Jim Morrison sat on the wooden sidewalk of another unfinished building across the street from Doc’s skeletal cantina, willing to idle for the while, sprawled against an upright; with a half-full whiskey bottle dangling loosely from his left hand, he listened with something close to awe to the music that Long Time Robert Moore was creating. Back on Earth, such purity of tone and sheer intensity of volume would have been impossible without major amplification. Here in the Afterlife, the majestic sound simply flowed from Moore’s acoustic National steel with no visible assistance. Music in the Afterlife could approach the magically sublime, as pickers, unencumbered by physical limitations, were free to indulge total audio fantasy. But the sound of Long Time Robert Moore still remained profoundly exceptional. Jim was glad he had Robert Moore to keep him entertained, as he settled into comfortable drunkenness. He was drunk enough not to want to negotiate the crowd that had now gathered in the cantina, but sufficiently comfortable that he was content to do nothing but slouch on the sidewalk and listen, eyes closed, his mind riding the chords.
Jim had noticed that it was almost impossibly easy to get drunk in Doc Holliday’s environment, and he wondered if that, and the magnificence of the music, had something to do with the unique quality of the air. The air in this land of Doc’s seemed unnaturally pure. Jim had noted this immediately when he’d emerged from the cantina. Although it still vibrated with the aftermath of the daytime desert heat, the atmosphere had an alpine crispness. It tasted as though it had been filtered, liquefied, distilled, and then reconstituted with an extra shot of oxygen. This was Antarctic air, Center for Disease Control, laboratory-conditioned air. Jim was surprised and a little amused by the care Doc took over his air. It hardly seemed in character for a man who smoked both opium and black, rank, rum-soaked Cuban cheroots; who deliberately maintained his near-terminal, blood-hacking tuberculosis as a signature of personal style. Or did it? Maybe virgin-pure air was Doc’s one concession to the physical.
How hard is that next page to turn?
How hard is that next page to turn?
How hard is that next page to turn?
How hard is the lesson to learn?
A purple night had fallen over Doc Holliday’s environment and the lazy indolence of the day had given way to a promise of dreaming urgency. As the light had dwindled and even the crimson and burning gold beyond the mesas at the horizon had eventually faded to black, the cantina and the whole tiny town had started to stir with expectations of the night to come. Lola had vanished for a while and then reappeared in a scarlet flamenco dress, matching shoes, and lipstick, with her hair in a mantilla. Lola’s red dress seemed to be the sign that the night’s festivities were open for business. Long Time Robert Moore had pushed back his hat and, with a sparkle of the diamond tooth that matched the wicked glint in his bloodshot eyes, opened the beat-up black case that contained the National steel. People Jim had never seen before converged on the cantina, hard-drinking men and women of the wild side who transformed the place from a sleepy afternoon refuge for wastrels to a juke joint so determinedly jumping that the eventual crescendo of what promised to be a cannonball night would bring either violent paranormal saturnalia or equally violent fistfights and gunplay.
Jim had been as determined as anyone else to go the dark distance and embrace anything that came his way. It was thus something of a surprise that he found himself flagging, taking himself out of the race to seek the sanctuary of a private bottle and a support to lean against. It might have been the air; it might have been a kind of delayed, second-time-around death lag, an aftereffect of his recent brush with the Great Double Helix. It might also have been the quantity of unidentified but effective drugs he had consumed for breakfast. Whatever the cause, Jim languished until the china-eyed black dog came up and spoke to him.
“Did you know that the electric chair at Parchman Penitentiary is painted bright banana yellow?”
Jim shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.”
The black dog nodded, its tongue lolling out. “Not many people do. It’s not something they publicize.”
Jim wasn’t at all surprised by the talking dog. He knew that people entered the Afterlife as dogs, horses, mules, and kittens, almost all of them able to talk. One guy had come through as a giant sea turtle the size of a Volkswagen; devoted Kafka enthusiasts sometimes faced life after death as giant bugs. The dog, however, had an odd look in its mismatched eyes. Jim decided his safest bet was to humor the animal. “I’d imagine it’d be something they’d want to keep quiet.”
The dog looked at him suspiciously. “Why should they want to do that?”
Jim hazily pondered this. “I don’t know. I guess I always figured that the electric chair ought to be a nice, dignified, judicial mahogany . . . mahogany with copper fittings, kinda like a coffin or the judge’s bench in the courtroom.”
The dog all but snapped. “Well, it ain’t. Least not at Parchman. You can take my word. It’s banana yellow. Layer upon layer of cheap banana yellow gloss enamel.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah.” The dog changed the subject. “You waiting for Doc?”
Jim shook his head. “No, just waiting. Hardly even doing that.”
“Doc’s down at the opium den. He don’t usually come out until things have started hotting up in town.”
Jim looked up with interest. “An opium den?”
The dog showed its canine fangs; Jim took the grimace to be one of friendship rather than hostility. The dog pointed its nose to the other end of the town’s single main street. “Sure, down there, behind the laundry. Beside where the whorehouse used to be.”
Jim pushed himself away from the post. All through his mortal life he’d dreamed of going to a real old-fashioned opium den. He had almost made it to one in Paris, but his death had ruined that plan. “Are you kidding me? An opium den? A real, all-the-way, Chinese opium den with bunks and fans, and guys with pigtails cooking the pipes?”
The dog nodded. “The whole fortune cookie, plus John Coltrane and Miles Davis on the sound system. It’s run by a guy called Sun Yat.”
“No shit.”
The dog looked at Jim intently. “Before you ask any more questions, you could offer me a drink.”
Jim looked down his bottle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think dogs drank.”
“This one does.”
Jim frowned. “I never fed whiskey to a dog before. How exactly do I do it?”
“It’s easy. Just put the neck of the bottle in my mouth and start pouring. Just don’t pour too fast or I drool.”
The timing of the pouring process required more skill than Jim had imagined, and buying a dog a drink proved a messy and wasteful transaction. A considerable quantity of liquor ran out of the side of the dog’s mouth, dripping on the ground and on Jim’s leather pants. This in itself didn’t worry Jim overmuch. Plenty of booze had been spilled on that pair of pants. He just didn’t like to be thought of as a sloppy drunk, especially when he wasn’t the one doing the slopping. When he finally took the bottle from the dog’s mouth and wiped the booze and dog spit from his leathers, he saw the liquor level had gone down considerably. The dog braced its legs and shook itself, producing a fresh spray of saliva. Finally the dog swayed slightly and growled contentedly. “Damn, but I needed that.”