The Best of Lucius Shepard (89 page)

From
Disneyworld the party train crossed the state to Ybor City, then up to
Jacksonville and then back down to Silver Springs. Eleven days and we hadn’t
gone a mile toward Lauderdale. Often as not, whenever Leeli was with Ava and Carl,
Squire would seek me out. He figured we were in the same boat, I expect.
Whereas Carl had one trick, Squire was proficient in two. Like he was a grade
up on Carl in Ava’s pre-school. Mostly he desired to talk about how much pussy
he’d been getting since a precocious early age, but it was plain he’d never
gotten any that hadn’t got him first. He recounted a string of fabulous
conquests, each more of a joke than the last. A female jockey, a porn star, a
TV actress, the girl who played center for the Dallas Sparks. They had the feel
of lies he’d overheard in a bar and loved so much he’d taken them in and given
them a new home. Tempted as I was to blow a hole in his picture window, I let
him rave. Sooner or later he’d wind down and go to thinking about Ava. I didn’t
have to be a mind reader to know this. Ava thoughts stamped their brand on that
boy’s face. If I had thumped his head at those moments, it would’ve bonged like
a bell.

In
Silver Springs, instead of staying at the resort, we checked into a dump on a
blue highway east of Ocala. A dozen frame bungalows painted beige with dark
brown trim and tarpaper roofs and screen doors tucked in among palmetto and
Georgia pine. From the road they looked like the backdrop for a 1940s
photograph of Grandma and Grandpa on the dashboard of their Model A, off to
homestead down in Stark or Sanford, right before Grandma gave birth to the next
gold-star-destiny generation of Scrogginses or Culpeppers or Inglethorpes. Up
close you saw them different. Tarpaper hats tipped at shady angles over chunky,
sallow faces with indifferent eyes, like Chinamen with sly intentions. The
screens documented tragic insect stories. Palmetto bugs the size of clothespins
scuttled from crack to crack. The sheets were maps of gray and yellow countries.
Facing my bed was a framed picture so dusty I could lie back and make it
anything I wanted. You smelled the toilet from the steps outside. The place
fucking cried out for a shotgun murder.

Of
an evening the owner, Mr. Gammage, a scrawny old geezer whose bermuda shorts
hung like loose sail from his hipbones, would beautify the grounds. Chop a few
weeds, prune a shrub or two, cut back a climbing cactus from a palm trunk. He’d
fuel his labors with glugs from a thermos that likely contained a libation
stiffer than Gatorade. If he was feeling frisky he’d start his electric trimmer
and hunt up stuff to trim. You could tell he loved that machine, the way he
flourished it about. Watching him survey his property, hands on hips, his
turkey-baster belly popped full out, it was my impression he was a happy man,
though it was tough to understand why. Whenever he revved up the trimmer his
wife would come to the office door and yell for him to quit making that noise.
She was built short and squarish and commonly wore a dark brown housecoat. This
sponsored the idea she might have given birth to the bungalows or was their
spirit made flesh, or something of the sort. Her face was topped off by about a
foot of forehead on which God had written a grim Commandment. I felt the air
stir when she glared at me. Inside the office there was a Bible big as a
microwave and I bet she would open it and pray for everything around her to
disappear.

I
was sitting outside my bungalow our second afternoon there, nursing a forty,
when she come flying from the office and took a run at Squire. He’d fallen out
on the grass near the highway, his head resting in a petunia bed. Mrs. Gammage
screamed, Get outa my flowers, punching the ground with a lurching,
stiff-gaited stride like an NFL guard with bad knees. Squire never moved, not
even when she kicked him. She kicked him again. I wouldn’t say I was spurred to
action, but since I was technically supposed to be on Squire’s side, I thought
I should make a supportive gesture. Time I got myself on over to the petunias,
she had stopped kicking and was bending to him and saying, Hey! Hey! She had a
thin, bitter smell, like a bin of rutabagas. Squire’s eyes were half-open, but
only one iris showed.

—’Pears
like you killed him, I said.

Mrs.
Gammage staggered back from the petunia bed, gazing at Squire with an
expression that crossed stricken with disgusted. He was already dead! I didn’t
do nothing coulda killed him.

—You
kicked him right in the side of his chest where the heart’s on. That’ll do ‘er
every time. It’s a medical fact.

I
was just fucking with her, but Squire hadn’t twitched and it dawned on me that
he actually might be dead. His color was good, though. Only dead man I’d ever
seen up close was this old boy got shot in the head outside the Surf Bar in
Ormond Beach for arguing about his girlfriend should have won the wet T-shirt
contest. All the color had left him straightaway. His skin had the look of gray
candlewax.

Mrs.
Gammage snorted and snuffled some. Maybe she was seeing herself strapped into
Old Sparky over to Raiford, or maybe she hadn’t yet gotten that specific with
self-pity and was tearing up because she felt the victim of a vast
injustice—here she’d been protecting her precious petunias and now Jesus had
gone and let her down despite all everything she’d done for him. I had in mind
to tell her that feeling she was having that everything had tightened up around
her and no matter how hard she tried to turn with it, the world was no longer a
comfortable fit, and if she made a move to pry herself loose from that terrible
grip, it’d pinch her off at the neck...I would have told her after a while it
got to feel natural and she likely wouldn’t know what to do things didn’t feel
that way. Before I could advise her of this, Ava came on the run and shooed us
away, babbling about how Squire was prone to these fits and she’d handle it,
just to leave her alone with him because when he woke up he was scared and she
could gentle him. I returned to step-sitting out front of my bungalow and Mrs.
Gammage streaked toward the office to recast the deadly prayer spell she’d been
fixing to hurl at the universe. Ava kneeled to Squire, hiding his upper body
from sight. My forty had gone warmish, but I chugged down several swallows and
wiped the spill from my chin and looked back to the petunia bed just in time to
see Squire sit bolt upright. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d expect from
someone smacked down by a fit. No wooziness or flailing about. It was like Ava
had shot a few thousand volts through him.

Leeli
had come out of Ava’s bungalow, wearing white shorts and a green halter. She
wandered over to me and sat on the stoop. What you think’s wrong with Squire?
she asked in a hushed voice.

—Boy’s
so slow, maybe his brain idles out every so often.

She
stared at Ava and Squire as if she was trying to figure something out. I did
some staring myself, digging my eyes under that halter. The heat cooked her
scent strong. I leaned closer and did a hit. She glanced up and asked, What you
doing?

—I
wish I was smelling breakfast, I said.

Squire
and Ava scrambled up, Squire gesturing like he was wanting to explain something
of importance. They made for Ava’s bungalow. Leeli started to join up with
them, but Ava waved her off and said she needed to tend Squire for a while.
That brightened Leeli, but she watched until the door closed behind them.

—Don’t
none of this strike you peculiar? she asked.

—Pretty
much everything strikes me peculiar. So I guess nothing does, really.

*
* * *

If I hadn’t been consumed with
getting Leeli into the bungalow and the two of us shaking the walls so hard,
the framed picture would shudder off its veil of dust and the palmetto bugs
would prepare for the fall of creation, I might’ve had room for some helpful
thoughts. I don’t suppose it matters, though. Chances are I wouldn’t have
reached any conclusion. If I had, either I wouldn’t have acted on it or else it
would have been the same half-assed conclusion I come to without even
stretching my brain. Studying on things until you couldn’t tell whether what
you thought was what you wanted to think and all that—it wasn’t my style. I had
two ways of going at the world. One, I was a furnace of a man and everything I
saw was viewed in terms of how it would do for fuel. The other, I was a
pitiable creature who’d been walked on for so long there was a damn dog run
wore down into my skull and whenever a shadow crossed my path, my instinct was
to snap my teeth. Neither of those boys gave a sugary shit about situational
fucking analysis.

Ava
was kept busy that night tinkering with Squire’s self-esteem. ‘Least that’s
what I believed had sucked his fire down so low, his pilot light kicked off. It
was like Leeli had been busted out of jail. She wanted one of everything with
me. We come close to killing each other. Toward nine we took a break, borrowed
Ava’s car, and brought back catfish and puppies and fries. Halfway through our
greasy feast, we went at it again, smearing fish juice all over the bed. It
would’ve took oven cleaner to scour the sheets. Long about midnight we smoked
cigarettes on the steps. Fireflies bloomed in the hazy dark. The breeze hauled
a smell of night-blooming cereus out from the shadows of the palms. A shine
from the bulb over the office door fresh-tarred the blacktop. We had us one of
those made-in-Nashville moments. Our arms around one another, heads together.
Snap the photo, frame it with a heart, and stick in a word balloon with me
saying something forever stupid like, Somepin’ wunnerful’s gonna happen to them
peaches, honey. Hillbilly Hallmark. I gave Leeli a kiss that sparked a shiver
and she settled in against me.

—I
could stand another beer, she said.

—Want
me to fetch it?

—Naw,
it’s too much trouble.

Skeeters
whined. A night bird said its name about three hundred times in a row. The TV
inside the office flickered a wicked green, an evil blue, a blast of white, as
if Mrs. Gammage was receiving communication from an unholy sphere. I wouldn’t
have much cared if the rest of everything was just this hot and black and
quiet.

*
* * *

Squire seemed fine to me,
especially for someone who looked to be a goner, but Ava was still acting
mothery the next morning. Around noon she herded us into the car and drove to
Silver Springs for, I guess, a give-Squire-love day. At a stall near the gift
shop she bought a T-shirt with his face airbrushed on it by a genuine T-shirt
artist. Squire had the good sense not to wear the thing. Wanna go see the
tropical fish? she asked of Carl and Squire both. Squire said he didn’t know,
whatever, and Carl repeated the word fish until he figured out how to spray
spittle when saying it. We crammed into a glass-bottomed boat with a mob of
lumpy fiftyish women in baggy slacks and floral blouses. I assumed they were a
church group, because they appeared to be the cut-rate harem belonging to this
balding, gray-haired individual with a banker’s belly and a sagging, doleful
face, dressed like a Wal-mart dummy in slacks with an elastic waistband and a
sweated-through sports shirt. A pretty blonde in a captain’s hat steered the
boat and as we glided across the springs, her voice blatted from the speakers,
identifying whatever portion of nature’s living rainbow we were then passing
over. The man stood the whole trip, clutching a pole for balance, providing his
own commentary and sneaking glances at Leeli, who was wearing short-shorts. He
was trying to make some general point relating to the fish. It had a charry
Unitarian flavor, a serving of God and fried turnip slices. All the ladies
nodded and favored him with doting gazes. Squashed between two of them was a
chubby kid about fourteen who had the miserable air of a hostage. One of the
women whispered urgently at him, probably telling him to pay attention or sit
up straight. He stared cross-eyed into nowhere, dreaming of columbining the
bunch of us. I winked at him, wanting him to know that some of us so-called
adults could be dangerous haters, too, when forced to ooh and aah over a
glittery mess of edible sea bugs. This only got him hating me extra special. If
somebody had slipped him a piece, they would’ve found me with my splattered
head resting on a cellulite-riddled thigh.

After
the boat ride we headed for a Howard Johnson’s restaurant down the road from
the resort. The reverend and his flock had beaten us there and were crammed
into a circular booth across from ours. The ladies chattered away, the kid
stared at his fries like they were a heap of golden brown logs on which he was
roasting his mom in miniature. Part of my problem was I’ve been cursed with
this inept paranoia that sees danger everywhere except where danger lies.
Though I’d done nothing criminal recently, the reverend’s presence made me feel
criminally guilty. I fiddled with the suspicion that his turning up at the
restaurant was police-related. That he’d recognized me for the perpetrator of a
crime I’d committed and forgot. Now and then his fruity voice cut through the
chatter. He was still going on about the damn fish.