Louisiana Breakdown

by Lucius Shepard

  Housewives’ phones are ringing off the hook, people asking, “Hear what Marjorie saw in the bird’s nest this mornin’?” or “Hear ’bout Larraine’s new chart?” or “Hear what Charlise found in the spider web behind her mirror?”

  They’ve all heard the same thing.

  The Good Gray Man’s not happy with his woman.

  Those among them who can truly see, the hidden seers and masters of the scene, recognize that it’s not that basic. They see the knot of time and circularity that’s been cinched around the town. Something has happened that no portrait painted by the cards or graven in lines upon a palm could ever prophesy. The Good Gray Man and his ribbed original have come together to be born. There’s no denying it. The signs don’t lie. Vida and that no-account guitar player were both start and finish of the tradition. Why else would the Good Gray Man have let the boy live, but that he recognized his own born body and knew he could not regain it? Ain’t the woman he’s unhappy with…though given the nature of the Good Gray Man, the paradoxical nature of the event, he might be unhappy with her, too. But mainly it’s the town. The bargain he made that can’t be squared. The thing that they, the masters, mistook for a spirit proves to be only a shade, a scrap of wrongly spelled love busted off from the source and slung back two centuries to confuse their ancestors.

  A reality loop, a cosmic glitch.

  How could this happen? one of them asks.

  The laws of physics remain open to interpretation, comes the reply. Magic is singular.

  What have we done? questions another.

  Lied to ourselves, says another yet. Deluded ourselves.

  They begin a doctrinal conversation, debating whether the patterns they perceive in the Tapestry are illusions masking the absence of pattern.

  An old lady with an empty shopping bag lapses into self-pity at the liquor store door, finding it closed.

  Jadeen Bisette, 15, found comatose in a patch of goldenrod back of Crosson’s Hardware. Pronounced dead at 5:44 A.M. Drug overdose. Grail’s first ever.

  No one has to ask, What’s it all coming to?

  Cloudy or clear, they get the picture.

  Over at Le Bon Chance, bored and gloomy as ever, cynical as a dime bag, Miss Sedele lingers by the jukebox, a pale beringed finger hovering above the buttons. She simply cannot make up her mind between M-257, “Louisiana Breakdown” by Jack Meets Vida, and M-258, “Louisiana Breakdown—Vietnam Mix” by Jack Loves Vida. Finally, for no other reason than her finger gets tired, she jabs at the top button, and the music begins breaking down the moment it was created for, soft grunts and quick-hearted flurries of notes and a slug-nickel tonality, and if you had Sedele’s far-seeing eye, you might look down on Le Bon Chance from on high and catch a glint of the music duppy making tracks out the front door, propped open to admit the cleaning staff, and watch the shiny ghost of music flowing along a crack that spreads throughout the world. A shallow crack like a fracture in a veneer caused by something squeezing down on things, closing its fist on the whole shebang. When it shows its palm again, who can say what shapes will remain unbroken.

  ’Least that’s the general feeling in Grail this morning.

  While you’re up there, gazing down at Le Bon Chance, you might take a gander out along Highway 10 at a little red car what’s heading for Florida at an excessive rate of speed, the music duppy hot on its trail, glinting like flecks of mica in the exhaust, desperate to catch up to the one who played it into being. The driver’s been crying, going crazy behind something he never had a handle on. Or if he did, he didn’t handle it too well. Sometimes his mind’s off with Vida on some soft mental surface, making the clumsy low dance of sex and hearing melodies in her hushed breath. Other times he’s out behind the shanty in the mist, retreating from a recognition he could not face or comprehend. He doesn’t know what happened…or maybe he just doesn’t want to know. Only thing he knows for sure, though it would not have done any good, he should have tried harder to save her. It was his time to make a warrior move. He can’t understand what stopped him. Was it the Good Gray Man or something in himself?

  Turn around, he thinks.

  But he keeps on driving.

  Don’t be too hard on the boy. He had magic, fate, human nature, and the Good Gray Man against him.

  The wind rips at his face, wildfires his hair. He stares at his eyes in the rearview mirror.

  Jammed down out of sight between the back seat and the door, a blue jay feather lashed to a forked twig by a piece of black twine, the wood smeared with brown tarry stuff.

  Somebody’s going-away present.

  Might be a hope charm from a secret friend who never made themselves known…

  But probably not.

  The rain that held off for St. John’s Eve is starting to fall. Big cold drops freckling the sidewalks. Storm clouds are contriving a passion of the sky. Hosannas of cloud with silver edges and pudgy faces with pursed lips swelling from their underbellies. Black clouds with lightning spooled in their guts, fat and dumb as gods.

  Far out on the Gulf, a waterspout hulas between heaven and earth, its spindly transparent tube twirling in a mockery of grace.

  Wind rolls a plastic trashcan along Shinbone Alley.

  The WALK sign at the corner of Twelfth and Monroe has gone on the fritz, the brilliant little man made of white dots strobing on and off at fifty apparitions per minute.

  People hide behind curtained windows all day, eating comfort food and watching TV, taking a vacation from the truth. Tonight they’ll hit the bars early. They’ll drink Jaegermeister, green absinthe, and Kalua cocktails, syrupy poisons to purge their spirits, and wind up in the parking lot on hands and knees, strings of bile trailing from their lips. Three sugary twenty-year-old girls with both Sunday school and sodomy on their resumes share a booth and whisper about their hopes and fears, embracing now and then, sharing a cry. Bar fights abound. Sucker-punched bullies with swollen cheeks and split foreheads and chipped molars wince in the fluorescent lights of bathroom mirrors. A rich man tells a whore he loves her and bursts into tears.

  Charlie Duhagen, 68, former fireman, kin to the Salt Harvest Duhagens, feeds his pension check into the poker slots and goes home alone.

  All penances of a kind.

  It’s like that everywhere, you say?

  No kidding…

  Mustaine keeps driving through darkest Alabama, then out into the Panhandle of the Sunshine State. He’s wind-burned, the skin tight across his face. The frontbone tight across his brain. Thoughts under pressure keen and whistle. He’s tempted to let his car drift over the center line, into the high beams. All he wants is Vida. He sees her, tastes her, smells her. He loves her more since he failed her (if failed her he did). That’s his penance. It’s an act of perfect self-destruction. Songs will jet from his blood. Crescent moons will rise on his fingernails. He has chosen not to rationalize what happened. Not to understand is understanding of a sort. He’s aware this is bullshit, but bullshit works for him.

  Right now it’s working overtime.

  He pulls off the highway into a truck stop with a round Sunoco sign atop a pole so high, you can spot it from the overpass. The hard white light of the restaurant sleets like radiation. The paintlike pink make-up on the waitress’s cheeks still looks a little tacky. Her lips remind him of those red gelatin lips with syrup inside them he bought when he was a kid.

  “Coffee,” he says.

  TV’s tuned to CNN, and the truckers, big-bellied ernies in baseball caps, T-shirts, and jeans, are watching a military medical expert explain the function of a nasal swab—he might be speaking to children, he’s talking so slowly, using such simple language. Beneath his image, a red, white, and blue graphic reads AMERICA STRIKES BACK.

  Sitting at the counter, Mustaine drops his head into his hands. It’s as if he’s absent from life, suspended like a shadow among the florid lives of waitresses and truckers and nighthawk tourists. Yet at the same time he’s too heavy for the place. Invulnerable as ston
e. When the waitress says, “Honey, want some eggs or somethin’?” the words set up a resonance in his mind, become a mantra that takes the place of thought, and he has to muster all his concentration in order to shake his head and say, “Unh-uh.”

  Now he can feel what he never felt before. What he thinks you’re supposed to feel, that everybody must feel, the current of life running ragged through him like a handsaw catching on a knot. The effects it produces, love and despair and joy and rage, are only afterimages of its passage. Decaying electron messages, ghosts of a signal. But he and Vida, they were in the moment for a while. They were right there. He holds her name in his mouth like a communion wafer.

  Vida.

  He thinks about returning to Grail, arming himself in some way against the Good Gray Man. But the hopelessness that afflicted him back in the swamp still dominates his heart.

  What, after all, would he find?

  Outside the restaurant, the air brakes of an eighteen-wheeler hiss like a twenty-ton vampire. Men are shining flashlights under the trailer, trying to locate a problem.

  Way back in the swamp, miles and hours behind, the sound of one woman screaming is heard by no one.

  Grail tosses and turns beneath its darkened star.

  The Future is fixed. The moving finger has moved elsewhere.

  An enormous crumbling sound, like thunder, in the west. The exhausted principle of the first storm. War and rumors of war.

  Mustaine’s head droops again. He feels terminally weak, devoid of interest or purpose. His battery cracked and leaking acid. The music duppy finally catches up to him, and he seems to hear the closing passages of the song he played in Le Bon Chance, the sweet sting of the metal slide drawing out the last note, letting it hang like a silver tear, and then it falls, plopping into the black despond of history, creating an irrelevant ripple. Then a scraping on the strings; the bonk of a metal guitar body against a wooden rest.

  Now it’s all broken down.

  Afterword

  WAY DOWN AT THE END OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, AT the bottom of the American heartland, where the division between land and sea is not rigorously defined by a single continuous coastline, there really does exist a world not much different from that of Grail. Lucius Shepard knows this world and has lived in it.

  For some reason reality gets bent like a heat shimmer coming off the hot asphalt in south Louisiana. Some blame it on rampant alcohol abuse, the roiling tropical heat, or consumption of polluted drinking water. Others claim that our tragic and conflicted past is projecting its skeletal fingers into the present in a karmic act of revenge. Despite a strong Christian presence, the confusing mix of superstitious belief systems, cobbled together from different continents and Caribbean islands, creates something akin to spiritual anarchy. We like to mix things up down here. We throw our leftovers into the simmering gumbo, combine rural French folk music with African-American blues, and worship Erzulie alongside the Virgin Mary. As a man who likes his Christianity straight up, without the voodoo chaser, I must confess I empathize with Jack Mustaine’s flight from romance and the supernatural manifestations that attend it. Mustaine can’t face up to love, responsibility, or the weirdness he must confront in Grail, or in himself. So he doesn’t get the girl and ride off into the sunset like in so many clichéd Hollywood films. He fails, bails, and pays for it dearly, but not without gaining something in the process as “songs…jet from his blood.”

  I suspect that more than a few readers of Louisiana Breakdown will feel Shepard’s poetic symbolism resonate in their bones. Others will experience a strange and hollow feeling in the pits of their stomachs as they contemplate Vida’s dark fate back at Madeleine’s shanty.

  This is at it should be, for beneath the splendidly ornate architecture of this tale lies the spare framework of a human mythology as old as, or older than, ancient Greek tragedy. Speaking as an illustrator, I know that Lucius Shepard paints his canvasses with an unusually broad range of colors when it comes to subjects of intimacy and tragic love. One can only acquire such varied hues by using pigments blended from direct experience. There is no other way.

  I have grounded my own illustrations for Louisiana Breakdown on the author’s vividly described imagery while adding my own perspective to each creation. Shepard’s visual-prose style gives the artist an overabundance of choice in subject matter. This is a luxury I rarely have. Invariably there were many scenes I would have liked to illustrate but didn’t. I avoided some scenes because I felt I couldn’t do justice to the level of the prose, while others remain unrealized because of publishing restrictions and obscenity laws. In either case I feel the reader is better left to exercise his or her own visual imagination.

  I first illustrated Lucius’s fiction in the pages of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the early ’80s. Our first illustrated hardcover, The Jaguar Hunter, was published by Arkham House in 1987 under the editorial direction of the late Jim Turner, founder of Golden Gryphon Press. Jim’s brother Gary and his wife Geri currently manage Golden Gryphon along with editor Marty Halpern. Jim has been sorely missed by all of us and we pay special tribute to him with the publication of this book.

  I would like to share with you an odd story about the genesis of this volume. Despite the fact that I consider myself a close friend and confidant of Lucius Shepard, I still find him to be an unusually complex and even baffling individual. Lucius actually sent me the first fifteen or twenty pages of this book well over ten years ago. It was a tantalizing excerpt and I expressed my immediate approval and interest in illustrating the story when finished. I remember him describing the basic themes of the remaining story to me in a phone conversation. I was hooked. As fate would have it, though, no other written installments were forthcoming and my mailbox remained empty for all these many years. I his was disappointing, but as I have much unfinished work myself I felt I had no right to complain. Other excellent Shepard manuscripts made their way to me in the interim, yet I had to wait until December 2001 to find out exactly how Vida and Jack’s story turned out. Coincidentally, I had just returned home to Louisiana after a seven-year stay in New England, so the finished manuscript seemed like an unusually serendipitous welcome-home present. Thank you, Lucius, my friend; you certainly do work in mysterious ways.

  J. K. Potter

  New Orleans

  August 2002

  Four thousand copies of this book have been printed by the Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group, Binghamton, NY, for Golden Gryphon Press, Urbana, IL. The typeset is Electra, printed on 55# Sebago. The binding cloth is Arrestox B. Typesetting by The Composing Room, Inc., Kimberly, WI.

  IN 1985

  LUCIUS SHEPARD won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His fiction, journalism, and commentary have appeared in Playboy, Spin, Omni, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and online on SCIFICTION and ElectricStory. In 1987 he won the Nebula Award for novella “R&R”; in 1988 he won the World Fantasy Award for collection The Jaguar Hunter; in 1992 he again won the World Fantasy Award for collection The Ends of the Earth; and in 1993 he won the Hugo Award for novella Barnacle Bill the Spacer. He has traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He has taught Spanish at a diplomatic school, owned a T-shirt company, and worked as a janitor in a nuclear facility. He has also been a rock musician and, for a time, a bouncer at a brothel. Lucius Shepard currently resides in Vancouver, Washington.