William S. Burroughs (9 page)

Scarf like rust on
marble. Stagnant slate-green color in houses shut in by trees and
gardens. He smells a whiff of brimstone and carrion in the late
afternoon light red hair and the sun washing a windowsill and the
rust of freckles red hairs washing legs red brown rectum sudden raw
hard-on.

There is an
emptiness. Breath comes in with that incurious gaze like ice on fire
in the light. I can. Sweet dry wind clothes are paper. A naked youth
about sixteen. Breath came in with his reflection. Rubs his crotch
and grins.
Quien es?

"You dry enough
to turn? Rubbing the cream up you."

Carbolic soap lean
buttocks a dead green sunlight. Puff of orange knees. What ass
kicking hi? The light. I can. Sweet thirst.
Quien es?
Stagnant
slate-green color a flash of violet light. Sweet clean feeling of
trees and gardens he smiles with the leaves late afternoon sunlight
red hair his feet through dead leaves washing legs. Face to the west.
My picture in the light. I can. Old paper. A naked youth about
somehow his timeless enchanted reflection.

Kim woke up with the
impression of a wide, white grin and a whiff of carrion erased in
light. Early morning. He lay naked on his bunk, looking at the shiny
white paneled ceiling, listening to the sound of running water and a
mourning dove calling from the woods.

He stretched and
arched his body, looking down at his erect phallus. He only wished
there was someone here to take his picture like that, one on the bed
with his back arched up, stretching and mewling like a cat and
squirming around on his ass, and now one sitting on the edge of his
bunk, gun, shells, kerosene lamp and
Confessions of an English
Opium Eater
visible on the night table, and now Kim, still naked
with a hard-on, levels his gun at the camera. This would be a
tasteful series called
Summer Dawn,
to appear on bedroom walls
throughout America, yes all over the world too
...
he
collapsed back onto the bunk, kicking his feet in the air in an
ecstasy of exposure, sighting the gun between his knees as he sings:

"Einer
Mann, einer Mann, einer RICHTIGER Mann.
"

Finally he sat up
with a petulant expression and reached for his pants. Why wasn't
Denny here when he wanted to get fucked? Why, it could be a deluxe
special edition for naughty old gentlemen in rooms lined with yellow
silk and lampshades of tattooed human skin. Oh well, he could always
walk up to town, only four miles. He touched his cock lovingly as if
to say "later," pulled his pants up, drew water at the sink
in an enameled basin with roses on it, and washed his face and neck
with carbolic soap.

On the porch he got
three eggs from the icebox, with a jug of cider, cold with the mellow
slightly rotten juiciness of Missouri apples and a few
yellowjackets crushed in for tartness. Smell of bacon, eggs and
coffee.
Young Boy Eating Breakfast
for the dining room. Kim
knew what he was doing. He had read about it in a yoga book. It was
known as Vipassana, being aware at all times of what you are doing.

Kim washes the
dishes. Everything shipshape. He decides to pack the guns and the
sulfur candles into his "alligator." It will be much more
like coming back to the old homestead after a long mysterious trip,
like his father used to make. Of course, he keeps one gun out to
wear. Young boys were sometimes carried off and raped by Indians. The
44
Russian, he decides.

The path is littered
with red flint chips and winds steeply upward through blackberry
vines. Kim stops here and there to pick a particularly luscious
blackberry with cool deft fingers to avoid the thorns. He
deliberately smears the red purple juice around his mouth, "like
a whore's makeup."

Over a rise, and
there is the house at the top of the hill. It is fairly large, two
stories and a balcony running across the front from which there is a
view of the river. At one time there had been a narrow-gauge railway
along the river, which is now overgrown with weeds and brush.
The bridges over the swamps and tributary streams remain, and there
is always good fishing under them for rock bass and perch. Kim walks
up to the door under the balcony and knocks three times. He opens the
door.

"Anybody home?"

A musty smell of the
empty house is the only answer. Kim walks inside.

The house had
originally been planned on rather a grand scale, suitable for the
manor house of a plantation. What had been intended as the downstairs
drawing room is now a sparsely furnished living and dining area. The
downstairs back rooms, intended as servant quarters, were simply
not used except in the summer, when his father used them as extra
studios. He liked to paint all over the house in different lights.
There had been plans to install a flush toilet with a regular
bathroom, but this had never been done. Kim walks from room to
room, selecting things he wants to take down to the boathouse,
calculating the number of sulfur candles he will need and putting
them out ready to light in metal trays set on bricks.

And now upstairs,
rather an impressive staircase with banisters of polished
walnut. Lovingly Kim runs his fingers over the smooth brown
knots
—
like rectums, he thinks with a
depraved smile, posing for a shot of the boy remembering how good it
felt sliding down the banister as a child, the smooth wood rubbing
his crotch. Upstairs there are two back bedrooms, one used by Kim and
the other by his father. The front of the house upstairs had been
converted into his father's studio.

Now Kim turns left
down the hall to the studio. Like an empty stage set. A sofa and an
armchair covered in green satin, a workbench littered with brushes,
palettes and tubes of paint, a rack for canvases and paintings. The
easel is empty. Kim sits down on the sofa, looking down to the river.

Kim's memory of his
past life is spotty. Sometimes he feels he is getting someone else's
memories. There is an incestuous episode with his mother in a seaside
hotel. He is standing on a balcony in his bathing trunks. His face is
clouded and sulky. His mother appears in the doorway behind him,
dressed in a blue kimono...

"I want to
sketch you. Cuppy."

He twitches
irritably
...
"Oh not now, Mother, I
want to

take a bath and
change for dinner...
"

"I want to
sketch you naked, Cuppy."

"Naked,
Mother?"

But that couldn't
have happened because Kim had never been to the seaside. Actually his
mother was a bit dotty, into Ouija boards and tarot cards and crystal
balls and she drank six bottles of paregoric every day and her room
reeked of it.

His father seemed
remote and veiled with an enigmatic sadness. He traveled frequently
on "company business." Expense account suggested illness.
Illness was radium poisoning.

He remembered the
occasions when he was allowed to shoot his father's
36
cap-and-ball revolver. It was kept in a mahogany case
with silver clasps and hinges, all lined with green felt and a place
for the revolver, the conical bullets covered with thick yellow
grease to prevent multiple discharge, the percussion caps, the bullet
molds. The revolver had a double trigger, the lower one cocking the
weapon and the upper one, which had a very light pull, fired the
shot.

On his twelfth
birthday he hit the target six times, death in his hands, grinning
through the smoke. His boy grin lit up, dazzling, radiant,
portentous as a comet, smelling immortality in powder smoke.

Kim is with a boy of
about his own age. He can't see the boy clearly but they have known
each other for a long time. They are standing on the railroad bridge
over Dead Boy Creek. The water runs still and deep here and they can
see fish stirring. The boy is teaching Kim to fly. He soars over the
water and lands on a path. Kim stands poised, thinking he can't, and
suddenly he is in the air, sweeping in to land on the path. Now they
crisscross back and forth across the stream, higher now over the
trees, they can see the field leading up to the house on the hill
where Kim lives. There is a balcony that runs across the front of the
house facing down toward the railroad and the river. The balcony is
supported by two marble columns which his father had acquired when
the old courthouse was torn down. Against the darkening sky it looks
like a painting.
The House on the Hill...
He is in the house
now, in the hallway that leads to the studio, telling his father how
he has learned to fly...

"We have no
such powers, my son," his father says sadly.

They are on the
balcony. A smoky red sunset over the river. Now an engine comes
in sight, two black men are stoking the fire and pounding each other
on the back...Kim can make out the name
Mary Celeste...
Slowly
like a parade of floats another ship moves by...
The
Copenhagen...
Kim smiles and waves...

His father watches
with the sad eyes of a guardian whose role it is to nurture and
protect a being greater than himself. He knows that the boy must go
and that he cannot follow. The track is overgrown with weeds now.

Kim puts out two
trays of sulfur candles ready to light, closes the french doors
leading onto the balcony, and caulks them as best he can with paper.
My father's bedroom. Enter. The room is empty except for the bed, a
chair, a dresser, a pair of workpants stained with paint hanging on a
wooden peg. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I remember, I
remember, into his own bedroom the little window where the sun
came peeping in at morn. He sets out the tray.

He had once found a
scorpion crawling on his bed, and a boy from a neighboring farm,
Jerry Ellisor, had been bitten by a brown recluse. A few days after
being bitten, Jerry came to visit Kim, and Kim asked him up to his
room.

"Where did it
bite you?"

The boy giggles.
"Well, uh, it's in a kinda funny place."

"Show me,"
said Kim firmly. He knew this boy was very tractable and would do
whatever anyone told him to do if he used the right tone.

The boy blushes and
drops his pants. He is wearing no shorts. He sits down on the bed and
points to a spot on his inner thigh near the crotch, a sort of crater
of red-purple flesh, black toward the center. Kim sits down beside
him and touches the bite gently. The boy licks his lips and slips Kim
a startled glance. Kim can see the blood rush to the boy's crotch.

"Did it hurt?"

"Not until
later. I was sick all over."

"Well, it's a
good thing he didn't bite you here." He touches the crown
of the boy's cock, which is already slightly tumescent...

"Or here."
He turns the boy's cock over and touches the spot just below the
crown in front. "Or here." He touches the boy's tight nuts.
The boy is getting a hard-on. He leans back on his elbows, his cock
arching up and pulsing.

"Hey, let's see
you naked too."

"All right."

Kim strips and
stands naked in front of the boy and looks at him appraisingly
through narrowed eyes. His cock is getting stiff. He sits down beside
the boy, who feels his cock and says, "Be careful a Brownie
don't bite you here." Kim rolls him back on the bed tickling him
and the boy rolls around laughing uncontrollably.

He lights the
candles in the two back rooms, picks up the canvases in the studio,
and lights the candles there and downstairs, shuts the doors and
puts signs on with skull and cross-bones.

danger
do not enter, fumigation in progress

He puts the
44
back in his bag, takes out the
38,
picks up his "alligator" and walks down to the outhouse,
stopping to put six small condensed-milk cans on top of a stone wall
opposite the door of the outhouse, feeling the slow movements of his
intestines, rather like a great brown river he thinks, like I had the
Amazon inside me
—
liquid gurglings and
seeps and slops. The outhouse is under an apple tree. His father said
it would make the best apples and Kim used to plant morning glories
to climb over it. He opens the door. Inside are two seats side by
side with covers. He lifts the covers, running his hands lovingly
over the smooth yellow oak
—
he'd
sandpapered it and waxed it himself. He looks down into the pit and
there is just a faint rotten smell of lime. He puts the "alligator"
in front of the other seat, takes off his shirt and hangs it on a
peg. He drops his pants and sits down on the seat with the gun in his
hand. He poses for a picture entitled
The Long Journey.
Kim
waves.