I explained what had happened to the MP on duty in the bunker—a heavyset guy named Cousins—and though he had no love for Randall, he was a dutiful sort and gave us permission to wait out the night inside. Randall slumped down against the wall, resting his head on his knees, the picture of despair. But I believed that his survival was assured. With the testimony of the clerk, I thought the shrinks would have no choice but to send him elsewhere for examination and possible institutionalization. I felt good, accomplished, and passed the night chain-smoking, bullshitting with Cousins.
Then, toward dawn, a voice issued from the radio. It was greatly distorted, but it sounded very much like Randall’s.
“Randall J.,” it said. “This here’s Delta Sly Honey. Do you read? Over.”
Randall looked up, hearkening to the spit and fizzle of the static.
“I know you out there, Randall J.,” the voice went on. “I can see you clear, sitting with the shadows of the bars upon your soul and blood on your hands. Ain’t no virtuous blood, that’s true. But it stains you alla same. Come back at me, Randall J. We gotta talk, you and me.”
Randall let his head fall; with a finger, he traced a line in the dust.
“What’s the point in keepin’ this up, Randall J.?” said the voice. “You left the best part of you over here, the soulful part, and you can’t go on much longer without it. Time to take that little walk for real, man. Time to get clear of what you done and pass on to what must be. We waitin’ for you just north of base, Randall J. Don’t make us come for you.”
It was in my mind to say something to Randall, to break the disconsolate spell the voice appeared to be casting over him; but I found I had nothing left to give him, that I had spent my fund of altruism and was mostly weary of the whole business…as he must have been.
“Ain’t nothin’ to be ’fraid of out here,” said the voice. “Only the wind and the gray whispers of phantom Charlie and the trail leadin’ away from the world. There’s good company for you, Randall J. Gotta man here used to be a poet, and he’ll tell you stories ’bout the Wild North King and the Woman of Crystal. Got another fella, guy used to live in Indonesia, and he’s fulla tales ’bout watchin’ tigers come out on the highways to shit and cities of men dressed like women and islands where dragons still live. Then there’s this kid from Opelika, claims to know some of your people down that way, and when he talks, you can just see that ol’ farmboy moon heavin’ up big and yellow over the barns, shinin’ the blacktop so it looks like polished jet, and you can hear crazy music leakin’ from the Dixieland Café and smell the perfumed heat steamin’ off the young girls’ breasts. Don’t make us wait no more, Randall J. We got work to do. Maybe it ain’t much, just breakin’ trail and walkin’ point and keepin’ a sharp eye out for demons…but it sure as hell beats shepherdin’ the dead, now, don’t it?” A long pause. “You come on and take that walk, Randall J. We’ll make you welcome, I promise. This here’s Delta Sly Honey. Over and out.”
Randall pulled himself to his feet and took a faltering few steps toward the mouth of the bunker. I blocked his path and he said, “Lemme go, Curt.”
“Look here, Randall,” I said. “I might can get you home if you just hang on.”
“Home.” The concept seemed to amuse him, as if it were something with the dubious reality of heaven or hell. “Lemme go.”
In his eyes, then, I thought I could see all his broken parts, a disjointed shifting of lights and darks, and when I spoke I felt I was giving tongue to a vast consensus, one arrived at without either ballots or reasonable discourse. “If I let you go,” I said, “be best you don’t come back this time.”
He stared at me, his face gone slack, and nodded.
Hardly anybody was outside, yet I had the idea everyone was watching us as we walked down the hill; under a leaden overcast, the base had a tense, muted atmosphere such as must have attended rainy dawns beneath the guillotine. The sentries at the main gate passed Randall through without question. He went a few paces along the road, then turned back, his face pale as a star in the half-light, and I wondered if he thought we were driving him off or if he believed he was being called to a better world. In my heart I knew which was the case. At last he set out again, quickly becoming a shadow, then the rumor of a shadow, then gone.
Walking back up the hill, I tried to sort out my thoughts, to determine what I was feeling, and it may be a testament to how crazy I was, how crazy we all were, that I felt less regret for a man lost than satisfaction in knowing that some perverted justice had been served, that the world of the war—tipped off-center by this unmilitary engagement and our focus upon it—could now go back to spinning true.
That night there was fried chicken in the mess, and vanilla ice cream, and afterward a movie about a more reasonable war, full of villainous Germans with Dracula accents and heroic grunts who took nothing but flesh wounds. When it was done, I walked back to my hooch and stood out front and had a smoke. In the northern sky was a flickering orange glow, one accompanied by the rumble of artillery. It was, I realized, just about this time of night that Randall had customarily begun his broadcasts. Somebody else must have realized this, because at that moment the PA was switched on. I half expected to hear Randall giving the news of Delta Sly Honey, but there was only static, sounding like the crackling of enormous flames. Listening to it, I felt disoriented, completely vulnerable, as if some huge black presence were on the verge of swallowing me up. And then a voice did speak. It wasn’t Randall’s, yet it had a similar countrified accent, and though the words weren’t quite as fluent, they were redolent of his old raps, lending a folksy comprehensibility to the vastness of the cosmos, the strangeness of the war. I had no idea whether or not it was the voice that had summoned Randall to take his walk, no longer affecting an imitation, yet I thought I recognized its soft well-modulated tones. But none of that mattered. I was so grateful, so relieved by this end to silence, that I went into my hooch and—armed with lies—sat down to finish my interrupted letter home.
Life of Buddha
Whenever the cops scheduled a raid on the shooting gallery to collect their protection money, old cotton-headed Pete Mason, who ran the place, would give Buddha the day off. Buddha rarely said a word to anyone, and Pete had learned that cops were offended by silence. If you didn’t scream and run when they busted in, if like Buddha you just sat there and stared at them, they figured you were concealing a superior attitude, and they then tended to get inside your head.
They had beaten Buddha half to death a couple of times for this very reason, and while Buddha hadn’t complained (he never complained about anything), Pete did not want to risk losing such a faithful employee. So on the night prior to the September raid, Pete went downstairs to where Buddha was nodding on a stained mattress by the front door and said, “Why don’t you hang out over at Taboo’s place tomorrow? Police is comin’ ’round to do they thang.”
Buddha shook himself out of his nod and said, “Talked to him already. Johnny Wardell’s gon’ be over sometime makin’ a buy, but he say to come ahead anyway.” He was a squat black man in his late thirties, his head stone bald, with sleepy heavy-lidded eyes and the beginning of jowls; he was wearing chinos stippled with blood from his last fix, and a too-small T-shirt that showed every tuck and billow of his round belly and womanly breasts. Sitting there, he looked like a Buddha carved from ebony that somebody had outfitted with Salvation Army clothes, and that was why Pete had given him the name. His real name was Richard Damon, but he wouldn’t respond to it anymore. Buddha suited him just fine.
“Beats me why Taboo wanna do business with Johnny Wardell,” Pete said, hitching his pants up over his ample stomach. “Sooner or later Wardell he be gettin’ crazy all over a faggot like Taboo…y’know?”
Buddha grunted, scratched the tracks on his wrist, and gazed out the window beside the front door. He knew Pete was trying to draw him into a conversation, and he had no intention of letting himself be drawn. It wasn’t that he disliked Pe
te; he liked him as much as anyone. He simply had no opinions he wanted to share; he had cultivated this lack of opinion, and he had found that the more he talked, the more opinions came to mind.
“You tell Taboo from me,” Pete went on, “I been livin’ in Detroit more’n sixty years, and I done business wit’ a lotta bad dogs, but I ain’t never met one meaner than Wardell. You tell him he better watch his behavior, y’understan’?”
“Awright.”
“Well…” Pete turned and with a laborious gait, dragging his bad leg, mounted the stairs. “You come on up ’round two and get your goodnighter. I’ll cut ya out a spoon of China White.”
“’Preciate it,” said Buddha.
As soon as Pete was out of sight, Buddha lay down and stared at the flaking grayish-white paint of the ceiling. He picked a sliver of paint from the wall and crumbled it between his fingers. Then he ran the back of his hand along the worn nap of the runner that covered the hallway floor. All as if to reassure himself of the familiar surroundings. He had spent the best part of fifteen years as Pete’s watchdog, lying on the same mattress, staring at that same dried-up paint, caressing that same runner. Before taking up residence on the mattress, he had been a young man with a fixture. Everybody had said, “That Richard Damon, he’s gon’ be headlines, he’s gon’ be Live at Five, he’s gon’ be People magazine.” Not that he had started out different from his peers. He’d been into a little dealing, a little numbers, a little of whatever would pay him for doing nothing. But he’d been smarter than most and had kept his record clean, and when he told people he had his eye on the political arena, nobody laughed. They could see he had the stuff to make it. The trouble was, though, he had been so full of himself, so taken with his smarts and his fine clothes and his way with the ladies, he had destroyed the only two people who had cared about him. Destroyed them without noticing. Worried his mama into an early grave, driven his wife to suicide. For a while after they had died, he’d gone on as always, but then he’d come up against guilt.
He hadn’t known then what that word guilt meant; but he had since learned its meaning to the bone. Guilt started out as a minor irritation no worse than a case of heartburn and grew into a pain with claws that tore out your guts and hollowed your heart. Guilt made you sweat for no reason, jump at the least noise, look behind you in every dark place. Guilt kept you from sleeping, and when you did manage to drop off, it sent you dreams about your dead, dreams so strong they began to invade your waking moments. Guilt was a monster against which the only defense was oblivion…Once he had discovered that truth, he had sought oblivion with the fervor of a converted sinner.
He had tried to kill himself but had not been able to muster the necessary courage and instead had turned to drugs. To heroin and the mattress in the shooting gallery. And there he had discovered another truth: that this life was in itself a kind of oblivion, that it was carving him slow and simple, emptying him of dreams and memories. And of guilt.
The porch steps creaked under someone’s weight. Buddha peered out the window just as a knock sounded at the door. It was Marlene, one of the hookers who worked out of Daily’s Show Bar down the block: a pretty cocoa-skinned girl carrying an overnight bag, her breasts hushed up by a tight bra.
Her pimp—a long-haired white kid—was standing on a lower step. Buddha opened the door, and they brushed past him. “Pete ’round?” Marlene asked.
Buddha pointed up the stairs and shut the door. The white kid grinned, whispered to Marlene, and she laughed. “John think you look like you could use some lovin’,” she said. “What say you come on up, and I’ll give you a sweet ride for free?” She chucked him under the chin. “How that sound, Buddha?”
He remained silent, denying desire and humiliation, practicing being the nothing she perceived. He had become perfect at ignoring ridicule, but desire was still a problem: the plump upper slopes of her breasts gleamed with sweat and looked full of juice. She turned away, apparently ashamed of having teased him.
“Take it easy now, Buddha,” she said with studied indifference, and hand-led the white kid up the stairs.
Buddha plucked at a frayed thread on the mattress. He knew the history of its every stain, its every rip. Knew them so thoroughly that the knowledge was no longer something he could say: it was part of him, and he was part of it. He and the mattress had become a unity of place and purpose. He wished he could risk going to sleep, but it was Friday night, and there would be too many customers, too many interruptions. He fixed his gaze on the tarnished brass doorknob, let it blur until it became a greenish-gold sun spinning within a misty corona. Watched it whirl around and around, growing brighter and brighter. Correspondingly his thoughts spun and brightened, becoming less thoughts than reflections of the inconstant light. And thus did Buddha pass the middle hours of the night.
At two o’clock Buddha double-bolted the door and went upstairs for his goodnighter. He walked slowly along the corridor, scuffing the threadbare carpet, its pattern eroded into grimy darkness and worm trails of murky gold. Laughter and tinny music came from behind closed doors, seeming to share the staleness of the cooking odors that pervaded the house. A group of customers had gathered by Pete’s door, and Buddha stopped beside them. Somebody else wandered up, asked what was happening, and was told that Pete was having trouble getting a vein. Marlene was going to hit him up in the neck. Pete’s raspy voice issued from the room, saying, “Damn it! Hurry up, woman!”
Getting a vein was a frequent problem for Pete; the big veins in his arms were burned-out, and the rest weren’t much better. Buddha peered over shoulders into the room. Pete was lying in bed, on sheets so dirty they appeared to have a design of dark clouds. His freckly brown skin was suffused by a chalky pallor. Three young men—one of them Marlene’s pimp—were gathered around him, murmuring comforts. On the night table a lamp with a ruffled shade cast a buttery yellow light, giving shadows to the strips of linoleum peeling up from the floor.
Marlene came out of the bathroom, wearing an emerald-green robe. When she leaned over Pete, the halves of the robe fell apart, and her breasts hung free, catching a shine from the lamp. The needle in her hand showed a sparkle on its tip. She swabbed Pete’s neck with a clump of cotton and held the needle poised an inch or two away.
The heaviness of the light, the tableau of figures around the bed, Marlene’s gleaming skin, the wrong-looking shadows on the floor, too sharp to be real: taken all together, these things had the same richness and artful composition, the same important stillness, as an old painting that Buddha had once seen in the Museum of Art. He liked the idea that such beauty could exist in this ruinous house, that the sad souls therein could become even this much of a unity. But he rejected his pleasure in the sight, as was his habit with almost every pleasure.
Pete groaned and twisted about. “Stop that shit!” Marlene snapped. “Want me to bleed you dry?”
Other people closed in around the bed, blocking Buddha’s view. Pete’s voice dropped to a whisper, instructing Marlene. Then people began moving away from the bed, revealing Pete lying on his back, holding a bloody Kleenex to the side of his neck. Buddha spotted his goodnighter on the dresser: a needle resting on a mirror beside a tiny heap of white powder.
“How you doin’?” Pete asked weakly as Buddha walked in.
He returned a diffident wave, went over to the dresser, and inspected the powder: it looked like a nice dose. He lifted the mirror and headed off downstairs to cook up.
“Goddamn!” said Pete. “Fifteen years I been takin’ care of you. Feedin’ your Jones, buyin’ your supper. Think we’d have a relationship by now.” His tone grew even more irascible. “I should never have give you that damn name! Got you thinkin’ you inscrutable, when all you is is ignorant!”
Nodding on his mattress in the moonlit dark, feeling the rosy glow of the fix in his heart, the pure flotation of China White in his flesh, Buddha experienced little flash dreams: bizarre images that materialized and faded so quickly, he was unable t
o categorize them. After these had passed he lay down, covered himself with a blanket, and concentrated upon his dream of Africa, the one pleasure he allowed himself to nourish. His conception of Africa bore no relation to the ethnic revival of the sixties, to Afros and dashikis, except that otherwise he might have had no cognizance of the Dark Continent. Buddha’s African kingdom was a fantasy derived from images in old movies, color layouts in National Geographic, from drugs and drugged visions of Nirvana as a theme park. He was not always able to summon the dream, but that night he felt disconnected from all his crimes and passionate failures, stainless and empty, and thus worthy of this guardian bliss. He closed his eyes, then squeezed his eyelids tight until golden pinpricks flowered in the blackness. Those pinpricks expanded and opened into Africa.
He was flowing like wind across a tawny plain, a plain familiar from many such crossings. Tall grasses swayed with his passage, antelope started up, and the gamy smell of lions was in the air. The grasslands evolved into a veld dotted with scum-coated ponds and crooked trees with scant pale foliage. Black stick figures leaped from cover and menaced him with spears, guarding a collage peopled by storytellers and long-legged women who wore one-eyed white masks and whose shadows danced when they walked. Smoke plumed from wart-shaped thatched huts and turned into music; voices spoke from cooking fires. Beyond the village stood green mountains that rose into the clouds, and there among the orchids and ferns were the secret kingdoms of the gorillas. And beyond the mountains lay a vast blue lake, its far reaches fringed by shifting veils of mist in whose folds miragelike images materialized and faded.
Buddha had never penetrated the mists: there was something ominous about their unstable borders and the ghostly whiteness they enclosed. At the center of the lake a fish floated halfway between the surface and the bottom, like the single thought of a liquid brain. Knowing that he must soon face the stresses of the outside world, Buddha needed the solace offered by the fish; he sank beneath the waters until he came face-to-face with it, floating a few inches away.
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 32
