Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

Rickey Wirgman, who I’d called my friend, was more of a brother fuck-up and former criminal associate, like a cousin you don’t have much use for but deal with on occasion. His grandfather had left him some property on the edge of the marshlands near South Daytona, a collection of weathered frame buildings alongside a stretch of open water that grandpa, if not for a crack habit and some harsh words spoken to a fellow inmate in the Volusia County Jail that caused his history to take a sudden tragic turn, might have developed into a full-blown financial disaster. A fishing camp had been his thought. In the years since he’d inherited, Rickey had run a contest to see what would fall apart the fastest, himself or the roof he slept under. He sold off pieces of the land to survive and recreated with the finest dope and the nastiest hookers. The sheds and cabins were rotting away, but the marsh was pretty in the twilight. Black watercourses meandering through tall green grasses, here and there a tiny humped island thick with palms going to silhouettes in the soft gray light, and pelicans crossing in black flapping strings against a streak of rose along the horizon, like a caption in a cool language. Exotic-looking. A Discovery Channel place. The grass was tamped down around the relics of the fishing camp. Seemed like some huge, heavy thing had made an emergency landing, maybe a big jetliner bellying in, and the survivors had squatted where they’d been spilled until death had swallowed them too, and now their shelters were decaying. Scattered around in the higher grass behind the cabins were beat-up refrigerators and washing machines and stoves. They got you thinking it wasn’t a plane had crashed, but one of those bird dinosaurs, and its teeth had busted from its mouth or it had laid a number of curious square white eggs before passing.

We hid the van behind a shed and straggled toward the main lodge. Lodge was a hundred-dollar name for a structure that was the house equivalent of a crooked old beekeeper who had stroked out in his sleep while wearing his hat and veil. Window shadows for eyes and a gnawed-off nose opening into a screen porch and boards the color of cigarette ash and a slumped partial second story with tattery shingle tiles drooping off the roof edge. There were no lights. Frogs bleeped out in the marsh, like electric raindrops, and skeeters would cover your arm unless you kept swiping them off.

—Nobody’s home, Leeli said in an exhausted tone.

—Maybe. It don’t matter. The porch stair creaked and bowed to my step. The billowed-out screens were rusted through in patches, torn loose from the railing. Just pick out some rooms, I said. I’ll see if anybody’s here.

I left the others to creep around and scare the spiders and explored some. You couldn’t find a grayer place, you searched in a cemetery. Every square inch and object had run out of time and stopped being what it once was. Phantom things that resembled tables and chairs and rugs and pictures on the walls and the walls themselves were just ghosts made of dust and habit and a gray smothery smell. The kitchen sink was gray and so were the stains on it. Peels of linoleum curled up from the floor like eucalyptus bark. The only bit of color I noticed was three custom car magazines poking from beneath an empty bookcase. Rickey’s version of the redneck dream.

From down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies, crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm, was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him, his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in Central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not in an awful hurry about it.

—Shit! The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two grunts and a hiccup. That you, man?

I picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat so he could watch me and the TV both.

—Maceo. He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. Crazy motherfucker. Where you been?

—Raiford. New Smyrna for a while after.

—Oh, yeah…right. Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that wasn’t healing too good.

I asked what he was up to and he said, Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly dilaudid lately. You want some? I got a shitload.

—There’s people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.

He blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through. Yeah…okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms. His eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass. Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside of his skull. Like a perfect fever.

—I’ll take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind, I said.

—I told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole shitload.

I kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out of another.

—You get settled, come on back you wanna talk. Rickey wriggled his ass around as if he had an itch.

—Yeah, maybe. We’re kinda wore down.

—Hey, Maceo!

I could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he was lonely.

—’Member that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?

—Twila, I said.

—Yeah, her. She got the virus. He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you might use to announce the birth of twins. ‘Spect some of them NASCAR boys better get theyselves checked, he went on. Last I heard, she was passing out blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.

—She musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit. My feet crunched the litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.

—Maceo?

—What?

—You wanna bring me something from the ‘frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too fucked-up to walk.

—I’ll do ‘er in a while.

The corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey quietly say, Oh, God…God! Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators done something stupid.

Leeli had spread sheets on the bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.

—What we gonna do? she asked.

—I told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.

She hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. It’s not back in Ocala now. We gotta figure something to do.