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The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the sum- mer sun. "My furniture." The commandante's face burned like metal in the Hash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out. A whif of ozone drifted through the room. The "novia" muttered over her candles and altars in one corner. "It is all Trak... modern, excellent..." he is nod- ding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at Carl's pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by. "I could get back my deposit. Start me a little busi- ness someplace." He nods and smiles like a mechanical toy. "Joselito!!!" Boys look up from street ball games, bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by and slowly fades away. "Joselito!... Paco!... Pepe!... Enrique!..." The plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame. THE BLACK MEAT "We friends, yes?" The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory. The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead, junky whisper. "With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time." He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat's squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over the high cheek-bones. He waited half a cigarette. The Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled emergency in a slow half pivot to case the man who had just come in. "Fats" Terminal sat there sweeping the cafe with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled nerves of junk sickness would have registered a move- ment. The Sailor handed the boy a coin. He drifted over to Fat's table with his floating walk and sat down. They sat a long time in silence. The cafe was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. |
