Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  From down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies, crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm, was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him, his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not in an awful hurry about it.

  “Shit!” The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two grunts and a hiccup. “That you, man?”

  I picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat so he could watch me and the TV both.

  “Maceo.” He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. “Crazy motherfucker. Where you been?”

  “Raiford. New Smyrna for a while after.”

  “Oh, yeah…right.” Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that wasn’t healing too good.

  I asked what he was up to and he said, “Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly Dilaudid lately. You want some? I got a shitload.”

  “There’s people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.”

  He blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through. “Yeah…okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms.” His eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass. Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside of his skull. Like a perfect fever.

  “I’ll take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind,” I said.

  “I told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole shitload.”

  I kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out of another.

  “You get settled, come on back you wanna talk.” Rickey wriggled his ass around as if he had an itch.

  “Yeah, maybe. We’re kinda wore down.”

  “Hey, Maceo!”

  I could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he was lonely.

  “’Member that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?”

  “Twila,” I said.

  “Yeah, her. She got the virus.” He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you might use to announce the birth of twins. “’Spect some of them NASCAR boys better get theyselves checked,” he went on. “Last I heard, she was passing out blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.”

  “She musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit.” My feet crunched the litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.

  “Maceo?”

  “What?”

  “You wanna bring me something from the ’frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too fucked-up to walk.”

  “I’ll do ’er in a while.”

  The corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey quietly say, “Oh, God…God!” Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators done something stupid.

  • • •

  Leeli had spread sheets on the bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.

  “What we gonna do?” she asked.

  “I told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.”

  She hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. “It’s not back in Ocala now. We gotta figure something to do.”

  “Don’t know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dilaudid.”

  “Is it something good?”

  “It’s evil. You gonna fucking adore it.”

  I powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her nose from the tip of a knife blade.

  “Oooh,” she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.

  “What I tell ya?”

  I did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried, and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Gothous and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jiggling in my chest. Something landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter. Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and she flicked my zipper.

  “I ain’t never gonna say no, but I’m pretty damn wasted.”

  “Me, too. I don’t really need to or nothing. I just want to see what it’s like…when I’m like this, y’know. Okay?”

  We fucked like space babies in no gravity, coming together at goofy angles, forgetting for long moments what we were doing, our minds scatting on some loopy riff, reawakened by the touch of lips, a breast, something that got us all juicy and eager for a time, speeding it up and lapsing again into slow motion, into stillness. It took Leeli damn near an hour to come and once she started it took her almost the same to stop. She curled up into me after like a dazed, sleek bug that had eaten too much of a leaf and said, “Sweet Jesus. That was amazing!” I was too gassed to respond. If we’d been a pair of spiders, she could have gnawed off my legs and laid eggs in my belly and I wouldn’t have argued the matter.

  Leeli had some trouble sleeping due to the itching that goes with the Dilaudid wearing off, but finally her breathing grew even and deep. I did a few more hits, pulled on my pants and went onto the porch. A wind had sprung up, driving away the skeeters and quieting the frogs. Clouds edged with milky light were racing the moon, parting around it, and the grasses gave forth with an approving chorus, like the sound Leeli made when the Dilaudid rushed upon her, only louder by a million throats, seeming to appreciate the architecture of dust and reflected fire in the sky, the hosanna clouds, the lacquered moon-colored water, the grasses tipped in silver, the black cut-outs of the palm islands like left-over pieces of Africa. I had that feeling of small nobility and pure solitude the world wants you to feel when it reveals this side of itself, so you’ll believe nature was this awesome beautiful peaceful rock concert deal before man come along and doggy-fucked it full of disease, and not the bloody, biting, eat-your-meat-while-it’s-alive horror show it truly is. That night I was okay about feeling this way and I walked along the shore, sucking in the
odors of fish and frogs and the millions of unrecorded deaths that had accompanied the HoJo manager’s as if they were the latest Paris perfumes.

  I thought I was out there on my lonesome, just me and a scrap of wilderness and Dilaudid, but when I climbed a hummock to avoid wading through the marsh, I spied Ava, Carl, and Squire standing at the tip of a grassy point about sixty feet farther along. Ava was gesturing at the sky like she was naming stars or teaching about the weather or something. Squire and Carl, whose jaw was bandaged, were gazing upward. I was too fogged to jam their nature walk in with all the other nothing junk I knew concerning them and make any sense of it, but when they strolled off still farther from the lodge, I realized this was my opportunity to take a peek at Ava’s personals and maybe scoop up some cash. I hustled back as fast I could, which was not real fast, and located the room where she was bunking. Her tote bag was stuffed under a pillow. I found no money, but among the keys and Kleenex and cosmetics and all was a badge holder holding a photo ID. Official evidence that Ava was affiliated with the FBI. A fake, I thought, but then remembered where I’d met up with her and wasn’t so sure. At the bottom of the bag was a leatherette photo album. The first picture was an overexposed black and white shot of Ava and Carl leaning against a vintage Chevy Impala. The ’62 convertible. She appeared to be around seventeen, eighteen, and wore white socks and buckle shoes and a print dress with a belling skirt that covered her legs to the mid-calves. Carl had on jeans and a sport shirt with its tail hanging out. He looked no younger than he did now. Another guy sat behind the wheel of the Impala. His face was a blur of sunlight, but going by his round head, I guessed this to be Squire. Both Ava and Carl were grinning and pointing at a shield-shaped sign on the shoulder of the road. The sign was also blurred, but readable: State Road 44.

  Several of the remaining pictures were shots of Carl, some of Ava and Carl. A few recent ones showed them with Squire. None of these said much to me, not like the first. Seeing that Ava had aged, though not so much as she should have, and Carl hadn’t aged a day, this gave rise to Star Trek movies in my head. Space aliens, UFOs, abductions, secret government projects, intelligent robots, all kinds of happy horseshit. A couple of times I thought I’d figured out who they must be, but if they were aliens or whatever on the run from the government, what the hell were they doing on government property? If they were working with the government, why were they hanging out with the likes of Leeli and me? And what was that house doing in the dunes near the Cape? A trap for lowlifes such as myself, I decided. That was it. Damn straight. Alien creatures from beyond the stars were studying the pork rind set. Government super-clones were learning how to mimic the scum of the earth so they would be in place to assassinate the redneck Jesus, who’d be coming to a womb in Kissimmee any day now. Or could be robot killers who did the evil bidding of the Bush administration were given vacations during which they hung out with real folks and fucked them up every whichaway. Or Squire and Carl were aliens who’d suffered brain damage in the Roswell crash and Ava was their rehab nurse, training them in the ways of society, and their vibrations were keeping her young. I got somewhat insane behind all this, creating tabloid headlines, picturing me and Leeli on the talk shows, discussing her alien lesbian lover with Jerry and Jay and David and the rest, going out to Hollywood to attend the premiere of the movie about our life story. Gradually I calmed down. There was bound to be a logical explanation for the photo and Carl’s recuperative powers and everything else. I told myself I’d get to the bottom of it eventually.

  • • •

  I woke the following morning with a pistol barrel poking my nose and Rickey’s hand on my throat and his burnt out eyes giving me a close-up of the dark sour-smelling rathole they opened into. It was like the little room he lived in was inside him, too. Straggles of hair curtained off his face, but did nothing to filter his rotten breath.

  “Motherfucker, you stole my dope!” he said.

  Leeli gave a squeak and rolled off the bed, covering herself with the sheet.

  “Where the fuck is it?” Rickey asked.

  “I took four goddamn tabs!” I said. “You want ’em back, you gonna have to scrape out my nose!”

  “Don’t think I won’t!” He screwed the barrel down hard against my cheek. “I’m missing a bottle.”

  “He didn’t take nothing!” Leeli said. “I promise!”

  “You check around by your chair?” I asked. “Jesus, you could hide a Volkswagen under all the crap you got on your floor.”

  His face lost some intensity.

  “I guess you were so clearheaded last night, you couldn’t have set it down somewheres and forgot,” I said. “You would know if you give it a kick accidental when you got up to piss or something.”

  Thought confused his expression. He backed away from the bed, the pistol angled toward the side.

  “Jesus Christ!” I sat up and swung my legs onto the floor. “Fuck you so crazy about, anyway? You said you had a good goddamn supply.”

  “It’s gotta last the weekend,” he said sullenly.

  “You run out, I know you’ll get you some more.” I pulled on my undershorts. “What’s wrong with you, man? Busting in here like that. I ever cheat you before? I ever treat you anything but righteous?”

  Rickey puzzled over that. The words came slow from his mouth, like slobber off a bull’s lip. “I can’t recall.”

  “Well, you’d remember if I did, wouldn’t you?”

  “I s’pose so. Yeah.” He lowered the pistol and let out a soggy, rueful snort of laughter. “Fuck, man. Y’know, I…just people been fucking me around a lot lately.”

  “If you can’t find it, don’t come back in here busting on me about it. You know you gonna find it sooner or later in that mess. Someday you run out, you gonna be stumbling around and it’ll turn up under your big toe. Be like finding a diamond in a cornfield.”

  This fairly brightened Rickey—he nodded energetically, seeing a vision of that glorious day. I noticed Leeli cowering in the corner, looking extra fine with her breasts gathered above her arm and her ass sticking out from the sheet.

  “Hey, Leeli. Get your tail over here,” I said. “This here’s my ol’ pal Rickey.”

  I tried to move Rickey on out of there before he could get paranoid again, but his eyes were leaving tracks all over Leeli, even after she covered everything up, and he kept hanging around. He began asking why we needed to hide and such. I told him some lies and when that didn’t stop his questions, I said I wanted to borrow his car so we could buy food and stuff. The best way to derail Rickey’s suspicions always was to beg a favor. If he could deny you something, he’d start feeling masterful and forget whatever was bothering him. I argued and pleaded, but he was resolute. “Nobody drives my car but me,” he said. Like everyone in the world was dying to park their behinds in his funky-smelling shitbox so they could race off to Monaco and display this automotive jewel before graceful society. It ended with Rickey agreeing to bring us food himself and stalking off to search for his missing Dilaudid with head held high.

  “That was sly, way you managed that,” Leeli said, giving me a smooch. “You’re pretty smart for white trash.”

  “Guess what that makes me in the real world,” I said.

  • • •

  Rain and guns. I think it must’ve been raining when the first gun was drawn hot from its tempering fire, because when it comes rain, I get an itch to handle a gun if I’ve got one. Which is a roundabout way of saying it rained and Rickey went for food, Leeli hunkered beside me on the bed fixing her nails, while I sat turning Ava’s Colt in my hands, picking at the plaque on the grip, rubbing a little raised, rough patch alongside the chamber, thinking gun thoughts, testing its heft and balance, knowing that if I was really pretty smart I would walk down to the water’s edge and toss it on in. Having a gun was not in my best interests. Without one, if I was at a beach party, let’s say, and some worthless drunken individual tipped over my beer and said diddley dog about it, the wors
t could happen was busted knuckles and a hospital trip—but I had a gun, God knows, that beer might seem like the very selfsame beer for which the Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, and I’d be called upon to uphold its sacred honor.

  It was an uncommon hard and lasting rain. A drizzle started about ten o’clock and five minutes later it was like a billion hailstones were bouncing off the roof, filling the house with a roar. A weird slivery darkness ensued. The cloud bellies passing over us were black as Satan’s boot soles and the wind flattened the marsh grasses with a constant rush. The rain slacked off many times during the day, a couple of times it stopped altogether and the land yielded up a sodden, animal smell; but it kept returning in strength. Rickey drove off to buy food. Carl and Squire sat on the porch playing a hand-held game of some kind. Leeli got a little closer to her new best friend, Mr. Dilaudid, and fell asleep. I wedged the Colt in my waist and paid a visit to Ava.

  Her door was open a foot and I stuck my head in without knocking. She was standing at the window, stark naked, arms folded beneath her breasts and hair loose about her shoulders, gazing out at the rain. She must have felt me there, because she turned her head and delivered me a flat, unsurprised stare. What do you want? she asked.

  “A few words would be good.”

  “I guess it’s inevitable.”

  “I’ll wait out here while you throw something on.”

  “No need. We’re like family now.”

  Ava went back to watching the weather and I let my eyes out for a run. Though her face was hagging out, her body belonged to a woman in her prime. She wanted to give me a show, it didn’t bother me none. The door proved to be stuck open. I eased in and perched on a straight chair set next to a dresser with its drawers stove-in. Her room was shabbier than ours. Rat turds speckled the boards along the molding and spiderwebs spanned the corners. The bed was so swaybacked, some of the springs were flush to the floor.