The Best of Lucius Shepard

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

  We spent the morning and early afternoon setting up, and once I was satisfied that everything was in readiness, I sought out Tan, thinking we might go for a walk; but she was engaged in altering Kai’s costume. I wandered into the main tent and busied myself by making sure the sawdust had been spread evenly. Kai was swinging high above on a rope suspended from the metal ring at the top of the tent, and one of our miniature tigers had climbed a second rope and was clinging to it by its furry hands, batting at her playfully whenever she swooped near. Tranh and Mei were playing cards in the bleachers, and Kim was walking hand-in-hand with our talking monkey, chattering away as if the creature could understand her—now and then it would turn its white face to her and squeak in response, saying “I love you” and “I’m hungry” and other equally non-responsive phrases. I stood by the entranceway, feeling rather paternal toward my little family gathered under the lights, and I was just considering whether or not I should return to the trailer and see if Tan had finished, when a baritone voice sounded behind me, saying, “Where can I find Vang Ky?”

  My father was standing with hands in pockets a few feet away, wearing black trousers and a gray shirt of some shiny material. He looked softer and heavier than he did in his photographs, and the flying fish tattoo on his cheek was now surrounded by more than half-a-dozen tiny emblems denoting his business connections. With his immense head, his shaved skull gleaming in the hot lights, he himself seemed the emblem of some monumental and soulless concern. At his shoulder, over a foot shorter than he, was a striking Vietnamese woman with long straight hair, dressed in tight black slacks and a matching tunic: Phuong Anh Nguyen. She was staring at me intently.

  Stunned, I managed to get out that Vang was no longer with the circus, and my father said, “How can that be? He’s the owner, isn’t he?”

  Shock was giving way to anger, anger so fulminant I could barely contain it. My hands trembled. If I’d had one of my knives to hand, I would have plunged it without a thought into his chest. I did the best I could to conceal my mood, and told him what had become of Vang; but it seemed that as I catalogued each new detail of his face and body—a frown line, a reddened ear lobe, a crease in his fleshy neck—a vial of some furious chemical was tipped over and added to the mix of my blood.

  “Goddamn it!” he said, casting his eyes up to the canvas; he appeared distraught. “Shit!” He glanced down at me. “Have you got his access code? It’s never the same once they go to Heaven. I’m not sure they really know what’s going on. But I guess it’s my only option.”

  “I doubt he’d approve of my giving the code to a stranger,” I told him.

  “We’re not strangers,” he said. “Vang was my father-in-law. We had a falling-out after my wife died. I hoped having the circus here for a week, I’d be able to persuade him to sit down and talk. There’s no reason for us to be at odds.”

  I suppose the most astonishing thing he said was that Vang was his father-in-law, and thus my grandfather. I didn’t know what to make of that; I could think of no reason he might have for lying, yet it raised a number of troubling questions. But his last statement, his implicit denial of responsibility for my mother’s death…it had come so easily to his lips! Hatred flowered in me like a cold star, acting to calm me, allowing me to exert a measure of control over my anger.

  Phoung stepped forward and put a hand on my chest; my heart pounded against the pressure of her palm. “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m…surprised,” I said. “That’s all. I didn’t realize Vang had a son-in-law.”

  Her make-up was severe, her lips painted a dark mauve, her eyes shaded by the same color, but in the fineness of her features and the long oval shape of her face, she bore a slight resemblance to Tan.

  “Why are you angry?” she asked.

  My father eased her aside. “It’s all right. I came on pretty strong—he’s got every right to be angry. Why don’t the two of us…what’s your name, kid?”

  “Dat,” I said, though I was tempted to tell him the truth.

  “Dat and I will have a talk,” he said to Phuong. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

  We went outside, and Phuong, displaying more than a little reluctance, headed off in the general direction of the trailer. It was going on dusk and the fog was closing in. The many-colored bulbs strung in the trees close to the wall and lining the paths had been turned on; each bulb was englobed by a fuzzy halo, and altogether they imbued the encroaching jungle with an eerily festive air, as if the spirits lost in the dark green tangles were planning a party. We stood beside the wall, beneath the great hill rising from the shifting fogbank, and my father tried to convince me to hand over the code. When I refused, he offered money, and when I refused his money he glared at me and said, “Maybe you don’t get it. I really need the code. What’s it going to take for you to give it to me?”

  “Perhaps it’s you who doesn’t get it,” I said. “If Vang wanted you to have the code he would have given it to you. But he gave it to me, and to no one else. I consider that a trust, and I won’t break it unless he signifies that I should.”

  He looked off into the jungle, ran a hand across his scalp, and made a frustrated noise. I doubted he was experienced at rejection, and though it didn’t satisfy my anger, it pleased me to have rejected him. Finally he laughed. “Either you’re a hell of a businessman or an honorable man. Or maybe you’re both. That’s a scary notion.” He shook his head in what I took for amiable acceptance. “Why not call Vang? Ask him if he’d mind having a talk with me.”

  I didn’t understand how this was possible.

  “What sort of computer do you own?” he asked.

  I told him and he said, “That won’t do it. Tell you what. Come over to my house tonight after your show. You can use my computer to contact him. I’ll pay for your time.”

  I was suddenly suspicious. He seemed to be offering himself to me, making himself vulnerable, and I did not believe that was in his nature. His desire to contact Vang might be a charade. What if he had discovered my identity and was luring me into a trap?

  “I don’t know if I can get away,” I said. “It may have to be in the morning.”

  He looked displeased, but said, “Very well.” He fingered a business card from his pocket, gave it to me. “My address.” Then he pressed what appeared to be a crystal button into my hand. “Don’t lose it. Carry it with you whenever you come. If you don’t, you’ll be picked up on the street and taken somewhere quite unpleasant.”

  As soon as he was out of sight, I hurried over to the trailer, intending to sort things out with Tan. She was outside, sitting on a folding chair, framed by a spill of hazy yellow light from the door. Her head was down, and her blouse was torn, the top two buttons missing. I asked what was wrong; she shook her head and would not meet my eyes. But when I persisted she said, “That woman…the one who works for your father…”

  “Phuong? Did she hurt you?”

  She kept her head down, but I could see her chin quivering. “I was coming to find you, and I ran into her. She started talking to me. I thought she was just being friendly, but then she tried to kiss me. And when I resisted”—she displayed the tear in her blouse—“she did this.” She gathered herself. “She wants me to be with her tonight. If I refuse, she says she’ll make trouble for us.”

  It would have been impossible for me to hate my father more, but this new insult, this threat to Tan, perfected it, added a finishing color, like the last brush stroke applied to a masterpiece. I stood a moment gazing off toward the hill—it seemed I had inside me an analogue to that forbidding shape, something equally stony and vast. I led Tan into the trailer, sat her down at the desk, and made her tea; then I repeated all my father had said. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that Vang is my grandfather?”

  She held the teacup in both hands, blew on the steaming liquid and took a sip. “I don’t know. My family has always been secretive. All my parents told me was that Vang was once a wealthy man with a lovi
ng family, and that he had lost everything.”

  “If he is my grandfather,” I said, “then we’re cousins.”

  She set down the cup and stared dolefully into it as if she saw in its depths an inescapable resolution. “I don’t care. If we were brother and sister, I wouldn’t care.”

  I pulled her up, put my arms around her, and she pressed herself against me. I felt that I was at the center of an enormously complicated knot, too diminutive to be able to see all its loops and twists. If Vang was my grandfather, why had he treated me with such coldness? Perhaps my mother’s death had deadened his heart, perhaps that explained it. But knowing that Tan and I were cousins, wouldn’t he have told us the truth when he saw how close we were becoming? Or was he so old-fashioned that the idea of an intimate union between cousins didn’t bother him? The most reasonable explanation was that my father had lied. I saw that now, saw it with absolute clarity. It was the only possibility that made sense. And if he had lied, it followed that he knew who I was. And if he knew who I was…

  “I have to kill him,” I said. “Tonight…it has to be tonight.”

  I was prepared to justify the decision, to explain why a course of inaction would be a greater risk, to lay out all the potentials of the situation for Tan to analyze, but she pushed me away, just enough so that she could see my face, and said, “You can’t do it alone. That woman’s a professional assassin.” She rested her forehead against mine. “I’ll help you.”

  “That’s ridiculous! If I—”

  “Listen to me, Philip! She can read physical signs, she can tell if someone’s angry. If they’re anxious. Well, she’ll expect me to be angry. And anxious. She’ll think it’s just resentment…nerves. I’ll be able to get close to her.”

  “And kill her? Will you be able to kill her?”

  Tan broke from the embrace and went to stand at the doorway, gazing out at the fog. Her hair had come unbound, spilling down over her shoulders and back, the ribbon that had tied it dangling like a bright blue river winding across a ground of black silk.

  “I’ll ask Mei to give me something. She has herbs that will induce sleep.” She glanced back at me. “There are things you can do to insure our safety once your father’s dead. We should discuss them now.”

  I was amazed by her coolness, how easily she had made the transition from being distraught. “I can’t ask you to do this,” I said.

  “You’re not asking—I’m volunteering.” I detected a note of sad distraction in her voice. “You’d do as much for me.”

  “Of course, but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be involved in this.”

  “If it weren’t for you,” she said, the sadness even more evident in her tone, “I’d have no involvements at all.”

  The first part of the show that evening, the entrance of the troupe to march music, Mei leading the way, wearing a red and white majorette’s uniform, twirling—and frequently dropping—a baton, the tigers gamboling at her heels; then two comic skits; then Kai and Kim whirling and spinning aloft in their gold and sequined costumes, tumbling through the air happy as birds; then another skit and Tranh’s clownish juggling, pretending to be drunk and making improbable catches as he tumbled, rolled, and staggered about…all this was received by the predominately male audience with a degree of ironic detachment. They laughed at Mei, they whispered and smirked during the skits, they stared dispassionately at Kim and Kai, and they jeered Tranh. It was plain that they had come to belittle us, that doing so validated their sense of superiority. I registered their reactions, but was so absorbed in thinking about what was to happen later, they seemed unreal, unimportant, and it took all my discipline to focus on my own act, a performance punctuated by a knife hurled from behind me that struck home between Tan’s legs. There was a burst of enthusiastic cheers, and I turned to see Phuong some thirty feet away, taking a bow in the bleacher—it was she who had thrown the knife. She looked at me and shrugged, with that gesture dismissing my poor skills, and lifted her arms to receive the building applause. I searched the area around her for my father, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  The audience remained abuzz, pleased that one of their own had achieved this victory, but when the major entered, led in by Mei and Tranh, they fell silent at the sight of his dark, convulsed figure. Leaning on his staff, he hobbled along the edge of the bleachers, looking into this and that face as if hoping to find a familiar one, and then, moving to the center of the ring, he began to tell the story of Firebase Ruby. I was alarmed at first, but his delivery was eloquent, lyrical, not the plainspoken style in which he had originally couched the tale, and the audience was enthralled. When he came to tell of the letter he had written his wife detailing his hatred of all things Vietnamese, an uneasy muttering arose from the bleachers and rapt expressions turned to scowls; but then he was past that point, and as he described the Viet Cong assault, his listeners settled back and seemed once again riveted by his words.

  “In the phosphor light of the hanging flares,” he said, “I saw the blood-red ground spread out before me. Beyond the head-high hedgerows of coiled steel wire, black-clad men and women coursed from the jungle, myriad and quick as ants, and, inside the wire, emerging from their secret warrens, more sprouted from the earth like the demon yield of some infernal rain. All around me, my men were dying, and even in the midst of fear, I felt myself the object of a great calm observance, as if the tiny necklace-strung images of the Buddha the enemy held in their mouths when they attacked had been empowered to summon their ribbed original, and somewhere up above the flares, an enormous face had been conjured from the dark matter of the sky and was gazing down with serene approval.

  “We could not hold the position long—that was clear. But I had no intention of surrendering. Drunk on whiskey and adrenaline, I was consumed by the thought of death, my own and others’, and though I was afraid, I acted less out of fear than from the madness of battle and a kind of communion with death, a desire to make death grow and flourish and triumph. I retreated into the communications bunker and ordered the corporal in charge to call for an air strike on the coordinates of Firebase Ruby. When he balked I put a pistol to his head until he had obeyed. Then I emptied a clip into the radio so no one could countermand me.”

  The major bowed his head and spread his arms, as though preparing for a supreme display of magic; then his resonant voice sounded forth again, like the voice of a beast speaking from a cave, rough from the bones that have torn its throat. His eyes were chunks of phosphorous burning in the bark of a rotting log.

  “When the explosions began, I was firing from a sandbagged position atop the communications bunker. The VC pouring from the jungle slowed their advance, milled about, and those inside the wire looked up in terror to see the jets screaming overhead, so low I could make out the stars on their wings. Victory was stitched across the sky in rocket trails. Gouts of flame gouged the red dirt, opening the tunnels to the air. The detonations began to blend one into the other, and the ground shook like a sheet of plywood under the pounding of a hammer. Clouds of marbled fire and smoke boiled across the earth, rising to form a dreadful second sky of orange and black, and I came to my feet, fearful yet delighted, astonished by the enormity of the destruction I had called down. Then I was knocked flat. Sandbags fell across my legs, a body flung from God knows where landed on my back, driving the breath from me, and in the instant before consciousness fled, I caught the rich stink of napalm.

  “In the morning, I awoke and saw a bloody, jawless face with staring blue eyes pressed close to mine, looking as if it were still trying to convey a last desperate message. I clawed my way from beneath the corpse and staggered upright to find myself the lord of a killed land, of a raw, red scar littered with corpses in the midst of a charcoaled forest. I went down from the bunker and wandered among the dead. From every quarter issued the droning of flies. Everywhere lay arms, legs, and grisly relics I could not identify. I was numb, I had no feeling apart from a pale satisfaction at having survived. But as
I wandered among the dead, taking notice of the awful intimacies death had imposed: a dozen child-sized bodies huddled in a crater, anonymous as a nest of scorched beetles; a horribly burned woman with buttocks exposed reaching out a clawed hand to touch the lips of a disembodied head—these and a hundred other such scenes brought home the truth that I was their author. It wasn’t guilt I felt then. Guilt was irrelevant. We were all guilty, the dead and the living, the good and those who had abandoned God. Guilt is our inevitable portion of the world’s great trouble. No, it was the recognition that at the moment when I knew the war was lost—my share of it, at least—I chose not to cut my losses but to align myself with a force so base and negative that we refuse to admit its place in human nature and dress it in mystical clothing and call it Satan or Shiva so as to separate it from ourselves. Perhaps this sort of choice is a soldier’s virtue, but I can no longer view it in that light.” He tapped his chest with the tip of his staff. “Though I will never say that my enemies were just, there is justice in what I have endured since that day. All men sin, all men do evil. And evil shows itself in our faces.” Here he aimed the staff at the audience and tracked it from face-to-face, as if highlighting the misdeeds imprinted on each. “What you see of me now is not the man I was, but the thing I became at the instant I made my choice. Take from my story what you will, but understand this: I am unique only in that the judgment of my days is inscribed not merely on my face, but upon every inch of my body. We are all of us monsters waiting to be summoned forth by a moment of madness and pride.”