“We must cast her from us.”
Aimee’s people, not hers.
“Let her be driven out and eaten by dogs.”
The frying pan was once again tilting into the fire.
“Stone the whore!”
“In the name of the Lord, stone the whore!”
***
“So are we there yet?”
Jim and Doc had now been drinking for what Jim subjectively conceived of as the entire long afternoon. He was well past his initial elation at being reunited with Holliday and at being rescued from the Jurassic. Bourbon shots with beer chasers had put Jim into a disgruntled discontent. His past was as fragmented as a surrealist quilt and his future looked to promise little more than prolonged degeneration and perversity. Like every drunk knew but usually forgot, introspection and booze never mixed well.
“So how soon do we get where we’re going?”
Doc had declined to answer Jim’s first Bart Simpson challenge, recognizing it as mere alcoholic petulance. When Jim asked a second time, Doc stared at him coldly; he, too, was reflective and grumpy from his own share of onboard drinking. “If you’re going to get fractious and start whining before you’ve even finished your first bottle, I might start to surmise that maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea for me to haul your sorry ass out of the mire back there.”
Jim’s face hardened. “I thought you did it because you owed me.”
Doc’s expression didn’t change, except for his left eye, which took on a dangerous glint. “I didn’t have to volunteer to pay the debt quite so freely, though, did I?”
Jim hadn’t drunk so much that he failed to realize he was drawing close to the line. He was being unreasonable, and maybe a little ill-mannered, and a half-drunk Doc Holliday was hardly the kind of man with whom one copped attitudes. Jim shrugged. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just kinda wondering how long we’re going be on the river.”
“You ought to know by now, kid. All time is relative.”
The boat journey, which Jim was starting to view as an extended and now largely unwanted Disneyland ride, was getting tired. He’d already seen plenty of water in the swamp, and he was more than ready for some hot nights, and at least the illusion of being in a big city. His outlandish encounter with the alien creations Epiphany and Devora was far enough behind him to start him thinking about women. Images of women in the sexual abstract, long legs, flashing eyes, ruby lips, swaying hips, curly pubic hair, high-heeled shoes, cries and whispers, and revealing, although not yet specified, costumes-all flickered beckoningly at the peripheries of his mind, eager to lead him to the edge of that old-fashioned temptation and the urge to be elsewhere. He couldn’t believe that Doc, from what he knew of him, wasn’t feeling the same way, too.
It didn’t help that the river had taken a decided turn for the depressing. The broccoli-colored jungle had been left far behind; now they were traveling in a corrupted Arizona, between tall, hollowly echoing cliffs of unhealthy sponge-yellow sandstone. In the shallows the water ran so thick with that silt that it gave these margins the look of diseased urine. Most of the animal life seemed to have gone, except for the buzzards and ravens that constantly circled overhead and, in the few patches of comparatively clear water, the swift outline of large, sinister fish. Here and there, on the river bottom, Jim could make out what looked to be masses of large orange spheres, angry and misshapen balloons, like those toxic orange ones made from that plastic ooze-in-a-tube that hucksters used to sell to kids at fairgrounds. Jim could only suppose they were egg sacs, laid, or maybe spawned, by some toadlike river life he had no desire to meet, undesirable and very large.
Jim’s overall impression was that the higher they moved on the river, the less benign its aspect. As if to make this perfectly clear, a galley straight out of Ben Hur had labored past them a little earlier, complete with sweating, groaning slaves, whip-wielding overseers, a relentless and muscular drummer, an aroma of shit and misery, and an obese, toga-clad Nero figure lounging on the quarterdeck with body-slaves peeling grapes for him. Where in its first, jungle-fringed reaches the Styx had been close to idyllic, it was now turning blighted and grim. Doc had stared at the wretched fantasy trireme as it creaked past, but had not felt moved to comment. Both he and Jim were lapsing into long bouts of silence.
For Jim, real confirmation of the downhill slide arrived when the launch passed the huge tail fin of a downed B-52, sticking up from a roughly cylindrical tangle of submerged and rusting wreckage. The huge jet appeared to have crashed, long ago, halfway up the cliff wall and then dropped, smashing down in what must have been a spectacular impact at the water’s edge. What Jim couldn’t figure was how any pilot would have been able to pull off such a maneuver. The old nuclear bomber would have needed the performance vectors of a UFO to make it down into a canyon that, at its narrowest point, was only slightly wider than the plane’s wingspan. The presence of a B-52, though, was enough of an uncomfortable memory, straight out of Vietnam, to make Jim lose any remaining enthusiasm for aimlessly rolling on the river.
Even the weather was taking a turn for the negative. In the shadowy places, where the sandstone walls rose to a hundred feet or more, the river grew chilly and a dank veil of cheap Bela Lugosi fog shrouded the water. What little sky was visible had darkened from blue to an implacable slate gray, and then became increasingly obscured by ominous near-black clouds.
“Are those rain clouds?”
“Smoke.”
“Smoke?”
“Smoke from Gehenna.”
Jim straightened up. “Gehenna?” He rose from the seat cushions in the stern of the launch and lurched toward the bow. “I have to see this.”
Doc was taking his turn at the helm, making him once again irritable. “It’s quite a sight, I promise you that.”
Jim looked up at the dark clouds overhead. “It is smoke.”
“That’s what I told you.”
“How soon till we see Gehenna itself?”
“You want to take the wheel for a spell?
Jim nodded. He knew it was the least he could do if he wanted to get back into Holliday’s good graces. “Sure.”
The two men changed places and Doc sagged back into the cushions, reaching for a drink. “Just take us around the curve nice and easy, and for fuck’s sake don’t go running us into an oil rig or something else up there in the mist.”
“Oil rigs?”
“I don’t know. They look like oil rigs. Big metallic shit, planted on legs on the middle of the river. God only knows what folks do on ’em.” Doc scowled. “All I know is we don’t want to be stuck anywhere in the immediate vicinity of that smoking garbage dump they call Gehenna. Hell no. That’s something we can absolutely do without. You read me?”
“I read you.”
“And while you’re at it, try not to hit any mines.”
“Mines?”
Doc ignored Jim’s expression of surprise and concern. “You sure you’re not too drunk to be doing that?”
Jim quickly shook his head. He wanted to know about the mines. “There are mines on the Styx?”
Doc made a dismissive gesture. “On this stretch? No. Not too many, and most of them are back down near the swamps and on into the delta. Leftovers from the Barbiturate Wars. But you do see one bobbing past every now and again. Let me know it you spot one.”
Jim took a deep breath. “Don’t worry. I will.”
The prospect of mines proved to be a highly sobering one. Jim was suddenly seeing single again, taking deep gulps of river air and giving all his attention to the navigation of the launch. It never ceased to amaze him how, since his death, some things had become so much easier. It was possible, if need be, to come out of the effect of intoxicants almost with a snap of the fingers. Of course, other things had grown nearly impossible. The writing of poetry was a case in point; Jim had reached the stage of wondering if his loss of creativity was caused, in some part, by the equal loss of any need to hedge his bets against death. Did other artists lose interest, on this side of the veil, in what had previously been the driving force in their lives? It hardly seemed so. Whoever had conjured a B-52 into the bottom of a canyon had to be up for some conceptual rock and roll sculpture pranking. And then there was this Phibes, with his seagoing wedding cake. Maybe Jim would have to fess up and admit he’d simply blown himself out back lifeside.