The Best of Lucius Shepard (104 page)

“Everyone
fibs now and again.”

“She
lied about something pretty crucial.”

I
suspected that Jo had told him he hadn’t always been Josey Pellerin. “Mind if I
ask what?”

“Yeah,”
he said. “I mind.”

I
watched him out of the corner of my eye. His features relaxed from their
belligerent expression and he appeared to be tracking the progress of something
through the air. I asked what he was looking at, half-expecting him to claim
that he had discovered a microscopic planet with an erratic orbit, but he said,
“A gnat.” Then he laughed. “A gnat with a fucking aura.”

“You
see that shit all the time?”

“Auras?
Yeah. Weirder stuff than that.”

“Like
what?”

“Shadows.”
He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a wad of bills, napkins, gum
wrappers—there must have been thirty or forty hundreds mixed in with the
debris; he selected a twenty, tossed the rest on the table and hailed the blond
waitress. “Margarita rocks,” he told her. “Salt.”

“Better
slow down,” I said. “If you’re going to play poker, that is.”

“You
kidding me? I need a handicap to play with those old ladies.”

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.

Pellerin
was laughing as I pulled him away from the pool, and he was still laughing when
I shoved him through the double glass doors of the hotel. I adopted a
threatening pose, intending to lecture him, and he made an effort to stifle his
laughter; but then I started laughing, too, and his mirth redoubled. We stood
wheezing and giggling in the lobby, giddy as teenage girls, drawing hostile
stares from the guests waiting on line at Reception, enduring the drudgery of
check-in. At the time I assumed that we were laughing at two different things,
or at different aspects of the same thing, but now I’m not so sure.

That
picture of Pellerin laughing by the side of the pool, bills fluttering out
above the water.... It emerges from the smoke of memory like a painted dream,
like one of those images that come just before a commercial break in a
television drama, when the action freezes and the colors are altered by a
laboratory process. Though it seems unreal, the rest—by comparison—seems in
retrospect less than unreal, a dusting of atoms, whispers, and suggestions of
hue that we must arrange into a story in order to lend body to this central
moment. Yet the stories we create are invariably inaccurate and the central
moments we choose to remember change us as much or more as we change them. And
so, in truth, my memories are no more “real” than Josey Pellerin’s, although
they have, as Jo would put it, more foundation.... But I was saying, that
picture of Pellerin beside the pool stayed with me because, I believe, it was
the first time I had acknowledged him as a man and not a freak. And when I went
to see him late the next morning, it was motivated more by curiosity over how
he’d made out with Tammy and Tomasina than by caretaker concerns.