Louisiana Breakdown

by Lucius Shepard

“What occasions are we talking about?”

  “Whenever I say it’s an occasion.” She took Mustaine’s arm. “You lookin’ frazzled, darlin’. Lemme getcha somethin’ to smooth you out.”

  She led him to the bar, where Joe Dill and Tuyet were still playing poker dice. He flopped onto a stool next to Sedele, brushing against the kid with the guitar. Joe Dill leaned forward to peer at Mustaine and fixed him with a reproving stare. “I can’t take you anywhere,” he said.

  Mustaine waved at the room, at all the din and blunder; the gesture made him feel drunker and gave him the sense of being more potent than his environment. “This is the best place in town? What’s your idea of haute cuisine? Tastee Freeze?”

  “You runnin’ down my establishment?” Sedele asked with good humor; she signaled the bartender. “Give this boy a Cryptoverde, Earl.”

  “You gotta admit,” said Mustaine, “the ambience is fucking weird. Sideshow Colonial Gothic.”

  Tuyet said, “Weird’s normal in Grail. And normal—” she let her gaze swing toward Mustaine “—normal’s not worth mentioning.”

  “You insecure about something?” he asked. “That why you such a bitch?”

  “Now that’s not called for,” said Joe Dill.

  Tuyet smiled triumphantly.

  “Look,” said Mustaine, trying to mend fences and at the same time uphold honor. “I’m grateful to you. But I’m not going to be anybody’s leg-humper.”

  “Y’all ease back.” Sedele spanked Joe Dill’s hand. “The boy’s had a tryin’ day. And he’s right. Just ’cause you befriended him don’t give you no papers.”

  “Maybe he needs some company,” Tuyet said with disdain. “Why don’t you fix him up with Vida?”

  Joe Dill said, “Yeah, that’d teach him ’bout weird.”

  Sedele turned on him. “Don’t you go puttin’ your mouth on Vida…not while I’m listenin’!”

  There was a strained silence; the “Sultans of Swing” came from the jukebox; lean shadows were gracefully whirling in its glow, Cajun hearts were being broken.

  “I won’t have it,” said Sedele grimly. “I won’t have nobody talkin’ down on Vida.”

  “Who’s Vida?” Mustaine asked, intrigued by the name, by the effect it had produced.

  Tuyet said something that sounded like “the Midsummer Queen,” but Mustaine thought he must have misheard. Joe Dill, with what seemed equal parts reverence and spite, said, “You gotta know Vida to ’preciate her.”

  “Well,” said Sedele, “that’s somethin’ you never gon’ do, now is it, Joe? I mean you ’bout the last person she wants to get to know.”

  “I can think of a few others got less chance than me,” he said.

  They stared at one another, as emotionless and steadfast in their regard as the profiles on the Welcome to Grail sign. Finally Joe Dill swept up the poker dice and turned away. Tuyet whispered in his ear; he laughed and rolled the dice.

  The bartender set down two green drinks crusted with foam. Sedele, anger still showing on her face, knocked back almost half of one. Mustaine had a sip. Tart and sweet, a little like a Margarita, but headier.

  “What all’s in this?” he asked, holding the glass up to his eyes. Threads of golden pulp were floating near the top; against the glare from the ceiling, it seemed to contain a slow play of green light and shadow.

  “Little a’this, little a’that,” said Sedele shortly; then she appeared to relax. “Vodka, bamboo liqueur, gator bile, a dead gambler’s cologne. Anything else green I could think of.”

  He smiled at that, but she remained deadpan.

  “’Course,” she said, “there’s a secret ingredient or two.”

  He studied the glass again.

  “Go ’head and drink up,” she said. “Two or three’ll give you a whole new perspective…I swear.”

  He had another, longer swallow. “That what it does for you?”

  “Yes, indeed! ’Fore I started drinkin’ Cryptoverdes I wasn’t the least little bit psychic.”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “I’m willing to be convinced.”

  She swiveled about to face him. “Gimme somethin’ to hold…somethin’ personal. There.” She pointed to his earring. “Gimme that.”

  He unscrewed the stud and passed the earring over; it glinted in her palm—the stylized face of a silver cat. She closed her hand around it, her eyelids drooped. She sighed and her breasts swelled from the green bodice.

  “This is a gift,” she said. “From a woman…an older woman. A lover. She’s unhappy. I’m gettin’ you did wrong by her somehow.” Her eyes blinked open. “You stole somethin’ from her.”

  Mustaine tried to snatch back the earring, but Sedele held it out of reach.

  “I guess,” she went on, “you didn’t really steal it. Just sorta stole it. I can’t figure it out, but it’s what I’m gettin’.” She squeezed the earring in her fist, pressed the fist to her forehead. “She forgives you. She knows it wasn’t in you to be the way she wanted. But she’s hopin’ someday you’ll see what you gave up with her and come back. ’Course you ain’t never comin’ back. You ain’t that kind.”

  Mustaine held up the empty glass to the bartender. He felt weary. The long-haired kid was showing off with some simple slide licks on his metal guitar. A National steel guitar. It had to be at least seventy years old. A Son House guitar. Chances were, it had been played by men with real talent, real reasons for playing. The kid didn’t deserve it.

  “Probably best for the lady you don’t come back,” said Sedele. “You’d just mess ’er up again.”

  “Get off it, okay?” said Mustaine.

  “I ain’t gon’ judge you, that’s what you worried about. I’m the last person to sit in judgment.”

  The bartender brought a fresh drink. Mustaine had a swallow.

  “Want to hear more?” Sedele asked.

  “Not about that.”

  “Awright.” She tossed the earring from one hand to the other. “How ’bout I tell you ’bout your character?”

  “Whatever.”

  She ran the ball of her thumb across the tiny silver face. “You think you got a line on things makes you immune from people, but you wide open, boy. What you think is armor ain’t nothin’ but an invitation to arrows. You just lookin’ to get hurt, and when nothin’ comes ’long to hurtcha, you find a way to hurt yourself. That’s what you like to call bein’ tough-minded.”

  Listening to her analysis, he finished the second drink. She was saying nothing new, only that he was limited emotionally, and he had known that for some time. What interested him most was why she wished to make him out an innocent. It was tactical, he was certain, and he began to believe that her intent was seductive in character. By illuminating his supposed naiveté, she was posing before him, establishing a sexual validity, making herself out to be someone of vast experience and insight, someone that he would run to for heat and consolation.

  “There’s strength in you,” Sedele went on. “Sometimes it’s a resource, but other times it’s like you don’t know how to tap into it—that makes you act weak.”

  He was getting very drunk, but he was calm and gathered in the midst of drunkenness, and he thought there might be something to what Sedele had said about Cryptoverdes giving you a new perspective. He pretended to listen, distant from her, yet engaged by the swells of her breasts in their silky green shells, the exaggerated femininity of her gestures. Behind her, Joe Dill and Tuyet were talking to an old man in work clothes. The jukebox was playing more Dire Straits. Mustaine felt lyrically submerged in the moment, that he had managed the transition from stranger to accomplice in strangeness.

  Sedele noticed him looking at her breasts. “I’m queer,” she said at last. “So don’t go gettin’ no ideas.”

  Mustaine was unfazed. “You mean you like girls?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “You like guys too,” he said. “So why’d you decide we were
n’t happening?”

  She started to object, but he broke in.

  “I been on the losing end of that decision too many times not to recognize it. Way I figure, you got worried you weren’t going to be the one in control. You wanted it to be all your idea.”

  “You’re a smug bastard!”

  He widened his eyes, affecting astonishment. “You mean I was right? Must be I’m psychic.”

  She gave a hitch of her shoulder. “Stick around. Could be I’ll change my mind.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Honey, you don’t know how much I love a challenge.”

  Her eyes were intricate. The green irises salted with gold, always shifting, as if the colors were awash beneath thin layers of crystal. Jungle and sunlight. Little fevers in them, little shivers and twitches.

  She handed him the earring. “Better put that back on, darlin’. You ain’t whole without it.”

  He threaded in the earring, tightened the stud; it was warm from her hand.

  “Joe tells me you a musician,” she said.

  “We starting over now?”

  “Just takin’ a little sidestep. What you play?”

  “Guitar.”

  She reached around him, tapped the long-haired kid on his shoulder. “Let the man borrow your guitar, Cody.”

  The kid eyed Mustaine sullenly, then passed him the National steel guitar. “It’s heavy,” he said. “Don’t drop it.” He held out fingerpicks and a slide.

  “Well?” Sedele said as Mustaine rested the guitar across his knee. “Play me somethin’.” She made a slashing gesture across her throat to Earl and a second later the jukebox died.

  The guitar must have weighed twenty-five, thirty pounds: like a small dead child in his arms. There was a painting of a woman in a green bathing suit water-skiing on the curved back of the instrument; she was plowing through turquoise water, sending up a frothy wake. He dropped Cody’s picks on the bar, pulled a flat pick from his shirt pocket, and fitted the slide to his ring finger left hand, then touched the strings. It was tuned to an open G—that suited him fine.

  He’d intended to play a couple of show-off passages and hand the guitar back, but after thirty seconds or so the music began to enclose him, to become a place he could hide within…which was always the case when it was good, no matter what his reasons for playing, whether trying to impress a girl or a club owner or some roach with major label connections, or just sitting in a room alone and trying to hide from himself. He played an uptempo blues—you couldn’t play much except blues on a National steel. It took too much pressure to hammer down on the strings, to bend and pluck them. The notes that issued from the resonator inside the steel body came out dull, like nickels dropped in a blind man’s cup. You had to work to brighten them, you had to labor at it, and from that labor, from cracking open your calluses on the strings so that your blood trickled along the neck, from squeezing your eyes shut with effort, came the feeling of passionate striving that was the blues, and even if you weren’t any good, what you played was never less than blue.

  The music Mustaine made was nervous and wired, traveling music, the music of interrupted flight, of anxiety, a breakdown of the moment, of his take on being stranded in Grail, this chicory-flavored nowhere that seemed itself to be in a state of breakdown, of imminent collapse. It referenced as well the working-class decay evidenced by Le Bon Chance, the more ornate sexual decay of its redheaded owner, and the startling presence of a beautiful woman in a white dress who was staring at him with disturbing intensity from the fringe of the crowd. Whenever he managed to figure his way out of a passage he’d gotten lost in, he gave a soft, satisfied grunt, and then he was off on the right road again, chasing the feeling that had put his feet on the road in the first place, the sense that he was almost in touch with something that would light him up and fill him with hot purpose forever if he could only push a little harder, reach the next level of invention, believing in it even though he knew the feeling would remain a desperate inch beyond his grasp and last only for as long as the music.

  5

  June 23 – 12:00 A.M.

  LIKE SHE ALWAYS DID BEFORE ENTERING LE BON Chance, Vida read the security company decal stuck to the window glass beside the front door. Read it over a few times the way a good Catholic might say her Hail Marys before entering an unholy place. This Establishment Protected By Dill Security Services, it said, and then in script letters beneath: What ye sow, so shall ye reap…The doorknob felt warm to her hand, as if there were a great burning inside. She hesitated, thinking she might be better off back at the cabin. Behind her, a group of boys leaning against two adjacent cars parked in the lot were hassling two black women quick-stepping past on the sidewalk. When they had spotted Vida, their eyes stuck to her but they didn’t say a thing. Just tracked her as she crossed the lot with her head down, wearing her nicest summer dress, white with a scoop neckline and decorated with lime crescents.

  She pushed through the door. The familiar bad smell of the club. Artificial brimstone compounded of cigarette smoke and cleaning agents. But instead of a confusion of music and human noise, all she heard was a single guitar playing. She picked out the musician straightaway. A thin, lanky man with shaggy black hair, sitting on a barstool, hunched over a silver guitar. Sitting next to him was Sedele. The music was agitated, dancing like static, but it had a sweet melody at its heart that drew her closer. The man’s face was lean, sharp-featured, but there was a softness in it, an old-soul energy; his eyes were a dark, dark blue. He wore a silver earring, like a drop of guitar metal soldered to his lobe. She moved closer yet, aware that people were staring at her. She didn’t care, she was accustomed to such. The earring resembled a cat’s face and she recognized by that sign, by all the signs, that he was an expression of the Nine Forms made flesh. The one she thought of as The Cunning, The Poet, The One-Eyed Jack, though its true name was Zedaial. The Great Cloud must have brought him. It must have heard her wish, her said-out-loud prayer for someone to save her from Marsh, and sent her its Trump.

  The man finished playing; the crowd clapped and shouted. He seemed uncomfortable when Sedele patted his arm, pretending to approve of the music. What she was really doing—trying to steal his power, like rubbing a cat’s back to cause a discharge of electricity—it angered Vida. She hurried over to stand by his side and glared at Sedele, who glanced up in surprise and said, “Vida! What you doin’ out so late?” The man’s eyes ranged over Vida’s body—he was only a Form made flesh and thus had the base nature of a man. He put on an innocent, inquisitive look that she assumed he’d used on women many times before; but then his eyes locked onto hers and she felt the cool flow of him, the stream of his spirit arcing across the distance between them.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  The question appeared to surprise him—she decided he must not be aware of his higher nature.

  “Jack…Jack Mustaine.” He smiled, an expression that turned down one corner of his mouth the slightest bit and lifted the other corner high, as if he were trying not to smile but couldn’t help it. She said the name to herself: Jack.

  Another sign.

  “Can I talk to you a while?” She eased past a long-haired kid and took the stool next to the man.

  “Sure.” He rested his right arm on the body of the silver guitar. “What you want to talk about?”

  “I’m Vida Dumars,” she said. “I own a little diner back down the road. I live out along Shotgun Row.” A silence hedged the space between them, and she asked, “Where you live?”

  “I haven’t lived anywhere for a long time.” He stroked the strings of the guitar—as if it were a gentled pet responding to the touch, it made a sweet sound.

  “Where’d you come from, then?”

  “West coast. LA.”

  From the west—like the Great Cloud. Vida noticed that Sedele had moved down along the bar and was talking to Joe Dill and his Vietnamese witch. The long-haired kid and the two girls he’d been talki
ng to had also moved farther away. All of them worried her luck would spill over onto them.

  “That where you were born…LA?” she asked.

  “No, I was born elsewhere.”

  “Ain’tcha gonna tell me?”

  “Back east,” he said. “I’m a Leo, Scorpio rising. What’s your sign?”

  “I don’t believe in that foolishness.”

  “Me neither. But I thought I should get to ask one question.”

  “You don’t have to talk smooth to get what you want,” she told him. “All you hafta do is speak the truth.”

  He looked nonplussed. “Which truth is that? The absolute, the momentary? The gospel unadorned?”

  “The momentary.”

  “You’re confusing me,” he said. “And that’s all three kinds.”

  She might have liked the answer if he were only a man, but as things stood she felt less sure about him.

  “But I’m just passing through,” he added. “I won’t be confused much longer.”

  That he knew he was only passing through the flesh made her feel easier about him. “Where you stayin’ at?” she asked. “The Gulfview?”

  “I haven’t got a room yet. But if it’s close by, that’s probably where I’ll stay.”

  The jukebox kicked up a racket, and Bruce Springsteen started singing about how he had a hungry heart. Couples went back to dancing, but were keeping an eye on Vida all the while.

  The man sang along softly with the chorus then said to Vida, “You like that song?” She realized the Form would surely know her heart and how it hungered for liberation of every sort—that hunger had brought her to trouble in the past, but she believed if she were ever going to get clear of trouble, it would be the engine that carried her away.

  “I don’t much care for music,” she said. “But the words are all right.”

  Puzzlement cut a vertical line in his brow, running a half-inch up from the bridge of his nose. “I thought you liked my playing…that’s why you came over.”

  “That wasn’t it.”

  He picked out a scatter of notes on the guitar that had the feel of a sardonic sentence. “I heard about you from Sedele and them.” He jerked his head toward where Sedele and Joe Dill were sitting.