Sex and Death in Television Town Read online

  Oxy snickers to himself.

  Jesus puts his hat on and takes another pistol, then steps into the hallway.

  The Telosians have already cleared out, and he strolls languidly scratching his bare ass with the barrel of a gun. He can hear Cry moaning behind one of the closed doors. Farther down, there are splinters of a door and Jesus can see the television woman still tied to a chair in an empty room, the wrestling program is on a commercial break and advertising some kind of canned Italian food for kids.

  Death sees the television commercial and it kind of makes him hungry. He watches it for a while. Then the commercial goes back to wrestling and there is some very old wrestler with platinum blond hair and his wrestler girlfriend pointing and screaming about some things.

  The television woman seems to lure Jesus closer with her flashy face. He steps into the room and sits down on the bed, very interested in what the wrestlers have to say.

  Then the wrestler gets hit over the head with a chair and he collapses to the floor.

  The audience is roaring and the wrestler’s girlfriend screams.

  Death regurgitates an oafish chuckle under his breath.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nixx is very irritated because the four of them are not lined up evenly. Oxy’s noose is twenty-eight inches away from Random’s, and Random’s is twenty-five inches away from his, and Sharp’s, well Nixx can hardly stomach calculating the distance but it is at least forty-three inches away from his.

  “It is utterly disgusting,” Nixx mutters to himself.

  Random is the only one praying. He is actually very annoyed that the others aren’t praying with him. Who the hell do they think they are anyway, not praying to God with him? He wonders if they are not Christians, but then dismisses that thought immediately. Everyone is Christian, he says to himself. People have told him that there’s such a thing as non-Christians but he doesn’t believe them.

  He nods his head and thinks, surely they must be praying to themselves . . .

  The television people are surrounding them with their obnoxious programs. They just stand there, watching them, dizzying light across their faces.

  On the next commercial break, Death comes outside with his pistols. Walking half-dazed with the wind chilling his naked skin.

  The leader of the lynch mob turns to Death and before he can change his channel a bullet is put into his face. The other television heads freeze at the sight of their fallen leader. They peer through the smoking hole in his screen that continues as a hole in the man’s inner goo-skull and brain.

  Death yawns and scratches at himself.

  A smaller Telosian, probably the son of the mob leader, screams a dirt bike racing show at Death and charges with his bare fists raised.

  Without a flinch, Jesus fires and chunks of skull explode from the back of the boy’s television head.

  The Telosians disperse, running back into their buildings and locking their doors.

  Death doesn’t untie his friends right away. He goes back upstairs and finishes watching television first.

  After he cuts them down, he says, “Get some sleep. The goblins will be here shortly after sundown.”

  Oxy giggles at his naked crinkled butt when he walks away from them.

  CHAPTER NINE

  They hope to get some sleep but right now they are too busy watching television. Oxy, Random, Death, and Sharp all piled together on the bed watching the TV woman who has given up struggling and sits slumped in her chair.

  Nixx is the only one who doesn’t really like to watch. He lies on the floor of the room and counts the hairs on his left arm. Last year he tried doing this but lost count after 245. This time he plans to finish or die trying. And then he will count the hairs on his right arm just to be sure they are even. He will become enraged if the arm hairs are not equal, because arm hairs are natural and he has come to rely on the geometrical correctness of things that are natural.

  Normally Nixx wouldn’t be counting his arm hairs in a room full of people who are most likely going to distract him, but he is nervous that the sun will go down while he isn’t paying attention and will have to battle the black creatures all by himself. Not to mention Cry said she saw him die while she was masturbating and he’s not yet sure if that was a joke or not, so that’s got him high-strung. It will be a while before he’ll want to be alone.

  Cry walks into the room naked, dripping with hot wet.

  “I’m taking a bath,” she says to Nixx, even her stegosaurus-spikes dripping, hot metal, her pubic hairs smoothed to the contours of her crotch.

  Nixx doesn’t look at her, using his fingernails to separate the counted arm hairs from the uncounted arm hairs.

  “You should take a bath too,” Cry’s face stern.

  Nixx is trying not to look at her, even though he can sense her wet flesh above him, fighting the urge to look up at her.

  She bends down to him. “Do I have to carry you?”

  That’s it. Her face is in front of his face. His count- ing ceases. His eyes crawling down her glistening snakeskin neck and shoulders, to shiny breasts draping down over his nose. Drops of hot bath drip from the nipples and slide down his cheek.

  “I don’t want to die,” Nixx says underneath her.

  Cry puts a spicy finger to his lips.

  “Clean yourself,” Cry says. “We need to fuck before you get killed tonight.”

  Then she pulls him to his feet and leads him by his pants into the bathroom.

  Three tubs: two are filled with steaming water and one has a handcuffed television man inside. She points at the television man. “That tub’s his.” She points at an empty tub. “This one’s mine,” and slides into the burning liquid.

  Nixx rips his clothes trying to get out of them while Cry pulls at him, trying to get him inside the tub with or with- out his clothes. She pulls him ass-first into her lap, wrapping her legs around him. His boots still on, sticking out of the tub and attached to his pants and tan suspenders. He leaves them that way while Cry slithers her limbs around him, her spikes sticking out of the water and scraping the back of the tub.

  “This is the machine,” Cry says, stuffing Nixx’s hand into her cunt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The sun goes down and the Telosians are outside carrying lanterns into a huge pile in the road.

  “We should have made friends with them,” Random says. “They could have helped us against the demons.”

  “They don’t have any real guns,” Sharp says. “They’re deader than we are.”

  Death is wandering through the town, through stores and houses, trying to find more bullets for his gun. His fists squeeze frustrated as he pushes television people out of the way to look in their cabinets and trunks. He doesn’t understand how they can have a civilization completely free of guns. He’s seen the remotes, but doesn’t understand how they can be considered weapons. You don’t load them. You don’t shoot anything out of them. You can’t practice with beer bottles. You can’t look dangerous holding one. And they can’t kill anything but television shows.

  “What good are they?” Jesus says to a Telosian family.

  They play soap operas at him.

  Oxy is still in the same spot on the bed, glued to the television set.

  Cry, naked and dripping dry in front of him, says, “What’s so interesting about her?” Oxy points at her television head. A science-fiction show is on about some people on a spaceship.

  Cry sits next to Oxy and leans forward, trying to get interested in the show he is watching. The show is now talking about some aliens who are absurdly logical and have long ears like Nixx.

  Oxy has no idea what is going on but he loves it anyway. He wants Cry to love it too but she doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself. She can’t sit still. She shifts forward and back. Looks around the room and at a daisy-painting in the hall. She squeezes her palm into the flab of her thigh and bites a tattooey finger.

  “I’ll make it better,” she says.

 
Pulling the blade from a pocket of her flesh, Cry steps to the television woman and cuts her shirt open, exposing human breasts that are not very large but have curvy long nipples. Piece by piece, she cuts the dress out from under the ropes. The television woman squirms wildly now and Cry gets an electric shock when she slips the woman’s nipple between her lips.

  She pinches a thanks to the nipple and sits back down, admiring the naked body with the television head.

  “That’s better,” she says to Oxy.

  But Oxy loves the face so much he doesn’t care about the figure. He was beginning to forget there was even a person attached to the television set.

  Cry exits the room and goes back to Nixx wiping off the smeared green paint from his face. She can sense his wormy nerves.

  “What are they anyway?” he asks. “Goblins,” Cry says. “That’s what Death calls them.”

  “Goblins?”

  “But they are just humans that have become wrong,” she says. “You saw what happened to the hermaphrodite on the train.”

  “He was turning black.”

  “He was infected with their disease. It is a plague that makes people demon-like.”

  “Goblin plague?”

  “Like the black death, leprosy.”

  “Where did it come from?” Nixx asks.

  “A dark spidery place.”

  “Have you seen this in your sex?”

  Cry nods. “Years ago. I was fucking both Jesus and Battle Johnny at the time. They saw it too.”

  “That’s why they came to Jackson, to warn everybody?”

  “But the townspeople thought they were under attack,” Cry responds. “They started killing the hermaphrodites.”

  “And then the black creatures came,” Nixx says.

  “They shouldn’t have tried to save Jackson. They should’ve known nobody would believe them.”

  “I believed them. If they didn’t come I would’ve been killed.”

  “You’ll be killed anyway,” Cry says.

  “Tonight, you say?” Nixx asks.

  “Tonight,” Cry says.

  Nixx repaints his face. But this time, instead of solid green, he paints his skull on the outside of his skin.

  Then, a little while later: “Can the Telosians get infected by the disease?”

  Cry says, “I don’t know. My vision said that no Telosian would fall victim to the disease, so I think maybe they are immune. In any case, Telos is the safest place for us to be.”

  “Not safe for me,” Nixx says.

  “No,” Cry says. “No place is safe for you.”

  “Should I try to fight fate?”

  “If you want to.”

  They make love again in one of the bedrooms and collapse on their sides facing each other. They are lazy-drugged from sex. Nixx sees the future again, but the future has nothing to do with him. It shows a landscape full of babies. Something like a painting.

  “I think I’ll create a work of art,” Nixx says.

  “Art?”

  “I always wanted to create something.” He closes his eyes. “I always planned on doing something significant.”

  “You don’t have time for art,” Cry says. “The goblins will be here soon.”

  “Perhaps I die because I am creating art rather than fighting to survive.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Fate can be an ugly thing . . .”

  “Shut up,” Cry says. “Let’s fuck again.”

  “I am like a slave to fate.”

  “You’re like a slave to my cunt,” Cry says, angry face looking down on him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The goblins aren’t here yet and it’s been dark for a few hours.

  Oxy has just been watching television and he only moves when he has to take a leak out the window, still looking over his shoulder so he doesn’t miss anything.

  He curls his sideburns and licks a tooth.

  “There’s no place on Earth you’d rather be than Hampshire Mall,” says the television.

  Oxy wishes he could go to that mall.

  Random and Sharp are sticking close to Death, following him around the room as he washes his underwear and draws little pictures of teddy bears on the wall with nail rust.

  “This is where everyone dies,” Death tells them.

  They nod their heads.

  “There’s just not enough bullets.”

  Outside, the Telosians have constructed a circus tent. The whole town must be there, a couple hundred of them crowding into the tent and mixing their television shows together.

  “What are they up to?” Nixx says to Cry looking out of a window.

  “Having a circus,” she says.

  The Telosians are just sitting in there, staring at each other and coated in flickery lantern light.

  “They picked the wrong night for that,” Nixx says.

  Sharp is sitting in a chair, playing with raggy television dolls.

  After a few more hours of waiting, Cry slams reptilian knuckles on a deck of cards and takes Nixx across the street to have a drink at the tavern.

  “This is driving me nuts,” Cry says. “I wish those things would just attack and get it over with.”

  Nixx shrugs.

  The tavern is empty but the door is unlocked and all the lights are still lit. Cry swipes a bottle of whiskey from behind the bar and nicks the green-skulled man’s cheek with her spiky backside, just flirting with him. She pours him a glass while the blood trickles and Nixx’s face is blank.

  “You don’t act like a Hoak,” Cry tells him. He sips his whiskey. “You look Hoak,” Cry says. “You’ve got Hoak ears, the Hoak face paint, Hoak arrows.”

  Nixx coughs at the liquor fumes.

  Cry drinks from the bottle, black lips enveloping most of the neck. “You are hard to figure out. You act nice and neat like an Easterner. Yet you dress like you’re a rough gunman, like one of Battle Johnny’s men. And you’re a Hoak.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” Nixx says.

  Cry jiggles her spikes and drinks some more. The lights flicker orange against the curve of her jaw. Then taunts, “Was your mommy raped by an Indian?”

  “I said—” Nixx threatens with a hand on his holster.

  Cry cackles at him. She continues until Nixx lowers his eyes and relaxes his hand.

  He says, “It’s no big deal, anyway.”

  “Sure it is,” Cry says. “Your Eastern mother was raped by a savage Hoak, maybe several savage Hoaks.”

  Nixx frowns.

  She continues, “Then maybe you grew up in a rough western town. Being part Hoak, you probably had to learn to fight at an early age. Your mother probably married a man who beat you day and night.”

  The green-faced man kicks the seat out from under him and paces the bar. He takes a new bottle of whiskey and chokes down a shot.

  “It was nothing like that,” he says.

  Cry smiles.

  “Then tell me.”

  He takes another drink and wheezes. This whiskey must have come from a different batch that was poorly distilled.

  Cry pulls him back to his seat. “I’m going to assume I’m right unless you tell me.”

  Nixx gets comfortable and starts to feel a bit dizzy. He is beginning to get drunk. Maybe too drunk. He wonders if the whiskey is what gets him killed tonight.

  “I shouldn’t be drinking,” Nixx says. “It’s your fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “You’re wrong about me. And you’re wrong about Hoaks.”

  “You can’t be full Indian. You’re too pale.”

  “Hoaks aren’t savage. They’re peaceful. And they’re smarter than whites. Even more technologically advanced.”

  “Advanced? Indians? Ha!” Cry pounds her fist on the table.

  “You people don’t understand. You think all the tribes are exactly the same. All weak ignorant primitives. But every tribe is unique in their own ways. Many are superior to you.”

  “Now you’re just being
funny.”

  “Some tribes are spiritually superior, some are poetically superior, some are physically superior. Hoaks are technically superior.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “It’s true.”

  “But what about your mixed genes?”

  “My what?”

  “Your race,” Cry says. “You’re a half-breed. Somebody had to be raped to make you. Either your father or your mother was white and one of them raped the other.”

  “No one was raped,” Nixx says, “and most Hoaks are half-breeds.”

  “They must get raped a lot.”

  “No one gets raped!” Nixx squeezes the dizziness behind his eyes. “It is our culture.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s just our culture. Leave me alone.”

  Nixx stands up and hurries out of the tavern.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Cry follows the Hoak boy, waving two whiskey bottles at him and blowing kisses with puffy black lips.

  He darts into the circus tent and the woman chugs liquor as she stumbles in after him.

  Inside:

  The television people are all sitting in a giant circle, motionless. Very loud television shows pointed at a totem pole in the center of the ring. The leader of the chant is a muscular man in a priest’s cassock, his screen larger than any other in Telos. He watches Cry carefully as she creeps around their meditation.

  Cry doesn’t see Nixx. She walks around the outside of the Telosian circle, trying to block out the scratchy TV noises.

  The pole in the center of the ring is not exactly a totem pole. It is a spiraling sculpture made of sewn together cockroaches and birds and half a bull. Twisting and shuffling.

  Cry sees an open flap on the far side of the tent and guesses Nixx weaseled away. Her spirit becomes clicker-waves with alcohol as she goes after him.

  The spinning totem pole begins to whistle and spray a squidy juice at the television sets. Arms and screens stretch to receive this thick liquid. Then they take off all of their clothes.