Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

I left Leeli sleeping and smoked in the breezeway of the motel, watching two rat-skinny children splash and squeak in the pool, while their two hundred pound plus mama, milky breasts and thighs and belly squeezed into inner-tube shapes by a lemon-yellow bathing suit, lay on a lawn chair and simmered like a dumpling over a low flame. The drapes of Ava’s room hung open a crack and I had a peek. All I saw of her was legs waving in the air and hands gripping onto a headboard. The rest was hidden underneath Squire. His pimply butt was just pumping up and down. Sitting straight in a chair beside the bed, like a schoolboy being taught a lesson, Carl was looking on with interest. Well, come get me Jesus, I said to myself. With Carl and Squire both bagging Ava, she wouldn’t have much time for Leeli. I had to admire Squire’s stamina, but he looked to be doing push-ups on a trampoline and if I was the boy’s daddy I’d have advised him that women tend to enjoy some rhythmic variation. He finally fell off his stroke and rolled onto his back. Ava came up flushed and sweaty, hair sticking to her cheeks. She had a sip of water, spoke briefly to Carl, then straddled Squire and began more-or-less to treat him like he’d been treating her. I’d been feeling about ten cents on the dollar, but watching her work cleaned the crust off my brain. Being the gentleman I am, I decided to buy Leeli coffee and a Krispy Kreme before checking out the rest of my parts.

I hated Daytona, and not just because I was born there, though every time I drove through Holly Hills, redneck purgatory, and saw those little bunkerlike concrete homes with cracked jalousie windows and chainlink fences and Big Wheels with faded colors buried in the front yard weeds, my wattles got all red and swollen. I also hated the beach, the kids who cruised it eight and nine to a convertible or rode around in ten-dollar-an-hour rent-a-buggies, the bikini girls with their inch-deep tans and MTV eyes, the boys in Hilfiger suits with an old man’s dream of financial security stuck like an ax into their brains at birth. I hated the fucking piped-in circus music that played along the boardwalk, sounding like it was made of sugar beets and red dye number seven. I hated the goddamn carnival rides and the heavy-metal curses shouting from the arcades. I liked the ocean all right, liked the blue-green water inside the sandbar, the creamy ridges of foam the tide left along the margin, and the power of the combers, but I wished they rolled in to no shore. I hated the burger joints with their fried-onion stink, their white plastic tables and chairs on a concrete deck, and walk-up windows manned by high school geeks with connect-the-dot acne puzzles on their foreheads, because it was at just such a joint I committed the error in judgment that earned me a nickel in Raiford, sauntering up to the service window so wired on crank, all I could smell was the inside of my nose, pulling a fifty-dollar pistol, and before I could speak the magic words, two plainclothes cops who were drinking milkshakes at the time snuck up behind me and said to turn around real quick, they’d like that, and later in jail, Sgt. John True, a man apparently fascinated with me, visited my cell, the first of our many nights together, and said, When I was a kid I’s just like you—meaning, I suppose, he no longer considered himself a dumbass hillbilly—prior to beating me unconscious. I carried a lot of anger relating to Daytona and that afternoon while we were sitting at a white plastic table on a concrete deck, staring at baskets of onion rings and fried shrimp so heavily breaded, eating one was like eating a hush puppy with a flavorless crunchy prize inside, I let angry out for exercise.

Squire got things off to a start by going on about how easy it would be to knock over the Joyland Arcade. You gotta have balls, he said, cause time to do it’s when it’s crowded. You walk on up and let ’em see your piece and grab them bags of money! He looked to Ava like he was expecting to have his belly rubbed. She smiled and dribbled salt from a packet onto her rings.

—You got a hard-on for quarters? I asked. They don’t bag nothing but the change.

—You have people with you. Three or four of ’em so you can carry more.

—You think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.

—You take the bills too, Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.

—Where am I? I asked Leeli.

Her expression begged me to shut up.

—Seriously. Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid rules?

Carl chuckled and I said, Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell, Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of popcorn.

—You the one’s acting superior, Ava said, and forked up some slaw.

—Fuck, I am superior! Superior to this shit. Maybe it gets you wet listening to the criminal genius here, but it don’t even give me a tickle.

Squire told me to watch my mouth, I was talking to a lady, and I said, Come on, you fucking chihuahua! Step to me!

Leeli caught my arm and said, Maceo! I jerked free and swatted my shrimp basket, backhanding it across the deck. People bespotted with ketchup splatter from the basket stared at us from the adjoining tables. The assistant manager, who could have passed for fourteen, looked like he was about to cry. Leeli was yelling at me, Squire was avoiding my eyes, Ava was calmly wiping her sleeve with a napkin. Carl giggled and said, Fucking chihuahua!

One of the citizens I’d splattered, a thick-necked, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Chevy-Suburban-driving son of the suburbs, his belly sagging like a hundred-year-old hammock, gave his pregnant wife a comforting pat on the shoulder and heaved up from his cheeseburger, but Ava saved his ass by intercepting him on the way to our table and slipped him a twenty for his dry cleaning bill. Other folks put in their claim and once she had satisfied them, she sat back down and said to me, Temper like that, it’s a wonder you still on the street.

Calmer now, I felt no call to answer. I gave her a fuck-you smile and popped one of Leeli’s shrimp into my mouth. It was covered with grit that had blown up from the beach, which made it extra crunchy.

—You so smart, Ava said, whyn’t you tell us how you’d handle the Toyland?

—Wouldn’t nothing but a damn fool mess with it. Too many cops. Too many boyfriends might wanna play hero. You feel the need to rob something, head out on the freeway. You know the back roads along the exits, you can take down two gas stations easy and be sitting in a bar before the cops get motivated.

—I suppose it was your expertise landed you in prison.

—Oh I was a fool. No doubt about that. It don’t mean I’m still a fool.

Challenged, I delivered a lecture on proper criminal procedure, most of it learned in Raiford, but salted in with personal experiences that I embellished for dramatic effect. You gotta terrorize a place, I told them. People ain’t always scared, they see the gun. Sometimes they can’t believe you’re for real and they go to debating what to do. You don’t want that, you want ’em scared. So you say something lets ’em know how scared they oughta be.

—Yeah? Squire said churlishly. Like what?

I made my hand into a gun and pointed it at his chest. Hands up! Who wants to die? You say that, it gets their attention every time.

—I like that, Carl said, grinning. Hands up who wants to die?

—Takes the punch out of it, you say it with a smile, I said. Tell ’em like you mean it.

With that, Carl jumped up and snarled, Hands up! Who wants to die?