The Best of Lucius Shepard

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

  “We’re perfectly safe,” said the lieutenant. “Take my word.” He motioned with the gun, indicating that Mingolla should sit on the floor.

  Mingolla did as ordered and was frozen by the sight of a corpse, a Cuban corpse, lying between two packing crates opposite him, its head propped against the wall. “Jesus!” he said, coming back up to his knees.

  “He won’t bite,” said the lieutenant. With the lack of self-consciousness of someone squeezing into a subway seat, he settled beside the corpse; the two of them neatly filled the space between the crates, touching elbow to shoulder.

  “Hey,” said Mingolla, feeling giddy and scattered. “I’m not sitting here with this fucking dead guy, man!”

  The lieutenant flourished his gun. “You’ll get used to him.”

  Mingolla eased back to a sitting position, unable to look away from the corpse. Actually, compared to the bodies he had just been stepping over, it was quite presentable. The only signs of damage were blood on its mouth and bushy black beard, and a mire of blood and shredded cloth at the center of its chest. Its beret had slid down at a rakish angle to cover one eyebrow; the brass scorpion pin was scarred and tarnished. Its eyes were open, reflecting glowing red chips of the emergency lights, and this gave it a baleful semblance of life. But the reflections made it appear less real, easier to bear.

  “Listen to me,” said the lieutenant.

  Mingolla rubbed at the blood on his shaking hand, hoping that cleaning it would have some good effect.

  “Are you listening?” the lieutenant asked.

  Mingolla had a peculiar perception of the lieutenant and the corpse as dummy and ventriloquist. Despite its glowing eyes, the corpse had too much reality for any trick of the light to gloss over for long. Precise crescents showed on its fingernails, and because its head was tipped to one side, blood had settled into that side, darkening its cheek and temple, leaving the rest of the face pallid. It was the lieutenant, with his neat khakis and polished shoes and nice haircut, who now looked less than real.

  “Listen!” said the lieutenant vehemently. “I want you to understand that I have to do what’s right for me!” The biceps of his gun arm bunched to the size of a cannonball.

  “I understand,” said Mingolla, thoroughly unnerved.

  “Do you? Do you really?” The lieutenant seemed aggravated by Mingolla’s claim to understanding. “I doubt it. I doubt you could possibly understand.”

  “Maybe I can’t,” said Mingolla. “Whatever you say, man. I’m just trying to get along, y’know.”

  The lieutenant sat silent, blinking. Then he smiled. “My name’s Jay,” he said. “And you are…?”

  “David.” Mingolla tried to bring his concentration to bear on the gun, wondering if he could kick it away, but the sliver of life in his hand distracted him.

  “Where are your quarters, David?”

  “Level Three.”

  “I live here,” said Jay. “But I’m going to move. I couldn’t bear to stay in a place where…” He broke off and leaned forward, adopting a conspiratorial stance. “Did you know it takes a long time for someone to die, even after their heart has stopped?”

  “No, I didn’t.” The thing in Mingolla’s hand squirmed toward his wrist, and he squeezed the wrist, trying to block it.

  “It’s true,” said Jay with vast assurance. “None of these people”—he gave the corpse a gentle nudge with his elbow, a gesture that conveyed to Mingolla a creepy sort of familiarity—“have finished dying. Life doesn’t just switch off. It fades. And these people are still alive, though it’s only a half-life.” He grinned. “The half-life of life, you might say.”

  Mingolla kept the pressure on his wrist and smiled, as if in appreciation of the play on words. Pale red tendrils of mist curled between them.

  “Of course you aren’t attuned,” said Jay. “So you wouldn’t understand. But I’d be lost without Eligio.”

  “Who’s Eligio?”

  Jay nodded toward the corpse. “We’re attuned, Eligio and I. That’s how I know we’re safe. Eligio’s perceptions aren’t limited to the here and now any longer. He’s with his men at this very moment, and he tells me they’re all dead or dying.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Mingolla, tensing. He had managed to squeeze the thing in his hand back into his fingers, and he thought he might be able to reach the gun. But Jay disrupted his plan by shifting the gun to his other hand. His eyes seemed to be growing more reflective, acquiring a ruby glaze, and Mingolla realized this was because he had opened them wide and angled his stare toward the emergency lights.

  “It makes you wonder,” said Jay. “It really does.”

  “What?” said Mingolla, easing sideways, shortening the range for a kick.

  “Half-lives,” said Jay. “If the mind has a half-life, maybe our separate emotions do, too. The half-life of love, of hate. Maybe they still exist somewhere.” He drew up his knees, shielding the gun. “Anyway, I can’t stay here. I think I’ll go back to Oakland.” His tone became whispery. “Where are you from, David?”

  “New York.”

  “Not my cup of tea,” said Jay. “But I love the Bay Area. I own an antique shop there. It’s beautiful in the mornings. Peaceful. The sun comes through the window, creeping across the floor, y’know, like a tide, inching up over the furniture. It’s as if the original varnishes are being reborn, the whole shop shining with ancient lights.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Mingolla, taken aback by Jay’s lyricism.

  “You seem like a good person.” Jay straightened up a bit. “But I’m sorry. Eligio tells me your mind’s too cloudy for him to read. He says I can’t risk keeping you alive. I’m going to have to shoot.”

  Mingolla set himself to kick, but then listlessness washed over him. What the hell did it matter? Even if he knocked the gun away, Jay could probably break him in half. “Why?” he said. “Why do you have to?”

  “You might inform on me.” Jay’s soft features sagged into a sorrowful expression. “Tell them I was hiding.”

  “Nobody gives a shit you were hiding,” said Mingolla. “That’s what I was doing. I bet there’s fifty other guys doing the same damn thing.”

  “I don’t know,” Jay’s brow furrowed. “I’ll ask again. Maybe your mind’s less cloudy now.” He turned his gaze to the dead man.

  Mingolla noticed that the Cuban’s irises were angled upward and to the left—exactly the same angle to which Jay’s eyes had drifted earlier—and reflected an identical ruby glaze.

  “Sorry,” said Jay, leveling the gun. “I have to.” He licked his lips. “Would you please turn your head? I’d rather you weren’t looking at me when it happens. That’s how Eligio and I became attuned.”

  Looking into the aperture of the gun’s muzzle was like peering over a cliff, feeling the chill allure of falling and, it was more out of contrariness than a will to survive that Mingolla popped his eyes at Jay and said, “Go ahead.”

  Jay blinked but he held the gun steady. “Your hand’s shaking,” he said after a pause.

  “No shit,” said Mingolla.

  “How come it’s shaking?”

  “Because I killed someone with it,” said Mingolla. “Because I’m as fucking crazy as you are.”

  Jay mulled this over. “I was supposed to be assigned to a gay unit,” he said finally. “But all the slots were filled, and when I had to be assigned here they gave me a drug. Now I…I…” He blinked rapidly, his lips parted, and Mingolla found that he was straining toward Jay, wanting to apply Body English, to do something to push him over this agonizing hump. “I can’t…be with men anymore,” Jay finished, and once again blinked rapidly; then his words came easier. “Did they give you a drug too? I mean I’m not trying to imply you’re gay. It’s just they have drugs for everything these days, and I thought that might be the problem.”

  Mingolla was suddenly, inutterably sad. He felt that his emotions had been twisted into a thin black wire, that the wire was frayed and spraying black sparks of
sadness. That was all that energized him, all his life. Those little black sparks.

  “I always fought before,” said Jay. “And I was fighting this time. But when I shot Eligio…I just couldn’t keep going.”

  “I really don’t give a shit,” said Mingolla. “I really don’t.”

  “Maybe I can trust you.” Jay sighed. “I just wish you were attuned. Eligio’s a good soul. You’d appreciate him.”

  Jay kept on talking, enumerating Eligio’s virtues, and Mingolla tuned him out, not wanting to hear about the Cuban’s love for his family, his posthumous concerns for them. Staring at his bloody hand, he had a magical overview of the situation. Sitting in the root cellar of this evil mountain, bathed in an eerie red glow, a scrap of a dead man’s life trapped in his flesh, listening to a deranged giant who took his orders from a corpse, waiting for scorpion soldiers to pour through a tunnel that appeared to lead into a dimension of mist and blackness. It was insane to look at it that way. But there it was. You couldn’t reason it away; it had a brutal glamour that surpassed reason, that made reason unnecessary.

  “…and once you’re attuned,” Jay was saying, “you can’t ever be separated. Not even by death. So Eligio’s always going to be alive inside me. Of course I can’t let them find out. I mean”—he chuckled, a sound like dice rattling in a cup—“talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy!”

  Mingolla lowered his head, closed his eyes. Maybe Jay would shoot. But he doubted that. Jay only wanted company in his madness.

  “You swear you won’t tell them?” Jay asked.

  “Yeah,” said Mingolla. “I swear.”

  “All right,” said Jay. “But remember, my future’s in your hands. You have a responsibility to me.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Gunfire crackled in the distance.

  “I’m glad we could talk,” said Jay. “I feel much better.”

  Mingolla said that he felt better, too.

  They sat without speaking. It wasn’t the most secure way to pass the night, but Mingolla no longer put any store in the concept of security. He was too weary to be afraid. Jay seemed entranced, staring at a point above Mingolla’s head, but Mingolla made no move for the gun. He was content to sit and wait and let fate take its course. His thoughts uncoiled with vegetable sluggishness.

  They must have been sitting a couple of hours when Mingolla heard the whisper of helicopters and noticed that the mist had thinned, that the darkness at the end of the tunnel had gone gray. “Hey,” he said to Jay. “I think we’re okay now.” Jay offered no reply, and Mingolla saw that his eyes were angled upward and to the left just like the Cuban’s eyes, glazed over with ruby reflection. Tentatively, he reached out and touched the gun. Jay’s hand flopped to the floor, but his fingers remained clenched around the butt. Mingolla recoiled, disbelieving. It couldn’t be! Again he reached out, feeling for a pulse. Jay’s wrist was cool, still, and his lips had a bluish cast. Mingolla had a flutter of hysteria, thinking that Jay had gotten it wrong about being attuned: instead of Eligio’s becoming part of his life, he had become part of Eligio’s death. There was a tightness in Mingolla’s chest, and he thought he was going to cry. He would have welcomed tears, and when they failed to materialize he grew both annoyed at himself and defensive. Why should he cry? The guy had meant nothing to him…though the fact that he could be so devoid of compassion was reason enough for tears. Still, if you were going to cry over something as commonplace as a single guy dying, you’d be crying every minute of the day, and what was the future in that? He glanced at Jay. At the Cuban. Despite the smoothness of Jay’s skin, the Cuban’s bushy beard, Mingolla could have sworn they were starting to resemble each other the way old married couples did. And, yep, all four eyes were fixed on exactly the same point of forever. It was either a hell of a coincidence or else Jay’s craziness had been of such magnitude that he had willed himself to die in this fashion just to lend credence to his theory of half-lives. And maybe he was still alive. Half alive. Maybe he and Mingolla were now attuned, and if that were true, maybe…Alarmed by the prospect of joining Jay and the Cuban in their deathwatch, Mingolla scrambled to his feet and ran into the tunnel. He might have kept running, but on coming out into the dawn light he was brought up short by the view from the tunnel entrance.

  At his back, the green dome of the hill swelled high, its sides brocaded with shrubs and vines, an infinity of pattern as eye-catching as the intricately carved facade of a Hindu temple; atop it, one of the gun emplacements had taken a hit: splinters of charred metal curved up like peels of black rind. Before him lay the moat of red dirt with its hedgerows of razor wire, and beyond that loomed the blackish-green snarl of the jungle. Caught on the wire were hundreds of baggy shapes wearing bloodstained fatigues; frays of smoke twisted up from the fresh craters beside them. Overhead, half-hidden by the lifting gray mist, three Sikorskys were hovering. Their pilots were invisible behind layers of mist and reflection, and the choppers themselves looked like enormous carrion flies with bulging eyes and whirling wings. Like devils. Like gods. They seemed to be whispering to one another in anticipation of the feast they were soon to share.

  The scene was horrid yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell. You could never paint it, or if you could the canvas would have to be as large as the scene itself, and you would have to incorporate the slow boil of the mist, the whirling of the chopper blades, the drifting smoke. No detail could be omitted. It was the perfect illustration of the war, of its secret magical splendor, and Mingolla, too, was an element of the design, the figure of the artist painted in for a joke or to lend scale and perspective to its vastness, its importance. He knew that he should report to his station, but he couldn’t turn away from the glimpse into the heart of the war. He sat down on the hillside, cradling his sick hand in his lap, and watched as—with the ponderous aplomb of idols floating to earth, fighting the cross-draft, the wind of their descent whipping up furies of red dust—the Sikorskys made skillful landings among the dead.

  4

  Halfway through the telling of his story, Mingolla had realized that he was not really trying to offend or shock Debora, but rather was unburdening himself; and he further realized that by telling it he had to an extent cut loose from the past, weakened its hold on him. For the first time he felt able to give serious consideration to the idea of desertion. He did not rush to it, embrace it, but he did acknowledge its logic and understand the terrible illogic of returning to more assaults, more death, without any magic to protect him. He made a pact with himself: he would pretend to go along as if desertion were his intent and see what signs were offered.

  When he had finished, Debora asked whether or not he was over his anger. He was pleased that she hadn’t tried to offer sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t really angry at you…at least that was only part of it.”

  “It’s all right.” She pushed back the dark mass of her hair so that it fell to one side and looked down at the grass beside her knees. With her head inclined, eyes half-lidded, the graceful line of her neck and chin like a character in some exotic script, she seemed a good sign herself. “I don’t know what to talk to you about,” she said. “The things I feel I have to tell you make you mad, and I can’t muster any small talk.”

  “I don’t want to be pushed,” he said. “But believe me, I’m thinking about what you’ve told me.”

  “I won’t push. But I still don’t know what to talk about.” She plucked a grass-blade, chewed on the tip. He watched her lips purse, wondered how she’d taste. Mouth sweet in the way of a jar that had once held spices. And down below, she’d taste sweet there, too: honey gone a little sour in the comb. She tossed the grass-blade aside. “I know,” she said brightly. “Would you like to see where I live?”

  “I’d just as soon not go back to ’Frisco yet.” Where you live, he thought; I want to touch where you live.

  “It’s not in town,” sh
e said. “It’s a village downriver.”

  “Sounds good.” He came to his feet, took her arm, and helped her up. For an instant they were close together, her breasts grazing his shirt. Her heat coursed around him, and he thought if anyone were to see them, they would see two figures wavering as in a mirage. He had an urge to tell her he loved her. Though most of what he felt was for the salvation she might provide, part of his feelings seemed real and that puzzled him, because all she had been to him was a few hours out of the war, dinner in a cheap restaurant and a walk along the river. There was no basis for consequential emotion. Before he could say anything, do anything, she turned and picked up her basket.

  “It’s not far,” she said, walking away. Her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell.

  They followed a track of brown clay overgrown by ferns, overspread by saplings with pale translucent leaves, and soon came to a grouping of thatched huts at the mouth of a stream that flowed into the river. Naked children were wading in the stream, laughing and splashing each other. Their skins were the color of amber and their eyes were as wet-looking and purplish-dark as plums. Palms and acacias loomed above the huts, which were constructed of sapling trunks lashed together by nylon cord; their thatch had been trimmed to resemble bowl-cut hair. Flies crawled over strips of meat hung on a clothesline stretched between two of the huts. Fish heads and chicken droppings littered the ocher ground. But Mingolla scarcely noticed these signs of poverty, seeing instead a sign of the peace that might await him in Panama. And another sign was soon forthcoming. Debora bought a bottle of rum at a tiny store, then led him to the hut nearest the mouth of the stream and introduced him to a lean white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench outside it. Tío Moisés. After three drinks Tío Moisés began to tell stories.