Ghost Town: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

cleanses him. He feels buoyed up, stroked by the fingering currents, fondled soapily from head to foot as if he were in the hands of some water nymph or an Indian princess, one who touches him in all the tenderest places, turning pain to sweet delight, skilled as such creatures of nature are in the art of healing with water, or so he’s heard. He tries to open his eyes, can’t, so surrenders to these silky caresses and takes them for what they seem to be and quite likely are, all the killings he’s done and seen soon washed away by them, and just as soon forgotten, or nearly so. Rolling in the water to open all his crevices to its tender attentions, or hers (as he thinks of them), he feels the water well up into volumes like liquid thighs, rolling as he rolls, and with spongy patches in between and wet lips that kiss and tickle, stripping his mind and spirit pure as his body is, and as is hers, bare breasts soft as foam brushing him gently as the water streams about. No such things in this watery world as widow weeds, no weeds at all, for she, like he, like all beings in this happy valley with its genial clime, goes always naked, stark staring, as someone’s said, wearing nothing daylong but the shells and beads braided into her black hair. Here, where he is now, everything is in unison with love and nature, and all that is true, fitting, and natural in a passion is proper and legitimate. As she teaches him in her silent and voluptuous acquiescence.
    How did he come to such a place? Perhaps he lost his way, or was sent by the army, or was chased by lawmen, or went in purposeful search of some secret treasure or his own self-knowledge, or perhaps he was captured and dragged to this alien land, stripped, bound, spread-eagled on the desert floor to be tortured and killed, only to be rescued at the last moment by the great chief’s only daughter, straddling his condemned body with her innocent one, staying her father’s hand with her tender plea as she knelt over him, dressed merely in her tinkling shells and beads, a rare sight unseen by him just so before, and one that, in spite of the extremity of his circumstances, arouses in him a most profound agitation, the evidence of it rearing up before their astounded eyes like a hostile totem erected on the arid plain—which in turn arouses in the men of the tribe a contrary emotion and, in a rage shared by all of them, a young brave, one of her brothers, or a suitor, or both, staggers forward with a tomahawk to chop down the hateful thing. To save it from destruction, or simply to hide it from view, the beautiful pagan princess impales herself upon it, screaming with the sudden pain, her coppery back arching, blood dribbling in a hot stream down over his groin. Like a baptism, he thinks, a blessing, a sweet salvation, his pinned body gratefully discharging its own boiling fluids like a surging revelation into her moist interior. No choice now. He’s set free, yet unfree: one of them.
    Life with the tribe, which follows as a river follows its bed, is, though always harmonious in this idyllic wilderness, not always painless. To initiate him into their exemplary ways, his new brothers play face-kicking, fire-throwing, and dodge-the-arrow games with him, rub him with skunk oil and hang him upside down in the sun without water and food for a week, cage him with rattlers, pierce his scrotum with sharpened hawk quills, chop off one of his fingers, and send him out to wrestle buck naked with a seven-foot black bear. They display their own scars and mutilations to show he isn’t being picked on, it’s all just for fun, part of their guileless way of life. While educating him in the art of scalping, they provide him with a wild coyote to practice on, failing to inform him that it is usually judicious—a lesson he learns almost immediately while losing a second finger—to kill the scalp’s owner before trying to slip a knife in under its hairline, the consequences of his ignorance