The Best of Lucius Shepard (23 page)

The kid said
something to her; he swung the burlap sack over his shoulder, and after a
rapid-fire exchange of Spanish he ran off toward the river. The crowds were
still thick, but more than half the stalls had shut down; those that remained
open looked—with their thatched roofs and strung lights and beshawled
women—like crude nativity scenes ranging the darkness. Beyond the stalls, neon
signs winked on and off: a chaotic menagerie of silver eagles and crimson
spiders and indigo dragons. Watching them burn and vanish, Mingolla experienced
a wave of dizziness. Things were starting to look disconnected as they had at
the Club Demonio.

“Don’t you
feel well?” she asked.

“I’m just
tired.”

She turned
him to face her, put her hands on his shoulders. “No,” she said. “It’s
something else.”

The weight
of her hands, the smell of her perfume, helped to steady him. “There was an
assault on the fire-base a few days ago,” he said. “It’s still with me a
little, y’know.”

She gave his
shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. “Maybe I can do something.” She said this
with such gravity, he thought she must have something specific in mind. “How’s
that?” he asked.

“I’ll tell
you at dinner ... that is, if you’re buying.” She took his arm, jollying him.
“You owe me that much, don’t you think, after all your good luck?”

“Why aren’t
you
with Psicorp?” he asked as they walked.

She didn’t
answer immediately, keeping her head down, nudging a scrap of cellophane with
her toe. They were moving along an uncrowded street, bordered on the left by
the river—a channel of sluggish black lacquer—and on the right by the
windowless rear walls of some bars. Overhead, behind a latticework of supports,
a neon lion shed a baleful green nimbus. “I was in school in Miami when they
started testing here,” she said at last. “And after I came home, my family got
on the wrong side of Department Six. You know Department Six?”

“I’ve heard
some stuff.”

“Sadists
don’t make efficient bureaucrats,” she said. “They were more interested in
torturing us than in determining our value.”

Their
footsteps crunched in the dirt; husky jukebox voices cried out for love from
the next street over. “What happened?” Mingolla asked.

“To my
family?” She shrugged. “Dead. No one ever bothered to confirm it, but it wasn’t
necessary. Confirmation, I mean.” She went a few steps in silence. “As for me
... “ A muscle bunched at the corner of her mouth. “I did what I had to.”

He was
tempted to ask for specifics, but thought better of it. “I’m sorry,” he said,
and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.

They passed
a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered if
these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills:
gone-dead tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye
toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that
accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control,
that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and only let out for
exercise. From out on the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life
surfacing briefly, then returning to its long ignorant glide through the dark
... and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange
it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle-flame,
with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard
overhead.

“Shit,” said
Debora under her breath.

It surprised
him to hear her curse. “What is it?”

“Nothing,”
she said wearily. “Just ‘shit.’ “ She pointed ahead and quickened her pace.
“Here we are.”

The
restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel:
a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing Fanta sign hung
above the entrance. Hundreds of moths swarmed about the sign, flickering
whitely against the darkness, and in front of the steps stood a group of
teenage boys who were throwing knives at an iguana. The iguana was tied by its
hind legs to the step railing. It had amber eyes, a hide the color of boiled
cabbage, and it strained at the end of its cord, digging its claws into the
dirt and arching its neck like a pint-size dragon about to take flight. As
Mingolla and Debora walked up, one of the boys scored a hit in the iguana’s
tail and it flipped high into the air, shaking loose the knife. The boys passed
around a bottle of rum to celebrate.

Except for
the waiter—
a
pudgy young guy leaning beside a door that opened onto a
smoke-filled kitchen—the place was empty. Glaring overhead lights shined up the
grease spots on the plastic tablecloths and made the uneven thicknesses of
yellow paint appear to be dripping. The cement floor was freckled with dark
stains that Mingolla discovered to be the remains of insects. However, the food
turned out to be pretty good, and Mingolla shoveled down a plateful of chicken
and rice before Debora had half-finished hers. She ate deliberately, chewing
each bite a long time, and he had to carry the conversation. He told her about
New York, his painting, how a couple of galleries had showed interest even
though he was just a student. He compared his work to Rauschen-berg, to
Silvestre. Not as good, of course. Not yet. He had the notion that everything
he told her—no matter its irrelevance to the moment—was securing the
relationship, establishing subtle ties: he pictured the two of them enwebbed in
a network of luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He
could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be
like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The
instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought.
He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no
one else, and so—having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.

She laid
down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. “You can’t really believe that,”
she said.

“I know it
sounds ... “

“Ridiculous,”
she broke in. “That’s how it sounds.”

“It’s the
truth,” he said defiantly.

She picked
up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. “How is it for you,” she
said, “when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams,
hear voices?”

“Sometimes I
just know things,” he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. “And
sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right.
Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.”

“With me,
it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.” Her lips
thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. “When I first saw
you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the
gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your
face ... it was pale, bloody.” She put her handout to cover his. “What I saw
was very clear, David. You can’t go back.”

He hadn’t
described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it.
Shaken, he said, “Where am I gonna go?”

“Panama,”
she said. “I can help you get there.”

She suddenly
snapped into focus. You find her, dozens like her, in any of the r&r towns.
Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla
connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear.
She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order
to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t
diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by
talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.

“I can’t do
that,” he said.

“Why not?
Don’t you believe me?”

“It wouldn’t
make any difference if I did.”

“I ... “

“Look,” he
said. “This friend of mine, he’s always trying to convince me to desert, and
there’ve been times I wanted to. But it’s just not in me. My feet won’t move
that way. Maybe you don’t understand, but that’s how it is.”

“This
childish thing you do with your two friends,” she said after a pause. “That’s
what’s holding you here, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t
childish.”

“That’s
exactly what it is. Like a child walking home in the dark and thinking that if
he doesn’t look at the shadows, nothing will jump out at him.”

“You don’t
understand,” he said.

“No, I
suppose I don’t.” Angry, she threw her napkin down on the table and stared
intently at her plate as if reading some oracle from the chicken bones.

“Let’s talk
about something else,” said Mingolla.

“I have to
go,” she said coldly.

“Because I
won’t desert?”

“Because of
what’ll happen if you don’t.” She leaned toward him, her voice burred with
emotion. “Because knowing what I do about your future, I don’t want to wind up
in bed with you.”

Her
intensity frightened him. Maybe she
had
been telling the truth. But he
dismissed the possibility. “Stay,” he said. “We’ll talk some more about it.”

“You
wouldn’t listen.” She picked up her purse and got to her feet.

The waiter
ambled over and laid the check beside Mingolla’s plate; he pulled a plastic bag
filled with marijuana from his apron pocket and dangled it in front of
Mingolla. “Gotta get her in the mood, man,” he said. Debora railed at him in
Spanish. He shrugged and moved off, his slow-footed walk an advertisement for
his goods.

“Meet me
tomorrow then,” said Mingolla. “We can talk more about it tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Why don’t
you gimme a break?” he said. “This is all coming down pretty fast, y’know. I
get here this afternoon, meet you, and an hour later you’re saying, ‘Death is
in the cards, and Panama’s your only hope.’ I need some time to think. Maybe by
tomorrow I’ll have a different attitude.”

Her
expression softened but she shook her head, No.

“Don’t you
think it’s worth it?”

She lowered
her eyes, fussed with the zipper of her purse a second and let out a rueful
hiss. “Where do you want to meet?”

“How ‘bout
the pier on this side? ‘Round noon.”

She
hesitated. “All right.” She came around to his side of the table, bent down and
brushed her lips across his cheek. He tried to pull her close and deepen the
kiss, but she slipped away. He felt giddy, overheated. “You really gonna be
there?” he asked.

She nodded
but seemed troubled, and she didn’t look back before vanishing down the steps.

Mingolla sat
a while, thinking about the kiss, its promise. He might have sat even longer,
but three drunken soldiers staggered in and began knocking over chairs, giving
the waiter a hard time. Annoyed, Mingolla went to the door and stood taking in
hits of the humid air. Moths were loosely constellated on the curved plastic of
the Fanta sign, trying to get next to the bright heat inside it, and he had a
sense of relation, of sharing their yearning for the impossible. He started
down the steps but was brought up short. The teenage boys had gone; however,
their captive iguana lay on the bottom step, bloody and unmoving. Bluish-gray
strings spilled from a gash in its throat. It was such a clear sign of bad
luck, Mingolla went back inside and checked into the hotel upstairs.

The hotel
corridors stank of urine and disinfectant. A drunken Indian with his fly
unzipped and a bloody mouth was pounding on one of the doors. As Mingolla
passed him, the Indian bowed and made a sweeping gesture, a parody of welcome.
Then he went back to his pounding. Mingolla’s room was a windowless cell five
feet wide and coffin-length, furnished with a sink and a cot and a chair.
Cobwebs and dust clotted the glass of the transom, reducing the hallway light
to a cold bluish-white glow. The walls were filmy with more cobwebs, and the
sheets were so dirty that they looked to have a pattern. He lay down and closed
his eyes, thinking about Debora. About ripping off that red dress and giving
her a vicious screwing. How she’d cry out. That both made him ashamed and gave
him a hard-on. He tried to think about making love to her tenderly. But
tenderness, it seemed, was beyond him. He went flaccid. Jerking-ofF wasn’t
worth the effort, he decided. He started to unbutton his shirt, remembered the
sheets and figured he’d be better off with his clothes on. In the blackness
behind his lids he began to see explosive flashes, and within those flashes
were images of the assault on the Ant Farm. The mist, the tunnels. He blotted
them out with the image of Debora’s face, but they kept coming back. Finally he
opened his eyes. Two ... no, three fuzzy-looking black stars were silhouetted
against the transom. It was only when they began to crawl that he recognized
them to be spiders. Big ones. He wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but these
particular spiders terrified him. If he hit them with his shoe he’d break the
glass and they’d eject him from the hotel. He didn’t want to kill them with his
hands. After a while he sat up, switched on the overhead and searched under the
cot. There weren’t any more spiders. He lay back down, feeling shaky and short
of breath. Wishing he could talk to someone, hear a familiar voice. “It’s
okay,” he said to the dark air. But that didn’t help. And for a long time,
until he felt secure enough to sleep, he watched the three black stars crawling
across the transom, moving toward the center, touching each other, moving
apart, never making any real progress, never straying from their area of bright
confinement, their universe of curdled, frozen light.