Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

I let my thoughts wander, vaguely mindful of the activity in the pool, speculating on the rate of skin cancers among the patrons of the Seminole Paradise, reflecting on the fact that I had not seen a single Seminole during our stay, if one omitted the grotesque statue of Osceola in the lobby, fashioned from a shiny yellowish brown material—petrified Cheese Whiz was my best guess. The waitress set Pellerin’s margarita down on the table; her eyes snagged on the cash strewn across it. She offered Pellerin his change and he told her to keep it. He tilted his head, squinted at her name tag, and said, “Is waitressing your regular job, Tammy, or just something you do on the side?”

Tammy didn’t know how to take this. She flashed her teeth, struck a pose that accentuated her breasts and said, “I’m sorry?”

“Reason I ask,” said Pellerin, “I wonder if you ever done any hostessing? I’m throwing a party up in my suite tonight. Around ten o’clock. And I was hoping to get a couple of girls to help me host it. You know the drill. Take care of the guests. See that everyone’s got a drink. You’d be doing me a huge favor.” He reached into his other pocket, peeled what looked to be about a grand off his roll and held it out to her. “That’s a down payment.”

A light switched on in Tammy’s brain and she re-evaluated Pellerin. “So how many guests are we talking about?” she asked.

“I’m the only one you’d have to worry about.” Pellerin gave a lizardly smile. “But I can be a real chore.”

“Why, I think we can probably handle it.” Tammy accepted the bills, folded them, stashed them next to her heart. “Around ten, you say?”

“I’m in the Everglades Suite,” said Pellerin. “Wear something negligible. And one more thing, darling. It’d be nice if your friend was a Latina. Maybe a Cuban girl. On the slender side. Maybe her name could be… Tomasina?”

“Why, isn’t that a coincidence! That’s my best friend’s name!” Tammy turned and twitched her cute butt. “See ya tonight.”

As she sashshayed off, Pellerin slurped down half his margarita and sighed. “Ain’t freedom grand?”

“What was that bullshit?” I said. “You’re in the Everglades Suite?”

“Three nights from now, we could be lying in a landfill,” he said. “I booked myself a suite and I’m going to have me a party.”

“This isn’t wise,” I said. “Suppose she gets a look at your eyes?”

“Did you get a load of the brain on that girl? I could tell her I was down in the Amazon and got stung by electric bees, she’d be fine with it.”

I wasn’t too sure about that, but then I was distracted from worry by thinking about Jo all alone in Room 1138.

“Yeah, boy!” said Pellerin, and grinned—he’d been watching me. “What they say is true. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

I made no response.

“Hell, if Jocundra don’t do it for you,” he said, “I’m sure Tammy and Tomasina wouldn’t mind accommodating another guest.”

“That’s all right.”

“On second thought, I believe you’re the kind of guy who needs that old emotion lotion to really get off.”

“Shut your hole, okay?”

Pellerin finished his margarita, signaled Tammy for another. I was through cautioning him about his drinking. Maybe he’d drop dead. That would let us off the hook. More people had jumped into the pool—it looked like a sparkling blue bowl of human head soup. There came a loud screech that resolved into “The Piña Colada Song” piped in over speakers attached to the surrounding palms. I was half-angry, though I couldn’t have told you at what, and that damn song exacerbated my mood. Tammy brought the margarita and engaged in playful banter with Pellerin.

“Does your friend want a friend?” she asked. “Because I bet I could fix him up.”

“Naw, he’s got a friend,” said Pellerin. “The trouble is, she ain’t treating him all that friendly.”

“Aw! Well, if he needs a friendlier friend, you let me know, hear?”

I shut my eyes and squeezed the arms of my chair, exerting myself in an attempt to suppress a shout. Eventually I relaxed and my mind snapped back into on-duty mode. “What kind of shadows?” I asked Pellerin.

He gazed at me blankly. “Huh?”

“You said you were seeing shadows. What kind?”

“You’re starting to sound like Jocundra, man.”

“What, is it a big secret?”

He licked salt off the rim of his glass. “I don’t guess they’re shadows, really. They’re these black shapes, like a man, but they don’t have any faces. Sometimes they have lights inside them. Shifting lights. They kind of flow together.”

I laughed. “Sounds like a lava lamp!”

“Everybody’s got one,” he said. “But it’s not an aura. It’s more substantial. I see patterns, too. Like…” He poked around in the pile of money and trash on the table and plucked out a napkin bearing the McSorely’s logo. “Like this here. The whole thing creeps me out.”

On the napkin were several sketches of what appeared to be ironwork designs: veves. I asked why it creeped him out.

“When we were on the island,” Pellerin went on, “I found these books on voodoo. And while I was leafing through them, I saw that same design. It’s used in the practice of voodoo. Called a veve. That there’s the veve of Ogun Badagris, the voodoo god of war. And this…” He pointed to a second sketch. “This one’s Ogun in his aspect as the god of fire. I get that one a lot.” He paused and then said, “You know anything about it?”

I had no doubt that he could read me if I lied and, although it was my instinct to lie, I didn’t see any reason to hide things from him anymore; yet I didn’t want to freak him out, either.

“Jo told me she had another patient who saw this same sort of pattern,” I said.

“What else she tell you?”

“She said he did some great things before…”

“Before he died, right?”

“Yeah.”

There ensued a silence, during which I noticed that the song playing over the speakers was now “Margaritaville.”

“She told me he got to where he could cure the sick,” I said.

He stared at me. “Fuck.”

“Let’s get through the weekend, then you can worry about it,” I said.

“Easy for you to say.”

“It’s a lot to process, I give you that. But you can’t…”

“I knew she was holding back, but… man!” He picked up his drink, put it back down. “You know, I don’t much care if we get through the weekend.”

“I care,” I said, but he appeared not to hear me, gazing out across the pool toward the hedge of palms and shrubbery that hid the concrete block wall that separated Seminole Paradise from a Circuit City store.

“You ever have the feeling you’re on the verge of understanding everything?” he said. “That if you could see things a tad clearer, you’d have the big picture in view? I mean the Big Picture . How it all fits together. That’s where I’m at. But I also get this feeling I don’t fucking want to see the big picture, that it’s about ten shades darker than the picture I already got.” He chewed on that a second, then heaved up to his feet. “I’m going to the casino.”

“Wait a second!” I said as he walked away.

I busied myself plucking the hundreds out of the mess we’d made on the table, and I pressed the clutter of bills into his hands. He seemed startled by the money, as if it were an unexpected bonus, but then he stepped to the edge of the glittering pool and said in a loud voice, “Hey! Here go, you lucky people!” and tossed the money into the air.

There couldn’t have been more than four or five thousand dollars, but for the furor it caused, it might have been a million. As the bills fluttered down, people surged through the water after them; others sprawled on the tiles in their mad scramble to dive into the pool. Children were elbowed aside, the elderly were at risk. A buff young lad surfaced with a joyous expression, clutching a fistful of bills, and was immediately hauled under by a bikini girl and her boyfriend, their faces aglow with greed. The water was lashed into a froth as by sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terrified screams replaced the prettier shrieks that had attended roughhousing and dunkings. One man dragged a woman from the melee and sought to give her mouth-to-mouth, whereupon she kicked him in the groin. The lifeguard’s umbrella toppled into the water. He shouted incoherent orders over his mike. This served to increase the chaos. He began blowing his whistle over and over, an irate clown with his cheeks puffed and a nose covered in sunblock.