Vile Blood (25 page)

A knock on the door had Gene turning and he walked across, opened it and stepped out and locked it after him. She heard the mutter of voices and then footsteps receding. She gathered herself. Tasted blood on her lips. Grasped the chair and righted it, back to the wall, fingers clasped behind the chair in an impersonation of being cuffed.

The pain in her mouth was nothing compared to the agony in her muscles, sinews, bones and nerves—her very cells—as she forced The Other down, staring through damp tendrils of hair as Gene came back into the room.

He held a nightstick in his right hand and a wet towel in his left. As she watched he wrapped the nightstick in the towel and when he looked at her she saw that he, too, had crossed a divide.

“This ain’t going to go well for you, Skye.”

“Don’t do it, Gene. Please.”

“Then talk. Tell me what you done with my boy.”

“Nothing, Gene. I swear. It’s Junior Cotton, it has to be.”

He laughed. “What, you see the news in some diner, using his escape as your cover story? Maybe you ain’t heard that he’s heading north?”

“Gene, why would I have come right here if I took Timmy? Why?”

“I don’t know, Skye. You tell me.”

He swung the wrapped nightstick and hit her in the ribcage beneath her breast. It was all she could do not to scream, still Skye enough to feel the pain as the nightstick broke a rib. Then the pain was gone and her body spasmed on the chair as The Other took to her. Took her long enough for Skye’s T-shirt to rip at the armpits as her frame thickened, and the chains at her ankles to stretch taut.

The room lightened and sharpened and she saw deep into Gene, into his eyes and beyond, into his desperation and his terror. Not fear of what she could do to him, fear of what had been done to his boy.

And it was that, his love for his son, that saved his life, that got her back in control, that got her back to a place where the inhuman strength drained from her, leaving her shaking and wet and crying.

“Please, Gene. Don’t hit me again. I won’t be able to hold it back next time.”

He stared at her, looked down at the wrapped nightstick, looked back at her, his jaws clenching and his eyes dark as
pebbles. She could sense the command forming in his brain, ready to travel to his arm and she knew she wouldn’t be able to contain The Other.

His cell phone, lying on the metal table, bleated. A single high chirp. Gene dropped the nightstick, picked up the phone and prodded at it and a light touched his face. His expression changed as Skye heard Timmy’s voice, tinny and distorted coming from the phone, saying, “Daddy. Help me. Daddy—”

Then abrupt silence.

When Gene looked back at her he was her brother again.

“Let me see, Gene,” she said and brought her hands from behind the chair, the broken chains clanking.

He handed her the phone and she hit play and watched a little video of Timmy, bound and gagged, lying in a darkness undefined and infinite, his upper body lit by the uncertain beam of a flashlight, begging for help before the camera panned left, finding the face that she’d seen in her dream, the face of the velvet Jesus, smiling like a Halloween pumpkin.

Something hit her behind her eyes, blinding her for a second, and when she could see again she wasn’t in the interrogation room she was out in the desert, in the night, smelling sagebrush and mesquite, seeing the stuttering flicker of a neon star, her vision clear and sharp as she turned her head and saw the old gas station.

And she was walking toward the wrecked pumps and looking down at the cracked concrete and she could see far down, through the cracks, into a tank to where Timmy lay alone in the dark.

“Skye? Skye?”

As Gene shook her shoulder, her legs were filled with an enormous power that drove her up from the chair, side seams of her blue jeans tearing as her quads shifted and swelled, the shackles at her ankles snapping.

“Get me out of here, Gene,” she said in a voice that wasn’t hers. “I know where Timmy is.”

52

Junior Cotton, lying in the dark on the rear seat of the parked Chevrolet, felt a slight shifting in the molecules around him, something as subtle and nearly imperceptible as the distant flutter of the wings of a moth.

The bait had been taken. He just knew.

Junior pulled himself upright and clicked off the dome light before he opened the car door. He sat a moment, feeling the still night air on his face, the smell of the dust in his nostrils.
 

“Della?” Keeping his voice low.

He heard the kiss of fabric on skin as she rose from where she sat with her back resting against the wall of the gas station.

“I’m here,” she said.

“It’s time.”

“Okay.”

Her sneakers crunched on broken glass as she walked over to him.

“What do I do?” she asked, no trace of anxiety in her voice.

“Kneel down,” he said, standing, supporting himself against the wall, the peeling plaster still warm beneath his palm.

She knelt and he risked the flashlight, finding the least distressed section of the plaster to use as his canvas. He handed her the light.

“Shine this on your left wrist.”

She did as he said and he brought the scalpel from his pocket and used it to open the vein on her pulse, a rhythmic pumping of blood issuing forth.

“Turn the beam onto the wall,” he said and she obeyed.      

He dipped a finger into the warm liquid and used it to paint the symbol, old whitewash crumbling at his touch, adhering like paste to his fingertip. The inverted pentagram appeared, spidery and crude but unmistakable.

“Turn and lean your face to the wall,” he said, and her forehead met the plaster at the center of the pentagram. He took the flashlight from her and killed the beam, keeping his eyes closed until his night vision was restored.

The voices came now from within him, speaking in tongues no longer understood, a multitude of voices, male, female, toddler and crone, snatches and fragments melting into one another, a Babel reaching back to a time primordial, to when life dragged itself from an alchemical soup of mud and blood and piss and shit and jism.

The tempo and pitch of the voices increased, like the mad beating of wings on glass, and when they peaked he cut her throat and felt the blood flow, and he held her and sang her a bloodsong lullaby, and as whatever she’d been left her he saw in the periphery of his vision a momentary bloom and flicker that was quickly doused, and he opened his mouth and inhaled her essence, giving him fuel for the coming battle.

He stood, the girl already forgotten, his heart beating a steady rhythm. Anticipating taking a much larger force into himself by the time the night was done, a force that would transport him from where he was, a creature still at the whim of his fragile body, still at the whim of age and decay, to a place at the feet of the fallen gods.

Standing, staring south, the blackness broken by a rash of stars in the moonless sky, he allowed himself the luxury of a memory that he had carefully rationed. A memory of such power that if accessed undiluted and unmediated would have left the synapses of his brain quarterized.

It was after midnight on the Day of The Dead and ten-year-old Junior was down across the border with his mama, in a filthy cantina where on a small stage a brown woman was mounted by a donkey while white men capered and cackled and sweated mescal and chemicals and lust.

He was led out of the cantina into the dark and thrown onto the back of a half-dead horse, his brain fogged and lagging from something in the drink he had been given and he puked down the scabbed and sore-ridden side of the animal, aware of his mama swinging herself up onto another mount, as graceful as an equestrian.

A man on a third horse made a clucking sound and they rode through the
stinking
town into the night, Junior’s guts swaying with the motion of the animal beneath him, and he had no recollection of how much time passed before they came to a few huts flung together on the slope of a hill.

They dismounted and the door of one of the huts opened, a guttering candle silhouetting a man in a cheap suit smoking a cigarette. Mama gave the man money and he took her arm and led her toward a tin outhouse, a gap between the bottom of the door and the raw earth.

Junior saw movement in the gap, heard the clanking of chains and the grunts and moans of something not entirely human.

The man in the suit opened the door and pushed Mama through, quickly closing and padlocking the privy. More noises, a muffled scream from his mother, then a slobbering and a moaning and the thudding rhythm of bodies slamming against the sides of the outhouse.

When Junior tried to follow his mama the guide
grabbed
him and carried him into a hovel that stank of pig shit, where a fat woman with slit eyes keened over a cauldron, stirring liquid with globs of fat floating on the top. Despite Junior’s best efforts, he passed out.

When he awoke his mother was in the hut with him. Her clothes were torn and her hair was muddied, there were scratches on her face and her lips were swollen and bruised, her eyes still full of something beyond her comprehension.

Junior drifted in and out of sleep and each time he surfaced he saw his mother sitting with her back to the wall, not moving, her eyes glazed, her tongue nervously working at her teeth.

At dawn they left on the horses, returning to the town that lay under a blanket of wood smoke. They found their car and drove north, crossed the border and checked into a motel where Mama spent a very long time in the bathroom with her
unguents and her lotions
and her hairdryer before she emerged smiling and perfectly groomed.

Life continued very much as before, the two of them crisscrossing the heartlands, killing for sport. But his mother changed. First physically, as something swelled her belly and caused her to waddle with one hand supporting her lower back, and splay her feet like a duck when she sat down in a chair.

She forced a laugh and said, “Your mama is in a state of grace, Junior. A state of
grace
.”

Her mood changed, too. Her lightness was gone and she was given to what she called the vapors. Dozing and retching, sending Junior for ice, instructing him to dip a cloth in the ice bucket and bathe her forehead.

When she raised her sweater, she revealed a distended belly, the navel poking out like a nasty finger, the skin mottled and marbled with a filigree of dark streaks that resembled burn marks. She had Junior bathe the belly, and it had taken all his self control not to scream when he felt something seething beneath the skin that stretched and warped as the thing within shifted.

One night she took them to a farm house in a far valley, where an old woman who seemed without speech spent hours with Mama, ministering to her as she screamed and writhed and finally expelled from her body a mess of blood and flesh that was connected to her by a tube snaking from the gaping mouth between her legs.

The woman stitched Mama and cleaned her and they drove away with an infant that looked like any other. It never cried, never demanded their attention, but as it lay on the rear seat of the car in its little bassinette it silently
dominated
every moment of their day. And before his eyes Junior’s mama became unhinged and disheveled, reduced to drinking
Thunderbird
wine and sometimes she went days without washing, until her body smelled sour and unclean.

Finally the day came, as they left behind some borderland hamlet, when Mama stopped the car and placed the infant in a cardboard box and
instructed
Junior to leave it at the side of the road just as a dust storm rushed at them from the desert. Driving away into the wall of brown, Junior looked back and saw the box and everything else disappear into the tempest.

They had never spoken of the baby again and his mama was restored to him until the night of the wreck.

Years later, drifting on the coattails of Tincup and his flock, Junior recognized the road where they’d dumped the box. And one day, in town for supplies, as he passed a blonde girl leaving Walmart, Junior felt his mother’s presence with such intensity that his nostrils were filled with her spice, a blend of cinnamon, Chanel No 5 and Burley tobacco, and he heard her laugh—a trilling sound like agitated wind chimes.

Junior shadowed the child—a round-shouldered stoop of a girl, maybe ten or eleven—as she dawdled toward the exit, her hands full of shopping bags, and when she turned he saw his mother in her face, the genetic imprint so clear that he was left breathless with sadness and longing.

“Skye! Skye!”

The man in uniform had to call twice to penetrate the dream fog that clouded the girl, and Junior had watched as she joined him and a very pregnant woman holding the hand of a small boy, and they had all climbed into a station wagon and driven away.

 Skye. 

Standing now in the desert, sniffing the night like a nocturnal animal, Junior felt a quiver of excitement at the coming reunion.

The reunion with his sister.

53 

Timmy lay in the dark, bound at the wrists and ankles. The mean girl had tied him up, pulling the ropes so tight they bit into his flesh, and he couldn’t feel nothing now in his hands and feet.

“Trussed up like a turkey on Thanksgiving,” he said out loud, his voice booming and echoing.

Speaking to break the silence of the pitch black that pressed down on him and scared him so much he had to work real hard not to wet his pants again.

He had no idea where he was, but even though the metal around him was dry he could smell gasoline like he would smell it when he went with Daddy to fill up the Jeep and he guessed that he was at an old gas station somewhere far away where nobody would never find him till he was dead.