The Best of Lucius Shepard (95 page)

Leeli
said she knew of a little rural airport west of New Smyrna where we could
charter a plane, no questions, and Ava said she and Carl and Leeli would use
Rickey’s car and take care of it right away.

—Like
hell! I said. We’ll go together.

—You
crazy? You know how it is when there’s a big storm, Ava said. Accidents and
drownings. Cops’ll be all over the highway. There’ll be roadblocks. They see
you, we’re finished.

—That’s
right! Leeli said. They gonna be too busy to worry ‘bout looking for us now.

—I’ll
be damned I’m gonna let you run off without me, I said.

—We
can’t run off! Won’t nothing be flying ‘til the storm blows out. But we set
things up, we can fly soon as it does.

—Just
you go then, I said to Ava.

—I
can’t leave Carl. You see how he is. And I need Leeli to point the way.

A
pitchfork of lightning ripped away the dark and the thunder had a metallic
sound, like somebody was pounding out a dent in the sky. Wind shivered the
lodge and slammed loose boards.

—Naw,
I said. Leeli can give you directions.

—What
if I get ‘em wrong? You got Squire here. Ain’t that enough of a guarantee?

I
couldn’t see Ava’s face in that moment, but I thought I felt slyness steaming
off of her. Tell her the directions, Leeli, I said.

—All
those country roads. Leeli put a hand to her brow like a mentalist trying to
make contact. I can show her, but I don’t know I can tell her.

Rain
drove in through the screen and we all moved back from it except for Carl, who
just sat there rocking.

—I
don’t trust you no more’n you trust me, I said to Ava. We gonna have to work
something else out.

Another
lightning flash brought leached colors to the porch and fitted a long shadow
beneath every object. Things looked to be tilted, as if the wind had knocked
the lodge askew.

—Hang
on, Ava said, and went off toward her bedroom.

Leeli
caught my hand and said something I didn’t catch, but had the sound of an
assurance, and then Ava came back out onto the porch and handed me a thick
envelope.

—Fuck’s
this? I asked.

—The
rest of the money I promised Leeli. You can hold it while we’re gone.

Leeli’s
eyes got stuck on the envelope as I inspected the contents. Hundred dollar
bills and plenty of them.

—That
guarantee enough for ya? Ava asked. ‘Tween Squire and the money, it’s ‘bout the
best I can do.

I
stuffed the envelope into my hip pocket. Leeli unstuck her eyes. I could see it
was a strain for her and that she didn’t love the idea of leaving the envelope
behind. All right, I said. I started to deliver a warning, to pose
consequences, but there didn’t seem much point to it. We all knew the lay of
the land.

—All
right, I repeated. Let’s get it rolling.

*
* * *

You know how it goes. Sometimes
you’re so deep in the world, so mired in its trouble, you forget that you were
born, you forget you were raised to be a dead man, you think you got where
you’re standing all on your own and that you’re holding destiny in your hands,
and when somebody passes you a golden ticket that’s stamped Freedom or
Foreverafter, you don’t check to see if the ink’s dry or if there’s printing on
the back, because you’re walking the road your daddy cut for you and stepping
along in clothes your mama sewed, because it’s the tendency of your kind to
believe the lottery can be won, great prizes are within your grasp, and though
the only winning ticket ever came your parents’ way was an error in their favor
made by a bartender or a grocery clerk, though you understand you’re their
homemade fool, you just can’t accept that the rules of their life apply to you.
That golden ticket is a guarantee all right, a twenty-four karat guaranteed
loser. You know this in your heart, but you hang onto the bitch like it was a
pass through the Gates of Glory or a voucher for an all-expenses-paid weekend
at Casino World on the Redneck Riviera, whichever premium you prefer.

Thoughts
such as these slammed my head as I dug through Rickey’s pockets, hunting for
his keys. He was still unconscious, his face swollen from the beating I’d
supplied him. Looked like he’d pissed off a swarm of bees. The keys were in the
bib pocket of his overalls. I stood jingling them in my hand, holding a last
debate over the wisdom of giving them to Ava. An old movie was playing on the
TV. Japanese men in moonsuits were gazing awestruck at a fleet of flying
saucers that soon began incinerating them with fiery beams. Watching them turn
into bright wavering silhouettes and vanish somehow made my decision for me.

Things
moved right smartly after that. Ava and Carl went for the car, Leeli gave me a
pert little kiss and said, Be back soon, and ran off after them. I patted my
hip pocket to make certain the money was still there. A minute later I was
standing on the porch steps, watching a pair of red taillights, one patched
with duct tape, jouncing along over the uneven ground toward the highway,
shining up tracers of rain. I had a moment of dissatisfaction with my decision
and I pulled Ava’s gun from the waist of my jeans with half a thought of
shooting out a tire. The car stopped at the end of the drive. There wasn’t any
traffic I could see and I wondered what was going on. A creep of paranoia
stirred me from the steps and out in the rain. I imagined Ava and Leeli arguing
over whether or not to betray me. Thunder mauled the sky. The car swung out
onto the highway. I felt like six kinds of fool, with the rain running down my
neck, alone as ever was, the gun cold and weighty in my hand.

The
night grew wilder yet, the thunder continuous. A ring of fiery stick men a
thousand feet tall jabbed and flashed on the horizons, penning me into their
magic circle. There was such a confusion of light and sound, it rooted me to
the spot. Behind the lodge a clump of palms bulked up solid, taking the shape
of a black frowning Buddha in my mind, scrunched up and angry from having me in
his sight. It seemed I could feel the wickedness of that place and time, the
mortal separation from the flow of life that wickedness enforces. I was flying,
stranded on a scrap of soggy marsh that had been chewed off from the planet and
set to spinning loose in the void. The rain needled my cheeks and brow, spitting
alternately dark and silver. The lodge looked to be changing shape, crouching
like a beast one second, the next blurring into an emblem of negativity, a
symbol on a rippling banner, then collapsing back into the ruinous thing it
pretended to be. I had the idea this was my night, my big moment, that I was
being showed a reflection of everything I’d said and thought and done, the
chaos of my life given larger, windier form, and this was the only celebration
of my useless days I’d likely get, this storm too small to have a name but big
enough to damage the unprepared, the tore-down spaces, the vacant properties of
the world. Then I glanced south to where Ava and Carl and Leeli had gone and
saw a flash of green. Not a dazzling seam and not the dull flicker of heat
lightning, but a dynamic burst of bright neon color like an enormous bug zapper
taking a hit. The color hung in the air, draping its afterimages around the
palm crowns, and I recalled Ava’s story about the green light coming from the
UFO. I tried to think of something else it could have been. I expect there must
have been a hundred possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with one. The rain
slowed to a drizzle and as if the green flash had been a cue, the storm began
to fade, flaring up now and again with a grumble and a distant snip of fire,
then fading even more, its battery running low. Drips and plops succeeded the
fury of the wind. Through scudding clouds you could glimpse a freckling of
stars, and soon a slice of moon surfaced from the horizon. I knew Carl and Ava
and Leeli were gone. It wasn’t the flash that told me so. Too many thoughts
were flapping around in my attic for me to work that part of it out. The
alignment of the world, the wrecked lodge and foundered cabins, the swaying
grasses and the dark water slurping at the mucky bank, the stars and all the
rest—it was like a sign saying Gone had been struck through every layer of
creation.

Naturally
I didn’t entirely believe this sign. Despite Ava’s anything-goes attitude
toward screwing, I figured Squire must do something special for her, and I just
knew Leeli wasn’t about to leave that money on the table. I patted my hip
pocket again and this time I found nothing. No bulge, no envelope sticking out.
I patted my other pockets and looked on the ground close by. Since I’d come out
from the porch to watch them drive away, I hadn’t hardly moved a step, but
there was no sign of the envelope. I told myself the wind must have took it. I
searched along the edge of the water, near the porch, and as I was poking
around in the grass, kicking scrap wood and fallen shingles aside, growing more
desperate every second, because with or without Leeli I needed that money to
get clear of Volusia County, it occurred to me there might never have been an
envelope. Maybe Ava was that much of a witch. Maybe she’d handed me a parlor
trick, an illusion, and made Leeli and me see what she wanted. Maybe Leeli had
been in on the hustle and just pretended to be worried about the money. It was
her, wasn’t it, led me to Ava in the first place? The missing envelope and the
green flash and the stories Ava told, they all washed together into a stew of
possibilities. I couldn’t separate out anything from it that sounded more than
half true.

I
stopped my searching and stood by the water. The clouds had slid off to the
north, except for a wedge that was convoying the rising moon. The stars were
thick. It was as if there had been no storm, just a gentle rain that smeared
the vegetable smells around into a sickly green sweetness. I told myself I must
be wrong about everything. Before long they’d be pulling into the driveway,
talking about our plane ride. But fool though I was, I wasn’t that big of a
fool. I could mumble all the pretty wishes I wanted to, but gone was still the
impression I got.

I
felt like a baby trapped under a bear rug, unable to crawl, too smothered to
cry, and I must’ve stood by the water damn near an hour, trying to poke holes
in the weighty thing that held me down. I was flummoxed by a question I wasn’t
even sure had been asked, stumped and dumb, unable to work out a plan or think
of a direction to travel in. I didn’t know what to do. Hitchhike out of there?
Drive away in a van every cop in Central Florida was probably on the look-out
for? Heading into the marsh and living off mullet and gator tail was about my
only option. The skeeters began to trouble me. Mostly I let them have my blood,
but I spanked a few dead. Seemed like I’d been living with my brain switched
off and now a recognition stole over me not just of how fucked I was at the
moment, but how fucked the normal weather was in Maceo’s world. Everything was
returning to normal. The frogs squelched up their bleepy cries. Cicadas
established a drone. A fish jumping for a bug out in the marsh made a squishy
plop and I could have sworn it was my own heart’s sound. Squire came out onto
the porch steps, rubbing his stubbly scalp, sleepy as a tick full of juice, and
asked, Where they all at?

—Went
to charter a plane.

He
gaped at me. They gone? Ava and everybody?

—Yeah.

—We
gotta go find ‘em! He tripped on the bottom step and reeled out sideways into
the yard, catching a furl of the rusted screen to right himself. He was wearing
jeans that still had creases in the legs and that stupid T-shirt with his face
spraypainted on it Ava had bought him in Silver Springs. Move it! he said. We
gotta find ‘em now!

He
got to scooting around the yard, little dashes this way and that, like a dog
with the runs in a hurry to locate a good place to do his business. Which way
they go? he asked.

—I
told you. They went to charter a plane somewheres ‘round New Smyrna.

—They
ain’t gone to New Smyrna! Dumb motherfucker! They ain’t going nowhere near New
Smyrna!

Usually
somebody calls me a dumb motherfucker, I don’t have much of an argument. It’s
not much different from saying that the grass is pretty green or the water
looks wet. But Squire irked me with his agitated movement and his two round
faces, the one on his chest smiling, the other scowling, both of them staring
at me.