Guises Read online

  He imagined that the spirits of the beasts who owned the many teeth that had been inscribed in his skin crept up in the shadows of the night to claim their stolen jaws. Then they fled to hunt under a savage moon that didn’t even need to be full like the stories said. A full moon was all right because it represented a haunch of meat, but a sliver of a crescent was just as well for it more nearly resembled a tooth. On slick ground they pursued the terror-stricken people and animals that Milo saw in his nightmares. And when they would catch their prey, oh, how they teased them, circling with wordless growls deep inside erotic throats. Reaching in to slash some meaty but otherwise non-mortal area, circling, biting, and bellowing thunder to the sky, laughing a jackal’s laugh even as they showed a wolf’s prowess. They then lunged to shake the soft, living bodies until riven meat steamed.

  And Milo dreamed it, knew well what these spirit wolves were up to as they playfully snapped at squirts of arterial blood that took to the air like battalions of scarlet butterflies. As they rolled in the ribbons of ropy intestines like puppies with yarn balls. As they grew so aroused by the peppery carnal odor of carrion matted into one another’s fur that they mounted each other indiscriminately. They licked each other’s furry balls and assholes, domineered and submitted with howls of rage and rapture. Milo knew because he had worn the images of their fangs. The spirit wolves had taken their fangs back, and his spirit rode in their mouths as they committed their carnal crimes with the unbridled compassion of the predator. The graphic layers of carcasses spread open, the rutting, even ravishing the fresh corpses of the kill left Milo whining in his sleep, feverish from the ecstatic sensations of brute manipulation.

  He’d wake up, feel the press of fangs on his flesh, the heat of blood across his skin that seemed to be more in evidence as each night passed. He was intoxicated by this rush of what had always been forbidden to him—contact. Even if it was brutal butchery. He had been there and tasted every scrap of gore, aching with its burn, savoring the pheromones of carnage and sex as they released like bubbles of boiling sugar. Had awakened close to his shroud of teeth, sticky and flushed.

  Then one night upon opening his eyes he found a bloodied half of a breast on the sheets, the nipple bisected raggedly and the lymphatic glands trailing in uneven tendrils. Milo leapt up and raced to his mother’s bedroom. He had to peek through the keyhole because she’d always kept the door locked against him. But he might have gotten in through her window, mightn’t he? Had he murdered her at last, torn her callous body apart with his bare hands while he’d been dreaming of mercurial moonlight and the delirium to be found in galvanic homicide?

  Her snore told him she was all right. He could see her flopping on the mattress and snorting, the sour stench of cheap whiskey gusting across the room. Milo shook his head in relief and confusion. Whose breast was it?

  He searched the house and the yard. There were no other body parts. Was the blood on his skin not his own?

  The next night the spirit wolves came to reclaim their teeth. He rode upon their tongues, clinging to the balustrades of their honed incisors as they raced two counties over to kill three horses in a blue-green pasture. The horses’ eyes bulged as they reared, trying to defend themselves with their hooves. Wolves jumped onto their backs to sink lethal fangs into their necks and skulls. They screamed almost like people did. The phallus of one stallion had been as tough as an old boot, but the foal inside one of the mares was as tender as butter.

  The dream faded and Milo struggled to wake up. He saw shadows leaving his room. He staggered out of bed and began to follow. Out in the yard their shapes humped, twisted, bent tortuously. And then they became men. He gasped. Were they not wolves in the spirit? Had they always possessed real flesh and bones?

  Milo followed as they went beyond the edge of town, to Fatima’s. Looking through a slit in the tent, Milo observed the freak ladies bathing the men, rubbing them down with fluffy towels, wrapping them in silk robes. They patted and caressed the men but never kissed them, never spread their legs for them. Their slavish devotions consisted only of touching, as they had been doing with Milo when he’d visited the tent years before.

  Did the women know that these creatures had just been slaughtering livestock this night, human beings on other nights? Couldn’t they smell the meat and blood on them?

  He growled in the back of his throat, thinking. Yes, the women knew. And it didn’t matter. They must have thought he was one of these when he’d run away to Fatima’s when he was only thirteen, a bear rug stitched to his skin.

  Or maybe they had only been humoring him, recognizing him as a would-be cub, a fledgling beast.

  Milo inhaled sharply, frightened of what he was going to do next. He flexed his muscles to give him courage and then boldly walked into the tent. The women cried out in surprise and alarm to fall back to positions behind the furniture. The men jumped to their feet, eyes faintly red at the edges, black at the centers, like moons emerging from full eclipse.

  “I know who you are. I wish to become one of you,” he stated as if this was reasonable. Did he not wear their power on his skin in tattoo? Had he not ridden to their places of slaughter with them in the shadows of his nightmares?

  The men glanced at each other, then turned back to him and grunted.

  It made him angry that he’d broken his usual silence to speak to them. And they wouldn’t speak back to him.

  “Will you not help me?” he demanded.

  One of the men stepped forward, wetting his lips from a cup of wine.

  “We can’t bite you,” the man said with slurring, lispy words. “We have no teeth.”

  The men laughed, pink gums poking out in the half-light from the tent’s lamps.

  The freak women tittered behind the furniture, peering up shyly to stare at Milo.

  “Please help me,” Milo pleaded. “I want to live your life. I need to live it. It is the only touching I have ever known.”

  One of the men rubbed a stubbly chin. “There is one way,” he replied tentatively. “Not just saliva carries the germ of the were. Semen does, too.”

  Milo started as if he’d been slapped. He imagined bending over a table so that each of these men could take their turns ramming their hardness into his rectum, until they were spent and he was contaminated. And by the nasty leers on their faces, he knew he would have to endure all of them, not just the one it might take to grant him their shifting powers.

  But he wanted it so badly.

  I enter the jaws of death.

  I become the jaws of death.

  After all, the wolves frolicking amid the pieces of their kills had fucked one another. It hadn’t repulsed him then.

  Even the most brutal touch was still a touch in a wasteland of isolation. And it had to hurt for he was sixteen and a virgin. And they were creatures addicted to very rough play.

  Milo began to unfasten his trousers.

  “No,” said one of the men. “Not that way. The newest member of a pack must always submit.”

  They dropped their robes and stood, erect and ready in a gauntlet of anxious animals. Milo understood and sank to his knees before the first in line.

  The freak women began to have sex with each other in an orgy of frustrated, voyeuristic passion. Skeletons rattled rocky pubes against the balloon faces of the fat women. Beards at both ends speckled with wet musk and occasional menstrual juices. Stumps thick as dildos vibrated with song. Lizard Lady’s gills were opening and closing in a frenzy. The fetus of an aborted hermaphrodite in a jar was jiggled from its shelf as two entwined two-faced prodigies kept bumping into the table it sat on. It smashed to the floor and the enraptured women kept right on rolling over the top of it, the baby’s elastic body pulping and the glass shards making them cry out in gurgling pleasure, embedding in their buttocks.

  The men rocked above him. Their unusually long, black, curved fingernails raked his scalp and shoulders as he sucked them. He felt his blood coursing down his face into his eyes, flowing across
his shoulders. He had his own erection, not from the act he was performing—but from the rust of his own blood, the scorch of it on his flesh. Its scent filled his nostrils as it crept down his face and he sucked it in great red drops, pulling it back into his head. He couldn’t help but revel in it for this was touching. It was any kind of touching at all that made people and beasts aware that they were alive. He’d always wanted to be loved, and violence was a sort of love—a bond in contact between two participants intent upon release, upon getting dirty with the night. There was a grace in fury and a gift to be given with each outrage. Milo heard the man above him howl in inarticulate orgasm.

  He tried to swallow the bitter semen but couldn’t. It wouldn’t go down. He tried to spit it out before sliding down to the next in line but it wouldn’t be dislodged. He sucked until the next man came, then moved on to the next. He growled as he cupped his mouth around each shaft, snarling with the impulse to bite down at the most explosive of the meat. But he restrained himself.

  Soon I’ll be able to actually run with them…

  But when he’d done them all—wiping at his chin, still unable to swallow or spit out their seed—Milo looked back to see that all the men were dead. Their faces were peaceful as if they were sleeping. They did not have the strained, sweaty faces of a mob that has been satiated with oral sodomy. The freak women were cradling the slightly shriveled bodies and smiling, cooing to them like the men had been husbands and sons who’d fallen in a worthy battle.

  “You’re the king of the wolves,” the ladies told him through their happy tears.

  Milo ran out of the tent, choking on the mouthful of semen.

  He didn’t go home. He collapsed in a field somewhere, exhausted, scratching at the tattooed skin, feeling the teeth press firmly against him, closing him in, hard as a kiss with open mouth and bared fangs.

  The moon had risen by the time he woke up again. He stretched in the darkness and thought at first that his tattoos of teeth had gone black. But he rubbed it and it ruffled. It was hair sprouting all over him, tickling its way around his genitals and into the crack of his ass, filling the hollows of his armpits, flowing down his thighs. Itchy loving fingers crawled across his belly. His snout jutted forward as he thought he heard his nose bones cracking. His jaws became cavernous with wicked fangs.

  He exulted and sniffed the air for signs of life somewhere, for the delicious odor of blood and the sound of a quickened heartbeat.

  Inside him, the semen of the werewolves ceased to choke him. It coated his tongue, slimed his gums. He grinned like a maniac in the moonlight, that being what he was. Grinned as he ran off to hunt and to rip to pieces and feed, knowing that the spirit wolves were going with him, riding in his mouth. Wherever he roamed and whoever he slaughtered with his terrible love, they would dream in death of his exploits.

  | — | — |

  THE CURRENT

  “A current under sea

  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.”

  T.S. Eliot, THE WASTELAND

  Tammy sticks pins in my feet, inserts needles under my toenails. She takes the pliers from George’s toolbox and yanks one of the nails off. She laughs like an eight-year-old loon.

  George comes in. He’s been arriving in the nick of time all my life it seems.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing!” he yells at her, then screams into the other room to his girlfriend, “Susan! Can’t you control this brat?”

  “So what?” Tammy chortles as she flicks the bloody nail across the room like it was just an old guitar pick. “Will can’t feel it.”

  And that’s true. I only know because I can see her sitting on the floor by my feet. Sitting back in the wheelchair I don’t see anything of me past my bent knees. Tammy describes what she does as she does it. The little ripple chip nail she shows me is proof enough.

  Two days later Tammy’s got a glass of ice water. She holds it next to my ear and jiggles it so I hear the cubes swirl in the water.

  “You hear that?” she asks me, the little minx.

  She dips her fingers in it and flicks droplets in my face.

  “You feel that? Close as you’ll ever come to feeling the water again, huh, Will?”

  Cool, clean, sweet. Tammy pours some of it over my head. I shiver down to my neck, then nothing. The memory of it is of a kiss, of a lover I can’t ever hold close again.

  “What’s it make you think of, Will?” she asks me in a whisper.

  Half of the water on my face is tears.

  I don’t tell her that it makes me think of a dream. The usual one where I’m running toward the pool, my bare feet on the icy, smooth tile. I get to the blue edge and leap. Prepare to fall in a perfect knife of flesh. Only there is no water. I sense no gravity. I’m just suspended in a vast, kidney-shaped darkness. There is no rippling motion, no gentle buoyancy, no liquid passage. I don’t feel anything.

  My brother George comes in. He knows all about that dream. He and Susan don’t see each other anymore. Good. Thank God, because I can’t picture myself as Tammy’s uncle.

  ««—»»

  Everyone has dreams. Mine have always involved water. Like sailors, I’ve always thought of water as feminine. Water is mysterious, graceful, undulating and life-giving. A natural, passive force capable of sudden, primal fury. If that’s not a description of the womanly, what is?

  I was a water baby. Before I even learned to walk, I learned to swim at one of those summer classes sponsored by the Red Cross. I was diving from a board by the age of five. By the time I was in high school, I was winning every butterfly, 200 meter breaststroke, and free-style event at the school meets. The coach convinced me—early—to begin training for the Olympics.

  I didn’t really care about swimming. I just wanted to be in the water, to feel her all around me. I was a fish. I was a creature of Poseidon.

  My folks were so proud, always counting the gold medals they figured I’d win. I was going to be greater than Mark Spitz. George, who had just graduated from TSU, nicknamed me Will the Gill.

  In honor of George coming home, Dad took the family for a picnic on the sailboat. I sat trailing my fingers in the water.

  Mother smiled at me. “Can’t stand it, can you?”

  “It’s all I can do not to jump overboard and swim alongside like a friendly dolphin.” I grinned back, moving my fingers back and forth, caressing the current.

  A storm can come up so fast in the Gulf. Anywhere there is a large body of water. Unpredictable. Female aspect again. Some might call me a sexist for that but I’m not saying that this unpredictability is necessarily a bad thing. It is the realm of caprice, of cruel impulse and freakish, genius escapade. That sort of wild spontaneity takes brilliance and strength.

  On that particular day, it was a bad thing. For us.

  The sky went from lapis to jet and a wind rushed out of it, turned, and snapped the mast in half. I heard Mother scream as I looked up at the wide yellow sail fluttering down like a shroud. The last thing I felt was the blow, the salt sea on my fingers.

  “Will?” George was pleading with me. “Open your eyes, Will. Jesus, don’t be dead, too.”

  I heard him sob. I was next to him where he’d hauled me half-assed onto a jagged piece from the cabin. The salt water burned up my nostrils, smelling rich with storm-churned kelp. I could taste it and bile and old, barnacled pirate doubloons. The ocean lapped, slapped the wood we lay on. It sounded like a slow drum beating. George looked almost drowned, wild and exhausted.

  That’s four of the five. Senses, that is. Present and accounted for.

  But the fifth. I was partially in the water. It held me up, rolled over me, kissed each bruise and break. I couldn’t feel it at all. I couldn’t feel anything.

  ««—»»

  George is cooking. I’m glad he’s here. If he wasn’t, I’m sure I’d have ended up in some institution. I couldn’
t have taken care of myself in this big old house on the Gulf of Mexico.

  Ten years of dreams now, running to the water’s edge, jumping, nothing. Nothing. My body’s all gone to fat. That’s because I like to eat. Not a bit wrong with my sense of taste. I love smelling what George is cooking for lunch. Aroma is a lover, oh yes. Stir-fry chicken, snow peas, bean sprouts, green onions, ginger. I hear the sounds of frying, spattering, emoting cuisine.

  (It sounds like rainfall. Can’t fool me. It sounds like water and so I keep an ear cocked in the direction of the kitchen.)

  “Is Oanna coming to eat with us?” I ask my brother as he puts dishes on the table. He’s setting a third place so I can have my hopes up, can’t I?

  “Maybe,” he replies. “She said she’d try.”

  Oanna and her two sisters moved in next door a week ago. I sat in my chair on the lawn as George helped them move in their porch furniture. The place next door has the biggest back yard pool on the beach.

  She’s no Aphrodite, believe me. Like her sisters, her eyes are too far apart, too large, her mouth too thin. Her hair is long but always looks wet. But when she moves she seems to be coming to the shore while walking upon waves.

  I met her that day, and that night when I went to sleep I dreamed I was running toward the pool. This time when I jumped, I plunged into the deep. It was cool, womanly-mysterious, bearing me away.

  The water was there, for the first time since the accident.

  I can’t help but take that as a sign. Only fools ignore genuine intuition.

  There is a knock at the door.

  “Come in!” George yells and shoots me a grin.