The Best of Lucius Shepard (96 page)

—Leave
me be! I walked off a few paces and gazed out into the marsh. With the passage
of the storm, heat was coming back into the world. A drop of sweat trickled
down my side. The air was slow and thick and humid. Something with curved black
wings scythed across the low-hanging moon. A dullness swept over my thoughts,
an oppressive, clammy feeling like the first sign of a fever.

—You
just gonna stand there? Squire grabbed onto my shoulder and spun me about. We
gotta get us a move on!

—Don’t
put your hands on me, I said.

—Aw,
Jesus! He wheeled away from me and looked to the sky. Thank you for sticking me
with this ignorant fucking hillbilly!

I
refitted my eyes to the marsh, the stirring grasses and the moon-licked water
to the east.

—Goddamn
it! Squire said. You’n me, we need to work together. I can find ‘em!

It
struck me that he was speaking with more authority than he’d previously
displayed, but I didn’t concern myself with this. Wasn’t that it didn’t tweak
my interest, just I was more interested in the way my head was emptying out,
like a car engine giving little ticks as it cools.

Squire
went to hammering at me, trying to rouse me to action, and finally I said, What
you want me to do, asshole? Drive you around in a stolen van ‘til we get
popped?

—We
don’t hafta go far. Won’t be on the road more’n a few minutes.

—They
been gone an hour...maybe more. You think they just circling out there?

—Trust
me, man. I know what I’m talking about.

—Trust
you? I said. Fuck you! Now I told you, leave me be.

I
stepped away along the shore and stopped at the very edge of the water, my
shoes sinking into the muck, wanting to restore the glum yet comforting
acceptance into which my thoughts had been sinking. Squire followed me, giving
orders, pleading, working every angle. Didn’t matter what he said, it was all
the same to my ears, a yammering that bored holes in my skull and poured itself
in hot and heavy like lead into a mold. I told him to shut up. He kept at it. I
told him again to shut up and it didn’t even put a hitch in his delivery. I was
acting like I had shit for brains, he said. Behaving like a child. Didn’t
matter what he said. Every word hardened into a white-hot ingot, stacks of them
crowding the space between my ears. I tried to see past him, past the heat
growing inside me, looking to cool my eyes in the lavender cave of sky among
the last clouds where the moon floated. It wasn’t a help.

—What
do I gotta do, spell it out for your sorry ass? Squire said. What the fuck’s it
gonna take to get through?

He
punched at my shoulder with the heel of his hand.

—Don’t
be doing that, I said.

—It
don’t bother you, you set there and watched Ava and them roll off into the
fucking sunset, but this here—he punched at me again—that bothers you?

A
thready strip of cloud spooled out across the moon, a golden bridge unraveling.

—You
are hillbilly shit piled high, y’know that? Squire said. I heard him kick at
the ground and then his voice came from a distance away: Guess you must like
the idea of ol’ Ava licking your girlfriend’s pussy.

I
turned on him, seeing only those two ugly round faces, one atop the other
mutant-style, and I lifted my right hand. I was kind of surprised to see the
gun—guess I’d forgotten I was holding it—and maybe it was surprise twitched my
trigger finger, or maybe another flickering snake tongue of anger. Or maybe I
just wanted to kill him, though I had the notion somewhere in the back of my
mind that he was not a man, he’d eat the bullet, lie there a while, then sit up
all of a sudden the way he’d done back in Ocala. The shot punched out the left
eye of his lower face. He gave a melancholy grunt, like a hog disappointed by
its supper, and went spinning to the ground. Heart’s blood came from his chest
in such a hurry, it might’ve had somewhere more important to go. Speckles of
wet dirt clung to his cheek. His one true eye was open blind and the other was
pressed into the earth. I thought I heard a voice of wind and rustling grass
say my name in welcome.

*
* * *

You might not understand, but
then again you might, how when you reach the end of the road and still find
yourself breathing, the unraveled threads that tied you to your life resemble a
puzzle you could easily have solved if you’d been one ounce smarter or one inch
less crazy, and you think now that you’ve gained a perspective, you can
probably develop some sort of reasonable explanation for all the crap you
hadn’t understood, but when you gather those threads up they hang limp from
your fist and don’t none of the frayed ends match, and you realize they weren’t
really connected, they had no more connection to each other than stalks of dead
grass floating on marsh water, and everything you depended on being true was
just a tricky kind of emptiness that looked like something real, and so when I
tried to fit Squire cooling out at my feet and the bossy way he’d acted in with
Ava’s stories, it only made a deeper puzzle, one I knew I’d never get straight.

I
kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so
I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The
painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into
the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped
it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else
I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My
chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to
reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled
there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive
thoughts.

—Stand
up straight, motherfucker!

Rickey
was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off 12-gauge with a
taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was
working good and pinned on me.

—Come
thisaway! he said.

I
walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to
sit.

—You
a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive. Rickey spat a dark wad of blood
and saliva.

The
wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a
little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face
was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.

—I
saw you kill that boy, he said. Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t
useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?

I
didn’t have no answers for him.

—You
liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy. Rickey fumbled in his pocket and
fetched out a cell phone. One fine morning a few years from now, they be
strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.

He
thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911.
I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute,
too low for me to hear.

—Hey,
Maceo!

He’d
moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled
across his knees.

—Hands
up! Who wants to die? he said. How you like them apples, huh?

A
queer little road of moonlight slithered off along the water into the east. I
wished I could follow it. I wished there was a tree with hundred dollar bills
for leaves growing out behind the lodge, and that Rickey was too weak and sore
to pull off both barrels before I could reach him, and that the end of this
world was the beginning of the next, and I wished I’d had more time with Leeli.

—I
feel them police dogs panting, Rickey said, stretching out his legs and getting
comfortable. I feel that heat humming out along the road.

It
come to seem all like a painting, then. One you’d see in a museum with a brass
plate on a frame enclosing a night on the marshlands south of South Daytona, a
night wild with stars and a wicked moon hanging like a bone grin among the
remains of the running clouds, a gray tumbledown lodge with a stove-in roof and
a lumpy, bloody man sitting on the steps, aiming a chest-buster at another man
sitting in the grass, and a corpse lying near the water’s edge, gone pale and
strange. It would look awful pretty and have the feeling of something going on
behind the scenes. Like silver nooses were hanging from the stars and important
shapes were hiding back of the clouds, big ones with the heads of beasts,
showing a shade darker than the blue darkness of the sky. It was that rich,
dark blue give the picture a soul. The rest of it was up to you. You could
study it and arrive at all sorts of erroneous conclusions.

—Damn
if I don’t believe I can smell ‘em, Rickey said. Y’know the smell I’m talking
about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have? He spat
again. You shouldn’t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to
never work out.

I
took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum
of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my
gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your
way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list
of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and
Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It
wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason
bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.

A
thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl
somewhat deeper than I knew.

The
air-horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going
crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a
siren corkscrewed through the night.

Rickey
spat up more blood.

Like
they say, shit happens.

I
figure that about tells it.

<>

*
* * *

DEAD MONEY

I knew slim-with-sideburns was
dead money before Geneva introduced him to the game. Dead money doesn’t need an
introduction; dead money declares himself by grinning too wide and playing it
too cool, pretending to be relaxed while his shoulders are racked with tension,
and proceeds to lose all his chips in a hurry.
Slim-with-sideburns-and-sharp-features-and-a-gimpy-walk showed us the entire
menu, plus he was wearing a pair of wraparound shades. Now there are a number
of professional poker players who wear sunglasses so as not to give away their
tells, but you would mistake none of them for dead money and they would never
venture into a major casino looking like some kind of country-and-western
spaceman.

“Gentlemen,”
Geneva said, shaking back her big blonde hair. “This here’s Josey Pellerin over
from Lafayette.”

A
couple of the guys said, Hey, and a couple of others introduced themselves, but
Mike Morrissey, Mad Mike, who was in the seat next to mine, said, “Not
the
Josie? Of Josie and the Pussycats?”

The
table had a laugh at that, but Pellerin didn’t crack a smile. He took a chair
across from Mike, lowering himself into it carefully, his arms shaking, and
started stacking his chips. Muscular dystrophy, I thought. Some wasting
disease. I pegged him for about my age, late thirties, and figured he would
overplay his first good hand and soon be gone.

Mike,
who likes to get under players’ skins, said, “Didn’t I see you the other night
hanging out with ‘A Boy Named Sue’?”

In
a raspy, southern-fried voice, Pellerin said, “I’ve watched you on TV, Mister
Morrissey. You’re not as entertaining as you think, and you don’t have that
much game.”