The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs Read Free Book Online Page B

be kept under discreet observation round the clock to insure that it does not eat anything unclean like bullshit, baby rabbits or dead frogs the surveillance being unobtrusive so as not to render the animal self-conscious.”
    “When you want this by, boss? A year from now?”
    “Next Sunday at the latest.”
    “But boss how in the hell…?”
    “Go to Hell if need be but find me such a hog.”
    “Yes boss.”
    “Once found he must be brought here. As you know hog’s liver that has been on ice for even a few hours isquite unfit to eat. The hog must be butchered in my kitchens and the twitching liver conveyed immediately to the skillet to be cooked in the bacon grease of another such hog.”
    “Well sure boss … We could crate the hog up and jet it out here.”
    “Are you mad? My hog would be terrorized and this would surely have an adverse effect on its liver.”
    “Well boss we could take over an ocean liner fix it up like an Ozark range and …”
    “Are you trying to poison me? The hog would become seasick and I would lose my dinner. Obviously the hog must be gently wafted here on a raft slung between two giant zeppelins, a raft lifted bodily from the Ozark Mountains. My squirrels, blackberries and wild asparagrass will of course accompany the hog and send a farm boy with it a thin boy with freckles. He will tend my hog during the trip. He will shoot and dress my squirrels. Then he will make himself useful in other ways.” “Boss the hog is here.”
    A.J. steps onto his balcony and there in the sky suspended between two vast blue zeppelins is a piece of Missouri trailing the smoke of hardwood forests …
    “I want a dinner of walleyed pike, yellow perch and channel catfish from clear cold spring-fed rivers.”
    “Right boss I’ll have a jet plane lined with aluminum and filled with water.”
    “Did you say
a
jet plane?”
    “Sure boss.”
    “Mindless idiot the pike would eat the perch and the catfish would eat everything. When the plane landed there would be nothing but one gorged sluggish catfishquite unfit for my inhuman consumption. Three planes must be outfitted.”
    “Sorry boss but the catfish crashed. All that water slopping around and the boulders come loose.”
    “Praise be to Allah it was not the pike that crashed.”
    As a piquant offset to all this luxury there is hunger and fear and danger in the street. A man’s best friends are his Colt and his Nubs experts with their staves jabbing with both ends blocking out teeth with a straight-thrust stave held level.
    It is a day like any other. Breakfast in the patio served by my Malay boy. The patio is a miniature oasis with a pool, palms, a cobra, a sand fox, and some big orange lizards mean and snappy which eat melon rinds. So after breakfast I set out for the Djemalfna to meet Reggie. We are going to plan our route to A.J.’s annual party which is tomorrow it will be the do of the season. We call ourselves the “Invited” and we all have punch card invitations around our necks like dog tags that will punch us through A.J.’s electric gates. So I am cutting through the noon market sun helmet Colt cartridge belt the lot flanked by my magnificant Nubs when we run into a pack of twenty wild boys. At sight of us their eyes light up inside like a cat’s will and the hair stands up straight on their heads spitting snarling they are all around us slashing at my Nubs. The leader has a patch over one eye and a hog castrator screwed into a wood and leather stump where his right hand used to be. Quick as a weasel he darts under the Nub’s staff his hand flashes in and up you can feel cold steel cut intestines like spaghetti. Now it is very unchic to lose your head and use the gun for trouble the Nubs should handle like say a pack of diseased beggars. You have to decide and decide quick is this or isn’t ita Colt case. I decide it is definitely a Colt case get my eyes converged on the leader’s skinny stomach and fire. The heavy forty-four slug