crossing the tide pool at my feet.
We never really knew each other,
not even each other’s names, but sometimes that is unimportant.
[Back
to Table of Contents]
Fiction: Vacancy by Lucius Shepard
Chapter One
Cliff Coria has been
sitting in a lawn chair out front of the office of Ridgewood Motors for the
better part of five years, four nights a week, from mid-afternoon until
whenever he decides it’s not worth staying open any longer, and during that
time he’s spent, he estimates, between five and six hundred hours staring
toward the Celeste Motel across the street. That’s how long it’s taken him to
realize that something funny may be going on. He might never have noticed
anything if he hadn’t become fascinated by the sign in the office window of the
Celeste. It’s a No Vacancy sign, but the No is infrequently lit. Foot-high
letters written in a cool blue neon script: they glow with a faint aura in the
humid Florida dark:
VACANCY
That cool, blue, halated
word, then…that’s what Cliff sees as he sits in a solitude that smells of
asphalt and gasoline, staring through four lanes of traffic or no traffic at
all, plastic pennons stirring above his head, a paperback on his knee (lately
he’s been into Scott Turow), at the center of gleaming SUVS, muscle cars,
mini-vans, the high-end section where sit the aristocrats of the lot, a BMW, a
silver Jag, a couple of Hummers, and the lesser hierarchies of reconditioned
Toyotas, family sedans with suspect frames that sell for a thousand dollars and
are called Drive-Away Specials. He’s become so sensitized to the word, the
sign, it’s as if he’s developed a relationship with it. When he’s reading,
he’ll glance toward the sign now and again, because seeing it satisfies
something in him. At closing time, leaving the night watchman alone in the
office with his cheese sandwiches and his boxing magazines, he’ll snatch a last
look at it before he pulls out into traffic and heads for the Port Orange
Bridge and home. Sometimes when he’s falling asleep, the sign will switch on in
his mind’s eye and glow briefly, bluely, fading as he fades.
Cliff’s no fool. Used car
salesman may be the final stop on his employment track, but it’s lack of
ambition, not a lack of intellect, that’s responsible for his station in life.
He understands what’s happening with the sign. He’s letting it stand for
something other than an empty motel room, letting it second the way he feels
about himself. That’s all right, he thinks. Maybe the fixation will goad him
into making a change or two, though the safe bet is, he won’t change. Things
have come too easily for him. Ever since his glory days as a high school jock
(wide receiver, shooting guard), friends, women, and money haven’t been a
serious problem. Even now, more than thirty years later, his looks still get
him by. He’s got the sort of unremarkably handsome, rumpled face that you might
run across in a Pendleton catalog, and he dyes his hair ash brown, leaves a
touch of gray at the temples, and wears it the same as he did when he was in
Hollywood. That’s where he headed after his stint in the army (he was stationed
in Germany near the end of the Vietnam War). He figured to use the knowledge he
gained with a demolition unit to get work blowing up stuff in the movies, but
wound up acting instead, for the most part in B-pictures.
People will come onto the
lot and say, “Hey! You’re that guy, right?” Usually they’re referring to a
series of commercials he shot in the Nineties, but occasionally they’re talking
about his movies, his name fifth- or sixth-billed, in which he played good guys
who were burned alive, exploded, eaten by monstrous creatures, or otherwise
horribly dispatched during the first hour. He often sells a car to the people
who recognize him and tosses in an autographed headshot to sweeten the deal.
And then he’ll go home to his beach cottage, a rugged old thing of boards and a
screened-in
We never really knew each other,
not even each other’s names, but sometimes that is unimportant.
[Back
to Table of Contents]
Fiction: Vacancy by Lucius Shepard
Chapter One
Cliff Coria has been
sitting in a lawn chair out front of the office of Ridgewood Motors for the
better part of five years, four nights a week, from mid-afternoon until
whenever he decides it’s not worth staying open any longer, and during that
time he’s spent, he estimates, between five and six hundred hours staring
toward the Celeste Motel across the street. That’s how long it’s taken him to
realize that something funny may be going on. He might never have noticed
anything if he hadn’t become fascinated by the sign in the office window of the
Celeste. It’s a No Vacancy sign, but the No is infrequently lit. Foot-high
letters written in a cool blue neon script: they glow with a faint aura in the
humid Florida dark:
VACANCY
That cool, blue, halated
word, then…that’s what Cliff sees as he sits in a solitude that smells of
asphalt and gasoline, staring through four lanes of traffic or no traffic at
all, plastic pennons stirring above his head, a paperback on his knee (lately
he’s been into Scott Turow), at the center of gleaming SUVS, muscle cars,
mini-vans, the high-end section where sit the aristocrats of the lot, a BMW, a
silver Jag, a couple of Hummers, and the lesser hierarchies of reconditioned
Toyotas, family sedans with suspect frames that sell for a thousand dollars and
are called Drive-Away Specials. He’s become so sensitized to the word, the
sign, it’s as if he’s developed a relationship with it. When he’s reading,
he’ll glance toward the sign now and again, because seeing it satisfies
something in him. At closing time, leaving the night watchman alone in the
office with his cheese sandwiches and his boxing magazines, he’ll snatch a last
look at it before he pulls out into traffic and heads for the Port Orange
Bridge and home. Sometimes when he’s falling asleep, the sign will switch on in
his mind’s eye and glow briefly, bluely, fading as he fades.
Cliff’s no fool. Used car
salesman may be the final stop on his employment track, but it’s lack of
ambition, not a lack of intellect, that’s responsible for his station in life.
He understands what’s happening with the sign. He’s letting it stand for
something other than an empty motel room, letting it second the way he feels
about himself. That’s all right, he thinks. Maybe the fixation will goad him
into making a change or two, though the safe bet is, he won’t change. Things
have come too easily for him. Ever since his glory days as a high school jock
(wide receiver, shooting guard), friends, women, and money haven’t been a
serious problem. Even now, more than thirty years later, his looks still get
him by. He’s got the sort of unremarkably handsome, rumpled face that you might
run across in a Pendleton catalog, and he dyes his hair ash brown, leaves a
touch of gray at the temples, and wears it the same as he did when he was in
Hollywood. That’s where he headed after his stint in the army (he was stationed
in Germany near the end of the Vietnam War). He figured to use the knowledge he
gained with a demolition unit to get work blowing up stuff in the movies, but
wound up acting instead, for the most part in B-pictures.
People will come onto the
lot and say, “Hey! You’re that guy, right?” Usually they’re referring to a
series of commercials he shot in the Nineties, but occasionally they’re talking
about his movies, his name fifth- or sixth-billed, in which he played good guys
who were burned alive, exploded, eaten by monstrous creatures, or otherwise
horribly dispatched during the first hour. He often sells a car to the people
who recognize him and tosses in an autographed headshot to sweeten the deal.
And then he’ll go home to his beach cottage, a rugged old thing of boards and a
screened-in
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