The Best of Lucius Shepard (9 page)

When
the battle of Managua was joined, Dantzler was living at home. His parents had
urged him to go easy in readjusting to civilian life, but he had immediately
gotten a job as a management trainee in a bank. Each morning he would drive to
work and spend a controlled, quiet eight hours; each night he would watch TV
with his mother, and before going to bed, he would climb to the attic and
inspect the trunk containing his souvenirs of war—helmet, fatigues, knife,
boots. The doctors had insisted he face his experiences, and this ritual was
his way of following their instructions. All in all, he was quite pleased with
his progress, but he still had problems. He had not been able to force himself
to venture out at night, remembering all too well the darkness in the cloud
forest, and he had rejected his friends, refusing to see them or answer their
calls—he was not secure with the idea of friendship. Further, despite his
methodical approach to life, he was prone to a nagging restlessness, the
feeling of a chore left undone.

One
night his mother came into his room and told him that an old friend, Phil
Curry, was on the phone. “Please talk to him, Johnny,” she said. “He’s been
drafted, and I think he’s a little scared.”

The
word
drafted
struck a responsive chord in Dantzler’s soul, and after
brief deliberation he went downstairs and picked up the receiver.

“Hey,”
said Phil. “What’s the story, man? Three months, and you don’t even give me a
call.”

“I’m
sorry,” said Dantzler. “I haven’t been feeling so hot.”

“Yeah,
I understand,” Phil was silent a moment. “Listen, man. I’m leaving, y’know, and
we’re having a big send-off at Sparky’s. It’s goin’ on right now. Why don’t you
come down?”

“I
don’t know.”

“Jeanine’s
here, man. Y’know, she’s still crazy ‘bout you, talks ‘bout you alla time. She
don’t go out with nobody.”

Dantzler
was unable to think of anything to say.

“Look,”
said Phil, “I’m pretty weirded out by this soldier shit. I hear it’s pretty bad
down there. If you got anything you can tell me ‘bout what it’s like, man, I’d
‘preciate it.”

Dantzler
could relate to Phil’s concern, his desire for an edge, and besides, it felt
right to go. Very right. He would take some precautions against the darkness.

“I’ll
be there,” he said.

It
was a foul night, spitting snow, but Sparky’s parking lot was jammed.
Dantzler’s mind was flurried like the snow, crowded like the lot—thoughts
whirling in, jockeying for position, melting away. He hoped his mother would
not wait up, he wondered if Jeanine still wore her hair long, he was worried
because the palms of his hands were unnaturally warm. Even with the car windows
rolled up, he could hear loud music coming from inside the club. Above the door
the words SPARKY’S ROCK CITY were being spelled out a letter at a time in red
neon, and when the spelling was complete, the letters flashed off and on and a
golden neon explosion bloomed around them. After the explosion, the entire sign
went dark for a split second, and the big ramshackle building seemed to grow
large and merge with the black sky. He had an idea it was watching him, and he
shuddered—one of those sudden lurches downward of the kind that take you just
before you fall asleep. He knew the people inside did not intend him any harm,
but he also knew that places have a way of changing people’s intent, and he did
not want to be caught off guard. Sparky’s might be such a place, might be a
huge black presence camouflaged by neon, its true substance one with the abyss
of the sky, the phosphorescent snowflakes jittering in his headlights, the wind
keening through the side vent. He would have liked very much to drive home and
forget about his promise to Phil; however, he felt a responsibility to explain
about the war. More than a responsibility, an evangelistic urge. He would tell
them about the kid falling out of the chopper, the white-haired girl in
Tecolutla, the emptiness. God, yes! How you went down chock-full of ordinary
American thoughts and dreams, memories of smoking weed and chasing tail and
hanging out and freeway flying with a case of something cold, and how you
smuggled back a human-shaped container of pure Salvadorian emptiness. Primo
grade. Smuggled it back to the land of silk and money, of mindfuck video games
and topless tennis matches and fast-food solutions to the nutritional problem.
Just a taste of Salvador would banish all those trivial obsessions. Just a
taste. It would be easy to explain.

Of
course, some things beggared explanation.

He
bent down and adjusted the survival knife in his boot so the hilt would not rub
against his calf. From his coat pocket he withdrew the two ampules he had
secreted in his helmet that long-ago night in the cloud forest. As the neon
explosion flashed once more, glimmers of gold coursed along their shiny
surfaces. He did not think he would need them; his hand was steady, and his
purpose was clear. But to be on the safe side, he popped them both.

<>

*
* * *

A
Spanish Lesson

That winter of ‘64, when I was
seventeen and prone to obey the impulses of my heart as if they were
illuminations produced by years of contemplative study, I dropped out of
college and sailed to Europe, landing in Belfast, hitchhiking across Britain,
down through France and Spain, and winding up on the Costa del Sol—to be
specific, in a village near Malaga by the name of Pedregalejo—where one night I
was to learn something of importance. What had attracted me to the village was
not its quaintness, its vista of the placid Mediterranean and neat white stucco
houses and little bandy-legged fishermen mending nets; rather, it was the fact
that the houses along the shore were occupied by a group of expatriates, mostly
Americans, who posed for me a bohemian ideal.

The
youngest of them was seven years older than I, the eldest three times my age,
and among them they had amassed a wealth of experience that caused me envy and
made me want to become like them: bearded, be-earringed, and travel-wise. There
was, for example, Leonard Somstaad, a Swedish poet with the poetic malady of a
weak heart and a fondness for
marjoun
(hashish candy); there was Art
Shapiro, a wanderer who had for ten years migrated between Pedregalejo and
Istanbul; there was Don Washington, a black ex-GI and blues singer, whose
Danish girlfriend— much to the delight of the locals—was given to nude sunbathing;
there was Robert Braehme, a New York actor who, in the best theatrical
tradition, attempted halfheartedly to kill several of the others, suffered a
nervous breakdown, and had to be returned to the States under restraint.

And
then there was Richard Shockley, a tanned, hook-nosed man in his late twenties,
who was the celebrity of the group. A part-time smuggler (mainly of marijuana)
and a writer of some accomplishment. His first novel,
The Celebrant,
had
created a minor critical stir. Being a fledgling writer myself, it was he whom
I most envied. In appearance and manner he suited my notion of what a writer
should be. For a while he took an interest in me, teaching me smuggling tricks
and lecturing on the moral imperatives of art; but shortly thereafter he became
preoccupied with his own affairs and our relationship deteriorated.

In
retrospect I can see that these people were unremarkable; but at the time they
seemed impossibly wise, and in order to align myself with them I rented a small
beach house, bought a supply of notebooks, and began to fill them with page
after page of attempted poetry.

Though
I had insinuated myself into the group, I was not immediately accepted. My
adolescence showed plainly against the backdrop of their experience. I had no
store of anecdotes, no expertise with flute or guitar, and my conversation was
lacking in hip savoir faire. In their eyes I was a kid, a baby, a clever puppy
who had learned how to beg, and I was often the object of ridicule. Three
factors saved me from worse ridicule: my size (six foot three, one-ninety), my
erratic temper, and my ability to consume enormous quantities of drugs. This
last was my great trick, my means of gaining respect. I would perform feats of
ingestion that would leave Don Washington, a consummate doper, shaking his head
in awe. Pills, powders, herbs—I was indiscriminate, and I initiated several
dangerous dependencies in hopes of achieving equal status.

Six
weeks after moving to the beach, I raised myself a notch in the general esteem
by acquiring a girlfriend, a fey California blonde named Anne Fisher. It amuses
me to recall the event that led Anne to my bed, because it smacked of the worst
of cinema verité, an existential moment opening onto a bittersweet romance. We
were walking on the beach, a rainy day, sea and sky blending in a slate fog
toward Africa, both of us stoned near to the point of catatonia, when we
happened upon a drowned kitten. Had I been unaccompanied, I might have
inspected the corpse for bugs and passed on; but as it was, being under Anne’s
scrutiny, I babbled some nonsense about “this inconstant image of the world,”
half of which I was parroting from a Eugenio Montale poem, and proceeded to
give the kitten decent burial beneath a flat rock.

After
completing this nasty chore, I stood and discovered Anne staring at me wetly,
her maidenly nature overborne by my unexpected sensitivity. No words were
needed. We were alone on the beach, with Nina Simone’s bluesy whisper issuing
from a window of one of the houses, gray waves slopping at our feet. As if
pressed together by the vast emptiness around us, we kissed. Anne clawed my
back and ground herself against me: you might have thought she had been
thirsting for me all her nineteen years, but I came to understand that her
desperation was born of philosophical bias and not sexual compulsion. She was
deep into sadness as a motif for passion, and she liked thinking of us as two
worthless strangers united by a sudden perception of life’s pathetic fragility.
Fits of weeping and malaise alternating with furious bouts of lovemaking were
her idea of romantic counterpoint.

By
the time she left me some months later, I had grown thoroughly sick of her; but
she had—I believed—served her purpose in establishing me as a full-fledged
expatriate.

Wrong.
I soon found that I was still the kid, the baby, and I realized that I would
remain so until someone of even lesser status moved to the beach, thereby
nudging me closer to the mainstream. This didn’t seem likely, and in truth I no
longer cared; I had lost respect for the group: had I not, at seventeen, become
as hiply expatriated as they, and wouldn’t I, when I reached their age, be off
to brighter horizons? Then, as is often the case with reality, presenting us
with what we desire at the moment desire begins to flag, two suitably
substandard people rented the house next to mine.

Their
names were Tom and Alise, and they were twins a couple of years older than I,
uncannily alike in appearance, and hailing from—if you were to believe their
story—Canada. Yet they had no knowledge of things Canadian, and their accent
was definitely northern European. Not an auspicious entree into a society as
picky as Pedregalejo’s. Everyone was put off by them, especially Richard
Shockley, who saw them as a threat. “Those kind of people make trouble for
everyone else,” he said to me at once. “They’re just too damn weird.” (It has
always astounded me that those who pride themselves on eccentricity are so quick
to deride this quality in strangers.) Others as well testified to the twins’
weirdness: they were secretive, hostile; they had been seen making strange
passes in the air on the beach, and that led some to believe they were
religious nuts; they set lanterns in their windows at night and left them
burning until dawn. Their most disturbing aspect, however, was their
appearance. Both were scarcely five feet tall, emaciated, pale, with black hair
and squinty dark eyes and an elfin cleverness of feature that Shockley
described as “prettily ugly, like Munchkins.” He suggested that this look might
be a product of inbreeding, and I thought he might be right: the twins had the
sort of dulled presence that one associates with the retarded or the severely
tranquilized. The fishermen treated them as if they were the devil’s spawn,
crossing themselves and spitting at the sight of them, and the expatriates were
concerned that the fishermen’s enmity would focus the attention of the Guardia
Civil upon the beach.

The
Guardia—with their comic-opera uniforms, their machine guns, their funny
patent-leather hats that from a distance looked like Mickey Mouse ears—were a
legitimate menace. They had a long-standing reputation for murder and
corruption, and were particularly fond of harassing foreigners. Therefore I was
not surprised when a committee led by Shockley asked me to keep an eye on my
new neighbors, the idea being that we should close ranks against them, even to
the point of reporting any illegalities. Despite knowing that refusal would
consolidate my status as a young nothing, I told Shockley and his pals to screw
off. I’m not able to take pride in this—had they been friendlier to me in the
past, I might have gone along with the scheme; but as it was, I was happy to reject
them. And further, in the spirit of revenge, I went next door to warn Tom and
Alise.