The Best of Lucius Shepard (91 page)

She
took off walking. Her round little butt looked real tasty in those shorts.

—Aw,
Leeli! Come on back here, girl!

*
* * *

I’m not a complete fool. I
understand it’s all about pussy, but pussy must be a sickness with me,
otherwise I cannot explain why I let myself get pulled back into a situation I
knew was a dead loser. A psychiatrist might say I was hunting for just such a
situation, but if Leeli had been one of the reverend’s old gals, I wouldn’t
have wasted a second before putting her in the rear view. I admit
self-destruction is the way of my life. The way of every life, maybe. But the
style Leeli brought to her walk-off scene, switching her hips and arching her
back and giving a sad, pouty look over her shoulder, psychology wasn’t that
huge a factor.

I
told her to drive and funneled Ava, Carl, and Squire into the rear of the van,
then climbed in behind the passenger seat so I could keep an eye on everybody.
Squire was by the doors, legs kicked out, his head wobbling like he was
listening to private music. Ava was next to the wheel hub, comforting Carl, who
rested his good cheek on her shoulder.

—Get
east, I said to Leeli. Use the interstate and keep it under the limit.

Ava
asked, Where we going? It was loud in the van and she had to shout it.

—Friend
of mine’s place in South Daytona!

She
thought about this and nodded gloomily.

—Wanna
tell me what’s going on? I pointed to Squire and then Carl.

She
shook her head. Not now! She shifted to accommodate Carl’s weight and said, I’d
like my gun back!

—I
like maple sugar on my oatmeal, I told her. But sometimes I gotta do without!

The
sun was bouncing along just above the palm tops like a dragged bait, and the
light was growing orangey, and a brown shadow gathered in the rear of the van.
It was all calming somehow, the shadow and the rattling, droning speed. I felt
submerged in it, a man sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, unmindful of
trouble in the air, and I worked the ride into a movie, not a big spectacular
with sinister terrorist plots or world-shattering disasters, but a movie from
back when stars used to play in crummy little stories about nobodies on their
way to damnation. Creedence and Lynard Skynard for the soundtrack. My daddy’s
kind of songs, but I liked them all the same. I found one cigarette left in my
crumpled pack and lit up. It didn’t taste a thing like movie smoke must taste,
clean and savory, a working man’s reward, but my exhales hazed the air so it
looked old-fashioned and yellowy brown, 1970s air, air with some character, and
I sat fingering the gun, trying to put my mind onto a future different from the
sort promised by the movie I was in, but thinking mainly about the manager,
what a strange thing it was for a man to come halfway around the world from a
place where they had monkeys and elephants and shit to go with their nuclear
bombs just to catch a bullet in a Hojos and die staring up at track lighting
and Styrofoam ceiling tile.

Rickey
Wirgman, who I’d called my friend, was more of a brother fuck-up and former
criminal associate, like a cousin you don’t have much use for but deal with on
occasion. His grandfather had left him some property on the edge of the
marshlands near South Daytona, a collection of weathered frame buildings
alongside a stretch of open water that grandpa, if not for a crack habit and
some harsh words spoken to a fellow inmate in the Volusia County Jail that
caused his history to take a sudden tragic turn, might have developed into a
full-blown financial disaster. A fishing camp had been his thought. In the
years since he’d inherited, Rickey had run a contest to see what would fall
apart the fastest, himself or the roof he slept under. He sold off pieces of
the land to survive and recreated with the finest dope and the nastiest
hookers. The sheds and cabins were rotting away, but the marsh was pretty in
the twilight. Black watercourses meandering through tall green grasses, here
and there a tiny humped island thick with palms going to silhouettes in the
soft gray light, and pelicans crossing in black flapping strings against a
streak of rose along the horizon, like a caption in a cool language.
Exotic-looking. A Discovery Channel place. The grass was tamped down around the
relics of the fishing camp. Seemed like some huge, heavy thing had made an
emergency landing, maybe a big jetliner bellying in, and the survivors had
squatted where they’d been spilled until death had swallowed them too, and now
their shelters were decaying. Scattered around in the higher grass behind the
cabins were beat-up refrigerators and washing machines and stoves. They got you
thinking it wasn’t a plane had crashed, but one of those bird dinosaurs, and
its teeth had busted from its mouth or it had laid a number of curious square
white eggs before passing.

We
hid the van behind a shed and straggled toward the main lodge. Lodge was a
hundred-dollar name for a structure that was the house equivalent of a crooked
old beekeeper who had stroked out in his sleep while wearing his hat and veil.
Window shadows for eyes and a gnawed-off nose opening into a screen porch and
boards the color of cigarette ash and a slumped partial second story with
tattery shingle tiles drooping off the roof edge. There were no lights. Frogs
bleeped out in the marsh, like electric raindrops, and skeeters would cover
your arm unless you kept swiping them off.

—Nobody’s
home, Leeli said in an exhausted tone.

—Maybe.
It don’t matter. The porch stair creaked and bowed to my step. The billowed-out
screens were rusted through in patches, torn loose from the railing. Just pick
out some rooms, I said. I’ll see if anybody’s here.

I
left the others to creep around and scare the spiders and explored some. You
couldn’t find a grayer place, you searched in a cemetery. Every square inch and
object had run out of time and stopped being what it once was. Phantom things
that resembled tables and chairs and rugs and pictures on the walls and the
walls themselves were just ghosts made of dust and habit and a gray smothery
smell. The kitchen sink was gray and so were the stains on it. Peels of
linoleum curled up from the floor like eucalyptus bark. The only bit of color I
noticed was three custom car magazines poking from beneath an empty bookcase.
Rickey’s version of the redneck dream.

From
down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a
pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A
lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was
an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out
cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies,
crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched
in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm,
was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him,
his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in
Central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm
dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill
bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I
asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not
in an awful hurry about it.

—Shit!
The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two
grunts and a hiccup. That you, man?

I
picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat
so he could watch me and the TV both.

—Maceo.
He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. Crazy
motherfucker. Where you been?

—Raiford.
New Smyrna for a while after.

—Oh,
yeah.. .right. Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and
sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that
wasn’t healing too good.

I
asked what he was up to and he said, Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly dilaudid
lately. You want some? I got a shitload.

—There’s
people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.

He
blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore
another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through.
Yeah...okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms. His
eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy
in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass.
Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that
paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from
the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside
of his skull. Like a perfect fever.

—I’ll
take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind, I said.

—I
told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole
shitload.

I
kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out
of another.

—You
get settled, come on back you wanna talk. Rickey wriggled his ass around as if
he had an itch.

—Yeah,
maybe. We’re kinda wore down.

—Hey,
Maceo!

I
could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he
was lonely.

—’Member
that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?

—Twila,
I said.

—Yeah,
her. She got the virus. He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you
might use to announce the birth of twins. ‘Spect some of them NASCAR boys
better get theyselves checked, he went on. Last I heard, she was passing out
blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.

—She
musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit. My feet crunched the
litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.

—Maceo?

—What?

—You
wanna bring me something from the ‘frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too
fucked-up to walk.

—I’ll
do ‘er in a while.

The
corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey
quietly say, Oh, God...God! Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future
had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators
done something stupid.

*
* * *

Leeli had spread sheets on the
bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a
stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the
bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.

—What
we gonna do? she asked.

—I
told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.

She
hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. It’s not back in Ocala now. We
gotta figure something to do.

—Don’t
know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.

—What
is it?

—Dilaudid.

—Is
it something good?

—It’s
evil. You gonna fucking adore it.

I
powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her
nose from the tip of a knife blade.

—Oooh,
she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.

—What
I tell ya?

I
did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid
glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I
moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing
sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards
and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were
probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building
that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried,
and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Go-thous
and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and
chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t
have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped
too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a
pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jigging in my chest. Something
landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter.
Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and
she flicked my zipper.