Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  An andie, he thought. No wonder.

  He ran to the door and began pounding on it. “Hey! Hey, somebody, let me out of here!”

  The door drifted open under his hands.

  The building was deserted. Chairs lay haphazardly around the offices and glass was broken out of the doors. Guy tapped on one of the CRTs, but it was dead as the old woman downstairs.

  The programmers had obviously panicked when the computer went down. So, Guy thought, no more govt.

  He compared his watch to the bright sunlight out, side and decided it was eleven in the morning. He went home, took a long shower, and walked to work.

  Isabel Necessary, his district manager, wanted to fire him at first. She couldn’t believe that Guy could have lost the diskette and missed five days’ work without phoning in.

  “I was in an accident,” Guy lied cheerfully. “I lost my memory.”

  “I’ll bet,” Isabel sneered. “You were probably just lying around watching TV.”

  But in the end she let him stay. Probably, Guy thought, because she couldn’t find anybody else for the money who’d wear decent clothes.

  He stopped at Sam and Janet’s place after work, but they’d moved away, with no forwarding address. The new tenant, a middle-aged man in a bathrobe, had WLCD running in the background when he answered the door.

  “Sorry I can’t help you,” he told Guy. He had one eye still on the TV as Guy thanked him and left.

  Standing in the street, Guy realized it was the first time he’d been outside in recent memory without something terrible happening to him. The astroturf sidewalk felt firm and springy beneath his feet; he was clean and nicely dressed again. He should have been happy, but somehow he felt like he’d missed out on something, as if he’d woken up and found himself inexplicably old and frail.

  He decided he really ought to talk it over with Santa. He crossed the street and went into the booth on the corner.

  The Porta-Santa was dead.

  Santa’s face was frozen on the screen, half, way into a wink. One eye was almost closed and his mouth was twisted in what looked like a grimace of pain.

  Guy stood there for half an hour, watching the distorted face, waiting for some kind of message. It’s not coming, he realized at last. It’s like the mutie said. The revolution happened, but nobody noticed. They were all home watching TV.

  “So long, Santa,” Guy said.

  He shut the door of the booth and shuffled away down the green plastic lawn of the sidewalk.

  Gold

  Pirate gold. Coins, rings, ingots. Necklaces of emeralds and opals and sapphires. Chalices, bracelets, daggers inlaid with diamonds and lapis and ivory.

  Malone rolled over in the soft hotel bed.

  Not just gold but the things it would buy. A two-story house of brick and wrought iron. Greek columns in front and coaches parked in the drive. Built high on the center of Galveston Island, away from the deadly storms of the Gulf, away from the noise and stink of the port. White servants and negro slaves. Fair-haired women to sit at the piano in his parlor. Dark-skinned women to open their legs to him in the secrecy of the night...

  He sat up in a sweat. I will think no evil thoughts, he told himself.

  Outside, the sun rose over New Orleans. Horse-drawn carts creaked and rattled through the streets, and chickens complained about the light. The smell of the Mississippi, damp and sexual, floated through the open window.

  Malone got up and put a robe on over his nightshirt, despite the heat. He turned up the gas lamp over the desk, took out pen, ink and paper, and began to write.

  “My dearest Becky...”

  He smelled the French Market before he saw it, a mixture of decayed fruit, coffee, and leather. He crossed Decatur Street to avoid a side of beef hung over the sidewalk, swarming with flies. Voices shouted in a dozen different languages. All manner of decrepit wooden carts stood on the street, their contents passed from hand to hand until they disappeared under the yellow canvas awnings of the market. Beyond the levee Malone could see the tops of the masts of the tall ships that moved toward Governor Nicholl’s Street Wharf.

  The market was crowded with cooks from the town’s better families, most of them Negro or Creole. The women wore calico dresses and aprons and kerchiefs, in all shades of reds and yellows and blues. The men wore second-hand suits in ruby or deep green, with no collars or neckties. Like their suits, their hats were battered and several years out of style. They carried shopping baskets on their shoulders or heads because there was no room to carry them at their sides.

  Malone let himself be drawn in. He moved slowly past makeshift stands built of crates and loose boards, past heaps of tomatoes and peppers and bananas and field peas, searching the faces of the vendors. His concern turned out to be groundless; he recognized Chighizola immediately.

  Nez Coupe, Lafitte had called him. With the end of his nose gone, he looked like a rat that stood on hind legs, sniffing at something foul. The rest of his ancient face was covered with scars as well. One of them, just under his right eye, looked pink and newly healed. He was tiny, well over eighty years old now, his frock coat hanging loose on his shoulders. Still his eyes had a fierce look and he moved with no sign of stiffness. His hands were large and energetic, seeming to carry his arms unwillingly behind them wherever they went.

  “Louis Chighizola,” Malone called out. The old man turned to look at him. Chighizola’s eyes were glittering black. He seemed ready to laugh or fly into a rage at a moment’s notice. Malone pushed closer. “I need a word with you.”

  “What you want, you?”

  “I have a proposition. A business proposition.”

  “This not some damn trash about Lafitte again?” The black eyes had narrowed. Malone took a half step back, colliding with an enormous Negro woman. He no longer doubted that some of Chighizola’s scars were fresh.

  “This is different, I assure you.”

  “How you mean different?”

  “I have seen him. Alive and well, not two weeks ago.”

  “I got no time for ghosts. You buy some fruit, or you move along.”

  “He gave me this,” Malone said. He took a flintlock pistol from his coat, holding it by the barrel, and passed it to the old man.

  Chighizola looked behind him, took one reluctant step toward Malone. He took the pistol and held it away from him, into the sunlight. “Fucking hell,” Chighizola said. He turned back to Malone. “We talk.”

  chighizola led him east on Chartres Street, then turned into an alley. It opened on a square full of potted palms and flowers and sheets hung out to dry. They climbed a wrought-iron spiral staircase to a balcony cluttered with pots, old newspapers, empty barrels. Chighizola knocked at the third door and a young woman opened it.

  She was an octoroon with skin the color of Lafitte’s buried gold. She wore a white cotton shift with nothing under it. The cotton had turned translucent where it had drunk the sweat from her skin. Smells of fruit and flowers and musk drifted from the room behind her.

  Malone followed the old man into an aging parlor. Dark flowered wallpaper showed stains and loose threads at the seams. A sofa with a splinted leg sat along one wall and a few unmatched chairs stood nearby. An engraving of a sailing ship, unframed, was tacked to one wall. Half a dozen children played on the threadbare carpet, aged from a few months to six or seven years. Chighizola pointed to a chair and Malone sat down.

  “So. Where you get this damn pistol?”

  “From Lafitte himself.”

  “Lafitte is dead. He disappears thirty years ago. The Indians down in Yucatan, they cook him and eat him I think.”

  “Is the pistol Lafitte’s, or is it not?”

  “You are not Lafitte, yet you have his pistol. Any man could.”

  Malone closed his eyes, fatigue taking the heart out of him. “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I have only deceived myself.” A small child, no more than two years old, crawled into Malone’s lap. She had the features of the woman who answe
red the door, in miniature. Her dress was clean, if too small, and her black hair had been pulled back and neatly tied in red and blue ribbons. She rubbed the wool of Malone’s coat, then stuck two fingers in her mouth.

  “I do not understand,” Chighizola said. “You come to me with this story. Do you not believe it yourself?”

  “I wish I knew,” Malone said.

  malone was born poor in Ohio. His parents moved to the Republic of Texas in 1837 to get a new start. Some perverse symbolism made them choose the island of Galveston, recently swept clean by a hurricane. There they helped with the rebuilding, and Malone’s father got work as a carpenter. Malone was ten years old at the time, and the memories of the disaster would stay with him the rest of his life. Block-long heaps of shattered lumber, shuffled like cards, the ruin of one house indistinguishable from the next. Stacks of bodies towed out to sea, and those same bodies washing in again days and weeks later. Scuff marks six feet up inside one of the few houses left standing, where floating furniture had knocked against the walls. The poor, Malone saw, would always be victims. For the rich there were options.

  One of the richest men on Galveston Island was Samuel May Williams. On New Year’s Day of 1848 he had opened the doors of the Commercial and Agricultural Bank of Texas, his lifetime dream. It sat on a choice piece of land just two blocks off the Strand Avenue, “the Wall Street of Texas.” Williams’ fellow Texans hated him for his shrewd land speculation, his introduction of paper money to the state, his participation in the corrupt Monclova legislature of ‘35. Malone thought them naive. Williams was a survivor, that was all.

  Not like his father, who found that a new start did not necessarily mean a new life. Malone’s mother died, along with a quarter of Galveston’s population, in the yellow fever epidemic of ‘39. Soon his father was drinking again. Between the liquor and his son’s education, there was barely money for food. Malone swore that he would see his father in a fine house in the Silk Stocking district. He never got the chance. Instead he returned from Baylor University in the spring of ‘48 in time to carry one corner of his father’s coffin.

  Malone’s classes in accounting were enough to land him a position as a clerk in Sam Williams’ new bank. Within a year he had married the daughter of one of its board members. His father-in-law made Malone a junior officer and an acceptable member of society. A long, slow climb lay ahead of him, leading to a comfortable income at best. It did not seem enough, somehow.

  He had been in Austin on the bank’s business. It was a foreclosure, the least pleasant of Malone’s duties. The parcel of land was one that Williams had acquired in his early days in Texas, “going halves” with immigrants brought in by the Mexican government.

  That night he had stood at the Crystal Saloon on Austin’s notorious Congress Avenue, drinking away the sight of the sheriff examining Malone’s papers, saying, “Sam Williams, eh?” and spitting in the dirt, the sight of the Mexican family disappearing on a mule cart that held every battered thing they owned.

  A tall man in a bright yellow suit had stood at Malone’s table, nodded at his satchel, and said, “On the road, are you?” The man spat tobacco onto the floor, the reason Malone had kept his satchel safely out of the way. The habit was so pervasive that Malone took precautions now by instinct. “I travel myself,” the man said. “I am in ladies’ garments. By trade, that is.”

  Malone saw that it was meant to be a joke. The drummer’s name was O’Roarke, but he constantly referred to himself in the third person as Brimstone Jack, “on account of this head of hair.” He lifted his hat to demonstrate. The hair that was visible was somewhere between yellow and red, matching his mustache and extravagant side-whiskers. There was, however, not much of it.

  Malone mentioned Galveston. The talk soon turned to Jean Lafitte, the world’s last pirate and the first white settler of Galveston Island. That was when O’Roarke offered to produce the genuine article.

  Four glasses of bourbon whiskey had raised Malone’s credulity to new heights. He followed O’Roarke to a house on West Avenue, the limits of civilization, and there stepped into a world he had never seen before. Chinese, colored, and white men sat in the same room together, most of them on folding cots along the walls. Heavy, sour smoke hung in the air. The aroma left Malone both nervous and oddly euphoric. “Sir,” he said to O’Roarke, “this is an opium den.”

  A man in the far corner began to laugh. The laugh went on and on, rich, comfortable, full of real pleasure. Malone, his good manners finally giving way to curiosity, turned and stared.

  The laughing man had fair skin, a hatchet nose, and piercing black eyes. His black hair fell in curls to the middle of his back. He was in shirt sleeves, leather trousers, and Mexican sandals. There was a power about him. Malone felt a sudden, strong desire for the man’s good opinion.

  “May I present,” O’Roarke said with a small bow, “the pirate Jean Lafitte?”

  Malone stared in open disbelief.

  “Privateer,” the dark-haired man said, still smiling. “Never a pirate.”

  “Tell him,” O’Roarke said to the dark-haired man. “Tell him who you are.”

  “My name is John Lafflin,” the man said.

  “Your real name,” O’Roarke said, “damn you.”

  “I have been known by others. You may call me Jean Lafitte, if it pleases you.”

  “Lafitte’s son, perhaps,” Malone said. “Lafitte himself would be, what, nearly seventy years old now. If he lived.”

  The hatchet-faced man laughed again. “You may believe me or not. It makes no difference to me.”

  sitting there in Chighizola’s apartment, watching dust motes in the morning sunlight, Malone found his own story more difficult to believe than ever. From the shadows the woman watched him in silence. He wondered how foolish he must look to her.

  “And yet,” Chighizola said, “you did believe him.”

  “It was something in his bearing,” Malone said. “That and the fact that he wanted nothing from me. Not even my belief. I found myself unable to sleep that night. I returned to the house before dawn and searched his belongings for evidence.”

  “Which is when you stole the pistol. He did not give it to you.”

  “No. He had no desire to convince me.”

  “So why does this matter so much to you?”

  Malone sighed. Sooner or later it had to come out. “Because of the treasure. If he is truly Lafitte—or even if he is merely Lafitte’s son—he could lead us to the treasure.”

  “Always to the treasure it comes.”

  “I grew up on Galveston Island. We all live in the shadow of Jean Lafitte. As children we would steal away into the bayous and search for his treasure. Once there we found grown men doing the same. And if I feel so personally connected, how can you not feel even more so? It is your treasure as much as Lafitte’s. You sailed with him, risked your life for him. And yet look at yourself. In poverty, living by the labor of your hands.”

  “I have not much time left.”

  “All the more reason you should want what is yours. You should want the money for your family, for your daughter here, and her children.”

  Chighizola looked at the woman. “He thinks you are my daughter, him.” She came over to kiss his scarred and twisted face. Malone felt his own face go red. “Here is a boy who knows nothing of life.”

  “I am young,” Malone said. “It is true. But so is this nation. Like this nation I am also ambitious. I want more than my own enrichment. I know that it takes money to bring about change, to create the growth that will bring prosperity to everyone.”

  “You sound like a politician.”

  “With enough money, I would become one. Perhaps a good one. But without your help it will never happen.”

  “Why am I so important? This man, Lafitte or not, what does it matter if he can lead you to the treasure?”

  “If he is Lafitte, he will listen to you. He cares nothing for me. He will lead me nowhere. I need you to make him care.
”

  “I will think on this.”

  “I am stopping at the French Market Inn. My ship leaves tomorrow afternoon for Galveston. I must know your answer by then.”

  “Tell me, you who are in such a hurry. What of ghosts?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Ghosts. The spirits of the dead.”

  “Lafitte is alive. That is all that concerns me.”

  “Ah, but you seek his gold. And where there is gold, there are ghosts. Always.”

  “Then I leave them to you, old man. I will take my chances with the living.”

  malone had already packed his trunk and sent for his bill when the woman arrived. He mistook her knock for the bellman and was shocked into silence when he opened the door. Finally he backed away and stammered an apology.

  “I bring a message from Chighizola,” she said. She pushed the door closed and leaned her weight against it. “We will go with you to see this Lafitte.”

  “‘We?’” Malone could not take his eyes away from her.

  “He says we are to divide the treasure four ways, equal shares, you, me, Louis, Lafitte.”

  “Which leaves the two of you with half the treasure. I thought he did not care for money.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps you care too much for it.”

  “I am not a schoolboy. I have no desire to be taught humility at Chighizola’s hands.”

  “Those are his terms. If they are agreeable, we leave today.”

  Malone took a step closer to her. Curls of black hair had stuck to the damp flesh of her throat. It was difficult for him to speak. “I do not know your name.”

  “Fabienne.”

  “And what is your interest in this?”

  “Louis,” she said. “He is my only interest.” She stepped to one side and pulled the door open. “We will meet you at the wharf in one hour.” She closed the door behind her.