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Softspoken

Page 6

by Lucius Shepard

“I don’t have to be prescient to know that a bar named the Boogie Shack isn’t the Russian Tea Room.”

  She has the urge to tell him the Russian Tea Room’s not what she wants, and, to her surprise, her inhibitions shredded by the drug, she blurts it out, saying she needs to be somewhere people are having normal stupid wrong-headed immoral fun and the Boogie Shack sounds about right.

  “Fine.” He closes the book with a peremptory thump.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Going with you. What did you expect?”

  “I expect you to tell me where the keys are.”

  When he puts his petulance on full display, as he does now, she almost always caves; but this time, because she doesn’t trust her motor skills, because it accords with her plans, she bears his displeasure, and she’s glad, once they’re on the road, that she didn’t insist on driving. Speed is a continuum that rattles her, rekindling her high. The SUV is unwieldy, lurching over the ruts, and the landscapes that bloom in the headlights are darkly bizarre. Her eyes snap from one malformed shape to another. Trees and shrubs and fences are puzzles she has to unsnarl before she can recognize them. Their momentum frightens her and she braces against the dash. Jackson’s not speaking to her, and she’s grateful for that. Along with everything else, she doesn’t believe she could handle a conversation.

  A couple of dozen cars and pick-ups are parked in the gravel lot outside the Boogie Shack, their hoods nosed up to gray concrete block walls, gleaming under the electric bulbs mounted under the eaves. The neon sign atop the roof spells out the name of the place in red-white-and-blue letters, lighting one letter at a time, then blinking them all on and off, a patriotic display that captivates Sanie. Inside, air-conditioned coolness and the beery smell of redneck frenzy. The thumping din she heard from without clarifies into country rock. Arm-waving torsos sprout like furniture-outlet centaurs from tables ringing the dance floor. Dancers painted by revolving red and purple lights strobe in and out of view. Situated on a knee-high stage, the band, lit by steadier red and purple, seems marginally more material. There’s too much noise, too much glare, too much everything, and Sanie is disoriented, but after a minute or two, beer in hand, she settles in. Beside her, Jackson, annoyed by the fact that the bar doesn’t carry his brand of gin, glumly makes do with a well-liquor martini. One bartender, a busty thirtyish woman in a tank top, her left arm sleeved in a complicated tattoo of tigers and sinister half-faces peeking out of jungle foliage, takes a special interest in Sanie. She pats her hand, calls her “honey,” manages a brief shouted conversation, asking where she’s from, does she live around here, obviously flirting, and Sanie, thoughts racing, mentally experiences an alternate universe in which she goes home with the bartender, initiates a passionate relationship that, after years of intimacy and companionable talk, dissolves into rancor when Sanie remembers that she’s not into women. She laughs at the hyperkinetic pace of the fantasy—like fast-forwarding a video—and Jackson asks, “What’s so funny?”

  She shakes her head, points to an ear and mouths, Nothing.

  The bass player’s too short to be Frank Dean, which means FD is the drummer, a shadow with violet shines in his hair, hunched over his kit. Tie’s crisp and professional. She can tell he’s bored by how he throws in an occasional jazz fill that doesn’t belong, a snide comment on the band’s rootsy groove. Ryan, the bearded singer, he’s not bad, though his rock star posturing comes off silly in an armpit like the Boogie Shack and the song he’s singing is too tall for his range. Sanie likes the music, though. It’s the same music she danced to in high school, in Carrboro bars she charmed her way into, using a fake ID that said she was twenty-two. She wouldn’t mind dancing now. But Jackson’s staring grimly at a neon beer ad, as if he’s seen his ancient enemy. So much for dancing. She wonders why they can’t admit their mutual mistake. She thinks there has to be a deeper reason than the ones she knows—control issues, childishness—because they apply only to him. What’s wrong with her? What makes her cling to him?

  “You’re an enabler,” Brittany told her. “You didn’t know what you were buying into, but now you enable him to abuse you verbally, to control you, so naturally he does.”

  Is that all?

  She thinks she must be guilty of more than that. If she asked for Jackson’s opinion on the subject, he would list her every fault, flaws he once celebrated as virtues. Making it sound as if he’s saying something flattering, he’ll infer that he loves her in spite of the items on his list. She’s like a defective puppy he had as a boy, one he loved fussing over.

  “If it was me,” Brittany said, “I’d leave him in a flash. Why you stay, why you let him treat you like that…It’s degrading.”

  The song ends and receives a spatter of applause, a few gleeful whoops. Unstrapping his guitar, the lead leans to the singer’s mike and says sullenly, “Thanks for the clap.”

  “We’re Local Prophet, Junior!” the singer announces. “You can catch us every weekend here at the…” Someone cuts the sound on the PA and he gives the mike a slap as if it were the culprit.

  On break, the band members go in separate directions, mingling with people at different tables. The juke box plays louder than the band did. Frank Dean’s talking with a bouncer by the door when he notices Sanie. He waves, signs off on his conversation, and heads over. Halfway to Sanie, he picks up on Jackson, sees they’re connected. It shows in a miniscule devaluation of his smile, but his step doesn’t falter.

  “How y’all doing?” he says, and sticks out his hand to Jackson. “Frank Dean.” He’s wearing a green Hawaiian shirt with a design of bears driving jitneys.

  Jackson gives him a grudging shake and says, “I know who you are,” and Sanie tries to cover his rudeness by saying, “This is Jackson.”

  Frank Dean displays a joint that’s been tucked behind his ear. “I’m gonna burn this outside. Y’all wanna join me?”

  Before Jackson can speak, Sanie hops down from the barstool and says, “Sure.”

  Outside, around the corner from the entrance, leaning against a black Camaro with a Confederate flag painted on its roof, Sanie looks up into the starless sky. A tension she didn’t realize was there drains from her. It seems that all enclosures, no matter how consoling, be they bars, houses, marriages, breed a poisonous tension. She wants to write down what she sees and feels, not because it’s profound, but because she’s registering the sensory world with such forceful precision. Heart muscling along, breasts hefted in silk, cunt in neutral, sex drive idling. The breathless night simmering with crickets; the hoods of the cars glistening like hard candy. Heat like an oven left on Warm. The gravel at her feet appears to be shifting, the way popcorn does when a few kernels start to pop. She’s still stoned out of her mind, not immersed in hallucination, but capable of revisiting that state effortlessly.

  Beside her, taking a stab at being companionable, Jackson says, “Fueling up for the next set?”

  “Naw, I’m done. We only do two sets on Sunday.” Frank Dean flicks his lighter, his cheeks hollow as he draws in smoke. He offers the joint to Jackson, exhales.

  “Pass.” Jackson gives a backhanded wave.

  “You the designated driver, are ya?”

  Jackson mutters, “The designated something.”

  Sanie sips at the joint, uncertain if she’ll like it. The smoke reminds her of the weeds she lived in that afternoon. Ordinary and bitter green. Her head balloons; her thoughts glide higher, spacier.

  “Good shit, huh?” Jackson says.

  Frank Dean apparently doesn’t notice that he’s being sarcastic. “Not bad for homegrown. I got a’hold of some Thai seeds. They grew up right fair.”

  “So you’re a connoisseur.” Jackson makes the word sound nastily French.

  “Don’t know ’bout that,” says Frank Dean, coolly.

  Sanie remembers her mission. “So tell us about LA. Did you work with any big stars?”

  Frank Dean’s eyes linger on Jackson, then he says, “I did a coupl
e of tours with Chrissie Hynde when her drummer died.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah…and I did some studio stuff with Warren Zevon and Lionel Ritchie. Tina Turner. Whole buncha folks.” Frank Dean hits the joint again and lets out smoke when he speaks. “Biggest star I worked with, I guess, was Jack Nicholson. He rented out a studio just for him and some pals to mess around in. They needed a drummer and I got the call.”

  “So what was he like?”

  Frank Dean shrugs. “Kinda guy probably was the class clown back in high school. ’Course I don’t know how much of that was him playing Jack. Most every actor I’ve met plays themselves when they’re out in public.”

  “Maybe you should have done an analysis,” Jackson says.

  “How do you mean?” asks Frank Dean.

  “You know. Seized the opportunity to sort out the private man from the public. So you could answer questions like this. I mean, if you tell the story often—as I imagine you do—the question’s bound to crop up.”

  Frank Dean seems to choose his words carefully. “That never occurred to me,” he says, taking the joint from Sanie. He squints at Jackson as he inhales.

  “You want to use a story like that,” Jackson says. “Work it up into material. Embellish it a little. How you went out drinking with Jack and the guys afterward. How the two of you bonded and all.”

  “Now why’d I want to do that?”

  There it is! The tone struck by the voice in the house, though the timbre’s off. Soft and enticing…except with Frank Dean, the tone isn’t enticing in the usual sense, it’s menacing, like he’s telling Jackson, Keep on with that shit and see what you get. The ghost voice might be angry in that same way.

  “It’s a fantastic icebreaker,” says Jackson. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a situation when I wished I could say, ‘That puts me in mind of the time I played drums with Jack Nicholson.’”

  “You frequently find yourself in difficult situations, do you?”

  “Yes. Of course I do. It comes with challenging oneself, with trying to achieve something in life.” Jackson makes a loose gesture that seems to include Frank Dean. “Rather than the opposite.”

  Frank Dean settles against the fender of the car parked next to the Camaro. “Tell you the truth, me and Jack did do some hanging out.”

  Jackson shoots Sanie a glad, bug-eyed look, as if to say, Isn’t that astonishing?

  “Yeah, we went out that night and many other nights,” Frank Dean goes on. “We got to be tight. We’d talk for hours sometimes. And each time we’d begin our conversation with the same topic. We’d tell each other about the biggest pussy we’d run into since last we’d met. That was our little icebreaker.” He hits the joint lightly and offers it to Sanie, who declines. “Many’s the night since I left LA, I’ve wished he was here.”

  Jackson’s having a hard time keeping his smile straight and Sanie wishes now that she had risked driving alone. “I could use another beer,” she says. “Let’s go on back in.”

  “Some nights,” Frank Dean continues. “Like tonight, for instance. I almost feel like Jack’s here in spirit. Like we’re sitting over a couple of whiskeys and I’m getting set to tell him my latest pussy-of-the-week experience.”

  “I’m going in!” Sanie grabs Jackson’s elbow, moves him with her shoulder.

  Frank Dean flicks the fire off the tip of the joint, drops the roach into his pocket. He says something as they walk away, but Sanie’s too angry to hear it. Angry at Jackson because he lives to put down anyone she brings into their circle—the only people he deems worthy of associating with are those he knows or, to a lesser degree, those whom they know together. Angry at Frank Dean because she assumes he’s worldly enough to recognize Jackson’s arrogance for a pose. Mainly she’s angry at herself for bringing the two men together. No matter how she spins it, she knows on some level it was a high school play.

  She drinks a beer at the bar, Jackson sulking beside her, then goes out into the parking lot while he settles the bill. She’s trying to recall where they parked, when a woman’s voice calls, “G’night, now!” The blond bartender is leaning beside the door, one knee drawn up, her foot braced on the wall, smoking a cigarette. Standing beneath a naked bulb, the smoke pluming into the hot light, the colors of her tattoos glowing—it’s a noirish image that brings to mind covers on the old pulp detective magazines Sanie boxed up in her father’s study after his death. A tough, lonely redneck moll waiting for Fate, her pockmarked boyfriend. Or girlfriend, in this instance. Sanie waves, and the bartender says, “See ya ’round.” They both could be on a cover. Bad girl and good girl eyeing each other on a hot southern nowhere night. Separated by a river of gravel and a world of experience. What will they do and which is which? That would be the subject of the story inside.

  Jackson steps through the door, spots Sanie, glances to his left to see what she’s looking at. He jerks his eyes away from the bartender as if they’ve touched something vile and beelines for the car without a word to Sanie. He knows that she’ll follow, and she supposes she will. She doesn’t believe that she can pull off becoming a lesbian, though certain aspects of it would be easier than the ride home’s going to be.

  TEN

  Here’s how it works between them. It’s up to Sanie to apologize whenever something happens that displeases Jackson, even if she’s not to blame. If she withholds apology, he withdraws from her, limiting their contact to brisk, superficially cheerful interactions. It’s like he’s telling her if he can’t have the relationship on his terms, he won’t have it at all. Every situation, it’s the same. If he doesn’t agree with her choice of dinner guests, videos, vacation destinations, he’ll have no dinner, no video, no vacation rather than agree. He’ll do without, he’ll suffer for his beliefs. He’ll lock himself inside himself and refuse to have fun again. Of course he never agrees. There’s not a single subject, be it ever so trivial, that he won’t argue. Her taste, her moral compass, her intellectual convictions—they’re all flawed, misguided, uninformed. The worthlessness of her judgments is the foundation of his good moods.

  Ordinarily, isolated with him, bound by habit and convention, she’s too busy doing chores, running errands, proofing his papers, and the rest to have much time either for friends or for herself—without him to talk to, the sensory deprivation gets to her and she gives in quickly. But at the Bullard house, though she’s essentially alone, his withdrawal doesn’t feel like deprivation and she can’t understand this, quite. A few days ago she was climbing the walls, a “bored-shitless wife.” Yet now that she’s withheld apology for a record-setting thirty-six hours, she’s…What’s the word? Happy? Happyish, at any rate. Energized. Hopeful. It’s as if she, too, has an elastic band attached and it’s about to snap. She hasn’t made a conscious decision to leave Jackson, but this unexpected feeling of liberation suggests to her that the vote may be in.

  The first night of non-apology, she’s too nervous to enjoy it. She’s violating a taboo and dreads repercussions. She tells herself that she should apologize—after all, the unpleasantness at the Boogie Shack was, seminally, her fault. But she’s apologized so many times for forgetting something at the store, for inviting someone over who hasn’t passed inspection, for hating a movie filled with exploding heads, she figures he owes her. The next morning, walking into the sunlit kitchen, she’s decided it’s not worth the hassle and intends to apologize, but seeing him at the table with his law book and cereal, poised to be forgiving, expecting her to cave in, that’s the moment her elastic band snaps…or at least loses much of its elasticity. As she pours coffee and hunts up a box of breakfast bars, his eyes track her, waiting, waiting, and when she turns, leans against the sink, cup in hand, and says, “’Morning,” he closes his book and sits back in the chair, his head tipped to the side, face neutral, like a priest prepared to hear confession, calm and accepting, readying a penance. This pisses her off so much, her hand trembles as she sips her coffee. Apology won’t come. The ba
rgain that’s been struck between them, her self-esteem in return for his tranquility, no longer seems a bargain. The reward he bestows—trifling conversation, a few minutes of pleasantness, an absolving kiss—no longer seems a reward. She stuffs a breakfast bar into the hip pocket of her cut-offs.

  “See you later,” she says.

  She spends the morning on the porch steps, making lists in a stenographer’s notebook she bought at Snade’s. In the past her lists have been wishes, like the lists she wrote as a child. Get Masters degree, register with temp agency, and look into cheap housing are no more realistic to her mind than become rock star, marry screen idol, live in Tangiers. But though this morning’s lists are similarly constructed, they seem to be comprised of possibilities, not fantasies. It startles her to recognize that she may have a future, one that’s not merely an adjunct to Jackson’s, an endless repetition of the present, and yet it’s exhilarating, too. Leaving is less frightening a prospect than staying. She believes she’s reached that point. Almost, anyway.

  The sun drugs her, lulling her to torpor. She’s got a funny sort of hangover from the peyote—head thick, joints achy—and it would be easy to sleep. Fat bugs buzz past like stray rounds. Frank Dean’s van rolls by without slowing, but—to her surprise—he waves. That starts her thinking about the previous night. The mission. Hearing him speak with the ghost’s voice (nearly the ghost’s voice, at any rate), its unhurried inflections. She wonders if she can trust her memory. If so, is the similarity between the two voices more than a coincidence? Though she recalls why she went to the Boogie Shack, she’s too lethargic to penetrate the air of unreality that now attaches to her formless suspicions. Maybe, she tells herself, she was only searching for a spark to kick over her engine.

  Will’s off somewhere, probably hanging out at the Piggly Wiggly, watching Allie dispense sticky buns and éclairs, and that afternoon, following a nap, Sanie goes poking around his room, looking for a video. She discovers that what she presumed was a closet door leads to a small windowless sitting room lined with bookshelves, furnished with two unspeakably ugly armchairs upholstered in a shiny olive-and-red striped material, a little cherrywood table standing between them, a hooked rug like a many-colored puddle on the floor. Most of the books are novels. Faulkner, Walker Percy, Hammett; a variety of more recent, less distinguished works, heavy on Grisham and King. There’s also a smattering of southern history, a series of do-it-yourself manuals, and, stuck at the end of one shelf, four composition books with the name Rayfield Bullard in neat handwriting on the covers. Sanie curls up in one of the chairs and begins leafing through them.

 

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