“She’s not angry at you,” Andrea said. “She’s jealous. You and Rudy…that was a part of him she never shared, and when she sees you, she doesn’t know how to handle it.”
“You think?”
“I used to feel that way.”
“About me and Rudy?”
She nodded. “And about the business. I don’t feel that way now. I guess I’m older. I understand you and Rudy had a guy thing and I didn’t need to know everything about it. But Beth’s dealing with a lot right now. She’s oversensitive and she feels…jilted. She feels that Rudy abandoned her for you. A little, anyway. So she’s jilting you. She’ll get over it, or she won’t. People are funny like that. Sometimes resentments are all that hold them together. You shouldn’t take it personally.”
I refitted my gaze to the Polozny, more-or-less satisfied by what she had said. “We live on the banks of the River Styx,” I said after a while. “At least it has a Styx-ian gravitas.”
“Stygian,” she said.
I turned to her, inquiring.
“That’s the word you wanted. Stygian.”
“Oh…right.”
A silence marked by the passing of a mail truck, its tire chains grinding the asphalt and spitting slush; the driver waved.
“I think I know why Rudy did it,” I said, and told her what I had found in the office waste basket. “More than anything, he wanted to do creative work. When he finally did, it gave him nightmares. It messed with his head. He must have built it into this huge thing and…” I tapped out a cigarette, stuck it in my mouth. “It doesn’t sound like much of a reason, but I can relate. That’s why it bites my ass to see guys like Stanky who do something creative every time they take a piss. I want to write those songs. I want to have the acclaim. It gets me thinking, someday I might wind up like Rudy.”
“That’s not you. You said it yourself—you get pissed off. You find someplace else to put your energy.” She rumpled my hair. “Buck up, Sparky. You’re going to live a long time and have lots worse problems.”
It crossed my mind to suggest that the stars might have played some mysterious part in Rudy’s death, and to mention the rash of suicides (five, I had learned); but all that seemed unimportant, dwarfed by the death itself.
At one juncture during that weekend, Stanky ventured forth from TV-land to offer his sympathies. He may have been sincere, but I didn’t trust his sincerity—it had an obsequious quality and I believed he was currying favor, paving the way so he might hit me up for another advance. Pale and shivering, hunched against the cold; the greasy collar of his jacket turned up; holding a Camel in two nicotine-stained fingers; his doughy features cinched in an expression of exaggerated dolor: I hated him at that moment and told him I was taking some days off, that he could work on the album or go play with his high school sycophants. “It’s up to you,” I said. “Just don’t bother me about it.” He made no reply, but the front door slamming informed me that he had not taken it well.
On Wednesday, Patty Prole (nee Patricia Hand), the leader of the Swimming Holes, a mutual friend of mine and Rudy’s who had come down from Pittsburgh for the funeral, joined me and Andrea for dinner at McGuigan’s, and, as we strolled past the park, I recalled that more than a month—thirty-four days, to be exact—had elapsed since I had last seen the stars. The crowd had dwindled to about a hundred-and-fifty (Stanky and Liz among them). They stood in clumps around the statue, clinging to the hope that Black William would appear; though judging by their general listlessness, the edge of their anticipation had been blunted and they were gathered there because they had nothing better to do. The van belonging to the science people from Pitt remained parked at the southeast corner of the library, but I had heard they were going to pull up stakes if nothing happened in the next day or two.
McGuigan’s was a bubble of heat and light and happy conversation. A Joe Henry song played in the background; Pitt basketball was on every TV. I had not thought the whole town would be dressed in mourning, but the jolly, bustling atmosphere came as something of a shock. They had saved the back booth for us and, after drinking for a half-hour or so, I found myself enjoying the evening. Patty was a slight, pretty, blue-eyed blonde in her late twenties, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans. To accommodate the sober purpose of this trip home, she had removed her visible piercings. With the majority of her tattoos covered by the jacket, she looked like an ordinary girl from western Pennsylvania and nothing like the exotic, pantherine creature she became on stage. When talk turned to Rudy, Andrea and I embraced the subject, offering humorous anecdotes and fond reminiscence, but Patty, though she laughed, was subdued. She toyed with her fork, idly stabbing holes in the label on her beer bottle, and at length revealed the reason for her moodiness.
“Did Rudy ever tell you we had a thing?” she asked.
“He alluded to it,” I said. “But well after the fact. Years.”
“I bet you guys talked all about it when you’re up at Kempton’s Pond. He said you used to talk about the local talent when you’re up there sometimes.”
Andrea elbowed me, not too sharply, in mock reproof.
“As I remember, the conversation went like this,” I said. “We were talking about bands, the Swimming Holes came up, and he mentioned he’d had an affair with you. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ And Rudy said, ‘Yeah.’ Then after a minute he said, ‘Patty’s a great girl.’”
“That’s what he said? We had an affair? That’s the word he used?”
“I believe so.”
“He didn’t say he was banging me or like that?”
“No.”
“And that’s all he said?” Patty stared at me sidelong, as if trying to penetrate layers of deception.
“That’s all I remember.”
“I bet you tried to get more out of him. I know you. You were hungering for details.”
“I can’t promise I wasn’t,” I said. “I just don’t remember. You know Rudy. He was a private guy. You could beat on him with a shovel and not get a thing out of him. I’m surprised he told me that much.”
She held my gaze a moment longer. “Shit! I can’t tell if you’re lying.”
“He’s not,” said Andrea.
“You got him scoped, huh? He’s dead to rights.” Patty grinned and leaned against the wall, putting one fashionably booted foot up on the bench. “Rudy and me…It was a couple weeks right before the band left town. It was probably stupid. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I don’t.”
Andrea asked how it happened, and Patty, who obviously wanted to talk about it, said, “You know. Like always. We started hanging out, talking. Finally I asked him straight out, ‘Where’s this going, Rudy?’ Because we only had a couple of weeks and I wanted to know if it was all in my head. He got this peculiar look on his face and kissed me. Like I said, it didn’t last long, but it was deep, you know. That’s why I’m glad Rudy didn’t tell everyone how it was in the sack. It’s a dumb thing to worry about, but…” Her voice had developed a tremor. “I guess that’s what I’m down to.”
“You loved him,” said Andrea.
“Yeah. I did.” Patty shook off the blues and sat up. “There wasn’t anywhere for it to go. He’d never leave his kids and I was going off to Pittsburgh. I hated his wife for a while. I didn’t feel guilty about it. But now I look at her…She was never part of our scene. With Vernon and Rudy and the bands. She lived off to the side of it all. It wasn’t like that with you, Andrea. You had your law thing going, but when you were around, you were into it. You were one of the girls. But Beth was so totally not into it. She still can’t stand us. And now it feels like I stole something from her. That really sucks.”
Platitudes occurred to me, but I kept quiet. Andrea stirred at my side.
“Sometimes it pays to be stupid,” Patty said gloomily.
I had a moment when the light and happy babble of the bar were thrust aside by the gonging thought that my friend was dead, and I didn’t entirely understand what she meant, but I knew
she was right.
Patty snagged a passing waitress. “Can I get a couple of eggs over?” she asked. “I know you’re not serving breakfast, but that’s all I eat is breakfast.” She winked broadly at the waitress. “Most important meal of the day, so I make every meal breakfast.”
The waitress began to explain why eggs were impossible, but Patty cut in, saying, “You don’t want me to starve, do ya? You must have a couple of eggs back there. Some fries and bacon. Toast. We’re huge tippers, I swear.”
Exasperated, the waitress said she’d see if the cook would do it.
“I know you can work him, honey,” Patty said. “Tell him to make the eggs dippy, okay?”
We left McGuigan’s shortly after eight, heading for Corky’s, a working man’s bar where we could do some serious drinking, but as we came abreast of the statue, Patty said, “Hey, let’s go talk to Stanky.” Stanky and Liz were sitting on the base of the statue; Pin and the other boys were cross-legged at their feet, like students attending their master. The crowd had thinned and was down, I’d guess, to about a hundred and twenty; a third of that number were clustered around the science van and the head scientist, who was hunched over a piece of equipment set up on the edge of the library lawn. I lagged behind as we walked over and noticed Liz stiffen at the sight of Patty. The boys gazed adoringly at her. Stanky cast me a spiteful glance.
“I heard your EP, man,” Patty said. “Very cool.”
Stanky muttered, “Yeah, thanks,” and stared at her breasts.
Like me, Patty was a sucker for talent, used to the ways of musicians, and she ignored this ungracious response. She tried to draw him out about the music, but Stanky had a bug up his ass about something and wouldn’t give her much. The statue loomed above, throwing a shadow across us; the horse’s head, with its rolling eyes and mouth jerked open by the reins, had been rendered more faithfully than had Black William’s face…or else he was a man whose inner crudeness had coarsened and simplified his features. In either case, he was one ugly mother, his shoulder-length hair framing a maniacal mask. Seeing him anew, I would not have described his expression as laughing or alarmed, but might have said it possessed a ferocious exultancy.
Patty began talking to the boys about the Swimming Holes’ upcoming tour, and Andrea was speaking with Pin. Stanky oozed over to me, Liz at his shoulder, and said, “We laid down a new song this afternoon.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“It’s decent. ‘Misery Loves Company.’”
In context, it wasn’t clear, until Stanky explained it, that this was a title.
“A guy from DreamWorks called,” he said. “William Wine.”
“Yeah, a few days back. Did Kiwanda tell you about it?”
“No, he called today. Kiwanda was on her break and I talked to him.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said they loved the tape and David Geffen’s going to call.” He squinched up his face, as if summoning a mighty effort. “How come you didn’t tell me about the tape? About him calling before?”
This, I understood, was the thing that had been bothering him. “Because it’s business,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you about every tickle we get. Every phone call.”
He squinted at me meanly. “Why not?”
“Do you realize how much of this just goes away? These people are like flies. They buzz around, but they hardly ever land. Now the guy’s called twice, that makes it a little more interesting. I’ll give it a day or two, and call him back.”
Ordinarily, Stanky would have retreated from confrontation, but with Liz bearing witness (I inferred by her determined look that she was his partner in this, that she had egged him on), his macho was at stake. “I ought to know everything that’s going on,” he said.
“Nothing’s going on. When something happens, I’ll tell you.”
“It’s my career,” he said in a tone that conveyed petulance, defiance, and the notion that he had been wronged. “I want to be in on it, you know.”
“Your career.” I felt suddenly liberated from all restraint. “Your career consists of my efforts on your behalf and three hours on-stage in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. I’ve fed you, I’ve given you shelter, money, a band. And now you want me to cater to your stupid whims? To run downstairs and give you an update on every little piece of Stanky gossip because it’ll gratify your ego? So you can tell your minions here how great you are? Fuck you! You don’t like how I’m handling things, clear the hell out of my house!”
I walked off several paces and stood on the curb, facing the library. That rough cube of Pennsylvania granite accurately reflected my mood. Patches of snow dappled the lawn. There was a minor hub bub near the science truck, but I was enraged and paid it no mind. Andrea came up next to me and took my arm. “Easy, big fella,” she said.
“That asshole’s been under my roof for what? Two months? It feels like two years. His stink permeates every corner of my life. It’s like living with a goat!”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s business.”
I wondered if she was hammering home an old point, but her face gave no sign of any such intent; in fact, her neutral expression dissolved into one of befuddlement. She was staring at the library, and when I turned in that direction, I saw the library had vanished. An immense rectangle—a window with uneven edges—had been chopped out of the wall of the world, out of the night, its limits demarked by trees, lawn, and sky, and through it poured a flood of blackness, thicker and more sluggish than the Polozny. Thick like molasses or hot tar. It seemed to splash down, to crest in a wave, and hold in that shape. Along the top of the crest, I could see lesser, half-defined shapes, vaguely human, and I had the thought that the wave was extruding an army from its substance, producing a host of creatures who appeared to be men. The temperature had dropped sharply. There was a chill, chemical odor and, close above our heads (five feet, I’d estimate), the stars were coasting. That was how they moved. They glided as though following an unseen track, then were shunted sideways or diagonally or backward. Their altitude never changed, and I suspect now that they were prevented from changing it by some physical limitation. They did not resemble stars as much as they did Crazy Ed’s enhancement: ten or twelve globes studded with longish white spines, the largest some eight feet in diameter, glowing brightly enough to illumine the faces of the people beneath them. I could not determine if they were made of flesh or metal or something less knowable. They gave forth high-frequency squeaks that reminded me, in their static quality, of the pictographs in Rudy’s cartoons, the language of the stars.
I’m not sure how long we stood there, but it could not have been more than seconds before I realized that the wave crest was not holding, it was inching toward us across the lawn. I caught Andrea’s hand and tried to run. She screamed (a yelp, really), and others screamed and tried to run. But the wave flowed around us, moving now like black quicksilver, in an instant transforming the center of town into a flood plain, marooning people on islands of solid ground bounded by a waist-high flood that was coursing swiftly past. As Andrea and I clung together, I saw Stanky and Liz, Pin and Patty, the rest of the kids, isolated beside the statue—there were dozens of such groupings throughout the park. It seemed a black net of an extremely coarse weave had been thrown over us all and we were standing up among its strands. We stared at each other, uncertain of our danger; some called for help. Then something rose from the blackness directly in front of me and Andrea. A man, I think, and fully seven feet tall. An African negro by the scarifications on his face. His image not quite real—it appeared to be both embedded in the tarry stuff and shifting over its surface, as if he had been rotoscoped. At the same time, a star came to hover over us, so that my terror was divided. I had from it an impression of eagerness—the feeling washed down upon me; I was drenched in it—and then, abruptly, of disinterest, as if it found Andrea and me unworthy of its attention. With the onset of that disinterest, the black man melted away into the tar and the star passed o
n to another group of stranded souls.
The largest groups were those two clustered about the science van. Figures began to sprout from the tar around them, and not all of these were men. Some were spindly as eels, others squat and malformed, but they were too far away for me to assign them a more particular identity. Stars hovered above the two groups, and the black figures lifted people one by one, kicking and screaming (screams now issued from every corner of the park), and held them up to the stars. These did not, as in Rudy’s cartoons, suck in the meat through one of their spikes; they never touched their victims. A livid arc, fiery black in color, leaped between star and human, visible for a split-second, and then the figure that had lifted the man or woman, dropped him or her carelessly to the ground and melted back into the flood, and the star moved on. Andrea buried her face in my shoulder, but I could not turn away, transfixed by the scene. And as I watched these actions repeated again and again—the figure melting up, lifting someone to a star, and then discarding him, the victim still alive, rolling over, clutching an injured knee or back, apparently not much the worse for wear—I realized the stars were grazing, that this was their harvest, a reaping of seed sown. They were harvesting our genius, a genius they had stimulated, and they were attracted to a specific yield that manifested in an arc of fiery black. The juice of the poet, the canniness of the inventor, the guile of a villain. They failed to harvest the entire crop, only that gathered in the park. The remainder of those affected would go on to create more garden tools and foundation garments and tax plans, and the stars would continue on their way, a path that now and again led them through the center of Black William. I must confess that, amid the sense of relief accompanying this revelation, I felt an odd twinge of envy when I realized that the genius of love was not to their taste.
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 81
