The Best of Lucius Shepard (31 page)

“And
hummingbirds. This friend of mine was down there once on a hummingbird
expedition, said there was a million kinds. I thought he was sort of a creep,
y’know, for being into collecting hummingbirds.” He opened his eyes and had to
close them again. “I guess I thought hummingbird collecting wasn’t very
relevant to the big issues.”

“David?”
Concern in her voice.

“I’m okay.”
The smell of her perfume was more cloying than he remembered. “You get there by
boat, right? Must be a pretty big boat. I’ve never been on a real boat, just
this rowboat my uncle had. He used to take me fishing off Coney Island, we’d
tie up to a buoy and catch all these poison fish. You shoulda seen some of ‘em.
Like mutants. Rainbow-colored eyes, weird growths all over. Scared the hell
outta me to think about eating fish.”

“I had an
uncle who ... “

“I used to
think about all the ones that must be down there too deep for us to catch.
Giant blowfish, genius sharks, whales with hands. I’d see ‘em swallowing the
boat, I’d ... “

“Calm down,
David.” She kneaded the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine.

“I’m okay,
I’m okay.” He pushed her hand away; he did not need shivers along with
everything else. “Lemme hear some more ‘bout Panama.”

“I told you,
I’ve never been there.”

“Oh, yeah.
Well, how ‘bout Costa Rica? You been to Costa Rica.” Sweat was popping out all
over his body. Maybe he should go for a swim. He’d heard there were manatees in
the Rio Dulce. “Ever seen a manatee?” he asked.

“David!”

She must
have leaned close, because he could feel her heat spreading all through him,
and he thought maybe that would help, smothering in her heat, heavy motion, get
rid of this shakiness. He’d take her into that hammock and see just how hot she
got.
How
hot
she got, how
hot
she got.
The words did a
train rhythm in his head. Afraid to open his eyes, he reached out blindly and
pulled her to him. Bumped faces, searched for her mouth. Kissed her. She kissed
back. His hand slipped up to cup a breast. Jesus, she felt good! She felt like
salvation, like Panama, like what you fall into when you sleep.

But then it
changed, changed slowly, so slowly that he didn’t notice until it was almost
complete, and her tongue was squirming in his mouth, as thick and stupid as a
snail’s foot, and her breast, oh shit, her breast was jiggling, trembling with
the same wormy juices that were in his left hand. He pushed her
off,
opened
his eyes. Saw crude-stitch eyelashes sewn to her cheeks. Lips parted, mouth
full of bones. Blank face of meat. He got to his feet, pawing the air, wanting
to rip down the film of ugliness that had settled over him.

“David?” She
warped his name, gulping the syllables as if she were trying to swallow and
talk at once.

Frog voice,
devil voice.

He spun
around, caught an eyeful of black sky and spiky trees and a pitted bone-knob
moon trapped in a weave of branches. Dark warty shapes of the huts, doors into
yellow flame with crooked shadow men inside. He blinked, shook his head. It
wasn’t going away, it was real. What was this place? Not a village in
Guatemala, naw, un-uh. He heard a strangled wildman grunt come from his throat,
and he backed away, backed away from everything. She walked after him, croaking
his name. Wig of black straw, dabs of shining jelly for eyes. Some of the
shadow men were herky-jerking out of their doors, gathering behind her, talking
about him in devil language. Long-legged licorice-skinned demons with drumbeat
hearts, faceless nothings from the dimension of sickness. He backed another few
steps.

“I can see
you,” he said. “I know what you are.”

“It’s all
right, David,” she said, and smiled.

Sure! She
thought he was going to buy the smile, but he wasn’t fooled. He saw how it
broke over her face the way something rotten melts through the bottom of a wet
grocery sack after it’s been in the garbage for a week. Gloating smile of the
Queen Devil Bitch. She had done this to him, had teamed up with the bad life in
his hand and done witchy things to his head. Made him see down to the layer of
shit-magic she lived in.

“I see you,”
he said.

He tripped,
went backward flailing, stumbling, and came out of it running toward the town.

Ferns
whipped his legs, branches cut at his face. Webs of shadow fettered the trail,
and the shrilling insects had the sound of a metal edge being honed. Up ahead,
he spotted a big moonstruck tree standing by itself on a rise overlooking the
water. A grandfather tree, a white magic tree. It summoned to him. He stopped
beside it, sucking air. The moonlight cooled him off, drenched him with silver,
and he understood the purpose of the tree. Fountain of whiteness in the dark
wood, shining for him alone. He made a fist of his left hand. The thing inside
the hand eeled frantically as if it knew what was coming. He studied the deeply
grooved, mystic patterns of the bark and found the point of confluence. He steeled
himself. Then he drove his fist into the trunk. Brilliant pain lanced up his
arm, and he cried out. But he hit the tree again, hit it a third time. He held
the hand tight against his body, muffling the pain. It was already swelling,
becoming a knuckle-less cartoon hand; but nothing moved inside it. The
riverbank, with its rustlings and shadows, no longer menaced him; it had been
transformed into a place of ordinary lights, ordinary darks, and even the
whiteness of the tree looked unmagically bright.

“David!”
Debora’s voice, and not far off.

Part of him
wanted to wait, to see whether or not she had changed for the innocent, for the
ordinary. But he couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust himself, and he set out
running once again.

Mingolla
caught the ferry to the west bank, thinking that he would find Gilbey, that a
dose of Gilbey’s belligerence would ground him in reality. He sat in the bow
next to a group of five other soldiers, one of whom was puking over the side,
and to avoid a conversation he turned away and looked down into the black water
slipping past. Moonlight edged the wavelets with silver, and among those gleams
it seemed he could see reflected the broken curve of his life: a kid living for
Christmas, drawing pictures, receiving praise, growing up mindless to high
school, sex, and drugs, growing beyond that, beginning to draw pictures again,
and then, right where you might expect the curve to assume a more meaningful
shape, it was sheared off, left hanging, its process demystified and explicable.
He realized how foolish the idea of the ritual had been. Like a dying man
clutching a vial of holy water, he had clutched at magic when the logic of
existence had proved untenable. Now the frail linkages of that magic had been
dissolved, and nothing supported him: he was falling through the dark zones of
the war, waiting to be snatched by one of its monsters. He lifted his head and
gazed at the west bank. The shore toward which he was heading was as black as a
bat’s wing and inscribed with arcana of violent light. Rooftops and palms were
cast in silhouette against a rainbow haze of neon; gassy arcs of blood red and
lime green and indigo were visible between them: fragments of glowing beasts.
The wind bore screams and wild music. The soldiers beside him laughed and
cursed, and the one guy kept on puking. Mingolla rested his forehead on the
wooden rail, just to feel something solid.

At the Club
Demonio, Gilbey’s big-breasted whore was lounging by the bar, staring into her
drink. Mingolla pushed through the dancers, through heat and noise and veils of
lavender smoke; when he walked up to the whore, she put on a professional smile
and made a grab for his crotch. He fended her off. “Where’s Gilbey?” he
shouted. She gave him a befuddled look; then the light dawned. “Meengolla?” she
said. He nodded. She fumbled in her purse and pulled out a folded paper. “Ees
frawm Geel-bee,” she said. “Forr me, five dol-larrs.”

He handed
her the money and took the paper. It proved to be a Christian pamphlet with a
pen-and-ink sketch of a rail-thin, aggrieved-looking Jesus on the front, and
beneath the sketch, a tract whose first line read, “The last days are in
season.” He turned it over and found a handwritten note on the back. The note
was pure Gilbey. No explanation, no sentiment. Just the basics.

I’m
gone to Panama. You want to make that trip, check out a guy named Ruy Barros in
Livingston. He’ll fix you up. Maybe I’ll see you.

G.

Mingolla had
believed that his confusion had peaked, but the fact of Gilbey’s desertion
wouldn’t fit inside his head, and when he tried to make it fit he was left more
confused than ever. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand what had happened. He
understood it perfectly; he might have predicted it. Like a crafty rat who had
seen his favorite hole blocked by a trap, Gilbey had simply chewed a new hole
and vanished through it. The thing that confused Mingolla was his total lack of
referents. He and Gilbey and Baylor had seemed to triangulate reality, to
locate each other within a coherent map of duties and places and events; and
now that they were both gone, Mingolla felt utterly bewildered. Outside the
club, he let the crowds push him along and gazed up at the neon animals atop
the bars. Giant blue rooster, green bull, golden turtle with fiery red eyes.
Great identities regarding him with disfavor. Bleeds of color washed from the
signs, staining the air to a garish paleness, giving everyone a mealy
complexion. Amazing, Mingolla thought, that you could breathe such grainy
discolored stuff, that it didn’t start you choking. It was all amazing, all
nonsensical. Everything he saw struck him as unique and unfathomable, even the
most commonplace of sights. He found himself staring at people—at whores, at
street kids, at an MP who was talking to another MP, patting the fender of his
jeep as if it were his big olive-drab pet—and trying to figure out what they
were really doing, what special significance their actions held for him, what
clues they presented that might help him unravel the snarl of his own
existence. At last, realizing that he needed peace and quiet, he set out toward
the airbase, thinking he would find an empty bunk and sleep off his confusion;
but when he came to the cut-off that led to the unfinished bridge, he turned
down it, deciding that he wasn’t ready to deal with gate sentries and duty
officers. Dense thickets buzzing with insects narrowed the cut-off to a path,
and at its end stood a line of sawhorses. He climbed over them and soon was
mounting a sharply inclined curve that appeared to lead to a point not far
below the lumpish silver moon.

Despite a
litter of rubble and cardboard sheeting, the concrete looked pure under the
moon, blazing bright, like a fragment of snowy light not quite hardened to the
material; and as he ascended he thought he could feel the bridge trembling to
his footsteps with the sensitivity of a white nerve. He seemed to be walking
into darkness and stars, a solitude the size of creation. It felt good and damn
lonely, maybe a little too much so, with the wind flapping pieces of cardboard
and the sounds of the insects left behind.

After a few
minutes he glimpsed the ragged terminus ahead. When he reached it, he sat down
carefully, letting his legs dangle. Wind keened through the exposed girders,
tugging at his ankles; his hand throbbed and was fever-hot. Below, multicolored
brilliance clung to the black margin of the east bank like a colony of
bioluminescent algae. He wondered how high he was. Not high enough, he thought.
Faint music was fraying on the wind—the inexhaustible delirium of San Francisco
dejuticlan—and he imagined that the flickering of the stars was caused by this
thin smoke of music drifting across them.

He tried to
think what to do. Not much occurred to him. He pictured Gilbey in Panama.
Whoring, drinking, fighting. Doing just as he had in Guatemala. That was where
the idea of desertion failed Mingolla. In Panama he would be afraid; in Panama,
though his hand might not shake, some other malignant twitch would develop; in
Panama he would resort to magical cures for his afflictions, because he would
be too imperiled by the real to derive strength from it. And eventually the war
would come to Panama. Desertion would have gained him nothing. He stared out
across the moon-silvered jungle, and it seemed that some essential part of him
was pouring from his eyes, entering the flow of the wind and rushing away past
the Ant Farm and its smoking craters, past guerrilla territory, past the
seamless join of sky and horizon, being irresistibly pulled toward a point into
which the world’s vitality was emptying. He felt himself emptying as well,
growing cold and vacant and slow. His brain became incapable of thought,
capable only of recording perceptions. The wind brought green scents that made
his nostrils flare. The sky’s blackness folded around him, and the stars were
golden pinpricks of sensation. He didn’t sleep, but something in him slept.