—Don’t think I won’t! He screwed the barrel down hard against my cheek. I’m missing a bottle.
—He didn’t take nothing! Leeli said. I promise!
—You check around by your chair? I asked. Jesus, you could hide a Volkswagen under all the crap you got on your floor.
His face lost some intensity.
—I guess you were so clearheaded last night, you couldn’t have set it down somewheres and forgot, I said. You would know if you give it a kick accidental when you got up to piss or something.
Thought confused his expression. He backed away from the bed, the pistol angled toward the side.
—Jesus Christ! I sat up and swung my legs onto the floor. Fuck you so crazy about, anyway? You said you had a good goddamn supply.
—It’s gotta last the weekend, he said sullenly.
—You run out, I know you’ll get you some more. I pulled on my undershorts. What’s wrong with you, man? Busting in here like that. I ever cheat you before? I ever treat you anything but righteous?
Rickey puzzled over that. The words came slow from his mouth, like slobber off a bull’s lip. I can’t recall.
—Well, you’d remember if I did, wouldn’t you?
—I s’pose so. Yeah. He lowered the pistol and let out a soggy, rueful snort of laughter. Fuck, man. Y’know, I…just people been fucking me around a lot lately.
—If you can’t find it, don’t come back in here busting on me about it. You know you gonna find it sooner or later in that mess. Someday you run out, you gonna be stumbling around and it’ll turn up under your big toe. Be like finding a diamond in a cornfield.
This fairly brightened Rickey—he nodded energetically, seeing a vision of that glorious day. I noticed Leeli cowering in the corner, looking extra fine with her breasts gathered above her arm and her ass sticking out from the sheet.
—Hey, Leeli. Get your tail over here, I said. This here’s my ol’ pal Rickey.
I tried to move Rickey on out of there before he could get paranoid again, but his eyes were leaving tracks all over Leeli, even after she covered everything up, and he kept hanging around. He began asking why we needed to hide and such. I told him some lies and when that didn’t stop his questions, I said I wanted to borrow his car so we could buy food and stuff. The best way to derail Rickey’s suspicions always was to beg a favor. If he could deny you something, he’d start feeling masterful and forget whatever was bothering him. I argued and pleaded, but he was resolute. Nobody drives my car but me, he said. Like everyone in the world was dying to park their behinds in his funky-smelling shitbox so they could race off to Monaco and display this automotive jewel before graceful society. It ended with Rickey agreeing to bring us food himself and stalking off to search for his missing Dilaudid with head held high.
—That was sly, way you managed that, Leeli said, giving me a smooch. You’re pretty smart for white trash.
—Guess what that makes me in the real world, I said.
Rain and guns. I think it must’ve been raining when the first gun was drawn hot from its tempering fire, because when it comes rain, I get an itch to handle a gun if I’ve got one. Which is a roundabout way of saying it rained and Rickey went for food, Leeli hunkered beside me on the bed fixing her nails, while I sat turning Ava’s Colt in my hands, picking at the plaque on the grip, rubbing a little raised, rough patch alongside the chamber, thinking gun thoughts, testing its heft and balance, knowing that if I was really pretty smart I would walk down to the water’s edge and toss it on in. Having a gun was not in my best interests. Without one, if I was at a beach party, let’s say, and some worthless drunken individual tipped over my beer and said diddley dog about it, the worst could happen was busted knuckles and a hospital trip—but I had a gun, God knows, that beer might seem like the very selfsame beer for which the Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, and I’d be called upon to uphold its sacred honor.
It was an uncommon hard and lasting rain. A drizzle started about ten o’clock and five minutes later it was like a billion hailstones were bouncing off the roof, filling the house with a roar. A weird slivery darkness ensued. The cloud bellies passing over us were black as Satan’s boot soles and the wind flattened the marsh grasses with a constant rush. The rain slacked off many times during the day, a couple of times it stopped altogether and the land yielded up a sodden, animal smell; but it kept returning in strength. Rickey drove off to buy food. Carl and Squire sat on the porch playing a hand-held game of some kind. Leeli got a little closer to her new best friend, Mr. Dilaudid, and fell asleep. I wedged the Colt in my waist and paid a visit to Ava.
Her door was open a foot and I stuck my head in without knocking. She was standing at the window, stark naked, arms folded beneath her breasts and hair loose about her shoulders, gazing out at the rain. She must have felt me there, because she turned her head and delivered me a flat, unsurprised stare. What do you want? she asked.
—A few words would be good.
—I guess it’s inevitable.
—I’ll wait out here while you throw something on.
—No need. We’re like family now.
Ava went back to watching the weather and I let my eyes out for a run. Though her face was hagging out, her body belonged to a woman in her prime. She wanted to give me a show, it didn’t bother me none. The door proved to be stuck open. I eased in and perched on a straight chair set next to a dresser with its drawers stove-in. Her room was shabbier than ours. Rat turds speckled the boards along the molding and spiderwebs spanned the corners. The bed was so swaybacked, some of the springs were flush to the floor.
—I sneaked a look at your photograph album last night, I said.
—Oh? What did you think?
—I think you’re damn sexy for a woman’s gotta be in her fifties.
—Sixty-one, she said. I’m sixty-one.
—Okay. A woman in her sixties. And Carl, how old is he?
—Carl. Her smile had a fond quality. Carl’s ageless.
—Squire, too. He ageless?
—In a way.
She crossed to the bed with a three-step stroll and laid herself out, back against the headboard, arms spread on the pillows. Her pubic hair was trimmed to a neat strip and she had a long waist to go with her trophy chest. She reminded me of this naked woman in a painting one of my high school teachers had prattled on about, some rich horny bitch from another century lying on a couch and looking at you with a similar scornful, seductive attitude.
—If you want to come over here with me, it’s all right, she said.
—I’m fine where I am.
—Leeli won’t mind, that’s what’s worrying you.
—You don’t know nothing about that, believe me.
She shrugged, smiled.
—Why would you even want me to come over there? I asked. We ain’t got nothing going on.
—I like sex.
—So do I, but…
—Oh I see! You have to like the girl first. You require an emotional attachment.
I didn’t care for her mocking me and I was tempted to fuck her knock-kneed, but that would have been playing with her deck. I don’t have to like her all that much, I said. Helps if I like her some, though.
Her smile cut itself a wider curve. You don’t like me a tiny bit?
—I ain’t even sure what the fuck you are. Whyn’t you clear that up for me?
The rain came harder, spitting through the window screen, drops darkening a wedge of floor beneath it. Some giant’s stomach grumbled and the light dimmed.
—You gonna shoot me if I don’t tell you?
—That wasn’t my intention.
—No? Yet you come in here with my gun on display.
—Just making a point.
—The point being, you might be prepared to shoot me.
—You want me to shoot you? You keep pissing me off, maybe I will. Don’t seem like it would affect you that much, anyway. Or is it just the boys who’s good at taking bullets?
This was the f
irst real conversation I’d had with Ava. I’d seen that on the outside she was a cool, collected sort. Now I was coming to think coolness ran deep in her, that instead of a heart, a little refrigeration unit was humming in her chest, pumping out frosty air. She seemed like a lotta women I’d known who’d survived bar fights that passed for marriages. Women who felt you couldn’t do nothing more to them than had been done already. Yet I didn’t accept that picture of her. She was too steady, too unconcerned. I had a notion that her steadiness came from a perception of my weaknesses. Like she was X-raying me, reading all my flaws.
—You’d like me to tell you a story, she said. Is that it?
—A true story. I don’t want no fairy tales.
—All right.
She proceeded to whip one off about how she and Carl had been dating back in the 60s while she was in high school and he was in college, and they had gone down to State Road 44 to look at the flying saucers and have sex, and a saucer had abducted them, worked some weird change on them both, and set them back on earth for God knows what purpose, maybe just as test subjects, and they were prodded this way and that by alien agencies—powerful ones that penetrated every layer of society, even the FBI—and they were always being put in strange situations, and this was why they had been at the house in the dunes when Leeli and I showed up.
I was about to ask if Squire was an alien agent, one who was doing the prodding, when she launched into a second story, saying Carl and Squire had been hybrid clone babies, grown from human eggs and alien juice extracted from a dead UFO pilot, and she’d been in charge of them when the government decided the experiment wasn’t producing any valuable result and decided to kill the two boys, so Ava, with the help of highly placed friends, had run off with them, and they’d been pursued for a time, but then the government changed their minds and thought the thing to do was let the boys run, acquire life experiences, and see if they developed into a crop worth harvesting. They lived in constant fear of judgment, she said. Never knowing if the government would change their minds again. She was worried that Carl shooting the HoJo’s manager might be the last straw and the government would send their killers.
I wondered if she could’ve tapped into my thoughts of the night before and devised these stories to suit my tabloid fantasies. Why’d you tell two stories? I asked. You told me just the one, I might’ve believed it.
—You’re not a believer, Ava said. You’re a doubter. Don’t matter what I say, you’re gonna pick at it.
The rain had ceased and you could hear everything dripping. A bluejay began jattering and a dog started going crazy at the sound. Four-legged somethings, probably squirrels, skittered across the roof. All those noises, it was like the world was surfacing to snatch a breath before the rain went to drowning it again.
—Carl’s my son, Ava said. He’s the spitting image of his daddy. He’s dead…Carl Senior. He was killed in a car wreck right before we was about to marry. I was already pregnant. Carl was born retarded and he’s got lotta other problems. There’s this disease makes his nerves not work right. He can’t hardly feel a thing. It’s killing him. I don’t know how much longer he’s got. Not long, I expect. Squire, he’s just this fella I met in a bar over in Boynton Beach. He keeps me happy and he’s simple enough to relate to Carl. Carl Senior’s daddy worked for NASA. One of the directors. Even though I never married his son, he was kind to us. When he died he left a trust for me and Carl. The house where you met us? He had it built for us. Pulled some strings so we could have access. The government don’t care about the land no more and his friends make sure people leave us be when we’re there. Ava crossed her legs and clasped her hands behind her head. That fly any higher for you?
—You’re a piece of fucking work, I’ll give you that, I said.
Ava grinned. You’ll never know ’til you cut you a slice.
—What the hell you hanging around with us for, you got all this money?
—I like Leeli. I like you, too. Different, though. I was enjoying myself with y’all until yesterday.
—The thing gets me, I said after studying on things a patch, is how come you don’t seem so worried about your son or your old boyfriend or your experimental subject, whichever he is…about him committing murder.
—Oh we’ll be all right. I got confidence in you.
—Now that’s a lie.
—You got us outa Ocala, didn’t you? With your experience in these matters and my money, we’re gonna do fine. I was thinking about Mexico.
—Mexico?
—Uh-huh. I was thinking I’d charter a plane and we’d lay low for a few and then jump on over. After Leeli finishes her time with me, the two of you can skedaddle. Twenty thousand’ll go a long way in Mexico.
—Whyn’t you just call your bigwig friends to haul your ass outa this?
—Maybe I will, things don’t go well. But you know how it is, Maceo. You got a favor in the bank, you want to hold back from using it long as you can.
My thoughts skipped back and forth from story to story. I didn’t believe any of them, but I kind of believed them all. I suspected there was a spoonful of truth in each, or that each was a stand-in double for a truth she hadn’t spoken.
—It don’t matter who I am, who Carl and Squire are, she said. We still hafta deal with the problem.
Trying to decide what to believe and what to do about it tied knots in my thought strings. Ava lay grinning at me, looking from the neck down like a dessert tray. I gave myself a nudge toward the bed, pretending to buy the proposition that if I tore one off with her, I’d have a better feel for the situation. Old hayseed philosophers gathered in the boiler room of my brain, swapped round a bottle, and spewed dipshit wisdoms: You can’t say how a peach tastes ’til the juice runs down your chin. Staring at the groceries don’t tell you who the cook is. Video footage of a naked, sucked-dry corpse, its mouth wrenched open in a final agony, was playing in the den, with graphics reading ALIEN EMBRACE KILLS REDNECK LOVER. I stayed where I was, speculating pro and con upon what I might be missing.
The door shrieked as someone shoved against it. Squire squeezed on in, followed by Carl. Squire glared at Ava, at me, and Carl beamed. His bandage was soaking wet, smudged with dirty finger marks.
—Hi, honey, Ava said.
—That man went for food’s coming down the drive, Squire said.
—That’s nice. Soon we can have us a feast! She patted the bed, an invitation, and Squire, good dog that he was, laid down beside her. Carl gazed at the chair I was on for a second, then plunked himself down on the floor next to the bed. Squire began toying with Ava’s nipples, kissing her neck. The rain swept back in. I heard a clattering from the front of the lodge, a door slamming, but I didn’t turn from watching Squire and Ava. The rainy noise seemed to be tightening the space around us, compressing and heating the air. I told myself the minute Squire started taking off his clothes, I was gone, but there was something mesmerizing about Ava, about the lush, lazy strain of her belly, the slow surges of her hips, and the way her eyes would graze me every so often. I felt the cold pull of her. The sexy warmth of her surface was a dream and beneath lay an undertow that sucked all the swimmers who’d strayed out past the bar into whatever deep lightless place her story really sprung from. I had a glimmering of how it would be to go with the flow, to stroke hard and arrow down into her dark, to reach the great secret at the bottom, whether toothy maw or golden kingdom, it wasn’t much important, because you were bound to be part of it, and as Squire’s fingers traipsed between her thighs and her hips lifted, I thought what I was feeling now was closer to the truth than anything she’d said, and knew that she was willful and careless and irresistibly strong. The instant I understood this, however, I declared bullshit on it. I was watching a dirty movie, I told myself, and not falling down no rabbit hole.
—Fuck y’all doing? Rickey had popped his head in and was gawking at the bed, where Squire and Ava hadn’t missed a beat.
—Notice how the entire school turns
as one, Carl said happily.
—Hallelujah! I said. The single mind’s directing.
Rickey slid himself in past the stuck door. I could see he was hoping to get in on the act, but was all puffed up and ready to be outraged in case he couldn’t. Goddamn it! he said, and stepped over to the window, getting a side angle on the center ring. I don’t want no weird shit going on in my house!
—God, no! I said. There’s never been no weird shit like people fucking and people watching going on out here. Not in this holy temple.
Rickey might have said something back, but his mouth stopped working, because right then Ava opened her legs and Squire started wrestling off his jeans.
—That’s Ava there showing her rosy, I said to Rickey. Squire, he’s the boy ’bout to have some fun. Down there in the front row, that’s Carl.
—In concert, said Carl. In simple harmony and balance.
—Carl’s got this kinda religious thing going, I told Rickey.
This inspired Carl to point at me and say, Hands up! Who wants to die?
Rickey pricked up his ears at that, but again gave no response. Squire had climbed on board the Ava train and was making tracks for the station, giving out with chuffing noises. The springs backed him up with a jangly, crunchy rhythm and the rain kept drumming and Ava sang a lyric with a single breathy word. Carl nodded, smiled. Rickey’s eyes cut toward me—I expect he was wanting a sign it would be okay for him to mix in.
The floorboards creaked. Leeli had crept in and was nailing me with a .45 caliber stare. She said, You asshole!, and ducked back out. Catching a last glimpse of Ava’s heels and Squire’s pimply backside, I wheeled up from the chair and after her. I checked the porch and saw Leeli standing with her arms folded out in the rain. I didn’t think she was crying or nothing, just had a mad on. Rickey came up at my shoulder and said, Hey, man! Is that Ava, she doing everybody?
—Don’t be shy, boy. Ask her.
—You serious?
—She ain’t gonna screech and hold her knees together if you do. She’ll just tell you yes or no.
—Cool.
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 63