William S. Burroughs (12 page)

The boys are naked,
kneeling side by side as they draw a map in the soft red-sand floor.
Kim's tongue sticks out the side of his mouth as he concentrates
tracing the route his horse must take and the other horse must
follow. From time to time the Chinese boy corrects the map. The map
is finished. The Chinese boy grins sideways into Kim's face.

"Me flucky
asshole?"

Kim straddles the
map on all fours.

The Chinese boy
twists a finger up his rectum.

"This Tiger
Balm. Velly good velly hot. Make horsey run...
"

He slides his thin
hard cock in. Kim rears backward, making hooves with his hands
and pawing the air. Then he pretends to gallop as the boy fucks him
with a riding motion, jogging Kim's shoulders with his hands.

Kim bares his teeth.
Strawberry hives break out on his neck, back and nipples. A reek of
horseflesh fills the hogan as Kim comes in a shuddering screaming
whinny. His horse streaks ahead of a distant posse.

Cut back to Bat
Masterson..."Yep he'd killed Old Man Bickford's kid, and
Bickford had thirty guns on his payroll. Had to keep moving after
that."

Wetting a pencil
with his lips Kim writes in his diary:

"What I have
learned today...Never turn your back on the bartender. He will side
with the locals every time since that's where his money is. Best
thing is shoot him straightaway. Only fools do those villains pity
who are punished before they have done their mischief."

Horse whinnies
softly outside. Kim pulls on his pants and boots. They decide to
split up and meet at Clear Creek in one month.

Kim stands in the
doorway of a saloon. Bearded man at the bar goes for his gun as the
bartender reaches under the bar for his sawed-off. Kim draws and
shoots the bartender in the chest. The other man's shot whistles past
him and slams into the belly of a horse at the hitching rail
outside...

Before the man can
recock his single-action
45
Kim kills him
with two quick shots in the stomach.

"Just as you
know before you shoot when you are going to miss, you know when
someone else is going to miss. I knew the beard's shot was a miss so
I took care of the bartender and his shotgun first.

"Always take
care of a shotgun first.
"

When Kim and Red Dog
walk into the Nugget Saloon, everybody stops talking. The
bartender is halfway down the bar, going through an elaborate
pantomime of looking for a special bottle to serve a special
customer. Kim stops behind the bartender and leans on the bar,
facing the door, after making sure there is no one behind him.

"Two beers
here, barkeep."

"You say
something?" the bartender asks without turning around.

"You heard me.
Two beers chop chop right away pronto
cold
sabe?
Fresca
..."

The bartender has
found what he was looking for
—
a
bottle of Southern Comfort. He starts back up the bar with the bottle
in his hand.

"We don't serve
Injuns here and we don't serve Injun lovers...Now I'm going to
serve a gentleman."

"You'll serve
us first."

The bartender is
pouring with his left hand as his right hand snakes under the bar for
his sawed-off ten-gauge shotgun. Red Dog's
32-20
mercury bullet tears through the bartender's fingers, shatters the
bottle and lodges just below the ribs. The bartender reels back,
clutching broken glass with a reek of peach brandy.

Five men are fanned
out blocking the door. Kim picks the one who hadn't turned a hair
when Red Dog shot the bartender, narrow-shouldered man with pale
eyes, wearing a deputy's badge. His gun is coming up fast. Kim pivots
sideways and the slug grazes his belt buckle.

"Ole!"
screams Red Dog.

Kim shoots the
lawman in the solar plexus. He doubles forward with a grunt,
spitting red flashes of hate from dying eyes. Kim shoots another
turkey in the neck. He falls, screaming blood through his shattered
windpipe. A bearded man falls slowly forward with a dreamy
Christlike expression, a blue hole between his eyes from Red
Dog's
32-20,
brains spattering out the back
of his head like scrambled eggs.

Killing can become
an addiction. Kim wakes up thin. He's gotta get it one way or
another. Small town, not many candidates. But that pimply-faced
ugly-looking kid has potential. Gotta be careful not to start
it. Don't give him the eye. The kid walks over and leans on the bar,
looking at Kim with his insolent piggish little eyes.

"I hear you're
quite a bad hombre."

"I never said
so."

Kim is shivering
slightly. A raw musky ferret smell reeks off him. Killer's fever,
that's what it is, but the kid is too dumb to read the signs. The kid
backs away, reaching.

YESSSSSSSS, Kim's
44
Russian leaps into his hand. He can feel his way into the
kid's stomach with the slug and the kid grunts doubling forward, a
grunt you can feel. Is it goooood.

Now the kid slumps
to the floor in a
delicious
heap.

I saw him in a
gunfight once. Wasn't much of a fight. Just a punk looking for a
reputation: he killed Kim Carsons. Not so young. About thirty. Kim
never cut notches, he said it ruined the gun butt, and his were all
special-made to his hand in ebony, ironwood, rosewood, teak and thin
metal, copper, silver and gold.

We are coming out of
the general store, got a porch, two wood steps down to the street.
Kim must have seen the punk out there because just as he walks out
the door he says
...
"Mind carrying
these," and hands me a bag of groceries. (We is sharing a room
at the time.) We walk out and there is this fat-faced slob just
beyond the porch.

Kim stands there,
eyes watchful, perceiving, indifferent hands limp at his sides,
waiting. Don't know why it didn't occur to me to take cover, like we
are on the stage and my part is to stand there with a brown paper bag
in my hands and then I felt it. A sudden icy cold that froze the
sweat on my shirt, it was a hot June day, above ninety...

"You fucking
fairy!" the man bellows, snatches out his gun and gets off two
shots, broke the store window two feet above Kim's head. Kim pays no
attention, just sweeps his gun up to eye level and shoots the man
where his stomach hangs over his belt...The man doubles forward
retching, and Kim shoots him in the forehead and turns to me.

"From
humanitarian considerations...
"

He drops his gun
back into its holster and brushes a shard of glass off his shoulder.

He wasn't at all
that fast..."I never shoot until I'm sure of a hit," he
told me. "There's a certain length of time in which you can draw
aim fire and
hit.
That's
your
time. If someone else's
time is faster, you've had it."

Some shooters are
perfect on the range, can't hit in a gunfight. Kim wasn't a good
range shooter at all. Just average. He said it didn't interest him,
like checkers. He didn't like any games, never gambled.

Kim got off the
stage at Cottonwood Junction. The stage was going west and he wanted
to head north. Sometimes he decided which way to go by the signs, or
his legs would pull him in a certain direction. Or maybe he'd hear
about some country he wanted to see. Or he might just be avoiding
towns where folks was known to be religious. That morning before he
took the stage he had consulted the Oracle, which was a sort of Ouija
board that had belonged to his mother. She'd been into table-tapping
and crystal balls and had her spirit guides. One that Kim liked
especially was an Indian boy called Little Rivers.

Once when she was
out Kim put on one of her dresses and made up his face like a whore
and called Little Rivers and next thing the dress was torn off him oh
he did it of course but the hands weren't his and then he was
squirming and moaning while Little Rivers fucked him with his legs up
and he blacked out in a flash of silver light.

The Oracle told him
that Little Rivers was near. He should keep his eyes open and he
would know what to do, so when he saw a sign pointing north
—
clear
creek
20
miles
—
he
decided to leave the stage, standing there in the street with his
"alligator."

The town was built
in a grove of cottonwoods at a river junction. He could hear running
water and the rustle of leaves in the afternoon wind. He passed
a cart with a strawberry roan. On the side, tom d. dark, traveling
photographer. He went into a saloon, dropped his "alligator"
on the floor and ordered a beer, noting a youth sitting at the end of
the bar. He took a long swallow, looking out into the shaded
street. The boy was at his elbow. He hadn't heard him move.

"You're Kim
Carsons, aren't you?"

The youth was about
twenty, tall and lean, with red hair, a thin face with a few pimples
growing in the smooth red flesh, his eyes gray-blue with dark
shadows.

"Yes, I'm
Carsons."

"I'm Tom Dark.
That's my cart outside."

They shook hands. As
their hands parted Tom stroked Kim's palm with one finger lightly.
Kim felt the blood rush to his crotch.

"Going north?"

"Yes."

"Like to ride
with me in the wagon?"

"Sure."

A Mexican kid is
sitting in the driver's seat of Tom's cart.

"Kim Carsons,
this is my assistant. Pecos Bridge Juanito."

The boy has a
knowing smile. The road winds along a stream, trees overhead
...
bits
of quartz glitter in the road, which isn't used often, you can tell
by the weeds. Looks like the road out of Saint Albans. They cross an
old stone bridge.

"This is Pecos
Bridge...We'll stop here
...
be dark in
another hour."

Juanito guides the
wagon off the road into a clearing by the stream, which is slow and
deep at this point. He unhitches the horse and starts pulling tripods
and cameras out of the wagon.

"My specialty
is erotics," Tom explains, "rich collectors. Paris
...
New
York
...
London. I've been looking for you on
commission. Got a client wants sex pictures of a real gunman."

"I hope you
don't mean the naked-except-for-cowboy-boots-gun-belt-and-sombrero
sort of thing."

"Look, I'm an
artist."

"And I'm a
shootist,
not a gunman. The gun doesn't own me. I own the
gun."

"Well, are you
interested?"

Kim puts a finger on
the cleft below his nose, runs the finger down his body and
under the crotch to the perineum. He holds out his open hand.

"Right down the
middle."

"Fair enough."

Kim brings a bottle
of sour-mash bourbon from his "alligator" and they
toast their fucking future.

"They hanged a
Mexican kid from that branch." Tom points to a Cottonwood branch
a few feet above the wagon. "You can still see the rope
marks...Yep hanged him offen the cay-use he went and stealed but he
hadn't stoled that horse. He'd boughten it. Only the posse didn't
find that out until after they'd hanged the kid.

"You may have
read about it
...
made quite a
stir
...
federal antilynching bill in
Congress and the Abolitionists took some northern states...All the
papers wanted a picture of the hanging and I gave them one
...
fake,
of course...How did I get away with it? Well there isn't any limit to
what you can get away with in this business. Faked pictures are more
convincing than real pictures because you can set them up to look
real. Understand this:
All pictures are faked.
As soon as you
have the concept of a picture there is no limit to falsification. Now
here's a picture in the paper shows a flood in China. So how do you
know it's a picture of a flood in China? How do you know he didn't
take it in his bathtub? How do you even know there was a flood in
China? Because you read it in the papers. So it has to be true, if
not, other reporters other photographers
...
sure
you gotta cover yourself or cut other reporters and photographers in
so they get together on the story...