Swamp Foetus (4 page)

Both twins had died of blood loss. The policeman showed us the crude stitches. Even if they had survived the operation, he said, they would have gotten deadly infections within days—the crackpot’s operating room was a hellhole of cockroaches and mold. The policeman made an apologetic joke about the operation being a success even though the patient died. At that, the operation had been a success. The twins certainly were sewn together at the shoulder.

As we headed home, Daddy’s face hanging heavy and impassive over the steering wheel, Mama praying loudly in the passenger seat, and the twins following us home in a refrigerated train car, I watched the sky for angels.

(1987)

On a cold January afternoon when the mist was already swirling over the dark ponds in anticipation of evening, I returned to Georgia. Two years and six thousand miles had separated me from the land that was my cradle and, once, my home.

Two years, six thousand miles. Florida and Disneyworld and liquid sunshine oranges, and in the Haunted Castle, a pale-handed figure suspended from an unseen rafter, slowly turning, turning. New Orleans jazz clubs and whores whose makeup made their eyes look bruised, swollen shut, their lips too lush, the taste of rot in their mouths. The long ribbons of shimmering night highway and sand with the radio turned too loud, trying not to see the lights that glowed like half-closed eyes from my dashboard.

Listen: once there were four boys who lived in the top story of a church made of ancient wood and stained glass. The church was abandoned, so no one cared if we lived there; we bathed in summer thunderstorms and stayed dirty in winter and walked with candles at night. Hollow-eyed Gene and sharp-faced prettyboy Sammy shared a room and a rum-stained mattress, and created drifting gray mountains of cigarette ash every day. Each tried to outdo the other’s thinness, and they wrote Freudian lyrics together, Gene with his vampire face, Sammy with long tangled sparkles of hair as glossy as ravens, with knowing green eyes that darkened in the presence of pain—ours or his own. At night we heard them through the crumbling walls, with their moans and their biting, and we knew that as long as two creatures in the world still loved each other, we were safe. In the morning their shoulders would be blotched with faint red crescents, their smiles a shade happier.

Gene’s singing voice—his vox humana, he called it—plunged from a psychosexual Bowie wail to a gutteral croak like the voice of terminal throat cancer. Sammy coaxed cries of pleasure out of a guitar as narrow and flat and shiny as himself. He also painted the walls of our church with murals: black eclipses, cats longer and meaner and more skeletal than any cats were ever meant to be, bowls of crystalline Jell-O like quivering jewels— whatever swam up from the recesses of his mind. He told me once that he mixed a little of his blood with all his paints. I never believed him until I saw him, one night by candlelight, make a shallow razorcut on his forearm and steep his brush in the crimson stream and swirl it into a drop of nightmare black. In that sensual, gory moment I wanted to press my mouth to the gash and drink the nourishment his veins would give me, and I knew Sammy would not mind, if the sweetness of his blood was what I needed. Instead I reached out to touch his painting with my fingertips, and Sammy, smiling, delicately outlined the bones of my hand in bloody black with his brush.

Gene and Sammy clutched each other against the dark when the candles flickered out. Saint (born John St.John) sold grass by the ounce to buy drums. He wore sunglasses at night and liked the candles to go out. I was the ordinary one of the bunch, the short-haired boy, so I wrote home and said I wanted to take a business course at a local college. When the money came, I bought a battered bass from a pawnshop. Sammy figured out how to play it and tried hard to show me, but his long thin fingers tipped with chips of black nail polish were more magical than mine. He braided strands of his glittering hair; they fell around his face as he played.

In decaying little clubs with runes and cryptic names spraypainted on their walls, we made music for crowds of Dachau children with blue-black hair and flickering fishnetted hands. Sometimes a long wing of depression, a chill of horror touched Gene’s days and midnights, brought on by acid or mushrooms or the skewed whorls of his brain. He raged through the church, and only our love for him kept us from hating him. He clung to the door of my room and accused me of having a thing with Sammy; he said he could taste my spit in Sammy’s mouth. I looked at dark-eyed Sammy standing in the hall behind Gene, and Sammy shook his head.

Gene lay on the slatted wooden floor and spoke of pathological self-destruction. He said he might never eat again: he could die among his bones, stop his heart by not feeding it, ignoring its pleas for bread. He could steal Sammy’s razor blades and peel his skin away in thin slices. “I could make you kill me,” he told Sammy, and Sammy gathered Gene into his arms and bowed his face over Gene’s and rocked Gene’s bony uncomfortable body, crooning a wordless plea for Gene to live, lulling them both into a rhythm of uneasy sleep.

One night Gene raved and sobbed until three. We could hear the rawness of his throat, as if his very voice were speckled with blood. Finally the church was silent.

Saint and I, too unnerved to sleep, crept into Gene and Sammy’s room. Sammy made room for us on the mattress and held us throughout the rest of the night, whispering meaningless words to drown out Gene’s ragged breathing.

We played more gigs. Sometimes Gene laughed and was human. Past midnight we leaned out the upstairs windows of our church and stared out over the cupolas and pinnacled monstrosities of our city. The roots of madness twisted more deeply into Gene. He told Sammy he didn’t want to write lyrics together any more; only Gene could make them dark enough, love their darkness, give the skeletal words the meaning they wanted. Gene drank two bottles of bourbon and left a red hand-shaped mark on Sammy’s ivory cheek because Sammy had said he loved the sun. When Sammy shut himself in another room, Gene bloodied his fingers trying to get to him through the unlocked door.

One night Gene took a piece of rope and climbed alone to the bell tower of the church. There was no bell there, but the spiders had filled the empty tower with a bell of webs. The spiders watched Gene strangle, listened to his vox humana squeeze away.

Saint changed his name back to John and went to work for his father’s pharmacy in Atlanta. Sammy cut down the rope in the bell tower and staggered under the meager weight of Gene. After the body was gone he lay on the mattress for days, fingering the rope, pulling it apart and braiding its fibers, destroying it and weaving it again. His eyes were black-green like rotting leaves. He did not speak, but I thought I could feel his scream, silent and spiraling and endless, echoing through the rooms.

One morning he was gone. Every tube of paint he owned had been emptied and smeared in great arcs across the floor and up over the walls, smothering the skeletal cats, clouding the eclipses. Sammy’s rainbow footprints led through the mess, down the stairs. As I was leaving the church, I saw his guitar broken-necked in a corner. I got into my car and drove six thousand miles, drove two years trying to forget Gene’s dark swollen face and Sammy’s guitar choked into silence.

Georgia. I only knew I was home because a sign had welcomed me some miles back. The wood-and-glass renaissance town I had left bore no resemblance to the landscape of abandoned gas stations, grimy hamburger stands, junkyards watched over by seamed old men in tarpaper-and-tin shacks that peppered my route now. A town sprouted at the side of the highway—diner, graveyard, Baptist church—and withered again. A faded banner strung between two telephone poles flapped against the aluminum sky:

McGRUDER & LARKS

CARNIVAL SHOW

ROCKVILLE FAIRGROUND JAN 20-22.

A few jacked-up cars and rickety pickups were parked in the fairground lot. I pulled in, hoping for a an ice cream cone as sweet and cold as they used to be, a slice of greasy, chewy pizza, a ride on the merry-go- round maybe. A small adventure, a way of botting out the silences that Georgia had brought back.

The pizza was thin and cardboard-dry. The ice cream melted in a gummy river over my fingers, and they had no merry-go-round. I was making my way through the oily mud and evil-smelling wastecans toward the exit when a hand brushed my shoulder and a Georgia voice said, “You haven’t seen everythin’ yet.”

I met his eyes. An aging child beginning to fatten, but he might have been handsome, even beautiful, once; his lips, bowed like a baby’s, might have kissed; his pale blue eyes might have dreamed. Now his fair hair straggled like dry cornsilk around his ears. A tiny gold hoop sparkled in one lobe. On his blue shirt, in fraying orange letters, was stitched the name Ben. He smiled, and though he lacked a front tooth, his smile was amazingly sweet. “It’s almost closin’ time,” he said. “I’ll let you in here for free.”

Canvas flapped behind him. Lurid painted shapes billowed and writhed. I made out the ornate red-and- gold lettering:

2-HEADED GOAT. SPIDER PIG WITH 8 LEGS. DEVIL TWINS FROM WALES. The freak tent. I wanted to turn away, to get back to my car and drive six thousand more miles, two more years. But I could not spoil Ben’s small kindness. “Thanks,” I said, and the carnival must have grown more deserted than I’d realized, for my voice echoed among the tents and stalls.

“Sure,” he said, and parted the canvas doorway.

The inside of the tent smelled of ancient dust and animal dung and acrid, deathly formaldehyde. The two- headed goat was alive, but its flanks trembled from the cold and the sawdust beneath its heads was spattered with greenish foam. The spider pig and other arcane fetuses floated in dim jars, curled, uncaring. The devil twins, flat and arid under glass, seemed to have flesh of hard earth, hair of dry grass.

Ben touched my shoulder again. “There’s one more. Out back. He usually costs extra, but seein’ as I let you in free anyhow—You’re not from round Rockville, are you?” Something trapped and screaming surfaced briefly in his eyes. I knew I did not want to see whatever solitary freak he kept out back, in the cold and the wind, for spectators curious or morbid enough to pay an extra fifty cents.

“No,” I told him. “I’m not from around Rockville.” He nodded, quiet, resigned. His eyes were once again as pale and placid as blue milk. “Come on then,” he said. “He’s waitin’.”

The out-back smell was heavy, sweet, and doyingly rotten. Dung and garbage crept in great soft piles up the back of the tent. A few feet away, in a cage of iron and heavy chicken-wire with a concrete base, a thin thing shifted and crouched. Long pale fingers clawed at the gap at the top of the bars.

“It’s a geek,” said Ben softly, almost respectfully. He had a long stick in his hand and was thrusting it into the cage, poking the geek, making him twitch and snap at the stick with his teeth. “Come on, you, move. Get off your haunches ... Don’t you know what a geek is, mister? Used to be all of’em was wild niggers from Borneo. This one, Mr. McGruder got him from an asylum north of here... Let go that stick, you! You hungry, geek? Gonna show the man your trick?... watch this, mister. Get in close. Not too close, he’ll try to grab you.” Ben stooped to a smaller cage and pulled out a twisted shape with flailing scaly tail and short scrabbling legs. With a little movement of his lips that might have been disgust or pity, he threw the rat into the geek’s cage.

I stooped to the gap and saw the rat racing across the cage floor in the instant before the geek’s hand flashed down to claim it. The concrete floor was covered with tracings and designs in flaking maroon. I watched the geek and knew the lines of his thin folded body. He began to salivate, and inside that wet mouth, that smear of red on white chalk skin, I saw the teeth that had once bitten Gene’s bird-boned throat—once longer ago than I knew, once when four boys lived in a church full of dust and sunlight. I saw the teeth that had tried to eat Gene’s pain away crunch through the rat’s bones. Long viscous strings of blood swirled with darker, stranger fluids dripped to the cage floor, forming puddles that covered the tracings there. I knew that later, before this fresh blood dried, the geek’s fingers would find it and use it to create new tracings, new legends to decorate his cage.

I laced my fingers into the bars. Blood beaded his long dull dark hair, ran bright as watercolor paint down his thin neck and his chest like a box of bones stretched over with dry translucent skin. Blood was on his eyelashes, on his eyelids like makeup. He had painted his lids black, purple, gold before, to touch our gigs with glamour; now they were forever gory crimson, and the intelligence—the brilliance that had taught me to play bass guitar, had brought me through a bad acid trip with tales of heavenly rainbow fire and Chinese fish, had laid his psyche wide open with blood and paint on the walls of our haven—the intelligence still glittered in his eyes, green, mad, but there. Still there. The tracings on the floor of the cage were no accident: there were eyes, hanged men, cats and eclipses in blood. There was Saint’s clever face, my face looking tender, Gene’s face handsome and vampiric and Gene’s face swollen, deadeyed. And there in a corner was Sammy’s own face, a cruel self-portrait, hollow-cheeked, mouth obscured by clots of gore.

I put my hand though the gap in the bars, but as Sammy reached up to take it, I drew back. His hand was slimy with blood and shreds of flesh. Ages of gore had dried under his fingernails. I could never touch him again. His eyes found mine and held them.

“Take me with you,” he whispered through the bars, just before he bit the rat’s head off.

I cranked my car radio up so loud that I could hear no distinct notes, no separate voices, only good mindless noise. I locked the doors and turned the heater on full blast against the winter night, against the vision of stars seen glittering coldly through cage bars. And the ribbon of highway rolled away from Rockville, and in its dwindling brightness I saw all the miles and all the years of the rest of my life.

(1987)