Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

—I told you. They went to charter a plane somewheres ‘round New Smyrna.

—They ain’t gone to New Smyrna! Dumb motherfucker! They ain’t going nowhere near New Smyrna!

Usually somebody calls me a dumb motherfucker, I don’t have much of an argument. It’s not much different from saying that the grass is pretty green or the water looks wet. But Squire irked me with his agitated movement and his two round faces, the one on his chest smiling, the other scowling, both of them staring at me.

—Leave me be! I walked off a few paces and gazed out into the marsh. With the passage of the storm, heat was coming back into the world. A drop of sweat trickled down my side. The air was slow and thick and humid. Something with curved black wings scythed across the low-hanging moon. A dullness swept over my thoughts, an oppressive, clammy feeling like the first sign of a fever.

—You just gonna stand there? Squire grabbed onto my shoulder and spun me about. We gotta get us a move on!

—Don’t put your hands on me, I said.

—Aw, Jesus! He wheeled away from me and looked to the sky. Thank you for sticking me with this ignorant fucking hillbilly!

I refitted my eyes to the marsh, the stirring grasses and the moon-licked water to the east.

—Goddamn it! Squire said. You’n me, we need to work together. I can find ’em!

It struck me that he was speaking with more authority than he’d previously displayed, but I didn’t concern myself with this. Wasn’t that it didn’t tweak my interest, just I was more interested in the way my head was emptying out, like a car engine giving little ticks as it cools.

Squire went to hammering at me, trying to rouse me to action, and finally I said, What you want me to do, asshole? Drive you around in a stolen van ’til we get popped?

—We don’t hafta go far. Won’t be on the road more’n a few minutes.

—They been gone an hour…maybe more. You think they just circling out there?

—Trust me, man. I know what I’m talking about.

—Trust you? I said. Fuck you! Now I told you, leave me be.

I stepped away along the shore and stopped at the very edge of the water, my shoes sinking into the muck, wanting to restore the glum yet comforting acceptance into which my thoughts had been sinking. Squire followed me, giving orders, pleading, working every angle. Didn’t matter what he said, it was all the same to my ears, a yammering that bored holes in my skull and poured itself in hot and heavy like lead into a mold. I told him to shut up. He kept at it. I told him again to shut up and it didn’t even put a hitch in his delivery. I was acting like I had shit for brains, he said. Behaving like a child. Didn’t matter what he said. Every word hardened into a white-hot ingot, stacks of them crowding the space between my ears. I tried to see past him, past the heat growing inside me, looking to cool my eyes in the lavender cave of sky among the last clouds where the moon floated. It wasn’t a help.

—What do I gotta do, spell it out for your sorry ass? Squire said. What the fuck’s it gonna take to get through?

He punched at my shoulder with the heel of his hand.

—Don’t be doing that, I said.

—It don’t bother you, you set there and watched Ava and them roll off into the fucking sunset, but this here—he punched at me again—that bothers you?

A thready strip of cloud spooled out across the moon, a golden bridge unraveling.

—You are hillbilly shit piled high, y’know that? Squire said. I heard him kick at the ground and then his voice came from a distance away: Guess you must like the idea of ol’ Ava licking your girlfriend’s pussy.

I turned on him, seeing only those two ugly round faces, one atop the other mutant-style, and I lifted my right hand. I was kind of surprised to see the gun—guess I’d forgotten I was holding it—and maybe it was surprise twitched my trigger finger, or maybe another flickering snake tongue of anger. Or maybe I just wanted to kill him, though I had the notion somewhere in the back of my mind that he was not a man, he’d eat the bullet, lie there a while, then sit up all of a sudden the way he’d done back in Ocala. The shot punched out the left eye of his lower face. He gave a melancholy grunt, like a hog disappointed by its supper, and went spinning to the ground. Heart’s blood came from his chest in such a hurry, it might’ve had somewhere more important to go. Speckles of wet dirt clung to his cheek. His one true eye was open blind and the other was pressed into the earth. I thought I heard a voice of wind and rustling grass say my name in welcome.

You might not understand, but then again you might, how when you reach the end of the road and still find yourself breathing, the unraveled threads that tied you to your life resemble a puzzle you could easily have solved if you’d been one ounce smarter or one inch less crazy, and you think now that you’ve gained a perspective, you can probably develop some sort of reasonable explanation for all the crap you hadn’t understood, but when you gather those threads up they hang limp from your fist and don’t none of the frayed ends match, and you realize they weren’t really connected, they had no more connection to each other than stalks of dead grass floating on marsh water, and everything you depended on being true was just a tricky kind of emptiness that looked like something real, and so when I tried to fit Squire cooling out at my feet and the bossy way he’d acted in with Ava’s stories, it only made a deeper puzzle, one I knew I’d never get straight.

I kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive thoughts.

—Stand up straight, motherfucker!

Rickey was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off 12-gauge with a taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was working good and pinned on me.

—Come thisaway! he said.

I walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to sit.

—You a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive. Rickey spat a dark wad of blood and saliva.

The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.

—I saw you kill that boy, he said. Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?

I didn’t have no answers for him.

—You liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy. Rickey fumbled in his pocket and fetched out a cell phone. One fine morning a few years from now, they be strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.

He thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911. I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute, too low for me to hear.

—Hey, Maceo!

He’d moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled across his knees.

—Hands up! Who wants to die? he said. How you like them apples, huh?