The Best of Lucius Shepard (86 page)

Leeli
clutched at my arm, breathing fast. Nobody said nothing. Finally I came out
from behind the couch and tossed Leeli her panties. I stepped into my pants and
feeling more confident with my junk covered, I said, Have yourself a show, did
ya?

—Have
yourself a show? the blond man said, mocking me, and the baldy sniggered like a
kid who’d seen his first dirty picture.

I
pulled on my shirt. Y’know this here’s government property? Y’all be in deep
shit, I turn your asses in.

—You
saying you the government? The woman’s voice was a contralto drawl made me
think of a dollop of honey hanging off the lip of a jar. You the first
government man I seen got jailhouse ink on his arms. She turned to Leeli, who
was tugging the tank top down over her breasts. How’s about you, sweetcheeks?
You in the government, too?

Leeli
snatched up her jeans. You got no more right being here than we do!

The
woman sniffed explosively, like a cat sneezing, and the bald man said, You
can’t get much more government than we are. Government’s like mommy and daddy
to us.

Leeli
piped up, Well, whyn’t you show us your ID?

The
flow of feeling in the room was running high, like everyone was waiting for a
direction to fly off in.

—Screw
this, said the woman. We was just going for a drink. Y’all wanna come?

I
was about to say we’d do our own drinking, but Leeli said, It’s Margarita Night
over the Dixieland! and soon everybody was saying stuff like, Looked like you
was gonna fall out and God you scared the hell outa me and telling their names
and their stories. Though he didn’t seem up to the job, the blond man, Carl,
was the woman’s husband. Her name was Ava and she owned a club in Boynton Beach
where the bald man, Squire, worked as a bartender. I knew a kid name of Squire
back in high school who was accused of having sex with a neighbor’s collie.
Much as I would have enjoyed bringing this up, I kept it to myself.

We
piled out through the glass doors, both Carl and Squire heading toward the
water. Fuck you think you going? I asked.

—Ava
got her four-by-four parked down on the beach, Squire said.

I
was staring at Ava and Leeli, who were still back at the glass doors. Leeli had
her head down and Ava was talking. Something didn’t sit right about the way
they were together.

—Government
don’t care what goes on at the house no more, Squire said, apparently thinking
I was off onto another track. We been partying here for years.

*
* * *

You know that kid’s toy ball
you can bounce and instead of coming straight back to your hand, it goes
dribbling off along the floor or kicks off to the side? My expectations of the
weekend had taken just that sort of wrong-angled bounce. After Leeli and I
broke in the leather couch, I assumed we’d be heading over to my place, maybe
coming up for air sometime Sunday. A shitkicker bar had for sure not been part
of the plan.

The
Dixieland was down on A1A, a concrete block eyesore with a neon sign on the
roof that spelled the name in red and blue letters, except for the N was
missing, which might have accounted for the gay boys who occasionally dropped
in and left real quick. All the waitresses were decked out in Rebel caps and
there were Confederate flags laminated on the table tops. The Friday night
crowd was men in cowboy hats who had never set a horse and women with flakes of
mascara clinging to their lashes and skirts so short you could see the tattooed
butterflies, roses, hummingbirds and such advertising their little treasures
whenever they hopped up onto a barstool. Some country & western goatboy was
howling on the jukebox about the world owed him a living, while a few couples
dragged around the dance floor, Ava and Leeli among them. Their relationship
appeared to be deepening.

Carl
fell in love with a digital beer display behind the bar that showed a bikini
girl waterskiing. I was coming to understand the boy must have some empty rooms
in his attic. He stood gawking at the thing like he was stoned on Jesus love.
That left Squire and me alone at a table, sucking on our margaritas. Shaving
his head probably hadn’t done for Squire what he hoped. It made his face
resemble a cream pie somebody drew a man-in-the moon face on, but he tried to
sell the look as being the front door into the world of a badass individual
with secrets you would want to know. It was kinda pathetic. He threw a couple
of insults my way and when that didn’t get a rise, he went on about how tight
he was with Carl and Ava, how they’d been partying for two months solid, saying
me and Leeli needed to get on board the party train, they’d sure show us a
time.

—Two
month vacation must get in the way of your bartending, I said and he said,
Huh?, then got flustered and came back with, Oh, yeah... hell, I just work when
we’re there, y’know.

The
juke box played the Dixie Chicks. Leeli squealed, clapped her hands, and did
this slow, snaky hula, dancing like she was on stage at a titty bar and using
Ava for the pole.

—We
ain’t hardly ever there, though. Squire said this like it was super important
for me to understand. He started to spout more worthless bullshit, but I told
him to hang onto the thought. I walked over to Ava and tapped her on the
shoulder and said, ‘Scuse me, buddy. Believe it’s my turn. She flashed a
condescending smile and backed off. Leeli kept her eyes closed like she didn’t
care what was going on, she was so lost in the music, but when I put my leg
where Ava’s hip had been she said, That was rude!

—Yeah
she was, I said.

She
punched me in the chest, but didn’t leave off dry-humping my leg. Just ‘cause
we did the deed, don’t you go waving no papers at me.

—That
wasn’t my intention.

She
didn’t hear and I said it again louder.

This
ticked her off. Just what is your intention? she asked.

—I
got a friend in Lauderdale lets me use his beach house. I thought we could
drive down next weekend and see how it goes. But hey, you wanna fuck the old
skank, do it.

—Well,
maybe I will! She looped her arms about my neck and smiled me up. Or maybe I’ll
wait ‘til after Lauderdale.

I
thought the two of us were back on track, but when Ava decided to hit another
bar, Leeli said in a cajoling voice, I’m having so much fun! Let’s not go home
yet! Wasn’t until we wound up in a Daytona Beach motel on Saturday morning,
sleeping in the room next to Ava’s, that I realized somewhere in the middle of
all those tequila shots, we’d climbed aboard the party train. I remembered
telling everybody about the beach house. From that I guess the idea had
developed for Ava to drive me and Leeli to Lauderdale, making frequent stops
for refreshment, with Ava paying the freight. They weren’t going to welcome me
back at the food mart when I turned up a week late for my shift, but that world
was spinning me nowhere and I thought I might take a shot at separating Ava
from some of the money she’d been throwing around. I worried about her going
after Leeli, though. We’d only had us the one night, but Leeli and I seemed to
recognize each other’s zero score in life as only folks do who’re born in a
neighborhood where the most you aspire to is a double-wide and sufficient loose
change to afford a couple of cases on the weekend. We’d both worn out our
craziness to the point where we saw we might have us a nice little run and
maybe avoid killing each other at the end. Once she loosened up and that
sick-of-it-all waitress hardness drained from her face, I saw a sweet seam in
her no one had bothered to mine.

I
left Leeli sleeping and smoked in the breezeway of the motel, watching two
rat-skinny children splash and squeak in the pool, while their two hundred
pound plus mama, milky breasts and thighs and belly squeezed into inner-tube
shapes by a lemon-yellow bathing suit, lay on a lawn chair and simmered like a
dumpling over a low flame. The drapes of Ava’s room hung open a crack and I had
a peek. All I saw of her was legs waving in the air and hands gripping
onto a headboard. The rest was hidden underneath Squire. His pimply butt was
just pumping up and down. Sitting straight in a chair beside the bed, like a
schoolboy being taught a lesson, Carl was looking on with interest. Well, come
get me Jesus, I said to myself. With Carl and Squire both bagging Ava, she
wouldn’t have much time for Leeli. I had to admire Squire’s stamina, but he
looked to be doing push-ups on a trampoline and if I was the boy’s daddy I’d
have advised him that women tend to enjoy some rhythmic variation. He finally
fell off his stroke and rolled onto his back. Ava came up flushed and sweaty,
hair sticking to her cheeks. She had a sip of water, spoke briefly to Carl,
then straddled Squire and began more-or-less to treat him like he’d been
treating her. I’d been feeling about ten cents on the dollar, but watching her
work cleaned the crust off my brain. Being the gentleman I am, I decided to buy
Leeli coffee and a Krispy Kreme before checking out the rest of my parts.

*
* * *

I hated Daytona, and not just
because I was born there, though every time I drove through Holly Hills,
redneck purgatory, and saw those little bunkerlike concrete homes with cracked
jalousie windows and chainlink fences and Big Wheels with faded colors buried
in the front yard weeds, my wattles got all red and swollen. I also hated the
beach, the kids who cruised it eight and nine to a convertible or rode around
in ten-dollar-an-hour rent-a-buggies, the bikini girls with their inch-deep
tans and MTV eyes, the boys in Hilfiger suits with an old man’s dream of
financial security stuck like an ax into their brains at birth. I hated the fucking
piped-in circus music that played along the boardwalk, sounding like it was
made of sugar beets and red dye number seven. I hated the goddamn carnival
rides and the heavy-metal curses shouting from the arcades. I liked the ocean
all right, liked the blue-green water inside the sandbar, the creamy ridges of
foam the tide left along the margin, and the power of the combers, but I wished
they rolled in to no shore. I hated the burger joints with their fried-onion
stink, their white plastic tables and chairs on a concrete deck, and walk-up
windows manned by high school geeks with connect-the-dot acne puzzles on their
foreheads, because it was at just such a joint I committed the error in
judgment that earned me a nickel in Raiford, sauntering up to the service
window so wired on crank, all I could smell was the inside of my nose, pulling
a fifty-dollar pistol, and before I could speak the magic words, two
plainclothes cops who were drinking milkshakes at the time snuck up behind me
and said to turn around real quick, they’d like that, and later in jail, Sgt.
John True, a man apparently fascinated with me, visited my cell, the first of
our many nights together, and said, When I was a kid I’s just like you—meaning,
I suppose, he no longer considered himself a dumbass hillbilly—prior to beating
me unconscious. I carried a lot of anger relating to Daytona and that afternoon
while we were sitting at a white plastic table on a concrete deck, staring at
baskets of onion rings and fried shrimp so heavily breaded, eating one was like
eating a hush puppy with a flavorless crunchy prize inside, I let angry out for
exercise.

Squire
got things off to a start by going on about how easy it would be to knock over
the Joyland Arcade. You gotta have balls, he said, cause time to do it’s when
it’s crowded. You walk on up and let ‘em see your piece and grab them bags of
money! He looked to Ava like he was expecting to have his belly rubbed. She
smiled and dribbled salt from a packet onto her rings.

—You
got a hard-on for quarters? I asked. They don’t bag nothing but the change.

—You
have people with you. Three or four of ‘em so you can carry more.

—You
think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one
way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.

—You
take the bills too, Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.

—Where
am I? I asked Leeli.

Her
expression begged me to shut up.

—Seriously.
Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid
rules?

Carl
chuckled and I said, Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and
make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell,
Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of
popcorn.