Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

The card room could be isolated from the remainder of the house. It had no windows and soundproofed walls, a bar, and, against the rear wall, three trophy cases celebrating Ruddle’s skill at poker. The place of honor was held by a ring won at a World Series of Poker circuit tournament in Tunica, Mississippi. It was flanked by several photographs of Ruddle with poker notables, Phil Ivey and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and the like, who were apparently among those he had defeated. I was inspecting the table, an elegance of teak and emerald felt lit by an hanging lamp, when a lean, long-haired, thirtyish man in cut-offs walked in holding an apple, and asked in a Eurotrash accent what I was doing. I told him I was casing the joint.

“No, no!” He wagged a finger at me. “This is not good… the drugs.”

I explained that “casing the joint” meant I was looking the house over, seeing whether it would be possible to burglarize it.

He took a bite of his apple and, after chewing, said, “I am Torsten. And you are?”

I thought he had misunderstood me again, but when I had introduced myself, he said, “You have chosen a bad time. There will be many here this weekend. Many guards, many guests.”

“How many guards?” I asked.

“Perhaps five… six.” He fingered the edge of the table. “This is excellent work.”

“Are you a friend of the family?”

“Yes, of course. Torsten is everyone’s friend.”

He strolled around the table, trailing a hand across the felt, and said, “Now I must go. I wish you will have success with your crime.”

Later that afternoon as I was preparing to leave, sitting in my rental car and making some notes, I spotted him outside the house. He was carrying a Weed Whacker, yelling at an older man who was pruning bushes, speaking without a trace of an accent, cussing in purest American. There might be, I thought, a lesson to be drawn from this incident, but I decided that puzzling it out wasn’t worth the effort. While driving back to the hotel, I noticed that a motorcyclist in a helmet with a tinted faceplate was traveling at a sedate rate of speed and keeping behind me. Whenever I slowed, he dropped back or switched lanes, and when I parked in the hotel lot, he placed a call on his cell phone. Aggravated and wanting to convey that feeling, I walked toward him, but he kicked over the engine and sped off before I could get near.

A Do Not Disturb card was affixed to the doorknob of the Everglades Suite, so I went down to 1138. Jo, who had been napping, let me in and went into the bathroom to wash her face. I sat at her table and put my feet up. She came back out and lay down on the bed, turned to face me. After I’d briefed her on what I had learned, she said softly, “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad you’re glad,” I said glibly, wondering at the intimacy implied by her tone.

She shut her eyes and I thought for a moment she had drifted off. “I’m afraid,” she said.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“You don’t act afraid.”

“If I let myself think about Saturday, I get to shaking in my boots.” I leaned toward her, resting my elbows on my knees. “We got to tough it out.”

“I’m not feeling very tough.”

I said something neutral and she reached out her hand, inviting me to take it. She caressed my wrist with her fingertip. Holding her hand while sitting on the edge of the chair grew awkward, and I moved to the bed. She curled up against me. I stroked her hair, murmured an assurance, but that seemed insufficient, so I kicked off my shoes and lay down, wrapping my arms around her from behind.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For how I behaved on the island. For this morning. You must think I’m a terrible tease. But when I see Josey like that, I feel I should comfort him, even though…”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Say.”

Her eyes teared; she pressed my hand against her breast. “It’s not him I want to comfort. You know that.”

I told her not to cry.

She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “That’s how I was brought up,” she said. “I was taught to deny what I wanted, that I had to let it come second to what everyone else wanted.”

“It’s okay.”

“No! it’s not! I watched my mother wither away taking care of my daddy, his brothers, of every stray that wandered by. She could scarcely let a second pass without doing for him. I swore I wouldn’t be like her. But I’m exactly like her.”

I came to realize that we were less having a conversation than engaging in a litany: she, the priestess, delivering the oration, and I, the acolyte, offering appropriate responses. And as we continued this ritual of confession and assurance, the words served to focus me on the hollow of her throat, the pale skin below her collarbone, the lace trim of a brassiere peeking out between the buttons of her shirt, until the only things in the world were the sound of her voice and the particulars of her body. For all it mattered, she could have been reciting a butcher’s list or reading from a manual on automotive maintenance.

“Feeling that way screwed up almost every relationship I ever had,” she said. “Because I didn’t feel that way. Not at heart… not really. It was just a rule I couldn’t break. I resented men for making me obey the rule, but they didn’t enforce it. I did. I couldn’t simply be with them, I couldn’t enjoy them. And now I don’t care about rules, I finally don’t care, and it’s too late.”

I told her it wasn’t too late, we’d pull through somehow.

Tears slipped along the almost imperceptible lines beside her eyes. I propped myself up on an elbow, intending to invoke some further optimistic cliché, wanting to make certain that she had taken it to heart. Lying half-beneath me, searching my face, her expression grew strangely grave, and then her tongue flicked out to taste my mouth, her hips arched against mine. The solicitude, the tenderness I felt… all that was peeled away to reveal a more urgent affinity, and I tore at her clothing, fumbling with buttons, buckle, snaps, rough with her in my hurry. She cried out in abandon, as if suffering the pain of her broken principles. Cities of thought crumbled, my awareness of our circumstance dissolved, and a last snatch of bleak self-commentary captioned my desire—I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a red burning thing in a fiery sky, not a true sun but a great shear of light in which was embedded an indistinct shape, like that of a bird flying sideways or a woman’s genital smile, and beneath it a low, smoldering wreckage that stretched from horizon to horizon, in which the shadows of men crouched and scuttered and fled with hands clamped to their ears so as to muffle the echoes of an apocalyptic pronouncement.

We spent that night and most of the next day in 1138. Every so often I would run up and check on Pellerin, but my concern was perfunctory. We stayed in bed through the afternoon and, late in the day, as Jo drowsed beside me, I analyzed what had happened and how we had ended up like this, who had said what and who had done what. Our mutual approach seemed to have been thoroughly crude and awkward, but I thought that, if examined closely, all the axiomatic beams that supported us, the scheme and structure of every being, could be perceived as equally crude and awkward… yet those scraps of physical and emotional poetry of which we were capable could transform the rest into an architecture of Doric elegance and simplicity. The romantic character of the idea cut against my grain, but I couldn’t deny it. One touch of her skin could make sense out of stupidity and put the world in right order.