The Best of Lucius Shepard (114 page)

Taken aback,
I said, “Hi,” and ushered her in.

She went
into the office and sat in the wooden chair beside my desk. I followed her in,
hesitated, and took a seat in my swivel chair.

“You look
... rattled,” she said.

“That about
covers it. Good rattled. But rattled, nonetheless.”

“I am, too.
Sorta.” She glanced around the office, as if noticing the changes. I could hear
every ticking clock, every digital hum, all the discrete noises of the house.

She drew in
breath, exhaled, clasped her hands in her lap. “I thought we could try,” she
said quietly. “We could do a trial period or something. Some days, a week. See
how that goes.” She paused. “The last few times I’ve seen you, I’ve wanted to
be with you. And I think you’ve wanted to be with me. So....” She made a flippy
gesture, as if she were trying to shade things toward the casual. “This seemed
like an opportunity.”

You would
have thought, even given the passage of time, after all the recriminations and
ugliness of divorce, some measure of negativity would have cropped up in my
thoughts; but it did not and I said, “I think you’re right.”

“Whew!”
Andrea pretended to wipe sweat from her brow and grinned.

An awkward
silence; the grin flickered and died.

“Could I
maybe go upstairs,” she asked.

“Oh! Sure.
I’m sorry.” I had the urge to run up before her and rip down the crapfest on
the wall, chuck all the furniture out the window, except for a mattress and
candles.

“You’re
still rattled,” she said. “Maybe we should have a drink before anything.” She
stretched out a hand to me. “Let’s get good and drunk.”

As it
happened, we barely got the drinks poured before we found our groove and got
busy. It was like old times, cozy and familiar, and yet it was like we were
doing it for the first time, too. Every touch, every sensation, carried that
odd
frisson
. We woke late, with the frost almost melted from the panes,
golden light chuting through the high east windows, leaving the bed in a bluish
shadow. We lay there, too sleepy to make love, playing a little, talking, her
telling me how she had plotted her approach, me telling her how I was oblivious
until that day at lunch when I noticed her loneliness, and what an idiot I had
been not to see what was happening.... Trivial matters, but they stained a few
brain cells, committing those moments to memory and marking them as Important,
a red pin on life’s map. And then we did make love, as gently as that violence
can be made. Afterward, we showered and fixed breakfast. Watching her move
about the kitchen in sweats and a T-shirt, I couldn’t stop thinking how great
this was, and I wanted to stop, to quit footnoting every second. I mentioned
this as we ate and she said, “I guess that means you’re happy.”

“Yeah! Of
course.”

“Me, too.”
She stabbed a piece of egg with her fork, tipped her head to the side as if to
get a better angle on me. “I don’t know when it was I started to be able to
read you so well. Not that you were that hard to read to begin with. It just
seems there’s nothing hidden in your face anymore.”

“Maybe it’s
a case of heightened senses.”

“No, really.
At times it’s like I know what you’re about to say.”

“You mean I
don’t have to speak?”

She adopted
the manner of a legal professional. “Unfortunately, no. You have to speak.
Otherwise, it would be difficult to catch you in a lie.”

“Maybe we
should test this,” I said. “You ask my name, and I’ll say Helmut or Torin.”

She shook
her head. “I’m an organic machine, not a lie detector. We have different ways.
Different needs.”

“Organic. So
that would make you ... softer than your basic machine? Possibly more
compliant?”

“Very much
so,” she said.

“You know, I
think I may be reading you pretty well myself.” I leaned across the table,
grabbed a sloppy kiss, and, as I sat back down, I remembered something. “Damn!”
I said, and rapped my forehead with my knuckles.

“What is
it?”

“I forgot to
take Stanky for his haircut.”

“Can’t he
take care of it himself?”

“Probably
not. You want to go with us? You might as well meet him. Get it over with.”

She popped
egg into her mouth and chewed. “Do we have to do it now?”

“No, he
won’t even be up for a couple of hours.”

“Good,” she
said.

The
Crucible, a concrete block structure on the edge of Black William, off beyond
the row houses, had once been a dress outlet store. We had put a cafeteria in
the front, where we served breakfast and lunch—we did a brisk business because
of the mill. Separate from the cafeteria, the back half of the building was
given over to a bar with a few ratty booths, rickety chairs, and tables. We had
turned a high-school artist loose on the walls and she had painted murals that
resembled scenes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s lost labor-union novel. An immense
crucible adorned the wall behind the stage; it appeared, thanks to the artist’s
inept use of perspective, to be spilling a flood of molten steel down upon an
army of orc-like workers.

There was a
full house that night, attracted by local legends The Swimming Holes, a girl
band who had migrated to Pittsburgh, achieving a degree of national renown, and
I had packed the audience with Friends of Vernon whom I had enjoined to applaud
and shout wildly for Stanky. A haze of smoke fogged the stage lights and
milling about were fake punks, the odd goth, hippies from Garnant College in
Waterford, fifteen miles away: the desperate wannabe counter-culture of the
western Pennsylvania barrens. I went into the dressing rooms, gave each
Swimming Hole a welcome-home hug, and checked in on Stanky. Jerry, a skinny guy
with buzzcut red hair, was plunking on his bass, and Geno was playing fills on
the back of a chair; Ian, the rhythm guitarist, was making a cell call in the
head. Stanky was on the couch, smoking a Camel, drinking a Coke, and watching
the SciFi Channel. I asked if he felt all right. He said he could use a beer.
He seemed calm, supremely confident, which I would not have predicted and did
not trust. But it was too late for concern and I left him to God.

I joined
Andrea at the bar. She had on an old long-sleeved Ramones shirt, the same that
she had worn to gigs back when my band was happening. Despite the shirt, she
looked out of place in the Crucible, a swan floating on a cesspool. I ordered a
beer to be carried to Stanky, a shot of tequila for myself. Andrea put her
mouth to my ear and shouted over the recorded music, “Don’t get drunk!” and
then something else that was lost in the din. I threw down the shot and led her
into the cafeteria, which was serving coffee and soda to a handful of kids,
some of whom appeared to be trying to straighten out. I closed the door to the
bar, cutting the volume by half.

“What were
you saying?” I asked.

“I said not
to get drunk, I might have use for you later.” She sat at the counter, patted
the stool beside her, encouraging me to sit.

“They’re
about to start,” I said, joining her. “I’ve only got a minute.”

“How do you
think it’ll go?”

“With
Stanky? I’m praying it won’t be a disaster.”

“You know,
he didn’t seem so bad this afternoon. Not like you described, anyway.”

“You just
like him because he said you were a babe.”

I took a
loose cigarette from my shirt pocket, rolled it between my thumb and
forefinger, and she asked if I was smoking again.

“Once in a
while. Mainly I do this,” I said, demonstrating my rolling technique. “Anyway
... Stanky. You caught him on his best behavior.”

“He seemed
sad to me.” She lifted a pepper shaker as she might a chess piece and set it
closer to the salt. “Stunted. He has some adult mannerisms, adult information,
but it’s like he’s still fourteen or fifteen.”

“There you
go,” I said. “Now ask yourself how it would be, being around a
twenty-six-year-old fourteen-year-old on a daily basis.”

One of the
kids, boys, men—there should be, I think, a specific word for someone old
enough to die for his country, yet who can’t grow a proper mustache and is
having difficulty focusing because he recently ate some cheap acid cut with
crank—one of the
guys
at the end of the counter, then, came trippingly
toward us, wearing an army field jacket decorated with a braid of puke on the
breast pocket, like a soggy service ribbon. He stopped to leer at Andrea, gave
me the high sign, said something unintelligible, possibly profane, and staggered
on into the club.

It had been
Andrea’s stance, when we were married, that episodes such as this were
indicative of the sewer in which she claimed I was deliquescing, a.k.a. the
music business. Though I had no grounds to argue the point, I argued nonetheless,
angry because I hated the idea that she was smarter than I was—I compensated by
telling myself I had more soul. There had been other, less defined reasons for
anger, and the basic argument between us had gotten vicious. In this instance,
however, she ignored the kid and returned to our conversation, which forced me
to consider anew the question of my milieu and the degradation thereof, and to
wonder if she had, by ignoring the kid, manipulated me into thinking that she
had changed, whereas I had not, and it might be that the music business was to
blame, that it had delimited me, warped and stunted my soul. I knew she was
still the smart one.

The music
cut off midsong and I heard Rudy Bowen, my friend and partner in the Crucible,
on the mike, welcoming people and making announcements. On our way back into
the club, Andrea stopped me at the door and said, “I love you, Vernon.” She
laid a finger on my lips and told me to think about it before responding,
leaving me mightily perplexed.

Stanky
walked out onto the stage of the Crucible in a baggy white T-shirt, baggy
chinos and his trucker wallet. He would have been semi-presentable had he not
also been wearing a battered top hat. Somebody hooted derisively, and that did
not surprise me. The hat made him look clownish. I wanted to throw a bottle and
knock it off his head. He began whispering into the mike. Another hoot, a
piercing whistle. Not good. But the whisper evolved into a chant, bits of
Latin, Spanish, rock-and-roll clichés, and nonsense syllables. Half-spoken,
half-sung, with an incantatory vibe, scatted in a jump-blues rhythm that the
band, coming in underneath the vocal, built into a sold groove, and then
Stanky, hitting his mark like a ski jumper getting a lift off a big hill, began
to sing:

“I heard the
Holy Ghost moan...
Stars seen through stone...”

Basically,
the song consisted of those two lines repeated, but sung differently—made into
a gospel plaint, a rock-and-roll howl, a smooth Motown styling, a jazzy lilt,
and so on. There was a break with more lyrics, but the two lines were what
mattered. The first time he sang them, in that heavy false bass, a shock ripped
through the audience. People looked up, they turned toward the stage, they
stopped drinking, their heads twitched, their legs did impromptu dance steps.
Stanky held the word “moan” out for three bars, working it like a soul singer,
then he picked up the trumpet and broke into a solo that was angry like Miles,
but kept a spooky edge. When he set the trumpet down, he went to singing the
lyric double time, beating the top hat against his thigh, mangling it. The
crowd surged forward, everyone wanting to get next to the stage, dancing in
place, this strange, shuffling dance, voodoo zombies from hell, and Stanky
strapped on his guitar. I missed much of what happened next, because Andrea
dragged me onto the dance floor and started making slinky moves, and I lost my
distance from the event. But Stanky’s guitar work sent the zombies into a
convulsive fever. We bumped into a punk who was jerking like his strings were
being yanked; we did a threesome with a college girl whose feet were planted,
yet was shaking it like a tribal dancer in a
National Geographic Special
;
we were corralled briefly by two millworkers who were dancing with a goth girl,
watching her spasm, her breasts flipping every which way. At the end of the
song, Jerry and Geno started speaking the lyric into their mikes, adding a
counterpoint to Stanky’s vocal, cooling things off, bringing it down to the
creepy chant again; then the band dropped out of the music and Stanky went a
capella for a final repetition of his two lines.