Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  It had to be a mistake, he thought. Something from a burlesque show over in Frankfurt, maybe. Somebody had just screwed up the titles, gotten the date wrong.

  Yeah, and the name wrong too.

  The silence closed in on him. For the first time since they’d moved into the house on Goethestrasse there weren’t any people on the street. In the distance, whining high and faint like a mosquito’s wings, he heard a motorcycle approaching. It was the only sound in the night.

  He started to feel the cold. Still it wasn’t bad enough to make him go back inside, to face the empty, staring socket of the TV set. He shivered, lifted one foot off the icy pavement.

  A light winked at him from the end of the street. The motorcycle, coming toward him, rattled like machine gun fire and echoed off the wet streets and flat brick walls. It was moving too fast for the icy roads and the driver seemed barely in control. He slid in and out of the streetlamps’ circles of light, shadowy in leather and denim.

  Something like a premonition made Elvis start to turn and run back inside. The cold had numbed him and he couldn’t seem to get the message through to his legs.

  The bike skidded to a stop in front of the house and its engine died.

  For a second Elvis and the rider started at each other in the silent moonlight. The rider had no helmet or goggles, just a pair of round, tortoise-shell glasses. Frost and bits of ice had clumped in his hair and the creases of his jacket. A cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth, and Elvis was sure that if he could have seen the man’s face he would have recognized him.

  But the man’s face was gone. Scars flowed and branched like rivers across the dead white skin of his cheeks. He had no eyebrows, and patches of hair were missing from his temples and forehead. One eye was permanently half-closed and the other was low enough to throw the ruined face off balance. The nose was little more than a flat place and the mouth smiled on one side and frowned on the other.

  “Hey,” the rider said.

  “What?” Elvis was startled by the man’s American accent.

  “Hey, man. What happened to your shoes?”

  The voice was maddeningly familiar. “Who are you?”

  “You look shook, man.” The scarred mouth stretched in what might have been a grin. “Like, ‘All Shook Up,’ right?”

  “Dean,” Elvis said, stunned. “Jimmy Dean, the actor.”

  The rider shrugged.

  “You’re dead,” Elvis said. “I saw the pictures in the paper. That car was torn to pieces, man.”

  Dean, if that was truly who it was, touched the underside of his mutilated eye and rubbed it softly, as if remembering pain that Elvis could not even imagine.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Dean shrugged again. “They just, like, wanted me to come by and check up on you. It looks like you already got the message.” He rose up on the bike, about to kick the starter, and Elvis moved toward him.

  “Wait! Who’s ‘they?’ What do you know about...” He stopped himself. Dean couldn’t possibly know anything about what Elvis had seen on TV.

  “Hey, be cool, man. If they wanted you to know who they were, then they would tell you, dig? I mean, they didn’t even tell me shit, you know?” Dean looked him over. “But I can take a guess, man. I can take a real good guess what they want with you. I seen you on TV, the way you shake your legs and all that. The way you dress like a spade and sing all those raunchy songs. You scare people, man. People think you want to fuck all their daughters and turn their sons into hoods. They don’t like that, man.”

  “I never tried to scare nobody,” Elvis said.

  Dean giggled. Coming out of that scarred mouth, it was terrifying. “Yeah, right. That’s what I used to say.”

  “What do you mean? Are you threatening me?”

  “No threats, man. You’re the King. You know? You’re the fucking King of America. King of all the cheeseburgers and pink Cadillacs and prescription drugs and handguns in the greatest country in the world. Shit, you are America. They don’t have to threaten you. They don’t have to hurt you. Just a little nudge here and a nudge there, and you’ll fall right in line.”

  A door slammed and Charlie came staggering down the sidewalk. “Elvis? What the fuck, man?”

  Dean looked like he wanted to say something else, then changed his mind. He started the bike, hunched his shoulders, and sped away.

  “Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. “You know who that was?”

  “It was nobody,” Elvis said. He put his hand in the middle of Charlie’s chest and shoved him back toward the house. “Understand? It was nobody.”

  “There’s going to be a new Elvis, brand new. I don’t think he will go back to sideburns or ducktails. He’s twenty-five now, and he has genuine adult appeal. I think he’s going to surprise everyone...”

  —COLONEL TOM PARKER, on Elvis’s return from Germany

  During rehearsals Elvis kept the windows of his hotel room covered with aluminum foil. It kept out the light and there was something comforting about having it there. It might even keep his TV set from picking up weird, lying broadcasts that would mess with his head. Just in case, he kept a loaded .45 on the bedside table, ready to blow the whole thing away. When forced to go out of the hotel, he kept his bodyguards with him at all times, the ones the papers had started to call his “Memphis Mafia.”

  He stayed inside as much as he could. The Florida air was hot and dead, seemed to pull the life right out of him. It had been the same in California and Las Vegas, everywhere he’d been since he came home from Germany. Everything was dry and hot and still. He was starting to believe it would be dry and hot and still forever.

  As they taped the opening of the show he fought, without much success, to control his unease. They had him in his Army uniform again, walking out onstage to shake hands with Sinatra and his entire Rat Pack, all of them in tuxedos, mugging the camera, slapping each other on the back.

  Over and over he caught himself thinking: What am I doing here?

  He worked his way through the crowd, the faces blurring together into single entity with Bishop’s mocking smile, Davis’s processed hair and hideous rings, Lawford’s limp handshake and Martin’s whiskey breath. He had to learn to be comfortable with them. The Colonel had told him how it was going to be, and it was far too late to argue with the Colonel.

  It happened while they were taping his duet with Sinatra, Sinatra who had called rock and roll “phony” and the singers “goons” just a couple of years before. Now they were trading verses, Elvis singing “Witchcraft” and Sinatra doing “Love Me Tender.”

  The scream came from somewhere toward the front of the audience. “That’s not him!” It was a girl’s voice, and it sounded at least as frightened as it was angry. The stage lights were blinding and Elvis couldn’t see her face. “That’s not Elvis!” she screamed. “What did you do with him?” The orchestra stopped and the girl’s voice carried on unaccompanied. “Where is he? Where’s Elvis?”

  Elvis saw Sinatra make a gesture toward the wings. A moment later there were muffled noises from the audience and then a vast and empty silence.

  “Don’t worry,” Sinatra said. “You’re one of us now. We’ll take good care of you.”

  “Yes, sir.” Elvis nodded and closed his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Secrets

  They’d been married sixteen days.

  Michael spent a lot of time in the bathroom, as some of her other boyfriends had. So maybe it wasn’t entirely an accident when Teresa walked in that night without knocking.

  “Sorry,” she smiled. “I didn’t know—”

  Michael was leaning over the lavatory, fully dressed. He had an index finger under each eyelid, pulling it down. A stream of blood poured out of the underside of each eye into the sink.

  “Michael?” she whispered.

  He turned to look at her. His eyes were rolled back in his head and blood flowed down his cheeks like dark red tears. “GET OUT!” he roared.

>   In panic she reverted to Spanish: “Lo siento, lo siento! I’m sorry!”

  When he came to bed it was like nothing had happened. He kissed her forehead and went back to reading his trial transcript. He didn’t ask why she shivered at the sight of him.

  It was a week before she let him make love to her again. He was so gentle and insistent that she finally gave in. Afterwards, while he slept, she stared at him in the moonlight, searching for strangeness, for some kind of explanation.

  She never walked in on him unexpectedly again. As the years went by and she failed to get pregnant she wondered, sometimes, if that was meaningful, if it was related to what she’d seen. The thing that was never mentioned, the thing she tried to tell herself she’d only imagined. The thing she could never forget.

  In the end it was Michael who left her. In the ten years they’d been together, he didn’t seem to have aged a day. He left her for a younger woman, of course. Theresa thought about calling the woman, trying to warn her, but what could she say?

  The feeling eventually passed. Theresa remarried, an older man, a man with few demands or expectations. They had a lovely home, gave many parties, and slept in separate beds.

  Golfing Vietnam

  She hadn’t seen Brian in five years, not since they both graduated from UNC Wilmington. His phone call caught her at a perfect time: between relationships, bored, a little nostalgic. When he mentioned Ashley and Dylan’s wedding she was blindsided by a powerful longing to see everyone again.

  “I’d been thinking about going,” she said, “but then I had to pay for a new engine in the Honda.”

  “Why don’t you go with me? I’ll fly you to Wilmington, we could stay at a bed and breakfast or something, go to the wedding together.” When she hesitated he said, “No obligation or anything. I mean in terms of . . . you know.”

  On two separate occasions in college they’d tried and failed to sustain a serious romance. It seemed to her that the sex, while fun, had not been profound for either one of them. On the other hand, she was not above a little fun at this point in her life.

  “Can you afford to do that?” she asked. “Is your father paying you that much?”

  “I’m not working for the old man anymore,” he said with a note of satisfaction. “Just wait. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”

  And so Shawn found herself in the passenger seat of Brian’s rented Sentra, headed south toward downtown from the airport. It was the first Saturday in June, unseasonably cool enough that Brian had asked to leave the windows down. Half a mile to their right she could see a solid green wall of trees on the far side of the Cape Fear River. The Atlantic was close enough that she could taste its salt in the air, bringing back memories of pelicans gliding in front of pink and purple clouds, of waking up without an alarm clock, of Brian’s boyish, nearly hairless body.

  “So tell me this big secret,” she said, turning toward him and noticing again, as she had at the airport, how dramatically his short, reddish-blond hair had receded from his forehead. “When did you quit the oil business?”

  “Two years ago. It kind of took me by surprise, really. I’d been playing at the club every weekend, and before I knew it I was doing really great.”

  He’d lost her. “What club? Are you in a band?”

  “The Dallas Country Club. I’m playing golf.”

  “Golf? Golf? You’re a golfer now, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “I did a year as a club pro, and then last year a bunch of the guys there put a stake together for me and I went out on the Australian tour. I was out for nine months and I’ve already paid everybody back.” He glanced at her for a reaction.

  “You never said anything to me about golf.”

  “I was on the team in high school. I kind of kept a low profile about it in college, I guess because I was afraid it wouldn’t sound cool or something, but I still went out every once in a while. Wilmington has some outstanding courses. With the Spanish moss and everything, first thing in the morning, with the mist over the water hazards. . .”

  “Well, you were right about it not sounding cool,” she said. “I can’t believe you mutated into a golfer when I wasn’t looking. Do they make you wear plaid pants and those awful polyester caps?”

  He was staring straight ahead, the smile frozen on his face. He’d paid for her trip, and not thirty minutes into it she’d trounced on his feelings. She really did hate herself sometimes. “I’m sorry, Brian. I didn’t mean to tease you.”

  “When I was thinking about you, about us, I never thought about what a smart mouth you have. I’d completely forgotten that whole side of your character.”

  “I said I was sorry.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Come on, Bri, forgive me. Even if I don’t deserve it. Tell me about this tour you’re on.”

  She had to coax a little more, but by the time they crossed Market Street she had him talking again. He parked on Third in front of a two-story Victorian with turrets and a wraparound porch.

  The sight of the place warmed her like a glass of champagne. The house was beautiful and romantic and just slightly decadent. The magnolia tree in the front yard was in full bloom, drenching the air with heavy, sensuous perfume. Brian rang the bell and a middle-aged woman answered the door. She gave them a short tour and then left them alone in the Hibiscus Room.

  Brian went to the window and opened it. “You like it?” he asked.

  “It’s great,” she said. He stood awkwardly with his hands in his pockets, and Shawn knew he was waiting to take his cue from her. The minor skirmish in the car had somehow put her off and now she couldn’t seem to find an intimate mood. The queen-sized bed loomed large in her mind. “Um,” she said, “I’ve got a lot of getting ready to do before six.”

  “Sure,” Brian said, with only a hint of disappointment.

  The service took forty minutes, counting processional and recessional, hymns, prayers, vows, and some sort of contemporary Christian love song that one of Dylan’s fraternity brothers delivered in a prissy tenor that made Shawn cringe. Ashley was radiant in a low-cut, arctic-white gown, her blonde hair piled Gibson-girl style with long wisps curling free on both sides, her veil suspended from a pearl headband. Dylan and his groomsmen, all in white dinner jackets, looked like waiters at an exclusive resort: tanned, muscular, poised on the balls of their feet.

  Drawn-out as it was, Shawn appreciated the ritual, the sense that nothing was being left out, nothing hurried over. Ashley and Dylan would have to come out of this, she thought, feeling well and truly married.

  The congregation was up and down a half-dozen times for one reason or another, and each time she sat Shawn found Brian’s arm stretched out on the pew behind her. Brian himself did not even seem to be looking at her, seemed more impersonally possessive than overtly sexual, though she knew in Brian’s dream world they would have made love before she got dressed. What she needed, she thought, was to feel desired instead of merely obligated.

  In the reception line, Ashley seemed genuinely thrilled to see her. “I was so afraid you weren’t going to make it!”

  “I had a mysterious benefactor,” Shawn said.

  Ashley glanced at Brian, who’d just kissed her and was now pumping Dylan’s hand. “You’ll have to tell me everything later.”

  “Nothing to tell,” she said, but Ashley had already turned to the next in line.

  Dylan grabbed her and kissed her. “You look so hot. What’s Brian got that I don’t?”

  It was impossible to set him straight in the milliseconds available. “It’s what he doesn’t have. Like a brand-new wife, remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” Dylan said. “Her.” Shawn assumed he was kidding but still didn’t know how to react, other than to smile and keep moving.

  Dylan’s father pretended to remember her while also pretending not to look down the front of her dress. The effort left him somewhat frazzled and left Shawn feeling better about herself than she had in a while. It was in fact a m
ajor statement of a dress, strapless and short, the perfect shade of taupe to set off her shoulder-length brown hair. There were plenty of disadvantages to living in D.C., but a lack of shopping was not one of them.

  The video crew kept them waiting for nearly half an hour while they shot close-ups at the altar, then, unhappy with the camera placement on the church steps, handed out fresh packets of birdseed for a second take of the exit.

  “Did you ever think,” Shawn asked, “that we work so hard to immortalize all the big events of our lives that we’re forgetting to have any emotions to come back and revisit?”

  “You’re never going to have any fun if you keep thinking so much,” Brian said. He took her arm. “Let’s go find the bar.”

  During the Civil War, Wilmington had been the last refuge of the Confederate blockade runners. After the war there’d been money in textiles and shipping. In the 1890s, a mob of white citizens had burned down the offices of the city’s black-owned newspaper and run its black mayor out of town in one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. Now the city catered to supertankers, tourists, and the film industry. It was an easygoing city, for the most part, willing to do whatever it took to get by.

  In the ’80s, when Shawn had first come to Wilmington with her parents, the entire downtown area had been a slum. Fifteen years and millions of dollars had brought the tourists back to cobbled streets and restored Victorian houses, historical plaques and a boardwalk along the river.

  Ashley’s parents had rented the Ice House, a downtown bar, for the reception. There was air-conditioning inside and an R&B band out on the patio, with bouncers at the back gate to keep Riverwalk tourists from wandering in.

  There was no champagne, only white wine, beer, and well liquor. Shawn, not yet ready to commit to serious drinking, settled for a Coke. The bride and groom made their entrance and Shawn stayed well away from the bouquet toss. Dylan threw a garter and there were photo opportunities galore as they cut and posed with their cakes.