Dagon

  He lumbered through the narrow doorway into the living room. In here the light was dim­mer and didn’t bulge in his head so much. The torn shade was pulled almost down in the north window; little chinks and blocks of light shone in the holes. Through the west window he could see the squat cheap white frame house across the street, all yellow in the sunlight. One pillow lay staggered on the floor, dropped from the springs of the stained greasy wine-colored sofa across the room; along the top of the sofa back all the prickly nap had worn away. On the black little end table was the radio, which was on—the radio was always on—but now nobody had both­ered to tune it to a station and it uttered only staccato driblets of static. There were a couple of broken cardboard boxes in one corner of the room, and a few sheets of newspaper were scat­tered on the floor. On the east wall beside the door were dime-store photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Elvis Presley, all dotted with flyshit. At the edge of the sofa and in two corners of the room were blurred rem­nants of the pattern which had once covered the dull rubbed linoleum.

  The bedroom was to the south of the living room and he entered without knocking. A dark green shade covered the single bedroom win­dow and in here it was much dimmer than in the living room. He had to wait until his eyes ad­justed to the darkness. Heaped together in the small bed in the corner—the big double bed on the left was Mina’s—the girls stirred restlessly, sensing in their sleep Peter’s presence in the room. He went to the bed, grasped a protruding pale shoulder and shook it as gently as he could. The startled flesh moved under his nerveless hand. “Whah.” He shook her again and she mumbled some more and sat up. Because of the bad light her sharp face looked detached, a soft lantern. It was Bella. Her black hair came forward, hiding her face; she shook her head, raised her arms and stroked her hair back over her shoulders. Only her face and her breasts stood visible. Her breasts were like featureless faces; they bobbed softly as she fixed her hair. Enid shifted in her sleep, turning toward them, and flung her thin arm over Bella’s gentle belly. She stopped manipulating her hair and for a mo­ment stroked carefully the arm which lay on her.—He knew that this too was one of Mina’s satisfactions, that Bella and Enid were after the woman in each other.—Then she tapped Enid’s arm. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice thick and throaty from sleep, “wake up. Mina must want us to get up. Come on.” Enid dug deeper into the bed.

  Bella looked up at him, her gaze abstracted, visionless. Momentarily it seemed to him that there was something she wanted from him, and the thought frightened him. He stumbled back from the bedside.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said. Her voice was regaining its natural sharpness. “Go on away. Go get where you belong.”

  As he went out the door he saw Bella resume her loving ministering to Enid.

  Mina was talking to Coke Rymer in the living room, and Peter went straight through and on through the kitchen out to the back porch. He wanted to check his pump handle, to see if it was still where he had hidden it—that was the one thing he could remember from the day before. The porch cracked and swayed under his foot­steps, the boards weakening with rot or ter­mites. A double handful of big blue-and-green flies was flocked on the carcass of the headless chicken that lay there. They skipped about on the queasy body, making a noise like muttered swearing. Already the air was hot, viscid, and the singing of the flies seemed to increase the oppressiveness of the heat. He nudged the chicken with his bare toe and the flies swirled up in a funnel-shaped pattern and then settled again immediately. With his forearm he wiped his mouth; he couldn’t understand how he could do something like that. All the glare of the sun seemed focused on the murdered bird.

  He stepped down into the fluffy dust of the back yard. The yard was small, and underneath the dust was burning packed clay. A ruptured hog-wire fence unevenly straggled the rectan­gular borders, and here and there long shoots of blackberry vine poked through. In the north corner of the yard was the little low weather-­stained shed from which he averted his eyes without even thinking about it, with the strength of a habit enforced by sheer instinct. He went around the edge of the little porch, which was laid out at the back of the house like a perfunctory throw rug, and peeked under­neath, where the pile of daubed stones sup­ported it. There, crosswise in a space between two joists, lay the pump handle. He hadn’t real­ized until he found the handle that he’d been holding his breath and it came in a swoop out his mouth and nose, all too heavily redolent of what had happened to his insides. He wiped his mouth. He got the pump handle and stood and held it before him, hefting it warm and solid in his hand, beholding it in the sunlight. He exam­ined it all over for a speck of rust or dirt, but it was clean and shiny as quicksilver.

  “Well, so that’s where you keep it then? Well, that’s all I wanted to know.”

  He looked up. Coke Rymer was standing at the edge of the porch, leaning against the post support and whittling slowly at the edge of it. Dismayed, Peter stepped back.

  Coke Rymer showed his meaningless grin; his teeth were little and yellow. “That’s all in the world I needed to know, where you keep hiding that ole pump handle.”

  He stepped farther back, gingerly swinging the bright handle like a pendulum in front of his legs. He decided that if the watery blond boy got down into the yard after him he would hit him, he would make blood come. Already now he was whimpering.

  The other folded his knife and returned it to his pocket. “Aw, hush up. I ain’t going to hurt you.” He grinned again. “You better come on in here now and get started on this stuff Mina wants you to get done. She’s liable to get mad if you don’t, and I guess you don’t want her to get mad at you. You’d be a even more pitiful sight than you are if she was to get mad and get ahold of you.”

  Still he hung back, but he had stopped swing­ing the pump handle. He clasped it fondly across his belly.

  Coke Rymer looked at him. “Aw, you can bring that old thing with you. What’s it matter to me?” He turned and briskly went inside.

  He shuffled unsteadily up the two creaky steps onto the porch. He didn’t mind the work so much. He was just hoping they wouldn’t make him eat the gooey soft-fried eggs and toast for lunch.

  FIVE

  It wasn’t long until September. In another one of his moments of clarity he sat inspecting his body. A good view of it; they dressed him now in only these tattered blue swimming trunks, no matter the weather. The boards of the hated floor were sharp with cold in the mornings, and sweated dirt streaked his body like paint. On his lower shoulder were still pieces of the silvery quarter-moon scars that Mina’s teeth had left on him, but now these were beginning to be lapped over by the tattooing. Where he wasn’t filthy dirty he was gaudy as a comic book. They had begun at the base of his spine. He had lain stretched on Mina’s bed, grasping the iron bars hard and weeping without control, while Coke Rymer, nervous and sweating and cursing him, held the nervous hot electric needle and Mina stood calmly watching. “No, not there, you’re not doing it right,” she had said. “No, you’re not doing it right.” And then she would lean over and touch softly the spot she wanted decorated and Peter’s body would jerk, as shocked as if her cold finger were the burning needle again. “Yeah, yeah, I see,” Coke Rymer would say, his voice querulous, whining asperity. “If I could just get this son of a bitch to hold still.” The sweat dripped oily from his face onto Peter’s back and then ran itching down his side. It was maddening. At the end of the first session they had got a couple of mirrors so that he could see the handiwork. He rose weakly from the bed, where the imprint of his body was wet and ve­hement. He looked where they directed and he couldn’t help crying out, “Is that all? Is that all?” in anguish and impotent rage. In the mirrored mirror was his skin and on it only a small mis­shapen yellow circle, about the size of a quarter, with an indistinguishable dark head in it and letters—he supposed these marks were letters—in a tongue he had never seen. It was a coin on his spine, or the sun, sardonically injured. Was that all? The i
ntolerable waiting and the ner­vous pain, just for that?—But now he had got used to it, it was no more than being swarmed over by a troop of red ants. They all took turns, Coke and Bella and Enid, but he wept no more under the needle, the artwork had come to seem necessary to him, and he was coolly curi­ous as to how it would turn out. The little gold coin—or maybe it was a sun—had been ob­scured almost; in his mirrored skin he had to search hard to find this starting point in the crawly fantastic turf his back had become. On his back nothing was what it was, there were no demarcations, no outlines; nothing was formed, it was all in the process of becoming. Except here a large eye, marbled and fluid; there a crippled hand, the fingers webbed together with sperm. Scattered purple lumps which might be grapes, but pendent from nothing, not attached; knives which looked melting but still cruel; blue fernlike hair; smeared yellowish-white spots, which might be stars dripping down the sound­less void, spots of startling silence on this rau­cous grating jungle, the polychrome verdure suggesting an impossible pointless fecundity and even the odor of this, but the whole impres­sion transitory as dew. Here, was this an inky bird struggling into shape? Really, were these great fish? Or bared unjoined tendons? Was this a clot of spiny seaweed?…A worm?…And now lapping over his shoulder onto his chest, covering over the scars of Mina’s bites, these looked like green licks of flame, upside-down.

  In a muffled flimsy way Peter could share their clear pleasure in the work. It was Bella’s turn now, and now that they laid him on his back to perform he observed the intense con­centration in her bladelike face. She used the needle as carefully as if she were making a pain­ful embroidery, and he felt obscurely flattered. When she worked on him she had about her none of the contemptuous stupor she used with the men that she and Enid brought to the house. But of course she had no interest in the men except for their money: a dark manner she had, and her body smelled always of earth, of the sandy dirt outside, beaten clangorous by the sun. Mina too was intent on the tattooing, though her face, forever closed, wouldn’t show her interest. But Peter knew it was there, and felt a crazy gladness. Clearly he was being pre­pared, clearly he was being readied, although he didn’t know for what. But that finally was unim­portant to him. He guessed that his evening per­formances, which he could not remember, were growing in intensity and in absurdity, and that he was gradually fixing for some simple horrify­ing climax to it all; but he didn’t care. The care­ful progress of the tattooing gave him the feel­ing of being new-made; his old self—perhaps his only self (that was all right too)—was being obliterated; it was almost as if he were being reborn, inch by inch, and this feeling was ef­fervescent in him, sometimes buoyed him over his hard depressions and the moments when he let go and felt himself falling, falling, fall­ing through the void shaft between all the atoms.

  He was sitting on the tiny back porch, the pump handle near, and the early afternoon sun­light was on his chest like thick cotton. The air seemed sugary and the scores of heavy flies fum­bled about in it. Enid came out of the house to sit beside him; hitched her skirt over her white thighs and let her legs dangle in the sunlight. He didn’t squirm away. He wasn’t afraid of Enid, felt even a sort of melting pity for her: she was nothing, she was airy, empty as air, and herself fearful. She was blond very much as Coke Rymer was blond, but she was thin and grace­less, had no cruelty in her. But still, he had fur­tively to move his hand and touch the pump handle. There; he felt better.

  Her voice was a singsong whisper. “I always have to do like you do,” she said. “I have to do whatever Bella tells me to, just like you have to do whatever Coke tells you to do. It’s funny, the way it is.”

  Peter didn’t answer. It hurt to talk; his throat had been stripped raw by the drinking.

  Her legs flashed when she moved them in the light. “And Bella and Coke have to do what Mina wants them to. It’s funny.” She shrugged; her shoulders were thin as dry leaves. “But I don’t care what they do, they can’t do anything that would really bother me.”

  He almost spoke. He wanted to tell her that she just didn’t know, that they could do things to her she couldn’t imagine, she would have pain and humiliation she could never under­stand. And worse, she would be deprived the solace of her outrage, she would have none.

  “I guess I’m next too,” she said, “I know it. When you’re all gone, I mean, when they’re finished with you, they’ll start on me. But I really don’t care, because I’ve put up with just about everything already.”

  He dropped his head sadly. It was all too clear that she referred to his death. He wondered for an instant why she had been told, and why they had kept it from him, for surely his foreknowl­edge would be the most closely observed part of their treatment of him. But he discarded the thought: she had not been told, no; she knew about his death in the same way that he did, for he had known long ago, even before the death of Sheila. He corrected himself. Before he had murdered her.…But Enid was still mistaken; there were things in store which would pain her impossibly. She was made for a victim too: empty and pliant as air, she had neither will nor way to strike back. Even so, he must admire her courage. She could guess something of what was coming, at least, and still she kept a resigned composure. Of course, any kind of courage was of no use without some allegiance to, some te­nacity for, one’s life, and Enid was void of these. To the end she would simply be what she was already, a ready-made victim. And perhaps it would be easier for her. He had sometimes thought that it would be much less painful for him if he could just resign himself, could just accept without struggle whatever black loom­ing entry they’d shove him through next.…And a darker thought rose to the surface: he wondered if Enid was being set as an example to him by Mina. Was her acquiescence, for all its show of courage, one of the final temptations for him? Were they trying finally to rupture in him a last thin shard of integrity, an integrity which must disturb Mina but which he could not himself discover? Or was this thought a single piece of self-flattery? The doubt in his mind was like a hard iron ring and, as ever, he hefted up his shiny pump handle for some kind of affirmation. And now it was not enough. Self-pity welled in his heart like empty tears to the eye. The pump handle too, like every other object, like every­thing but his tough chains and the boards of the floor and the quivery tattooing needle, was los­ing its presence. It lacked its former heft, its authority. It was going away from him; now he was going to be entirely alone.

  Enid pushed lightly off the edge of the porch and went round in front of him up the steps into the house. He listened to the whisper of her bare feet on the wood, over the linoleum. And he heard Bella’s sharp voice accost the blond girl as she entered the living room. “Here’s Enid now, and she’s a pretty thing, isn’t she?” A pierc­ing voice, a throaty male tenor, Bella’s. “You ought to put some meat on your bones, honey,” she said. “You’re just a bag of bones. I still love you, though, because you’re so blond. I always was crazy about blonds. You’d be just about per­fect, I think, if you’d just put some meat on those bones.” She was silent for a moment, and Peter could picture the scene: Bella was sitting in the balding sofa in her long brown dress, her legs crossed like a man’s, ankle laid across knee, ex­posing her long stale dusty thighs; and now she stubbed out her cigarette with a single jab of her wrist, sharp. “Come here,” he heard her say. “Come here to mama.”

  He sighed. The afternoon was blazing away; the sun had dipped lower, but the light was still white, still hot. It didn’t seem the sun had moved, but that the landscape had ached up­ward after it, as if the heat that had soaked through the dust into the pressed earth was not enough, would never be enough. In the center of the world was a fast deep iciness, pure recalci­trant cold, which could absorb the whole heat of the sun and every point of light; yearned after it. This coldness impinged upon him; he had felt its approach and now he felt it so imposing that his body shivered, anticipated.—The hand of every natural thing was turned against him, he knew it. The pump handle felt light as balsa wood, bod
iless. There was no point at which his body was in contact with the world; his body garish, he floated a garish emptiness.

  But something with a weight was dipping into his shoulder. He looked. Coke Rymer’s hand upon him, and he rose as steadily as he could, not wanting the boy cruelly to help him to his feet. But he lurched into him—it was almost impossible for him to keep his feet any more—and Coke Rymer shoved him sharply backward and smacked his left jaw with a sharp elbow. “Goddam you,” the boy said. “By God, I’ll learn you.” He slapped him across the eyes and then took his hand and led him inside.

  His vision was dazed with tears. Something in his head bored like a big auger.

  Coke Rymer leaned him against the spotted kitchen wall, the way one might prop a board up while he turned to something else. The blond boy stepped back to look at him, but even in his mean eyes most of the cruel interest was gone. This handling of him was routine, and the per­formance was much too far along for the routine to carry interest. Now all was bent toward accel­eration, toward the meaty ending.

  “Well, honeybunch, can I give you a drink?”

  Coke Rymer’s figure swam blurry before him; he tried to fix it tight, but couldn’t. He shook his head. He couldn’t drink any more. His body would no longer accept the stuff; he couldn’t keep it down and there was no comfort in it.