“What? Who said that I was?” The paper eyes came alive. “Definitions, boy. I am done, mortally hurt. That is not the same as ill. Ill as I recall is simply sick. Taken with disease. An affliction or discomfort of the body. I am mortally hurt is what I am. Cut down, stricken, assaulted by violent hand. Felled with a bullet in the spine. God in Oklahoma, that’s a wonder,” the man said, following Orville’s path. “A marvel of nature it is. I wish Charlie Bowdrie could see it. I would give some thought to the army. I can think of nearly thirty-two things I’d rather do. ’Course that’s entirely up to you. I went to Colorado one time, me and Tom O’Folliard driving horses. Came back quick as I could. The cold there not to my liking at all.”
“You got to go now,” said John, and Erwin wasn’t sure just how long he’d been standing there in the room.
* * *
“That canopy will shade you from the sun,” said Garrett. “I don’t expect the heat will be bad. You’ll reach Roswell before dark and Will’ll see you settled before he leaves.”
“Thank you,” said Helene, “we are grateful for your help.”
Will sat straight as a rod beside Erwin and his mother. He was proud of this new if only temporary post as wagon driver, and was determined to see it through. Orville wore his duster and his goggles. Earlier, after he had taken Erwin racing over the flats for nearly a full half-hour, he had given him a finely rendered pen and ink sketch of his muslin craft. John gave him two brass buttons, which he said had belonged to a U.S. Army major prior to a misunderstanding with Apaches in the Sierra Diablo country, which is south of the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas.
Garrett extended his hand. “Take care of your mother, boy. I have confidence that you will make yourself proud.”
“Yes, sir,” said Erwin.
“Well, then.” Garrett extended his hand again, and Helene laid white-gloved fingers in his palm for just an instant. He studied the fair lines of her face, the silken hair swept under her bonnet. Strangely enough, he found he no longer regretted her departure. To be honest, he was glad to see her go. Keeping real people and phantoms apart was increasingly hard to do. Delusions he’d never seen were lately creeping into his life. An old lady crying in the kitchen. A stranger at the table betting queens. The woman only served to cause confusion, being real enough herself while his fancy made her something she never was.
“I’m giving you the shotgun, Will,” said Garrett, “I don’t see trouble but you use it if there is.”
“Yes sir, I surely will.”
“You know where the trigger is I guess.”
“I surely do.”
“And which way to point it, no doubt.”
“Quite clearly sir, yes I do.”
“Then make sure you—”
“Oh. Oh, my!” said Helene, and brought a hand quickly to her lips.
Garrett turned to see her concern. The sight struck him in the heart. “Christ Jesus California!” he said at once, and stepped back as if felled by a blow. John stood in the door with the wicker chair, his great arms around it like a keg, the chair’s pale apparition resting within. Garrett was unsure if this image was whiskey-real or otherwise and greatly feared it was the latter.
“John,” he managed to say, “what in hell is he doing out here!”
“Mr. Billy say he ride,” John announced.
“Ride what, for God’s sake?”
“Ride that,” John nodded. “He say he ride in Orville’s machine.”
“You tell him he’s lost his senses.”
“Mr. Billy say to tell you he going to do it.”
“Well you tell Mr. Billy that he’s not,” Garrett said furiously. “This is the most damn fool thing I ever heard.”
“Tell Mr. Garrett I can kill myself any way I want,” Billy said. He looked right at Garrett with a wide and papery grin. “Tell him I do not need advice from a fellow can’t shoot a man proper close up.”
“So that’s it, is it,” said Garrett. “You going to come downstairs every twenty-odd years now and pull that business out of the fire. By God it’s just like you, too. I said I was sorry once, I don’t see the sense in doing it twice.”
“Miz Rommel,” said Billy, “I do not think your boy ought to look to the army. That is a life for a man with no ambition or gumption at all and it is clear your boy is a comer. Bound for better things. May I say I have greatly enjoyed watching you take your evening walk. I said to Sallie Chisum once, you’ve likely seen her picture inside if Mr. Garrett hasn’t thrown it out or burned it which wouldn’t surprise me any at all, I said Sallie, a woman’s walk betrays her breeding high or low. She might be a duchess or the wife of a railroad baron or maybe even a lady of the night, a woman dedicated to the commerce of lust and fleshly delight, but the walk, now, the walk of a woman will out, the length and duration of her stride will tell you if she comes from good stock in a moment’s glance, now am I right or am I not?”
“I would—I would really—I would really hardly—” Helene looked helplessly at Garrett.
“Will, Miz Rommel is sitting around in the heat,” Garrett said firmly. “Would you kindly get this wagon headed south sometime before Tuesday?”
Will bobbed about with indecision, then flicked the reins and started the team moving with a jerk. Erwin waved. Garrett and John and Orville waved back.
Billy waved too, though in no particular direction. “If you are headed for Roswell,” he advised, “there was a fair hotel there at one time. Of course it may have changed hands I can’t say. Mr. John Tunstall and I stopped there once and I recall that the rates were more than fair. A good steak is fifty cents don’t spend any more than that. The cook is named Ortega. His wife cooks a good cabrito if you can find a goat around that’s not sick. Don’t eat a goat that looks bad or you’ll regret it. They are too bitter though I’ve known those who prefer it that way to the other. Mr. John Chisum took four spoons of sugar. I could not fathom why. He kept an owl in a cage behind his house. That and other creatures some considerably less than tame…”
* * *
When the wagon reached the rise slightly east of the Sallie C. Erwin looked back and heard the engine running strong and saw the white planes of muslin catch the sun, saw the runners racing swiftly over the sand. Orville’s duster flew, his goggles flashed, his hands gripped the magic controls. John gripped the chair at Orville’s back, and though Erwin from afar couldn’t see Billy at all, spiderweb hair like a bright and silken scarf trailed past the wicker arms to whip the wind.
LEWIS SHINER
Jeff Beck
Lewis Shiner is widely regarded as one of the most exciting new SF writers of the eighties. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Oui, Shayol, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Wild Card, and elsewhere. His first novel, Frontera, appeared in 1984 to good critical response. Upcoming, from the Bantam New Fiction line, is a new novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart. His story “Twilight Time” was in our Second Annual Collection; his story “The War at Home” was in our Third Annual Collection. Shiner lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Edith.
Here he tells us an elegant little story about a man who is unlucky enough to get just what he wants out of life.…
JEFF BECK
Lewis Shiner
Felix was 34. He worked four ten-hour days a week at Allied Sheet Metal, running an Amada CNC turret punch press. At night he made cassettes with his twin TEAC dbx machines. He’d recorded over a thousand of them so far, over 160 miles of tape, and he’d carefully hand-lettered the labels for each one.
He’d taped everything Jeff Beck had ever done, from the Yardbirds’ For Your Love through all the Jeff Beck Groups and the solo albums; he had the English singles of “Hi Ho Silver Lining” and “TallyMan”; he had all the session work, from Donovan to Stevie Wonder to Tina Turner.
In the shop he wore a Walkman and listened to his tapes. Nothing seemed to cut the sound of tortured metal like the diamond-ed
ged perfection of Beck’s guitar. It kept him light on his feet, dancing in place at the machine, and sometimes the sheer beauty of it made tears come up in his eyes.
On Fridays he dropped Karen off at her job at Pipeline Digest and drove around to thrift shops and used book stores looking for records. After he’d cleaned them up and put them on tape he didn’t care about them anymore; he sold them back to collectors and made enough profit to keep himself in blank UDXL-II’s.
Occasionally he would stop at a pawn shop or music store and look at the guitars. Lightning Music on 183 had a Charvel/Jackson soloist, exactly like the one Beck played except for the hideous lilac-purple finish. Felix yearned to pick it up but was afraid of making a fool out of himself. He had an old Sears Silvertone at home and two or three times a year he would take it out and try to play it, but he could never even manage to get it properly in tune.
More often than not Felix spent his Friday afternoons in a dingy bar down the street from Pipeline Digest, alone in a back booth with a pitcher of Budweiser and an anonymous brown sack of records. On those afternoons Karen would find him in the office parking lot, already asleep in the passenger seat, and she would drive home. She worried a little, but it never happened more than two or three times in a month. The rest of the time he hardly drank at all, and he never hit her or chased other women. Whatever it was that ate at him was so deeply buried it just seemed easier to leave well enough alone.
* * *
One Thursday afternoon a friend at work took him aside.
“Listen,” Manuel said, “are you feeling okay? I mean you seem real down lately.”
“I don’t know,” Felix told him. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Everything okay with Karen?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Work is okay. I’m happy and everything. I just … I don’t know. Feel like something’s missing.”
Manuel nodded to himself for a second, then took something out of his pocket. “A guy gave me this. You know I don’t do this kind of shit no more, but the guy said it was killer stuff.”
It looked like a Contac capsule, complete with the little foil blister pack. But when Felix looked closer the tiny colored spheres inside the gelatin seemed to sparkle in rainbow colors.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say exactly. When I asked him what it did all he said was, ‘Anything you want.’”
* * *
He dropped Karen off at work the next morning and drove aimlessly down Lamar for a while. He hadn’t hit Half Price Books in a couple of months, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He drove home and got the capsule off the top of his dresser where he’d left it.
Felix hadn’t done acid in years, hadn’t taken anything other than beer and an occasional joint in longer than he could remember. Maybe it was time for a change.
He swallowed the capsule, put Jeff Beck’s Wired on the stereo, and switched the speakers into the den. He stretched out on the couch and looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock.
He closed his eyes and thought about what Manuel had said. It would do anything he wanted. So what did he want?
This was a drug for Karen, Felix thought. She talked all the time about what she would do if she could have any one thing in the world. She called it the Magic Wish game, though it wasn’t really a game and nobody ever won it.
What the guy meant, Felix told himself, was it would make me see anything I wanted to. Like a mild hit of psilocybin. A light show and a bit of rush.
But he couldn’t get away from the idea. What would he wish for if he could have anything? He had an answer ready; he supposed everybody did. He framed the words very carefully in his mind.
I want to play guitar like Jeff Beck, he thought.
* * *
He sat up. He had the feeling that he’d dropped off to sleep and lost a couple of hours, but when he looked at his watch it was only five after ten. The tape was still playing “Come Dancing.” His head was clear and he couldn’t feel any effects from the drug.
But then he’d only taken it five minutes ago. It wouldn’t have had a chance to do anything yet.
He felt different though, sort of sideways, and something was wrong with his hands. They ached and tingled at the same time, and felt like they could crush rocks.
And the music. Somehow he was hearing the notes differently than he’d ever heard them before, hearing them with a certain knowledge of how they’d been made, the way he could look at a piece of sheet metal and see how it had been sheared and ground and polished into shape.
Anything you want, Manuel had said.
His newly powerful hands began to shake.
He went into his studio, a converted storeroom off the den. One wall was lined with tapes; across from it were shelves for the stereo, a few albums, and a window with heavy black drapes. The ceiling and the end walls were covered with gray paper egg cartons, making it nearly soundproof.
He took out the old Silvertone and it felt different in his hands, smaller, lighter, infinitely malleable. He switched off the Beck tape, patched the guitar into the stereo and tried tuning it up.
He couldn’t understand why it had been so difficult before. When he hit harmonics he could hear the notes beating against each other with perfect clarity. He kept his left hand on the neck and reached across it with his right to turn the machines, a clean, precise gesture he’d never made before.
For an instant he felt a breathless wonder come over him. The drug had worked, had changed him. He tried to hang on to the strangeness but it slipped away. He was tuning a guitar. It was something he knew how to do.
He played “Freeway Jam,” one of Max Middleton’s tunes from Blow By Blow. Again, for just a few seconds, he felt weightless, ecstatic. Then the guitar brought him back down. He’d never noticed what a pig the Silvertone was, how high the strings sat over the fretboard, how the frets buzzed and the machines slipped. When he couldn’t remember the exact notes on the record he tried to jam around them, but the guitar fought him at every step.
It was no good. He had to have a guitar. He could hear the music in his head but there was no way he could wring it out of the Silvertone.
His heart began to hammer and his throat closed up tight. He knew what he needed, what he would have to do to get it. He and Karen had over $1300 in a savings account. It would be enough.
* * *
He was home again by three o’clock with the purple Jackson soloist and a Fender Princeton amp. The purple finish wasn’t nearly as ugly as he remembered it and the guitar fit into his hands like an old lover. He set up in the living room and shut all the windows and played, eyes closed, swaying a little from side to side, bringing his right hand all the way up over his head on the long trills.
Just like Jeff Beck.
He had no idea how long he’d been playing when he heard the phone ringing. He lunged for it, the phone cord bouncing noisily off the strings.
It was Karen. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Uh, no,” Felix said. “What time is it?”
“Five thirty.” She sounded close to tears.
“Oh shit. I’ll be right there.”
He hid the guitar and amp in his studio. She would understand, he told himself, but he wasn’t ready to break it to her just yet.
In the car she seemed afraid to talk to him, even to ask why he’d been late. Felix could only think about the purple Jackson waiting for him at home.
He sat through a dinner of Chef Boyardee Pizza, using three beers to wash it down, and after he’d done the dishes he shut himself in his studio.
For four hours he played everything that came into his head, from blues to free jazz to “Over Under Sideways Down” to things he’d never heard before, things so alien and illogical that he couldn’t translate the sounds he heard. When he finally stopped Karen had gone to bed. He undressed and crawled in beside her, his brain reeling.
* * *
He woke up to the sound of the vacuum cleaner. H
e remembered everything, but in the bright morning light it all seemed like a weirdly vivid hallucination, especially the part where he’d emptied the savings account.
Saturday was his morning for yard work, but first he had to deal with the drug business, to prove to himself that he’d only imagined it. He went into the studio and lifted the lid of the guitar case and then sat down across from it in his battered blue-green lounge chair.
As he stared at it he felt his love and terror of the guitar swell in his chest like cancer.
He picked it up and played the solo from “Got the Feelin’” and then looked up. Karen was standing in the open door.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god. What have you done?”
Felix hugged the guitar to his chest. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her.
“How long have you had this? Oh. You bought it yesterday, didn’t you? That’s why you couldn’t even remember to pick me up.” She slumped against the door frame. “I don’t believe it. I don’t even believe it.”
Felix looked at the floor.
“The bedroom air conditioner is broken,” Karen said. Her voice sounded like she was squeezing it with both hands; if she let it go it would turn into hysteria. “The car’s running on four bald tires. The TV picture looks like hell. I can’t remember the last time we went out to dinner or a movie.” She pushed both hands into the sides of her face, twisting it into a mask of anguish.
“How much did it cost?” When Felix didn’t answer she said, “It cost everything, didn’t it? Everything. Oh god, I just can’t believe it.”
She closed the door on him and he started playing again, frantic scraps and tatters, a few bars from “Situation,” a chorus of “You Shook Me,” anything to drown out the memory of Karen’s voice.
It took him an hour to wind down, and at the end of it he had nothing left to play. He put the guitar away and got in the car and drove around to the music stores.
On the bulletin board at Ray Hennig’s he found an ad for a guitarist and called the number from a pay phone in the strip center outside. He talked to somebody named Sid and set up an audition for the next afternoon.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 71