The Best of Lucius Shepard (106 page)

“For
a while.”

She
frowned. “Well, I don’t know.”

“You
don’t know what?”

“We
didn’t bargain on a four-way, especially with another woman.”

“You
got something against women? It didn’t look like you did.”

Tammy
didn’t catch my drift and I told her what I had witnessed.

“That’s
different,” she said primly.

“Would
more money help?”

She
perked up. “Money always helps.”

“I’m
going out now, but I’ll take care of you. I promise.”

“Okay!”
She stood on tip-toe and kissed my cheek.

“One
more thing,” I said. “Jo’s kind of shy, but once you start her up, she’s a
tigress.”

“I
bet.” Tammy shivered with delight. “Those long legs!”

“So
in a few minutes why don’t you ... maybe the both of you. Why don’t you go out
there and warm her up? She really loves intimate touching. You know what I
mean? She likes to be fondled. She may object at first, but stay with it and
she’ll melt. I’ll get you your money. Deal?

“Deal!
Don’t worry. We’ll get her going.”

“I’m
sure you will,” I said.

* * * *

The
one salient thing I learned at Ruddle’s was that a pier extended out about a
hundred feet into the water from a strip of beach, and at the end of the pier
was moored a sleek white Chris Craft that had been set up for sports
fishing—the keys to the boat, the
Mystery Girl,
were kept in a small
room off the kitchen that also contained the controls to the security system.
The house itself was a postcard. Big and white and ultramodern, it looked like
the Chris Craft’s birth mother. An Olympic-sized pool fronted the beach, tennis
courts were off to the side. The grounds were a small nation of landscaped palms
and airbrushed lawn, its borders defined by a decorous electric fence topped
with razor wire and guarded by a pink gatehouse with a uniform on duty. There
was a plaque on the gate announcing that the whole shebang was called The Sea
Ranch, but it would have been more apt if it had been named The Sea What I Got.

Ruddle’s
son showed me around—a blond super-preppie with a cracker accent that had
acquired a New Englander gloss. During our brief time together he said both
“y’all” and “wicked haahd,” as if he hadn’t decided which act suited him best.
He was impatient to get back to his tanned, perfect girlfriend, an aspiring
young coke whore clearly high on more than life. She sat by the pool, listening
to reggae, painting faces on her toenails, and flashed me an addled smile that
gave me a contact high. I made sure to ask the kid a slew of inane questions
(“Is that door sealed with a double grommet?” “What kind of infrared package
does that sensor use?”), delaying and stalling in order to annoy him until,
growing desperate, he gave me the run of the house and scurried back to her
side.

The
card room could be isolated from the remainder of the house. It had no windows
and soundproofed walls, a bar, and, against the rear wall, three trophy cases
celebrating Ruddle’s skill at poker. The place of honor was held by a ring won
at a World Series of Poker circuit tournament in Tunica, Mississippi. It was
flanked by several photographs of Ruddle with poker notables, Phil Ivey and
Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and the like, who were apparently among those he had
defeated. I was inspecting the table, an elegance of teak and emerald felt lit
by an hanging lamp, when a lean, long-haired, thirtyish man in cut-offs walked
in holding an apple, and asked in a Eurotrash accent what I was doing. I told
him I was casing the joint.

“No,
no!” He wagged a finger at me. “This is not good ... the drugs.”

I
explained that “casing the joint” meant I was looking the house over, seeing
whether it would be possible to burglarize it.

He
took a bite of his apple and, after chewing, said, “I am Torsten. And you are?”

I
thought he had misunderstood me again, but when I had introduced myself, he
said, “You have chosen a bad time. There will be many here this weekend. Many
guards, many guests.”

“How
many guards?” I asked.

“Perhaps
five ... six.” He fingered the edge of the table. “This is excellent work.”

“Are
you a friend of the family?”

“Yes,
of course. Torsten is everyone’s friend.”

He
strolled around the table, trailing a hand across the felt, and said, “Now I
must go. I wish you will have success with your crime.”

Later
that afternoon as I was preparing to leave, sitting in my rental car and making
some notes, I spotted him outside the house. He was carrying a Weed Whacker,
yelling at an older man who was pruning bushes, speaking without a trace of an
accent, cussing in purest American. There might be, I thought, a lesson to be
drawn from this incident, but I decided that puzzling it out wasn’t worth the
effort. While driving back to the hotel, I noticed that a motorcyclist in a
helmet with a tinted faceplate was traveling at a sedate rate of speed and
keeping behind me. Whenever I slowed, he dropped back or switched lanes, and
when I parked in the hotel lot, he placed a call on his cell phone. Aggravated
and wanting to convey that feeling, I walked toward him, but he kicked over the
engine and sped off before I could get near.

A
Do Not Disturb card was affixed to the doorknob of the Everglades Suite, so I
went down to 1138. Jo, who had been napping, let me in and went into the
bathroom to wash her face. I sat at her table and put my feet up. She came back
out and lay down on the bed, turned to face me. After I’d briefed her on what I
had learned, she said softly, “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m
glad you’re glad,” I said glibly, wondering at the intimacy implied by her
tone.

She
shut her eyes and I thought for a moment she had drifted off. “I’m afraid,” she
said.

“Yeah.
Me, too.”

“You
don’t act afraid.”

“If
I let myself think about Saturday, I get to shaking in my boots.” I leaned
toward her, resting my elbows on my knees. “We got to tough it out.”

“I’m
not feeling very tough.”

I
said something neutral and she reached out her hand, inviting me to take it.
She caressed my wrist with her fingertip. Holding her hand while sitting on the
edge of the chair grew awkward, and I moved to the bed. She curled up against
me. I stroked her hair, murmured an assurance, but that seemed insufficient, so
I kicked off my shoes and lay down, wrapping my arms around her from behind.

“I’m
sorry,” she said.

“For
what?”

“For
how I behaved on the island. For this morning. You must think I’m a terrible
tease. But when I see Josey like that, I feel I should comfort him, even
though...”

“What?”

She
shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Say.”

Her
eyes teared; she pressed my hand against her breast. “It’s not him I want to
comfort. You know that.”

I
told her not to cry.

She
drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “That’s how I was brought up,” she said.
“I was taught to deny what I wanted, that I had to let it come second to what
everyone else wanted.”

“It’s
okay.”

“No!
it’s not! I watched my mother wither away taking care of my daddy, his
brothers, of every stray that wandered by. She could scarcely let a second pass
without doing for him. I swore I wouldn’t be like her. But I’m exactly like
her.”

I
came to realize that we were less having a conversation than engaging in a
litany: she, the priestess, delivering the oration, and I, the acolyte,
offering appropriate responses. And as we continued this ritual of confession
and assurance, the words served to focus me on the hollow of her throat, the
pale skin below her collarbone, the lace trim of a brassiere peeking out
between the buttons of her shirt, until the only things in the world were the
sound of her voice and the particulars of her body. For all it mattered, she
could have been reciting a butcher’s list or reading from a manual on
automotive maintenance.

“Feeling
that way screwed up almost every relationship I ever had,” she said. “Because I
didn’t
feel that way. Not at heart ... not really. It was just a rule I
couldn’t break. I resented men for making me obey the rule, but they didn’t
enforce it. I did. I couldn’t simply be with them, I couldn’t enjoy them. And
now I don’t care about rules, I finally don’t care, and it’s too late.”

I
told her it wasn’t too late, we’d pull through somehow.

Dominus
vobiscum,

Et
cum spiritus tuo.

Tears
slipped along the almost imperceptible lines beside her eyes. I propped myself
up on an elbow, intending to invoke some further optimistic cliché, wanting to
make certain that she had taken it to heart. Lying half-beneath me, searching
my face, her expression grew strangely grave, and then her tongue flicked out
to taste my mouth, her hips arched against mine. The solicitude, the tenderness
I felt ... all that was peeled away to reveal a more urgent affinity, and I
tore at her clothing, fumbling with buttons, buckle, snaps, rough with her in
my hurry. She cried out in abandon, as if suffering the pain of her broken
principles. Cities of thought crumbled, my awareness of our circumstance
dissolved, and a last snatch of bleak self-commentary captioned my desire—I saw
in my mind’s eye the image of a red burning thing in a fiery sky, not a true
sun but a great shear of light in which was embedded an indistinct shape, like
that of a bird flying sideways or a woman’s genital smile, and beneath it a
low, smoldering wreckage that stretched from horizon to horizon, in which the
shadows of men crouched and scuttered and fled with hands clamped to their ears
so as to muffle the echoes of an apocalyptic pronouncement.

* * * *

We
spent that night and most of the next day in 1138. Every so often I would run
up and check on Pellerin, but my concern was perfunctory. We stayed in bed
through the afternoon and, late in the day, as Jo drowsed beside me, I analyzed
what had happened and how we had ended up like this, who had said what and who
had done what. Our mutual approach seemed to have been thoroughly crude and
awkward, but I thought that, if examined closely, all the axiomatic beams that
supported us, the scheme and structure of every being, could be perceived as
equally crude and awkward ... yet those scraps of physical and emotional poetry
of which we were capable could transform the rest into an architecture of Doric
elegance and simplicity. The romantic character of the idea cut against my
grain, but I couldn’t deny it. One touch of her skin could make sense out of
stupidity and put the world in right order.

About
seven o’clock, simply because we felt we should do something else with the day,
we walked down to the strip mall, to the Baskin-Robbins, and sat by the window
in the frosty air conditioning. I had two scoops of vanilla; she had a
butterscotch sundae. We ate while the high school girls back of the counter
listened to the same Fiona Apple song again and again, arguing over the content
of the lyrics as if they espoused an abstruse dialectic. Jo and I talked, or
rather I talked and she questioned me about my childhood. I told her my father
had been a saxophone player in New Orleans and that my mother had run off when
I was seven, leaving me in his care. Jo remarked that this must have been hard
on me, and I said, “He wasn’t much of a dad. I spent a lot of time running the
streets. He was primarily concerned with dope and women, but when he was in the
mood, he could be fun. He taught me to play sax and guitar, and made up songs
for me and got me to learn them. I could have done worse.”

“Do
you remember the songs?”