Люциус Шепард: The Best of Lucius Shepard

“You have no imagination,” I said.

Rudy grunted. “Fishing doesn’t require an imagination. That’s what makes it fun.”

Motionless, he was a bearish figure muffled in a down parka and a wool cap, his face reddened by the cold, breath steaming. He seemed down at the mouth and, thinking it might cheer him up, I asked how he was coming with the comic strip.

“I quit working on it,” he said.

“Why the hell’d you do that? It was your best thing ever.”

“It was giving me nightmares.”

I absorbed this, gave it due consideration. “Didn’t strike me as nightmare material. It’s kind of bleak. Black comedy. But nothing to freak over.”

“It changed.” He flicked his wrist, flicking his line sideways. “The veins of pork… You remember them?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“They started growing, twisting all through the mountain. The mineworkers were happy. Delirious. They were going to be rich, and they threw a big party to celebrate. A pork festival. Actually, that part was pretty funny. I’ll show it to you. They made this enormous pork sculpture and were all wearing pork pie hats. They had a beauty contest to name Miss Pork. The winner… I used Mia for a model.”

“You’re a sick bastard, you know that?”

Again, Rudy grunted, this time in amusement. “Then the stars began eating the pork. The mineworkers would open a new vein and the stars would pour in and choff it down. They were ravenous. Nothing could stop them. The mineworkers were starving. That’s when I started having nightmares. There was something gruesome about the way I had them eating. I tried to change it, but I couldn’t make it work any other way.”

I said it still didn’t sound like the stuff of nightmares, and Rudy said, “You had to be there.”

We fell to talking about other things. The Steelers, could they repeat? Stanky. I asked Rudy if he was coming to the EP release and he said he wouldn’t miss it. “He’s a genius guitar player,” he said. “Too bad he’s such a creep.”

“Goes with the territory,” I said. “Like with Robert Frost beating his wife. Stanky’s a creep, he’s a perv. A moral dwarf. But he is for sure talented. And you know me. I’ll put up with perversity if someone’s talented.” I clapped Rudy on the shoulder. “That’s why I put up with you. You better finish that strip or I’ll dump your ass and start hanging with a better class of people.”

“Forget the strip,” he said glumly. “I’m too busy designing equipment sheds and stables.”

We got into a discussion about Celebrity Wifebeaters, enumerating the most recent additions to the list, and this led us—by loose association only—to the subject of Andrea. I told him about our conversation at McGuigan’s and what she had said about the outbreak of creativity, about love.

“Maybe she’s got a point,” Rudy said. “You two have always carried a torch, but you burned each other so badly in the divorce, I never would have thought you’d get back together.” He cracked open a beer, handed it to me, and opened one for himself. “You hear about Colvin Jacobs?”

“You mean something besides he’s a sleazeball?”

“He’s come up with a plan to reduce the county’s tax burden by half. Everybody says it’s the real quill.”

“I’m surprised he found the time, what with all those congressional junkets.”

“And Judy Trickle, you hear about her?”

“Now you’re scaring me.”

“I know. Ol’ Juggs ‘R’ Us Judy.”

“She should have been your model for Miss Pork, not Mia. What’d she do? Design a newfangled bra?”

“Lifts and separates.”

“You mean that’s it?”

“You nailed it.”

“No way!”

“She’s been wearing a prototype on the show the last few days. There’s a noticeable change.” He did a whispery voiceover voice. “The curves are softer, more natural.”

“Bullshit!”

“I’m serious. Check her out.”

“I got better things to do than watch AM Waterford. ”

“I remember the time when you were a devoted fan.”

“That was post-Andrea… and pre-Andrea.” I chuckled. “Remember the show when she demonstrated the rowing machine? Leotards aren’t built to handle that sort of stress.”

“I knew the guy who produced her back then. He said they gave her stuff like that to do, because they were hoping for a Wardrobe Malfunction. They weren’t prepared for the reaction.”

“Janet Jackson’s no Judy Trickle. It was like a dam bursting. Like… help me out here, man.”

“Like the birth of twin zeppelins.”

“Like the embodiment of the yang, like the Aquarian dawn.”

Rudy jiggled his line. “This is beginning to border on the absurd.”

“You’re the one brought her up.”

“I’m not talking about Judy, I’m talking about the whole thing. The outbreak.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, we’re way past absurd if Miz Trickle’s involved. We’re heading toward surreal.”

“I’ve heard of five or six more people who’ve had… breakthroughs, I suppose you’d call them.”

“How come I don’t hear about these people except from you? Do you sit in your office all day, collecting odd facts about Black William?”

“I get more traffic than you do, and people are talking about it now.”

“What are they saying?”

“What you’d expect. Isn’t it weird? It must be the water, the pollution. I’ve even heard civic pride expressed. Someone coined the phrase, ‘Black William, Pennsylvania’s Brain Capital.’”

“That’s taking it a bit far.” I had a slug of Iron City. “So nobody’s panicking? Saying head for the hills?”

“Who said that?”

“Andrea. She was a little disturbed. She didn’t exactly say it, but she seemed to think this thing might not be all good.”

He tightened his lips and produced a series of squeaking noises. “I think Andrea’s right. Not about head for the hills. I don’t know about that. But I think whatever this is, it’s affecting people in different ways. Some of them emotionally.”

“Why’s that?”

“I…” He tipped back his head, stared at the clouds. “I don’t want to talk anymore, man. Okay? Let’s just fish.”

It began to snow again, tiny flakes, the kind that presage a big fall, but we kept fishing, jiggling our lines in the dead water, drinking Iron City. Something was troubling Rudy, but I didn’t press him. I thought about Andrea. She planned to get off early and we were going to dinner in Waterford and maybe catch a movie. I was anticipating kissing her, touching her in the dark, while the new James Bond blew stuff up or (this was more likely) Kenneth Branagh destroyed As You Like It , when a tremor ran across the surface of the pond. Both Rudy and I sat up straight and peered. “T. Rex is coming,” I said. An instant later, the pond was lashed into a turbulence that sent waves slopping in all directions, as if a large swimmer had drawn near the surface, then made a sudden turn, propelling itself down toward its customary haunts with a flick of its tail. Yet we saw nothing. Nary a fin nor scale nor section of plated armor. We waited, breathless, for the beast to return.

“Definitely not a current,” said Rudy.

Except for the fact that Rudy didn’t show, the EP release went well. The music was great, the audience responsive, we sold lots of CDs and souvenirs, including Average Joe dogtags and Joe Stanky’s Army khaki Tshirts, with the pear-shaped (less so after diets and death marches) one’s silhouette in white beneath the arc of the lettering. This despite Stanky’s obvious displeasure with everyone involved. He was angry at me because I had stolen his top hat and refused to push back the time of the performance to ten o’clock so he could join the crowd in front of the library waiting for the return of Black William (their number had swelled to more than three hundred since the arrival of the science team from Pitt, led by a youngish professor who, with his rugged build and mustache and plaid wool shirts, might have stepped out of an ad for trail mix). He was angry at Geno and Jerry for the usual reasons—they were incompetent clowns, they didn’t understand the music, and they had spurned the opportunity to watch TV with him and Liz. Throughout the hour and a quarter show, he sulked and spoke not a word to the audience, and then grew angry at them when a group of frat boys initiated a chant of “Skanky, Skanky, Skanky…” Yet the vast majority were blown away and my night was made when I spotted an A&R man from Atlantic sneaking around.