Louisiana Breakdown

by Lucius Shepard

  The breakdown was more impressionistic this time around, illustrating the mystical sickness of Grail, the brain damage of the night. He felt the guitar was channeling the music from some wiser head, the patterns of notes illuminating the invisible patterns that ruled not only the town, but the world that contained it, the ones that prevented you from realizing dreams, from achieving the smallest transcendence, yet that also protected you from the dangers of transcendence, thereby enforcing a neurotic security, a mediocrity glorious for its stability…People were standing and cheering. He supposed it was for the music. Then he saw Vida dancing on stage among the bar girls. Not mimicking their disinterested style. Her dance was all heat and vigor. Like she was working out a violent impulse in 4/4 time. If it had been another night, another woman who had jumped on the stage, he would have played to the moment. He would have moved close and made her twitch faster. But Vida disrupted his focus. Her abandon seemed to have less to do with the music than with derangement, and the crowd’s gleeful approval brought home the perversity of their circumstance. He unstrapped the guitar and the rhythm fell apart behind him; the bar girls quit dancing. Vida staggered as if she’d been shot. He crossed the stage, brushing past the bar girls who, with passive-aggressive languor, put themselves in his path, and caught Vida by the waist. She tried to pull away. She blinked, appearing to recognize him, but reacted dazedly. How, he wondered, could she have gotten drunk so fast? Then he realized he had left her alone for almost an hour.

  “I want to dance some more,” she said, looping her arms about his neck. “Dance with me.”

  “We can dance outside. Let’s go.”

  As he walked her down off the stage, the band struck up an amateurish version of “Sympathy for the Devil” that, with its lurching, fragmented ineptitude and whined vocals, felt more truly demonic than the original.

  “Oh, I love that song!” Vida pushed at his chest, closed her fists and swayed unsteadily, unable to catch the rhythm. “Come on, Jack! Please!”

  “Nobody can dance to that shit,” said Mustaine, though behind them everybody was dancing.

  Drunk, but not so drunk as she had been, Vida sat on the curb with Jack beside her, his arm around her waist. She wished she hadn’t done all those shooters with John Guineau and his friends. She hadn’t had a drink for years, afraid that drunkenness would lower her defenses against Marsh. But knowing he was gone, she had wanted to celebrate her freedom. She still felt like dancing. Sitting there was like sitting in a comfortably warm flame made of Jack and tequila, but she wanted to move, to liberate herself from the vestiges of woe. The Form had done its promised work. She was one answered prayer closer to the mainline of life, and once she got away from Grail, once she settled on the shores of a different ocean, New Smyrna, and God! What would that be like…? Once she got away from Grail, even if Marsh regained his strength, she would be beyond him.

  She bumped Jack with her shoulder, trying to rouse a smile. He just sat there like a crooked black stick turned into a man, brooding over something…she didn’t care what. She’d put a smile on his face before the night was through. She looked off along the street. The mist had thickened; it was getting downright hard to see and almost everybody was inside one or another of the bars. The only people in sight were a handful of Joe Dill’s Vietnamese. Some boys with motor scooters, old women, a slim coppery-colored man in shorts sitting cross-legged across the way, repairing a bicycle that was propped upside down in front of him. Vida liked it better where she was crowned Queen. Out on Beauford Monroe’s estate. Sedele’s daddy. That night had been misty same as this. Beauford had set metal torches everywhere outside and they had gleamed like foxfire in the misty dark. Here, with all these bright electric lights, it wouldn’t half be so pretty.

  “How long’s it all going to take,” Jack asked. “This coronation deal.”

  “Half-hour, maybe. Little more.” She caressed his hair. “Don’t act so put upon! You might enjoy it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You might! For me, most of the fun is tryin’ to guess how they choose the queen.”

  “Don’t they just vote…or have judges?”

  “Oh, no! See it’s gotta be like the Good Gray Man does the choosin’. So they let him speak through somethin’ of nature.”

  He flashed her a quizzical look.

  “My year, they did the choosin’ with a serpent. They dragged a big of blacksnake outa the swamp, and whichever of us it wriggled up to, she’d be the queen.”

  “I woulda wriggled up to you…it’d been me.”

  “You ain’t no snake.” She leaned her head back into his shoulder. “’Cept sometimes.”

  The mist was growing thicker, stained into zones of hazy color by the neon and the lights from inside the bars, and Vida thought maybe it would be a pretty coronation after all, the little girls in their white dresses walking through gauzy scarves of lavender and green and rose.

  “’Course there was some controversy when I was chosen,” she said. “I musta stepped on somethin’, some dead critter, and got blood on my shoe. So when the snake come to me, some said it was ’cause it smelled the blood on my shoe and they accused my mama of puttin’ it there. Which was a lie. There was dogs everywhere ’round the place where I was chosen. They’re always killin’ squirrels…cats. Probably I stepped in some ol’ piece of a barn cat.”

  Something was bothering Jack again, his mouth was all tight and unsmiling. Vida caught his chin in her bunched fingers and shook him gently. “I wish you’d relax! Won’t be long ’fore we outa here and headin’ east. We can drive a couple hours, then get us a motel.”

  “I was thinking we’d drive straight through,” he said.

  “No…un-unh. Nosir! We don’t wanna do that. What you need to do is drive us to Biloxi and find us a room at the nicest motel in town.”

  He was smiling now. “That’s how you see things going, huh? Things’ll work out best we do it your way?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I promise!”

  Mustaine couldn’t recall whether he’d had any expectation of the coronation, other than that it would be cheesy, stupid, a drag. He could not have predicted it would have any effect on him except, perhaps, to increase his impatience to be gone. But from the outset he felt an occult menace, an impression he tried unsuccessfully to rationalize in terms of his having overdosed on the weirdness of Grail. More than a thousand people lined the misted street, talking murmurously, like a crowd awaiting the opening of theater doors. No music could be heard. Acting the part of an army officer, dressed in fatigues—jacket, cap, pants—Joe Dill paced about at the center of the street, occasionally speaking into a walkie-talkie and receiving static-garbled replies. A good many of his Vietnamese bit-actors had removed themselves from the scene and were leaning out upstairs windows. Vida was standing in front of the yellow church, holding a club of twisted dark wood as if it were a bouquet, looking relatively self-possessed, and Mustaine had secured a position thirty feet down from her, in among people he hadn’t previously met, though several of them smiled and said hello. Their simple village friendliness, so untypical of the town, heightened his anxiety. Then Joe Dill waved his arm, retreated back into the crowd, and all the talking stopped. Everything was muffled. Heartbeat-quiet. Just stirrings. The mist thinned and thickened with an oddly vital irregularity, as if it were being circulated by process of some failing organ.

  Something was approaching from the east end of the street, resolving from a white disturbance inside the mist into three pretty little girls in lacy white communion dresses: two brunettes flanking a redhead. Bearing sheaves of what appeared to be flowering weeds. They walked abreast of one another at a slow, obviously practiced pace, their eyes straight ahead, expressions sober…though Mustaine thought the redhead was repressing a smile. When they reached Vida they turned as one and stood beside her, facing back the way they had come. Vida shifted her feet, adjusted her grip on the club. She gazed in his direction. He waved, but she didn’t se
em to notice the gesture.

  The silence of the crowd was oppressive, beating in against Mustaine. His chest tightened and he felt a pulse in his neck. He peered off along the street. Something big and dark materialized from the mist. Mist congealed around it, nearly hiding it from view, then dissipated enough for him to see an enormous longhorn steer with a dark red coat and a white patch on its face. The boy leading it was about fourteen or fifteen, and the top of his head was lower than the beast’s shoulder. The tip of its horns were at least seven feet off the ground. It shook its massive head and expelled a bellows sound as it passed. Mustaine was amazed that the girls, confronted with this barnyard freak, could maintain their poise, but they seemed unconcerned. Vida, however, had become agitated.

  Close behind the steer followed a gray figure that, after a moment of alarm, Mustaine recognized to be a man covered from head to foot in gray cloth, effecting a Gumby look. Holes for eyes, but otherwise featureless. He would scoot toward the crowd with a rolling gait, flapping his arms as if they were boneless; then freeze in place and stand without moving. Mustaine thought of the gray figure he had seen in the swamp and wondered if the performance was based on observation.

  The steer stopped a couple of feet away from the girls. Again as one, they stretched out their hands, offering it their sheaves of weeds. The boy let the lead rope fall, and the steer tossed its head. It was a disturbing sight, this monstrous hot creature with heaving sides looming over the delicate little girls in their lace finery. Mustaine had a vision of the steer lowering its head, hooking with its horns, and white bloodstained dresses, tiny disemboweled bodies tumbling through the air. But it only edged forward and sniffed at the weeds. Somebody behind Mustaine gasped, apparently believing that the steer had chosen the brown-haired girl on the right; but the animal proved to be picky and sniffed each bunch of weeds in turn, before taking a cautious bite from the other brunette’s bunch. The gray-clad man leaped high; cheers burst from the crowd as they poured into the street. Mustaine lost sight of the girls, of Vida—he never saw her pass the scepter. He pushed toward the steer, whose horns showed above the heads of the crowd, but by the time he reached the spot he had headed for, the steer apparently had been led away. He saw the redheaded girl. She looked sad. A redheaded woman in jeans and a plaid shirt was offering consolation.

  Not a sign of Vida, though.

  The street cleared, the crowd flowing back into the bars from which music once again began to issue. Stragglers stood about in small groups. Mustaine thought Vida had likely returned to the Miami, but he worried that she had not. The coronation, despite its grotesque imagery, had not been overly disturbing; yet he had a feeling he had missed something. That something had occurred outside his field of vision and Vida was involved. He walked toward the parked cars, thinking he would make a circuit of the street before heading for the Miami. Not seeing her, he became frantic. He started off one way, walked a few paces, then changed his mind and headed in the opposite direction. As he passed some men talking, Joe Dill broke off from the group and fell into step beside him.

  “You not leavin’, are ya, man?” he asked. “Party’s just gettin’ started.”

  “I’m looking for Vida. You seen her?”

  “She’s off somewhere, don’t you worry.”

  The forced casualness of his tone set off Mustaine’s detectors. He confronted Joe Dill. “You know where she is?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Tell me where the fuck she is!”

  “Off doin’ her civic duty,” said Joe Dill. “Givin’ her all for good ol’ Grail.” He removed his cap and got into Mustaine’s face. “You been a pain in the ass since the second you got here, man. Y’know? Sneerin’ at us…lookin’ down your nose. You don’t know shit about us. This town takes care of its own. We face up to what we do.” He jabbed two fingers into Mustaine’s chest. “Whatever your part was in all this, it’s done. You got no place here now. Time for you to be movin’ on.”

  “Where the hell is she?” Mustaine insisted.

  Joe Dill gave his fatigues a pat-down. “Guess she musta fallen outa my pocket.” He grinned. “I gotta coupla spare hookers at the Miami, you lookin’ to upgrade.”

  A surge of anger overrode Mustaine’s natural caution. He pushed Joe Dill, sent him reeling back, but not down.

  “Whoo-ee!” Having regained his balance, Joe Dill put hands on hips and regarded Mustaine with mock admiration. “You a regular killin’ machine! The ol’ two-handed shove…Don’t believe I ever seen it used with such deadly efficiency.”

  “Tell me what the fuck is going on! Where is she?”

  “I should tell you, y’know? I should send you after her and let your sorry ass get all fucked up.”

  The way he said this, the words, the tone: they confirmed Mustaine’s suspicion that something bad was happening to Vida. Yet the notion that this entire magical mystery tour of Good Gray Men, witch men, Midsummer Queens, and a town of clairvoyants had the slightest reality…even in the moment he believed it, he didn’t completely believe it. But he cast disbelief aside and went at Joe Dill again, taking him by surprise, knocking him flat with an amateurish, looping, yet mystically directed right hand. He kicked him in the stomach, the legs. He cursed him, kicked him in the hip. Then he stumbled back, breathing hard. The group of men who had been talking with Joe Dill were watching, but showed no inclination of coming to his aid.

  “Where is she?” Mustaine toe-rolled him onto his back.

  Blood trickled from the bridge of Joe Dill’s nose onto his lips, painting a red line down the center of his face. His left eyelid was cut and swollen. Nonetheless, he wheezed out a laugh. “You want it that bad, I won’t stand in your way.” He heaved up onto an elbow. “You do a lot better takin’ your little car and your faggoty guitars and gettin’ yourself on down the road. But since you asked…” He spat a glob of pink saliva, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Back of the church there’s a trail runs off into the swamp. She’ll be on that trail right ’bout now.”

  Mustaine hesitated and Joe Dill chuckled. “Didn’t Vida set her spell on you? She set it on me, that’s for sure. I’da gone through fire for that woman back in the day. She must not have got you good as she got me. ’Least you don’t act like she did.”

  Suspended between disbelief and belief, fear for himself and fear for Vida, Mustaine set out walking toward the church, slowly at first, then with purpose.

  “Ain’t you gonna run? Ain’t she worth runnin’ after?”

  Mustaine kicked it into a jog.

  “That ain’t gonna get it done!” Joe Dill shouted. “Oh, man! You never gonna catch up to her! Not movin’ that slow!”

  Desperation and shame caught up with Mustaine and began wrestling for his soul. He broke into a sprint, arms pumping, the yellow church jolting sideways with every step. Some of the young guys sitting astride their motor scooters were jeering and urging him on, and a few people had emerged from the bars and were staring with consternation. As if worried about what he might do. That spurred him faster.

  “There you go, man!” Joe Dill’s voice was fading. “That’s more like it! Now you gotta chance!”

  Feeling disconsolate and not understanding why, Vida took herself off back of the church after passing the scepter to Jeannette Lamoreaux, needing a moment alone to pull her thoughts together. Maybe, she thought, being the Midsummer Queen had meant more to her than she had known, because now she was queen no longer, she felt a lack inside her. Her fears of the future went to tumbling around inside her head like a load of dirty laundry on the rinse cycle.

  The mist was thicker here, seeming to glow whitely, wrapping the cypress trees beyond in luminous ribbons like the ghosts of rivers wending their way into the nothing they sprang from. Vida stood on the edge of the lawn that extended from the church, at the foot of a path that led off into the cypress, and wished she’d gone when Jack wanted. Then she would still be Midsummer Queen in her own mind, she would never have relinquished the one
thing that had made her feel special.

  That wasn’t true, she told herself. Jack and the Form, they made her feel special too.

  “Hey, Vida!”

  She wheeled about, saw a gray figure walking out from the mist alongside of the church, and before she recognized it for Jeannette’s daddy, Pinky Lamoreaux, in that dumb gray costume of his, she let out a squawk and threw up her hands to ward him off.

  “Jesus Christ, Pinky!” Her right hand went to her heart, which was thumping wildly. “Whyn’t you take that stupid thing off?”

  “It’s too damn hot’s why. I ain’t wearin’ nothin’ underneath,” said Pinky, coming up to her. The hood of the costume sucked in toward his mouth when he inhaled. His eyeholes looked empty.

  “Well, you give me a fright. What you want?”

  “I’s hopin’ you’d talk to me ’bout Jeannette. ’Bout what it’s gonna be like for her…being queen and all.”

  She studied on the question, parsed out its meaning. “She ain’t gonna be like me, that’s what you worryin’ ’bout. Jeannette’s a real sweetheart. She don’t have the wildness in her I had. I always had it in me. Wasn’t bein’ queen made it come.”

  “That ain’t what I’m askin’.” Pinky held out his gray paws as if in supplication. “What I’m wonderin’ on is how you feelin’ now.”

  “I feel fine. I’m a little sad. I mean—”

  A figure materialized from the mist behind Pinky. Much larger than him. Darker gray, like trash-fire smoke grown solid. It put its fingerless hands on Pinky, lifted him up, and he went to trembling all over and making muffled explosive sounds, as if trying to suppress a bad cough. Blood plastered the face of his mask to his mouth and chin, lending them shape. Then he was sailed up and out into the swamp. There came a sodden splash. The figure loomed over Vida. Its particulars overwhelmed her. Not like smoke, she thought. Like a smudge, a stain whose outlines shifted, its edges fraying, shrinking, and expanding. Though it had no eyes, she could feel its eyes branding their oval shapes onto her brain, and though it had no fingers, she felt fingers grip her waist hard like cypress forks, drawing her in, submerging her in its gray substance, which was electric and terrible, a gray fire tingling all through her…He was all through her, she realized, and that knowledge kindled her fear in a strike that sent every other thought scattering and lit a scream in her throat that must have brought blood with it, it was so desperate, so final and despairing. Then, as if the sum of her fear had been used up in that awful flaring scream, she was diminished, pared down to a primitive awareness capable only of knowing one thing, but of that one thing knowing almost everything.