Vile Blood (15 page)

When she saw the smiling face of a porcelain china doll she calmed herself, pressing her nose up against the window of a store that stocked only old and wonderful things. Hands cupped against the glass, Skye tracked her way along the display, past an ivory elephant, a top hat and a cape, a rouged Spanish dancer, until a face filled her view, a face so anguished that it scared away all memory of the butchered hog.

It was a velvet Jesus, the figure nailed to the cross rendered in lurid colors on cloth black and sleek as the coat of a cat. The agony was depicted with photo-realistic relish: the crown of thorns atop the mid-blond wavy hair, the drops of blood flowing down the forehead, hands, wrists and ankles, the oozing holes in the flesh painful to Skye, the torment in the soft brown eyes that
X-rayed her
caused an uncomfortable lurch within, threatening to shake loose something old and dark and terrifying.

Skye yelped and leap back, bumping into her mother who caught her in safe hands and steered her away, muttering about Papists and their idolatry. After that day Skye had always contrived to walk on the opposite sidewalk, eyes averted from the store window.

Years later, when she was ten or eleven, Skye found herself back at the window. The black velvet had faded to a dull brown and the painting seemed banal and crude. But the eyes, once they engaged hers, still had the power to crack open a door buried deep within her, and she’d continued to avoid the store until it disappeared one day, the velvet Jesus with it.

Lying on Minty’s bed, the crucifix pendant still gently swaying, Skye knew that the memory wasn’t random, that the Christ face was a link to something that had skittered away into the shadows of her subconscious.

But were these precognitive flashes to be trusted? Or were they no more real or significant than bits of dreams that evaporated like smoke on waking? Evidence, perhaps, of a change in her. A seismic shift. Caused by The Other that was slowly invading her, cell by cell.

She stood, needing to make some effort to freshen up for her last shift at the diner. It was when Skye sat brushing her hair at Minty’s vanity table, confronted with her double reflection, that it came to her: she saw that face again, that beautiful bearded face, but this time it wasn’t on a half-naked body nailed to a cross, it was the face of a barefoot man in bloody jeans and T-shirt, his hands cuffed behind his back, mesmerizing eyes fixed on the lens of a TV news camera, smiling beatifically into the barrage of flashbulbs as he was pushed into the back of police car and driven away.

32

Even though the nurse drove slowly, easing her little blue bubble car along the rutted gravel road, the dry brown landscape seemed to fly by Junior Cotton, his spatial sense still
impaired from
years of catatonia and he found himself in the grip of a motion sickness that threatened to have him puking in his lap.

He wiped sweat from his forehead and took a drink from the can of Diet Coke that stood in the drink holder jutting from a dashboard as jazzy as a jukebox. The Coke was warm and tinny, the syrup unpleasantly thick on his tongue, but the gas in the soda made him hiss out a series of burps that eased the queasiness in his gut.

“Where are you taking me?” the woman asked.

“Just drive,” he said.

Driving with no aim other than leaving the institution far behind, the way he had with his parents and then later—glory days—when he and his mother had crisscrossed the country in search of adventure. There had been no plans, no maps, just some invisible GPS guiding them toward the gullible and the weak.

A blur of color caught Junior’s eye and he saw washing strung on a line that sagged beside a rundown house standing in the thin shadow of a windmill.

 “Stop,” he said.

The nurse obeyed, pumping the brake with her ridiculous platform shoe, her painted toes peeping out like fries dipped in ketchup. The image filled Junior with a hunger that almost had him slicing at her flesh with the scalpel, right there at the roadside. But he controlled himself and had the woman take her arms behind the driver’s seat, where he bound her wrists with another of Alfonso’s cable ties.

Rooting in the glove box—dipping into a mess of make-up and lipsticks, avoiding a pair of scissors with dayglo pink handles and a brush clogged with hair—he found a wad of used tissues.  

“Open wide,” he said, jabbing her with the scalpel when she didn’t obey him immediately.

Her mouth fell open on a picket fence of pointy teeth, and he stuffed the
tissues
inside. She gagged and sucked air through her nose, a bubble of snot inflating from one nostril when she spluttered and sneezed.

Junior opened the car door and hauled himself out onto the road. He kicked off his flip-flops, feeling the coarse gravel beneath his soft feet. He looked across at the house and saw nobody. Lowering himself to the ground he leopard crawled over a hard thatch of grass and beneath a barbed wire fence, crossing the open ground that lay between him and the washing line, the stones tearing at the elbows and knees of his jumpsuit.

He tuned out the pain, eyes on the washing that hung limp in the still air, picking out a blue man’s shirt and a pair of khaki work pants that dangled beside a sun-bleached dress and a floral babygro.

Nearly at the wash line, Junior heard the whine of a vehicle and stopped crawling, ignoring a fly that plundered his nostril. An old pick-up truck bounced up to the house and Junior flattened himself to the earth as the vehicle creaked to a halt, the engine idling raggedly.

A door opened on rusted hinges and a man shouted, “May? May!”

When there was no reply boots crunched across gravel and the door of the house flew
open,
handle smacking a wall. More shouting that went unanswered. The door slammed closed and the boots crossed to the truck, the man cursing as he forced the pick-up into gear and sped out of the yard, throwing up a scrim of dust that settled on Junior and had him blinking and coughing.

When the noise of the truck disappeared, Junior hauled himself to the line and pulled the pants and shirts free of the pegs, unzipping his jumpsuit and wadding the clothes inside. His knees and elbows were bleeding by the time he got back to the nurse’s car.

He freed her hands and she wrenched the
tissues
from her mouth, coughing and crying.

“What you gonna do with me?”

“Drive,” he said and she got the little car moving, taking them farther down the road into a great sandy emptiness.

They passed a cow, all white bones and dried skin, hanging from a wire fence. A few miles on an old
sedan
with tailfins lay on its roof on the berm, stripped of its wheels, dark birds scared from its torn interior by the whine of the car. A contrail drew itself across the indigo sky like a line of cocaine, the vapor disintegrating into a furry
wisp
before Junior caught the distant rumble of jet engines.

Then he saw the house. A ruin rising from the desert, its roof beams bared, glassless windows
staring
at them blindly. A gate lay where it had fallen from its posts and two parallel tracks, like giant fingers
had
been dragged through the dirt, sketched a path up to the front door.

“Turn in here,” Junior said.

The nurse balked, stopping the car, sobbing, shaking her head, clutching at the wheel like it was a
life ring
.

“I ain’t going up there.”

Junior reached over and sliced her where her white uniform hugged the
corrugations of her ribs. The linen of the dress parted like lips, revealing a bulge of toffee-colored skin that disappeared beneath a wash of bright, fresh blood.

The woman screamed and clutched at her side. “You cut me! Oh, Jesus.”

She gabbled something in Spanish, and Junior held the tip of the scalpel to her eye, a fake eyelash fluttering against the bloodied blade like a moth beating at a window pane.

“Drive or I’ll take
out
your eye.”

She drove, the car rattling and bumping toward the house. He looked back. The road was empty.

“Park behind the house,” he said.

She obeyed, stopping at what had been the kitchen, the door long ago reduced to matchwood.

Junior found the scissors in the glove box, holstered them in his pocket, lifted himself out of the car and leaned against the hood, the metal hot beneath his palms.

“Come,” he said to the woman.

She stared at him through the windshield, her face patterned with tears and dust. She shook her head, and he saw her as a child.

“Come,” he said again.

She slid out, knock-kneed, her dress riding high on her chunky thighs. She teetered a moment on her silly heels, then he held out a hand and she came to him, docile as a whipped dog, and he knew she was his now.

He put an arm around her shoulders, supporting himself on her as they entered the house. The kitchen stank of animal dung and rot.

Junior lowered himself to the linoleum floor, his feet skidding a trail in the
dust
as he crossed his legs. He handed the scissors to the nurse, handle first.

“Cut my hair and beard. Make me look like
your
Jesus.”

The woman stared at the scissors for a moment and he read her mind as easily as if her thoughts were
caught
in a bubble in a comic book.

He reached a hand up under her dress and touched the scalpel blade to where her panties sliced into the meat of her thigh, the
stew
of her flesh on his fingers.

“Do it,” he said, and she stepped off the heels, and kneeled beside him, snickering and sobbing, and started hacking away at his hair, enough dry tendrils falling to the floor to fill a pillow.

When his hair was trimmed to where it just brushed his shoulders, she started on his beard, and he felt coolness on his skin as the fur fell away. After a few minutes she nodded and dropped the scissors. He touched a hand to his face, fingers finding soft down.

Using her shoulder for support he got to his feet, his hips and legs stiff as he unfolded himself.

“Come,” he said. “Take me to the bathroom.”

They wandered through the ruined house, avoiding holes in the floor where the boards had rotted, until they came to a room containing a blackened shit pot and an old iron bathtub, crouching on clawed feet, the enamel eroded by water.

Junior lowered himself onto the edge of the tub. It rocked a moment, then stilled itself.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

She stared at him, biting her lip, sobbing. “Please don’t rape me.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it over her head, the blood on her ribs a red ooze, revealing a lacy white bra and a pair of pink panties so tiny they were almost hidden by the softness of her belly.

“Those too,” Junior said, gesturing at her underwear with the scalpel.

She reached behind her and unhooked the bra, her heavy breasts sagging out. She dropped the bra and turned her back, stepping out of the panties, hugging herself, looking over her shoulder at him when she was done.

“Get into the tub,” he said.

She sobbed and said, “Please.”

“It’s going to be fine,” he said.

She stepped a leg up high and placed it in the tub, finding her balance before she lifted the other. She
held
the edges of the tub and lowered herself into a crouch, eyes fixed on the rusted faucets.

“Lie stretched out,” he said. “Like you’re taking a bath.”

“There ain’t no water,” she said.

“That doesn’t matter.”

She sank her buttocks to the enamel, laid her head against the slope of the tub, and stretched out her legs, covering her breasts and her pubes with her hands.

Junior nodded and smiled. “That’s good,” he said, and took her panties and balled them up and stuffed them into the black mouth of the plughole.

He stood and balanced the scalpel on the edge of the tub, the metal finding the hard yellow light of the window. He unzipped his jumpsuit and pulled it off. Freed himself from the brown boxer shorts that accordioned the loose flesh of his navel.

Junior lifted his emaciated body and settled into the tub, straddling the nurse, his dangling penis slack and blue, the twist of foreskin brushing her naked thigh.

The woman turned her head, staring at a stain that bubbled from the plaster of the wall.

“Look at me.”

She ignored him.

“Please.”

She turned to him, her eyes large and wet. There was enough light in the room for him to see his twin reflections in her flecked pupils as he lifted the scalpel and ran it down from her throat to her pubes, as if he
were
unzipping her, her
organs
swelling out, glistening.

She sighed and shuddered, and then she was still. He sat unpacking her
entrails,
letting her blood fill the tub, bathing himself in it, luxuriating in the warmth of her insides, before he opened his mouth and let the blood fill him.

33

Gene, at the wheel of the Lincoln, drove away from the city and into the desert, the head of the man in the suit rolling in the trunk like a bowling ball as the car swooped through a cloverleaf and onto the straight. Drum was slumped in the passenger seat, leaking blood, his breath coming in shallow gasps,

Gene had held the weapon on Drum, back at the house, a stranger’s voice saying, “What have you done with Timmy?”

“Nothing. Yet. You get me home safe and sound, nobody gonna bother your boy and Bobby and Sally Heck.”

“If you’ve hurt him—”

“Not a hair on his head has been touched. You have my word on that.” Gene stared into those porcine eyes. “Call Mrs. Heck if you don’t believe me.”

Keeping the weapon on Drum, Gene reached for his phone with his left hand and hit speed-dial. After a few rings Sally Heck picked up and, trying to sound calm, Gene asked if Timmy was behaving himself.

“Oh, he’s as good as gold,” the woman said.