The Best of Lucius Shepard (110 page)

“Yeah,”
I said, my tongue thick, throat raw.

Something
was inserted between my lips and a cool liquid soothed the rawness. My chest
hurt. My whole body hurt.

“How’s
that? Better?” The voice had a familiar ring.

“I
can’t see,” I said. “Everything’s a blur.”

“The
doctor says you’ll be seeing fine in a few days.”

I
asked for more water and, after I had drunk, I said, “I know you ... don’t I?”

“Of
course. Jocundra ... Jo.” A pause. “Your partner. We live together. Don’t you
remember?”

“I
think. Yeah.”

“You’ve
been through a terrible ordeal. Your memory will be hazy for awhile.”

“What
happened to me?”

“You
were shot. The important thing is, you’re going to be fine.”

“Who
shot me? Why ... what happened?”

“I’ll
tell you soon. I promise. You don’t need the stress now.”

“I
want to know who shot me!”

“You
have to trust me,” she said, placing a hand on my chest. “There’s psychological
damage as well as physical. We have to go cautiously. I’ll tell you when you’re
strong enough. Won’t you trust me ‘til then?”

I
asked her to come closer.

Something
swam toward me through the gray. I made out a crimson mouth and enormous brown
eyes. Gradually, the separate features resolved into a face that, though
blurred, was indisputably open and lovely.

“You’re
beautiful,” I said.

“Thank
you.” A pause. “It’s been awhile since you told me that.”

Her
face withdrew. I couldn’t find her in the murk. Anxious, I called out. “I’m
here,” she said. “I’m just getting something.”

“What?”

“Cream
to rub on your chest and shoulders. It’ll make you feel better.”

She
sat on the bed—I felt the mattress indent—and she began massaging me. Each
caress gave me a shock, albeit gentler than the ones I had felt initially. Soft
hands spread the cream across my chest and I began to relax, to feel repentant
that I had neglected her. I offered apology for doing so, saying that I must
have been preoccupied.

Her
lips brushed my forehead. “It’s okay. Actually, I’m hopeful...”

“Hopeful?
About what?”

“It’s
nothing.”

“No,
tell me.”

“I’m
hoping some good will come of all this,” she said. “We’ve been having our
problems lately. And I hope this time we spend together, while you recuperate,
it’ll make you remember how much I love you.”

I
groped for her hand, found it. We stayed like that a while, our fingers mixing
together. A white shape melted up from the grayness. I strained to identify it
and realized it was her breast sheathed in white cloth.

“I’m
up here,” she said, laughter in her voice, and leaned closer so I could see her
face again. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? The doctor said I
should test your memory. So we can learn if there’s been any significant loss.”

“Yeah,
okay. I’m feeling more together now.”

I
heard papers rustling and asked what she was doing.

“They
gave me some questions to ask. I can’t find them.” More rustling. “Here they
are. The first one’s a gimmee. Do you recall your name?”

“Jack,”
I said confidently. “Jack Lamb.”

“And
what do you do? Your profession?”

I
opened my mouth, ready to spit out the answer. When nothing came to me, I
panicked. I probed around in the gray nothing that seemed to have settled over
my brain, beginning to get desperate. She touched the inside of my wrist, a
touch that left a trail of sparkling sensation on my skin, and told me not to
force it. And then I saw the answer, saw it as clearly as I might see a shining
coin stuck in silt at the bottom of a well, the first of a horde of memories
waiting to be unearthed, a treasure of anecdote and event.

Firmly,
and with a degree of pride as befitted my station, I said, “I’m a financier.”

<>

*
* * *

STARS
SEEN THROUGH STONE

I was smoking a joint on the steps of the public
library when a cold wind blew in from no cardinal point, but from the top of
the night sky, a force of pure perpendicularity that bent the sparsely leaved
boughs of the old alder shadowing the steps straight down toward the Earth, as
if a gigantic someone directly above were pursing his lips and aiming a long
breath directly at the ground. For the duration of that gust, fifteen or twenty
seconds, my hair did not flutter but was pressed flat to the crown of my head
and the leaves and grass and weeds on the lawn also lay flat. The phenomenon
had a distinct border—leaves drifted along the sidewalk, testifying that a less
forceful, more fitful wind presided beyond the perimeter of the lawn. No one
else appeared to notice. The library, a blunt nineteenth century relic of
undressed stone, was not a popular point of assembly at any time of day, and
the sole potential witness apart from myself was an elderly gentleman who was
hurrying toward McGuigan’s Tavern at a pace that implied a severe alcohol
dependency. This happened seven months prior to the events central to this
story, but I offer it to suggest that a good deal of strangeness goes unmarked
by the world (at least by the populace of Black William, Pennsylvania), and,
when taken in sum, such occurrences may be evidence that strangeness is visited
upon us with some regularity and we only notice its extremes.

Ten years
ago, following my wife’s graduation from Yale Law, we set forth in our decrepit
Volvo, heading for northern California, where we hoped to establish a community
of sorts with friends who had moved to that region the previous year. We chose
to drive on blue highways for their scenic value and decided on a route that
ran through Pennsylvania’s Bittersmith Hills, knuckled chunks of coal and
granite, forested with leafless oaks and butternut, ash and elder, that—under
heavy snow and threatening skies—composed an ominous prelude to the smoking
redbrick town nestled in their heart. As we approached Black William, the Volvo
began to rattle, the engine died, and we coasted to a stop on a curve
overlooking a forbidding vista: row houses the color of dried blood huddled
together along the wend of a sluggish, dark river (the Polozny), visible
through a pall of gray smoke that settled from the chimneys of a sprawling
prisonlike edifice—also of brick—on the opposite shore. The Volvo proved to be
a total loss. Since our funds were limited, we had no recourse other than to
find temporary housing and take jobs so as to pay for a new car in which to
continue our trip. Andrea, whose specialty was labor law, caught on with a firm
involved in fighting for the rights of embattled steelworkers. I hired on at
the mill, where I encountered three part-time musicians lacking a singer. This
led to that, that to this, Andrea and I grew apart in our obsessions, had
affairs, divorced, and, before we realized it, the better part of a decade had
rolled past. Though initially I felt trapped in an ugly, dying town, over the
years I had developed an honest affection for Black William and its citizens,
among whom I came to number myself.

After a
brief and perhaps illusory flirtation with fame and fortune, my band broke up,
but I managed to build a home recording studio during its existence and this
became the foundation of a career. I landed a small business grant and began to
record local bands on my own label, Soul Kiss Records. Most of the CDs I
released did poorly, but in my third year of operation, one of my projects, a
metal group calling themselves Meanderthal, achieved a regional celebrity and I
sold management rights and the masters for their first two albums to a major
label. This success gave me a degree of visibility and my post office box was
flooded with demos from bands all over the country. Over the next six years I
released a string of minor successes and acquired an industry-wide reputation
of having an eye for talent. It had been my immersion in the music business
that triggered the events leading to my divorce and, while Andrea was happy for
me, I think it galled her that I had exceeded her low expectations. After a
cooling-off period, we had become contentious friends and whenever we met for
drinks or lunch, she would offer deprecating comments about the social value of
my enterprise, and about my girlfriend, Mia, who was nine years younger than I,
heavily tattooed, and—in Andrea’s words—dressed “like a color-blind
dominatrix.”

“You’ve got
some work to do, Vernon,” she said once. “You know, on the taste thing? It’s
like you traded me in for a Pinto with flames painted on the hood.”

I stopped
myself from replying that it wasn’t I who had done the trading in. I understood
her comments arose from the fact that she had regrets and that she was angry at
herself: Andrea was an altruist and the notion that her renewed interest in me
might be partially inspired by envy or venality caused her to doubt her moral
legitimacy. She was attractive, witty, slender, with auburn hair and patrician
features and a forthright poise that caused men in bars, watching her pass, to
describe her as “classy.” Older and wiser, able by virtue of the
self-confidence I had gained to cope with her sharp tongue, I had my own
regrets; but I thought we had moved past the point at which a reconciliation
was possible and refrained from giving them voice.

In late
summer of the year when the wind blew straight down, I listened to a demo sent
me by one Joseph Stanky of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Stanky billed himself as
Local Profitt, Jr. and his music, post-modern deconstructed blues sung in a
gravelly, powerful baritone, struck me as having cult potential. I called his
house that afternoon and was told by his mother that “Joey’s sleeping.” That
night, around three a.m., Stanky returned my call. Being accustomed to the
tactless ways of musicians, I set aside my annoyance and said I was interested
in recording him. In the course of our conversation, Stanky told me he was
twenty-six, virtually penniless, and lived in his mother’s basement,
maintaining throughout a churlish tone that dimmed my enthusiasm. Nevertheless,
I offered to pay his bus fare to Black William and to put him up during the
recording process. Two days later, when he stepped off a bus at the Trailways
station, my enthusiasm dimmed further. A more unprepossessing human would be
difficult to imagine. He was short, pudgy, with skin the color of a new potato
and so slump-shouldered that for a moment I thought he might be deformed.
Stringy brown hair provided an unsightly frame for a doughy face with a bulging
forehead and a wispy soul patch. His white T-shirt was spattered with food
stains, a Jackson Pollack work-in-progress; the collar of his windbreaker was
stiff with grime. Baggy chinos and a trucker wallet completed his ensemble. I
knew this gnomish figure must be Stanky, but didn’t approach until I saw him
claim two guitar cases from the luggage compartment. When I introduced myself,
instead of expressing gratitude or pleasure, he put on a pitiful expression and
said in a wheedling manner, “Can you spot me some bucks for cigarettes, man? I
ran out during the ride.”

I advanced
him another hundred, with which he purchased two cartons of Camel Lights and a
twelve-pack of Coca-Cola Classic (these, I learned, were basic components of
his nutrition and, along with Quaker Instant Grits, formed the bulk of his
diet), and took a roundabout way home, thinking I’d give him a tour of the town
where he would spend the next few weeks. Stanky displayed no interest
whatsoever in the mill, the Revolutionary War-era Lutheran Church, or Garnant
House (home of the town’s founding father), but reacted more positively to the
ziggurat at the rear of Garnant house, a corkscrew of black marble erected in
eccentric tribute to the founding father’s wife, Ethelyn Garnant, who had died
in childbirth; and when we reached the small central park where stands the
statue of her son, Stanky said, “Hey, that’s decent, man!” and asked me to stop
the car.

The statue
of William Garnant had been labeled an eyesore by the Heritage Committee, a
group of women devoted to preserving our trivial past, yet they were forced to
include it in their purview because it was the town’s most recognizable
symbol—gift shops sold replica statuettes and the image was emblazoned on
coffee mugs, post cards, paperweights, on every conceivable type of souvenir.
Created in the early 1800s by Gunter Hahn, the statue presented Black William
in age-darkened bronze astride a rearing stallion, wearing a loose-fitting
shirt and tight trousers, gripping the reins with one hand, pointing toward the
library with the other, his body twisted and head turned in the opposite
direction, his mouth open in—judging by his corded neck—a cry of alarm, as if
he were warning the populace against the dangers of literacy. Hahn did not take
his cues from the rather sedentary monuments of his day, but (impossibly)
appeared to have been influenced by the work of heroic comic book artists such
as Jim Steranko and Neal Adams, and thus the statue had a more fluid dynamic
than was customary ... or perhaps he was influenced by Black William himself,
for it was he who had commissioned the sculpture and overseen its construction.
This might explain the figure’s most controversial feature, that which had
inspired generations of high school students to highlight it when they painted
the statue after significant football victories: Thanks to an elevated position
in the saddle, Black William’s crotch was visible, and—whether intended or an
inadvertency, an error in the casting process that produced an unwanted rumple
in the bronze—it seems that he possessed quite a substantial package. It always
gladdened my heart to see the ladies of the Heritage Committee, embarked upon
their annual spring clean-up, scrubbing away with soap and rags at Black
William’s genital pride.