The Best of Lucius Shepard (49 page)

“Lookit
here,” said Wardell, a mean grin slicing across his face. “The ho already done
got herself a man. C’mon, bro’! We saved ya a piece.”

Long-buried
emotions were kindled in Buddha’s heart. Rage, love, fear. Their onset toe
swift and powerful for him to reject. “Get your hand off him,” he said,
pitching his voice deep and full of menace.

Wardell’s
lean face went slack, and his grin seemed to deepen, as if the lustful
expression engraved on his skull were showing through the skin, as if he
perceived in Buddha an object of desire infinitely more gratifying than Taboo.

Wardell
nodded at the man kneeling between Taboo’s legs, and the man flung himself at
Buddha, pulling a knife and swinging it in a vicious arc. Buddha caught the
man’s wrist, and the man’s violence was transmitted through his flesh, seeding
fury in his heart. He squeezed the man’s wristbones until they ground together,
and the knife fell to the floor. Then he pinned the man against the wall and
began smashing his head against it, avoiding the fingers that clawed at his
eyes. He heard himself yelling, heard bone splinter.

The
man’s eyes went unfocused, and he grew heavy in Buddha’s grasp; he slumped
down, the back of his head leaving a glistening red track across a puffy cloud.
Buddha knew he was dead, but before he could absorb the fact, something struck
him in the back, a liver punch that landed with the stunning impact of a
bullet, and he dropped like a stone.

The
pain was luminous. He imagined it lighting him up inside with the precise
articulation of an X-ray. Other blows rained in upon him, but he felt only the
effects of that first one. He made out Wardell looming over him, a slim
leathery giant delivering kick after kick. Blackness frittered at the edges of
his vision. Then a scream—a sound like a silver splinter driven into Buddha’s brain—and
there was Taboo, something bright in his hand, something that flashed downward
into Wardell’s chest as he turned, lifted, flashed down again. Wardell stumbled
back, looking puzzled, touching a red stain on the shirtfront, and then
appeared to slide away into the blackness at the corner of Buddha’s left eye.
Buddha lay gasping for breath: the last kick had landed in the pit of his
stomach. After a second his vision began to clear, and he saw Taboo standing
above Wardell’s body, the other man’s knife in his hand.

With
his sleek breasts and male genitalia and the bloody knife, he seemed a creature
out of a myth. He kneeled beside Buddha. “You awright?” he asked. “Buddha? You
awright?”

Buddha
managed a nod. Taboo’s eyes reminded him of the eyes of the fish in his
dream—aswarm with terrors—and his magic was heavy wash in the air, stronger
than Buddha had ever seen it.

“I
never wanted to kill nobody,” said Taboo tremulously. “That’s the
last
thing
I wanted to do.” He glanced at the two corpses, and his lips quivered. Buddha
looked at them, too.

Sprawled
in oddly graceful attitudes on the green grass amid a calligraphy of blood,
they appeared to be spelling out some kind of cryptic message. Buddha thought
if he kept staring at them, their meaning would come clear.

“Oh,
God!” said Taboo. “They gon’ be comin’ for me, they gon’ put me in jail! I
can’t live in jail. What am I gon’ do?”

And
to his astonishment, looking back and forth between the corpses and Taboo’s
magical aura, Buddha found he could answer that question.

*
* * *

The answer was, he realized,
also the solution to the problem of his life; it was a means of redemption, one
he could have arrived at by no other process than that of his fifteen-year
retreat.

Its
conception had demanded an empty womb in which to breed and had demanded as
well an apprehension of magical principle: that had been supplied by his dream
of Africa. And having apprehended the full measure of this principle, he
further realized he had misunderstood the nature of Taboo’s powers. He had
assumed that they had been weakened by the wrongness of his birth and would
mature once he went under the knife; but he now saw that they were in
themselves a way of effecting the transformation with a superior result, that
they had needed this moment of violence and desperation to attain sufficient
strength. Buddha felt himself filling with calm, as if the knowledge had
breached an internal reservoir that had dammed calmness up.

“You
need a disguise,” he said. “And you got the perfect disguise right at your
fingertips.” He proceeded to explain.

“You
crazy, Buddha!” said Taboo. “No way I can do that.”

“You
ain’t got no choice.”

“You
crazy!” Taboo repeated, backing away. “Crazy!”

“C’mon
back here!”

“Naw,
man! I gotta get away, I gotta....” Taboo backed into the door, felt for the
knob, and—eyes wide, panic-stricken—wrenched it open. His mouth opened as if he
were going to say something else, but instead he turned and bolted down the
hall.

The
pain in Buddha’s back was throbbing, spreading a sick weakness all through his
flesh, and he passed out for a few seconds.

When
he regained consciousness, he saw Taboo standing in the doorway, looking
insubstantial due to the heavy wash of magic around him; in fact, the whole
room had an underwater lucidity, everything wavering, like a dream fading in
from the immaterial. “See?” said Buddha. “Where you gon’ go, man? You barely
able to make it here!”

“I
don’t know, I’ll...maybe I’ll....” Taboo’s voice, too, had the qualities of
something out of a dream; distant and having a faint echo.

“Sheeit!”
Buddha reached out to Taboo. “Gimme a hand up.”

Taboo
helped him to his feet and into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. Buddha
felt as if he might sink forever into the black satin coverlet.

“Show
me that new dress you bought,” he said. Taboo went to the closet, pulled out a
hanger, and held the dress against his body to display its effect. It was white
silk, low-cut, with a scattering of sequins all over.

“Aw,
man,” said Buddha. “Yeah, that’s your dress. You be knockin’ the boys’ eyes out
wearin’ that.. .if they could ever see it. If you’d just do what’s right. You’d
be too beautiful for Detroit. You’d need to get someplace south, place where
the moon shines bright as the sun. ‘Cause that’s what kinda beautiful you gon’
be. Moon beautiful. Miami, maybe. That’d suit ya. Get you a big white car,
drive down by them fancy hotels, and let all them fancy people have a look at
ya. And they gon’ lay down and beg to get next to you, man....”

As
Buddha talked, conjuring the feminine future with greater seductiveness and
invention than ever before, the heat haze of Taboo’s magic grew still more
visible, taking on the eerie miragelike aspect of the mists beyond the lake in
Buddha’s Africa; and after Buddha had finished, Taboo sat on the edge of the
bed, holding the dress across his lap. “I’m scared,” he said. “What if it don’t
work?”

“You
always been scared,” said Buddha. “You bein’ scared’s what got them two men
dead out there. Time for that to stop. You know you got the power. So go on!”

“I
can’t!”

“You
ain’t got no choice.” Buddha pulled Taboo’s head down gently and kissed him
openmouthed, breathing into him a calming breath. “Do it,” he said. “Do it
now.”

Hesitantly
Taboo came to his feet. “Don’t you go nowhere now. You wait for me.”

“You
know I will.”

“Awright.”
Taboo took a few steps toward the bathroom, then stopped. “Buddha, I don’t....”

“Go
on!”

Taboo
lowered his head, walked slowly into the bathroom, and closed the door.

Buddha
heard the tub filling, heard the splashing as Taboo climbed into it. Then heard
him begin to mutter his charms. He needed to sleep, to fix, but he kept awake
as long as he could, trying to help Taboo with the effort of his will. He could
feel the vibrations of the magic working through the bathroom door. Finally he
gave in to the pressures of exhaustion and the throbbing in his back and
drifted off to sleep; the pain followed him into the blackness of sleep,
glowing like the core of his being. He woke sometime later to hear Taboo
calling his name and spotted him in the darkest corner of the room—a shadow
outlined by painted stars.

“Taboo?”

“It
don’t feel right, Buddha.” Taboo’s voice had acquired a husky timbre.

“C’mere,
man.”

Taboo
came a step closer, and though Buddha was still unable to see him, he could
smell the heat and bitterness of the herbs.

“It
worked, didn’t it?” Buddha asked. “It musta worked.”

“I
think.... But I feel so peculiar.”

“You
just ain’t used to it is all.... Now c’mere!”

Taboo
moved still closer, and Buddha made out a naked young woman standing a few feet
away. Slim and sexy, with shoulder-length black hair and high, small breasts
and a pubic triangle that showed no sign of ever having been male.

The
air around Taboo was still and dark. No ripples, no heat haze. The magic had
all been used.

“I
told ya,” said Buddha. “You beautiful.”

“I
ain’t...I just ordinary.” But Taboo sounded pleased.

“Ordinary
as angels,” Buddha said. “That’s how ordinary you are.”

Taboo
smiled. It was faltering at first, that smile, but it grew wider when Buddha
repeated the compliment: the smile of a woman gradually becoming confident of
her feminine powers. She lay down beside Buddha and fingered his belt buckle.
“I love you, Buddha,” she said. “Make me feel right.”

Love
was a steady flow from her, as tangible as a perfume, and Buddha felt it
seeping into him, coloring his calm emptiness. On instinct he started to reject
the emotion, but then he realized he had one more duty to fulfill, the most
taxing and compromising duty of all. He reached down and touched the place
between Taboo’s legs. Taboo stiffened and pushed her hips against his finger.

“Make
me feel right,” she said again.

Buddha
tried to turn onto his side, but the pain in his back flared. He winced and lay
motionless. “Don’t know if I can. I’m hurtin’ pretty bad.”

“I’ll
help you,” she said, her fingers working at his buckle, his zipper. “You won’t
have to do nothin’, Buddha. You just let it happen now.”

But
Buddha knew he couldn’t just let it happen, knew he had to return Taboo’s love
in order to persuade her of her rightness, her desirability. As she mounted
him, a shadow woman lifting and writhing against the false night of the ceiling
stars, strangely weightless, he pinned his dead wife’s features to her darkened
face, remembered
her
ways,
her
secrets. All the love and lust he
had fought so long to deny came boiling up from nowhere, annihilating his calm.
He dug his fingers into the plump flesh of her hips, wedging himself deep; he
plunged and grunted, ignoring the pain in his back, immersed again in the suety
richness of desire, in the animal turbulence of this most alluring of human
involvements. And when she cried out, a mournful note that planed away to a
whisper, like the sound a spirit makes falling through eternity, he felt the
profound satisfaction of a musician who by his dominance and skill has brought
forth a perfect tone from chaos. But afterward as she snuggled close to him,
telling him of her pleasure, her excitement, he felt only despair, fearing that
the empty product of his years of ascetic employment had been wasted in a single
night.

“Come
with me, Buddha,” she said. “Come with me to Miami. We can get us a house on
the beach and....”

“Lemme
be,” he said, his despair increasing because he wanted to go with her, to live
high in Miami and share her self-discovery, her elation. Only the pain in his
back—intensifying with every passing minute—dissuaded him, and it took all his
willpower to convince her of his resolve, to insist that she leave without him,
for Taboo and his dead wife had fused into a single entity in his mind, and the
thought of losing her again was a pain equal to the one inflicted by Johnny
Wardell.