The Color of Dying

by Carlos Colon

  Don’t say anything stupid, Dominic.

  “And you,” says Travis, turning his anger towards me. “What were you doing just standing there?”

  “I’m sorry, Travis. She—”

  “Sorry? Sorry?” Travis falls to his knees again, beside Donny. This time his uncontrollable grieving resembles unearthly moans echoing in a cave. Against my better judgment I place a hand on his heaving shoulder. Surprisingly, he doesn’t flip out. Instead he leans his face towards my hand appreciatively.

  A teardrop trails down Travis’ cheek, spilling onto my hand.

  A teardrop! Tears are actually streaming down Travis’ face!

  This contradicts everything I ever thought I knew about us. All this time I thought that the dead could not produce tears. I thought we didn’t have the capability. But now as they pour from my grieving friend, I realize that it’s not the dead. It’s just me.

  Whether I was alive or dead, I have no recollection of ever producing a tear—not through my mother’s death, not through my father’s abandonment, nor after the accident that killed Dani. I wanted to, but maybe the horror of seeing Dani’s life end right in front of my eyes, sucked my life along with it. And if the shock was too much for me to react in tears, surely the pounding my mother gave me should have left me crying. Instead I just lost control of my bladder.

  Every morning I rose after that day, the shame of my failure to protect Dani was a weight that crushed me through my entire existence, living or dead. But yet it never produced one tear. And then there was Papi, a man that I idolized, suddenly disappearing from our lives, someone I wanted so much to have been proud of me. But how could he? The one time he needed me to be there to protect his little girl, I wasn’t.

  If ever there was ever a time I needed all the love I could possibly get, it was then. But somehow, everyone around me forgot that I lost Dani, too. She was my little sister and it was my fault. All it took was a few seconds. And in those few seconds that I lost sight of her, my life changed forever.

  I guess Mami later tried her best to do the right thing and raise me as her child. But in the end she was just going through the motions. I knew that she would never forgive me. The protected feeling I had when Mami spoiled me with her love would be a distant memory. Still I tried. Throughout high school and college when it was just me and her, I turned the tables and did my best to spoil her. I cooked, I took care of the house, hell, I even did the shopping. Through it all, she remained numb, never again to show any sign of love for her firstborn. Did I want to cry? Hell yeah. I just didn’t know how.

  Not knowing my history, Travis can’t be expected to understand my shock at seeing him crying. He squints his cracked, blackened eyes at me, wondering why he needs to explain. “He was everything to me.”

  “I’ll bring you her ashes in a jar,” says Dominic.

  Travis grits his teeth. He’s a kettle of rage, seconds from boiling over. I hold his shoulder a little firmer. “Easy, Travis.” My brother-in-law’s stubbornness is even starting to piss me off. “Dominic, I told you to get out of here.”

  “No, screw that,” he insists. “I can do what you two can’t.”

  “And what exactly is that?” snaps Travis.

  “I can get to her in the daylight.”

  “Well, she’s long gone by now,” says Travis, holding back, but probably not for long. “That opportunity is gone.”

  “No,” says Dominic, looking down at the destruction on the dance floor. “She’s done her damage. Any second now the police are going to pull in here. She’s made it impossible for you to stay around and keep this place open. And since you things are territorial, she did this because she’s making plans to stay, which means she’s not going far.”

  Dominic, this is not a good time. Go home. You’re really testing my patience. “So what, Dominic? Look at what’s happened here. What makes you think you can find her?”

  “I’ve been a detective for forty years. That’s how I’m going to find her.”

  “POLICE!”

  The cops have arrived, inching their way into the club with their guns drawn.

  Dominic heads towards the back exit. “I can’t be seen here.” He stops for a moment, looking back at us, shaking his head in irony. “You two better...disappear.”

  31

  She’s Puerto Rican. That much is a fact. Even though she was born in New York, her parents Artie and Ramona were childhood sweethearts in Rio Piedras, so Stefanie is one hundred percent Puerto Rican. That’s why I could never figure out her infatuation with the whole English literature thing. “Tu eres una Boricua. Why do you give a crap about all this Shakespeare shit?”

  It didn’t end there. She loved all that Charles and Diana bochinche and she used to get weak between the knees over Michael Caine. “Mmm, his accent is sooo sexy,” she’d drool.

  Michael Caine?

  According to Ramona, her fascination began as a little girl when she saw a Popeye cartoon where he was a Medieval Knight defending Olive Oyl’s honor against the lecherous Bluto. It blossomed from there. Anything with knights, princesses, kings and queens, she just ate that shit up.

  Whatever.

  At least she got me through those required literature classes that I had no chance of staying awake in.

  One year, when we were married, we even went on a vacation in England.

  England!

  I busted my ass collecting insurance premiums in the most dangerous projects in the South Bronx and Harlem to spend two weeks “relaxing” in the grey skies of London walking in and out of ancient castles with no air conditioning and no Piña Coladas.

  “Ooh, isn’t this exciting?” squealed Stefanie.

  “” Yeah, babe, this is great,” I lied, wondering where the fucking beach was.

  After the kids were born, she began the annual tradition of dragging all of us—and I mean all of us; the kids, Dominic, Patti, the twins, Artie and Ramona—to the Renaissance Festival in Upstate New York. None of us wanted to go, but Stefanie insisted that the kids would love the costumes, the accents, and the jousting. “They’ll have a great time,” she’d say. “And it’ll be educational too.”

  Of course when they were babies, the kids had no choice. But once they got older, they’d always try to find a way out of it. Davey suddenly had a “big game” he had to participate in and Jessie planned sleepovers at her friend’s house in White Plains, with hopes of being too out of the way and inconvenient to pick up. Nice try, Jessie. “Don’t worry,” said Stefanie. “We’ll pick you up bright and early, so be ready.” You didn’t think you were going to get off that easy, did you, Jessie?

  On the morning of our Renaissance excursions, Dominic and I would load up our station wagons while Artie and Ramona would board his car and the twins would go in mine so the cousins could all be together. When Davey, being the only boy cousin, found himself being the brunt of the girls’ constant teasing and giggling, he started riding with Uncle Dom.

  That whole Renaissance Fair thing still goes on to this day. They hold it in Tuxedo, New York, which back then was a foreign country to me, like everything else outside of the Bronx and Manhattan. That’s why Dominic’s car led the way with me following close behind.

  The first time we went, I remembered seeing signs that said “Sterling Forest”. Something about the name bounced around my head like the logo in a Windows screensaver and I repeated it to myself to see if I could jar something loose out of my memory.

  Sterling Forest.

  Sterling Forest.

  Nothing came to mind, even as we arrived.

  The kids were still babies so Dominic, Patti, Stefanie and I were all pushing strollers as we entered the park. Jessie was around three, Davey was a newborn. Dominic and Patti’s twins, Aida and Penny, were turning two.

  Upon walking in it became quickly apparent that whatever Sterling Forest was before, it wasn’t anymore. And while the knights, wenches, Robin Hoods and Merry Men all did their best in welcoming us and creating
a festive atmosphere, to me, something about the park was a little unsettling. Directional signs pointed towards attractions that were long gone and the park’s benches had weeds growing through the seats. Yet, in my mind, the park remained eerily familiar.

  “What was this place?” I asked Dominic.

  “It used to be some kind of like botanical gardens in the sixties,” he replied.

  Stefanie observed as I studied the area, searching through my memories. “There’s something about this place,” I said.

  To my right was a big pond, abandoned, just like everything else around us. It had a small wooden bridge going over it, but it probably wasn’t sturdy enough so a barrier blocked the entrance to prevent anyone from crossing. Below the bridge, weeds grew out of the water and brushed against the bottom. I paced a couple of steps, observing the park’s state of disrepair before stopping cold. Aha!

  “What’s wrong?” asked Stefanie.

  “I was here.”

  “When?”

  I stepped away from the stroller towards the pond, leaving Jessie with her grandparents. Davey, in the other stroller, started crying so Stefanie picked him up and followed me to the edge of the pond.

  I sang under my breath, staring into the water. “Oh, Dani, oh Dani, ohhh...”

  I was weirding Stefanie out. “Nicky?”

  I nodded my head. “The paddle boats.”

  “What paddle boats?”

  “Oh, Dani, oh, Dani ohh...”

  Those weren’t the real words that the Four Seasons sang. That was Papi’s version. He was sitting in the paddle boat with my three-year old sister on his lap, singing his own words along with Frankie Valli. “Oh Dani, oh Dani, ohh…” He was a beaming, proud Papi, un hombre bien orgulloso, smiling, holding his chin up high, nodding hello to everyone in the paddle boats that passed.

  “How you doing there, Nicky?” he called out. I was a few yards away paddling in another boat with Mami.

  “Mami’s letting me steer,” I answered.

  Stefanie’s voice brought me back to the abandoned pond of the present. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that I was here a long time ago with my family.” Another lifetime ago was more like it. Another life that almost seemed like it wasn’t mine. “It was so different then.”

  Stefanie asked nothing further. Some topics are better left alone. Later we sat in a quiet, grassy area while Stefanie fed Davey. The adults, Dominic, Patti, Artie and Ramona all sat together as the girls played beside us. Dominic was blowing smoke to me and Artie about how Dave Kingman of the Mets was a better hitter than Mike Schmidt of the Phillies. The ladies were fussing over cute little Davey. Giggles from Jesse, Aida and Penny echoed in the cool September air.

  Hearing enough of Dominic’s half-baked baseball analysis, I stepped away and sat beside Stefanie. Papi came to mind as I absorbed the harmonious sounds of our family. Un hombre bien orgulloso. Even the sound of Dominic grumbling, “Fuck Mike Schmidt!” was drowned out by the serenity of the voices surrounding me. All of us together, all of us happy. Even Dominic saying “Mike Schmidt can kiss my hairy ass” caressed my ears like the tune of a soft violin. Like Papi so many years before in the same place, I was enveloped in everything wonderful that life had to offer.

  I leaned my head towards Stefanie, kissing her on the back of the neck, breathing in the fresh clean scent of her hair.

  It smelled perfect.

  32

  It would probably be next to impossible for someone to identify with the sensation of a baseball bat smashing full-force against the back of your head. The most obvious reason being that if any mortal receives the thwack that I just did, it would be lights out—probably forever. At the very least, you would never recover to the point where you could say, “Man, that shit hurt!”

  For me the sound is a dull eight-hundred-pound thud followed by the fizz of a champagne bottle after the cork pops. Or the static on the TV when you disconnect the cable. Being that I am already dead, my reaction is more like, “What the fuck!” while my wits are chased down by a centerfielder on the warning track. Yes, good old Nicky is still taking his lumps trying to be the good guy. You know, the good guy that also devours humans for survival.

  At my insistence, Dominic’s been calling every night so I can meet up with him to track Simone. I’m not comfortable letting him hunt by himself. Over the daytime, I have no control over Dominic no matter how much I try to discourage him. And that’s when he runs the risk of exposing himself to a Renfield.

  “What do you mean, Renfield,” he asked. “You mean like that guy in Dracula?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Dominic, the guy from Dracula.”

  Like the Count, many of us use our mind control to employ Renfields to guard our coffins during the daylight. Many misinterpret the fictional Renfield as a character driven by loyalty. That’s bullshit! The reason he protected old Vlad at all costs is because his mind was completely fucked by the Count. That’s why they all wind up with permanent brain damage. And while Dominic might be armed with his NYPD Glock 22, if he gets caught off guard by a Renfield, he’s as good as dead. Those loons are programmed to kill.

  I’ve been staying at Travis’ apartment because it takes some time off my commute to New York. Also, I honestly don’t feel right leaving him alone with Donny gone. And though there isn’t a chance in hell you’d ever get him to admit it, I think my being here actually brings Travis some comfort. The guy is completely broken. He can use a friend. These days, he can’t even focus on trying to find Simone, especially since we’ve been starving ourselves to prevent her from sensing us. Me, I still have some reserve left from my last helping at the hospital. Travis, on the other hand, probably isn’t in the best shape right now to face any sneak attacks.

  I asked him if he wanted to join us tonight but he declined the same way he has every night since he lost Donny—by saying nothing. He just sits on the couch staring at the walls of his apartment, going through his database of memories. And that’s all that he has. When you’re dead there are no photos, videos, Facebook profiles, nothing. Memories are all Travis will have to remind himself of the times they had together. And he will be lost in them for quite a while.

  In the meantime, there’s a red-haired beast that needs to be slayed. For the past few weeks, Dominic and I have been focusing our efforts in the Long Island area where the Goth teens lived. We’ve broken into foreclosed homes, abandoned businesses, closed-down factories and other dark safe places where our nemesis might be hiding her coffin. Dominic felt her presence a couple of times over those nights but it was always from a distance. That allows plenty of time for her to be somewhere else by the time we arrive.

  Dominic’s determination to find Simone is taking its toll. Lack of sleep, combined with the venom that has penetrated his veins, has his face looking pale and gaunt despite his pudginess. But knowing him, he’s never going to stop. Dominic thinks he has some kind of super-detective adrenaline that can get him through anything. Truthfully, the worst thing that can happen is that he finds her. He’s no match for the demoness that made me what I am. He’s just a 280-pound happy meal waiting to happen.

  The current fucked-up economy adds to our workload by giving birth to an endless stream of boarded-up businesses, homes and factories—places where a nomad predator can crash during the day. It makes Simone a considerable needle in New York’s urban and suburban haystacks. A short while ago at one of the less desirable neighborhoods in Nassau County, Dominic and I approached another of the dozens of foreclosed homes that we’ve combed through. This one had boarded windows with cock, pussy and other examples of eloquence spray-painted over them. There was also a collapsed wire fence that suggested some driver had one too many and made a left when he should have made a right.

  I stepped over the fence lying on the unkempt grass and grabbed the corner of a plywood board with the intellectual scrawling, easily prying it from the front window.

  Wh
ile I placed the board on the grass, leaning against the house, Dominic tried to raise the window. “It’s locked from the inside,” he said.

  “Let me try.”

  “It’s no use,” he insisted. “It’s locked. Just smash the window.”

  Dominic scowled as I raised the window with minimal effort. It just needed a little undead oomph.

  I stuck my head in to peep into the dark room. To the left there were no signs of life, nor any of the undead. But, like the car that took down the fence surrounding the house, I should have looked right.

  The thunderous force of the baseball bat crashed against the back of my head, driving me face first on to the house’s wooden floor. Hairline fracture. Again my skull has been breached, the fucker made perfect contact. Not expecting anyone that took such a wallop to remain conscious, the assailant with the Louisville Slugger was taken by surprise when the intruder leapt up and grabbed him by the throat.

  Dominic swiftly pulled out his gun and shone his flashlight through the window. “Police!” Two screams wailed out from the far corner of the room, drawing the beam from Dominic’s light.

  Sitting on the floor, huddled against the wall was a trembling, young mother with a frightened little girl in her arms. Dominic shone the light back on the man with the bat, who was gasping for air under my grip. I set the man down. He was not a Renfield, just a dad. A dad doing what a dad does, protecting his family.

  No further words were spoken. The only sound was that of the terrified girl sobbing in her mother’s arms. I stepped aside and let the man walk over to his family to calm them. After he joined them, they looked back at the freak that was somehow still standing after taking that blow. They were squatters. People are going through difficult times these days. And through these difficult times, that little girl needs to know that she is safe under the watch of her father. He did what he was supposed to do. He protected his family. I did what I was supposed to do. I walked away. Daddy defeated the monster. They are now safe. Even with my head being smashed nearly open, my feeding from the hospital the other night is enough to keep my senses intact—no chance of a close call again like the other night at Rego Park with the young mother and her baby. I still don’t know what the fuck that was all about. It’s like I find new shit out about myself every night.