Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  A Port-A-Sign on the edge of the road marked his turnoff. Stan parked behind the other cars and vans under the palm trees. A crew in matching blue T-shirts and caps was positioning the VTRs and laying down an Astro-turf carpet for the band.

  He started setting up his drums. This was as far as his imagination had been able to take him. From here on he’d have to wing it. His nerves had tunneled his vision down to the wood and plastic and chrome under his hands and he jumped when a voice behind him said, “They gonna fry your ass, boy.”

  Stan turned to face a six-foot-six apparition in a feathered hat, leopard scarf, chains, purple silk shirt, green leather pants, and lizard boots.

  “Jackson?” Stan asked carefully.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Jesus Christ, man, where did you get those clothes?”

  Jackson stared at him without expression. “I’m a star now. Not trash like you, boy, a star. Do you know who I was talking to yesterday? Bruce. That’s Bruce Springsteen. He says he might need me for his next tour.”

  “That’s great, Jackson. I hope it works out.”

  “You laugh, boy, but when Rosen see you, he gonna shit a picket fence.”

  Rosen, Keven, and some blond kid pulled up in a Jeep. Stan slipped deeper into the shade of a palm tree to watch. Keven and the blond kid were holding hands. The kid was dressed in a white bush jacket and Bermuda shorts. Keven was in a matching outfit that had been artfully torn and smudged by the costume crew. The blond kid said something to Keven and she laughed softly in his face. The director called places and the rest of the band settled in behind their instruments.

  “Where the fuck is the drummer?” Rosen shouted.

  Stan stepped out from behind the trees.

  “Oh Christ,” Rosen said. “Okay, take ten everybody. You, Stan Shithead. Off the set.”

  Stan was looking at Keven. Say the word, he thought. Tell him I can stay.

  Keven glanced at him with mild irritation and walked away. She had hold of the blond kid’s hand.

  Stan looked back at Rosen. A couple of grips, ex-bikers by the size of them, were headed toward him. Stan held up his hands. “Okay,” he said. He put his sticks in his back pocket and pointed at his drums. “Just let me...”

  “No way,” Rosen said. “Leave them here. We’ll get them back to you. Right now you’re trespassing and I want your ass out of here.”

  On the other side of the road was a tall, grassy hill. Stan could see Keven and the blond kid halfway up it. “Okay,” he said. He walked past Rosen and got in his car, started it, and got back onto the road.

  Past the first switchback he pulled over and started up the other side of the hill on foot. He was still a hundred yards away from Keven when she spotted him and sent the blond kid down to cut him off.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Stan said. The blond kid looked at Stan’s face and swerved downhill toward the jungle set at a run.

  “Keven!” She stopped at the top of the hill and turned back to look at him. The blond kid would be back with the bikers any minute. Stan didn’t know what to say. “You’re killing me,” he said. “Rosen won’t let me work. Did you know that?”

  “Go away, Stan,” she said.

  “Goddammit,” he said. “How was I supposed to not to fall in love with you? What the hell did you expect? Do you ever listen to the words of all those songs you sing?”

  A hand appeared on his shoulder, spinning him around. Stan tried to duck and ended up on his back as Rosen’s fist cut the air above him. No bikers, then, Stan thought giddily. Not yet. He rolled a few feet, off balance. One of his drumsticks fell out of his pocket and he grabbed for it.

  Rosen’s looked more annoyed than anything else. “You stupid piece of shit,” he said. Stan scuttled around the hillside on his palms and his ass and his feet, dodging two more wild punches. The slope made it tricky. Finally he was up again. He kept moving, letting Rosen come after him. He outweighed Rosen by at least 40 pounds and had the reach on him besides. And if he actually hit Rosen he might as well throw his drums into the Pacific. On the other hand, if he waited around long enough, the bikers might just beat him to death.

  It was what his grandfather would have called a classic no-win situation.

  Kill me then, Stan thought, and to hell with you. He stepped inside Rosen’s next swing and tapped him, very lightly, on the chest with his drumstick. Then he stepped back, smiling, into Rosen’s roundhouse left.

  “Hey, Sitting Bull,” a voice said. It was Keven, kneeling next to him. “I think Custer just kicked your ass.”

  Stan propped himself up on his elbows. He could see Rosen walking down the hill, rubbing his knuckles. “Who’d have thought the little bastard could hit so hard? Did you call him off?”

  “I wasn’t going to let him kill you. Even if you did deserve it.” She took his face in both her hands. “Stan. What am I going to do with you?”

  Stan didn’t have an answer for that one.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” she said. “It’s over. It’s going to stay over.”

  “You never called me.”

  She sat back, arms wrapped around herself. “Okay. I should have called. But you’re a scary guy, Stan. You’re just so...intense, you know? You’ve got so much hunger in you that it’s... it’s hard to be around.”

  Stan looked at his hands.

  “I wasn’t, like, just playing with you, okay? What there was, what happened, it was real. I just, I changed my mind. That’s all. I’m just a person, you know. Just like anybody else.”

  She believed that, Stan thought, but it wasn’t true. She wasn’t like other people. She didn’t have that fist in her stomach, pushing her, tearing up her insides. Not any more. That was what made her different, but there wasn’t any point trying to tell her that.

  She stood up and walked away from him, breaking into a run as she moved downhill. Rosen was there at the bottom. She took him by the arm and talked to him but Stan couldn’t hear any of it. He watched the clouds for a while then headed down.

  Rosen walked over, holding out his hand. “Sorry I lost my temper.” Keven was back at the jungle set.

  Stan took his hand. “No hard feelings.”

  “Keven says she wants you to do the video.” Rosen clearly didn’t like the idea. “She says nobody else can really do that drum part. She says there won’t be any more trouble.”

  “No,” Stan said. “No more trouble.”

  The worst part was hearing her voice on the radio, but in time Stan even got used to that.

  Her album was out just before Thanksgiving and that week they premiered the video on MTV. It opened with Keven and her boyfriend in their jungle suits, then cut back and forth between a sort of stylized Tarzan plot and the synched-up footage of the band playing under the palm trees.

  The phone rang. “Dude, you watching?”

  “Yeah, Darryl. I’m watching.”

  “Totally crucial video, bud. I’m serious.”

  “Good drummer,” Stan said.

  “The best. This is going to make your career. You are on the map.”

  “I could live with that. Listen, Darryl, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? I want to catch the rest of this.”

  Stan squatted in front of the TV. Keven sang hard into the camera. Stan could read the words of the song on her face. She turned and looked over her shoulder and the camera followed, panning past her to the drummer, a good-looking, muscular guy in his middle thirties, with black hair that hung straight to his collar. The drummer smiled at Keven and then bent back to his work.

  The clear, insistent power of his drumming echoed through the jungle afternoon.

  The Tale of Mark the Bunny

  One spring it stopped raining in early March and didn’t start again.

  There was one very well-off bunny in the village who had a large burrow and lots of food saved up. He wasn’t worried about the drought at all. The other bunnies, though, looked at the purple-red nettles withering in the
fields and the mayweed that hadn’t even flowered and wondered if they were going to have enough food to get them through the next winter.

  The very well-off bunny was named Albertus, but everybody called him Big Al—at least they called him that when they were sure he couldn’t hear them. Big Al was in fact a very large bunny with long, white, silky fur. He had lots of land that his parents had left to him, and he never let any of the other bunnies gather food there. The story was that Big Al had sat on the one bunny who tried to make off with some of his carrots until the small bunny begged for mercy. After Big Al let him up, the small bunny moved to another village.

  One morning a dozen or more bunnies sat around the village square, licking the dew off the dried and wrinkled clover to quench their thirsts, and talking about the drought. There was still a bit of a cool breeze from Possum Creek, a mile or so away. Sophie Bunny, who was large and sleek, with a black circle around one eye, was there with her husband Lenny and their youngest, Ralph, who still lived at home with them.

  “I don’t mind telling you,” Lenny said, “I’m getting a little scared by all this.” Lenny was a small, tan bunny with buck teeth and big cheeks like a chipmunk.

  “No need to be afraid,” said the short, overweight Reverend Billy Bunny, the village’s spiritual leader. “The Easter Bunny will provide.” He sat, as he usually did, by the thick green hawthorn bush in the middle of the square—although the bush was neither as thick nor as green as it had once been.

  “Easter was two weeks ago,” said Maria Bunny. “And there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

  “I thought the Easter Bunny just did eggs,” little Ralph said.

  “Actually,” Lenny said, “so did I.”

  “I never really understood what a bunny was doing with eggs in the first place,” Sophie said, “if you want to know the truth.”

  “We could ask Big Al for help,” Annie Bunny suggested. “He’s got enough food for everybody.”

  It was well known that Big Al provided the Reverend Billy’s food. He’d discovered Billy preaching in the village square a few years before and liked the fact that most of Billy’s sermons were about keeping things the way they already were. Since then word had gone around that Big Al thought the other bunnies should pay attention when the Reverend Billy had something to say, and that he would frown on anyone who made fun of him in public. If anybody could talk to Big Al, it had to be the Reverend Billy.

  “Well, ah, ahem,” Billy said. Ever since he became official, he’d started to talk like a much older rabbit. “I think we should remember that the Easter Bunny helps those who help themselves.” This was exactly the sort of thinking that had impressed Big Al.

  “I agree,” Annie said. “Let’s help ourselves to some of Big Al’s food.”

  Annie’s husband Jonathan said, “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

  Suddenly a bunny no one had ever seen before hopped out from behind a tree. He was very thin, with black fur and dark, intense eyes. “I know one thing you could do,” he said. “You could stop eating all that clover while you’re worrying about starving to death.”

  “Darn it!” Lenny said. “I am eating again.”

  “Who are you?” the Reverend Billy asked the stranger.

  “My name is Mark.”

  Billy narrowed his eyes. “Are you the same Mark Bunny that used to live down by Clearwater Pond? The one that got kicked out of the village for being a troublemaker?”

  “I guess I am,” Mark said.

  “Uh oh,” somebody said. For a few seconds all the bunnies hopped around nervously, and when everyone quieted down again Mark had lots of space around him in all directions.

  Billy continued to stare at Mark from his high position. “You keep moving along,” he said. “We don’t want your kind around here.”

  Mark looked at the other bunnies to see if anyone else wanted to speak up. When no one did he said, “Okay,” and hopped slowly away.

  Late that afternoon, as Sophie, Lenny, and Ralph headed home to their burrow, they saw Mark in the grass by the side of the path ahead of them.

  “Oh dear,” Lenny said. “It’s that Mark bunny.”

  “I don’t think he’d actually hurt us, do you?” Ralph said. “He just looks kind of sad.”

  “I don’t know,” Lenny said. “I’m afraid.”

  “I’m afraid too,” Sophie said. “We’re bunnies. We’re always afraid. But sometimes we have to do the right thing, even when it’s scary.”

  “And what exactly are you saying, in this case, the right thing might be?” Lenny asked.

  “There’s wolves around this time of year. We can’t let him wander around all night without a burrow to stay in.”

  “Actually we could, if we wanted to...”

  “Lenny...”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll go ask him.”

  Lenny hopped carefully over toward Mark. “Um, hi,” Lenny said.

  Mark nodded.

  “My wife,” Lenny said, “er, that is, we, wanted to know if maybe you needed a place to stay tonight? Of course if you have someplace else, that would be perfectly fine and we wouldn’t feel in the least insulted if you turned us down.”

  “No, Mark said, “I don’t have a place. That’s very kind of you.”

  “We’ve got some strawberries we’ve been saving,” little Ralph said, bounding up. “They’re kind of small, but you could have one.”

  “I do love strawberries,” Mark said. “But you’ll have to let me do something for you in return.”

  “How come?” Ralph said.

  “That’s just my philosophy.”

  “What’s a philosophy?”

  “Well,” Mark said, “I guess it’s just some ideas about life.”

  “Oh. Why don’t you just say ‘ideas about life,’ then?”

  “Ralph,” Sophie said, “you’re being rude.”

  “Sorry,” Ralph said.

  That evening, after sharing the strawberries, the four bunnies lay happily on the floor of the burrow. “Tell me some more about this philosophy of yours,” Sophie said. Sophie was always interested in new things.

  “You mean my ideas about life?” Mark asked. Ralph laughed at that and Mark wiggled his whiskers and went on. “Really I just have this one idea. I’ve thought about it a lot and got it down to the simplest words I could.”

  “So what is it?” Lenny asked.

  Mark sat up and spoke in a deep voice, clearly liking the sound of the words as they came out. “‘Give what you can. Take what you need.”

  “Is that what got you in trouble at Clearwater Pond?” Sophie asked.

  “Actually most people seemed to like my idea, once they thought about it. There was just this one very well-off bunny named Sophocles who got upset, and told everybody I was dangerous.”

  “Are all rich bunnies mean?” Ralph asked.

  “I’ve traveled around quite a bit,” Mark said, “and I’ve seen rich bunnies who were very kind and generous. I’ve also seen quite a few who did tend to be a bit selfish.”

  “So are you saying,” Sophie asked, “that if we get hungry enough it’s okay to take some of Big Al’s food?”

  “Only if Big Al had already given up what he could for you to take from. Everybody has to agree. That’s the hard part, of course, for those that have more than enough to give some of it up.”

  “It’s hard to think about,” Lenny said. “It scares me.”

  “Bunnies are always afraid,” Sophie said. “But sometimes...”

  “I know,” Lenny said. “I know.” He thought for a while. “Do you think if all of us put all our food together—except for Big Al, of course—we’d have enough to get us through the drought?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sophie said.

  Mark shrugged his shoulders and lay down again. “That’s where the luck part comes in.”

  Mark left before the others got up the next morning. When little Ralph went outside he found something very strange and called for hi
s parents to come look. It seemed Mark had chewed some of the leaves off a nearby hawthorn bush and stuck some new branches where there hadn’t been any before. Sophie, Lenny, and Ralph all looked at it for a while.

  “You know,” Lenny said, “it almost looks like...nah. Couldn’t be.”

  “Looks like what?” Sophie said. She was finishing her morning grooming, licking her front paws and then rubbing them over her big, silky ears.

  “Well, except for being green and everything, don’t you think it looks a bit like Ralph?”

  “I think it looks a lot like Ralph,” Sophie said.

  “Why would somebody make a tree look like a bunny?” Lenny asked.

  “I think it’s called ‘art,’” Sophie said.

  “‘Art,’” Lenny said. “No doubt about it. That was one weird bunny.”

  “I liked him,” Ralph said.

  “Me, too,” said Sophie.”

  “I don’t know,” Lenny said. “I lay awake for a long time last night thinking about his—” He looked at Ralph. “—ideas about life, and this morning my head hurts. Now I look at this ‘art’ thing and it makes my head hurt too.” Slowly he reached up with his rear leg to scratch under his chin. “Okay,” he said, “maybe it hurts in a nice kind of way.”

  They all went back to the village that morning to talk some more about the drought. Everyone seemed a little crankier and a little thirstier than the day before.

  “Everyone should just eat less,” the Reverend Billy said.

  “Some of us aren’t eating much at all right now,” Maria said. She was in fact a very thin bunny, going gray in many places.

  There was a long silence.

  “What if we...” Lenny swallowed hard. “What if everybody gave all they could and only took what they needed?”

  All the other bunnies turned to look at him. “What?” Jonathan asked.

  The Reverend Billy hopped over from the high place in the middle of the square and stared right into Lenny’s eyes. “What are you?” he said, squinting. “Some kind of Markist?”