Gypsy Blood (29 page)

“I’ve brought it.”

The hermit took the bottle from the Gypsy’s hand. He stepped down onto the rocks and stood ankle deep in the water. It looked like a wave might sweep him out to sea. He brought the bottle down hard against a mossy rock. It was to be a street fight, between a man and the sea.

He dragged the broken edges of the bottle across the skin of the ocean.

And the waves began to bleed.

Red Tide

T
he sea was full of blood.

Why not? This is where we all go to die.

Poppa was right. The ash filled clouds rain us down upon it. We leap from bridges into it. Fall from ships and drown in sinking barges. We rot in the dirt and wash down to the endless green and black. Vikings burned and Indians drowned and lovers leaped and men pissed and spat their bitter memories from a thousand aching docks.

The sea is always thirsty. That’s why it tastes of salt. The sea is where we all begin and where we all must go. We touch it in our dreams and it vanishes like the slap of a mermaid’s fine frothy tail.

Carnival stepped into the water, accidentally stomping on the beached carcass of a small jellyfish. He felt a little guilty.

Guilt is for Gaijo. You were bigger than it was. Why not stomp?

Poppa was right. It felt good to stomp on those that can’t stomp back. The hermit hacked at the water, muttering the old words, scrying in the murky darkness. And the waters began to churn. Something pushed periscope like from out of the deep wet darkness.

Oh look, it’s Raymond Burr. Godzilla will be showing up, any time soon.

It was Olaf, looking like a mildewed moldy Detective Ironsides, still belted on to his office chair. To make matters worse, Poppa started to sing.

…should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind…

Olaf stared at Carnival, with a wet baleful glare.

…we’ll drink a cup of kindness yet, for days of auld lang syne…

“So you’re the fuck that killed me,” Olaf said.

He sounds happy to see you. Do you always make such close immediate friends?

Olaf looked a lot worse for wear. There was seaweed and a couple of cranky crabs crawling through his mossed over hairline. Carnival could see a cluster of funky barnacles clumping beneath the man’s armpit. Carnival wondered briefly what antiperspirant tasted like.

“You killed me.” Olaf repeated. “You used a knife. Goddamn amateur.”

He’s dead right. In fact, he’s dead in every direction – right, left and straight up the middle.

“Yesterday’s Dow Jones,” Carnival answered. “There’s nothing to worry about it now. Death’s just another step in the dance, that’s something you’ve got to come to grips with. You might as well accept it.”

Carnival wondered if the dead man would buy any of that.

I sure wouldn’t.

“I’ve seen you, somewhere before,” Olaf said.

“I’ve got that kind of face.” Carnival told him.

“No. It’s not like that. It’s deeper than that. It’s like I’ve been lying down here dreaming about you. You and some woman. She’s got one of them Ouija boards, and a bright red pendulum.”

Ouija board? What would she do with a child’s toy like that?

“She’s looking for you, I think. Like she’s worried about you. Worried about what you’re getting set to do.”

Olaf looked up at Carnival, his eyes as sharp as rusted bayonets

“What do you want?” Olaf asked. “You sure as shit didn’t call me up to just say hello.”

“I want to use your body.”

That struck Olaf as pretty funny.

“Ha! You’ve used it plenty enough, haven’t you? You and that thirsty bitch. The one with the teeth. I remember her.”

He shook his head. Carnival thought it might fall off.

“She fucked me, that’s for sure. You and her both fucked the shit out of me.”

“I just need to use you for a while.”

Olaf laughed again. It wasn’t a pretty sound.

“Why should I let you? I want to kill you. Want to drown you. Want to stick my head down your throat and listen to you strangle on my rot. Why should I help you to do anything?”

“I can give you peace. Aren’t you tired of the dreams? Tired of listening to the waves and the crabs chewing on your skull meat?”

Ha. You have him there.

Olaf looked up sadly. “I never even cared for sea food, you know that?” he shook his head. “Do you just want to wear me for a while, is that it?”

Carnival nodded.

“I kind of like that,” he looked up. “All right. So what do I have to do?”

“Nothing,” Carnival said. “Just lean back and relax.”

Carnival leaned forward, reaching for the dead man’s mind.

Repossession

I
t felt dirty and tight inside of Olaf’s soul as if Carnival was wearing a used condom for a necktie.

You call this tight? You ought to try living in someone’s chest. Compared to that, this is roomy.

“Thanks Poppa. Hearing somebody talk inside you while you were inside somebody else is a really entertaining experience.”

There you go again, Deja Voodoo. What goes around, comes around, posh rat.

What else could you expect from something so temporary? This was strictly just a rental like putting on a pair of rubber boots after going out to play in the water. It wasn’t comfortable in here. Carnival could see himself, could feel the aching gape of the knife hole in the wound that was left of his throat. He could see a woman, lying upon a bed, tied to it. He was standing over her…

“Now?” the hermit asked.

Carnival looked up at the old man out of Olaf’s eyes. The hermit was a stranger to these eyes but he’d always been, Carnival guessed. He knew him well enough, even inside of someone else’s spirit, he knew him well enough to ask him one more favor.

“Now,” Carnival said.

The hermit began to chant.

“Come avatar. Come city. Come concrete and brick-bone. Walls and halls and avenues, come tar, come pavement, come window glass and dream,” The hermit chanted.

And the red waters began to churn once more, like that part in the movie where the sea monster comes out onto the land.

Carnival stood there, in Olaf’s body, watching.

These were the moments that Carnival lived for. These moments when he could peel back the veneer of reality and have a peek at what hid inside. He wasn’t sure of why he was so damn hooked onto seeing what was really there. All that he knew was that the world, as it stood, was so deadly dull and boring without these fleeting opportunities to roll the dice of destiny.

Watch and see. It will happen just as I told you. Any minute Godzilla is going to clamber up out of those murky depths.

And then a minute later, that’s just how it happened.

Getting Familiar with the City

T
he human body is like an atom. There’s the nucleus, and that’s important, but then there’s all that empty space moving around it, charged with spiritual ions whirling like dervish satellites. That’s what really counts. Never mind the thunder. It’s all of those uncountable fruitless raindrops beating down between the rumble and the roar.

That’s where the real action is.

That’s the spirit and everybody’s got one. Same as everybody’s got muscles but some of us look like Woody Allen while others resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger. It all depends on what you do with it. There are businessmen and politicians who never climb out of their money belts long enough to grow a spirit more comfortable than a rotted chunk of fungus. Then there are the people who learn to dance with life and their spirits know no boundaries.

Carnival figured his own spirit fell somewhere between the two. It was probably bigger than a bread loaf but not much larger than a Doberman Pinscher. It probably had a greenish tinge to it from all of the murky dealings he’d been in. Still, he had something in my spirit that most folks didn’t need to deal with.

He had a hitchhiker.

He had a hitchhiker and he was hitchhiking in Olaf.

The three of them.

Poppa, Olaf, and Carnival - and that woman tied to the bed.

She was in this somehow, too.

Tied into it.

Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub with a woman to scrub.

“Shut up, Poppa.”

Aye, there’s the rub.

Every city has its own spirit, a sort of body politic, a cumulative creation of all the souls that have passed through its domain. When that many people fart and sweat and breath and curse there’s bound to be some kind of residue. And that residue is the city familiar - the Aggregate.

The city’s spirit lived down in the water because it was easier to hide. Not that it needed concealment. The average citizen couldn’t see the city spirit any more than they could make sense out of the latest census. No, it preferred the murkiness of the waters. It wrapped itself in ancient obituaries and the fog of forgotten legend.

Its actual being was no more substantial than your breath on a cold November morning, but to those who worked these long dark areas, like the hermit and Carnival, the city spirit was huge and all too visible. Some mornings Carnival could hear it from his bedroom window, howling like a wounded foghorn over some particularly tasty soul or a juicy one liner told to it by the Indian sea serpent that haunted the passage beneath the old city bridge. This was the city spirit. This was the Aggregate.

It reared up out of the water, long and wormlike, its skin the color of dirty concrete, eyes of window pane cracked with age and dangled with underwater cobwebs, yellowed eyes, like piss in snow, the color of moonshine over misery. A small colony of lamprey dangled from its scaly hide. A homeless bag lady clattered a shopping cart through its sinus cavities, sang midnight lullabies all day long. They were nothing more than parasites. Fleas and heat rashes and memory stains.

No one could escape such irritations. Not even a god.

Carnival saw the tiny bourbon bottle like a miniscule tick, nestled in the great beast’s lips. The city spirit loves its booze. You would too if your veins were haunted with the memories of all those souls that had lived and died within your walls for the last two centuries. You heard them shuffling, like blind drones, still walking the long streets and avenues that accomplished the great beast’s form. They were all in there, all of the Olaf’s and Sally’s and nameless pizza boys. An acre of regret crammed into a matchbox.

And then it noticed Carnival/Olaf. Perched like a lonely widow on a lonely widow’s walk, still belted tight to that ridiculous gutted office chair, feeling about as secure as Woody Allen’s last conviction.

“You’re on your own now, Carnival,” The hermit called, making for the dubious safety of his rickety abandoned warehouse.

I won’t leave you here on your own, my son. Not now, not ever.

“Good,” Carnival said. “You stay here and talk to the giant building while I run for cover.”

The city spirit loomed down towards Carnival. Carnival had just enough time for a truckload of second thoughts.

It’s too late to go back to the hooker now. You had your chance.

The city spirit grabbed him. Like a fat olive from the world’s largest Greek salad.

It grabbed Carnival/Olaf up and pulled him down under.

He’d take this call.

Deeper Than He Needs to Go

T
here’s a world down here in the bottom of the sea. This is where memories go when they’ve been long forgot them. This is where bad dreams go and unanswerable regrets linger on. This is where the ghosts come out to play, where the sun can’t touch them, nor do men’s eyes soil them.

Carnival talked to the city familiar through Olaf’s mouth.

“Aggregate. I would have words with you.”

Polite now, aren’t you?

Carnival had to be. Talking to a city spirit called for a more proper tone of voice than badgering blood demons.

“Who are you, little deadling, to talk to me so?”

“Look deeper, familiar. Look through the rot and the crabs.”

His eyes focused upon Carnival like a thousand window shields of pain. Carnival felt a little like an ant beneath a burning glass.

“Ah yes. The gypsy. I knew your father. He feels close.”

“Don’t hold that against me.”

“I felt the wounds you gave for misguided love. I felt the drunkard and the whore. The delivery boy you took. All of them were close to me. Close to the street.”