The Best of Lucius Shepard (119 page)

I was
reaching for another Iron City when I felt a tug on the line. I kept still and
felt another tug, then—though I waited the better part of a minute—nothing.

“Something’s
down in there,” I said, peering at the impenetrable surface.

“You get a
hit?” Rudy asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“How much
line you got out?”

“Twenty,
twenty-five feet.”

“Must have
been a current.”

“It happened
twice.”

“Probably a
current.”

I pictured
an enormous grouper-like face with blind milky-blue globes for eyes, moon
lanterns, and a pair of weak, underdeveloped hands groping at my line. The
Polozny plunges deep underground east of the bridge, welling up into these
holes punched through the Pennsylvania rock, sometimes flooding the woods in
the spring, and a current was the likely explanation; but I preferred to think
that those subterranean chambers were the uppermost tiers of a secret world and
that now and again some piscine Columbus, fleeing the fabulous madness of his
civilization, palaces illumined by schools of electric eels controlled by the
thoughts of freshwater octopi, limestone streets patrolled by gangs of river crocs,
grand avenues crowded with giant-snail busses and pedestrian trout, sought to
breech the final barrier and find in the world above a more peaceful prospect.

“You have no
imagination,” I said.

Rudy
grunted. “Fishing doesn’t require an imagination. That’s what makes it fun.”

Motionless,
he was a bearish figure muffled in a down parka and a wool cap, his face
reddened by the cold, breath steaming. He seemed down at the mouth and,
thinking it might cheer him up, I asked how he was coming with the comic strip.

“I quit
working on it,” he said.

“Why the
hell’d you do that? It was your best thing ever.”

“It was
giving me nightmares.”

I absorbed
this, gave it due consideration. “Didn’t strike me as nightmare material. It’s
kind of bleak. Black comedy. But nothing to freak over.”

“It
changed.” He flicked his wrist, flicking his line sideways. “The veins of
pork.... You remember them?”

“Yeah,
sure.”

“They
started growing, twisting all through the mountain. The mineworkers were happy.
Delirious. They were going to be rich, and they threw a big party to celebrate.
A pork festival. Actually, that part was pretty funny. I’ll show it to you.
They made this enormous pork sculpture and were all wearing pork pie hats. They
had a beauty contest to name Miss Pork. The winner ... I used Mia for a model.”

“You’re a
sick bastard, you know that?”

Again, Rudy
grunted, this time in amusement. “Then the stars began eating the pork. The
mineworkers would open a new vein and the stars would pour in and choff it
down. They were ravenous. Nothing could stop them. The mineworkers were
starving. That’s when I started having nightmares. There was something gruesome
about the way I had them eating. I tried to change it, but I couldn’t make it work
any other way.”

I said it
still didn’t sound like the stuff of nightmares, and Rudy said, “You had to be
there.”

We fell to
talking about other things. The Steelers, could they repeat? Stanky. I asked
Rudy if he was coming to the EP release and he said he wouldn’t miss it. “He’s
a genius guitar player,” he said. “Too bad he’s such a creep.”

“Goes with
the territory,” I said. “Like with Robert Frost beating his wife. Stanky’s a
creep, he’s a perv. A moral dwarf. But he is for sure talented. And you know
me. I’ll put up with perversity if someone’s talented.” I clapped Rudy on the
shoulder. “That’s why I put up with you. You better finish that strip or I’ll
dump your ass and start hanging with a better class of people.”

“Forget the
strip,” he said glumly. “I’m too busy designing equipment sheds and stables.”

We got into
a discussion about Celebrity Wifebeaters, enumerating the most recent additions
to the list, and this led us—by loose association only—to the subject of Andrea.
I told him about our conversation at McGuigan’s and what she had said about the
outbreak of creativity, about love.

“Maybe she’s
got a point,” Rudy said. “You two have always carried a torch, but you burned
each other so badly in the divorce, I never would have thought you’d get back
together.” He cracked open a beer, handed it to me, and opened one for himself.
“You hear about Colvin Jacobs?”

“You mean
something besides he’s a sleazeball?”

“He’s come
up with a plan to reduce the county’s tax burden by half. Everybody says it’s
the real quill.”

“I’m
surprised he found the time, what with all those congressional junkets.”

“And Judy
Trickle, you hear about her?”

“Now you’re
scaring me.”

“I know. Ol’
Juggs ‘R’ Us Judy.”

“She should
have been your model for Miss Pork, not Mia. What’d she do? Design a newfangled
bra?”

“Lifts
and
separates.”

“You mean
that’s it?”

“You nailed
it.”

“No way!”

“She’s been
wearing a prototype on the show the last few days. There’s a noticeable
change.” He did a whispery voiceover voice. “The curves are softer, more
natural.”

“Bullshit!”

“I’m
serious. Check her out.”

“I got
better things to do than watch
AM Waterford.
”

“I remember
the time when you were a devoted fan.”

“That was
post-Andrea ... and pre-Andrea.” I chuckled. “Remember the show when she
demonstrated the rowing machine? Leotards aren’t built to handle that sort of
stress.”

“I knew the
guy who produced her back then. He said they gave her stuff like that to do,
because they were hoping for a Wardrobe Malfunction. They weren’t prepared for
the reaction.”

“Janet
Jackson’s no Judy Trickle. It was like a dam bursting. Like ... help me out
here, man.”

“Like the
birth of twin zeppelins.”

“Like the
embodiment of the yang, like the Aquarian dawn.”

Rudy jiggled
his line. “This is beginning to border on the absurd.”

“You’re the
one brought her up.”

“I’m not
talking about Judy, I’m talking about the whole thing. The outbreak.”

“Oh, okay.
Yeah, we’re way past absurd if Miz Trickle’s involved. We’re heading toward
surreal.”

“I’ve heard
of five or six more people who’ve had ... breakthroughs, I suppose you’d call
them.”

“How come I
don’t hear about these people except from you? Do you sit in your office all
day, collecting odd facts about Black William?”

“I get more
traffic than you do, and people are talking about it now.”

“What are
they saying?”

“What you’d
expect. Isn’t it weird? It must be the water, the pollution. I’ve even heard
civic pride expressed. Someone coined the phrase, ‘Black William,
Pennsylvania’s Brain Capital.’”

“That’s
taking it a bit far.” I had a slug of Iron City. “So nobody’s panicking? Saying
head for the hills?”

“Who said
that?”

“Andrea. She
was a little disturbed. She didn’t exactly say it, but she seemed to think this
thing might not be all good.”

He tightened
his lips and produced a series of squeaking noises. “I think Andrea’s right.
Not about head for the hills. I don’t know about that. But I think whatever
this is, it’s affecting people in different ways. Some of them emotionally.”

“Why’s
that?”

“I....” He
tipped back his head, stared at the clouds. “I don’t want to talk anymore, man.
Okay? Let’s just fish.”

It began to
snow again, tiny flakes, the kind that presage a big fall, but we kept fishing,
jiggling our lines in the dead water, drinking Iron City. Something was
troubling Rudy, but I didn’t press him. I thought about Andrea. She planned to
get off early and we were going to dinner in Waterford and maybe catch a movie.
I was anticipating kissing her, touching her in the dark, while the new James
Bond blew stuff up or (this was more likely) Kenneth Branagh destroyed
As
You Like It
, when a tremor ran across the surface of the pond. Both Rudy
and I sat up straight and peered. “T. Rex is coming,” I said. An instant later,
the pond was lashed into a turbulence that sent waves slopping in all
directions, as if a large swimmer had drawn near the surface, then made a
sudden turn, propelling itself down toward its customary haunts with a flick of
its tail. Yet we saw nothing. Nary a fin nor scale nor section of plated armor.
We waited, breathless, for the beast to return.

“Definitely
not a current,” said Rudy.

Except for
the fact that Rudy didn’t show, the EP release went well. The music was great,
the audience responsive, we sold lots of CDs and souvenirs, including Average
Joe dogtags and Joe Stanky’s Army khaki T-shirts, with the pear-shaped (less so
after diets and death marches) one’s silhouette in white beneath the arc of the
lettering. This despite Stanky’s obvious displeasure with everyone involved. He
was angry at me because I had stolen his top hat and refused to push back the
time of the performance to ten o’clock so he could join the crowd in front of
the library waiting for the return of Black William (their number had swelled
to more than three hundred since the arrival of the science team from Pitt, led
by a youngish professor who, with his rugged build and mustache and plaid wool
shirts, might have stepped out of an ad for trail mix). He was angry at Geno
and Jerry for the usual reasons—they were incompetent clowns, they didn’t
understand the music, and they had spurned the opportunity to watch TV with him
and Liz. Throughout the hour and a quarter show, he sulked and spoke not a word
to the audience, and then grew angry at them when a group of frat boys
initiated a chant of “Skanky, Skanky, Skanky....” Yet the vast majority were
blown away and my night was made when I spotted an A&R man from Atlantic
sneaking around.

I was in my
office the next morning, reading the
Gazette
, which had come late to the
party (as usual) and was running a light-hearted feature on “Pennsylvania’s
Brain Capital,” heavy on Colvin Mason quotes, when I received a call from Crazy
Ed in Wilkes-Barre, saying that he’d e-mailed me a couple of enhancements of
Pin’s photograph. I opened the e-mails and the attachments, then asked what I
was looking at.

“Beats me,”
said Ed. “The first is up close on one of those white dealies. You can get an
idea of the shape. Sort of like a sea urchin. A globe with spines ... except
there’s so many spines, you can’t make out the globe. You see it?”

“Yeah. You
can’t tell me what it is?”

“I don’t
have a clue.” Ed made a buzzing noise, something he did whenever he was
stumped. “I assumed the image was fake, that the kid had run two images
together, because there’s a shift in perspective between the library and the
white dealies. They look like they’re coming from a long way off. But then I
realized the perspective was totally fucked up. It’s like part of the photo was
taken though a depth of water, or something that’s shifting like water. Different
sections appear to be at different distances all through the image. Did you
notice a rippling effect ... or anything like that?”