Butcher Bird

THIRTY-SIX Highway to Hell

“My left ring finger,” said Spyder.

“My little toe. Either one,” replied Lulu.

“I suppose I could lose an ear.”

“A nostril.”

“Nope. It’s the whole nose or nothing.”

“Picky fucker. I’ll keep my nose. How about my pancreas? I could lose that. What the hell does a pancreas do anyway?” Lulu asked.

“That’s where your Islets of Langerhans are.”

“What the hell are they?”

“I have no idea. I just remember the name from high school biology.”

“I wonder if I even have a pancreas anymore.”

The group was riding north, into a waste of dust and heat. It was early in the day and the air was still crisp. The lemon sun had bleached the sky to a pearly blue.

“If they took it, they must know what it’s for, so someone’s getting some use out of it.”

“As long as someone’s happy.”

“Smell,” said Spyder.

“Smell? That’s a sense. Smell’s not a part of your body you can lose.”

“Excuse me, Nurse Ratched, but smell is a neurological response in the olfactory cortex in the temporal lobe of your brain. Ipso goddam facto, ‘smell’ is a part of your body.”

“Fuck you and the Discovery Channel,” said Lulu. “It’s still a stupid answer. Without smell, you’d never get laid again. Sex is all about smell. Pheromones and all that invisible shit that let’s you know who wants to ride you like a rocking horse and who just wants to steal your smokes.” Lulu turned around in her saddle. “Am I right, Shrike? Guys are such idiots.”

“She’s right, Spyder. Sex is smell. Smell is sex.”

“You’re all against me,” Spyder said. “Primo, you lost something the other day. You should be playing, too. What part of your body would you lose first if you had to lose something?”

“I don’t think I’d like to lose anything more, thank you,” said Primo.

Shrike said, “You don’t want to play game this with Primo. He’ll win.”

“Why’s that?” Spyder asked.

“Primo, what did you do with your severed arm?” Shrike asked.

“I ate it, ma’am.”

From the desert floor rose the detritus of long-dead cities. Spyder slowed as they rode among the ruins. He ran his fingers over broken pillars that curved up from the sand like the ribs of a fossilized giant. Spiral stairways curled into the empty sky. Faceless, wind-scarred statues stood watch over the wreckage of enigmatic machines of corroded brass gears and cracked mirrors, stained ivory, springs, sprockets and shattered quartz lenses.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit,” Count Non said.

“It’s shit like that that most weeks made me cut Sunday school,” said Spyder. “I got a beating for it, but I’ll take that over brainwashing. Everything we do or try is corrupt? What are we supposed to do with our lives?”

“According to a number of prophets,” said Non, “our true calling is a lifetime of worship and nothing more.”

“Praise the lord and pass the ammunition,” said Spyder. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“I agree.”

“You’ve got quite a stack of biblical pickup lines, Count. You in the seminary or something?”

“I am the victim of a classical education. I learned at a young age that a good quote allows you to appear smarter than you really are.”

“‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock,’” recited Spyder. “Welles says that in The Third Man. I remember it whenever life goes all abstract expressionist.”

“That’s every other weekend for you, right?” said Lulu.

“Fuck you, Martha Stewart.”

Along a high ridge to the east, desert nomads were salvaging junk from the sand. They had sheets of sand-scoured metal, ornate urns and statues piled on long sleds that they hauled, by hand, across the dunes.

“Should we stop and say hi?” asked Lulu.

“Why?” asked Shrike.

“I don’t know. So we don’t seem like assholes.”

“This is their desert,” said Count Non. “They’re more likely to think we’re thieves after their salvage than their new best friends.”

“What about food and water? Maybe we could trade with them,” Spyder said.

“We have enough food. And there’s plenty of water in the desert,” said Shrike. “Primo’s taking us along a route with springs and wells, aren’t you?”

“Give me a single leaf and I will tell you the shadows of the birds that have crossed it. Give me a stone and I will tell you what army has marched past and where the freshest water can be found,” Primo said. “That’s the earliest bit of wisdom the Gytrash learn in childhood.”

The day was heating up quickly. The tracks of the nomads’ sleds paralleled their trail for several miles, then cut to the east and disappeared. Spyder pulled off his leather jacket (causing shooting pains throughout his injured hand) and draped it over the saddle horn.

Shrike rode up beside him and offered him some of her water. Spyder drank and kissed her hand as he gave her back the canteen.

“Tell me more about Lucifer’s kingdom,” she said.

A few yards ahead of them, Spyder could hear Lulu singing quietly, “I’m on the Highway to Hell…”

“Some cultures see Hell as a pit of torment. Others as a workhouse as big as the universe,” Spyder said.