Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  But that was 18 years ago and this was now. A lot of men had touched her since then. But that was all right. She took a condom out of the nightstand and I put it on and she guided me inside her. She tried to say something, maybe it was only my name, but I put my mouth over hers to shut her up. I put both my arms around her and closed my eyes and let the heat and pleasure run up through me.

  When I finished and we rolled apart she lay on top of me, pinning me to the bed. “That was real sweet,” she said.

  I kissed her and hugged her because I couldn’t say what I was thinking. I was thinking about Charlie, remembering the earnest look on his face when he said, “It was just to have sex, that’s all.”

  She was wide awake and I was exhausted. She complained about the state cutting back on aid to single parents. She told me about the tiny pieces of tape she had to wear on the ends of her nipples when she danced, a weird Health Department regulation. I remembered the tiny golden flashes and fell asleep to the memory of her dancing.

  Screaming woke me up. Kristi was already out of bed and headed for the living room. “It’s just Stoney,” she said, and I lay back down.

  I woke up again a little before dawn. There was an arm around my waist but it seemed much too small. I rolled over and saw that the little boy had crawled into bed between us.

  I got up without moving him and went to the bathroom. There was no water in the toilet; when I pushed the handle a trap opened in the bottom of the bowl and a fine spray washed the sides. I got dressed, trying not to bump into anything. Kristi was asleep on the side of the bed closest to the door, her mouth open a little. Stoney had burrowed into the middle of her back.

  I was going to turn around and go when a voyeuristic impulse made me open the drawer of her nightstand. Or maybe I subconsciously knew what I’d find. There was a Beeline book called Molly’s Sexual Follies, a tube of KY, a box of Ramses lubricated condoms, a few used Kleenex. An emery board, a finger puppet, one hoop earring. A short barreled Colt .32 revolver.

  I got to the jail at nine in the morning. The woman at the visitor’s window recognized me and buzzed me back. Gonzales was at his desk. He looked up when I walked in and said, “I didn’t know you was coming in today.”

  “I just had a couple of quick questions for Charlie,” I said. “Only take a second.”

  “Did you want to use the office...?”

  “No, no point. If I could just talk to him in his cell for a couple of minutes, that would be great.”

  Gonzales got the keys. Charlie had a cell to himself, five by ten feet, white-painted bars on the long wall facing the corridor. There were Bibles and religious tracts on his cot, a few paintings hanging on the wall. “Maybe you can get Charlie to show you his pictures,” Gonzales said. A stool in the corner had brushes and tubes of paint on the top.

  “You painted these?” I asked Charlie. My voice sounded fairly normal, all things considered.

  “Yessir, I did.”

  “They’re pretty good.” They were landscapes with trees and horses, but no people.

  “Thank you kindly.”

  “You can just call for me when you’re ready,” Gonzales said. He went out and locked the door.

  “I thought you’d be back,” Charlie said. “Was there something else you wanted to ask me?” He sat on the edge of the cot, forearms on his knees.

  I didn’t say anything. I took the Colt out of the waistband of my pants and pointed it at him. I’d already looked it over on the drive up and there were bullets in all six cylinders. My hand was shaking so I steadied it with my left and fired all six rounds into his head and chest.

  I hadn’t noticed all the background noises until they stopped, the typewriters and the birds and somebody singing upstairs. Charlie stood up and walked over to where I was standing. The revolver clicked on an empty shell.

  “You can’t kill me,” Charlie said with his droopy-eyed smile. “You can’t never kill me.” The door banged open at the end of the hall. “You can’t kill me because I’m inside you.”

  I dropped the gun and locked my hands behind my head. Gonzales stuck his head around the corner. He was squinting. He had his gun out and he looked terrified. Charlie and I stared back at him calmly.

  “It’s okay, Ernie,” Charlie said. “No harm done. Mr. McKenna was just having him a little joke.”

  Charlie told Gonzales the gun was loaded with blanks. They had to believe him because there weren’t any bulletholes in the cell. I told them I’d bought the gun off a defendant years ago, that I’d had it in the car.

  They called Dallas and Ricky asked to talk to me. “There’s going to be an inquiry,” he said. “No way around it.”

  “Sure there is,” I said. “I quit. I’ll send it to you in writing. I’ll put it in the mail today. Express.”

  “You need some help, Dave. You understand what I’m saying to you here? Professional help. Think about it. Just tell me you’ll think about it.”

  Gonzales was scared and angry and wanted me charged with smuggling weapons into the jail. The sheriff knew it wasn’t worth the headlines and by suppertime I was out.

  Jack had already heard about it through some kind of legal grapevine. He thought it was funny. We skipped dinner and went down to the bars on Sixth Street. I couldn’t drink anything. I was afraid of going numb, or letting down my guard. But Jack made up for me. As usual.

  “Kristi called me today,” Jack said. “I told her I didn’t know but what you might be going back to Dallas today. Just a kind of feeling I had.”

  “I’m not going back,” I said. “But it was the right thing to tell her.”

  “Not what it was cracked up to be, huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “That and much, much more.”

  For once he let it go. “You mean you’re not going back tonight or not going back period?”

  “Period,” I said. “My job’s gone, I pissed that away this morning. I’ll get something down here. I don’t care what. I’ll pump gas. I’ll fucking wait tables. You can draw up the divorce papers and I’ll sign them.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “What’s Alice going to say?”

  “I don’t know if she’ll even notice. She can have the goddamn house and her car and the savings. All of it. All I want is some time with Jeffrey. As much as I can get. Every week if I can.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ve got to have it. I don’t want him growing up screwed up like the rest of us. I’ve got stuff I’ve got to tell him. He’s going to need help. All of us are. Jack, goddamn it, are you listening to me?”

  He wasn’t. He was staring at the Heart video on the bar’s big screen TV, at the blonde guitarist. “Look at that,” Jack said. “Sweet suffering Jesus. Couldn’t you just fuck that to death?”

  Steam Engine Time

  The Kid turned up the gaslight in his room. The pink linen wallpaper still looked a little dingy. Ever since J. L. Driskill had opened his new place in December of ’86 the Avenue Hotel had been going downhill.

  There was a framed picture on the wall and the Kid had been staring at it for an hour. It was an engraving of a Pawnee Indian. The Indian’s head was shaved except for a strip of hair down the middle. There were feathers in what hair he had, and it hung down over his forehead.

  He compared it to what he saw in the mirror. He was pretty badly hung over from jimson weed and unlabeled whiskey the night before. His fine yellow hair went every which way and his eyes were mostly red. He got out his straight razor, stropped it a couple of times on his boot, and grabbed a hank of hair.

  What the hell, he thought.

  It was harder to do than he thought it would be, and he ended up with a lot of tiny cuts all over his head. When he was done he took the razor and used it to cut the bottom off his black leather duster coat. He hacked it off just below the waist. For a couple of seconds he wondered why in hell he was doing it, wondered if he’d lost his mind. Then he put it on an
d looked in the mirror again and this time he liked what he saw.

  It was just right.

  There’d been a saloon at the corner of Congress Avenue and Pecan Street pretty much from the time Austin changed its name from Waterloo and became the capital of Texas. These days it was called the Crystal Bar. There was an overhang right the way round the building, with an advertisement for Tom Moore’s 10 cent cigars painted on the bricks on the Pecan Street side. The fabric of the carriages at the curb puffed out in the mild autumn breeze.

  The mule cars were gone and the street cars were electric now, thanks to the dam that opened in May of the year before. They were calling Austin “the coming great manufacturing center of the Southwest.” It was the Kid’s first big city. The electric and telegraph wires strung all over downtown looked like the history of the future, block-printed across the sky.

  The Kid was a half-hour late for a two-o’clock appointment with the Crystal’s manager. The manager’s name was Matthews, and he wore a bow tie and a starched collar and a tailormade suit. “Do you know ‘Grand-Father’s Clock is Too Tall for the Shelf?’” Matthews asked the Kid.

  The Kid had kept his hat on. “Why sure I do.” He took his steel-string Martin guitar out of the case and played it quiet with his fingers.

  It was bought on the morn

  Of the day he was born

  And was always his treasure and pride

  But it stopped—short—

  Never to go again

  When the old man died.

  I’m going to God-damned puke, the Kid thought.

  “Not much of a voice,” Matthews said.

  “All I want is to pass the hat,” the Kid said. “Sir.”

  “Not much of a hat, either. All right, son, you can try it. But if the crowd don’t like it, you’re out. Understand?”

  “Yes sir,” the Kid said. “I understand.”

  The Kid came back at nine that night. He’d bought some hemp leaves from a Mexican boy and smoked them but they didn’t seem to help his nerves. It felt like Gentleman Jim Corbett was trying to punch his way out of the Kid’s chest.

  The ceiling must have been thirty feet high. The top half of the room was white with cigar smoke and the bottom half smelled like farts and spilled beer. Over half the tables and all but a couple of seats at the bar were full. The customers were all men, of course. All white men. They said ladies dared not walk on the east side of the Avenue.

  Nobody paid him much attention, least of all the waitresses. The Kid counted three of them. One of them was not all that old or used-up looking.

  Some fat bastard in sleeve garters pounded out “The Little Old Cabin in the Lane” on a piano with a busted soundboard. The Kid knew the words. They talked about the days when “de darkies used to gather round de door/When dey used to dance an sing at night.” If there was anything going to keep him from turning yellow and going back to the hotel, that had to be it.

  There was a wooden stage about three feet wide and four feet high that ran across the back of the room. Just big enough for some fat tart to strut out on and hike up the back of her skirts. The Kid set the last vacant bar stool up on the stage with his guitar case. He climbed up and sat on the stool. It put him just high enough up to strangle on the cloud of smoke.

  The piano player finished or gave up. Anyway he quit playing and went over to the bar. The Kid took out his guitar. He had a cord with a hook on the end that came up under the back and let him carry the weight of it on his neck. It was what they called a parlor guitar, the biggest one C. F. Martin and Sons made. With his copper plectrum and those steel strings it was loud as Jesus coming back. Still the Kid would have liked a bigger sound box. It would have made it even louder.

  Somebody at the bar said, “Do you know ‘Grand-Father’s Clock’?”

  “How about ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’?” said somebody further down. The man was drunk and started singing it himself.

  “No, ‘Grand-Father’s Clock!’” said another one. “Grand-Father’s Clock!’”

  The Kid took his hat off.

  Maybe the whole bar didn’t go quiet, but there was a circle of it for thirty or forty feet. The Kid looked at their faces and saw that he had made a mistake. It was the kind of mistake he might not live through.

  There were upwards of fifty men looking at him. They all wore narrow brim hats and dark suits and the kind of thick mustaches that seemed to be meant to hide their mouths in case they ever accidentally smiled.

  They were none of them smiling now.

  The Kid didn’t see any guns. But then none of them looked like they needed a gun.

  The Kid played a run down the bass strings and hit an E 7th as hard as he could with his copper pick. “‘Rolled and I tumbled,’” he sang, “‘cried the whole night long.’” He was so scared his throat was swollen shut and his voice came out a croak. But his hand moved, slapping the rhythm out of the guitar. The craziness came up in him at the sound of it, to be playing that music here, in front of these people, rubbing their faces in it, like it or not.

  “‘Rolled and I tumbled, lord,’” he sang, “‘cried the whole night long.’” He jumped off the stool and stomped the downbeat with his bootheel. “‘Woke up this morning, did not know right from wrong.’”

  He pounded through the chords again twice. He couldn’t hold still. He’d seen music do that to folks, lived with it all his life, sharecropping in a black county with the families just one generation out of slavery, seeing them around their bonfires on Saturday nights and in their churches Sunday mornings, but this was the first time it had ever happened to him.

  It was time for a verse and he was so far gone all he could sing was “Na na na na” to the melody line. When it came around again he sang,

  Well the engine whistlin’,

  Callin’ Judgment Day

  I hear that train a whistlin’

  Callin’ Judgment Day

  When that train be pass by

  Take all I have away.

  Through the chords again. It was play or die or maybe both. The song roared off the tracks and blew up on B 9th. The last notes hung in the air for a long time. It was so quiet the Kid could hear the wooden sidewalk creak as somebody walked by outside.

  “Thank you,” the Kid said.

  One at a time they turned away and started talking to each other again. A man in a plaid suit with watery blue eyes stared at him for another few seconds and then hawked and spat on the floor.

  “Thank you,” the Kid said. “I’d now like to do one I wrote myself. It’s called ‘Twentieth Century Man.’ It’s about how we got to change with the times and not just let time get past us. It goes a little like this here.” He started to hit the first chord but his right hand wouldn’t move. He looked down. Matthews had a hold of it.

  “Out,” Matthews said.

  “I was just getting ‘em warmed up,” the Kid said.

  “Get the hell out,” Matthews said, “or by thunder if they don’t kill you I’ll do it myself.”

  “I guess this means I don’t pass the hat,” the Kid said.

  He sat on the board sidewalk and wiped the sweat off the guitar strings. When he looked up the not-so-old waitress was leaning on the batwings, watching him.

  “Was it supposed to be some kind of minstrel song?” she asked. “Like the Ethiopian Serenaders?”

  “No,” the Kid said. “It wasn’t no minstrel song.”

  “Ain’t heard nothin’ like it before.”

  “Not supposed to have. Things everybody heard before is for shit. ‘The Little Old Cabin in the Lane.’ Songs like that make people the way they are.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Ignorant.”

  “What happened to your hair?”

  “Cut it.”

  “Why?”

  “So it’d be different.”

  “Same with your coat?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You sure like things different.”

  �
��I guess I do.”

  “Where’d your song come from?”

  “Back home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Mississippi.”

  “Well,” she said. “I sort of liked it.”

  The Kid put the guitar back in the case. He shut the lid and closed the latches. “Thanks,” he said. “You want to fuck?”

  She looked at him like he was a dog just tried to pee on her shoe. She made the batwings bang together as she spun away hard and clomped away across the saloon.

  They’d laid Austin out in a square. Streets named after Texas rivers went north and south, trees went east and west. The south side of the square lay along the Colorado River so they called it Water Avenue. There was West Avenue and North Avenue and East Avenue.

  East of East Avenue was colored town. The Kid carried his guitar east down Bois d’Arc Street, pronounced BO-dark in Texas. Past East Avenue there weren’t street lights any more. Babies sat barefoot in the street and there was music but it didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular. The air smelled like burned fat.

  The Kid finally saw a bar and went inside. This time it got quiet for him right away. “Son,” the man behind the bar said, “I think you in the wrong part of town.”

  “I want to play some music,” the Kid said.

  “Ain’t no music here.”

  “They call it ‘blue music.’ You ever hear of it?”

  The man smiled. “Didn’t know music came in no colors. Now you run along, before you make a mistake and hurt you self.”

  He went back to his hotel long enough to pack his bag and then he went down to the train station. He sat on a bench there and read a paper somebody had left behind. It was called The Rolling Stone. It seemed to be a lot of smart aleck articles about books and artists. There was a story by somebody called himself O. Henry. The Kid didn’t find anything in there about music.