The Best of Lucius Shepard
Page 34
“Aw, man,” said Buddha. “Yeah, that’s your dress. You be knockin’ the boys’ eyes out wearin’ that…if they could ever see it. If you’d just do what’s right. You’d be too beautiful for Detroit. You’d need to get someplace south, place where the moon shines bright as the sun. ’Cause that’s what kinda beautiful you gon’ be. Moon beautiful. Miami, maybe. That’d suit ya. Get you a big white car, drive down by them fancy hotels, and let all them fancy people have a look at ya. And they gon’ lay down and beg to get next to you, man…”
As Buddha talked, conjuring the feminine future with greater seductiveness and invention than ever before, the heat haze of Taboo’s magic grew still more visible, taking on the eerie miragelike aspect of the mists beyond the lake in Buddha’s Africa; and after Buddha had finished, Taboo sat on the edge of the bed, holding the dress across his lap. “I’m scared,” he said. “What if it don’t work?”
“You always been scared,” said Buddha. “You bein’ scared’s what got them two men dead out there. Time for that to stop. You know you got the power. So go on!”
“I can’t!”
“You ain’t got no choice.” Buddha pulled Taboo’s head down gently and kissed him openmouthed, breathing into him a calming breath. “Do it,” he said. “Do it now.”
Hesitantly Taboo came to his feet. “Don’t you go nowhere now. You wait for me.”
“You know I will.”
“Awright.” Taboo took a few steps toward the bathroom, then stopped. “Buddha, I don’t…”
“Go on!”
Taboo lowered his head, walked slowly into the bathroom, and closed the door.
Buddha heard the tub filling, heard the splashing as Taboo climbed into it. Then heard him begin to mutter his charms. He needed to sleep, to fix, but he kept awake as long as he could, trying to help Taboo with the effort of his will. He could feel the vibrations of the magic working through the bathroom door. Finally he gave in to the pressures of exhaustion and the throbbing in his back and drifted off to sleep; the pain followed him into the blackness of sleep, glowing like the core of his being. He woke sometime later to hear Taboo calling his name and spotted him in the darkest corner of the room—a shadow outlined by painted stars.
“Taboo?”
“It don’t feel right, Buddha.” Taboo’s voice had acquired a husky timbre.
“C’mere, man.”
Taboo came a step closer, and though Buddha was still unable to see him, he could smell the heat and bitterness of the herbs.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Buddha asked. “It musta worked.”
“I think…But I feel so peculiar.”
“You just ain’t used to it is all…Now c’mere!”
Taboo moved still closer, and Buddha made out a naked young woman standing a few feet away. Slim and sexy, with shoulder-length black hair and high, small breasts and a pubic triangle that showed no sign of ever having been male.
The air around Taboo was still and dark. No ripples, no heat haze. The magic had all been used.
“I told ya,” said Buddha. “You beautiful.”
“I ain’t…I just ordinary.” But Taboo sounded pleased.
“Ordinary as angels,” Buddha said. “That’s how ordinary you are.”
Taboo smiled. It was faltering at first, that smile, but it grew wider when Buddha repeated the compliment: the smile of a woman gradually becoming confident of her feminine powers. She lay down beside Buddha and fingered his belt buckle. “I love you, Buddha,” she said. “Make me feel right.”
Love was a steady flow from her, as tangible as a perfume, and Buddha felt it seeping into him, coloring his calm emptiness. On instinct he started to reject the emotion, but then he realized he had one more duty to fulfill, the most taxing and compromising duty of all. He reached down and touched the place between Taboo’s legs. Taboo stiffened and pushed her hips against his finger.
“Make me feel right,” she said again.
Buddha tried to turn onto his side, but the pain in his back flared. He winced and lay motionless. “Don’t know if I can. I’m hurtin’ pretty bad.”
“I’ll help you,” she said, her fingers working at his buckle, his zipper. “You won’t have to do nothin’, Buddha. You just let it happen now.”
But Buddha knew he couldn’t just let it happen, knew he had to return Taboo’s love in order to persuade her of her rightness, her desirability. As she mounted him, a shadow woman lifting and writhing against the false night of the ceiling stars, strangely weightless, he pinned his dead wife’s features to her darkened face, remembered her ways, her secrets. All the love and lust he had fought so long to deny came boiling up from nowhere, annihilating his calm. He dug his fingers into the plump flesh of her hips, wedging himself deep; he plunged and grunted, ignoring the pain in his back, immersed again in the suety richness of desire, in the animal turbulence of this most alluring of human involvements. And when she cried out, a mournful note that planed away to a whisper, like the sound a spirit makes falling through eternity, he felt the profound satisfaction of a musician who by his dominance and skill has brought forth a perfect tone from chaos. But afterward as she snuggled close to him, telling him of her pleasure, her excitement, he felt only despair, fearing that the empty product of his years of ascetic employment had been wasted in a single night.
“Come with me, Buddha,” she said. “Come with me to Miami. We can get us a house on the beach and…”
“Lemme be,” he said, his despair increasing because he wanted to go with her, to live high in Miami and share her self-discovery, her elation. Only the pain in his back—intensifying with every passing minute—dissuaded him, and it took all his willpower to convince her of his resolve, to insist that she leave without him, for Taboo and his dead wife had fused into a single entity in his mind, and the thought of losing her again was a pain equal to the one inflicted by Johnny Wardell.
At last, suitcase in hand, she stood in the doorway, the temptation of the world in a white silk dress, and said, “Buddha, please won’tcha…”
“Damn it!” he said. “You got what you want. Now get on outta here!”
“Don’t be so harsh wit’ me, Buddha. You know I love you.”
Buddha let his labored breathing be the answer.
“I’ll come see ya after a while,” she said. “I’ll bring you a piece of Miami.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Buddha?”
“Yeah.”
“In the bathtub, Buddha…I just couldn’t touch it.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
She half-turned, glanced back. “I’ll always love you, Buddha.” The door swung shut behind her, but the radiance of her love kept beaming through the wood, strong and contaminating.
“Go on,” he murmured. “Get you a big white car.”
He waited until he heard the front door close then struggled up from the bed, clamping his hand over his liver to muffle the pain. He swayed, on the verge of passing out; but after a moment he felt steadier, although he remained disoriented by unaccustomed emotion. However, the sight of the pitiful human fragment lying in the herb-steeped water of the bathtub served to diminish even that. He scooped it up in a drinking glass and flushed it down the toilet. Then he lay back on the bed again. Closed his eyes for a minute…at least he thought it was just a minute. But he couldn’t shake the notion that he’d been asleep for a long, long time.
Buddha had to stop and rest half a dozen times on the way back to the shooting gallery, overcome by pain, by emotions…mostly by emotions. They were all around him as well as inside.
The shadows of the ruined houses were the ghosts of his loves and hates; the rustlings in the weeds were long-dead memories with red eyes and claws just waiting for a chance to leap out and snatch him; the moon—lopsided and orange and bloated—was the emblem of his forsaken ambitions shining on him anew. By loving Taboo he had wasted fifteen years of effort and opened himself to all the indulgent errors of his past, and he w
ished to God now he’d never done it. Then, remembering how dreamlike everything had seemed, he had the thought that maybe it hadn’t happened, that it had been a hallucination brought on by the liver punch. But recalling how it had felt to make love, the womanly fervor of Taboo’s moves, he decided it had to have been real. And real or not, he had lived it, he was suffering for it.
When he reached the shooting gallery he sat cross-legged on his mattress, heavy with despair. His back ached something fierce. Pete was angry with him for being late, but on seeing his discomfort he limped upstairs and brought down a needle and helped him fix. “What happened to ya?” he asked, and Buddha said it wasn’t nothin’, just a muscle spasm.
“Don’t gimme that shit,” said Pete. “You get hit by a goddamn car, and you be tellin’ me it ain’t ’bout nothin’.” He shook his head ruefully. “Well, to hell wit’ ya! I’m sick of worryin’ ’bout ya!”
Buddha began to feel drowsy and secure there on his mattress, and he thought if he could rid himself of the love that Taboo had imparted to him, things might be better than before. Clearer, emptier. But he couldn’t think how to manage it. Then he saw the opportunity that the old man presented, the need for affection he embodied, his hollow heart.
Pete turned to go back up the stairs, and Buddha said, “Hey, Pete!”
“Yeah, what?”
“I love you, man,” said Buddha, and sent his love in a focused beam of such strength that he shivered as it went out of him.
Pete looked at him, perplexed. His expression changed to one of pleasure, then to annoyance. “You love me? Huh? Man, you been hangin’ out with that faggot too much, that’s what you been doin’!”
He clumped a couple of steps higher and stopped. “Don’t bother comin’ upstairs for your goodnighter,” he said in gentler tones. “I’ll send it down wit’ somebody.”
“’Preciate it,” said Buddha.
He watched Pete round the corner of the stairwell, then lay down on the mattress. He was so free of desire and human connections that the instant he closed his eyes, golden pinpricks bloomed behind his lids, opened into Africa, and he was flying across the grasslands faster than ever, flying on the wings of the pain that beat like a sick heart in his back. The antelope did not run away but stared at him with wet, dark eyes, and the stick figures of those who guarded the village saluted him with their spears. The shadows of the masked women danced with the abandon of black flames, and in one of the huts a bearded old man was relating the story of a beautiful young woman who had driven a white car south to Miami and had lived wild for a time, had inspired a thousand men to greater wildness, had married and…Buddha flew onward, not wanting to hear the end of the story, knowing that the quality of the beginning was what counted, because all stories ended the same. He was satisfied that Taboo’s beginning had been worthwhile. He soared low above the green mountains, low enough to hear the peaceful chants of the gorillas booming through the hidden valleys, and soon was speeding above the lake wherein the solitary fish swam a slow and celebratory circle, arrowing toward the mists on its far side, toward those hallucinatory borders that he previously had neither the necessary courage nor clarity to cross.
From behind him sounded a distant pounding that he recognized to be someone knocking on the door of the shooting gallery, summoning him to his duty. For an instant he had an urge to turn back, to reinhabit the world of the senses, of bluesy-souled hookers and wired white kids and punks who came around looking to trade a night’s muscle work for a fix. And that urge intensified when he heard Pete shouting, “Hey, Buddha! Ain’t you gon’ answer the goddamn door?” But before he could act upon his impulse, he penetrated the mists and felt himself irresistibly drawn by their mysterious central whiteness, and he knew that when old Pete came downstairs, still shouting his angry question, the only answer he would receive would be an almost impalpable pulse in the air like the vibration of a gong whose clangor had just faded beneath the threshold of hearing, the pure signal struck from oblivion, the fanfare announcing Buddha’s dominion over the final country of the mind.
White Trains
Concerning the strange events
outside the Castle Monosodium Glutamate Works.
White trains with no tracks
have been appearing on the outskirts
of small anonymous towns,
picket fence towns in Ohio, say,
or Iowa, places rife with solid American values,
populated by men with ruddy faces and weak hearts,
and women whose thoughts slide
like swaths of gingham through their minds.
They materialize from vapor or a cloud,
glide soundlessly to a halt in some proximate meadow,
old-fashioned white trains with pot-bellied smokestacks,
their coaches adorned with filigrees of palest ivory,
packed with men in ice cream suits and bowlers,
and lovely dark-haired women in lace gowns.
The passengers disembark, form into rows,
facing one another as if preparing for a cotillion.
and the men undo their trouser buttons,
their erections springing forth like lean white twigs,
and they enter the embrace of the women,
who lift their skirts to enfold them,
hiding them completely, making it appear
that strange lacy cocoons have dropped from the sky
to tremble and whisper on the bright green grass.
And when at last the women let fall their skirts,
each of them bears a single speck of blood
at the corner of their perfect mouths.
As for the men, they have vanished
like snow on a summer’s day.
I myself was witness to one such apparition
on the outskirts of Parma, New York,
home to the Castle Monosodium Glutamate Works,
a town whose more prominent sophisticates
often drive to Buffalo for the weekend.
I had just completed a thirty-day sentence
for sullying the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter
(They all said she was a good girl
but you could find her name on every bathroom wall
between Nisack and Mitswego),
and having no wish to extend my stay
I headed for the city limits.
It was early morning, the eastern sky
still streaked with pink, mist threading
the hedgerows, and upon a meadow bordering
three convenience stores and a laundromat,
I found a number of worthies gathered,
watching the arrival of a white train.
There was Ernest Cardwell, the minister
of the Church of the Absolute Solstice,
whose congregation alone of all the Empire State
has written guarantee of salvation,
and there were a couple of cops big as bears
in blue suits, carrying standard issue golden guns,
and there was a group of scientists huddled
around the machines with which they were
attempting to measure the phenomenon,
and the mayor, too, was there, passing out
his card and declaring that he had no hand
in this unnatural business, and the scientists
were murmuring, and Cardwell was shouting
“Abomination,” at the handsome men
and lovely women filing out of the coaches,
and as for me, well, thirty days and the memory
of the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter
had left me with a more pragmatic attitude,
and ignoring the scientists’ cries of warning and
Cardwell’s predictions of eternal hellfire,
the mayor’s threats, and the cops’ growling,
I went toward the nearest of the women
and gave her male partner a shove and was amazed
/> to see him vanish in a haze of sparkles
as if he had been made of something insubstantial
like Perrier or truth.
The woman’s smile was cool and enigmatic
and as I unzipped, her gown enfolded me
in an aura of perfume and calm,
and through the lacework the sun acquired
a dim red value, and every sound was faraway,
and I could not feel the ground beneath my feet,
only the bright sensation of slipping inside her.
Her mouth was such a simple curve, so pure
a crimson, it looked to be a statement of principle,
and her dark brown eyes had no pupils.
Looking into them, I heard a sonorous music;
heavy German stuff, with lots of trumpet fanfares
and skirling crescendos, and the heaviness
of the music transfigured my thoughts,
so that it seemed what followed was a white act,
that I had become a magical beast with golden eyes,
coupling with an ephemera, a butterfly woman,
a creature of lace and heat and silky muscle…
though in retrospect I can say with assurance
that I’ve had better in my time.
I think I expected to vanish, to travel
on a white train through some egoless dimension,
taking the place of the poor soul I’d pushed aside,
(although it may be he never existed, that only
the women were real, or that from those blood drops
dark and solid as rubies at the corners of their mouths,
they bred new ranks of insubstantial partners),
but I only stood there jelly-kneed watching
the women board the train, still smiling.
The scientists surrounded me, asking questions,
offering great sums if I would allow them to do tests
and follow-ups to determine whether or not
I had contracted some sort of astral social disease,
and Cardwell was supplicating God to strike me down,
and the mayor was bawling at the cops to take me
in for questioning, but I was beyond the city limits