King Death

by Nik Cohn

  Next day, the Special embarked on yet another journey and King Death resumed his vigil beyond the window. The Stars and Stripes flew proudly from the smokestack, the golden eyes gleamed and sparkled. On the screen, everything looked brand new.

  Inside his bedroom, Eddie drank, sweated, cursed. When the train slowed down at its first stop, and the band began to play, he exposed himself indecently and shouted out a stream of blasphemies. But he was too far away, the smoked glass was too thick – the crowds could not hear or truly see him. All that they recognised was his silhouette, which was flawless, and they cheered as loud as ever.

  Though Eddie himself was crumpling, King Death remained immaculate.

  The cameras were omnipotent. They could create any truth that they chose and, even when the performer was reduced to a shambles, they kept his image perfect.

  Once a week, he was led out from his refuge and pumped full of sedatives. Paint restored his profile, perfumes masked his smell, soft focus soothed his trembling. Viewed from a suitable distance and angle, buried in deep enough shadow, he hardly seemed altered at all.

  At every stage, he was cushioned and camouflaged. Slow motion turned pain and panic into a dreamlike floating, and any hint of squalor was exorcised on the cutting-room floor. When the moment came for completion, Mantequilla spat out his instructions on to cue cards and Eddie performed by numbers, like a sleepwalker, hardly knowing what he rendered.

  By all these strategems, Death was able to preserve her surface gloss and there were no ugly scenes or scandals. But her spirit, her power of inner exaltation – that could not be faked. Gradually, by imperceptible shifts, she ceased to be a sacrament. Though she looked and sounded the same as ever, she lost the secret of sensation.

  The uniform, the golden eye, the face beyond the window – all the old rituals and symbols were unchanged. But they had lost their power. Little by little, they turned into formalities, dry-boned observances, and the watchers were not fulfilled.

  Inside Tierra de Ensueños, the families grew fretful and uneasy. For as long as they could remember, King Death had watched over them and kept them satisfied. He had provided for their every hunger, they had yearned for nothing more. But now the spell was broken. For no reason that they could identify, his image failed to release them.

  Deprived of sensation, they became resentful. After all these years of contentment, they were filled with doubt, mistrust, unspecified dread, and they began to disintegrate. Martha McGhee kept bursting into tears, for no particular cause. The mansion was swept by epidemics. Charley Mitchell got drunk and broke all his windows. Brawls broke out, and big Jim Haggard lost three of his front teeth.

  With every week, as the Special passed through the nation, the crowds grew more sullen. They didn’t shout or wave, they no longer scrabbled at the fences. Even when Eddie appeared in silhouette, they did not react in any way. Faces set, they simply stood and stared.

  Still, they did not complain out loud. King Death had been absolute for so long, the country owed him so much. To rise up against him now would have seemed like sacrilege, a treason.

  So the cavalcade continued. Each Friday evening, just as though the golden age had never ended, the families tuned in to HBLF and the performer was put through his routine. The fanfares sounded, the subjects were deluged with prizes, the long blonde girls flashed their teeth. Propped up in left profile, King Death went through the familiar motions, and nobody dared to hiss.

  On the last Sunday before Advent, King Death got off the train in Abilene and performed inside a Pentecostal church. By his own recent standards, the completion went quite smoothly. There was no struggle or mess, and the subject knelt down meekly before the altar, expiring with outstretched arms.

  The candles flickered, the long blonde girls sprinkled incense, the organist played Steal Away. The producers shook hands with the cameramen, and the grips swapped jokes with the extras. Turning away from the arc lights, which hurt his eyes, Eddie mopped his brow, adjusted his hat brim and shuffled off down the aisle. Nobody noticed him go.

  Far away, beyond a pair of embossed bronze doors, there was a small chink of sunlight and the lion led him through the shadows, stumbling, groping in the darkness, until they reached it and found themselves in the street outside.

  Dulled by sedatives, dazzled by the sudden brightness, Eddie stood with hunched shoulders and waited to be mobbed. But nobody screamed, nobody tried to touch him. The street was almost deserted, and nothing moved.

  It was a mild and aimless afternoon; a slow, sleepy Sunday. After a few moments, since no one made any move to prevent him, Eddie turned his face towards the sun and started walking. The sidewalk beneath his feet was scarred and broken, full of cracks, and he drifted past a laundromat, on past a junk shop and a wholesale fruiterer, while the lion ambled behind.

  He moved in a daze, not knowing where he was, not watching where he was going, and soon he put his foot into one of the cracks, slightly jarring his ankle. Puzzled, he stopped and looked down, to see what had caused the trouble, and gradually, like a man awakening from a bottomless sleep, he grew aware of his surroundings.

  He saw the sidewalk. He saw the grass growing up between the cracks and the faded marks of hopscotch. He saw the laundromat, the junk shop, the mission on the corner. He saw stray cats among the garbage cans, broken glass and candy wrappers in the gutters, a faded green door, a hand-painted sign for furniture. All at once, he could see everything.

  Slowly, he drew his toe out of the crack; then, with utmost caution, as if testing unfathomed waters, he dipped it back in again. Deliberately, he scuffed his heel against the rim, savoured the roughness against his sole, and he heard a door slam in an alley. Far away, the organist was playing Just A Closer Walk With Thee. A foghorn sounded on the river. The lion purred behind his back. Growing reckless, Eddie wriggled his toes up and down inside his black boot, then wriggled them round in circles and suddenly, the last thing that he had ever expected, he found that he was laughing.

  Someone was cooking collards and chicken dumplings in a room above his head. Up the alley, a radio was playing the lowdown blues, and Eddie felt for his gun. Behind his back, the lion shuffled and sniffed, and the performer gave a cry, an animal roar of release, as he whirled and fired and fired again, blazing wildly from the hip.

  Shot three times through the heart, the lion lay down upon the sidewalk. Resting its head on its paws, it smiled serenely and wagged its tail, it nuzzled for the last time in Eddie’s blackleather palm and, as its lifeblood flowed away, it began to change its shape. Its golden coat was turned into skin, its whiskers shrivelled and died, its body shrank to less than half its former size. Twitching, it snickered in triumph, and it was not a lion at all. When at last its blood stopped flowing, and it went still, it was revealed as a small human child, aged seven, who had walked five miles through the dust and heat, to ask King Death for his autograph.

  ‘A child. An innocent baby,’ said Martha McGhee.

  ‘Gunned down without mercy,’ said big Jim Haggard.

  ‘Our trust has been betrayed,’ said Charley Mitchell. ‘We have been taken for a ride.’

  When Eddie’s malfeasance was first discovered, HBLF had done its best to cover up. The parents were given compensation, all the witnesses paid off, the child himself disposed of without trace. Mumbling incoherently, the performer was locked up again in his compartment. Then the Special moved on, and the matter was considered closed.

  But one spectator had been overlooked. At the time of the shooting, Seaton had been stationed across the street, looking down from an upstairs window. Half-hidden behind a curtain, he watched everything that had happened, recording the details on a drugstore Polaroid and, when the prints were developed, he sent out copies to five hundred newspapers, networks and magazines.

  The response was instant and absolute. Within an hour of receipt, the child had been splashed across e
very screen and front page in the nation, and the King was destroyed for ever.

  All the resentments, doubts and buried lusts of the past months burst to the surface at once and exploded. The ties of faith and habit were swept aside, every inhibition collapsed. Reflected in the child’s still face, America saw her own lost self and, in the instant of recognition, she was released from her bondage, she woke from her long dream.

  Her first thought was for vengeance.

  When the Deliverance Special pulled in at San Antonio, its next scheduled stop, it was received with stones and broken bottles. Hissing and howling, the crowds charged the fences and in no time, since the guards made no real effort to stop them, they were swarming all over the platform. The brass band was routed, the majorettes sent shrieking for sanctuary, firebrands flung through the carriage windows. A posse stormed the engine and gouged out the golden eye. Kouncillors were dragged from their beds, to be kicked and beaten unconscious. Looters rampaged through the compartments with brickbats, iron bars, cans of kerosene, and they did not rest satisfied until the entire train had been reduced to rubble.

  Two nooses were slung from the station beams, but no trace could be found of either Seaton or the performer. Apparently, they had vanished into nothingness and, though America was combed inch by inch, they were never seen again.

  Cheated of their prime targets, the avengers were forced to make do with minnows. Anyone who had ever been associated with Death, in whatever capacity, was systematically rounded up and purged. J Jones Dickerson caught a plane to Guatemala and did not return. Mort Mossbacher hanged himself from a clothes hook. Kouncillors were tried, live on HBLF, and sent to jail by the hundred. Publicists were tarred and feathered, long blonde girls tied to streetlamps with shaven skulls. Even rank-and-file Loyalists found themselves informed against, fired from their jobs, shunned by their friends, deserted by their wives and families.

  In every city, monstrous bonfires consumed KD posters and propaganda. His supermarkets were stripped bare, his old films destroyed. All his industries changed their names, and it became a federal offence even to possess his photograph.

  Just one month after the King had fallen, if a stranger had arrived in America for the first time, he would have found no visible sign that Death had ever existed.

  Inside the mansion, when the families looked back on their years of residence, everything seemed hopelessly blurred. They could not remember why they had come here, what had made them watch the performer in the first place or how they had ever been induced to think of him as their friend: ‘We must have been brainwashed,’ said Charley Mitchell.

  ‘Duped,’ said Sarah Carter. ‘We were cheated and bamboozled, until we didn’t know what we were buying. Otherwise, we would never have played along.’

  ‘We would have recoiled in horror,’ said Mildred Potterson. ‘If only we had known, if we’d had the faintest idea of what was going on or what it really meant, we would have run a mile.’

  ‘But we didn’t understand,’ said Billy Mace. ‘We were victims of a conspiracy, and we didn’t have a clue.’

  ‘Perhaps we were gullible. Looking back, perhaps we were foolish to be taken in,’ said Tom Potterson. ‘But we meant no harm.’

  ‘It wasn’t our fault,’ said Martha McGhee.

  ‘Honest to God,’ said big Jim Haggard, ‘we were innocent.’

  By this time, Tierra de Ensuenos had fallen completely into ruin and there was no point in remaining any longer. So they packed their bags and went back to their previous existences. They took new jobs, made new friends, moved into new apartments, and their lives drifted off in different directions. Soon there was nothing left to connect them, and their years together in the mansion lost all meaning, became no more than a mirage.

  Meanwhile, beyond the barbed-wire fences, everything withered and rotted and crumbled. Inside the perfumed garden, the animals perished of starvation, the pools and fountains dried up, the jungle slowly choked itself to death. The labyrinth was blocked by landfalls and, one by one, the heart-shaped follies turned to dust. Then nothing moved or made a sound. The mansion was complete, and only the screens survived.

  On a rainy February morning, just outside Tupelo city limits, Seaton stopped the car and passed a hand across his eyes, to wipe away the weariness. He had been driving throughout the night, all the way from Memphis, and now that he had finally arrived, his only sensations were of damp and grime.

  For a few minutes, the partners sat in silence, lulled by the swishing of the windscreen wipers and the gentle murmur of country music on the radio. Then Eddie took out his trucidator and began to pick at his teeth.

  He was greatly altered. Now that he had ceased to be an image, he no longer suffered and he had reverted to his former self. His hands had stopped shaking, his jowls and grey hair had vanished. In place of his uniform, he wore jeans, a windbreaker and a red-checked workshirt, and his face was placid, ageless, completely neutral.

  From time to time, as he picked at his teeth, passers-by would glance in casually through the window. But none of them stopped or gave him a second look. Without his uniform, he looked just like anyone else, and nobody knew him.

  Rain fell steadily, the windows were streaked with mud and wet sand. The car radio played a song about honky-tonk angels and Seaton rested his head upon the steering wheel, exhausted. ‘Do you hate me?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because I betrayed the King.’

  ‘You made him,’ said Eddie, indifferent. ‘It was also your right to destroy him. When I was ill, it’s true that I abhorred you and wanted you to be punished. But that lies in the past. I am cured again, the saga is concluded. What would be the point in vengeance now?’

  Across the street, workmen in overalls were working on a giant billboard, which had once been a showplace for Death, sticking up a slogan for Coca-Cola: ‘It was the only way,’ Seaton said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To reach an ending. To be freed.’

  Eddie made no comment. Snapping shut the trucidator, he put it back in his pocket and replaced it with a wad of gum. His jaws chomped in a steady rhythm and, opening the morning paper across his knees, he buried himself in the funny papers.

  Inside his suitcase, there was only dirty underwear, a selection of comics, three packs of playing cards, two cans of shaving cream and a half-eaten Hershey bar. Of all his armoury, he had only retained one pistol, a Gilronan .32, which lay snug and warm against his heart.

  Seaton’s tie, Wykhamist, was slewed round beneath his right ear. His blazer was stained with slopped whisky, there was a smudge of soot on his nose and, when he tried to smile, he had no dimples left. ‘What will become of you?’ he asked.

  ‘Who can tell?’ Eddie said. ‘I might take a job at The Golden Slipper. I might hustle in the pool hall or drive a truck or become a lawman. Or I might just stand in a doorway and watch.’

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘There was a girl, her name was Marie, she had a home down by the railroad tracks. Perhaps she has gotten married and left. But if she is still free, I will ask to make her mine.’

  ‘And give up the profession?’

  ‘My race is run,’ said Eddie simply. ‘I have enjoyed a fair span, I’ve got no complaints. Now it’s time for someone else to take a turn. Death is bigger than any one performer, she will not perish without me. Professionals come and go but she survives for ever. No matter how she may be persecuted and abused, she is indestructible and you can bet that some day she will rise again, stronger and greater than ever.’

  On the radio, the deejay spoke of hair oil, of second-hand cars and chicken coops. Damp steamed up the glass, seeped through the cracks in the bodywork. Tupelo was full of puddles, and Seaton felt numb.

  ‘And what about yourself?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘I am trapped,’ replied the Englishman. ‘There i
s nowhere I can go, nothing left for me to do. All my documents and records, all the trappings of my life, are lost in Tierra de Ensueños, and I am too old to make a new start. Truthfully, I believe that I am finished.’

  ‘Finished,’ said Eddie. ‘But not complete.’

  ‘No. Not complete.’

  ‘That is a waste.’

  ‘Do you honestly think so?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said the performer. ‘It’s time you were released. Even though you may have sinned, I know that Death forgives you and wants you to be fulfilled.’

  ‘Perhaps she thinks that I don’t deserve her.’

  ‘Not her. Her heart is much too big to carry grudges. Everything that happened was inevitable, she knows that. Whatever your errors, she understands that you have always yearned for her, right from the moment you first saw her, and even though I am now in official retirement, she would not wish me to leave before you had received your just reward.’

  Reaching inside his breast pocket, Eddie brought out the Gilronan and laid it in his lap. The radio played Tumbling Tumbleweeds, and Seaton wiped his wet palms on his thighs. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘I would not mislead you,’ the professional replied. ‘I know Death inside out, and I understand the way her mind works, just as though it were my own. Believe me, she is waiting to embrace you.’

  When Seaton looked out through the window, he could see only drizzle and mist. His eyes stung, there was egg on his lapel, he wanted to go to the toilet. ‘What must I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Just look into my eyes,’ Eddie said. ‘Then you will find everything that you require, everything that you have been looking for.’

  So Seaton blew his nose, straightened his tie, patted down his rumpled hair, and he turned to face the performer. Eddie picked up the Gilronan, and their eyes met. But the Englishman’s vision was blurred, his pupils seemed full of fog. Search as he might, the only image that came back to him was his own pale reflection, distant and distorted. ‘Is that all?’ he asked.