The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  “Listen up,” he says quietly, putting a hand on her arm. “Don’t you be playin’ these games. I’m payin’ you good, so you just sit still and we’ll have a couple drinks and talk a little bit. When the time comes, we’ll go upstairs. Can you deal with that?”

  He feels resentment in the tension of her arm. “OK, baby,” she says with casual falsity. “What you wan’ talk about?”

  Mariah Carey is having a vision of love, her sinewy falsetto going high into a gospel frequency, and Mears asks the hooker if she likes the song.

  She shrugs. “It’s all right.”

  “You know the words?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sing it with me?”

  “Say what?”

  He starts to sing, and after a couple of seconds the hooker joins in. Her voice is slight and sugary but blends well with Mears’ tenor. As they sing, her enthusiasm grows and Mears feels a frail connection forming between them. When the record ends, she giggles, embarrassed, and says, “That was def, baby. You sing real good. You a musician?”

  “Naw, just church stuff, you know.”

  “Bobby Mears!” A man’s voice brays out behind him, a hand falls heavily onto his shoulder. “Goddamn, it is you! My fren’, he saying, ‘Ain’t that Bobby Mears over there?’ and I said, ‘Shit, what he be doin’ in here?’”

  The man is huge, dark as a coal sack against the lesser darkness, and Mears has no clue to his identity.

  “Yes, sir! Bobby ‘the Magician’ Mears! I’m your biggest fan, no shit! I seen you fight a dozen times. And I ain’t talkin’ TV. I mean in person. Man, this is great! Can I get you a drink? Lemme buy you one. Hey, buddy! Give us another round over here, OK?”

  “’Nother draft, ’nother shot of the Gentleman,” says the bartender in a singsong delivery as he pours. He picks up the hooker’s glass and says with less flair, “Vodka and coke.”

  “Sister,” the man says to the hooker, “I don’t know what Bobby’s been tellin’ you, but you settin’ next to one of the greatest fighters ever lived.”

  The hooker says, “You a fighter, baby?” and Mears, who has been seething at this interruption, starts to say it’s time to leave, but the man talks through him.

  “The boy was slick! I’m tellin’ you. Slickest thing you ever seen with that jab of his. Like to kill Marvin Hagler. That old baldhead was one lucky nigger that night. Ain’t it the truth, man?”

  “Bullshit,” Mears says.

  “Man’s jus’ bein’ modest.”

  “I ain’t bein’ modest. Hagler was hurtin’ me from round one, and all I’s doin’ was tryin’ to survive.” Mears digs a roll of bills from his pocket, peels a twenty from the top—the twenties are always on top; then the tens, then the fives. “Anybody saw that fight and thinks Hagler was lucky don’t know jack shit. Hagler was the best, and it don’t make me feel no better ’bout not bein’ the best, you comin’ round and bullshittin’ me.”

  “Be cool, Bobby! All right, man? Be cool.”

  The hooker caresses Mears’ shoulders, his neck, and he feels the knots of muscle, like hard tumors. It would take a thousand left hooks to work out that tension, a thousand solid impacts to drain off the poisons of fear lodged there, and he experiences a powerful welling up of despair that seems connected to no memory or incident, no stimulus whatsoever, a kind of bottom emotion, one you would never notice unless the light and the temperature and the noise level, all the conditions, were just right. But it’s there all the time, the tarry stuff that floors your soul. He tells the man he’s sorry for having lashed out at him. He’s tired, he says, got shit on his mind.

  “Hey,” says the man, “hey, it’s not a problem, OK?”

  There follows a prickly silence that ends when Aaron Neville comes on the jukebox. Mears goes away with the tune, with the singer’s liquid shifts and drops, like the voice of a saxophone, and is annoyed once again when the man says, “Who you fightin’ next, Bobby? You got somethin’ lined up?”

  “Vederotta,” Mears says.

  “The Heat, man? You fightin’ the Heat? No shit! Hey, you better watch your ass with that white boy! I seen him fight Reggie Williams couple months back. Hit that man so hard, two his teeth come away stuck in the mouthpiece.”

  Mears slides the twenty across the bar and says, “Keep it” to the bartender.

  “That’s right,” says the man with apparent relish. “That white boy ain’t normal, you ax me. He jus’ be livin’ to fuck you up, know what I mean? He got somethin’ wrong in his head.”

  “Thanks for the drink,” Mears says, standing.

  “Any time, Bobby, any time,” the man says as Mears lets the hooker lead him toward the stairs. “You take my advice, man. Watch yourself with that Vederotta. That boy he gon’ come hard, and you ain’t no way slick as you used to be.”

  Cold blue neon winks on and off in the window of Mears’ room, a vague nebular shine that might be radiating from a polar beacon or a ghostly police car, and as the hooker undresses, he lies on the bed in his shorts and watches the light. It’s the only thing he sees, just that chilly blue in a black field, spreading across the surface of the glass like some undersea thing, shrinking and expanding like the contractions of an icy blue heart. He has always been afraid before a fight, yet now he’s afraid in a different way. Or maybe it’s not the fear that’s different, maybe it’s his resistance to it that has changed. Maybe he’s weaker, wearier. He is so accustomed to suppressing fear, however, that when he tries to examine it, it slithers away into the cracks of his soul and hides there, lurking, eyes aglow, waiting for its time. Vederotta. The man’s name even sounds strong, like a foreign sin, an age-old curse.

  “Ain’t you wan’ the lights on, honey?” asks the hooker. “I wan’ you be able see what you doin’.”

  “I see you just fine,” he says. “You come on lie down.”

  A siren curls into the distance; two car horns start to blow in an impatient rhythm like brass animals angry at each other; smells of barbecue and gasoline drift in to overwhelm the odor of industrial cleaner.

  Training, he thinks. Once he starts to train, he’ll handle the fear. He’ll pave it over with thousands of sit-ups, miles of running, countless combinations, and by fight night there’ll be just enough left to motivate him.

  The hooker settles onto the bed, lies on her side, leaning over him, her breasts spilling onto his chest and arm. He lifts one in his palm, squeezing its heft, and she makes a soft, pleased noise.

  “Why you didn’t tell me you famous?” she asks.

  “I ain’t famous.”

  “Yeah, but you was.”

  “What difference it make? Bein’ famous ain’t about nothin’.”

  She moves her shoulders, making her breasts roll against him, and her hot, sweet scent seems to thicken. “Jus’ nice to know is all.” She runs a hand along his chest, his corded belly. “Ain’t you somepin’,” she says, and then, “How old’re you, baby?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  He expects her to say, “Thirty-two! Damn, baby. I thought you was twenty-five, you lookin’ good.” But all she does is give a little mmm sound as if she’s filing the fact away and goes on caressing him. By this he knows that the connection they were starting to make in the bar has held and she’s going to be herself with him, which is what he wants, not some play-acting bitch who will let him turn her into Amandla, because he is sick and tired of having that happen.

  She helps him off with his shorts and brings him all the way hard with her hand, then touches his cock to her breasts, lets it butt and slide against her cheek, takes it in her mouth for just seconds, like into warm syrup, her tongue swirling, getting his hips to bridge up from the mattress, wise and playful in her moves, and finally she comes astride him and says, “I believe I’m ready for some of this, baby,” her voice burred, and she reaches for him, puts him where she needs it, and then her whole dark, sweet weight swings down slick and hot around him, and his neck arches, his mouth strains open and his
head pushes back into the pillow, feeling as if he’s dipped the back of his brain into a dark green pool, this ancient place with mossy-stone temples beneath the water and strange carvings and spirits gliding in and out the columns. When that moment passes, he finds she’s riding him slow and deep and easy, not talking hooker trash, but fucking him like a young girl, her breath shaky and musical, hands braced on the pillow by his head, and he slides his hands around to cup her ass, to her back, pressing down so that her breasts graze and nudge his chest, and it’s all going so right he forgets to think how good it is and gives himself over to the arc of his feelings and the steady, sinuous beat of her heart-filled body.

  Afterward there is something shy and delicate between them, something he knows won’t survive for long, maybe not even until morning, and maybe it’s all false, maybe they have only played a deeper game, but if so, it’s deep enough that the truth doesn’t matter, and they are for now in that small room somewhere dark and green, the edge of that pool he dipped into for a second, a wood, sacred, with the calls of those strange metal beasts sounding in the distance from the desolate town. A shadow is circling beneath the surface of the pool, it’s old, wrinkled, hard with evil, like a pale crocodile that’s never been up into the light, but it’s not an animal, not even a thought, it’s just a name: Vederotta. He holds her tight, keeps two fingers pushed between her legs touching the heated damp of her, feeling her pulse there, still rapid and trilling, and he wants to know a little more about her, anything, just one thing, and when he whispers the only question he can think to ask, she wriggles around, holding his two fingers in place, turns her face to his chest and says her name is Arlene.

  Training is like religion to Mears, the litanies of sparring, the penances of one-arm push-ups, the long retreats of his morning runs, the monastic breakfasts at four a.m., the vigils in the steam room during which he visualizes with the intensity of prayer what will happen in the ring, and as with a religion, he feels it simplifying him, paring him down, reducing his focus to a single consuming pursuit. On this occasion, however, he allows himself to be distracted and twice sleeps with Arlene. At first she tries to act flighty and brittle as she did in the bar, but when they go upstairs, that mask falls away and it is good for them again. The next night she displays no pretense whatsoever. They fuck wildly like lovers who have been long separated, and just before dawn they wind up lying on their sides, still joined, hips still moving sporadically. Mears’ head is jangled and full of anxious incoherencies. He’s worried about how he will suffer for this later in the gym and concerned by what is happening with Arlene. It seems he is being given a last sweetness, a young girl not yet hardened beyond repair, a girl who has some honest affection for him, who perhaps sees him as a means of salvation. This makes him think he is being prepared for something bad by God or whomever. Although he’s been prepared for the worst for quite a while, now he wonders if the Vederotta fight will somehow prove to be worse than the worst, and frightened by this, he tells Arlene he can’t see her again until after the fight. Being with her, he says, saps his strength and he needs all his strength for Vederotta. If she is the kind of woman who has hurt him in the past, he knows she will react badly, she will accuse him of trying to dump her, she will rave and screech and demand his attentions. And she does become angry, but when he explains that he is risking serious injury by losing his focus, her defensiveness—that’s what has provoked her anger—subsides, and she pulls him atop her, draws up her knees and takes him deep, gluing him to her sticky thighs, and as the sky turns the color of tin and delivery traffic grumbles in the streets, and a great clanking and screech of metal comes from the docks, and garbage trucks groan and whine as they tip Dumpsters into their maws like iron gods draining their goblets, she and Mears rock and thrust and grind, tightening their hold on each other as the city seems to tighten around them, winching up its loose ends, notch by notch, in order to withstand the fierce pressures of the waking world.

  That afternoon at the gym, Leon takes Mears into the locker room and sits him on a bench. He paces back and forth, emitting an exhaust of cigar smoke, and tells Mears that the boxing commission will be no problem, the physical exam—like most commission physicals—is going to be a joke, no eye charts, nothing, just blood pressure and heart and basic shit like that. He paces some more, then says he’s finished watching films of Vederotta’s last four fights.

  “Ain’t but one way to fight him,” he says. “Smother his punches, grab him, hold him, frustrate the son of a bitch. Then when he get wild and come bullin’ in, we start to throw uppercuts. Uppercuts all night long. That’s our only shot. Understand?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Man’s strong.” Leon sighs as he takes a seat on the bench opposite Mears. “Heavyweight strong. He gon’ come at us from the bell and try to hurt us. He use his head, his elbows, whatever he gots. We can’t let him back us up. We back up on this motherfucker, we goin’ to sleep.”

  There is more, Mears can feel it, and he waits patiently, picking at the wrappings on his hands while he listens to the slap and babble from the gym.

  “’Member that kid Tony Ayala?” Leon asks. “Junior middleweight ’bout ten years ago. Mean fuckin’ kid, wound up rapin’ some schoolteacher in Jersey. Big puncher. This Vederotta ’mind me of him. He knock Jeff Toney down and then he kick him. He hold up Reggie Williams ’gainst the ropes when the man out on his feet so he kin hit him five, six times more.” Leon pauses. “Maybe he’s too strong. Maybe we should pull out of this deal. What you think?”

  Mears realizes that Leon is mainly afraid Vederotta will knock him into retirement, that his cut of the twenty thousand dollars will not compensate for a permanent loss of income. But the fact that Leon has asked what he thinks, that’s new, that’s a real surprise. He suspects that deep within that gross bulk, the pilot light of Leon’s moral self, long extinguished, has been relit and he is experiencing a flicker of concern for Mears’ well-being. Recognizing this, Mears is, for reasons he cannot fathom, less afraid.

  “Ain’t you listenin’, man? I axed what you think.”

  “Got to have that money,” Mears says.

  Leon sucks on his cigar, spits. “I don’t know ’bout this,” he says, real doubt in his voice, real worry. “I just don’t know.”

  Mears thinks about Leon, all the years, the lies, the petty betrayals and pragmatic loyalty, the confusion that Leon must be experiencing to be troubled by emotion at this stage of the relationship. He tries to picture who Leon is and conjures the image of something bloated and mottled washed up on a beach—something that would have been content to float and dream in the deep blue-green light, chewing on kelp, but would now have to heave itself erect and lumber unsightly through the bright, terrible days without solace or satisfaction. He puts a hand on the man’s soft, sweaty back, feels the sick throb of his heart. “I know you don’t,” he says. “But it’s all right.”

  The first time he meets Vederotta, it’s the morning of the fight, at the weigh-in. Just as he’s stepping off the scale, he is startled to spot him standing a few feet away, a pale, vaguely human shape cut in the middle by a wide band of black, the trunks. And a face. That’s the startling thing, the thing that causes Mears to shift quickly away. It’s the sort of face that appears when a fight is going badly, when he needs more fear in order to keep going, but it’s never happened so early, before the fight even begins. And this one is different from the rest. Not a comic-book image slapped onto a human mold, it seems fitted just below the surface of the skin, below the false human face, rippling like something seen through a thin film of water. It’s coal black, with sculpted cheeks and a flattened bump of a nose and a slit mouth and hooded eyes, an inner mask of black lusterless metal. From its eyes and mouth leaks a crumbling red glow so radiant it blurs the definition of the features. Mears recognizes it for the face of his secret pain, and he can only stare at it. Then Vederotta smiles, the slit opening wider to show the furnace glow within, and says in a dull, s
tuporous voice, a voice like ashes, “You don’t look so hot, man. Try and stay alive till tonight, will ya?” His handlers laugh and Leon curses them, but Mears, suddenly spiked with terror, can find no words, no solidity within himself on which to base a casual response. He lashes out at that evil, glowing face with a right hand, which Vederotta slips, and then everyone—handlers, officials, the press—is surging back and forth, pulling the two fighters apart, and as Leon hustles Mears away, saying, “Fuck’s wrong with you, man? You crazy?” he hears Vederotta shouting at him, more bellowing than shouting, no words, nothing intelligible, just the raving of the black beast.

  Half an hour before the fight is scheduled to start, Mears is lying on a training table in the dressing room, alone, his wrapped hands folded on his belly. From the arena come intermittent announcements over the PA, the crowd booing one of the preliminary bouts, and some men are talking loudly outside his door. Mears scarcely registers any of this. He’s trying to purge himself of fear but is not having much success. He believes his peculiar visual trick has revealed one of God’s great killers, and that tonight the red seed of pain in his head will bloom and he will die, and nothing—no determined avowal, no life-affirming hope—will diminish that belief. He could back out of the fight, he could fake an injury of some sort, and he considers this possibility, but something—and it’s not just pride—is pulling him onward. No matter whether or not that face he saw is real, there’s something inhuman about Vederotta. Something evil and implacable. And stupid. Some slowness natural to sharks and demons. Maybe he’s not a fate, a supernatural creature; maybe he’s only malformed, twisted in spirit. Whatever, Mears senses his wrongness the way he would a change in the weather, not merely because of the mask but from a wealth of subtle yet undeniable clues. All these months of imagining beasts in the ring and now he’s finally come up against a real one. Maybe the only real one there is. The one he always knew was waiting. Could be, he thinks, it’s just his time. It’s his time and he has to confront it. Then it strikes him that there may be another reason. It’s as if he’s been in training, sparring with the lesser beasts, Alligator Man, the Fang, Snakeman and the rest, in order to prepare for this bout. And what if there’s some purpose to his sacrifice? What if he’s supposed to do something out there tonight aside from dying?