Chap Eleven
And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out. They were cold. Cold, you see, with age in their bones, and Tex, shivering, dug himself out of the chill deep folds of the blanket and D.J.’s body hugging ice to ice against him. Like a thin bitter old woman, cursing ice and old age and his lazy partner and the rheumatism of future joints, Tex poked in the dark and worked the pile of other black spruce twigs and branches into the fire, his nostrils going near to drunk from the sensitivity of mucus deep in sleep being lit up by the aroma of unsuspecting pure burning resin, turpentine converging for an instant to something like opium, you bet, the planes of flame thin, not yet hot, hardly warm till he built a cage of twigs and beat the log as if he scourging indolence to cut to the live coal and reworked and remade his fire structure, tuning it, and stood before the new flame getting some of that ingredient of Alaska earth which worked once to make a tree and give it fuel to burn for his heat, so Tex stood there pulling heat from the earth, and to the side D.J. saw a wolf go easing off and sat up in bed in ice fear and reached for a pot and clanged it.
They cursed each other for a while, Tex him for staying under the blankets, he Tex for being so dumb as never to see a wolf so near, and then D.J. got up and stood by the fire, and when they both warm, they lay down again, and got calm, and felt warm and the trouble started, trouble of the simplest sort it was that profound—they could not sleep. Lying there in wilderness, for all they knew no other man for fifteen or twenty miles, the moon was on the pond, little sounds coming from that pond, fish of the North breaking surface time to time could that be, and on the ground the restlessness of lemmings and voles, and foxes no doubt and the wolf, nothing sleeping easy in this bowl around this pond. Fire, that pit of possibilities beyond the imagination of quadruped animals, yes, the inner throat of the active lion easier to contemplate for such as beasts, and the silence was not a still but came in flows and swells like the ripples of a pool, yeah, and each sound left clouds of silence in the trough between each echo, and they were wired up by the mixture of fatigue, cold, and the first good rest they’d got, and by the life of the day they had just passed, and by the clean in them free of mixed shit, and lying without a gun or knife which was like traveling naked at night now weaponless in near unmarked mountains watching wolf and griz, mother caribou, the cranes never forget their hearts starting to beat at the mystery sound of a thousand cranes’ wings near enough to lift your heart out of your body, make it fly after. So they breathing hard with all of this, lying next to each other like two rods getting charged with magnetism in electric coils, the ante going up and up under that blanket, and in the next half hour as they lay there saying not a word in an intensity of hung suspension, like purgatory so near they are to reaching across, fingers poised, hands up, throats near to gorging with heartbeat, there like that over the next half hour the Arctic lights began, Aurora Borealis was out like she had not been out any night in September this trip and looked to begin above their feet across the pond, North of them in a corona of red and electric green wash and glow colors rippling like a piece of silk and spikes of light radiating up like searchlights, diamond spikes from the crown of the corona going two hundred miles up vertically into the sky while rays and bands, curtains of light, draperies rustled, pulses of color went up into the dark, something agitated in the bend of the night, and a crackling sound like agitation of sparks run over a run of silk, some light was alive and spoke to them.
“What cause that?” said Tex.
“Don’t know.”
“Sunspots.”
“Yeah, sunspots.”
“Magnetic disturbance?”
“Yeah.”
Silence. And they each are living half out of their minds. For the lights were talking to them, and they were going with it, near to, the lights were saying that there was something up here, and it was really here, yeah God was here, and He was real and no man was He, but a beast, some beast of a giant jaw and cavernous mouth with a full cave’s breath and fangs, and secret call: come to me. They could almost have got up and walked across the pond and into the north without their boots, going up to disappear and die and join that great beast. In the field of all such desire D.J. raised his hand to put it square on Tex’s cock and squeeze and just before he did the Northern lights shifted on that moment and a coil of sound went off in the night like a blowout in some circuit fuse of the structure of the dark and D.J. who had never put a hand on Tex for secret fear that Tex was strong enough to turn him around and brand him up his ass, sheer hell for a noble Texan but he, D.J., was beloved son of perfume on the poo Halleloo and her sweet ass was his sweet ass and so temptation made him weak at the root of his balls and he always swelled to be muscle hard around Tex so that Indian could never get it up his ass nor no man living, and vibrations coming off Tex tonight like he giving up the secret of why he never tried to bugger old D.J., Tex who’d bugger any punk, cause asshole is harder to enter than cunt and so reserved for the special tool but Tex, who never sucked a dick and never let no one near him not even to touch, could bugger all but was never ripe to try for D.J.’s dangerous hard-ass soft mother’s cherry although secret unvoiced almost unknown panic for attempting such entrance had him nipped in the groin with a claw, but it came out in the night some tension of waves of unspoken confession from Tex to D.J. that Tex Hyde he of the fearless Eenyen blood was finally afraid to prong D.J., because D.J. once become a bitch would kill him, and D.J. breathing that in by the wide-awake of the dark with Aurora Borealis jumping to the beat of his heart knew he could make a try to prong Tex tonight, there was a chance to get in and steal the iron from Texas’ ass and put it in his own and he was hard as a hammer at the thought and ready to give off sparks and Tex was ready to fight him to death, yeah, now it was there, murder between them under all friendship, for God was a beast, not a man, and God said, “Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill,” and they hung there each of them on the knife of the divide in all conflict of lust to own the other yet in fear of being killed by the other and as the hour went by and the lights shifted, something in the radiance of the North went into them, and owned their fear, some communion of telepathies and new powers, and they were twins, never to be near as lovers again, but killer brothers, owned by something, prince of darkness, lord of light, they did not know; they just knew telepathy was on them, they had been touched forever by the North and each bit a drop of blood from his own finger and touched them across and met, blood to blood, while the lights pulsated and glow of Arctic night was on the snow, and the deep beast whispering Fulfill my will, go forth and kill, and they left an hour later in the dark to go back to camp and knew on the way each mood of emotion building in Rusty and Big Luke and Ollie and M.A. Bill and Pete and their faces were etched just as they had foreseen them and the older men’s voices were filled with the same specific mix of mixed old shit which they had heard before in the telepathic vaults of their new Brooks Range electrified mind.
Terminal Intro Beep and Out
A ring of vengeance like a pitch of the Saracen’s sword on the quiver (what a movie was that, madame!) rings out of the air as if all the woe and shit and parsimony and genuine greed of all those fucking English, Irish, Scotch and European weeds, transplanted to North America, that sad deep sweet beauteous mystery land of purple forests, and pink rock, and blue water, Indian haunts from Maine to the shore of Californ, all gutted, shit on, used and blasted, man, cause a weed thrives on a cesspool, piss is its nectar, shit all ambrosia, and those messages at night—oh, God, let me hump the boss’ daughter, let me make it, God, all going up through the M.E.F. cutting the night air, giving a singe to the dream field, all the United Greedies of America humping up that old rhythm, turning the dynamo around, generating, just cut through that magnetism and go, boy, and God got to give it to the Greedies, cause get a man greedy enough and he got the guts to go—go, go, Gutsy Hyde—so the Devil feeding them from one side and God having to juice man from the ot
her, and whoa, whoa, but no, it will not slow, and these messages zoom across the lands, M.E.F. on call, at night—check on this, idiot expert technologue!—the ionization layer rises, the interference is less, the radio messages go further, zoom, zoom, zoom, like pneumatic tubes going back to the lap of Hiram Hardon, President and Head of Head’s Dept. Store right up there, Endicott Mountains, Brooks Range, and an hour before sunrise as all those North America shit heads stir in their sleep, digesting the messages they sent out and got back, beginning to smog the predawning air with their psychic glug, glut and exudations, not to mention all the funeral parlors cooling out in the premature morn from the M.E.F. all through the night screams and wails of corpses exhumed, excavated, flushed, sponged, spiced, finger-fucked, flayed, sewn, pushed, cut and shoved, not to mention sliced loose from their organs and petrified man in embalming juice—every undertaker worth his junked-out gunk has a secret formula—formaldehyde, do not relinquish your secret ceremonies, your treasure chests, your Paris gardens where the vestal virgins partouse in your juice, no, sir, never forget the living, the dead, and the just dead are fighting up all those square root of minus one bands in the M.E.F. mystery kc frequently kill your cycles, and as morning comes on, one hour before dawn, they are scheming in their sleep, getting practical, getting ready to get up, yawn, cough, fart, shoot a little piss, just generally fuck up that M.E.F. band, and so, friends, the ionization layer (first cousin to static in telepathic affairs) comes down again like a cloud, and intercranial communication is muffled, no mean matter, cause at Brooks Range, on the edge of the great snow-white parabolic reflector, sitting in the silent resonant electric hum of the still, there is a rub in the air like your hair on edge or coitus all interruptus with electric coils of gas in your bowel, pain in your balls, and hate in your ding, yes, discomfort as the ionization layer settles back and the hills is full of static charge. And when the shit was over in the Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari Group bunkhouse on Dolly Ding Bat Lake and the ice pinnacles of the Brooks Range was murmuring the word from ice shield to parabolic vale, “m.e.f., m.e.f., roger and out, it’s morning, come in, e.m.f.,” why, Rusty and Luke and the guides and boys and packers and medium assholes all got into the planes to go on back to Fairbanks and led the way into the new life smack right up here two years later in my consciousness, D.J. here at this grope dinner in the Dallas ass manse, given in my honor, D.J., I thank you, because tomorrow Tex and me, we’re off to see the wizard in Vietnam. Unless, that is, I’m a black-ass cripple Spade and sending from Harlem. You never know. You never know what vision has been humping you through the night. So, ass-head America contemplate your butt. Which D.J. white or black could possibly be worse of a genius if Harlem or Dallas is guiding the other, and who knows which? This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot damn.
TO MY FRIENDS
Roger Donoghue
Buzz Farbar
Mickey Knox
Norman Podhoretz
Cy Rembar
and
Jose Torres
BY NORMAN MAILER
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
The White Negro
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer
The Deer Park—A Play
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Bullfight
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
King of the Hill
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
The Long Patrol
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Faith of Graffiti
The Fight
Genius and Lust
A Transit to Narcissus
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Conversations with Norman Mailer
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Time of Our Time
The Spooky Art
Why Are We at War?
Modest Gifts
The Big Empty (with John Buffalo Mailer)
The Castle in the Forest
On God (with Michael Lennon)
Mind of an Outlaw
Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
About the Author
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than forty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to date to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Norman Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
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Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam?
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