths and blacks and Indians resulting from various
recombinant techniques.

Their part is easy
to play. They are the guests, down from the north or up from the Deep
South or in from the West, millionaires who own the county the
sheriff and the townspeople. There is Kim with his father mother and
younger brother getting off the train with an unmistakable air of
wealth and quiet self-possession. Porters stagger under their
luggage. Kim gives them each a bright new dime. They snarl after him.

"Little prick.
Wait till he has to play porter."

For the roles
rotate. You can be
fih de famille
today and busboy
tomorrow
—
son cosas de la vida.
Besides it's more interesting that way. Kim loves to play
the acne-scarred blackmailing chauffeur or the insolent bellhop
tipped back in a chair, his face flushed from drinking the bottle of
champagne he has delivered.

"What is the
meaning of this?" Tom snaps...The boy rubs his crotch and smiles
and insolently squirts Tom in the crotch with a soda siphon.

"Oh sir, you've
had an accident." He bustles around, loosening Tom's belt
and trying to shove his pants down.

"What the
bloody hell are you doing?"

"Just changing
your didies, sir."

Or maybe Tom is
coming on and Kim the bellboy is playing it cool.

"Oh sir, I
couldn't
sit down at the table with you. I knows me place,
sir, if you'll pardon the expression, sir."

This system of
rotating parts operates on the basis of a complex lottery...Some
people achieved a lottery-exempt status for a time but for most
it was maybe a month, often less, before they got the dread call.
Turn in your tycoon suit and report to casting.

The Johnson Family
is a cooperative structure. There isn't any boss man. People know
what they are supposed to do and they do it. We're all actors and we
change roles. Today's millionaire may be tomorrow's busboy.
There's none of that ruling-class old school tie..."Hey boy,
manicure my toenails and look sharp about it
...
and
you, boy, don't slack at the ceiling fan, I'm sweating my bloody
balls off
...
saddle my horse, nigger..."