“Okay, what’s with him, then? What’s Raka’s story.”
“You ask too many questions, Mr. Hull.”
I guess I’ll take that as a hint
. Hull felt entrenched by the sudden weirdness. Americans in business suits? Some black stoneface in a mojo costume? This was a coke factory in the middle of Peru. But the girl was right; he mustn’t make waves.
Don’t look a gift blimp in the mouth
. As long as Hull got his order, Casparza could have his mystery. He could have his truth and this power and his spirit.
The tour was over. Evening came early here; the jungle darkened in dusk. “I’m impressed,” Hull admitted.
“You should be.”
Hull kept looking at the camp. More men in suits filed out of the big tent. He saw women, too, dressed like Janice. All clearly Americans.
“Don’t worry about it,” Janice repeated. It sounded like a warning. “The world is more diverse than we think, Mr. Hull. It’s really not a world at all, but a whole bunch of worlds.”
“Meaning?”
“This—this place here—is not
your
world.”
Hull stared at her.
“Just remember what Casparza said, Mr. Hull. Remember it well.”
Her cigarette had grown an inch of ash. Hull’s eyes darted from the pendant at her bust to her eyes, always back to her eyes. For a fractured moment he felt seized, or rather bound. He felt tied up by his own confusion.
Her eyes
, he pondered. There was something about her eyes.
Her eyes looked dead.
««—»»
Janice fingered the makak; it seemed to give off heat.
But Janice felt cold.
She raised her nightgown and rubbed the jelly into her sex. K-Y, the tube read. She barely felt it. The night air steamed around her, but she barely felt that either. She did not sweat. She looked at her hand and saw the cigarette burns encrusted between her fingers.
Moonlight eddied in through the window. Hull lay asleep on the bed. Janice drifted in, still not sure what she was doing. So much was instinct now—habits that sat perched behind her life like ghosts. She envied Hull in his sleep.
Real sleep
, she thought.
Hull reminded her of home, whatever that was. He reminded her of life.
“Mr. Hull?” she whispered, leaning over his bed. She shook him gently.
What am I doing
? she wondered.
Why am I here
?
Hull stirred, then his eyes snapped open. “What…?” he murmured. A pause ticked like dripping wax. Then: “Janice?”
She queried him with her eyes, as if viewing not a person but a notion or an idea only partially interpretable.
“Come here,” he said.
She pulled the sheet off and lay beside him. What could she say? I’m lonely, Mr. Hull? You remind me of things? Her fingers closed around his penis. It grew stiff at once. The reaction pleased her; it made her happy: flesh coming to life at her touch. She flinched when he kissed her. His hands felt her body through the nightgown. Again, she wondered if it was the memory of being touched that registered, or the actual sensation. It was like being touched by a ghost.
“You remind me of things,” she whispered.
“What things? Tell me.”
Janice wanted to cry. Possibly she was, though tearlessly. She hitched her nightgown up and straddled him. His penis slipped right into her sex—another ghost.
He reached for the nightgown. “Take this off.”
“No!” she said too quickly.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Janice. I want to see you.”
Beautiful. Woman. See you
. But she didn’t want him to see her. She instead pushed the straps off her shoulders and let the gown slide down to her waist. He began to pump slowly in and out. The makak bobbled between her breasts.
“Christ, your pussy feels good,” he panted. But even this crude remark pleased her, complimented her.
My pussy feels goood.
It made her feel real.
“I’m gonna come so much in you…”
Come. Sperm. Fucking.
Yes, you remind me of things
. What, though? She could remember only in snatches. Each thrust of his penis into her sex pushed a little piece to the surface of her mind. How old had she been? 14? 15? Not an uncommon story. Her father had sodomized her for years. Then she’d run away only to be sodomized by worse people, but by then the drugs held the reins of her life so she didn’t really care. She’d been passed back and forth—for anything. Lots of gang bangs and bondage. Lots of fletching. Many times, her man—his name was ’Rome—brought her up for what he called the “Champagne Special.” She’d have to blow a roomful of men, spitting each ejaculation into a champagne glass; upon completion of course, she’d then consume the contents of the glass in one gulp. Dog shows were another regular entertainment for ’Rome’s dealer friends. Some of the dogs they brought up were quite large and frisky. “Make Fido happy, Janice,” ’Rome had ordered, “or it’s no froggie for you.” The little white rocks were all the motivation she needed, her treasure at the end of the rainbow, day in, day out. Eventually she’d been sold.
And ended up here.
She’d been sold to Casparza as part of a favor. Casparza liked them young, before they got too beat. He owned many girls. He was too fat to effectively have intercourse, but he liked blowjobs and handjobs. He’d lie on his back and hold his massive belly up as the girls took turns. He also liked tongue baths. “Ah, my little lovers,” he’d mutter while several girls slowly licked the greasy sweat off his entire lardacious carriage. Casparza didn’t wash much, which made it worse. Sometimes he’d lie on his belly, two girls holding apart his buttocks as others licked his testicles and anus. Occasionally he would defecate on a girl’s chest—a squatting human whale—and it always seemed to be poor Janice who received the privilege of eating the spicy excrement.
Once a girl got old—20 or so—he didn’t want them anymore. Many were given to the merc camps that patrolled the fields, others simply disappeared. But the lucky ones were saved for special duties. For Raka.
Raka
, she thought, riding up and down.
Hull’s rhythm steepened. “You are one hot box, Janice—Christ.” Her sex made a wet, crinkly noise, like someone eating food. The sensation of motion, of heat and impact, made Janice feel dully elated. Being penetrated—now—was a transposition of sorts, a crossing of matrixes. It put flesh on her memory, life in the space where her heart used to be.
Hull groped for her; he pulled her down, hugging her, as he ejaculated. She could feel his semen spurt into her sex. It felt warm. It was a warm gift he’d given to her, a deposit from one world to another.
She lay back beside him. His finger traced around her breast, then tapped the makak. “What’s this?”
My life
, she wished she could say. “Just a good luck charm.”
“Superstitious, huh? I’ve seen a lot of people around here with these things. At that camp. What is that place, anyway?” When she didn’t answer, he pushed her back. “Let me go down on you. I want to eat your snatch.”
“No!” she objected.
He pulled at the nightgown rumpled about her waist.
“No!” she said, grabbing his hands. “Please don’t.”
“You don’t have anything to be self-conscious about.”
“Just…please…don’t.”
Hull let it rest. He was an attractive man, unabashed in nakedness. He looked clean-cut and professional. He didn’t look like what he was, and she supposed that’s why Casparza liked him.
“How does he do it?” Hull asked her.
“Do what?”
“How does Casparza get his shit out? He can’t be doing it with boats; the U.S. Navy’s all over the coast. And surveillance planes are IRing the major land routes 24 hours a day.”
“He mules the orders.”
Hull leaned up, astonished. “What, commercial air flights?”
“Yes.”
“That’s
crazy
. Customs checks every plane inside and out, and they fluoroscope and sniff every single piece of luggage and hand-carry on every flight. Casparza’s probably moving a thousand keys a month. He can’t possibly be muling through airports, not in this day and age. He’d lose everything.”
“Just don’t worry about it,” she wearied. Her hand returned to his penis; it was hard again in moments, hard and hot and pulsing with life. “Do it to me again,” she said. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do it to you, all right. You’ll like it.” He turned her over, pushed her on her belly, and spat between her buttocks. Yet another memory, not surprising. Then he plugged his penis into her rectum, humping her hard.
’Rome, Daddy, all those other men—no big deal. It made her feel good because it reminded her of things.
She hung partway off the bed. The moon seemed to bob up and down in the window with Hull’s frenetic thrusts. Janice’s hair tossed; the makak danced dangling about her neck. Each impact beat more memories into her head, more life. The ferocious seemed to verify something to her.
This is what people do,
she mused. Hull’s penis was proof of life. She wanted him to come in her again; she wished he could come in her forever, for every time he did was another validation that she was something more than a shadow, more than a ghost.
He shuddered, moaning. Janice felt happy. The warm spurts felt thinner and hotter this time, spurtling into her bowel, and she was so happy she wanted to cry. But then—
—she froze.
The face bled into her—black as obsidian and utterly blank.
Raka’s face.
The priest’s voice, an echoic chord, marched across her mind.
Now
, it commanded.
Still penetrated, Janice slammed the lamp down on Hull’s head.
««—»»
The warped words oozed, spreading.
Truth is power. Spirit is truth
.
The mist of Hull’s consciousness trickled up into the light. His eyes lolled open. Blurred faces hovered like blobs, then sharpened, gazing down. Janice and Casparza. He’d been fucking the girl, hadn’t he? Yes, and then…then…
Goddamn
, he thought when the rest of the memory landed.
He tried to get up but he couldn’t.
“Ah, Mr. Hull.” Casparza’s face loomed. “Welcome back, amigo.”
Hull glanced around. The fuckers had tied him down to a table. He was nude. The hissing light from a dozen gas lanterns licked about drab canvas walls.
The camp,
, he realized.
The tent
.
He was in the big tent.
Janice stood beside the table, wan in her nightgown. Casparza stood opposed, the avalanche of flab straining against his huge shirt.
Standing by a canvas partition was Raka.
“We gain power through spirit, Mr. Hull,” Casparza cryptified. “Raka is an Obeah priest, a Papaloi. He was bred to harness the spirit.”
The black priest stood in total lack of movement, the staring face bereft of life as a wooden mask. He wore a necklace of human fingers, or perhaps pudenda, and the thing that hung from his sash was a shrunken baby’s head. But from his hand something else depended, swaying: one of those little bags on a cord, one of the makak.
“I thought we had a deal,” Hull moaned.
“Oh, we do, Mr. Hull,” the fat man assured. “But you want to know my secret, don’t you?”
“I don’t give a fuck about your secret. Just let me loose.”
“In time.” Casparza’s grin seemed to prop up the bulbous face. He nodded to Janice.
I’m fucked
, Hull realized. He squirmed against his bonds. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that they were going to kill him. But why? He hadn’t crossed any lines. It didn’t make sense. Had some new mover back home put a contract on him? Had someone fingered him as a stool?
“Look, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t know what’s going on. Just let me go. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
Casparza laughed, fat jiggling.
Janice pushed in a wheeled table like a gurney.
Holy motherfucking shit
, Hull thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, and the least human. His eyes felt stapled open. On the gurney lay a corpse: a man, an American. It was pale and naked.
“Janice will show you,” Casparza said. “The power of spirit.”
Hull grit his teeth. Janice very deftly slit open the cadaver’s belly with heavy-gauge autopsy scalpel. She plunged her hands into the rive and began to pull things out. First came glistening pink rolls of intestines, then the kidneys, the liver, stomach, spleen. She tossed each wet mass of organs into a big plastic garbage can. Then she reached up further for the higher stuff—the heart, the lungs. It all went into the can. By the time she was done, she was slick to the elbows with dark, oxygen-starved blood.
“We can fit six or eight keys into the average corpse,” Casparza informed.
Hull frowned in spite of his dilemma. “You’re out of your mind. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Customs has been wise to it for years.”