Stars Seen Through Stone

by Lucius Shepard

  The world beat against our door. Pin’s photograph was printed on the third page of the Black William Gazette, along with the news that the University of Pittsburgh would be sending a team of observers to measure the phenomenon, should it occur again, as was predicted (by whom, the Gazette did not say). There was a sidebar recounting Black William’s sordid history and Jonathan Venture’s version of BW’s involvement with the stars. The body of the article…. Well, it was as if the reporter had been privvy to our conversation at the Szechuan Palace. I suspected that he had, if only at second-hand, since my wavefront theory was reproduced in full, attributed to “a local pundit.” As a result of this publicity, groups of people, often more than a hundred, mostly the young and the elderly, came to gather in front of the library between the hours of five and nine, thus depriving me of the customary destination of my evening walks.

  Stanky, his ego swollen to improbable proportions by two successful performances, by the adulation of his high school fans (“Someone ought to be writing everything Joey says down,” said one dreamy-eyed fool), became increasingly temperamental, lashing out at his bandmates, at me, browbeating Liz at every opportunity, and prowling about the house in a sulk, ever with a Coke and cigarette, glaring at all who fell to his gaze, not bothering to speak. In the mornings, he was difficult to wake, keeping Geno and Jerry waiting, wasting valuable time, and one particular morning, my frustration wth him peaked and I let Timber into his bedroom and closed the door, listening while the happy pup gamboled across the mattress, licking and drooling, eliciting squeals and curses from the sleepy couple, an action that provoked a confrontation that I won by dint of physical threat and financial dominance, but that firmly established our unspoken enmity and made me anxious about whether I would be able to maneuver him to the point where I could rid myself of him and show a profit.

  A gray morning, spitting snow, and I answered the doorbell to find a lugubrious, long-nosed gentleman with a raw, bony face, toting a briefcase and wearing a Sy Sperling wig and a cheap brown suit. A police cruiser was parked at the curb; two uniformed officers stood smoking beside it, casting indifferent looks toward the Polozny, which rolled on blackly in—as a local DJ was prone to characterize it—“its eternal search for the sea.” Since we were only a couple of days from the EP release, I experienced a sinking feeling, one that was borne out when the man produced a card identifying him as Martin Kiggins of McKeesport, a Friend of the Court. He said he would like to have a word with me about Joseph Stanky.

  “How well do you know Joseph?” he asked me once we had settled in the office.

  Kiwanda, at her desk in the next room, made a choking noise. I replied that while I had, I thought, an adequate understanding of Joseph as a musician, I was unfamililar with the details of his life.

  “Did you know he has a wife?” Kiggins was too lanky to fit the chair and, throughout our talk, kept scrunching around in it. “And he’s got a little boy. Almost two years old, he is.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Poor little guy nearly didn’t make it that far. Been sick his whole life.” Kiggins’s gaze acquired a morose intensity. “Meningitis.”

  I couldn’t get a handle on Kiggins; he acted as if he was trying to sell me something, yet he had arrived on my doorstep with an armed force and the authority of the law.

  “I thought meningitis was fatal,” I said.

  “Not a hundred percent,” said Kiggins cheerlessly. “His mother doesn’t have insurance, so he didn’t get the best of care.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “She’s on welfare. Things aren’t likely to improve for the kid or for her. She’s not what you’d call an attractive woman.”

  “Why are we talking about this?” I asked. “It’s a sad story, but I’m not involved.”

  “Not directly, no.”

  “Not any damn way. I don’t understand what you’re looking for.”

  Kiggins seemed disappointed in me. “I’m looking for Joseph. Is he here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. Okay.” He put his hands on his knees and stood, making a show of peering out the window at his cop buddies.

  “I really don’t know if he’s here,” I said. “I’ve been working, I haven’t been downstairs this morning.”

  “Mind if I take a look down there?”

  “You’re goddamn right, I mind! What’s this about? You’ve been doing a dance ever since you came in. Why don’t you spit it out?”

  Kiggins gave me a measuring look, then glanced around the office—I think he was hoping to locate another chair. Failing this, he sat back down.

  “You appear to be a responsible guy, Vernon,” he said. “Is it okay I call you Vernon?”

  “Sure thing, Marty. I don’t give a shit what you call me as long as you get to the point.”

  “You own your home, a business. Pay your taxes … far as I can tell without an audit. You’re a pretty solid citizen.”

  The implicit threat of an audit ticked me off, but I let him continue. I began to realize where this might be going.

  “I’ve got the authority to take Joseph back to McKeesport and throw his butt in jail,” said Kiggins. “He’s in arrears with his child and spousal support. Now I know Joseph doesn’t have any money to speak of, but seeing how you’ve got an investment in him, I’m hoping we can work out some arrangement.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked. “About my investment.”

  “Joseph still has friends in McKeesport. High school kids, mainly. Truth be told, we think he was supplying them with drugs, but I’m not here about that. They’ve been spreading it around that you’re about to make him a star.”

  I snorted. “He’s a long way from being a star. Believe me.”

  “I believe you. Do you believe me when I tell you I’m here to take him back? Just say the word, I’ll give a whistle to those boys out front.” Kiggins shifted the chair sideways, so he could stretch out one leg. “I know how you make your money, Vernon. You build a band up, then you sell their contracts. Now you’ve put in some work with Joseph. Some serious time and money. I should think you’d want to protect your investment.”

  “Okay.” I reached for a cigarette, recalled that I had quit. “What’s he owe?”

  “Upwards of eleven thousand.”

  “He’s all yours,” I said. “Take the stairs in back. Follow the corridor to the front of the house. First door on your right.”

  “I said I wanted to make an arrangement. I’m not after the entire amount.”

  And so began our negotiation.

  If we had finished the album, I would have handed Stanky over and given Kiggins my blessing, but as things stood, I needed him. Kiggins, on the other hand, wouldn’t stand a chance of collecting any money with Stanky in the slam—he likely had a predetermined figure beneath which he would not move. It infuriated me to haggle with him. Stanky’s wife and kid wouldn’t see a nickel. They would dock her welfare by whatever amount he extracted from me, deduct administrative and clerical fees, and she would end up worse off than before. Yet I had no choice other than to submit to legal blackmail.

  Kiggins wouldn’t go below five thousand. That, he said, was his bottom line. He put on a dour poker face and waited for me to decide.

  “He’s not worth it,” I said.

  Sadly, Kiggins made for the door; when I did not relent, he turned back and we resumed negotiations, settling on a figure of three thousand and my promise to attach a rider to Stanky’s contract stating that a percentage of his earnings would be sent to the court. After he had gone, my check tucked in his briefcase, Kiwanda came to stand by my desk with folded arms.

  “I’d give it a minute before you go down,” she said. “You got that I’m-gonna-break-his-face look.”

  “Do you fucking believe this?” I brought my fist down on the desk. “I want to smack that little bitch!”

  “Take a breath, Vernon. You don’t want to lose any more today th
an just walked out of here.”

  I waited, I grew calm, but as I approached the stairs, the image of a wizened toddler and a moping, double-chinned wife cropped up in my brain. With each step I grew angrier and, when I reached Stanky’s bedroom, I pushed in without knocking. He and Liz were having sex. I caught a fetid odor and an unwanted glimpse of Liz’s sallow hindquarters as she scrambled beneath the covers. I shut the door partway and shouted at Stanky to haul his ass out here. Seconds later, he burst from the room in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and stumped into the kitchen with his head down, arms tightly held, like an enraged penguin. He fished a Coke from the refrigerator and made as if to say something; but I let him have it. I briefed him on Kiggins and said, “It’s not a question of morality. I already knew you were a piece of crap. But this is a business, man. It’s my livelihood, not a playground for degenerates. And when you bring the cops to my door, you put that in jeopardy.”

  He hung his head, picking at the Coke’s pop top. “You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to understand! Get it? I have absolutely no desire to understand. That’s between you and your wife. Between you and whatever scrap of meatloaf shaped like the Virgin Mary you pretend to worship. I don’t care. One more screw-up, I’m calling Kiggins and telling him to come get you.”

  Liz had entered the kitchen, clutching a bathrobe about her; when she heard “wife,” she retreated.

  I railed at Stanky, telling him he would pay back every penny of the three thousand, telling him further to clean his room of every pot seed and pill, to get his act in order and finish the album; and I kept on railing at him until his body language conveyed that I could expect two or three days of penitence and sucking up. Then I allowed him to slink by me and into the bedroom. When I passed his door, cracked an inch open, I heard him whining to Liz, saying, “She’s not really my wife.”

  I took the afternoon off and persuaded Rudy to go fishing. We bundled up against the cold, bought a twelve-pack of Iron City and dropped our lines in Kempton’s Pond, a lopsided period stamped into the half-frozen ground a couple of miles east of town, punctuating a mixed stand of birch and hazel—it looked as if a giant with a peg leg had left this impression in the rock, creating a hole thirty feet wide. The clouds had lowered and darkened, their swollen bellies appearing to tatter on the leafless treetops as they slid past; but the snow had quit falling. There was some light accumulation on the banks, which stood eight or nine feet above the black water and gave the pond the look of an old cistern. The water circulated like heavy oil and swallowed our sinkers with barely a splash. This bred the expectation that if we hooked anything, it would be a megaladon or an ichthyosaur, a creature such as would have been trapped in a tar pit. But we had no such expectation.

  It takes a certain cast of mind to enjoy fishing with no hope of a catch, or the faint hope of catching some inedible fishlike thing every few years or so. That kind of fishing is my favorite sport, though I admit I follow the Steelers closely, as do many in Black William. Knowing that nothing will rise from the deep, unless it is something that will astound your eye or pebble your skin with gooseflesh, makes for a rare feeling. Sharing this with Rudy, who had been my friend for ten years, since he was fresh out of grad school at Penn State, enhanced that feeling. In the summer we sat and watched our lines, we chatted, we chased our depressions with beer and cursed the flies; in winter, the best season for our sport, there were no flies. The cold was like ozone to my nostrils, the silence complete, and the denuded woods posed an abstract of slants and perpendiculars, silver and dark, nature as Chinese puzzle. Through frays in the clouds we glimpsed the fat, lordly crests of the Bittersmiths.

  I was reaching for another Iron City when I felt a tug on the line. I kept still and felt another tug, then—though I waited the better part of a minute—nothing.

  “Something’s down in there,” I said, peering at the impenetrable surface.

  “You get a hit?” Rudy asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How much line you got out?”

  “Twenty, twenty-five feet.”

  “Must have been a current.”

  “It happened twice.”

  “Probably a current.”

  I pictured an enormous grouper-like face with blind milky-blue globes for eyes, moon lanterns, and a pair of weak, underdeveloped hands groping at my line. The Polozny plunges deep underground east of the bridge, welling up into these holes punched through the Pennsylvania rock, sometimes flooding the woods in the spring, and a current was the likely explanation; but I preferred to think that those subterranean chambers were the uppermost tiers of a secret world and that now and again some piscine Columbus, fleeing the fabulous madness of his civilization, palaces illumined by schools of electric eels controlled by the thoughts of freshwater octopi, limestone streets patrolled by gangs of river crocs, grand avenues crowded with giant-snail busses and pedestrian trout, sought to breech the final barrier and find in the world above a more peaceful prospect.

  “You have no imagination,” I said.

  Rudy grunted. “Fishing doesn’t require an imagination. That’s what makes it fun.”

  Motionless, he was a bearish figure muffled in a down parka and a wool cap, his face reddened by the cold, breath steaming. He seemed down at the mouth and, thinking it might cheer him up, I asked how he was coming with the comic strip.

  “I quit working on it,” he said.

  “Why the hell’d you do that? It was your best thing ever.”

  “It was giving me nightmares.”

  I absorbed this, gave it due consideration. “Didn’t strike me as nightmare material. It’s kind of bleak. Black comedy. But nothing to freak over.”

  “It changed.” He flicked his wrist, flicking his line sideways. “The veins of pork…. You remember them?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “They started growing, twisting all through the mountain. The mineworkers were happy. Delirious. They were going to be rich, and they threw a big party to celebrate. A pork festival. Actually, that part was pretty funny. I’ll show it to you. They made this enormous pork sculpture and were all wearing pork pie hats. They had a beauty contest to name Miss Pork. The winner … I used Mia for a model.”

  “You’re a sick bastard, you know that?”

  Again, Rudy grunted, this time in amusement. “Then the stars began eating the pork. The mineworkers would open a new vein and the stars would pour in and choff it down. They were ravenous. Nothing could stop them. The mineworkers were starving. That’s when I started having nightmares. There was something gruesome about the way I had them eating. I tried to change it, but I couldn’t make it work any other way.”

  I said it still didn’t sound like the stuff of nightmares, and Rudy said, “You had to be there.”

  We fell to talking about other things. The Steelers, could they repeat? Stanky. I asked Rudy if he was coming to the EP release and he said he wouldn’t miss it. “He’s a genius guitar player,” he said. “Too bad he’s such a creep.”

  “Goes with the territory,” I said. “Like with Robert Frost beating his wife. Stanky’s a creep, he’s a perv. A moral dwarf. But he is for sure talented. And you know me. I’ll put up with perversity if someone’s talented.” I clapped Rudy on the shoulder. “That’s why I put up with you. You better finish that strip or I’ll dump your ass and start hanging with a better class of people.”

  “Forget the strip,” he said glumly. “I’m too busy designing equipment sheds and stables.”

  We got into a discussion about Celebrity Wifebeaters, enumerating the most recent additions to the list, and this led us—by loose association only—to the subject of Andrea. I told him about our conversation at McGuigan’s and what she had said about the outbreak of creativity, about love.

  “Maybe she’s got a point,” Rudy said. “You two have always carried a torch, but you burned each other so badly in the divorce, I never would have thought you’d get back together.” He cracked open a bee
r, handed it to me, and opened one for himself. “You hear about Colvin Jacobs?”

  “You mean something besides he’s a sleazeball?”

  “He’s come up with a plan to reduce the county’s tax burden by half. Everybody says it’s the real quill.”

  “I’m surprised he found the time, what with all those congressional junkets.”

  “And Judy Trickle, you hear about her?”

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “I know. Ol’ Juggs ‘R’ Us Judy.”

  “She should have been your model for Miss Pork, not Mia. What’d she do? Design a newfangled bra?”

  “Lifts and separates.”

  “You mean that’s it?”

  “You nailed it.”

  “No way!”

  “She’s been wearing a prototype on the show the last few days. There’s a noticeable change.” He did a whispery voiceover voice. “The curves are softer, more natural.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I’m serious. Check her out.”

  “I got better things to do than watch AM Waterford.”

  “I remember the time when you were a devoted fan.”

  “That was post-Andrea … and pre-Andrea.” I chuckled. “Remember the show when she demonstrated the rowing machine? Leotards aren’t built to handle that sort of stress.”

  “I knew the guy who produced her back then. He said they gave her stuff like that to do, because they were hoping for a Wardrobe Malfunction. They weren’t prepared for the reaction.”

  “Janet Jackson’s no Judy Trickle. It was like a dam bursting. Like … help me out here, man.”

  “Like the birth of twin zeppelins.”

  “Like the embodiment of the yang, like the Aquarian dawn.”