The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

  A lovely cloak but it does look a little strange in Mayfair. Kim billows out a few whiffs. The passersby look at him indignantly, cough, and walk away.

  "They won't be so sassy in a few days' time." Still it would be prudent to change into a suit before he has to take out a bobby or two. He walks into a men's-wear store on Jermyn Street.

  The manager prided himself on his impeccable cool. Despite the horrible odor, he observed that the cloak was of the finest materials and probably priceless, the sandals of an authentic medieval design in deerskin with gold buckles. The manager considered himself a good judge of character and it was Kim's presence that decided him against giving the call-police signal to his assistant. An aura of menace palpable as a haze, eyes with a cold blue burn like sputtering ice, and the voice silk-soft and caressing, sugary and evil with violence just under the surface...

  "I want the lot, from shoes to hat, you understand."

  "I understand perfectly," the manager said and lifted his hand. A willowy young fag undulated up...

  "Am, take care of this gentleman."

  Arn fingered the hem of Kim's cloak...

  "Sweet stuff, dearie."

  "Yes, it's been in our family for a long time."

  The boy lingered in the doorway of the change cubicle, hoping Kim would take off his cloak and be naked underneath. Kim smiled at him and took off the cloak, which billowed across the cubicle, seemingly with a life of its own, and settled onto a hanger.

  The boy sniffed ecstatically..."Coo what a lovely smell!"

  "It's been in our family for quite a long time."

  Kim was wearing a codpiece fashioned from some pinkish-brown porous skin.

  "The pelt of an electric eel," Kim told him.

  A sheath of the same material was at his belt shaped to hold a curved blade twelve inches long. Kim withdrew the blade, which shone with an inner light like crystal.

  "This blade, fashioned by a Japanese craftsman, was tempered in human blood...an insolent peasant who called my ancestor a Dishdigger...that's medieval slang for 'queer...Intolerable, was it not?"

  "Yes sir. Quite intolerable."

  "Now I want your M-5 suit."

  "Something inconspicuous, sir?" Exactly. The well-dressed man is one whose clothes you never notice...That's what you English say, isn't it?"

  "Sometimes, sir. What size?"

  "Thirty-eight long...felt hat, not a bowler...the cloak and sandals to be packed into one of those leather satchels with brass fittings...that one..." Kim pointed.

  "It's rather expensive, sir."

  "The more the merrier. Expense account, you know."

  9

  So in what guise shall he return to the New World as if he were coming from the Old World, which in fact he is, since his footsteps are vanishing behind him like prints in heavy snow or windblown sand.

  "Our chaps are jolly good," Tony told him. "Any passport, any part you fancy, old thing..."

  A rich traveler of uncertain nationality .. . with a Vaduz passport.

  Name: Kurt van Worten

  Occupation: Businessman

  And what business is Mr. van Worten in? Difficult to pin down. But wherever he opens his briefcase, disaster slides out. The market crashes, currencies collapse, breadlines form. War clouds gather. An austere gilt-edged card with a banking address in Vaduz...

  The passport picture catches the petulant expression of the rich. It can be counterfeited. Just look sour and petulant and annoyed at everything in sight. At the slightest delay give little exasperated gasps. It is well from time to time to snarl like a cat. And a handkerchief redolent of disinfectant can be placed in front of the face if any sort of creature gets too close. And spend long hours in deck chairs with dark glasses and a lap robe, silent as a shark. Just do it long enough and money will simply cuddle around you.

  Hall sips his drink and picks up another envelope. Mr. van Worten, he feels, would prove a bit confining, and he is not intrigued by the mysteries of high finance. Something more raffish, disreputable, shameless...It is pleasant to roll in vileness like a dog rolls in carrion, is it not?

  A con man who calls himself Colonel Parker, with the sleek pomaded smug expression of a man who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. His cold predatory eyes scan the dining room from the Captain's table...

  An impoverished Polish intellectual from steerage trying to conceal his tubercular cough and the stink of cold doss houses he carries with him like a haze. One expects to see typhus lice crawling on his frayed dirty collar...Too uncomfortable...

  The door to another dimension may open when the gap between what one is expected to feel and what one actually does feel rips a hole in the fabric. Years ago I was driving along Price Road and I thought how awful it would be to run over a dog or, my God, a child, and have to face the family and portray the correct emotions. When suddenly a figure wrapped in a cloak of darkness appeared with a dead child under one arm and slapped it down on a porch:

  "This yours, lady?"

  I began to laugh. The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply. There is no light to see them by. It is from this dark door that the antihero emerges...

  A Titanic survivor...You know the one I mean...

  "Somewhere in the shadows of the Titanic slinks a cur in human shape. He found himself hemmed in by the band of heros whose watchword and countersign rang out across the deep:

  " 'Women and children first.' "

  "What did he do? He scuttled to the stateroom deck, put on a woman's skirt, a woman's hat, and a woman's veil and, picking his crafty way back among the brave men who guarded the rail of the doomed ship, he filched a seat in one of the lifeboats and saved his skin. His identity is not yet known. This man still lives. Surely he was born and saved to set for men a new standard by which to measure infamy and shame..."

  Or a survivor of the Hindenburg disaster who was never seen or heard of again. By some strange quirk his name was omitted from the passenger list. He is known as No. 23...

  Drang nach Westen: the drag to the West. When the Traveler turns west, time travel ceases to be travel and becomes instead an inexorable suction, pulling everything into a black hole. Light itself cannot escape from this compacted gravity, time so dense, reality so concentrated, that it ceases to be time and becomes a singularity, where all physical laws are no longer valid. From such license there is no escape...stepping westward a jump ahead of the Geiger...

  Kim looks up at a burning sky, his face lit by the blazing dirigible. No bones broken, and he didn't see fit to wait around and check in...No. 23 just faded into the crowd.

  The Bunker is dusty, dust on the old office safe, on the pipe threaders and sledgehammers, dust on his father's picture. The West has only its short past and no future, no light.

  Kim feels that New York City has congealed into frozen stills in his absence, awaiting the sound of a little voice and the touch of a little hand...Boy walks into an Italian social club on Bleecker Street. A moment of dead ominous silence, dominoes frozen in the air.

  "Can't you read, kid? Members Only."

  Two heavy bodyguards move toward him.

  "But I'm a member in good standing!" A huge wooden phallus, crudely fashioned and daubed with ocher, springs out from his fly as he cuts loose, shooting with clear ringing peals of boyish laughter as he cleans out that nest of garlic-burping Cosas.

  Patagonian graves, wind and dust...Same old act, sad as a music box running down in the last attic, as darkness swirls

  around the leaded window...It looks like an early winter.

  Dead leaves on the sidewalk.

  A number of faces looking out from passports and identity cards, and something that is Kim in all of them. It's as though Kim walked into a toy shop and set a number of elaborate toys in motion, all vying for his attention..."Buy me and me and meeee..."

  Little figures shoot each other in little toy streets...hither and
thither, moves and checks and slays, and one by one back in the closet lays. He can feel the city freeze behind him, a vast intricate toy with no children to play in it, sad and pointless as some ancient artifact shaped to fill a forgotten empty need.

  There is an urgency about moving westward—or stepping westward, isn't it? A wildish destiny? One is definitely a jump or a tick ahead of something...the Blackout...the countdown...or the sheer, shining color of police? Perhaps you have just seen the same Stranger too many times, and suddenly it is time to be up and gone.

  One-way ticket to the Windy City..."There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight." Tiny figures string looters up to paper lampposts as the fire raging on the backdrop is bent horizontal by the wind. Two actors in a cow do a song-and-dance number, tripping each other up and squirting milk at the audience.

  "One dark night when all the people were in bed"—squirt squirt squirt—"Mrs. O'Leary took a lantern to the shed."

  Mrs. O'Leary with her milk pail—clearly she is retarded, or psychotic. She looks around the barn blankly (I'm sorry, I guess I have the wrong number), puts the lantern down, goes to the door and looks out (Oh well, he's always late. I'll wait inside for him). The cow kicks'the pail over with a wink and sings, "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight."

  The cow dances offstage, and suddenly the audience realizes that the fire in the backdrop is real...

  Meet me in Saint Louie, Louie

  Meet me at the fair

  Don't tell me the lights are shining

  Anyplace but there...

  The lights go on. The music plays. Well-dressed characters stroll through the fountains and booths and restaurants...There is Colonel Greenfield, and Judge Farris, Mrs. Worldly, Mr. and Mrs. Kindhart...Walk-on parts, all perfectly dressed models of wealth and calm self-possession...

  The Director screams out: "No, no, no! It's too stiff! Loosen it up, let's see some animation. Tell a joke. "

  "Well, you see the clerk is being nice. This old colored mammy wants to buy some soap: 'You mean toilet soap, madam.'

  "Oh no, just some soap to wash my hands and face. . .

  "It's a sick picture, B. J."

  "Oh well, the songs will carry it. "

  Meet Me in Saint Louis, The Trolley Song, Saint Louis Blues, Long Way from Saint Louis...They are turning off the fountains, carrying the sets away.

  "All right, you extras, line up here. "

  "Look, I told a joke. I get one-liner pay. "

  "You mean you dropped a heavy ethnic. We had to cut the whole scene. " A security guard edges closer. "Pick up your bread and beat it, Colonel."

  Train whistles..."Saint Albans Junction."

  "Which way is the town?"

  "What town?"

  "Saint Albans."

  "Where you been for twenty years, Mister?" Just the old farmhouse...where are the boys? There are no boys, just the empty house.

  Denver...Mrs. Murphy's Rooming House, a little western ketch in the station...Salt Chunk Mary's, rings and watches spilling out on the table...Joe Varland drops with a hole between his eyes...train whistles...clear creek, weeds growing through the rails..."End of the line: Fort Johnson."

  "All rise and face the enemy!"

  The Wild Fruits stand up, resplendent in their Shit Slaughter uniforms. Each drains a champagne glass of heroin and aconite. They throw the glasses at the gate.

  When shit blood spurts from the knife

  Denn geht schon alles gut!

  They stagger and fall. Kim feels the tingling numbness sweeping through him, legs and feet like blocks of wood...the sky begins to darken around the edges, until there is just a tiny round piece of sky left...SPUT he hits a body, bounces off, face to the sky...he is moving out at great speed, streaking across the sky...Raton Pass...the wind that blew between the worlds, it cut him like a knife...back in the valley, now in the store being tested—Wouldn't mind being reborn as a Mexican, he thought wistfully, knowing he really can't be reborn anywhere on this planet. He just doesn't fit somehow.

  Tom's grave...Kim rides out on a pack horse. Kim, going the other way, heads out on a strawberry roan. A rattle of thunder across the valley. Kim scratches on a boulder: Ah Pook Was Here.

  Frogs croaking, the red sun on black water...a fish jumps...a smudge of gnats...this heath, this calm, this quiet scene; the memory of what has been, and never more will be...back on the mesa top, Kim remembers the ambush. Time to settle that score.

  10

  Kim is heading north for Boulder. Should make it in five, six days hard riding. He doesn't have much time left. September 17, 1899, is the deadline, only ten days away.

  In Libra, Colorado, his horse is limping. Kim figures to sell him and move on, after a night's sleep. He receives an early morning visit from Sheriff Marker and his frog-faced deputy.

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

  "So you got a flier?"

  "Nope. Just wondered if you figure on staying long."

  "Nope. Horse is lame. I figure to sell him, buy another, and move on."

  "Maybe you better get the morning train. Faster that way." Kim took the stage to Boulder, arriving at 3:00 p.m. on September 16.

  He checked into the Overlook Hotel..."Room with bath. I'll take the suite, in fact. I may be entertaining."

  Kim took a long, hot bath. He looked down at his naked body, an old servant that had served him so long and so well, and for what? Sadness, alienation...he hadn't thought of sex for months.

  "Well, space is here. Space is where your ass is.

  He dries himself, thinking of the shoot-out and making his own plans. He knows Mike Chase will have a plan that won't involve a straight shoot-out. Mike is faster, but he doesn't take chances. Kim will use his 44 special double-action. Of course it isn't as fast as Mike's 455 Webley, but this contest won't be decided by a barrage. First two shots will tell the story and end it. Kim will have to make Mike miss his first shot, and he'll have to cover himself.

  But Mike has no intention of shooting it out with Kim. Mike is fast and he is good, but he always likes to keep the odds in his favor. The fill-your-hand number is out of date.

  This is 1899, not 1869, Mike tells himself. Oh yes, he will keep the appointment at the Boulder Cemetery. But he has three backup men with hunting rifles. This is going to be his last bounty hunt. Time to move on to more lucrative and less dangerous ventures. He will put his past behind him, take a new name. He has a good head for business, and he'll make money, a lot of money, and go into politics.

  It is a clear, crisp day...Aspens splash the mountains with gold. Colorado Gold, they call it; only lasts a few days.

  The cemetery is shaded by oak and maple and cottonwood, overhanging a path that runs along its east side. Leaves are falling. The scene looks like a tinted postcard: "Having fine time. Wish you were here."

  Mike swings into the path at the northeast corner, wary and watchful. He is carrying his Webley 455 semiautomatic revolver. His backup men are about ten yards behind him.

  Kim steps out of the graveyard, onto the path.

  "Hello, Mike." His voice carries cool wind clear on the wind.

  Twelve yards...ten...eight...

  Kim's hand flicks down to his holster and up, hand empty, pointing his index finger at Mike. "BANG! YOU'RE DEAD"

  Mike clutches his chest and crumples forward in a child's game.

  "WHAT THE FU—" Someone slaps Kim very hard on the back, knocking the word out. Kim hates being slapped on the back. He turns in angry protest...blood in his mouth...can't turn...the sky darkens and goes out.

  THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS. Copyright © 1983 by William S. Burroughs. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this hook may he used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint a portion of "Keep the Home Fires Burning" by Lena Guilbert Ford and Ivor Novello. Copyright 1915 by Chappell & Co., Ltd.; Copyright renewed, published in the U.S.A. by Chappell & Co., Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burroughs, William S.

  The place of dead roads.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.U75P54 1983 813'.54 83-8498

  ISBN 0-312-27865-9

  First published in the United States by Holt, Rinehart and Winston