Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  She’s walking the curve between Snade’s and the house, when she hears a car behind her and moves onto the shoulder. Headlights saw across the shrubs on the opposite side of the road. Then the car is on her, its black flank swerving past inches from her hip. An eerie, alarming passage, like a shark’s fin surfacing by your shoulder as you’re treading water. She stumbles back, catches her heel, and goes sprawling in the roadside ditch. The car, a black panel van, brakes hard and a man calls, “You okay?” Stunned, she comes to all fours. Her left knee is stinging and her heart’s doing a trance beat. A hand snags her arm, helps her to stand.

  “Sanie…Jesus! You okay?”

  Frank Dean. His face etched with worry.

  She wrenches free of his grip. “Whyn’t you look where you’re going? You could have killed me!”

  “I’m sorry. You were in the blind spot. There’s a blind spot covers about ten, fifteen feet of the curve. You were right in it.”

  “You think maybe you should take that into account when you’re driving? God!”

  “I’m sorry! I really am!”

  He tries to take her arm again and she swats at him. “Leave me be!”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Her left knee and shin are shiny with blood. The sight makes her shaky. “Fuck!”

  “I’ll drive you home so you can get that bandaged.”

  Her head swims. She’s willing to accept the ride, but thinks of Jackson, how he’ll react. “No! They don’t have bandages, they don’t have anything there!”

  It’s a lie, but saying this brings her to the edge of tears, as if she’s touched on a sadder, more telling lack.

  “We’ll fix you up at Snade’s, then,” Frank Dean says. “Come on.”

  He steers her to the passenger door, tells her there’s Kleenex in the glove compartment. As he drives, she dabs at her knee, soaking up the blood, exposing a contusion below her kneecap. She must have fallen on a rock. Queasy, she leans back and squeezes her eyes shut.

  At the store Frank Dean sits her down on a porch chair and hurries inside. Sitting calms her. The grease-smeared concrete apron, the gas pumps, and moth-flurried light bulbs are persuasive in their ordinary solidity. They do not threaten to yield spectral voices. He returns with iodine, bandages, rubbing alcohol, and kneels before her, as if intending to treat her himself. She tells him she can do it. As she cleans the leg, he sits on the top step, continuing to apologize. He’s wearing jeans and a different Hawaiian shirt. Dressed for the Boogie Shack. The screen door opens and Gar emerges. The porch lights polish his high forehead to a pinkish glare, causing his Fu Manchu to look even more ridiculous than usual.

  “Had yourself an accident, didja?” he says.

  “I cut myself shaving,” Sanie says, feeling intruded upon.

  Gar doesn’t appear to notice her attitude. He puts his hands on hips, sticks out his belly. “Pretty nasty cut there.”

  “Really? You think?” Sanie applies a cotton pad to the knee.

  “’Pears like you making a habit of running down females,” Gar says to Frank Dean.

  “Goddamn it, Gar! Don’t you see she’s shook up? Last thing she needs is you standing over her and gabbing.”

  “Excuse me! I was just trying to be friendly.”

  Gar retreats into the store and Sanie, taping the pad to her knee, asks, “What’d he mean by that?”

  “About me running down females? It’s not exactly a habit. My last girlfriend, way we met, she pulled out in front of me against a red light. Gar made a big deal out of it. He’s a good shit, but he doesn’t have a whole lot to do with himself.”

  Sanie finishes taping.

  “You need aspirin, I got some in the van.”

  “Okay.”

  While he fetches the aspirin, she limps into the store and buys a tall Bud. Gar, along with two brothers in doofusness, is watching preseason football on a smallish TV behind the counter. She goes back onto the porch, gulps down the aspirin with a swallow of beer. Frank Dean retakes his seat on the steps.

  “You must be a neighbor of ours,” Sanie says. “Or isn’t that where you live, down our road?”

  “I don’t know I’d call myself a neighbor. My place’s about eight miles farther along.” He pauses. “Feeling better now?”

  “Much.”

  “I was worried there. You were looking pale.”

  “Almost getting run over tends to set me back a step.”

  A red station wagon slows on the highway and pulls up alongside the pumps. The driver, long-haired and bearded, rests an elbow in the window and says, “You might wanta get a move on, Frank Dean. We need to do a sound check.” He gives Sanie the once-over and says, “Hi.”

  “Sanie,” says Frank Dean. “This here’s Ryan.” “Hey, Ryan.”

  Ryan offers her a wave that’s half a salute. “No shit, man. I want the balance on the PA right. Couldn’t nobody hear the vocals last night.”

  “I’ll be along.”

  “Those guys from Myrtle Beach said they’d be there tonight for sure,” Ryan says. “We do a good show, we might start making some real money. So let’s be prepared, okay?”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  Ryan looks doubtful. “Whyn’t you bring her along? Maybe she’d like watching us setup.”

  “Just ease your egg bag, Ryan. I’m there.”

  “Is he the singer?” Sanie asks as Ryan pulls out onto the highway.

  “He thinks he is.” Frank Dean taps out a cigarette from a pack of American Spirits, but doesn’t light up. “This band is history.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “’Cause the talent’s all in the rhythm section and the only ones serious about the band are Ryan and the lead. Pretty soon we’ll go to having these morbid discussions about commitment and the band’s direction. We’ll start having personal hassles. Y’know…Like who’s carrying the load, who’s getting the jobs, putting up flyers? That kinda thing. Before that happens, I’ll find myself somebody else to jam with. I love music, but I’ve had it with the bullshit that goes with it.” He hangs the cigarette behind his ear, a habit that’s always appealed to Sanie, and stands. “I gotta go. You want to come along, you’re welcome.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “You sure? I can run you back after the first set, you want to go for a beer and a listen.”

  She’s tempted, but says, no, she can’t.

  “Okay. Next time, maybe.”

  She stays on the porch for another beer after he’s gone. Two farm boys are the only customers. They nod and say, “Evenin’.” She regrets not having gone to the Boogie Shack with Frank Dean. It would have been a breach of regulation, but it’s a regulation that seems wrongfully binding. The Boogie Shack would not gave been life-changing, probably not even entertaining, but she needs something to break the monotony. Drinking beer on the porch of Snade’s Corners doesn’t cut it. If she were motivated, she would return to the house and begin the process of narrowing down her career choices. She could jump back into grad school, or try that writing course. There is no end of challenging options, but it seems the challenges oppress her. What’s missing from her life is life. Without its current pouring through her, she can’t unlock her motivation. She’s unable to comprehend how she reached this pass. How she became such a slug, a drudge. Though Jackson was a complicitor in her decline, she knows she let it happen. But she also knows that while her decline and that of the marriage have fed into each other, they don’t run off the same battery. If she were suddenly to evolve into a dynamo, it would make her even less respectful of Jackson. She thinks it may be their co-dependency, their mutual slump into the ordinary, that has preserved the union.

  She walks back to the house without much difficulty. The voice welcomes her home. She mocks it. “I wish I could see you, too,” she says. “I’d kick your ass.”

  …Sanie…I wish…

  “Yeah, you wish! Leave it to the Bullards to attract a wimpy ghost.”

  In nee
d of a Diet Pepsi, she goes into the kitchen. Jackson’s at the table, a Heineken and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate before him.

  “Hey!” she says, and makes for the refrigerator.

  “What have you been up to?” he asks in an arch tone that is, she recognizes, an effort to hide surliness.

  “Nothing. Sitting on the porch at the Corners. Drinking a beer.” For punctuation, she pops open the Pepsi. “Couple cars passed, couple good ol’ boys said ‘Howdy.’ That’s about it.”

  “You were sitting on the porch at Snade’s dressed like that?”

  When did you get to be such a prude?, she wants to say. When did my behavior become so inappropriate?

  “It’s hot! What am I supposed to wear?”

  “Did you hold up a sign saying Will Work For Beer?”

  “What are you on about? You used to sit on the stoop drinking beer all the time.”

  “That was then, this is now.”

  “Yeah, been there, done that.”

  He gives her a perplexed look.

  “I thought,” she says, “you might want to communicate in slogans. Catchphrases. Y’know, in case we could arrive at a meeting of the minds that way. Like I’d say, ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,’ and then you’d go, ‘Beauty fades, but stupid is forever.’”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Shitfaced. I can barely stand. It’s taking all my strength to maintain a pose of sobriety.”

  With a display of manly gusto, as if tearing at raw meat, he rips off a bite of sandwich and chews. “What happened to your leg?”

  “If it’s broke, you promise not to shoot me?”

  He refuses to dignify this with response.

  “I tripped,” she says. “Walking to the Corners. I tripped and fell on my butt.”

  He takes another bite, makes a gruff noise that seems to convey his acceptance of the story. Under the glare of the overhead, the walls are the rancid yellow of spoiled custard. The refrigerator clicks and starts to hum.

  “Aren’t you going to sit down?” he asks.

  “I was just waiting for an invite. Didn’t want to interrupt the cramming.” She pulls back a chair and plops into it.

  “Maybe we should go back to Chapel Hill.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t think you’re doing well here.”

  And you thought I was doing well in Chapel Hill? “You said you couldn’t study there.”

  “I can’t…not with the phone ringing all the time.”

  When do you ever answer the phone? she thinks. “You don’t have to take the calls,” she says.

  “If I’m there, yes, I do.”

  She’s inclined to examine this logic, but understands that the childlike perversity that’s inspired his statement won’t profit from examination. “Rattling around in this house isn’t my idea of a great time, but do what you need to. I’m fine.”

  “Let’s see how it goes.”

  “Whatever. It’s only until the end of November.” She flashes a grin and adopts a tough quasi-masculine tone. “I can do that much time standing on my head.”

  The grin once served to disarm him, but it has no measurable effect now. Sober as a pickle, he stands and carries his book, beer, and plate toward the door.

  “You ask me to sit down and then you leave?” she says. “What’s that about?”

  “I just thought you should get off that leg.”

  But she knows that she failed to provide a backboard for his ego and so he’s sulking off to the punishment room in hopes she’ll feel sorry for him.

  “I scraped my knee,” she says. “It’s not a torn ACL.”

  “Best not to take any chances,” he says as an exit line.

  She rolls the cold can of pop back and forth across her brow in an attempt to suppress the headache that’s starting to build, but she realizes she’ll need a stronger remedy.

  SEVEN

  …if only you could see me…

  “I see you! All right?”

  …Sanie…

  “God, please go away! I’m trying to work.”

  I don’t know what I’ll do…

  “Too bad shooting yourself isn’t an option.”

  …Sanie…Sanie…

  “You want me to read to you? I bet you do. Let me see here…”

  …I wish yoooo…

  “Now this is the first note I ever took. ‘Start with an ant crawling beside a chain-link fence.’ I don’t have the slightest idea what that refers to. The context, y’know. It’s gone. But I put it in the front of all my notebooks for luck. And this, too. ‘On the last day of the world, the gargoyle changed from stone to flesh and just sat there.’ That was an assignment Professor Demery gave us—to write a one-sentence story. I only got a C, but I liked it. Fact that the gargoyle sits there implies a lot about its upbringing. But Demery thought I was trying to be funny, which I suppose I was.”

  …Sanie…

  “You hush! Let me see what else I got. Oh, here you go. This is another assignment. Demery told us to take a contemporary news story and sketch out a scene relating to it. I picked Katrina. That’s the name of this big ol’ hurricane that flooded New Orleans. So I put this guy, Harry, and his wife out front of their house. They just emerged after the storm, and there’s this man wading down the street, who Harry talks to. Okay?

  “‘“That was some fucking hurricane.” Harry was standing atop a triangular chunk of cement that had been part of our house, gazing off across the desolation. “I mean, that wasn’t no pissant tropical depression, that was a hurricane.”’

  “‘“Hey, there!” the man hollered. “Your house is unsafe!”’

  “‘Harry glanced at me over his shoulder. “You believe this shit?” He turned back to the man. “Think I don’t know that?”’

  “‘“Authorities gonna come along and tell you it’s unsafe!”’”

  Sanie pauses, reads what follows silently. “This really, really sucks.”

  Silence.

  “So what do you think?”

  The silence continues.

  She slaps the notebook down on the table.

  “You go to hell!”

  EIGHT

  Three days later, when she comes into the kitchen, yawning and sleepy-eyed, Sanie finds a coffeemaker and a bag of French Roast on the counter. “Bless you, Will,” she says. She’s settling down with her first cup when the kitchen door is pushed inward and a pale, dark-haired woman in a red terrycloth robe walks in. “Oh,” she says, stopping dead, a hand on her breast. Though prettier than might be expected, her aghast expression and anxious demeanor tell Sanie that this must be Will’s girlfriend, likely the reason it took him three days to purchase a coffeemaker. Sanie offers a cup, fresh-made, and in a voice so frayed and fey, it sounds like a shaving left over from a Stevie Nicks vocal, the woman says, “Caffein’s a poison. It’ll rot your teeth worse than sugar.” She remains stuck in the pose she struck on entering. “I didn’t know anyone else would be up.”

  Sanie introduces herself.

  “Hello,” says the woman, and darts a glance to the side as if trying to locate a weapon, something she can use as a defense.

  “You’re Will’s friend. Allie, is it?”

  A nod.

  It appears Will has found a woman who’s every bit his equal in the area of social ineptitude. That’s amazing in itself. The fact that she’s attractive in a sweetly old-fashioned kind of way, with a cameo face and piled-up smokey brown hair…that’s a miracle.

  “So…” Sanie rots her teeth with a sip of hot caffein. “How’d you and Will get together?”

  “It was fate,” says Allie.

  No further information seems to be forthcoming.

  “Fate in the sense of a cosmic plan?” Sanie asks wryly. “Or more like an operation of chance?”

  She’s not expecting an answer, but Allie, deadpan, says, “The former, I believe. Will’s very much in harmony with the cosmos ’cause of all the drugs he takes.”r />
  “Huh,” says Sanie, dumfounded. “Wow.”

  “The drugs allow him to see things we can’t.”

  Either Allie’s putting her on, Sanie thinks, or else she’s a cult convert, repeating what’s she’s been programmed to say by Swami Will. Or maybe it’s love.

  “I have to go,” Allie says. “We’re driving to the Meher Baba Center in Myrtle Beach. Do you know Baba?”

  “Dead Indian guy, right? Religious figure?”

  Allie’s dismayed reaction is so profound, Sanie feels ashamed at having smart-mouthed her.

  “I’m sorry,” Sanie says. “I had a rough night. Come on, sit down. We can chat.”

  “Will says you’re in danger.”

  Was that a glimmer of vindictiveness in Allie’s face? Was the warning offered as a curse? Sanie thinks so, yet at the same time, it’s hard to believe this Vegan redneck could have a mean zone in her astral body.

  “Did he specify the nature of this danger?”

  “Imminent,” says Allie, pronouncing the word with a British precision. She marches toward the door.

  “Did you come in here for a reason?” Sanie asks. “Something you needed, maybe?”

  “Oh. Yes. A spoon.”

  “Top drawer left of the sink.”

  Allie pads over to the sink, extracts a spoon and, holding it in front of her like a nun holding a cross, exits without another word spoken. Sanie wonders what she’ll do with the spoon. Bend it with her mental rays, maybe. Stir some herbal fungus into her yoghurt. Spank Will. It’s best not to speculate. As for Will’s warning—if it was his and not Allie taking a cheap shot at her for having dissed the avatar—she supposes it was a part of Will’s love tactics, impressing Allie with his knowledge of the beyond so as to get her into the sack.