The Best of Lucius Shepard (47 page)

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*
* * *

Life
of Buddha

Whenever the cops scheduled a
raid on the shooting gallery to collect their protection money, old
cotton-headed Pete Mason, who ran the place, would give Buddha the day off.
Buddha rarely said a word to anyone, and Pete had learned that cops were
offended by silence. If you didn’t scream and run when they busted in, if like
Buddha you just sat there and stared at them, they figured you were concealing
a superior attitude, and they then tended to get inside your head.

They
had beaten Buddha half to death a couple of times for this very reason, and
while Buddha hadn’t complained (he never complained about anything), Pete did
not want to risk losing such a faithful employee. So on the night prior to the
September raid, Pete went downstairs to where Buddha was nodding on a stained
mattress by the front door and said, “Why don’t you hang out over at Taboo’s
place tomorrow? Police is comin’ ‘round to do they thang.”

Buddha
shook himself out of his nod and said, “Talked to him already. Johnny Wardell’s
gon’ be over sometime makin’ a buy, but he say to come ahead anyway.” He was a
squat black man in his late thirties, his head stone bald, with sleepy
heavy-lidded eyes and the beginning of jowls; he was wearing chinos stippled
with blood from his last fix, and a too-small T-shirt that showed every tuck
and billow of his round belly and womanly breasts. Sitting there, he looked
like a Buddha carved from ebony that somebody had outfitted with Salvation Army
clothes, and that was why Pete had given him the name. His real name was
Richard Damon, but he wouldn’t respond to it anymore. Buddha suited him just
fine.

“Beats
me why Taboo wanna do business with Johnny Wardell,” Pete said, hitching his
pants up over his ample stomach. “Sooner or later Wardell he be gettin’ crazy
all over a faggot like Taboo.. .y’know?”

Buddha
grunted, scratched the tracks on his wrist, and gazed out the window beside the
front door. He knew Pete was trying to draw him into a conversation, and he had
no intention of letting himself be drawn. It wasn’t that he disliked Pete; he
liked him as much as anyone. He simply had no opinions he wanted to share; he
had cultivated this lack of opinion, and he had found that the more he talked,
the more opinions came to mind.

“You
tell Taboo from me,” Pete went on, “I been livin’ in Detroit more’n sixty
years, and I done business wit’ a lotta bad dogs, but I ain’t never met one meaner
than Wardell. You tell him he better watch his behavior, y’understan’?”

“Awright.”

“Well....”
Pete turned and with a laborious gait, dragging his bad leg, mounted the
stairs. “You come on up ‘round two and get your goodnighter. I’ll cut ya out a
spoon of China White.”

“
‘Preciate it,” said Buddha.

As
soon as Pete was out of sight, Buddha lay down and stared at the flaking
grayish-white paint of the ceiling. He picked a sliver of paint from the wall
and crumbled it between his fingers. Then he ran the back of his hand along the
worn nap of the runner that covered the hallway floor. All as if to reassure
himself of the familiar surroundings. He had spent the best part of fifteen
years as Pete’s watchdog, lying on the same mattress, staring at that same
dried-up paint, caressing that same runner. Before taking up residence on the
mattress, he had been a young man with a fixture. Everybody had said, “That
Richard Damon, he’s gon’ be headlines, he’s gon’ be
Live at Five,
he’s
gon’ be
People
magazine.” Not that he had started out different from his
peers. He’d been into a little dealing, a little numbers, a little of whatever
would pay him for doing nothing. But he’d been smarter than most and had kept
his record clean, and when he told people he had his eye on the political
arena, nobody laughed. They could see he had the stuff to make it. The trouble
was, though, he had been so full of himself, so taken with his smarts and his
fine clothes and his way with the ladies, he had destroyed the only two people
who had cared about him. Destroyed them without noticing. Worried his mama into
an early grave, driven his wife to suicide. For a while after they had died,
he’d gone on as always, but then he’d come up against guilt.

He
hadn’t known then what that word
guilt
meant; but he had since learned
its meaning to the bone. Guilt started out as a minor irritation no worse than
a case of heartburn and grew into a pain with claws that tore out your guts and
hollowed your heart. Guilt made you sweat for no reason, jump at the least
noise, look behind you in every dark place. Guilt kept you from sleeping, and
when you did manage to drop off, it sent you dreams about your dead, dreams so
strong they began to invade your waking moments. Guilt was a monster against
which the only defense was oblivion.... Once he had discovered that truth, he
had sought oblivion with the fervor of a converted sinner.

He
had tried to kill himself but had not been able to muster the necessary courage
and instead had turned to drugs. To heroin and the mattress in the shooting
gallery. And there he had discovered another truth: that this life was in
itself a kind of oblivion, that it was carving him slow and simple, emptying him
of dreams and memories. And of guilt.

The
porch steps creaked under someone’s weight. Buddha peered out the window just
as a knock sounded at the door. It was Marlene, one of the hookers who worked
out of Daily’s Show Bar down the block: a pretty cocoa-skinned girl carrying an
overnight bag, her breasts hushed up by a tight bra.

Her
pimp—a long-haired white kid—was standing on a lower step. Buddha opened the
door, and they brushed past him. “Pete ‘round?” Marlene asked.

Buddha
pointed up the stairs and shut the door. The white kid grinned, whispered to
Marlene, and she laughed. “John think you look like you could use some lovin’,”
she said. “What say you come on up, and I’ll give you a sweet ride for free?”
She chucked him under the chin. “How that sound, Buddha?”

He
remained silent, denying desire and humiliation, practicing being the nothing
she perceived. He had become perfect at ignoring ridicule, but desire was still
a problem: the plump upper slopes of her breasts gleamed with sweat and looked
full of juice. She turned away, apparently ashamed of having teased him.

“Take
it easy now, Buddha,” she said with studied indifference, and hand-led the
white kid up the stairs.

Buddha
plucked at a frayed thread on the mattress. He knew the history of its every
stain, its every rip. Knew them so thoroughly that the knowledge was no longer
something he could say: it was part of him, and he was part of it. He and the
mattress had become a unity of place and purpose. He wished he could risk going
to sleep, but it was Friday night, and there would be too many customers, too
many interruptions. He fixed his gaze on the tarnished brass doorknob, let it
blur until it became a greenish-gold sun spinning within a misty corona.
Watched it whirl around and around, growing brighter and brighter.
Correspondingly his thoughts spun and brightened, becoming less thoughts than
reflections of the inconstant light. And thus did Buddha pass the middle hours
of the night.

*
* * *

At two o’clock Buddha
double-bolted the door and went upstairs for his goodnighter. He walked slowly
along the corridor, scuffing the threadbare carpet, its pattern eroded into
grimy darkness and worm trails of murky gold. Laughter and tinny music came
from behind closed doors, seeming to share the staleness of the cooking odors
that pervaded the house. A group of customers had gathered by Pete’s door, and
Buddha stopped beside them. Somebody else wandered up, asked what was
happening, and was told that Pete was having trouble getting a vein. Marlene
was going to hit him up in the neck. Pete’s raspy voice issued from the room,
saying, “Damn it! Hurry up, woman!”

Getting
a vein was a frequent problem for Pete; the big veins in his arms were
burned-out, and the rest weren’t much better. Buddha peered over shoulders into
the room. Pete was lying in bed, on sheets so dirty they appeared to have a
design of dark clouds. His freckly brown skin was suffused by a chalky pallor.
Three young men—one of them Marlene’s pimp—were gathered around him, murmuring
comforts. On the night table a lamp with a ruffled shade cast a buttery yellow
light, giving shadows to the strips of linoleum peeling up from the floor.

Marlene
came out of the bathroom, wearing an emerald-green robe. When she leaned over
Pete, the halves of the robe fell apart, and her breasts hung free, catching a
shine from the lamp. The needle in her hand showed a sparkle on its tip. She
swabbed Pete’s neck with a clump of cotton and held the needle poised an inch
or two away.

The
heaviness of the light, the tableau of figures around the bed, Marlene’s
gleaming skin, the wrong-looking shadows on the floor, too sharp to be real:
taken all together, these things had the same richness and artful composition,
the same important stillness, as an old painting that Buddha had once seen in
the Museum of Art. He liked the idea that such beauty could exist in this
ruinous house, that the sad souls therein could become even this much of a
unity. But he rejected his pleasure in the sight, as was his habit with almost
every pleasure.

Pete
groaned and twisted about. “Stop that shit!” Marlene snapped. “Want me to bleed
you dry?”

Other
people closed in around the bed, blocking Buddha’s view. Pete’s voice dropped
to a whisper, instructing Marlene. Then people began moving away from the bed,
revealing Pete lying on his back, holding a bloody Kleenex to the side of his
neck. Buddha spotted his goodnighter on the dresser: a needle resting on a
mirror beside a tiny heap of white powder.

“How
you doin?” Pete asked weakly as Buddha walked in.

He
returned a diffident wave, went over to the dresser, and inspected the powder:
it looked like a nice dose. He lifted the mirror and headed off downstairs to
cook up.

“Goddamn!”
said Pete. “Fifteen years I been takin’ care of you. Feedin’ your Jones, buyin’
your supper. Think we’d have a relationship by now.” His tone grew even more
irascible. “I should never have give you that damn name! Got you thinkin’ you
inscrutable, when all you is is ignorant!”

*
* * *

Nodding on his mattress in the
moonlit dark, feeling the rosy glow of the fix in his heart, the pure flotation
of China White in his flesh, Buddha experienced little flash dreams: bizarre
images that materialized and faded so quickly, he was unable to categorize
them. After these had passed he lay down, covered himself with a blanket, and
concentrated upon his dream of Africa, the one pleasure he allowed himself to
nourish. His conception of Africa bore no relation to the ethnic revival of the
sixties, to Afros and dashikis, except that otherwise he might have had no
cognizance of the Dark Continent. Buddha’s African kingdom was a fantasy
derived from images in old movies, color layouts in National Geographic, from
drugs and drugged visions of Nirvana as a theme park. He was not always able to
summon the dream, but that night he felt disconnected from all his crimes and
passionate failures, stainless and empty, and thus worthy of this guardian
bliss. He closed his eyes, then squeezed his eyelids tight until golden
pinpricks flowered in the blackness. Those pinpricks expanded and opened into
Africa.

He
was flowing like wind across a tawny plain, a plain familiar from many such
crossings. Tall grasses swayed with his passage, antelope started up, and the
gamy smell of lions was in the air. The grasslands evolved into a veld dotted
with scum-coated ponds and crooked trees with scant pale foliage. Black stick figures
leaped from cover and menaced him with spears, guarding a collage peopled by
storytellers and long-legged women who wore one-eyed white masks and whose
shadows danced when they walked. Smoke plumed from wart-shaped thatched huts
and turned into music; voices spoke from cooking fires. Beyond the village
stood green mountains that rose into the clouds, and there among the orchids
and ferns were the secret kingdoms of the gorillas. And beyond the mountains
lay a vast blue lake, its far reaches fringed by shifting veils of mist in
whose folds miragelike images materialized and faded.

Buddha
had never penetrated the mists: there was something ominous about their
unstable borders and the ghostly whiteness they enclosed. At the center of the
lake a fish floated halfway between the surface and the bottom, like the single
thought of a liquid brain. Knowing that he must soon face the stresses of the
outside world, Buddha needed the solace offered by the fish; he sank beneath
the waters until he came face-to-face with it, floating a few inches away.