Mr Oakenhurst tipped his hat to his friend and went to collect his horse from Boudreaux’s makeshift stables.
(Have you heard of the conspiracy of the Just? she would ask. Once the likes of us becomes aware of this conspiracy, we are part of it. There’s no choice in the matter. We are, after all, what we are. And you and I, Sam, are of the Just. You don’t have to like it.)
In common with most who chanced their luck at the gambling trade, Sam Oakenhurst had left his will with the Terminal’s neanderthal proprietor. He took the one good horse he had ridden in on, the sound of Boudreaux’s zeeband still marking the rhythm of his actions.
He was almost in the ruins of Picayune before the tunes had left his head. On his way up, he had seen two corpses, a man’s and a woman’s, half buried in the shallows of the beach; behind them was the distant wall of the Biloxi Fault, howling and groaning and never still.
Picayune was the closest Mr Oakenhurst would let himself get to New Orleans. He had no fear of machinoix enmity. They regarded him as one of their own. But he had found a dark new greed in himself which tempted him back to their stronghold.
Mr Oakenhurst did not feel in any way free of the hunger until he entered the twilight fern forests beyond Nouveaux Iberie. His horse followed a broad, dry road, well-marked and patrolled by the local security committees who guaranteed the safety of all who lived there, or passed through peacefully, and swift death to any aggressor.
Sam Oakenhurst’s plan was to take the road right up past Sulphur. He stopped for the night at a lodging house just above Lake Charles where he was met by the landlord, a veteran of the First Psychic War, his skin scaled with pale unstable colour. Lieutenant Twist said that the road now ran up to De Quincey, beside the Texas Waters, a recent series of connected lochs populated by islands stretching almost as far as Houston and nearly up to Dallas. There were a few paddle-wheelers carrying passengers through the lakes but they were infrequent and unscheduled. Mr Oakenhurst was advised to return to New Orleans and buy a ticket on a coastal schoomer to Corpus Cristi. ‘There’s a weekly run. Calmest and safest waters in the world now. They say all the ocean around the Fault’s like that.’
Mr Oakenhurst said he had decided to take his chances. ‘In that case,’ said Lieutenant Twist, ‘you would be better trying for De Quincey and hope a boat or a colour-rider come in soon.’ He shook his head in admiration of what he understood to be Mr Oakenhurst’s bravery. ‘Somebody help me get out of Louisiana, help me get to Houston town!’ Whistling, he led Sam Oakenhurst to the choice individual accommodation behind the old main building.
Making himself presentable Mr Oakenhurst went, after half-an-hour, to join an acoustic game in a corner of the hotel’s bar, but after a few minutes he grew bored and deliberately let the other players win back most of their stakes, keeping five piles noires as payment for his time. On his way to his cabin he saw a movement high up where the fronds were thinnest and the moonlight was turned to pale jade, some sort of owl. Its eyes were huge and full of hope.
Sam Oakenhurst’s chamber was clean, well kept, though the furniture was old and the bedding darned. A useless V-cabinet stood in the comer. Converted to hold magazines, it dispensed them in return for a few pennies. The magazines were hand-coloured, crudely stencilled versions of old-time V programmes. Mr Oakenhurst put in the coins and the screen opened to offer him a selection.
They were chiefly magazines detailing the escapades of various unfamiliar heroes and heroines - The Merchant Venturer, Pearl Peru - Captain Billy Bob Begg’s Famous Chaos Engineers - Karl Kapital - Professor Pop - Fearless Frank Force - Bullybop - Corporal Pork - violently coloured attempts to reproduce the interactive video melodramas some addicts still enjoyed at the Terminal Café. All the characters seemed engaged in perpetual war between Plurality and Singularity for the domination of a territory (possibly philosophical) called the Second Ether. These unlikely events were represented as fact. The gambler, finding their enigmatic vocabularies and queer storylines too cryptic, replaced them in the dispenser, blew out his lamp and slept, dreaming a familiar dream.
(He had talked to Jack Karaquazian when they were still in New Orleans. He had asked his friend if he would care if he spoke of something that was on his mind.
“Not at all,” the Egyptian had said.
I had this dream, said Sam Oakenhurst. I was standing on this cliff with a pack of dogs and killer blankeys at my back and nothing but rocks and ocean far below and nowhere to go but down when suddenly out of the blue this golden limo pulls up in the air right where I’m standing on the edge and the driver’s eye-balling me. She’s a beautiful woman, real elegant, and she says “Hop in, Sam. Where do you want to go?”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Any place you like,” she says.
“Well,” I say, “I guess in that case I’ll stick here and take my chances.”
“Please yourself,” she says and she’s ready to start up when I say “Hey, what’s your name, lady?”
“Luck,” she says, puts the car in gear and vanishes. I turn around and the dogs and the men are gone. What do you make of that, Jack?
“Well,” said Jack Karaquazian after some considerable thought, “I guess it means that luck is luck. That’s all.”
“I guess so,” said Mr Oakenhurst. “Well, goodnight, Jack.”
Next morning they played a game of Joli Jean before breakfast and talked about going up to the Frees.)
He had the dream again, exactly as before, but this time he stepped into the limo.
(Jack Karaquazian kept a room above the main casino of the Terminal Café. You could feel the zee coming up through the floor. The room was filled with shadows and flames, ragged holes of verdigris and kidney. “It’s home,” he had said.)
~ * ~
3. ERASE UNA VEZ EN LA OUESTE
‘I HAD A dream,’ says Precious Mary as she moves against Sam Oakenhurst’s arm. ‘I dreamed I was lying in this field of silver poppies looking up at the moon. I stretched my arms and legs wide and the Moon Goddess smiled. She had a wonderful round pale oriental face like a Buddha. Is that a Buddhess, Sam? And she came down from the midnight blue and pursed her silver lips and she sucked my pussy, Sam, like nobody but you.’ She grins and laughs and slaps at him in his flattered embarrassment.
~ * ~
They had been here at Ambry’s for almost a month. Precious Mary was on her way to join a closed order in Laredo. She collected mosquitoes and her little clear envelopes were full of the different types, including the hybrids. Her pride was a great dragon mosquito, rainbow carapace over two inches long, able to drain a small rodent dry of blood in less than a minute. ‘They thought it carried A,’ she said. ‘But now they ain’t so sure.’
She had cornrows beaded with tiny precious stones - emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds - large green eyes, a refined Watutsi face. She wore a silk shift which swam on the blackness of her skin like milk over marble. Her head, she said, was worth a million guineas, but her body was priceless. She lived, like everyone in De Quincey, at Ambry’s big Gothic timber house just by the jetty which jutted over the flat sheen of a lake revealed below the surrounding yellow and black mist. The lake was never entirely at rest. Shapes just under the surface were mysterious and alarming. Every once in a while a tiny spot of colour would float by. ‘They find big ones out there and milk them,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing but rigs once you get twenty kays over that horizon.’ She pointed to the north. ‘Do you believe in God, Sam?’
Mr Oakenhurst admitted that he did.
‘You believe in a just God, Sam?’
‘I believe God deals you a fair hand.’ He became thoughtful. ‘What you do with it after that is a question of luck and judgement both. And luck is what other people are making of their hands. It’s a complicated game, it seems to me, Mary. Only a few of us are willing to accept the kind of odds it offers. But what else can you do? This is reality, I think. I look at the game. I work out the odds. And then I d
ecide if I want to play or not. I hope I’m doing no more or less with my mind and time than God expects of me.’
‘You’re crazy,’ she said.
That was the last Sam Oakenhurst and Precious Mary ever spoke of religion.
In Milton he had lost his horse to a tall pile broker from Natchez who had proved to be so much better than the table’s other partners that Mr Oakenhurst suspected him of being a secret professional. But he had played a fair game. The broker let Sam take his place on the coach to De Quincey. That trip to the lake shore had been Mr Oakenhurst’s first real experience of the practical realities of the Free States, where whites were supposed to be his equals. He found it awkward to be travelling in a horse-drawn coach with a black man driving and a white man riding inside. On the seat across from him the “bianco” showed no similar embarrassment and chatted amiably on the tandem subjects of fluke attractors and the availability of piles noires. Mr Oakenhurst did his best to converse without seeming to condescend, but he was still suffering from a strong desire to stare in wonder at this educated and self-confident whitey much as one would regard a clever circus animal. His name was Peewee Wilson and he had owned property up in Haute County, he said, until it had popped one morning, all of a piece, and left him “wiv a weird damned hole coloured like dirty bottly-glass an’ radiatin’ coldness so damned bad ah’d felt mahse’f chillered to mah soul.” He had moved his wife and kids to his sister in San Diego and was on his way to join them. He had never been to Biloxi (“Ah have not chosered vat pilgrimage, sah, as yet.”) but was eager to hear Mr Oakenhurst’s account of it and the jugador loved to tell a tale.
So the time had passed pleasantly enough between Milton and De Quincey. Peewee informed Mr Oakenhurst about the famous Colossus of Tarzana, one of the wonders of their new world - a huge figure some two hundred feet high and apparently consisting of living flame which gave off a soft heat filling most observers with a sense of calm and well-being. A tent town had grown around the feet of the Colossus, populated by those who had become hooked on the phenomenon’s influence.
(Let us have the body, the machinoix would demand. We need it for our science. Its soul has dissipated. What use is it to you? But Sam Oakenhurst would refuse to give it up. He would take it with him all the way to the Fault and pitch it in. The machinoix would not be offended. He was of their number. He could do no wrong, save betray another of their own.)
Mr Oakenhurst waded through the shallow mud of the lake shore. There seemed no end to it. At present the flat, troubled liquid reflected nothing, but every so often a shape threatened to break through the surface. The clouds had become a solid monochrome grey. Once in a while a long thread of bright scarlet would rise from below the horizon and give the sky a lizard’s lick. Mr Oakenhurst ran secret fingers over his most intimate scars. His longing for the past was like physical hunger. A madness. He prayed for a vessel to rescue him.
Mr Oakenhurst walked through the mud. Sometimes his legs would begin to tremble, threatening to give out completely, and he would panic, turning slowly to look back at Ambry’s and the long, dark jetty whose far point penetrated the mist.
‘Darling.’ Precious Mary led him home on these occasions.
‘Darling, Sam.’
Sam Oakenhurst decided that if he stayed another week he would take it as a sign and let New Orleans call him back. He shivered. He had made no real decision at all. He glared at the grey water. The sky, he thought, had turned the colour of rotten honey.
~ * ~
4. LA MUERTE TERRIO UN PRECIO
PRECIOUS MARY WAS not impatient to leave. She had discovered an interest in the vegetable garden and, with another woman called Bellpai’s, was planting in the assumption there would be some kind of new season. The garden lay behind the house, where it was most sheltered. Mary complained about the lack of sunlight, the clouds of dust which swam forever out of the north. ‘It seems like it’s the same clouds keep coming around,’ she said. ‘Like everything’s on repeat.’
‘Hope not,’ said Sam Oakenhurst, thinking of New Orleans. As a child he had played his favourite records until the phonograph’s machinery had started to show the strain. Gradually the voices grew sluggish and the music became a mixture of whines and groans until finally the records brought only depression, a sense of loss, a distorted memory of harmony and resolution. He sometimes thought the whole world was running down in a series of ever-widening, steadily dissipating circles. ‘I cannot believe that one thing cancels out another,’ he admitted to Precious Mary.
‘It’s like a roof.’ She looked at the sky. ‘Like a cave. We could be underground, Sam. Living on the innards of the world.’
Across the surface of measureless grey, past the end of their jetty, a couple of spots of colour floated. The spots moved as if with purpose but both Mr Oakenhurst and Precious Mary knew they drifted more or less at random around the perimeter of the lake, carrying with them an assortment of organic flotsam. Bones, feathers, twigs, tiny corpses made a lattice through which gleamed the dull gold and silver of the colour, blank round eyes staring out from a void. The colour seemed like a magnet to certain vegetable and animal matter. Other material it repulsed violently, not always predictably.
(We are the whole within the whole, Sam. Your ancestors knew that. And we are unique.)
‘I reckon Jack Karaquazian struck colour up on the Trace,’ mused Sam Oakenhurst. ‘But something happened that didn’t suit him. What the hell is that, Mary?’ He pointed out over the lake. Through the twilight a slow bulky shape was emerging. At first the jugador thought it might be the tapering head of a large whale. Then as it came nearer he realized it was not a living creature at all but a ramshackle vessel, shadowing the shore, a great broad raft about ninety by ninety, on which was built a floating shanty-town, a melange of dull-coloured shacks, tents, barrels and lean-tos. In the middle of this makeshift floating fortress stood a substantial wooden keep with a flat roof where other tents and packing-case houses had been erected so that the whole had the appearance of an untidy ziggurat made of animal hides, old tapestries, painted canvases, upholstery and miscellaneous pieces of broken furniture.
Observing what distinguished this floating junkpile, Precious Mary said: ‘Ain’t that queer, Sam. No metal, not much plastic ... ‘
‘And there’s why.’ Sam showed her the dull gleam of colour spilling up from under the raft’s edges. ‘She’s moving on a big spot. She’s built to cover it. You saw it. That kind of colour won’t take anything much that’s non-organic. It’s kind of like anti-electricity. They haven’t figured any real way of conducting the stuff. It can’t be refined or mined. It moves all the time so it’s never claimed. I guess these types have found the only use there is for it. Ahoy!’
~ * ~
5. MUCHOS GRACIAS, MON AMOUR
THE IDEA OF being trapped on a raft which would put the Texas Waters between him and New Orleans was immensely attractive to Mr Oakenhurst just then. There was no way of stopping the spot, only of slowing it down with metal lures floated out from the shore on lines. As soon as the goods had been thrown aboard, he jumped from the jetty to the slow-moving deck, shook hands with Captain Roy Ornate, master of The Whole Hog, and thanked him for the opportunity to take passage with him. He did not bother to announce his trade.
He had been allowed to carry no arms aboard The Whole Hog, no razor, no metal of any kind except alumite, and so glad was he to be on his way that he had accepted the terms, leaving his gold, his piles noires, his slender Nissan 404 and all other metal goods with Precious Mary. She had loaded the raft with so much collateral in the form of fresh provisions that she had put him in excellent credit with Captain Ornate. The bandy-legged pig-faced upriver rafter had lost his original trade to the Colorado Gap. ‘Took the river and half the State with it. You can still see the spray fifty kays away.’ He was a cheerful man who apologized for his rules. His methods were the only practical ones for the service he offered, which was, he admitted, not much. ‘Still, ch
ances are this spot’ll carry us round to Waco and you’re halfway to Phoenix, or wherever it is you’re heading, mister. You won’t be old when you get there, but I can’t guarantee how long it will take ...
‘You won’t be bored, either, mister. There’s a couple of jugaderos in the main saloon glad to make room for another. This is an easy vessel, Mr Oakenhurst, and 1 hope you’ll find her comfortable. She’s rough and ready, I’ll grant, but we have no power weapons aboard and hardly any violence, for I don’t tolerate trouble. Those who make it I punish harshly.’
‘A man of my own principles, captain,’ said Sam Oakenhurst, conscious of the loss of his fancy links. His shirt was heavier on the wrists, the cuffs now decorated with antique Mickey and Minnie Mouse figures his daughter had given him for his twenty-fifth birthday, almost exactly forty-four seasons ago, and which he had never expected to wear in public. Now that the need had arisen he welcomed it. Wearing the links felt like some sort of confirmation. Serdia and Ona had died together on the Hattiesburg Roar, trying to escape an army of half-wild blankeys released by a shiver from the nearby pens. He had been in Memphis, running a powered game for Peabody and his fellow barons who could command all the necessary colour. He had been unable to resist.
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