The fish resembled a carp and measured three feet from its head to its tail; its overlapping scales were a muddy brown, and its face was the mask of a lugubrious god, with huge golden eyes and a fleshy down-turned mouth. It seemed to be regarding Buddha sadly, registering him as another of life’s disappointments, a subject with which it was quite familiar, for its swollen belly encaged all the evil and heartache to the world, both in principle and reality. Buddha gazed into its eyes, and the pupils expanded into black funnels that connected with his own pupils, opening channels along which torrents of grief and fear began to flow. The deaths of his wife and mother were nothing compared with the hallucinatory terrors that now confronted him: demons with mouths large enough to swallow planets; gales composed of a trillion dying breaths; armies of dead men and women and children. Their bodies maimed by an infinity of malefic usage. Had he witnessed these visions while awake, he would have been overwhelmed; but protected by the conditions of the dream, he withstood them and was made strong.
And before long he fell asleep in the midst of this infinite torment contained within the belly of the fish in his dream, contained in turn within his skull, within the ramshackle frame house, within the gunshot-riddled spiritual realm of the Detroit ghetto, whose agonies became a fleeting instance of distress—the fluttering of an eyelid, the twitching of a nerve—within the dreamed-of peace of Buddha’s sleep.
The shooting gallery was located in the Jefferson-Chalmers district, the section of the ghetto most affected by the ’67 riots. Hundreds of gutted houses still stood as memorials to that event, and between them—where once had stood other houses—lay vacant lots overgrown with weeds and stunted trees of heaven. The following afternoon, as he walked past the lot adjoining the shooting gallery, Buddha was struck by the sight of a charred sofa set among weeds at the center of the lot, and obeying an impulse, he walked over to it and sat down. It was the first day of fall weather. The air was crisp, the full moon pinned like a disfigured cameo of bone to a cloudless blue sky. In front of the sofa was a pile of ashes over which somebody had placed a grill; half a dozen scorched cans were scattered around it. Buddha studied the ashes, the grill, the cans, mesmerized by the pattern they formed. Sirens squealed in the distance, a metallic clanging seemed to be issuing from beyond the sky, and Buddha felt himself enthroned, the desireless king of a ruined world in which all desire had faltered.
He had been sitting for perhaps an hour when a teenage boy with a freckly complexion like Pete’s came running along the sidewalk. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and lugging an immense ghetto blaster. The boy looked behind him, then sprinted across the lot toward Buddha and flung himself down behind the sofa. “You tell ’em I’m here,” he said breathlessly, “I’ll cut ya!” He waggled a switchblade in front of Buddha’s face. Buddha just kept staring at the toppled brick chimneys and vacated premises. A dragonfly wobbled up from the leaves and vanished into the sun dazzle of a piece of broken mirror canted against the ash heap.
Less than a minute later two black men ran past the lot. Spotting Buddha, one shouted, “See a kid come this way?” Buddha made no reply.
“Tell ’em I headed toward Cass,” the kid whispered urgently, but Buddha maintained his silence, his lack of concern.
“Y’hear me?” the man shouted.
“Tell ’em!” the boy whispered.
Buddha said nothing.
The two men conferred and after a second ran back in the direction from which they had come. “Damn, blood! You take some chances!” said the boy, and when Buddha gave no response, he added, “They come back, you just sit there like you done. Maybe they think you a dummy.” He switched on the ghetto blaster, and rap music leaked out, the volume too low for the words to be audible.
Buddha looked at the boy, and the boy grinned, his nervousness evident despite the mask of confidence.
“Ain’t this a fine box?” he said. “Fools leave it settin’ on the stoop, they deserve to get it took.” He squinted as if trying to scry out Buddha’s hidden meaning. “Can’t you talk, man?”
“Nothin’ to say,” Buddha answered.
“That’s cool…Too much bullshit in the air, anyhow.”
The boy reminded Buddha of his younger self, and this disquieted him: he had the urge to offer advice, and he knew advice would be useless. The boy’s fate was spelled out by the anger lying dormant in the set of his mouth. Buddha pitied him, but pity—like love, like hate—was a violation of his policy of noninvolvement, an impediment of the emptiness to which he aspired. He got to his feet and headed for the sidewalk.
“Hey!” yelled the boy. “You tell them mothafuckas where I’m at, I’ll kill yo’ ass!”
Buddha kept walking.
“I mean it, man!” And as if in defiance, as if he needed some help to verbalize it, the boy turned up the ghetto blaster, and a gassed voice blared, “Don’t listen to the shuck and jive from Chairman Channel Twenty-Five…”
Buddha picked up his pace, and soon the voice mixed in with the faint sounds of traffic, distant shouts, other musics, absorbed into the troubled sea from which it had surfaced.
From the shooting gallery to Taboo’s apartment should have been about a twenty-minute walk, but that day—still troubled by his encounter with the boy—Buddha cut the time in half. He had learned that it was impossible to avoid involvement on his day off, impossible not to confront his past, and in Taboo he had found a means of making the experience tolerable, letting it be the exception that proved the rule. When he had first met Taboo seven years before, Taboo’s name had been Yancey; he had been eighteen, married to a pretty girl, and holding down a steady job at Pontiac Motors.
Three years later, when he had next run into him, Taboo had come out of the closet, was working as a psychic healer, curing neighborhood ladies of various minor complaints, and through hormone treatments had developed a small yet shapely pair of breasts, whose existence he hid from the world beneath loose-fitting clothes.
Buddha had caught a glimpse of Taboo’s breasts by accident, having once entered his bathroom while he was washing up, and after this chance revelation, Taboo had fixed upon him as a confidant, a circumstance that Buddha had welcomed—though he did not welcome Taboo’s sexual advances. He derived several benefits from the relationship. For one thing, Taboo’s specialty was curing warts, and Buddha had a problem with warts on his hands (one such had given him an excuse to visit that day); for another, Taboo—who dealt on the side—always had drugs on hand. But the most important benefit was that Taboo provided Buddha with an opportunity to show kindness to someone who brought to mind his dead wife. In their solitary moments together, Taboo would don a wig and a dress, transforming himself into the semblance of a beautiful young woman, and Buddha would try to persuade him to follow his inner directives and proceed with the final stage of his sex change. He would argue long and hard, claiming that Taboo’s magical powers would mature once he completed the transformation, telling Taboo stories of how wonderful his new life would be. But Taboo was deathly afraid of the surgeon’s knife, and no matter how forcefully Buddha argued, he refused to pay heed. Buddha knew there had to be an answer to Taboo’s problem, and sometimes he felt that answer was staring him in the face. But it never would come clear. He had the notion, though, that sooner or later the time would be right for answers.
It was a beautiful spring day in Taboo’s living room. The walls were painted to resemble a blue sky dappled with fluffy white clouds, and the floor was carpeted with artificial grass. In Taboo’s bedroom where he did his healing, it was a mystical night. The walls were figured with cabalistic signs and stars and a crescent moon, and the corner table was ebony, and the chairs upholstered in black velour. Black drapes hid the windows; a black satin quilt covered the bed. Muted radiance shone from the ceiling onto the corner table, and after he had fixed, it was there that Buddha sat soaking his wart in a crystal bowl filled with herb-steeped water, while Taboo sat beside him and muttered charms.
Taboo wa
s not in drag because he was waiting for Johnny Wardell to show; but even so he exhibited a feminine beauty. The soft lighting applied sensual gleams to his chocolate skin and enhanced the delicacy of his high cheekbones and generous mouth and almond-shaped eyes. When he leaned forward to inspect Buddha’s wart, the tips of his breasts dimpled the fabric of his blousy shirt. Buddha could make out his magic: a disturbance like heat haze in the air around him.
“There, darlin’,” said Taboo. “All gone. Your hand back the way it s’posed to be.”
Buddha peered into the bowl. At the bottom rested a wrinkled black thing like a raisin. Taboo lifted his hand from the water and dried it with a towel. Where the wart had been was now only smooth skin. Buddha touched the place; it felt hot and smelled bitter from the herbs.
“Wish Johnny’d hurry up,” said Taboo. “I bought a new dress I wanna try on for ya…”
“Whyn’t you try it on now? If the buzzer goes, you can pretend you ain’t at home.”
“’Cause I just have to deal wit’ him later, and no tellin’ what kinda mood Johnny be in then.”
Buddha had no need to ask Taboo why he had to deal with Johnny Wardell at all. Taboo’s reason for risking himself among the bad dogs was similar to Buddha’s reason for retreating from life: he felt guilty for the way he was, and this risk was his self-inflicted punishment.
Taboo pulled out a packet of white powder and a drinking straw and told Buddha to toot a few lines, to put a shine on his high. Buddha did as he suggested. A luxuriant warmth spread through his head and chest, and little sparkles danced in the air, vanishing like snowflakes. He started getting drowsy. Taboo steered him to the bed, then curled up beside him, his arm around Buddha’s waist.
“I love you so much, Buddha,” he said. “Don’t know what I’d do without you to talk to…I swear I don’t.” His soft breasts nudged against Buddha’s arm, his fingers toyed with Buddha’s belt buckle, and despite himself, Buddha experienced the beginnings of arousal. But he felt no love coming from Taboo, only a flux of lust and anxiety. Love was unmistakable—a warm pressure as steady as a beam from a flashlight—and Taboo was too unformed, too confused, to be its source.
“Naw, man,” Buddha said, pushing Taboo’s hand away.
“I just wanna love you!”
In Taboo’s eyes Buddha could read the sweet fucked-up sadness of a woman born wrong; but though he was sympathetic, he forced himself to be stern. “Don’t mess wit’ me!”
The buzzer sounded.
“Damn!” Taboo sat up, tucked in his shirt. He walked over to the table, picked up the white powder and the drinking straw, and brought them over to Buddha. “You do a little bit more of this here bad boy. But don’t you be runnin’ it. I don’t want you fallin’ out on me.” He went out into the living room, closing the door behind him.
There seemed to be a curious weight inside Buddha’s head, less an ache than a sense of something askew, and to rid himself of it he did most of the remaining heroin. It was enough to set him dreaming, though not of Africa. These dreams were ugly, featuring shrieks and thuds and nasty smears of laughter, and once somebody said, “The man got tits! Dig it! The man’s a fuckin’ woman!”
Gradually he arrived at the realization that the dreams were real, that something bad was happening, and he struggled back to full consciousness. He got to his feet, swayed, staggered forward, and threw open the door to the living room.
Taboo was naked and spread-eagled facedown over some pillow, his rump in the air, and Johnny Wardell—a young leather-clad blood with a hawkish face—was holding his arms. Another man, darker and heavier than Wardell, was kneeling between Taboo’s legs and was just zipping up his trousers.
For a split second nobody moved. Framed by the vivid green grass and blue sky and innocent clouds, the scene had a surreal biblical quality, like a hideous act perpetrated in some unspoiled corner of the Garden of Eden, and Buddha was transfixed by it. What he saw was vile, but he saw, too, that it was an accurate statement of the world’s worth, of its grotesque beauty, and he felt distanced, as if he were watching through a peephole whose far end was a thousand miles away.
“Lookit here,” said Wardell, a mean grin slicing across his face. “The ho already done got herself a man. C’mon, bro’! We saved ya a piece.”
Long-buried emotions were kindled in Buddha’s heart. Rage, love, fear. Their onset toe swift and powerful for him to reject. “Get your hand off him,” he said, pitching his voice deep and full of menace.
Wardell’s lean face went slack, and his grin seemed to deepen, as if the lustful expression engraved on his skull were showing through the skin, as if he perceived in Buddha an object of desire infinitely more gratifying than Taboo.
Wardell nodded at the man kneeling between Taboo’s legs, and the man flung himself at Buddha, pulling a knife and swinging it in a vicious arc. Buddha caught the man’s wrist, and the man’s violence was transmitted through his flesh, seeding fury in his heart. He squeezed the man’s wristbones until they ground together, and the knife fell to the floor. Then he pinned the man against the wall and began smashing his head against it, avoiding the fingers that clawed at his eyes. He heard himself yelling, heard bone splinter.
The man’s eyes went unfocused, and he grew heavy in Buddha’s grasp; he slumped down, the back of his head leaving a glistening red track across a puffy cloud. Buddha knew he was dead, but before he could absorb the fact, something struck him in the back, a liver punch that landed with the stunning impact of a bullet, and he dropped like a stone.
The pain was luminous. He imagined it lighting him up inside with the precise articulation of an X-ray. Other blows rained in upon him, but he felt only the effects of that first one. He made out Wardell looming over him, a slim leathery giant delivering kick after kick. Blackness frittered at the edges of his vision. Then a scream—a sound like a silver splinter driven into Buddha’s brain—and there was Taboo, something bright in his hand, something that flashed downward into Wardell’s chest as he turned, lifted, flashed down again. Wardell stumbled back, looking puzzled, touching a red stain on the shirtfront, and then appeared to slide away into the blackness at the corner of Buddha’s left eye. Buddha lay gasping for breath: the last kick had landed in the pit of his stomach. After a second his vision began to clear, and he saw Taboo standing above Wardell’s body, the other man’s knife in his hand.
With his sleek breasts and male genitalia and the bloody knife, he seemed a creature out of a myth. He kneeled beside Buddha. “You awright?” he asked. “Buddha? You awright?”
Buddha managed a nod. Taboo’s eyes reminded him of the eyes of the fish in his dream—aswarm with terrors—and his magic was heavy wash in the air, stronger than Buddha had ever seen it.
“I never wanted to kill nobody,” said Taboo tremulously. “That’s the last thing I wanted to do.” He glanced at the two corpses, and his lips quivered. Buddha looked at them, too.
Sprawled in oddly graceful attitudes on the green grass amid a calligraphy of blood, they appeared to be spelling out some kind of cryptic message. Buddha thought if he kept staring at them, their meaning would come clear.
“Oh, God!” said Taboo. “They gon’ be comin’ for me, they gon’ put me in jail! I can’t live in jail. What am I gon’ do?”
And to his astonishment, looking back and forth between the corpses and Taboo’s magical aura, Buddha found he could answer that question.
The answer was, he realized, also the solution to the problem of his life; it was a means of redemption, one he could have arrived at by no other process than that of his fifteen-year retreat.
Its conception had demanded an empty womb in which to breed and had demanded as well an apprehension of magical principle: that had been supplied by his dream of Africa. And having apprehended the full measure of this principle, he further realized he had misunderstood the nature of Taboo’s powers. He had assumed that they had been weakened by the wrongness of his birth and would mature once he went under t
he knife; but he now saw that they were in themselves a way of effecting the transformation with a superior result, that they had needed this moment of violence and desperation to attain sufficient strength. Buddha felt himself filling with calm, as if the knowledge had breached an internal reservoir that had dammed calmness up.
“You need a disguise,” he said. “And you got the perfect disguise right at your fingertips.” He proceeded to explain.
“You crazy, Buddha!” said Taboo. “No way I can do that.”
“You ain’t got no choice.”
“You crazy!” Taboo repeated, backing away. “Crazy!”
“C’mon back here!”
“Naw, man! I gotta get away, I gotta…” Taboo backed into the door, felt for the knob, and—eyes wide, panic-stricken—wrenched it open. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something else, but instead he turned and bolted down the hall.
The pain in Buddha’s back was throbbing, spreading a sick weakness all through his flesh, and he passed out for a few seconds.
When he regained consciousness, he saw Taboo standing in the doorway, looking insubstantial due to the heavy wash of magic around him; in fact, the whole room had an underwater lucidity, everything wavering, like a dream fading in from the immaterial. “See?” said Buddha. “Where you gon’ go, man? You barely able to make it here!”
“I don’t know, I’ll…maybe I’ll…” Taboo’s voice, too, had the qualities of something out of a dream; distant and having a faint echo.
“Sheeit!” Buddha reached out to Taboo. “Gimme a hand up.”
Taboo helped him to his feet and into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. Buddha felt as if he might sink forever into the black satin coverlet.
“Show me that new dress you bought,” he said. Taboo went to the closet, pulled out a hanger, and held the dress against his body to display its effect. It was white silk, low-cut, with a scattering of sequins all over.
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 33
