Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  Then he could breathe.

  Sweet, musty air.

  He gulped it in, gorging on it. The door to the attic had sprung open. His head spinning, he crawled toward the light of a gable window and slipped; a splinter drove deep into the heel of his palm. He rolled onto his back, applying pressure to the point of entry, almost grateful for the sensation. Blood and gray dust mired on his hand.

  ‘I”m sorry, Donnell,’ said Otille’s voice from the speaker. ‘I couldn’t let you leave thinking you’d won. But don’t worry. I still want you.’

  Chapter 16

  August 17, 1987

  On the morning of Dularde’s funeral, Donnell told Jocundra he had slept with Otille. He was contrite; he explained what had happened and why and said it had been awful, and swore there would be no repetition. Jocundra, who had tried to prepare for this turn of events, believed he was truly contrite, that it had been a matter of circumstance allied with Otille’s charm, but despite her rational acceptance, she was hurt and angry.

  ‘It’s this place,’ she said mournfully, staring back at the angelic faces sinking into the black quicksand of their bedroom walls. ‘It twists everything.’

  ‘I can’t leave…’ he began.

  ‘Why should you? You’re the king of Maravillosa! Otille’s prince consort!’

  ‘You seem to think everything’s fucking normal,’ he said. ‘That I’m a guy and you’re a girl, and we’re stuck in this little unpleasantness, but soon we’ll be off to some paradisiacal subdivision. Three kids with sunglasses, a green-eyed dog, the veve in the back yard next to the barbecue. I’m walking a goddamn tightrope with Otille!’

  ‘Is that what they’re calling it now?’ she sneered. ‘Walking a tightrope? Or is that Otille’s erotic specialty?’

  ‘Maybe Edman’s right,’ he said. ‘Maybe you groomed me to be your soulmate. A sappy, morose cripple! Maybe you wanted someone to pity and control, and I’m not pitiable enough anymore.’

  ‘Oh, no?’ She laughed. ‘Now that you’ve risen to the status of pet, I’m supposed to be in awe? I watch you swallow every treat she feeds you…’ Tears were starting to come. ‘Oh, hell!’ she said, and ran out of the door, down the stairs and onto the grounds.

  The sunlight leached the wild vegetation of color and acted to parch her tears. She found a flat stone beside the driveway and sat down, watching flies drone in a clump of weeds. The undersides of their leaves were coated with yellow dust. It hadn’t rained in a couple of weeks, and everything was shriveling. She felt numb, guilty. He was in enough difficulty; he didn’t deserve her insults. A butterfly settled on her knee. If a butterfly lights on your shoulders, you’ll be lucky for a year, she remembered. Her father had been full of such bayou wisdoms. Nine leaves on a sprig of lavender brings money luck. Catch a raindrop in your pocket and it’ll turn to silver. As he had grown older, he had stopped quoting the optimistic ones and taken to scribbling darker sayings on scraps of paper. During her last visit home she had seen them scattered about the house like spent fortunes, tucked between the pages of books, crumpled and flung on the floor, and a final one slipped under the door just before she had left. Those who love laughter pay court to disaster, it had read. Prayers said in the dark are said to the Devil.

  Clouds swept overhead, obscuring the sun and passing off so that the light brightened and faded with the rhythm of laboured breathing. Donnell came out of the house and headed toward the graveyard. Jocundra stood and was about to call his name, but a girl, one of the ‘friends,’ ran down the steps and fell in beside him. Green eyes in a woman means passion, bitterness in a man, Jocundra remembered, staring after Donnell’s retreating figure. One who has not seen his mother will be able to cure.

  There were six coffins in the crypt, walled off behind stone and mortar, all containing a portion of Valcours Rigaud’s remains; there was space for a seventh, but Otille said it was buried elsewhere on the grounds. She lit a candle and set it into an iron wall mount. The yellow light turned her skin to old ivory, licked up the walls, and illuminated a carved device above each of the burial niches. Donnell recognized the design to be a veve, though he had only seen a crude version of it drawn on the back of Jack Richmond’s guitar: a stylized three-horned man. The sight of it waked something inside him to a fury. His fists clenched; his mind was flocked with violent urges, shadowy recognitions, images and scenes that flashed past too quickly for recall. He had such a strong sense of being possessed, of being operated by some alienated fragment of his personality. For a long moment he could do nothing but stand and strain against the impulse to tear at the stones with his bare hands, smash the coffins, crush the rags and splinters of Valcours into an unreconstructable dust. At last the sensation left him, and he asked Otille what the design was.

  ‘The veve of Mounanchou,’ she said. ‘Valcours’ patron god. And Clothilde’s. A nasty sort. The god of gangsters and secret societies.’

  ‘Then why not use it on your calling card?’ he asked, still angry. ‘It seems more appropriate.’

  ‘I’ve rejected Mounanchou,’ said Otille, unflappable. ‘Just as I’ve rejected Clothilde and Valcours. Ogoun Badagris was the patron of… a family friend. A good man. So I adopted it.’ She brushed against him, and her touch had the feel of something roused from the dry air and darkness. ‘Why did you look so peculiar when you saw it?’

  ‘I felt the bacteria moving around,’ he said. ‘It made me a little dizzy.’

  Otille went to the door. ‘Baron,’ she called. ‘Would you bring my parasol from my office. I don’t want to burn.’

  Beyond the door, beyond rows of tombstones tilted at rustic angles, was the raw mound of earth covering Dularde’s coffin. A group of ‘friends’ was in line beside the grave, laughing and chattering; more were straggling toward the line along the path leading from the cabins. Simpkins stood atop the grave, a box of syringes and medicine bottles at his feet. As each of the ‘friends’ joined him on the mounded earth, he would tie off their arms with a rubber tube and give them an injection. Then they would stagger away, weaving, and collapse among the weeds to vomit and twitch, their arms waving feebly, like poisoned ants crawling from their nest to die. It was, thought Donnell, an ideal representation of the overall process of Maravillosa: these healthy, attractive men and women bumping together in line, playfully smacking one another, being changed into derelicts by the cadaverous Simpkins and his magic fluid. He appeared to be enjoying his work, spanking the newly injected on the rumps to get them moving again, beaming at the next in line and saying, ‘This one’s on Brother Dularde.’ Someone switched on a radio, and a blast of rock and roll static defiled the air.

  Donnell stepped out of the crypt, squinting against the sun. Just above his head, surmounting the door, was a whitewashed angel with black tears painted on its cheeks, and he could relate to its languishing expression. Clea, Papa and Downey had not yet arrived, and their absence meant he had to put up with Otille nonstop. He peered down the path, hoping to see them. A man and a woman were walking toward the graveyard, dressed - he assumed at first - in gaudy uniforms of some sort. But as they neared, he realized the uniforms were a satin gown and a brocade jacket, and he saw that their faces were brown and mummified, the faces of the corpses identical to those he had seen in the Replaceable Room. He wheeled about on Otille. She was smiling.

  ‘Just a reminder,’ she said.

  He looked back at the corpses; they were holding hands, now, skipping along the path, and he wondered if there really had been corpses in the Replaceable Room, or if there had only been these counterfeits. He turned back to Otille.

  ‘I don’t need a reminder of what a bitch you are,’ he said.

  He had expected she would flare up at him, but she drew back in fright as if the sound of his voice had menaced her.

  ‘What’s the problem, Otille?’ he asked, delighting in her reaction. ‘I thought you still wanted me.’

  At this, she whirled around and walked hurriedly off toward the house. />
  ‘Bitch!’ he yelled, venting his rage. ‘I’d rather shack up with barnyard animals than make it with you again!’

  The people by the grave were staring at him; some were edging back. Still boiling with anger, he gestured at them in disgust and stormed off along one of the paths leading away from the house. He continued to fume as he walked, knocking branches aside, kicking beer cans and bottles out of his way. The thicket was festooned with litter. Charred mattresses, ripped underwear, food wrappers. Scraps of cellophane clung to the twigs, so profuse in places they seemed floral productions of the shrubs. His anger subsided, and he began to worry about his loss of control, not only its possible repercussions, but its relevance to his stability. He had been losing his temper more and more frequently since arriving at Maravillosa, and he did not think it was solely due to Otille’s aggravation. Certainly she was not responsible for the feeling of possession. The path jogged to the right, widened, and he saw the sternwheeler between the last of the bushes. Against the glittering water and bright blue sky, it had the unreal look of a superimposed image, a black stage flat propped up from behind. Something snapped in back of him.

  ‘Mornin,’ brother,’ said Simpkins.

  Donnell looked around for an escape route, knowing himself in danger, but there was none.

  ‘You just don’t understand how to handle Otille,’ Simpkins said, advancing on him. ‘She’s like a fisherman who’s been havin’ a good day, got herself a string of big cats coolin’ in the stream. Every once in a while she hauls one up and thinks about fryin’ him. And that’s your situation, brother. Just floppin’ on the dock.’

  Donnell started back up the path, but Simpkins put out a restraining hand.

  ‘You gotta just hang there and let the water flow through your gills,’ said Simpkins. ‘You struggle too much and you bound to catch her eye.’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Donnell.

  ‘A little talk,’ said Simpkins. ‘See, brother. Since you arrived, things been goin’ downhill for the rest of us, and we’d like to know what it is you got. Maybe we can get some of it for ourselves. And then’ - he chucked Donnell under the chin in good buddy fashion - ‘once that’s done, the one and only Papa Salvatino is goin’ to cure your ills.’

  Jocundra ran into the Baron on the path to the graveyard. He was standing lost in thought, twirling a yellow parasol. When he saw her, he spat.

  ‘That monkey of yours put on some kind of show at the funeral,’ he said. ‘Used a trick voice or somethin.’ Like to flip Otille out.’

  ‘Where’s Donnell now?’

  ‘You ain’t seen him?’

  ‘I saw him coming this way about a half hour ago.’

  ‘Ah, damn!’ said the Baron. ‘Let’s head on back up there.’

  Bodies were strewn among the tombstones, most unmoving, and most never stirred when the Baron prodded them. Others moaned or frowned groggily. The only person not lying down was a thin-armed, pot-bellied man wearing a bathing suit, who was sitting on top of a tombstone, his stringy brown hair blowing about his face. Static fizzed from a radio on his lap.

  ‘Look like we gonna have to talk to ol’ Captain Tomorrow,’ said the Baron. ‘Dude’s been here so long he’s fuckin’ ossified. The light’s on but nobody’s home.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Let me do the talkin’. He liable to think you an alien or somethin’.’

  He sauntered up casually to the tombstone and said, ‘Hey, what you know, Captain?’

  ‘What I know,’ said the man, staring off at the roof of the main house emerging like a black pyramid above the treeline.

  ‘I say, “What you know, Captain?’” said the Baron, ‘and then you say back, “What I know…” What you mean by that?’

  ‘It’s not ordered knowledge,’ said Captain Tomorrow. ‘It doesn’t come in Aristotelian sequence. I’m trying to give it form, but I don’t expect you to understand.’

  Despite the pomposity of his words, the man’s manner was pathetic. His skin showed the effects of bad diet, his eyes were watery and blinking, and when he lifted his hand to scratch his neck, he did not complete the action and left his hand suspended in the air.

  ‘I’ve been dreaming about flying lately,’ he said to Jocundra.

  She remembered looking into Magnusson’s eyes, feeling sucked in, but looking at this man produced a totally opposite phenomenon. Her gaze skidded away from his, as if his eyes contained polar contradictories to the human senses.

  ‘Probably a result of my work,’ he informed her with solemnity. ‘I’ve been translating secret books of the ancient Hindus.’ He seemed to be waiting for Jocundra to respond.

  ‘I have a friend who’s compiling a Tibetan dictionary,’ she said.’ She’s working in Nepal.’

  ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead.’ He stared at her with renewed intensity. ‘Is she translating that?’

  ‘I think it’s already been done,’ said Jocundra tactfully.

  ‘Not correctly.’ He turned away. ‘Could you get me a copy of her dictionary?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Jocundra. ‘But it’ll take a long time to mail it from Nepal. More than a month.’

  ‘Time,’ said Captain Tomorrow. He found the concept amusing. ‘It’s very important I get the dictionary.’

  ‘That green-eyed fella…’ the Baron began.

  ‘No, not him.’ The Captain hugged himself and hunched his neck and shuddered.

  ‘Naw,’ agreed the Baron. ‘Naw, he ain’t worth a shit wherever he is. Good riddance to him. But whoever’s with him is probably pretty scared.’

  The Captain smiled; it was a sick, secret-keeping smile.

  “Less he’s with Simpkins. I don’t reckon Simpkins would be scared.’

  The radio on the Captain’s lap broke into faint song, then lapsed into frying noises.

  ‘Where’d they go, man?’

  ‘Going, going, gone,’ said the Captain.

  ‘Jesus!’ The Baron spun around and began trying to rouse others of the ‘friends,’ kicking them, shaking them, asking had they seen Donnell.

  ‘Here,’ said Captain Tomorrow; he pulled a plastic baggie from the front of his bathing suit and withdrew a stack of Otille’s business cards. He handed one to Jocundra. On the back was a neat, hand-lettered couplet:

  Those who cannot cope with the reality of today

  Will be literally crushed by the fantasy of tomorrow.

  It’s my motto,’ he said, slowly reintegrating his gaze with the rooftop.

  ‘Thank you.’ Jocundra pocketed the card and was on the verge of joining the Baron, when Captain Tomorrow reached out his hand toward the sun, then brought it back to his lips as if he were swallowing a mouthful of light, accepting communion.

  ‘They’re down at the riverboat,’ he said to his radio. ‘Down, down, down.’

  The hold of the sternwheeler had a resiny odor, and the wavelets slapping against the hull were edged with echoes, sounding like the ticking of a thousand clocks. Sunlight showed between the boards where caulking had worn away, and bars of light glowed beneath the hatch cover, dimming when Papa Salvatino lit a battery lamp and positioned it atop a crate. Clea and Downey stood beside him, their faces anxious. Simpkins threw a chokehold around Donnell’s neck, wrenched his arms up behind his back, and Papa came toward him, rubbing his hands.

  ‘What’s ailin’ you tonight, Brother Harrison?’ he asked, and laughed.

  He placed his hands above Donnell’s head, and Donnell had a fuzzy, dislocated feeling. A high-pitched whine switched on inside his ears.

  ‘I can’t see what I’m doin’ like you, brother,’ said Papa. ‘I got to work by touch, and sometimes… sometimes I slip up.’

  All the strength suddenly drained from Donnell’s body; the weakness was so severe and shocking that his gorge rose, and he would have vomited if Simpkins had not been choking him. Then, as Simpkins released his hold, he sagged to the floor.

  ‘I can make you bleed,’ said Papa. ‘You won’t like it at all.’
r />   ‘Talk to us, brother,’ said Simpkins.

  Donnell was silent a moment, and Simpkins kicked him; but Donnell’s silence was not due to recalcitrance. He had had and continued to have an impression of Jocundra moving around above him, now standing somewhere near the prow. The impression seemed to be compounded of the smell of her hair, the color of her eyes, her warmth, a thousand different impressions, yet its character was unified, an irreducible distillate of these things. He rubbed his throat and pretended to be straining for air.

  ‘About what?’ he gasped. ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Tell us what you did to them birds,’ Clea twanged; her voice trembled, and she stood half-hidden behind Downey, who was chewing on his thumbnail. Despite his masterful pose, belly out, thumbs couched behind his lapels, Papa was also exhibiting signs of unease. Even Simpkins’ smile looked out of true. Donnell’s sunglasses had slipped down onto his nose, and he let them fall, turning away from the lantern so his eyes would show to advantage in the dark.

  ‘Remember, brother,’ said Papa. ‘You ain’t hidin’ out behind Otille’s skirts no more. You down in dirt alley with the dogs howlin’ for your bones.’ He drew forth a hunting knife and let light dazzle the blade.

  ‘Just take it from the beginning,’ said Simpkins. ‘We got all kinds of time.’

  Maybe not, thought Donnell; Jocundra was moving again, stopping, moving, stopping, and there was a purposefulness to her actions.

  ‘The beginning’s not the place to start,’ he said, surprised to hear himself speak because he had been concentrating on Jocundra. Then he realized it had been his alter ego who had spoken, and this time he welcomed it. ‘I saw a man die once. He was shot, lying on a restaurant floor. His heart had quit, his blood was everywhere, and yet he still wasn’t dead. That’s the place to start.’