The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  He was tempted to ask for specifics, but thought better of it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.

  They passed a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered if these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills: gone-dead tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control, that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and only let out for exercise. From the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life surfacing briefly, then returning to its long ignorant glide through the darkness…and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle flame, with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard overhead.

  “Shit,” said Debora under her breath.

  It surprised him to hear her curse. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she said wearily. “Just ‘shit.’” She pointed ahead and quickened her pace. “Here we are.”

  The restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel: a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing Fanta sign hung above the entrance. Hundreds of moths swarmed about the sign, flickering whitely against the darkness, and in front of the steps stood a group of teenage boys who were throwing knives at an iguana. The iguana was tied by its hind legs to the step railing. It had amber eyes, a hide the color of boiled cabbage, and it strained at the end of its cord, digging its claws into the dirt and arching its neck like a pint-size dragon about to take flight. As Mingolla and Debora walked up, one of the boys scored a hit in the iguana’s tail and it flipped high into the air, shaking loose the knife. The boys passed around a bottle of rum to celebrate.

  Except for the waiter—a pudgy young man leaning beside a door that opened onto a smoke-filled kitchen—the place was empty. Glaring overhead lights shined up the grease spots on the plastic tablecloths and made the uneven thicknesses of yellow paint appear to be dripping. The concrete floor was freckled with dark stains that Mingolla discovered to be the remains of insects. The food turned out to be decent, however, and Mingolla shoveled down a plateful of chicken and rice before Debora had half finished hers. She ate deliberately, chewing each bite a long time, and he had to carry the conversation. He told her about New York, his painting, how a couple of galleries had showed interest even though he was just a student. He compared his work to Rauschenberg, to Silvestre. Not as good, of course. Not yet. He had the notion that everything he told her—no matter its irrelevance to the moment—was securing the relationship, establishing subtle ties: he pictured the two of them enwebbed in a network of luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought. He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no one else, and so having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.

  She laid down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. “You can’t really believe that,” she said.

  “I know it sounds—”

  “Ridiculous,” she broke in. “That’s how it sounds.”

  “It’s the truth,” he said defiantly.

  She picked up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. “How is it for you,” she said, “when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams, hear voices?”

  “Sometimes I just know things,” he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. “And sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right. Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.”

  “With me, it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.” Her lips thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. “When I first saw you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your face…it was pale, bloody.” She put her handout to cover his. “What I saw was very clear, David. You can’t go back.”

  He hadn’t described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it. Shaken, he said, “Where am I gonna go?”

  “Panama,” she said. “I can help you get there.”

  She suddenly snapped into focus. You find her, dozens like her, in any of the R&R towns. Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear. She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not? Don’t you believe me?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if I did.”

  “I…”

  “Look,” he said. “This friend of mine, he’s always trying to convince me to desert, and there’ve been times I wanted to. But it’s just not in me. My feet won’t move that way. Maybe you don’t understand, but that’s how it is.”

  “This childish thing you do with your two friends,” she said after a pause. “That’s what’s holding you here, isn’t it?”

  “It isn’t childish.”

  “That’s exactly what it is. Like a child walking home in the dark and thinking that if he doesn’t look at the shadows, nothing will jump out at him.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “No, I suppose I don’t.” Angry, she threw her napkin down on the table and stared intently at her plate as if reading some oracle from the chicken bones.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” said Mingolla.

  “I have to go,” she said coldly.

  “Because I won’t desert?”

  “Because of what’ll happen if you don’t.” She leaned toward him, her voice burred with emotion. “Because knowing what I do about your future, I don’t want to wind up in bed with you.”

  Her intensity frightened him. Maybe she had been telling the truth. But he dismissed the possibility. “Stay,” he said. “We’ll talk some more about it.”

  “You wouldn’t listen.” She picked up her purse and got to her feet.

  The waiter ambled over and laid the check beside Mingolla’s plate; he pulled a plastic bag filled with marijuana from his apron pocket and dangled it in front of Mingolla. “Gotta get her in the mood, man,” he said. Debora railed at him in Spanish. He shrugged and moved off, his slow-footed walk an advertisement for his goods.

  “Meet me tomorrow then,” said Mingolla. “We can talk more about it tomorrow.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you gimme a break?” he said. “This is all coming down pretty fast, y’know. I get here this afternoon, meet you, and an hour later you’re saying, ‘Death is in the cards, and Panama’s your only hope.’ I need some time to think. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have a different attitude.”

  Her expression softened, but she shook her head, No.

  “Don’t you think it’s worth it?”

  She lowered her eyes, fussed with the zipper of her purse a second and let out a rueful hiss. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “How ’bout the pier on this side? ’Round noon.”

  She hesitated. “All right.” She came around to his side of the table, bent down and brushed her lips across his cheek. He tried to pull her close and deepen the kiss, but she slipped away. He felt giddy, overheated. “You really gonna be there?” he asked.

  She nodded but seemed troubled, and she didn’t look back before vanishing down the steps.
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br />   Mingolla sat a while, thinking about the kiss, its promise. He might have stayed even longer, but three drunken soldiers staggered in and began knocking over chairs, giving the waiter a hard time. Annoyed, Mingolla went to the door and stood taking in hits of the humid air. Moths were loosely constellated on the curved plastic of the Fanta sign, trying to get next to the bright heat inside it, and he had a sense of relation, of sharing their yearning for the impossible. He started down the steps but was brought up short. The teenage boys had gone; however, their captive iguana lay on the bottom step, bloody and unmoving. Bluish-gray strings spilled from a gash in its throat. It was such a clear sign of bad luck, Mingolla went back inside and checked into the hotel upstairs.

  The hotel corridors stank of urine and disinfectant. A drunken Indian with his fly unzipped and a bloody mouth was pounding on one of the doors. As Mingolla passed him, he bowed and made a sweeping gesture, a parody of welcome. Then he went back to his pounding. Mingolla’s room was a windowless cell five feet wide and coffin-length, furnished with a sink and a cot and a chair. Cobwebs and dust clotted the glass of the transom, reducing the hallway light to a cold bluish-white glow. The walls were filmy with more cobwebs, and the sheets were so dirty that they appeared to have a pattern. He lay down and closed his eyes, thinking about Debora. About ripping off that red dress and giving her a vicious screwing. How she’d cry out. That both made him ashamed and gave him a hard-on. He tried to think about making love to her tenderly. But tenderness, it seemed, was beyond him. He went flaccid. Jerking off wasn’t worth the effort, he decided. He started to unbutton his shirt, remembered the sheets and figured he’d be better off with his clothes on.

  In the blackness behind his lids he began to see explosive flashes, and within those flashes were images of the assault on the Ant Farm. The mist, the tunnels. He blotted them out with the image of Debora’s face, but they kept coming back. Finally he opened his eyes. Two…no, three fuzzy-looking black stars were silhouetted against the transom. It was only when they began to crawl that he recognized them to be spiders. Big ones. He wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but these particular spiders terrified him. If he hit them with his shoe he’d break the glass and they’d eject him from the hotel. He didn’t want to kill them with his hands. After a while he sat up, switched on the overhead and searched under the cot. There weren’t any more spiders. He lay back down, feeling shaky and short of breath. Wishing he could talk to someone, hear a familiar voice. “It’s okay,” he said to the dark air. But that didn’t help. And for a long time, until he felt secure enough to sleep, he watched the three black stars crawling across the transom, moving toward the center, touching each other, moving apart, never making any real progress, never straying from their area of bright confinement, their universe of curdled, frozen light.

  2

  In the morning Mingolla crossed to the west bank and walked toward the airbase. It was already hot, but the air still held a trace of freshness and the sweat that beaded on his forehead felt clean and healthy. White dust was settling along the gravel road, testifying to the recent passage of traffic; past the town and the cutoff that led to the uncompleted bridge, high walls of vegetation crowded close to the road, and from within them he heard monkeys and insects and birds: sharp sounds that enlivened him, making him conscious of the play of his muscles. About halfway to the base he spotted six Guatemalan soldiers coming out of the jungle, dragging a couple of bodies; they tossed them onto the hood of their jeep, where two other bodies were lying. Drawing near, Mingolla saw that the dead were naked children, each with a neat hole in his back. He had intended to walk on past, but one of the soldiers—a gnomish copper-skinned man in dark blue fatigues—blocked his path and demanded to check his papers. All the soldiers gathered around to study the papers, whispering, turning them sideways, scratching their heads. Used to such hassles, Mingolla paid them no attention and looked at the dead children.

  They were scrawny, sun-darkened, lying facedown with their ragged hair hanging a fringe off the hood; their skins were pocked by infected mosquito bites, and the flesh around the bullet holes was ridged up and bruised. Judging by their size, Mingolla guessed them to be about ten years old; but then he noticed that one was a girl with a teenage fullness to her buttocks, her breasts squashed against the metal. That made him indignant. They were only wild children who survived by robbing and killing, and the Guatemalan soldiers were only doing their duty: they performed a function comparable to that of the birds that hunted ticks on the hide of a rhinoceros, keeping their American beast pest-free and happy. But it wasn’t right for the children to be laid out like game.

  The soldier gave back Mingolla’s papers. He was now all smiles, and—perhaps in the interest of solidifying Guatemalan-American relations, perhaps because he was proud of his work—he went over to the jeep and lifted the girl’s head by the hair so Mingolla could see her face. “Bandida!” he said, arranging his features into a comical frown. The girl’s face was not unlike the soldier’s, with the same blade of a nose and prominent cheekbones. Fresh blood glistened on her lips, and the faded tattoo of a coiled serpent centered her forehead. Her eyes were open, and staring into them—despite their cloudiness—Mingolla felt that he had made a connection, that she was regarding him sadly from somewhere behind those eyes, continuing to die past the point of clinical death. Then an ant crawled out of her nostril, perching on the crimson curve of her lip, and the eyes looked merely vacant. The soldier let her head fall and wrapped his hand in the hair of a second corpse; but before he could lift it, Mingolla turned away and headed down the road toward the airbase.

  There was a row of helicopters lined up at the edge of the landing strip, and walking between them, Mingolla saw the two pilots who had given him a ride from the Ant Farm. They were stripped to shorts and helmets, wearing baseball gloves, and they were playing catch, lofting high flies to one another. Behind them, atop their Sikorsky, a mechanic was fussing with the main rotor housing. The sight of the pilots didn’t disturb Mingolla as it had the previous day; in fact, he found their weirdness somehow comforting. Just then, the ball eluded one of them and bounced Mingolla’s way. He snagged it and flipped it back to the nearer of the pilots, who came loping over and stood pounding the ball into the pocket of his glove. With his black reflecting face and sweaty, muscular torso, he looked like an eager young mutant.

  “How’s she goin’?” he asked. “Seem like you a little tore down this mornin’.”

  “I feel okay,” said Mingolla defensively. “’Course”—he smiled, making light of his defensiveness—“maybe you see something I don’t.”

  The pilot shrugged; the sprightliness of the gesture seemed to convey good humor.

  Mingolla pointed to the mechanic. “You guys broke down, huh?”

  “Just overhaul. We’re goin’ back up early tomorrow. Need a lift?”

  “Naw, I’m here for a week.”

  An eerie current flowed through Mingolla’s left hand, setting up a palsied shaking. It was bad this time, and he jammed the hand into his hip pocket. The olive-drab line of barracks appeared to twitch, to suffer a dislocation and shift farther away; the choppers and jeeps and uniformed men on the strip looked toylike: pieces in a really neat GI Joe Airbase kit. Mingolla’s hand beat against the fabric of his trousers like a sick heart.

  “I gotta get going,” he said.

  “Hang in there,” said the pilot. “You be awright.”

  The words had a flavor of diagnostic assurance that almost convinced Mingolla of the pilot’s ability to know his fate, that things such as fate could be known. “You honestly believe what you were saying yesterday, man?” he asked. “’Bout your helmets? ’Bout knowing the future?”

  The pilot bounced the ball on the concrete, snatched it at the peak of its rebound and stared down at it. Mingolla could see the seams and brand name reflected in the visor, but nothing of the face behind it, no evidence either of normalcy or deformity. “I get asked that a lot,” said the pi
lot. “People raggin’ me y’know. But you ain’t raggin’ me, are you, man?”

  “No,” said Mingolla. “I’m not.”

  “Well,” said the pilot, “it’s this way. We buzz ’round up in the nothin’, and we see shit down on the ground, shit nobody else sees. Then we blow that shit away. Been doin’ it like that for ten months, and we’re still alive. Fuckin’ A, I believe it!”

  Mingolla was disappointed. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

  “You hear what I’m savin’?” asked the pilot. “I mean we’re livin’ goddamn proof.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mingolla scratched his neck, trying to think of a diplomatic response, but thought of none. “Guess I’ll see you.”

  He started toward the PX.

  “Hang in there, man!” the pilot called after him. “Take it from me! Things gonna be lookin’ up for you real soon!”

  The canteen in the PX was a big barnlike room of unpainted boards; it was of such recent construction that Mingolla could still smell sawdust and resin. Thirty or forty tables; a jukebox; bare walls. Behind the bar at the rear of the room, a sour-faced corporal with a clipboard was doing a liquor inventory, and Gilbey—the only customer—was sitting by one of the east windows, stirring a cup of coffee. His brow was furrowed, and a ray of sunlight shone down around him, making it look that he was being divinely inspired to do some soul-searching.

  “Where’s Baylor?” asked Mingolla, sitting opposite him.

  “Fuck, I dunno,” said Gilbey, not taking his eyes from the coffee cup. “He’ll be here.”

  Mingolla kept his left hand in his pocket. The tremors were diminishing, but not quickly enough to suit him; he was worried that the shaking would spread as it had after the assault. He let out a sigh, and in letting it out he could feel all his nervous flutters. The ray of sunlight seemed to be humming a wavery golden note, and that, too, worried him. Hallucinations. Then he noticed a fly buzzing against the windowpane. “How was it last night?” he asked.