Free The Best of Lucius Shepard by Lucius Shepard

the stream. “Gimme a hand across.”
     
    Dantzler
reached out to him, but instead of taking his hand, he grabbed his wrist and
pulled him off-balance. DT teetered on his good leg, then toppled and vanished
beneath the mist. Dantzler had expected him to fall, but he surfaced instantly,
mist clinging to his skin. Of course, thought Dantzler; his body would have to
die before his spirit would fall.
     
    “What
you doin’, man?” DT was more disbelieving than enraged.

 
    Dantzler
planted a foot in the middle of his back and pushed him down until his head was
submerged. DT bucked and clawed at the foot and managed to come to his hands
and knees. Mist slithered from his eyes, his nose, and he choked out the words
“...kill you...” Dantzler pushed him down again; he got into pushing him down
and letting him up, over and over. Not so as to torture him. Not really. It was
because he had suddenly understood the nature of the ayahuamaco’s laws,
that they were approximations of normal laws, and he further understood that
his actions had to approximate those of someone jiggling a key in a lock. DT
was the key to the way out, and Dantzler was jiggling him, making sure all the
tumblers were engaged.
     
    Some
of the vessels in DT’s eyes had burst, and the whites were occluded by films of
blood. When he tried to speak, mist curled from his mouth. Gradually his
struggles subsided; he clawed runnels in the gleaming yellow dirt of the bank
and shuddered. His shoulders were knobs of black land foundering in a mystic
sea.
     
    For
a long time after DT sank from view, Dantzler stood beside the stream,
uncertain of what was left to do and unable to remember a lesson he had been
taught. Finally he shouldered his rifle and walked away from the clearing.
Morning had broken, the mist had thinned, and the forest had regained its usual
coloration. But he scarcely noticed these changes, still troubled by his faulty
memory. Eventually, he let it slide—it would all come clear sooner or later. He
was just happy to be alive. After a while he began to kick the stones as he
went, and to swing his rifle in a carefree fashion against the weeds.
     
    *
* * *
     
    When the First Infantry poured
across the Nicaraguan border and wasted Leon, Dantzler was having a quiet time
at the VA hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and at the precise moment the
bulletin was flashed nationwide, he was sitting in the lounge, watching the
American League playoffs between Detroit and Texas. Some of the patients ranted
at the interruption, while others shouted them down, wanting to hear the
details. Dantzler expressed no reaction whatsoever. He was solely concerned
with being a model patient; however, noticing that one of the staff was giving
him a clinical stare, he added his weight on the side of the baseball fans. He
did not want to appear too controlled. The doctors were as suspicious of that
sort of behavior as they were of its contrary. But the funny thing was—at least
it was funny to Dantzler—that his feigned annoyance at the bulletin was an
exemplary proof of his control, his expertise at moving through life the way he
had moved through the golden leaves of the cloud forest. Cautiously,
gracefully, efficiently. Touching nothing, and being touched by nothing. That
was the lesson he had learned—to be as perfect a counterfeit of a man as the ayahuamaco had been of the land; to adopt the various stances of a man, and yet, by
virtue of his distance from things human, to be all the more prepared for the
onset of crisis or a call to action. He saw nothing aberrant in this; even the
doctors would admit that men were little more than organized pretense. If he
was different from other men, it was only that he had a deeper awareness of the
principles on which his personality was founded.
     
    When
the battle of Managua was joined, Dantzler was living at home. His parents had
urged him to go easy in readjusting to civilian life, but he had immediately
gotten a job as a