Vile Blood (8 page)

The sound of an engine got Minty looking up, coming half to standing. When she saw an RV rolling to a stop outside the diner she slumped back down again. The geriatric wayfarers who
sailed the highways
in
those things were fussy and demanding and never tipped worth a damn.

But when the bells on the door jingled, a blond guy in his late twenties came in and took a booth, long legs ending in frayed Chuck Taylor’s jutting out from under the table. He lifted the menu and Skye heard him sigh.

Minty stood, adjusted her apron, warming up one of her smiles as she clacked over to him. “Evenin’.”

“Hi,” he said with no enthusiasm, gazing past Minty.

Skye realized he was looking at her and she turned away and pretended to neaten a stack of menus.

The blond man ordered a cheeseburger, fries and a coffee. Minty tried to make conversation but got only monosyllables in
reply.
She tore off the page of her order book, stuck it in the clip on Earl’s hatch and slid up beside Skye.

“Cute, isn’t he?”

“I dunno.”

“Got a young Brad Pitt thing going. When Brad was in that movie with Susan Sarandon.”

“
Thelma & Louise
.”

“Uh huh. Lord the six-pack on that man.” Minty was lost in recollection, then she nudged Skye in the ribs with a bony elbow. “He can’t stop starin’ at you.”

“Minty, you’re crazy,” Skye said, laughing. But it was true and the man was beckoning her over.

Minty nudged her again. “Go on, go git yourself some.”

“He’s calling you.”

“No he ain’t. Get going.”

Skye walked over, feeling a blush on her face.

“Yes sir?” she said.

“Where can a man get himself a drink in this town?”

When she gave him directions to the nearest saloon, he nodded, smiling, and she saw he had pale green eyes and very white teeth.

“Whyn’t you join me, when you’re done?”

Right then Skye felt something she’d never felt before. A raw surge of desire, a heat that spread from her middle outward. She felt a hunger, a hunger for this man’s hands on her, for the feel of his body. And with that came another hunger, and she could smell the spice of his flesh, smell the saltiness of the blood coursing through him. Could feel his warmth as she feasted.

Skye spun and ran for the bathroom, locking herself in the stall, sweating and shaking. She heard the clatter of Minty’s shoes and saw her high heels under the stall door.

“You okay, girl?” Minty asked.

“I’m fine,” Skye said.

Minty tapped on the door. “Come on out.”

Skye flushed the toilet and stepped back into the washroom. Minty stared at her, then she laughed.

“You’re a virgin, ain’t you?” She wagged a hand, false nails like talons. “Don’t bother to answer. What you’re gonna do is get on out there and take Brad up on his offer.”

“No way.”

“Honey, you gotta do it sometime, and I speak from experience when I say that a quickie with a stranger is the ideal way to get the business done.”

Skye shook her head but a bold feeling rose in her. She wanted this and when Minty took out her lipstick Skye didn’t argue, just let the older woman paint her lips red as blood.

“Now you get rid of that apron and you get out there. I’ll tell Earl you’re feeling poorly. Lord knows, you’ve covered for me enough times.”

So Skye went out, not hearing Willie Nelson warbling on about
how he fell to pieces,
or
the clatter of Earl washing plates in the kitchen. She heard only the beating of her own heart, strong and regular.

The blond man had eaten half his burger and pushed the plate aside, a few dollar bills tucked beneath it. He stood as she walked toward him.

“I thought you’d gone and run out on me.” Skye shook her head, not trusting her voice. He smiled and said, “You don’t need lipstick, you’re pretty enough already.”

And she let him take her hand and lead her out the door, the bells serenading them gaily as they walked toward the RV and the blond man opened the passenger door and helped her to step up into the high vehicle.

Just for a second a voice spoke to her:
what in God’s name are you doing?

And then the voice was gone and the man was beside her with his heat and his flesh and they were driving into the night.

14

Junior Cotton lay staring up at the stained ceiling of his cell, paint bubbling away from plaster where moisture from hidden plumbing seeped and pooled. He hadn’t moved since Alfonso had dumped him on the bed, set the brake on the wheelchair and slammed the door, unlubricated tumblers
gnashing
as the orderly forced the key in the lock.

Junior commanded his right arm to rise and it took some time before the limb obeyed him, lifting slowly from the rough, sour-smelling blanket, as if it belonged to somebody else.

He brought his hand to his mouth and spat out the nighttime medication inserted by Alfonso, a necklace of spittle connecting the two bombs on his palm to his tongue. His arm, suddenly without strength, fell to the blanket and the strand of drool snapped, one half trapped in his beard, the other landing in a wet coil on his wrist, where the pulse beat fast and erratic.

Junior heard muffled moans and screams and oaths and thuds from the honeycomb of cells adjoining his, then—as the inmates’ medication kicked in—all that broke the silence was the insect-like buzz of the caged light bulb. He almost surrendered to sleep, exhausted by the day but he forced his eyes open and lifted himself, frail arms quivering, head loose on his neck, his breath coming in little sneezes, until, at last, he sat up, feet dangling over the side of the bed.

 Freeing the purloined scalpel from the sleeve of his jumpsuit, he stared down at the short, curved blade. He ran a fingertip over the blade, felt it parse the whorls of his fingerprint, leaving a bead of blood as he stroked the corrugated crosspieces of the handle.

Folding at the waist like a rag doll, Junior dipped his tongue to his fingertip, sucking at the warm, salty blood. He closed his eyes and savored the taste. He knew that if he was to do what he had to do tomorrow he needed to find strength, so he levered his torso upright and flopped back against the cold enamel wall. He gripped the scalpel and jabbed it at his bleeding fingertip, opening the cut, allowing more blood to flow, droplets raining down on the blanket as he brought his hand to the wall and started finger painting with his blood.

His motor skills were unreliable and his hand seemed too heavy for his arm but he managed to trace the symbol onto the wall, the blood streaking and coagulating even as he drew.

The symbol he’d rendered was unmistakably a pentagram—two points upward—and just the sight of it sent a charge into his body, and he was able to turn and sit cross-legged on the bed, resting his palms on the clammy paint on either side of the star, his forehead connected to nexus of the pentagram, and he began a whispered chant, his thin voice growing in strength and confidence—but not volume, he made sure of that—as he jacked into the power of darkness.

When he was filled, Junior shoved away from the wall and felt his body respond, felt strength course through his wasted muscles and he swiveled and set his feet on the floor and pushed himself up to standing, swaying like a flagpole in the wind.

You can do it, darling boy. You can do it. His mama encouraging him.

Cautiously, like an
aerialist high on a rope
, he lifted a foot and set it down, transferring his weight. Lifted his other foot and repeated the process. Held his arms away from his sides to keep his balance. Step by tentative step, his body dripping with sweat, he reached the opposite wall, a journey of maybe six feet. But he made it.

And he would walk again tomorrow. Walk right the hell out of here.

When he did an about-turn, Junior was overconfident and nearly toppled, but he locked his abdominals and squeezed the muscles of his legs and with the sheer force of his will stayed standing. Then he stumbled back to the bed and fell upon it, face down, his beard wet against his face.

He drifted off to sleep chanting again, using the language taught him by his parents before they had taught him English, the language of the blood rites they had enacted with and upon him, his small body the vessel taking them from the gray and mundane day-to-day to the vivid playground on the other side.

15

Skye was unused to talkative men. The men she knew spoke when they had to, reluctantly, as if each word diluted their power. The blond man, though, was different. As the RV swayed and rumbled through town in the direction of the saloon he recounted the events that had him behind the wheel of the unlikely vehicle.

His uncle, a rancher, scratching out half a living from the parched borderland, had dreamed of retiring, selling up his spread and taking himself and his wife to the ocean. In the way of these things, the uncle had bought the RV and refitted it and sold his ranch and was preparing for his journey to a better life when he keeled over from a heart attack.

“Right back there,” the blond man said, jabbing a thumb toward the rear of the RV, “fixing the chemical john.” He looked at Skye, the beams of a passing car setting his hair alight and getting his teeth gleaming. He sure was pretty. “Now, you’re not scared of ghosts, are you?”

“No,” she said, feeling the thing in her swoop and rise, bumping up against her diaphragm, as if it wanted to explode out of her.

“No need to fear Uncle Jim, he was the sweetest man I ever knew. I’m named after him.” Smiling again.

He went on to tell her how his aunt was in a retirement home and her son, young Jim’s father, had paid him to collect the RV and drive it up to the city, where a buyer was waiting.

Jim slid a CD into the player and loud, primitive, music pumped out. “Like it?”

She nodded, listening to the drums and the high, keening voices.

‘It’s called
Kwassa Kwassa
. From central Africa. I was there for a year, with the Peace Corps.”

And he was off again, with his tales and his jokes she couldn’t quite catch, the punch lines eluding her.

The neon of the saloon beckoned them in the distance when he said, “Why bother with that place? Bet it’s all good ole boys and country on the jukebox. I’ve got a bottle right here and, hell, we’ve got music and a place to sit.”

Without waiting for her to reply he drove the RV off the road onto the sand and killed the engine. Got up and squeezed between the front seats and took a bottle and glasses from a cupboard and set them on the little fold-down table.

Skye joined him and he lifted his glass to her. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she said and took a sip. It burned.

He leaned across and kissed her. First with his lips, still sharp from the liquor, and then with his tongue, sending it into her mouth where it got all entangled with hers, because she was still learning this business. But she learned quickly and felt her nipples harden in her bra and a pleasant wet heat in her underwear.

Jim unbuttoned her shirt and nuzzled at her breasts, working the top buttons of her jeans loose, his fingers hot and hard on her belly.

When Skye closed her eyes The Other erupted, smashed up against her, forced her aside, and she felt again what she had felt the night with those men, the strength in her muscles, the shifting of her bones, the reshaping of her.

Jim came up for air, his hair hanging over his eyes. He moved the bangs aside with his fingers, looked at her and froze.

It was almost comical. His eyes widened, his mouth worked like he was chewing toffee but no words emerged. He backed away, up against the bulkhead of the RV, and finally found his voice: “Jesus fucking Christ.”

She stood, feeling her shirt stretching and tearing, feeling her head brushing the ceiling—could that be?—and reached across the table, the yellow roof light throwing her shadow like a blanket over the terrified man.

“What the hell are you?” he asked, trying to fight her—which was silly, of course.

The Other held him, enveloped him, his flesh rich and ripe, and her hand took him by the throat, her teeth were already ripping into the meat of his neck, ready to take his head from his shoulders when he said, “Please, I’ve got a child. A little girl. Her name is Donna Lee.”

And how she didn’t know, but she—his blood and skin and a hank of flesh in her mouth—could see that child. Two, maybe three years old. Blonde like her daddy, soft white hair framing her face, smiling.

The image of the child was
an empathy bullet that smashed straight through The Other and took Skye square between the eyes and somehow she was back in control, her body coursing with some kind of mad strength, and she tore open the side door of the RV, hearing the rattle as it bumped on its castors, spat the warm blood and meat from her mouth and took off into the night.

16

Gene Martindale sat vigil at the deathbed of Sheriff Milton Lavender. The old man, shrunken and reduced, his bowel and most of its neighboring organs taken by cancer, lay in a place somewhere between here and the afterlife, a place that allowed him access to the living and the dead in equal measure. His wife Roseanne, gone these four years, was as real to him as Gene was, and he addressed them alternately in rambling monologues which were sad, boring and—most unsettling for Gene—frankly sexual in content.

When Gene and Skye had been taken in by the sheriff and his barren wife—
sister to their dead mother—there had been no hint that the couple, then in late middle-age, had enjoyed vividly carnal pleasures behind the closed door of this very bedroom.