The Best of Lucius Shepard (50 page)

At
last, suitcase in hand, she stood in the doorway, the temptation of the world
in a white silk dress, and said, “Buddha, please won’tcha....”

“Damn
it!” he said. “You got what you want. Now get on outta here!”

“Don’t
be so harsh wit’ me, Buddha. You know I love you.”

Buddha
let his labored breathing be the answer.

“I’ll
come see ya after a while,” she said. “I’ll bring you a piece of Miami.”

“Don’t
bother.”

“Buddha?”

“Yeah.”

“In
the bathtub, Buddha...I just couldn’t touch it.”

“I’ll
take care of it.”

She
half-turned, glanced back. “I’ll always love you, Buddha.” The door swung shut
behind her, but the radiance of her love kept beaming through the wood, strong
and contaminating.

“Go
on,” he murmured. “Get you a big white car.”

He
waited until he heard the front door close then struggled up from the bed,
clamping his hand over his liver to muffle the pain. He swayed, on the verge of
passing out; but after a moment he felt steadier, although he remained
disoriented by unaccustomed emotion. However, the sight of the pitiful human
fragment lying in the herb-steeped water of the bathtub served to diminish even
that. He scooped it up in a drinking glass and flushed it down the toilet. Then
he lay back on the bed again. Closed his eyes for a minute...at least he
thought it was just a minute. But he couldn’t shake the notion that he’d been
asleep for a long, long time.

*
* * *

Buddha had to stop and rest
half a dozen times on the way back to the shooting gallery, overcome by pain,
by emotions...mostly by emotions. They were all around him as well as inside.

The
shadows of the ruined houses were the ghosts of his loves and hates; the
rustlings in the weeds were long-dead memories with red eyes and claws just
waiting for a chance to leap out and snatch him; the moon—lopsided and orange
and bloated—was the emblem of his forsaken ambitions shining on him anew. By
loving Taboo he had wasted fifteen years of effort and opened himself to all
the indulgent errors of his past, and he wished to God now he’d never done it.
Then, remembering how dreamlike everything had seemed, he had the thought that
maybe it hadn’t happened, that it had been a hallucination brought on by the
liver punch. But recalling how it had felt to make love, the womanly fervor of
Taboo’s moves, he decided it had to have been real. And real or not, he had
lived it, he was suffering for it.

When
he reached the shooting gallery he sat cross-legged on his mattress, heavy with
despair. His back ached something fierce. Pete was angry with him for being
late, but on seeing his discomfort he limped upstairs and brought down a needle
and helped him fix. “What happened to ya?” he asked, and Buddha said it wasn’t
nothin’, just a muscle spasm.

“Don’t
gimme that shit,” said Pete. “You get hit by a goddamn car, and you be tellin’
me it ain’t ‘bout nothin’.” He shook his head ruefully. “Well, to hell wit’ ya!
I’m sick of worryin’ ‘bout ya!”

Buddha
began to feel drowsy and secure there on his mattress, and he thought if he
could rid himself of the love that Taboo had imparted to him, things might be
better than before. Clearer, emptier. But he couldn’t think how to manage it.
Then he saw the opportunity that the old man presented, the need for affection
he embodied, his hollow heart.

Pete
turned to go back up the stairs, and Buddha said, “Hey, Pete!”

“Yeah,
what?”

“I
love you, man,” said Buddha, and sent his love in a focused beam of such
strength that he shivered as it went out of him.

Pete
looked at him, perplexed. His expression changed to one of pleasure, then to
annoyance. “You
love
me? Huh? Man, you been hangin’ out with that faggot
too much, that’s what you been doin’!”

He
clumped a couple of steps higher and stopped. “Don’t bother comin’ upstairs for
your goodnighter,” he said in gentler tones. “I’ll send it down wit’ somebody.”

“
‘Preciate it,” said Buddha.

He
watched Pete round the corner of the stairwell, then lay down on the mattress.
He was so free of desire and human connections that the instant he closed his
eyes, golden pinpricks bloomed behind his lids, opened into Africa, and he was
flying across the grasslands faster than ever, flying on the wings of the pain
that beat like a sick heart in his back. The antelope did not run away but
stared at him with wet, dark eyes, and the stick figures of those who guarded
the village saluted him with their spears. The shadows of the masked women
danced with the abandon of black flames, and in one of the huts a bearded old
man was relating the story of a beautiful young woman who had driven a white
car south to Miami and had lived wild for a time, had inspired a thousand men
to greater wildness, had married and....Buddha flew onward, not wanting to hear
the end of the story, knowing that the quality of the beginning was what
counted, because all stories ended the same. He was satisfied that Taboo’s
beginning had been worthwhile. He soared low above the green mountains, low
enough to hear the peaceful chants of the gorillas booming through the hidden
valleys, and soon was speeding above the lake wherein the solitary fish swam a
slow and celebratory circle, arrowing toward the mists on its far side, toward
those hallucinatory borders that he previously had neither the necessary
courage nor clarity to cross.

From
behind him sounded a distant pounding that he recognized to be someone knocking
on the door of the shooting gallery, summoning him to his duty. For an instant
he had an urge to turn back, to reinhabit the world of the senses, of
bluesy-souled hookers and wired white kids and punks who came around looking to
trade a night’s muscle work for a fix. And that urge intensified when he heard
Pete shouting, “Hey, Buddha! Ain’t you gon’ answer the goddamn door?” But
before he could act upon his impulse, he penetrated the mists and felt himself
irresistibly drawn by their mysterious central whiteness, and he knew that when
old Pete came downstairs, still shouting his angry question, the only answer he
would receive would be an almost impalpable pulse in the air like the vibration
of a gong whose clangor had just faded beneath the threshold of hearing, the
pure signal struck from oblivion, the fanfare announcing Buddha’s dominion over
the final country of the mind.

<>

*
* * *

White
Trains

Concerning the strange events

outside the Castle Monosodium
Glutamate Works.

White trains with no tracks

have been appearing on the
outskirts

of small anonymous towns,

picket fence towns in Ohio,
say,

or Iowa, places rife with solid
American values,

populated by men with ruddy
faces and weak hearts,

and women whose thoughts slide

like swaths of gingham through
their minds.

They materialize from vapor or
a cloud,

glide soundlessly to a halt in
some proximate meadow,

old-fashioned white trains with
pot-bellied smokestacks,

their coaches adorned with
filigrees of palest ivory,

packed with men in ice cream
suits and bowlers,

and lovely dark-haired women in
lace gowns.

The passengers disembark, form
into rows,

facing one another as if
preparing for a cotillion.

and the men undo their trouser
buttons,

their erections springing forth
like lean white twigs,

and they enter the embrace of
the women,

who lift their skirts to enfold
them,

hiding them completely, making
it appear

that strange lacy cocoons have
dropped from the sky

to tremble and whisper on the
bright green grass.

And when at last the women let
fall their skirts,

each of them bears a single
speck of blood

at the corner of their perfect
mouths.

As for the men, they have
vanished

like snow on a summer’s day.

I myself was witness to one
such apparition

on the outskirts of Parma, New
York,

home to the Castle Monosodium
Glutamate Works,

a town “whose more prominent
sophisticates

often drive to Buffalo for the
weekend.

I had just completed a
thirty-day sentence

for sullying the bail
bondsman’s beautiful daughter

(They all said she was a good
girl

but you could find her name on
every bathroom wall

between Nisack and Mitswego),

and having no wish to extend my
stay

I headed for the city limits.

It was early morning, the
eastern sky

still streaked with pink, mist
threading

the hedgerows, and upon a
meadow bordering

three convenience stores and a
laundromat,

I found a number of worthies
gathered,

watching the arrival of a white
train.

There was Ernest Cardwell, the
minister

of the Church of the Absolute
Solstice,

whose congregation alone of all
the Empire State

has written guarantee of
salvation,

and there were a couple of cops
big as bears

in blue suits, carrying
standard issue golden guns,

and there was a group of
scientists huddled

around the machines with which
they were

attempting to measure the
phenomenon,

and the mayor, too, was there,
passing out

his card and declaring that he
had no hand

in this unnatural business, and
the scientists

were murmuring, and Cardwell
was shouting

“Abomination,” at the handsome
men

and lovely women filing out of
the coaches,

and as for me, well, thirty
days and the memory

of the bail bondsman’s
beautiful daughter

had left me with a more
pragmatic attitude,

and ignoring the scientists’
cries of warning and

Cardwell’s predictions of
eternal hellfire,

the mayor’s threats, and the
cops’ growling,

I went toward the nearest of
the women

and gave her male partner a
shove and was amazed

to see him vanish in a haze of
sparkles

as if he had been made of
something insubstantial

like Perrier or truth.

The woman’s smile was cool and
enigmatic

and as I unzipped, her gown
enfolded me

in an aura of perfume and calm,

and through the lacework the
sun acquired

a dim red value, and every
sound was faraway,

and I could not feel the ground
beneath my feet,

only the bright sensation of
slipping inside her.

Her mouth was such a simple
curve, so pure

a crimson, it looked to be a
statement of principle,

and her dark brown eyes had no
pupils.

Looking into them, I heard a
sonorous music;

heavy German stuff, with lots
of trumpet fanfares

and skirling crescendos, and
the heaviness

of the music transfigured my
thoughts,

so that it seemed what followed
was a white act,

that I had become a magical beast
with golden eyes,

coupling with an ephemera, a
butterfly woman,

a creature of lace and heat and
silky muscle...

though in retrospect I can say
with assurance

that I’ve had better in my
time.

I think I expected to vanish,
to travel