Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  We stayed at Disneyworld four more days. Leeli spent the nights with Ava and mornings with me. The rest of the hours we traveled as a pack. At these times the air got icy. Dinners became occasions of grand formality, long bouts of chewing and swallowing broken by courteous exchanges. Please pass the butter. Would you like another dessert? Can I bring you back something? Leeli had to make sure both Ava and I got our share of flirty glances and secret smiles, and the strain of it all roughed her up some. I learned to let her relax when she came back to our room. She would take two valium from a bottle Ava had given her and sit by the window, her breath ragged, like she was pushing herself to exhale. Finally shed smile and say, “Hi” or “How you doing?” as if she had just noticed me.

  “I can’t take much more of Carl,” she said one day. “It’s not about him watching. I’m almost grateful he’s there. It kinda makes it easier to switch off my head. But the talking they do…Jesus Lord!” She glanced at me for a reaction. “Am I boring you?”

  “I was just letting you tell it.”

  “I know you’re being sweet with me, and I appreciate it. But I’m wore out with sweetness. I could use a shot of male insensitivity. Can you handle that?”

  I grinned at her and said gruffly, “Hell they talking about, woman?”

  Leeli sighed like those words had hit the spot. “Ava’ll stop right in the middle of things and explain what’s going on. Anatomical stuff, y’know. And Carl he just sits there humming to himself.”

  “He don’t say nothing back?”

  “Sometimes he asks can he go do something with Squire, and she’ll say maybe later or naw it’s not your time to be with Squire.”

  “See what I told you? He’s a fucking retard.”

  “He’s not dumb! Ava’s always testing him or something. Asking him weird questions. He never gets a’one wrong. She’ll ask him to do a sum and he does ’em in his head. Just snaps ’em off!”

  “Remember that Tom Cruise movie where his brother did all that? That guy was a retard.”

  “It’s not just Carl. Ava, she’s…”

  “What?”

  “She’s a strong woman, is what it is. Sometimes I get a feeling I’m gonna drown in her, y’know. Like she’s this tide rolling over me and when it goes out again, nothing’s gonna be left of me. Leeli hung her chin onto her chest. I don’t know I can do this for a month.”

  “Fine with me. Let’s take the five and split.”

  The second hand must have galloped damn near ten times around the dial before she said, “Chances this good don’t come around but every so often. Let’s give it a few days.”

  She come over to the foot of the bed and crawled up beside me and cuddled into my shoulder like she wanted to sleep. I did my best to be pillow and comforter, but the heat of her and my natural preoccupations got me all charged up. She reached her hand down and played with me a while, then lost interest and closed her eyes. “Want me take care of that for you?” she asked after another bit.

  “We’ll have our time,” I said. “Whyn’t you rest?”

  She blinked and peered at me. Wide open, those brown eyes could be like a car coming at you with its high beams on. They left me dazed and fighting for the road.

  “That a real feeling I see in there?” she asked.

  “Whatever you see, that’s what it is. You know I ain’t smart enough to fake nothing.”

  She didn’t act like she believed this. Her lights dimmed and she lay quiet. She fingered my shirt button and appeared to be studying the stubble on my chin. I asked what she was thinking.

  “Lots of things.”

  “Say one.”

  “I was wondering if anybody’s smart enough to know they’re faking and I was wishing we already had that twenty thousand.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I was thinking you got a whole crowd of people paying rent in your skull. Different sizes, different ways of doing. But they all wearing the same face.”

  • • •

  A woman starts to get deep on you, you know it’s just the coming attraction for a head movie that’ll be playing six shows daily in the weeks to come. She’s evaluating her prospects and unless you’re a fool, you best do some evaluating your own self. Generally speaking, a commitment is being called for, but with Ava in the picture I wasn’t sure how things were fitting together in Leeli’s thoughts. She went to drowning in moods so wide, they’d wash over me from the next room. Sometimes she wanted me to be patient and other times she wanted me to haul her off to the monkey jungle. After playing mama’s little helper at night, she needed daddy to straighten her out. I didn’t have a good record when it come to treating female mental disease, but I managed it with Leeli. I gave her to know I was there for her like Oprah and Tarzan both. It surprised me that I was up to the task and when I meditated on this, I realized the feeling Leeli had spotted in me might be for real. A runty little weed sprouted from sandy soil—that was all it was. If it was going to survive, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye would have to drop in from TV heaven and manifest a miracle. But there it waved, baking under the sky of all the shit that had ever gone wrong with me, waggling its dried-up leaves, trying like hell to grow up and learn how to whistle. Puny as it was, it stood taller than any decision I could have made to chop it down.

  From Disneyworld the party train crossed the state to Ybor City, then up to Jacksonville and then back down to Silver Springs. Eleven days and we hadn’t gone a mile toward Lauderdale. Often as not, whenever Leeli was with Ava and Carl, Squire would seek me out. He figured we were in the same boat, I expect. Whereas Carl had one trick, Squire was proficient in two. Like he was a grade up on Carl in Ava’s pre-school. Mostly he desired to talk about how much pussy he’d been getting since a precocious early age, but it was plain he’d never gotten any that hadn’t got him first. He recounted a string of fabulous conquests, each more of a joke than the last. A female jockey, a porn star, a TV actress, the girl who played center for the Dallas Sparks. They had the feel of lies he’d overheard in a bar and loved so much he’d taken them in and given them a new home. Tempted as I was to blow a hole in his picture window, I let him rave. Sooner or later he’d wind down and go to thinking about Ava. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know this. Ava thoughts stamped their brand on that boy’s face. If I had thumped his head at those moments, it would’ve bonged like a bell.

  In Silver Springs, instead of staying at the resort, we checked into a dump on a blue highway east of Ocala. A dozen frame bungalows painted beige with dark brown trim and tar paper roofs and screen doors tucked in among palmetto and Georgia pine. From the road they looked like the backdrop for a 1940s photograph of Grandma and Grandpa on the dashboard of their Model A, off to homestead down in Stark or Sanford, right before Grandma gave birth to the next gold-star-destiny generation of Scrogginses or Culpeppers or Inglethorpes. Up close you saw them different. Tar paper hats tipped at shady angles over chunky, sallow faces with indifferent eyes, like Chinamen with sly intentions. The screens documented tragic insect stories. Palmetto bugs the size of clothespins scuttled from crack to crack. The sheets were maps of gray and yellow countries. Facing my bed was a framed picture so dusty I could lie back and make it anything I wanted. You smelled the toilet from the steps outside. The place fucking cried out for a shotgun murder.

  Of an evening the owner, Mr. Gammage, a scrawny old geezer whose Bermuda shorts hung like loose sail from his hipbones, would beautify the grounds. Chop a few weeds, prune a shrub or two, cut back a climbing cactus from a palm trunk. He’d fuel his labors with glugs from a thermos that likely contained a libation stiffer than Gatorade. If he was feeling frisky he’d start his electric trimmer and hunt up stuff to trim. You could tell he loved that machine, the way he flourished it about. Watching him survey his property, hands on hips, his turkey-baster belly popped full out, it was my impression he was a happy man, though it was tough to understand why. Whenever he revved up the trimmer his wife would come to the office door and yell fo
r him to quit making that noise. She was built short and squarish and commonly wore a dark brown housecoat. This sponsored the idea she might have given birth to the bungalows or was their spirit made flesh, or something of the sort. Her face was topped off by about a foot of forehead on which God had written a grim Commandment. I felt the air stir when she glared at me. Inside the office there was a Bible big as a microwave and I bet she would open it and pray for everything around her to disappear.

  I was sitting outside my bungalow our second afternoon there, nursing a forty, when she come flying from the office and took a run at Squire. He’d fallen out on the grass near the highway, his head resting in a petunia bed. Mrs. Gammage screamed, Get outa my flowers, punching the ground with a lurching, stiff-gaited stride like an NFL guard with bad knees. Squire never moved, not even when she kicked him. She kicked him again. I wouldn’t say I was spurred to action, but since I was technically supposed to be on Squire’s side, I thought I should make a supportive gesture. Time I got myself on over to the petunias, she had stopped kicking and was bending to him and saying, “Hey! Hey!” She had a thin, bitter smell, like a bin of rutabagas. Squire’s eyes were half-open, but only one iris showed.

  “’Peers like you killed him,” I said.

  Mrs. Gammage staggered back from the petunia bed, gazing at Squire with an expression that crossed stricken with disgusted. “He was already dead! I didn’t do nothing coulda killed him.”

  “You kicked him right in the side of his chest where the heart’s on. That’ll do ’er every time. It’s a medical fact.”

  I was just fucking with her, but Squire hadn’t twitched and it dawned on me that he actually might be dead. His color was good, though. Only dead man I’d ever seen up close was this old boy got shot in the head outside the Surf Bar in Ormond Beach for arguing about his girlfriend should have won the wet T-shirt contest. All the color had left him straightaway. His skin had the look of gray candlewax.

  Mrs. Gammage snorted and snuffled some. Maybe she was seeing herself strapped into Old Sparky over to Raiford, or maybe she hadn’t yet gotten that specific with self-pity and was tearing up because she felt the victim of a vast injustice—here she’d been protecting her precious petunias and now Jesus had gone and let her down despite all everything she’d done for him. I had in mind to tell her that feeling she was having that everything had tightened up around her and no matter how hard she tried to turn with it, the world was no longer a comfortable fit, and if she made a move to pry herself loose from that terrible grip, it’d pinch her off at the neck…I would have told her after a while it got to feel natural and she likely wouldn’t know what to do things didn’t feel that way. Before I could advise her of this, Ava came on the run and shooed us away, babbling about how Squire was prone to these fits and she’d handle it, just to leave her alone with him because when he woke up he was scared and she could gentle him. I returned to step-sitting out front of my bungalow and Mrs. Gammage streaked toward the office to recast the deadly prayer spell she’d been fixing to hurl at the universe. Ava kneeled to Squire, hiding his upper body from sight. My forty had gone warmish, but I chugged down several swallows and wiped the spill from my chin and looked back to the petunia bed just in time to see Squire sit bolt upright. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d expect from someone smacked down by a fit. No wooziness or flailing about. It was like Ava had shot a few thousand volts through him.

  Leeli had come out of Ava’s bungalow, wearing white shorts and a green halter. She wandered over to me and sat on the stoop. “What you think’s wrong with Squire?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “Boy’s so slow, maybe his brain idles out every so often.”

  She stared at Ava and Squire as if she was trying to figure something out. I did some staring myself, digging my eyes under that halter. The heat cooked her scent strong. I leaned closer and did a hit. She glanced up and asked, What you doing?

  “I wish I was smelling breakfast,” I said.

  Squire and Ava scrambled up, Squire gesturing like he was wanting to explain something of importance. They made for Ava’s bungalow. Leeli started to join up with them, but Ava waved her off and said she needed to tend Squire for a while. That brightened Leeli, but she watched until the door closed behind them.

  “Don’t none of this strike you peculiar?” she asked.

  “Pretty much everything strikes me peculiar. So I guess nothing does, really.”

  • • •

  If I hadn’t been consumed with getting Leeli into the bungalow and the two of us shaking the walls so hard, the framed picture would shudder off its veil of dust and the palmetto bugs would prepare for the fall of creation, I might’ve had room for some helpful thoughts. I don’t suppose it matters, though. Chances are I wouldn’t have reached any conclusion. If I had, either I wouldn’t have acted on it or else it would have been the same half-assed conclusion I come to without even stretching my brain. Studying on things until you couldn’t tell whether what you thought was what you wanted to think and all that—it wasn’t my style. I had two ways of going at the world. One, I was a furnace of a man and everything I saw was viewed in terms of how it would do for fuel. The other, I was a pitiable creature who’d been walked on for so long there was a damn dog run wore down into my skull and whenever a shadow crossed my path, my instinct was to snap my teeth. Neither of those boys gave a sugary shit about situational fucking analysis.

  Ava was kept busy that night tinkering with Squire’s self-esteem. Least that’s what I believed had sucked his fire down so low, his pilot light kicked off. It was like Leeli had been busted out of jail. She wanted one of everything with me. We come close to killing each other. Toward nine we took a break, borrowed Ava’s car, and brought back catfish and puppies and fries. Halfway through our greasy feast, we went at it again, smearing fish juice all over the bed. It would’ve took oven cleaner to scour the sheets. Long about midnight we smoked cigarettes on the steps. Fireflies bloomed in the hazy dark. The breeze hauled a smell of night-blooming cereus out from the shadows of the palms. A shine from the bulb over the office door fresh-tarred the blacktop. We had us one of those made-in-Nashville moments. Our arms around one another, heads together. Snap the photo, frame it with a heart, and stick in a word balloon with me saying something forever stupid like, Somepin’ wunnerful’s gonna happen to them peaches, honey. Hillbilly Hallmark. I gave Leeli a kiss that sparked a shiver and she settled in against me.

  “I could stand another beer,” she said.

  “Want me to fetch it?”

  “Naw, it’s too much trouble.”

  Skeeters whined. A night bird said its name about three hundred times in a row. The TV inside the office flickered a wicked green, an evil blue, a blast of white, as if Mrs. Gammage was receiving communication from an unholy sphere. I wouldn’t have much cared if the rest of everything was just this hot and black and quiet.

  • • •

  Squire seemed fine to me, especially for someone who looked to be a goner, but Ava was still acting mothery the next morning. Around noon she herded us into the car and drove to Silver Springs for, I guess, a give-Squire-love day. At a stall near the gift shop she bought a T-shirt with his face airbrushed on it by a genuine T-shirt artist. Squire had the good sense not to wear the thing. “Wanna go see the tropical fish?” she asked of Carl and Squire both. Squire said he didn’t know, whatever, and Carl repeated the word “fish” until he figured out how to spray spittle when saying it. We crammed into a glass-bottomed boat with a mob of lumpy fiftyish women in baggy slacks and floral blouses. I assumed they were a church group, because they appeared to be the cut-rate harem belonging to this balding, gray-haired individual with a banker’s belly and a sagging, doleful face, dressed like a Wal-Mart dummy in slacks with an elastic waistband and a sweated-through sports shirt. A pretty blond in a captain’s hat steered the boat and as we glided across the springs, her voice blatted from the speakers, identifying whatever portion of nature’s living rainbow we w
ere then passing over. The man stood the whole trip, clutching a pole for balance, providing his own commentary and sneaking glances at Leeli, who was wearing short shorts. He was trying to make some general point relating to the fish. It had a charry Unitarian flavor, a serving of God and fried turnip slices. All the ladies nodded and favored him with doting gazes. Squashed between two of them was a chubby kid about fourteen who had the miserable air of a hostage. One of the women whispered urgently at him, probably telling him to pay attention or sit up straight. He stared cross-eyed into nowhere, dreaming of Columbining the bunch of us. I winked at him, wanting him to know that some of us so-called adults could be dangerous haters, too, when forced to ooh and aah over a glittery mess of edible sea bugs. This only got him hating me extra special. If somebody had slipped him a piece, they would’ve found me with my splattered head resting on a cellulite-riddled thigh.