Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  Squire got things off to a start by going on about how easy it would be to knock over the Joyland Arcade. “You gotta have balls,” he said, ’cause time to do it’s when it’s crowded. “You walk on up and let ’em see your piece and grab them bags of money!” He looked to Ava like he was expecting to have his belly rubbed. She smiled and dribbled salt from a packet onto her rings.

  “You got a hard-on for quarters?” I asked. “They don’t bag nothing but the change.”

  “You have people with you. Three or four of ’em so you can carry more.”

  “You think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.”

  “You take the bills too,” Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.

  “Where am I?” I asked Leeli.

  Her expression begged me to shut up.

  “Seriously. Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid rules?”

  Carl chuckled and I said, “Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell, Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of popcorn.”

  “You the one’s acting superior,” Ava said, and forked up some slaw.

  “Fuck, I am superior! Superior to this shit. Maybe it gets you wet listening to the criminal genius here, but it don’t even give me a tickle.”

  Squire told me to watch my mouth, I was talking to a lady, and I said, “Come on, you fucking chihuahua! Step to me!”

  Leeli caught my arm and said, “Maceo!” I jerked free and swatted my shrimp basket, backhanding it across the deck. People bespotted with ketchup splatter from the basket stared at us from the adjoining tables. The assistant manager, who could have passed for fourteen, looked like he was about to cry. Leeli was yelling at me, Squire was avoiding my eyes, Ava was calmly wiping her sleeve with a napkin. Carl giggled and said, “Fucking chihuahua!”

  One of the citizens I’d splattered, a thick-necked, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Chevy-Suburban-driving son of the suburbs, his belly sagging like a hundred-year-old hammock, gave his pregnant wife a comforting pat on the shoulder and heaved up from his cheeseburger, but Ava saved his ass by intercepting him on the way to our table and slipped him a twenty for his dry cleaning bill. Other folks put in their claim and once she had satisfied them, she sat back down and said to me, “Temper like that, it’s a wonder you still on the street.”

  Calmer now, I felt no call to answer. I gave her a fuck-you smile and popped one of Leeli’s shrimp into my mouth. It was covered with grit that had blown up from the beach, which made it extra crunchy.

  “You so smart,” Ava said, “whyn’t you tell us how you’d handle the Joyland?”

  “Wouldn’t nothing but a damn fool mess with it. Too many cops. Too many boyfriends might wanna play hero. You feel the need to rob something, head out on the freeway. You know the back roads along the exits, you can take down two gas stations easy and be sitting in a bar before the cops get motivated.”

  “I suppose it was your expertise landed you in prison.”

  “Oh I was a fool. No doubt about that. It don’t mean I’m still a fool.”

  Challenged, I delivered a lecture on proper criminal procedure, most of it learned in Raiford, but salted in with personal experiences that I embellished for dramatic effect. “You gotta terrorize a place,” I told them. “People ain’t always scared, they see the gun. Sometimes they can’t believe you’re for real and they go to debating what to do. You don’t want that, you want ’em scared. So you say something lets ’em know how scared they oughta be.”

  “Yeah?” Squire said churlishly. “Like what?”

  I made my hand into a gun and pointed it at his chest. “Hands up! Who wants to die?” You say that, it gets their attention every time.

  “I like that,” Carl said, grinning. “Hands up who wants to die?”

  “Takes the punch out of it, you say it with a smile,” I said. “Tell ’em like you mean it.”

  With that, Carl jumped up and snarled, “Hands up! Who wants to die?”

  The pregnant lady yipped and the people at the table behind me grabbed up their belongings and scooted. Ava pulled Carl down into his chair and I said to him, “That’ll get it done.”

  Leeli stood and said, “Can we just go? Please!”

  We set off down the boardwalk toward the car and she fell into step with Ava and Carl. Irritated by this, not wanting to be stuck with Squire, I dropped off the pace, lollygagging along. That’s how Leeli wanted to play it, I told myself, to hell with her. I’d find myself a sweeter can of tuna. I started eye-fucking the bikini girls strolling past and when one made a smart-ass remark, getting her friends to laughing at me, I told her once she lost that babyfat she oughta try a real dick, but right now it’d likely be too much for her.

  • • •

  Ava drove south and then west on State Road 44 toward Orlando. She went to talking about the old days, the 60s, when there was so many UFOs in the sky—because of the rockets at the Cape, she guessed—you could see them from out on 44 every night. “Boys useta take us down here to see ’em,” she said, “’cause they thought we’d let ’em get fresh while we were stargazing.” Leeli, who was riding shotgun next to Carl, said, “I bet they were right, huh?”

  “’Course they were,” Ava said, and they shared a laugh.

  “You ever see any UFOs?” Leeli asked.

  “All the time! You look up in the sky, you couldn’t help seeing ’em. Pretty soon what you thought was a group of stars would get to darting around, making these really sharp turns, flying in formation.”

  She asked Leeli to fish around in her tote bag and find her cigarettes. Once she got a smoke going, she said, “Couple times we saw one real close.”

  “A flying saucer?”

  “Uh huh. We saw this one shoot a green light from its belly. Straight down to the ground.”

  “Maybe it was Santa Claus you saw,” I suggested. “Waving his green flashlight.”

  Ava took a glance back toward me. “You don’t believe in UFOs, Maceo?”

  “’Bout as much as I believe in liberty and justice for all.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Leeli said. He’s a contrary sort.

  I told Leeli she didn’t know squat about me and then said to Ava, “Whatever you saw, wasn’t no flying saucer. Ain’t no sense to any of that business.”

  “That might be,” Ava said. “Most things don’t make sense, especially you try and understand ’em too hard.”

  “I suppose that’s profound, but I’m just a dumb Florida Cracker. It goes right by me.”

  Ava flicked ash and sparks out the window. “You might catch up to it one of these days,” she said.

  It struck me that Ava must be a lot older than I’d estimated, she was dating back in the 60s, but I didn’t stay with the thought. I was a six pack along into a decent buzz and still feeling sour about Leeli, fully occupied with self-pity and scorn. When we stopped for gas I pulled Leeli aside, fed her all the I’m-sorry she could swallow and persuaded her to switch seats with Squire. I discovered a sensitive spot under her ear and before long I had her squirming pretty good, though each time my fingers traipsed near the old plantation home, she’d give them a spank. Squire began telling a lie about a beauty queen he’d gone with in high school and Ava shut him up quick, saying she needed to concentrate on the road. That clued me in she was upset about Leeli, and I felt satisfied in mind.

  Scattered around the edges of Disneyworld were a number of shooting ranges where for a few dollars you could fire assault rifles. Given the encouragement this surely offered the freaks who flocked to the ranges, you had to wonder if the city fathers of Orlando didn’t unconsciously long to see TV coverage of a giant blood-spattered mouse. While Carl and Squire were busy playing soldier at Buck’s Guns and Sporting Gallery, me and Ava and Leeli walked to a nearby 7-11 and bought som
e forty-ouncers, one of which I chugged walking back to the parking lot. The girls sat talking on the hood of Ava’s truck. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel mean, but I felt separate from things. The cars racing along the six-lane were shiny toys with glaring headlights and dabs of meat inside. The strip malls lining the road were grimy slot-car accessories. The heat came from a neon tube inside my head and the starless orange-lit sky was a gasoline-soaked rag someone had throwed over the whole mess so’s to hide it from company. What I’m saying, it wouldn’t have taken much to upgrade me to mean. Ava was pitching hard at Leeli, touching her thigh, the back of her hair. I just kept working on my second forty. If I could drink fast enough, I wouldn’t care what they did and I’d be able to ignore some deeper thoughts that were trying to gnaw out my brains like a squirrel with a nut meat.

  When Squire and Carl returned, all hotted up from proving their marksmanship, Ava announced a surprise. She had reserved us rooms at the mouse’s hotel. We’d have a few cocktails, go on some rides, and see what developed. This made Carl happy, but Squire and Leeli didn’t seem to care. I sucked down a third forty on the ride over and after Ava checked us in, I told her I felt poorly and was going to my room.

  “Me, too,” said Leeli. “I’m awful tired.”

  This surprised Ava as much as it did me. “You sure?” she said to Leeli. “Space Mountain’ll juice you right up.”

  “Naw, we’ll catch y’all later.” Leeli started walking so fast, she beat me to the elevator.

  I had a shower while Leeli ordered room service cheeseburgers and Cokes. The food left me placid and sleepy. I laid out on the bed in my skivvies and Leeli stood at the window, her arms folded, stern of face, like she was taking stock of a brightly lit country she’d just done conquering.

  “You don’t have to worry ’bout me making a move, that’s what’s keeping you vertical,” I said. “I’m through for today.”

  She made a noise that didn’t tell me much.

  I grabbed the remote from the bedside table and found a wrestling show on TV. Wrestling hasn’t been the same since the prime of Hulk Hogan and the Giant and Macho Man Savage, you ask me. Back in the day your superhero had a gut just like the asshole sitting next to you in the bar and so when you smacked him with a beer bottle, you had a greater sense of accomplishment. Now there was too many pretty boys and it was more tumbling and role-playing than the honest-to-God fake it once was.

  Leeli wriggled out of her jeans. “Ava gave me money to buy clothes,” she said. “Reckon we better do it soon.”

  “We can get some fine clothes here. Get us some mouse shirts and mouse hats with the ears. Maybe you can get some panties with the mouse on the crotch and wear ’em inside out.”

  She pulled off her tank top and threw it at me in a ball. “You always have to be a shit?”

  “It was a fucking joke! Jesus!”

  She stared at me as if she didn’t believe it.

  “I swear,” I said.

  She held the stare a second longer. “Damn!” she said. “Why do I like you?”

  “You want an honest answer?”

  “Naw, I know why.” She sat down on the bed, glum as old gravy, picked up the remote and went surfing, changing channels so fast, there was only little blurts of sound. “Know what Ava told me? She says she works for the government. The FBI.”

  “No shit! I said. Is she a friend of Spiderman?”

  “She showed me her badge!” Leeli bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

  “Give me ten bucks and I’ll show you a badge. I can probably find one in the gift shop.”

  Leeli threw herself down on the pillow like she was trying to hurt herself. “You wanna hear this or not?”

  “Sure. Lemme have it.” I turned to lie facing her so she’d know I was listening, and rested a hand on her waist.

  “She said she was an agent and Carl and Squire are in some sorta experiment. She’s in charge of ’em. She says she’ll pay me a ton of money to be part of it. The experiment.”

  “Want me to say what I’m thinking?”

  “I’m not an idiot! I know she likes me, and I know it could all be a story. But she’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars! For one month!”

  “You see the money?”

  Leeli gave a vigorous nod. “I get five now, the rest after.”

  “Well, shit.” I rolled onto my back. “I guess this is goodbye.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Yeah, necessarily. I can’t compete with someone throws around twenty thousand bucks.”

  She sat up cross-legged and muted the TV. “Look, I’m not no shiny apple been sitting on the shelf like you think.”

  “That ain’t what I think,” I said, grumpy from losing out to a rich dyke.

  “Then why you treating me like I don’t know which end of a jar to open? I been with women. It ain’t my favorite, but there’s times I felt that way. And I can feel that way again. Enough to earn us twenty thousand dollars, I can.”

  The word “us” punched a hole in my overcast.

  “I don’t trust Ava,” Leeli said. “But with you along I don’t have to trust her. So I told her you had to come with us.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said it’d be okay ’long as you don’t get crazy ’bout I’m sleeping with the both of you.”

  I turned this proposition over to see if it was missing a piece. “I don’t know,” I said. “I get these mood swings.”

  “Oh, really! I couldn’t tell.” She flounced down beside me, resting her chin on my chest. “Can you deal with it? ’Cause if you can’t, I might not do this. But I want that money! You imagine the party we could have on twenty thousand? I bet we can get more’n twenty, you ease back and lemme treat Ava right.”

  I hooked my thumb under the waistband of her panties and gave the elastic a snap. “You a bad woman, ain’tcha?”

  “Goodness me!” She batted her eyelashes. “I don’t know what in the world more I’m gonna have to do to prove it.”

  • • •

  In the morning we had another conversation. It kicked off wrong when I said what bothered me was Ava offering twenty when she could have snagged Leeli for less. Once I got her cooled down, she said, huffily, “It’s not like she was comparison shopping. She’s took with me. Guess you’d have trouble understanding that.”

  “You know that ain’t it. I’m just being a realist.”

  “That’s what a realist is? A pea-brained Florida cracker?”

  “Damn, Leeli! Some guy offered me twenty grand to go party with him for a month, you’d think something was screwy.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe my ass!”

  A polite room service knock ended this round. The waiter, a college boy with a forelock of frosted hair, rolled his cart to the table at the window, off-loaded Leeli’s omelette and my breakfast steak, and stood waiting for his tip.

  “I got no cash on me,” I told him.

  “You can add it to the bill, sir.”

  This was spoken like he was advising a backward child who’d stepped in shit. He had the kind of smug, fleshy face made me yearn to see it staring up from inside a roll of sheet plastic, dripping wet from a canal where he’d been swimming underwater for a week. I snatched the bill from him and wrote one billion dollars on the tip line. His eyes flicked to the amount and froze.

  “I was you, hoss,” I said, “I’d polish up one of them special Disney smiles and waltz on outa here.”

  I guess he wasn’t a total candy-ass. He had some size on him and I could tell he was weighing job security against the joys of bashing my face in with one of those metal domes that kept the food warm. I thought about sucker-punching him just to see how far he’d fly, but he turned on his heel and headed for the door.

  “Rock on, dude,” I called after him.

  I sat down to eat. Leeli gave me a God-you’re-hopeless look. She bit into her toast with a snap, as if somehow it might do me an injury. We ate without talking fo
r a while, then she said, “It might be true what Ava told me. ’Bout the experiment. Carl and Squire are pretty strange.”

  “One’s a retard, other don’t know he’s a retard. That ain’t so strange.”

  She diddled the fork in her eggs. “I can’t figure why she’d tell me that story if it wasn’t true.”

  I had to talk around a bite of steak. “To make herself look like a big deal.”

  “People with the money she’s got, they don’t hafta do that.”

  “If they’re freaks they do.” I finally got the bite chewed. “Say it’s true. Fuck does it matter? We still get paid.”

  Leeli had built a little fence of eggs around her sausage patty. “Nothing this good ever works out,” she said, staring at the plate like she was considering making a rock garden out of her cottage fries. “What I think’s gonna happen and what does happen, there’s always a mile of swamp ’tween the two.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “There is that.”

  • • •

  With a step that was a shade perky for my tastes, Leeli ran off to tell Ava the news. For want of better occupation, I took my Disneyworld pass and went to experience America. As I waited in line the man behind me kept ramming my legs with his gray-headed mama who was sitting in a wheelchair, gripping the arms and scowling like a fury. Everywhere you turned you saw parents yelling at kids who were bawling about they didn’t get this or that. Stuck in a photograph album, I supposed these same scenes would dredge up fond memories years from now. It depressed me that I wasn’t able to work such a change with my own miseries. Must be I come to Disneyworld too late in life for the enchantment to do its trick.

  Close by the Pirates of the Caribbean, an elderly fat man with the word “Jellybean” embroidered on the chest of his overalls and dozens of jellybeans stuck on his straw cowboy hat had cordoned off a section of walkway and there created portraits of celebrities from thousands of—guess what?—jellybeans. He was working on his knees, dribbling jellybeans onto a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, which except for the spiky headdress looked a whole hell of a lot like his take on the fat Elvis. People stood around saying, “Isn’t that amazing.” He seemed so jolly in his craft, I naturally wished him ill. Odds were he was a twelve-stepper who after a lifetime of domestic abuse visited upon wife and children had gone simple enough from Jesus and caffeine to believe this shit was a suitable atonement. A four-year-old howler with the mouse on his chest and a stalk of blue cotton candy in his fist broke free of his parents and came to stand by Jellybean. Way he held the candy to his mouth and screamed, you could easily picture him at twenty-one doing the same with a microphone and getting laid by supermodels. When his mama tried to drag him off, he endeared himself to me forever by ralphing all over Miss Liberty. Jellybean offered him grandpa consolation, but I caught a glint of good old murder in his eye.