The Best of Lucius Shepard (115 page)

Applause
erupted, and it was as idiosyncratic as the dancing had been. This one guy was
baying like a hound; a blond girl bounced up and down, clapping gleefully like
a six-year-old. I didn’t catch much of the set, other than to note the
audience’s positive response, in particular to the songs “Average Joe” and “Can
I Get a Waitress?” and “The Sunset Side of You”—I was working the room,
gathering opinions, trying to learn if any of the industry people I’d invited
had come, and it wasn’t until twenty minutes after the encore that I saw Stanky
at the bar, talking to a girl, surrounded by a group of drunken admirers. I
heard another girl say how cute he was and that gave me pause to wonder at the
terrible power of music. The hooker I had hired to guarantee my guarantee, a
long-legged brunette named Carol, dish-faced but with a spectacular body, was
biding her time, waiting for the crowd around Stanky to disperse. He was in
competent hands. I felt relief, mental fatigue, the desire to be alone with
Andrea. There was no pressing reason to stay. I said a couple of good-byes,
accepted congratulations, and we drove home, Andrea and I, along the Polozny.

“He’s
amazing,” she said. “I have to admit, you may be right about him.”

“Yep,” I
said proudly.

“Watch
yourself, Sparky. You know how you get when these things start to go south.”

“What are
you talking about?”

“When one of
your problem children runs off the tracks, you take it hard. That’s all I’m
saying.” Andrea rubbed my shoulder. “You may want to think about speeding
things up with Stanky. Walk him a shorter distance and let someone else deal
with him. It might save you some wear and tear.”

We drove in
silence; the river widened, slowed its race, flowing in under the concrete lees
of the mill; the first row house came up on the right. I was tempted to respond
as usually I did to her advice, to say it’s all good, I’ve got it under
control, but for some reason I listened that night and thought about everything
that could go wrong.

Carol was
waiting for me in the office when I came downstairs at eight o’clock the
following morning. She was sitting in my swivel chair, going through my
Rolodex. She looked weary, her hair mussed, and displeased. “That guy’s a
freak,” she said flatly. “I want two hundred more. And in the future, I want to
meet the guys you set me up with before I commit.”

“What’d he
do?” I asked.

“Do you
really want to know?”

“I’m kind of
curious.... Yeah.”

She began to
recite a list of Stanky-esque perversion—I cut her off.

“Okay,” I
said, and reached for my checkbook. “He didn’t get rough, did he?”

“
Au
contraire
.” She crossed her legs. “He wanted me to....”

“Please,” I
said. “Enough.”

“I don’t do
that sort of work,” she said primly.

I told her
I’d written the check for three hundred and she was somewhat mollified. I
apologized for Stanky and told her I hadn’t realized he was so twisted.

“We’re
okay,” she said. “I’ve had ... Hi, sweetie!”

She directed
this greeting to a point above my shoulder as Andrea, sleepily scratching her
head, wearing her sweats, entered the office. “Hi, Carol,” she said,
bewildered.

Carol hugged
her, then turned to me and waved good-bye with my check. “Call me.”

“Pretty
early for hookers,” Andrea said, perching on the edge of the desk.

“Let me
guess. You defended her.”

“Nope. One
of her clients died and left her a little money. I helped her invest. But that
begs the question, what was she doing here?”

“I got her
for Stanky.”

“A reward?”

“Something
like that.”

She nodded
and idly kicked the back of her heel against the side of the desk. “How come
you were never interested in the men I dated after we broke up?”

I was used
to her sudden conversational U-turns, but I had expected her to interrogate me
about Carol and this caught me off-guard. “I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t
want to think about who you were sleeping with.”

“Must be a
guy thing. I always checked out your girlfriends. Even the ones you had when I
was mad at you.” She slipped off the desk and padded toward the door. “See you
upstairs.”

I spent the
next two days between the phone and the studio, recording a good take of “The
Sunset Side of You”—it was the closest thing Stanky had to a ballad, and I
thought, with its easy, Dr. John-ish feel, it might get some play on college
radio:

I’m gonna
crack open my venetian blind
and let that last bit of old orange glory shine,
so I can catch an eyeful
of my favorite trifle,
my absoutely perfect point of view....
That’s an eastbound look,
six inches from the crook
of my little finger,
at the sunset side of you....”

Stanky
wasn’t happy with me—he was writing a song a day, sometimes two songs, and
didn’t want to disrupt his creative process by doing something that might
actually make money, but I gamed him into cutting the track.

Wednesday
morning, I visited Rudy Bowen in his office. Rudy was an architect who yearned
to be a cartoonist, but who had never met with much success in the latter
pursuit, and the resonance of our creative failures, I believe, helped to
cement our friendship. He was also the only person I knew who had caught a fish
in the Polozny downstream from the mill. It occupied a place of honor in his
office, a hideous thing mounted on a plaque, some sort of mutant trout
nourished upon pollution. Whenever I saw it, I would speculate on what else
might lurk beneath the surface of the cold, deep pools east of town, imagining
telepathic monstrosities plated with armor like fish of the Mesozoic and frail
tentacled creatures, their skins having the rainbow sheen of an oil slick, to
whom mankind were sacred figures in their dream of life.

Rudy’s
secretary, a matronly woman named Gwen, told me he had gone out for a latte and
let me wait in his private office. I stepped over to his drafting table,
curious about what he was working on. Held in place on the table was a clean
sheet of paper, but in a folder beside the table was a batch of new cartoons, a
series featuring shadowy figures in a mineshaft who conversed about current
events, celebrities, etc., while excavating a vein of pork that twisted through
a mountain.... This gave rise to the title of the strip:
Meat Mountain
Stories.
They were silhouettes, really. Given identity by their shapes,
eccentric hairstyles, and speech signatures. The strip was contemporary and
hilarious—everything Rudy’s usual work was not. In some frames, a cluster of
tiny white objects appeared to be floating. Moths, I thought. Lights of some
kind. They, too, carried on conversations, but in pictographs. I was still
going through them when Rudy came in, a big, blond man with the beginnings of a
gut and thick glasses that lent him a baffled look. Every time I saw him, he
looked more depressed, more middle-aged.

“These are
great, man!” I said. “They’re new, right?”

He crossed
the room and stood beside me.

“I been
working on them all week. You like ‘em, huh?”

“I love
them. You did all this this week? You must not be sleeping.” I pointed to the
white things. “What’re these?”

“Stars. I
got the idea from that song Stanky did. ‘Stars Seen Through Stone.’”

“So they’re
seeing them, the people in the mine?”

“Yeah. They
don’t pay much attention to them, but they’re going to start interacting soon.”

“It must be
going around.” I told him about Stanky’s burst of writing, Kiwanda’s adventures
in office management.

“That’s odd,
you know.” He sipped his latte. “It seems like there’s been a real rash of
creativity in town. Last week, some grunt at the mill came up with an
improvement in the cold forming process that everybody says is a huge deal.
Jimmy Galvin, that guy who does handyman work? He invented a new gardening
tool. Bucky Bucklin’s paying his patent fees. He says they’re going to make
millions. Beth started writing a novel. She never said anything to me about
wanting to write, but she’s hardly had time for the kids, she’s been so busy
ripping off the pages. It’s not bad.”

“Well, I
wish I’d catch it,” I said. “With me, it’s same old same old. Drudgeree,
drudgeroo. Except for Andrea’s back.”

“Andrea? You
mean you guys are dating?”

“I mean back
as in back in my house. Living with me.”

“Damn!” he
said. “That’s incredible!”

We sat in
two chairs like two inverted tents on steel frames, as uncomfortable as my
upstairs couch, and I told him about it.

“So it’s
going okay?” he asked.

“Terrific, I
think. But what do I know? She said it was a trial period, so I could get home
tonight and she might be gone. I’ve never been able to figure her out.”

“Andrea.
Damn! I saw her at the club, but I didn’t realize she was with you. I just had
time to wave.” He leaned across the space between us and high-fived me. “Now
maybe you’ll stop going around like someone stole your puppy.”

“It wasn’t
like that,” I said.

He chuckled.
“Naw. Which is why the people of Black William, when asked the date, often
reply, ‘Six years, two months, and twelve days since the advent of Vernon’s
Gloom.’”

We moved on
to other topics, among them the club, business, and, as I made to leave, I
gestured at Rudy’s grotesque trophy and said, “While those creative juices are
flowing, you ought to design a fishing lure, so I can watch you hook into the
Loch Polozny Monster.”

Rudy laughed
and said, “Maybe if I have a couple of minutes. I’m going to keep working on
the comic. Whatever this shit is, it’s bound to go away.”

I was
fooling around in the studio one evening, ostensibly cleaning up the tape we’d
rolled the previous weekend at the Crucible, hoping to get a live rendition of
“Stars Seen Through Stone” clean enough for the EP, but I was, instead, going
over a tape I’d made, trying to find some ounce of true inspiration in it,
finding none, wondering why this wave of creativity—if it, indeed, existed—had
blessed Rudy’s house and not mine. It was after seven; Stanky was likely on his
way home from the library, and I was thinking about seeing if Andrea wanted to
go out, when she leaned in the doorway and asked if she was interrupting. I
told her, no, not at all, and she came into the booth and sat next to me at the
board, looking out at the drum kit, the instruments, the serpents’ nest of
power cords.

“When we
were married, I didn’t get what you saw in this,” she said. “All I saw was the
damage, the depravity, the greed. Now I’ve been practicing, I realize there’s
more or less the same degree of damage and greed and depravity in every
enterprise. You can’t see it as clearly as you do in the music business, but
it’s there.”

“Tell me
what I see that’s good.”

“The music,
the people.”

“None of
that lasts,” I said. “All I am’s a yo-yo tester. I test a thousand busted
yo-yos, and occasionally I run across one that lights up and squeals when it
spins.”

“What I do
is too depressing to talk about. It’s rare when anyone I represent has a good
outcome, even if they win. Corporations delay and delay.”

“So it’s
disillusionment that’s brought us together again.”

“No.” She
looked at me steadily. “Do you love me?”