Wild Cards V (30 page)

The Second Coming of Buddy Holley

by Edward Bryant

Wednesday

THE DEAD MAN SLAMMED
his fist through the pine door.

No knuckles broke, but his skin tore. Blood streaked the wooden shards of door panel. It hurt, but not enough. No, it didn't hurt much at all, other things considered. “Other things”—what a euphemistic code for people and relationships, lovers and kin. The dirty little politics of rejections and betrayals. Jesus god,
they
hurt.

Real mature, my frien', Jack Robicheaux thought. Going through the grieving process at Mach 10. Right past denial and directly to self-pity. Real grown-up for a guy into his forties. Fuck it.

He gingerly withdrew his hand from the shattered door. Naturally the long wooden splinters faced the wrong way. It was like trying to extract his flesh from some sort of toothy trap.

Jack turned and walked back into the shambles of his living room. It still looked like Captain Nemo's stateroom on the
Nautilus
—after the giant squid had wrestled with the submarine in the middle of the Atlantic's storm of a century.

He loved this room. “Love.” Funny word to use anymore.

Kicking aside a shattered antique sextant, Jack crossed to the outside door—the one opening on a passage leading to the subway maintenance tunnels—and bolted it. As he did so, he caught a last whiff of Michael's sharp citrus after-shave. The image of Michael's retreating back, shoulders slightly hunched with denial, flickered in the space the door occupied, vanished, slipped out of existence with not even a whimper.

Jack stepped over the old-fashioned phone crafted as the effigy of Huey Long. Somehow it had miraculously ended on the floor upright with the earpiece still cradled in Huey's upraised right hand. Ol' Huey had communicated like a son-of-a-bitch. Why couldn't Jack?

He couldn't call Bagabond.

He wouldn't call Cordelia.

There was no one else he wanted to talk to. Besides, he thought he'd talked enough. He'd spoken to Tachyon. An apple a day hadn't worked. And he had talked to Michael. Who was left? A priest? Not a chance. Atelier Parish was too far behind. Too many years. Too much memory.

Jack stepped behind the carved mahogany bar with the brass fittings, smelled the dusty plush velvet hanging as he opened the cabinet. The brandy had cost close to sixty bucks. Expensive on a transit worker's salary, but what the hell, he'd always read in sea novels about brandy's being administered to survivors of wrack and storm, and besides, the cut-crystal decanter fit this Victorian room beautifully.

He poured himself a triple, drank it like a double, and filled the glass again. He didn't usually gulp like this, but—

“There is an interesting fact about Mr. Kaposi,” Tachyon had said. His medical smock shone an immaculate white with almost the albedo of an arctic snowfield. His red hair seemed aflame under the examining-room lights. “Shortly before he discovered and named his sarcoma in 1872, Kaposi had changed his name from Kohn.”

Jack stared at him, unable to form the words he wanted to say. What the fuck was Tachyon
talking
about?

“There was, of course, a pogrom in Czechoslovakia,” Tachyon said, slender fingers gesturing expressively. “He reacted to the sort of ill-informed prejudice that has cursed both jokers, not to mention aces, of course, and AIDS patients alike. Exotic viruses might as well be the evil eye.”

Jack looked down at his bare chest, gingerly touching the blue-black bruiselike markings above his ribs. “I don' need no double-barreled curse. One to a customer, no?”

“I'm sorry, Jack.” Tachyon hesitated. “It's difficult to say when you were infected. The tumors are well-advanced, but the biopsy and the anomalous workup results suggest there's a synergy going on between the wild card virus and the HIV organism attacking your immunosuppressant system. I suspect some sort of galloping accelerated process.”

Jack shook his head as though only half-hearing. “I had a negative test a year ago.”

“It's as I feared then,” said the doctor. “I can't forecast the progress.”

“I can,” said Jack.

Tachyon shrugged sympathetically. “I must ask,” he said, “if you habitually use amyl nitrite.”

“Poppers?” said Jack. He shook his head. “No way. I'm not much on drugs.”

Tachyon marked something on Jack's chart. “Their use is frequently connected with Kaposi's.”

Jack shook his head again.

“Then there is another matter,” said the doctor.

Jack stared at him. It was like trying to look out from the center of a block of ice. He felt numb all over. He knew the psychic shock would go away soon. And then— “What?”

“I must ask you this. I need to know about contacts.”

Jack took a deep breath. “There was one.
Is
one. Only one.”

“I should talk to him.”

“Are you kidding?” said Jack. “I will talk to Michael. An' den I'll have him come see you. But I'll talk to him first.” His voice dropped off. “Yeah, I'll talk to him.”

He proceeded to remind Tachyon of the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship. Tachyon seemed affronted. Jack didn't apologize. Then he left. That was in the morning.

—this was a special occasion. He felt as if he were drinking after his own funeral. “Cajuns do great wakes,” he said aloud, pouring another brandy. Had the decanter been full? He couldn't remember. Now it was down close to half.

He glanced at the phone again. Why the hell did he want to talk to anyone? After all, no one wanted to talk to
him.
Now that he thought about it, for the last few months living with Michael had pretty much been like living alone. Now he might as well die alone.
Can the self-pity.
But it was so
easy—

“So what's up?” Michael had said, closing the door after him before giving Jack a squeeze. No other greeting. No preamble. As light as Jack was dark, tall and slender-limbed, Michael had always seemed to bring something of the sunlit street-level spring down with him to Jack's subterranean dwelling. Not today. Jack couldn't read him at all.

“Huh?” Michael said. Jack turned his face away and disengaged himself from the other's arms. He stepped back. “Something wrong?” Jack scrutinized Michael's face. His lover's features were the very model of glowing health. Of innocence.

“You might want to sit down,” said Jack.

“No.” Michael stared at him. “Just say what whatever it is you want to say.”

Jack's mouth was dry. “I went to the clinic today.”

“So?”

“The tests—” He had to start over. “The tests were positive.”

Michael looked at him blankly. “Tests?”

“AIDS.” He said the hateful word. His stomach twisted.

“No,” said Michael. He shook his head. “Naw. Not a chance.”

“Yes,” said Jack.

“But who—” Michael's eyes widened. “Jack, did you—”

“No.” Jack stared back. “There's been no one. No one else,
mon cher.
”

Michael cocked his head. “There has to be. I mean, I wouldn't—”

“It isn't like immaculate conception, Michael. No miracle here. It
has
to be.”

“No,” said Michael. He shook his head vehemently. “It's impossible.” His eyes flickered and he looked away. Then he turned on his heel, opened the door, and left.

“No,” Jack had heard Michael say one more time.

—to feel the rusty blade twisting in his gut.

The brandy, it occurred to him, as like an emotional tetanus shot. Except it wasn't working. All it did was make him feel worse because it lessened his ability to control what he was feeling.

He felt suddenly as if he had inhaled all the oxygen there was to breathe in his home. He wanted to get out, to go up to the streets. So he carefully, with what he realized were exaggerated motions, put away the brandy decanter. Then Jack left by the same door Michael had exited. He followed the ghost's footsteps to the tunnels and ladders that took him up to the streets.

He walked. Jack could have taken the track maintenance car down below but decided he didn't want to. The night was too chilly, but that was fine. He wanted something astringent to cleanse him, to flense the bruise marks, to clean out his flesh. He realized he was wishing there was now some overt pain.

He walked uptown, not truly comprehending where he was until he saw the sign for Young Man's Fancy. I shouldn't be here, of all places, he thought. He'd met Michael here. He shouldn't be in the West Village at all. And not at this bar. But by now it was too late. Here he was. Shit. He turned to leave.

“Hey, pretty boy, lookin' to get some tail? Or
you
the tail?”

The voice was all too familiar. Jack looked up and saw the memorably overmuscled face, not to mention the body, of Bludgeon emerge from the shadowed downstairs entrance to the closed laundry below the bar. Jack turned and started away.

There was the smack of size-eighteen Brogans on the sidewalk. Fingers like German sausages curled around his shoulder and spun Jack around. “The thing about them gorgeous eyes,” said Bludgeon, “is that all I gotta do is dig my thumbs in there and they'll pop out like the green cherries onna wop cookies.”

Jack shrugged the fingers away. He felt impatient and not terribly cautious. He just didn't give a damn. “Fuck off,” he said.

“You
need
one of these too.” Bludgeon put spurned fingers to his own cheek and touched the ragged, inflamed scar that ran all the way from the edge of his right eye to his bulbous chin.

Jack remembered the triumphant shriek of Bagabond's black cat. The feline was old but agile enough to have dodged Bludgeon's flailing fists after the claws had raked down the man's ugly features.

“Cat scratches get infected,” Jack said, continuing to back toward the street. “You ought to see to those. I know a real good doctor.”