Louisiana Breakdown

by Lucius Shepard

  “Right,” said Mustaine, turning his gaze back along the road.

  Lethargy, he thought, would be considered uptempo in Grail.

  Overhead, the sky was cloudless, but to the west lay a pile of bubbling white cumulus. Weird-looking. Like the wreckage of a wedding cake, with a frothy ledge of leaden gray circling the base that appeared to be changing shape more quickly than the mass above it, as if the two areas of cloud were being affected by different streams of wind. He watched it drift townward, thinking about the story Vida had told him.

  The crazy story.

  A woman like Vida, stuck in a creep show like Grail—she was bound to get squirrely. But she was basically sound. Strong. Her soul came busting out at you like an ocean wave. All she needed, he thought, was someone to take responsibility while she backed down the stress levels. He wasn’t secure, however, with the idea that he might be the right someone. Responsibility had never been his strength, though his stability wasn’t in question. Despite a multiplicity of career and personal traumas, he had remained annoyingly stable. A nervous breakdown would do wonders for his self-esteem, reinvigorate a sense of his humanity. He had been skating along for years. Uninvolved with family, unaffected by friends, as if damaged by an accident he could not recall. Spiritually neutered. But he felt a pull from Vida, an undertow of emotion dragging him toward her, and he wanted to go with it. His first agent in LA, a psychotherapy junkie, had treated him to a month of sessions with a shrink, who asked him after the fourth appointment if he would be scheduling a fifth. When Mustaine said he would not, the shrink offered a preliminary diagnosis, opining that he seemed emotionally disconnected and could use some more work.

  “Of course you might get lucky,” the shrink said.

  Mustaine said, “Lucky?”

  “The world has a way of reconnecting people. Sometimes the reconnection is…difficult. Traumatic in the extreme. Sometimes, though—” the shrink swiveled his chair around and looked down onto Rodeo “—it’s not so bad.”

  “You see lots of that, do you?” Mustaine asked. “Reconnection.”

  “No,” said the shrink, with a quick shake of his head. “Not around here.”

  Mustaine imagined this thing with Vida might be the beginning of a “traumatic in the extreme” reconnection, or maybe even a “not so bad” one. His initial instincts had been to back off, to analyze, but she had rolled over him and he doubted free will was a viable option at this point.

  The heat began cooking an asphalt smell from the blacktop; the remnants of something wrapped in crumpled newspaper and tossed into the gutter was attracting flies. Mustaine considered going back to the cabin and sleeping a while longer. He thought about retracing his path up Monroe and taking a stroll through Crosson’s Hardware, the only other store open at this hour. Check out the skill saws. The belt sanders.

  Remedies, he decided.

  The interior of the shop was cool and dim, smelling of herbal bitterness. Stocking the cases and lining the shelves were apothecary bottles with handwritten labels, filled with dark fluids. Also charms made of bones, feathers, beads, and scraps of fur. Medals; amulets; crosses. On the floor behind one of the cases was a stuffed border collie mounted on a plank. Mustaine was leaning over the case, taking a closer look at the dog, who seemed happy to be dead, lips stretched into a smile, tail aloft, when a scratchy contralto with no hint of accent asked if he needed help. A trim blonde woman in a white blouse, gray skirt, and a wide black belt had emerged from the office or whatever lay behind the ajar door. Fiftyish; a bit dried-out, but still attractive. Hair elegantly styled. Understated make-up. Faint crow’s-feet. Her face was a sexy grandma ad for Modern Maturity. He could easily picture her in the offices of a New York publishing house; less easily in a place such as Remedies.

  “Just browsing,” he said; then, with a measure of guilt: “I was checking out the dog.”

  “I suppose it’s a bit ghoulish, but I wanted to be able to look at her.” She stepped behind the case and gave the collie a pat on the head. She glanced at Mustaine. Her eyes were grayish-blue and gave an impression of steadiness. She gestured at the contents of the case. “Would you like to know anything about all this?”

  “Yeah, sure. What kinda remedies you got.”

  “Two kinds, basically. Effective and ineffective.” She did not appear to be kidding.

  “So,” he said, “I guess ineffective remedies aren’t your real movers.”

  “Not at all. I’d say they account for three-quarters of my sales. Many people are defined by their disease. The last thing they want is a cure.” Her smile made a brief appearance, as if to suggest that what she had said—while amusing—was nonetheless true.

  This was not turning out as Mustaine had expected. He had assumed the shop would be operated by some funky old relic, not Ms. Vassar Class of ’72.

  “You’re not in the market for a remedy, I don’t think.” The woman produced a pack of Salems from her skirt pocket and tapped one out. “Possibly the shells…” She lit up, exhaled a narrow stream of smoke, and stood holding the cigarette to the side, a hand on her hip, as if he were a cover design she was contemplating.

  “Nedra!” A pretty black woman wearing a bathrobe, her bronze-colored hair hanging in dozens of thin braids, came out of the back room. The bathrobe was not belted, and she was naked beneath it. She didn’t seem self-conscious about the exposure. “You gonna be a while?”

  “Fifteen or twenty minutes.” The blond woman smiled fondly at her. “Why don’t you go upstairs and put on some music?”

  With a flirty shrug, shaking her fists in dance moves, the black woman hustled off through the door.

  Grail, Louisiana. Kinky Kajunland.

  “Would you like me to do a reading?” Nedra asked of Mustaine.

  “Uh…yeah. How much is it?”

  “Twenty-five for a short reading, fifty for the long.” She said this pertly, her face composed in a neutral expression.

  “Short,” Mustaine said.

  The back room of Remedies, Nedra said, was also the living room of her apartment, most of which lay upstairs. A sofa of white leather and unfinished cedar. Chairs and coffee table to match. A couple of chrome lamp stands. Grasscloth wallpaper. The Upper West Side transplanted. She asked Mustaine to sit on the sofa and went to a lacquered Chinese cabinet at the far end of the room and removed a leather sack about the size of the pouches full of gold that movie Robin Hoods were always ripping off from fat noblemen back in Sherwood.

  “I get the idea you’re not from around here,” he said as she sat beside him.

  “I’m originally from Rhode Island. Newport.” She handed him the sack. “But I’ve lived here for years.”

  “Grail must be a let-down after Newport.”

  “How long have you been in town?” she asked.

  “Since yesterday.”

  “Well…” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. “If you stay, perhaps you’ll understand. There’s a wonderful energy here.”

  A thumping bass issued from upstairs, penetrating the ceiling. Frowning, Nedra glanced upward, lifted her hand as if signaling a waiter, and closed her eyes. Seconds later, the volume was reduced. Watching this, Mustaine felt like a kid who had fallen into the deep end of the pool and discovered that he could not touch bottom.

  “Arlise always forgets how sound carries in this place.” Nedra said. She pointed to the sack. “These are cowry shells. They’re used for divination. Have you ever worked with them before?”

  Mustaine allowed that he had not.

  “Are you religious?”

  “Not really.”

  “Very well.” She clasped her hands about his, so they were both holding the sack; her fingertips were cool against his wrists. “I want you to concentrate. It’s not essential to have a question in mind. Think about something that’s important to you.”

  He bowed his head, picturing Vida’s face, the way it looked when she had approached him in Le Bon Chance
. Intense. Hungry for life.

  Nedra took the sack from him and seemed to be praying. Eyes closed, lips moving. Then she loosened the drawstring and scattered several dozen tiny shells across the surface of the coffee table. They were roughly oval. White with dark speckles and slit openings down the center. Reminiscent of female genitalia. Nedra leaned across the table, holding both hands above the shells. Her nostrils flared and her breathing grew increasingly labored. The shells had spilled into four main groupings, one markedly smaller than the rest. With a practiced movement, she scooped up the shells in the largest grouping and tossed them again onto the table. Studied the new pattern. Then she repeated this process with the remaining groups, her face close to the table, as if she were trying to catch a scent. After about ten minutes, a period during which Mustaine began to feel uneasy, Nedra sighed and sat up straight.

  “I usually have a drink after a reading,” she said. “Would you care for something?”

  “That’s it? You’re finished?”

  “I’ve completed the divination. Now I have to explain it to you.” She stood and smoothed down her skirt. “I have some nice vodka.”

  “Vodka’s fine.”

  She left the room briefly, returning with two shot glasses of chilled vodka. She lifted her glass to Mustaine and knocked it back. He followed suit.

  “You noticed there were four main groups of shells?” She set down her empty glass. “The largest represents your situation in life. The second largest represents you. The third and the fourth groups represent women. One in the recent past, one in the present.”

  “What about the future?” Mustaine asked, affecting a glibness he did not feel. He was beginning to think she might actually be able to offer him a revelation.

  “Anyone who claims they can read the future is a fraud. There is no future, only the present. Even the past is a dream.”

  Disappointed, he asked, “How does that help? I know all I need to about the present.”

  Nedra laughed, a single note of mild incredulity. “Really? Tell me, then. How do you see your situation? What’s going on with you at the moment?”

  He started to speak, but she cut in.

  “It’s important you’re honest with me, no matter how painful that may be.”

  He told her about LA, his songwriting. “I’ve got enough money to live for a couple of years…but not in LA. I’d piss it away there. So I’m going down to Florida to write. I want to write an album they’ll let me record.”

  “That’s not the only reason you left.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I was living with someone. A woman. She was older than me. About your age.”

  Nedra smiled. “I hesitate to ask how old you think I am.”

  “You want me to guess?”

  She shrugged.

  “Forty-eight, forty-nine.”

  “I’m sixty-one. Please don’t tell me I don’t look it. I feel every minute of sixty-one.” She crossed her legs, straightened the hem of her skirt. “You ran out on this woman. You took something of hers.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Is there a more accurate way?”

  He looked down at the speckled profusion of the shells, trying to find himself among them. “No, I guess not.”

  “Whatever it is,” Nedra said, “she can afford it.”

  “I know.” He didn’t want to meet her eyes. “It was a strange relationship. I mean, when she came on to me, I thought it was strange. But I really liked her…”

  “You liked her, but you also were aware that she could help your career, and you can’t reconcile that. You suspect you were only using her.” Nedra leaned forward and took his right hand. “But you weren’t. You liked her, though not as much as she liked you. That was dishonest, but no more so than most of us.”

  Mustaine realized that though her fingers were extremely cold, his hand was growing warmer, as if whatever warmth she possessed was flowing into him.

  “You need to take care of this,” she said. “Call her. Explain that she was mothering you, and that was difficult for you. Admit your weakness and things will go well.”

  “I thought you couldn’t read the future.”

  “This has nothing whatsoever to do with clairvoyance. I can read you, I can read the woman. Certain things become apparent.”

  “It was a car,” Mustaine said after a silence. “She bought it for me. My old car died and she wanted to surprise me. Couple of days after she gave it to me, I was supposed to do some session work. I threw my guitars in the trunk, and instead of heading to the studio I started driving east. I kept thinking I was going to turn around.”

  “It was your car,” Nedra said.

  “Yeah, but…I’m supposed to pay her back.”

  Nedra made an “oh well” noise. “You’ll have to deal with it. Right now you have more immediate worries.”

  Mustaine looked at her expectantly.

  “The second woman,” she said. “Tell me about her.”

  “I’ve only known her a little while, but I’ve fallen in love with her. She’s got some problems.”

  Nedra formed a church-and-steeple with her fingers. “Her problems are not mental.”

  “I don’t know about that. She’s pretty messed up.”

  “Not in the way you suppose. She’s at the center of two opposing magical forces…each trying to claim her for its own. It’s taken an enormous act of will on her part to distance herself from one of these forces. Now she’s in danger from the other.”

  Mustaine was distracted by the sight of the black woman, Arlise, peeking at them from the doorway that led to the upstairs.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Nedra asked.

  “Uh-huh. But I…”

  “I realize you don’t believe in magic, but you’d better learn to suspend your disbelief if you want things to work out between you.” Nedra leaned toward him. “Do you think life is so simple it can be explained by a single philosophical system? This woman you love, she may well be having psychological problems; but they’re the result of magical operations. There are any number of reasons why any one thing happens. They’re congruent, those reasons—they flow together, even though they often appear to run contrary to each other. You can’t examine just one and hope to make sense of the world. You have to accept that this woman is the object of a magical struggle. You have to understand that you are not only her lover, but also a figure in that struggle. That’s who she perceives you to be…as someone who embodies a force that can save her. And according to the shells, that’s who you are.”

  When Mustaine failed to respond she asked if he understood, and he said, “Hell, no!”

  “What is it you don’t understand?”

  He was inclined to say that he didn’t understand why he had paid twenty-five dollars to see her show. What happens for fifty bucks? he wanted to ask. You get topless before you start sniffing the shells? Yet he could not quite convince himself that she was hustling him. Though the thought that he might be the embodiment of some potent salvation was patently absurd, though aware that this sort of intimation was a staple in the canon of every tent show psychic and fortune teller, he was tempted to buy into it if only for the reason that Vida clearly needed saving and he had been the one to happen along. But more than that, the concept of congruent explanations for every worldly event, a concept he would previously have decried as being ludicrous…it seemed plausible now that everything was true, every apparent opposition a form of congruency. Perhaps the force that had joined itself to him was allowing him to see more deeply into the veil of illusion. Yet at the same time he wondered how he could entertain the notion. It went contrary to everything he understood about the world. But maybe this was only another instance of congruency.

  “You’re telling me,” he said, “I have to believe everything she says?”

  “It’s not necessary. But it would help her cause—and yours—if you stopped regarding what she tells you as part of a mental failure and kept a
n open mind.”

  “I don’t know.” Mustaine ran a hand through his hair. “She’s talking some crazy shit. Witch men from New Orleans sending her visions. Using shadows to perform proxy rapes. She says this witch man kept her in his house and handed her out like a party favor to his pals. She…”

  Mustaine broke off, seeing that Nedra’s face had hardened.

  “This woman,” she said. “Is her name Vida Dumars?”

  “You must have heard this before, huh? Yeah, it’s her. Maybe you can…”

  Nedra got to her feet. “I have an appointment. I’m afraid you’ll have to go. I’m sorry.”

  Mustaine, too, stood. “What’s going on?”

  “I told you…I have an appointment.” She gestured toward the door, inviting him to precede her.

  “Y’know,” he said, “seems the second you realized I was talking about Vida your whole attitude changed.”

  “Not at all. I simply remembered an appointment. If you wish to return another day, that’s fine.”

  She ushered him through the shop and out the door and closed it firmly behind him. Blinking against the sunlight, a bit disoriented, Mustaine realized that in her haste she had not bothered to collect his twenty-five dollars. He stood for a couple of seconds, getting his bearings, then started west up Monroe; but as he reached the corner of the building, a woman called to him: “Hey, Mister!”

  It was Arlise, holding her bathrobe closed about her breasts. She peered at him through the beaded curtain of her braids and said, “You wanna help Vida, drive out past the road leads to her place. ’Bout a quarter-mile. There’s a path leads back into the swamp. You follow it to a shanty set on the water, you gon’ find somethin’ll explain what’s happenin’ to Vida.”

  She retreated toward the rear of the building and Mustaine said, “Hey, I want to talk to you!”

  “I got to get back!”

  “Why would you help me?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Vida’s my friend. She baby-sit me when I was little. You help her, I’ll help you.” She backed away, heels scuffing up puffs of yellow dust. “Best you can do is get her away from this damn place!”