She held the books as if they were made of wormy fruit. The covers depicted monstrous creatures rising from coffins, attacking women in various states of undress, and hanging around castles perched on barren mountains. The letters in the titles dripped blood. "These are all about vampires?"
"That's just the nonfiction that they had on hand. I ordered a bunch more through the library exchange. Check out some of the fiction." He picked up another stack from the floor.
"A Feast of Blood; Red Thirst; Fangs; Dracula; Dracula's Dream; Dracula's Legacy; Fevre Dream; The Vampire Lestat — there must have been a hundred novels."
Jody, a little overwhelmed, stared at the books. "There seems to be a theme here on the covers."
"Yeah," Tommy said. "Vampires seem to have an affinity for lingerie. Do you have any particular craving for sexy nightgowns?"
"Not really." Jody had always thought it a little silly to spend a lot of money on something that you only put on long enough for someone to take it off you. Evidently, though, if you went by these book covers, vampires looked at lingerie as garnish.
"Okay," Tommy said, picking up a notebook from the floor and making a check mark. "No lingerie fetish. I've made a list of vampire traits with boxes to check either 'fact' or 'fiction. Since you missed the lecture, I guess we'll have to just test them."
"What lecture?"
Tommy put down his pen and looked at her as if she'd gotten into the express lane with a cartful of groceries and a two-party check. "Everybody knows that there's always an orientation lecture in vampire books. Usually it comes from some old professor guy with an accent, but sometimes it's another vampire. You obviously missed the lecture."
"I guess so," Jody said. "I must have been busy chasing women in lingerie."
"That's okay," Tommy said, returning to the list. "Obviously you don't have to sleep in your native soil." He checked it off. "And we know that everyone you bite doesn't necessarily turn into a vampire."
"No, a jerk, maybe…"
"Whatever," Tommy said, moving on in the list. "Okay, sunlight is bad for you." He made a check mark. "You can enter a house without being invited. How about running water?"
"What about it?"
"Vampires aren't supposed to be able to cross running water. Have you tried crossing any running water?"
"I've taken a couple of showers."
"Then that would be fiction. Let me smell your breath." He bent close to her.
She turned her head and shielded her mouth. "Tommy, I just woke up. Let me brush my teeth first."
"Vampires are supposed to have the 'fetid breath of a predator, or, in some cases, 'breath like the rotting smell of the charnel house. C'mon, give us a whiff."
Jody reluctantly breathed in his face. He sat up and considered the list.
"Well? "she asked.
"I'm thinking. I need to get the dictionary out of my suitcase."
"What for?"
"I'm not sure what a charnel house is."
"Can I brush my teeth while you look?"
"No, wait, I might need another whiff." He went to his suitcase and dug out the dictionary. While he looked up "charnel house," Jody cupped her hand and smelled her own breath. It was pretty foul.
"Here it is," he said, putting his finger on the word. "'Noun. A mausoleum or morgue. A structure where corpses are buried or stored. See morning breath! I guess that we check 'fact' on that one."
"Can I brush my teeth now?"
"Sure. Are you going to shower?"
"I'd like to. Why?"
"Can I help? I mean, you're much more attractive when you're not room temperature."
She smiled. "You really know how to charm a girl." She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Tommy waited on the bed.
"Well, come on," she said as she turned on the water.
"Sorry," he said, leaping to his feet and wrestling out of his shirt.
She stopped him at the bathroom door with a firm hand on the chest. "One second, mister. I have a question for you."
"Shoot."
"Men are pigs: fact or fiction?"
"Fact!" Tommy shouted.
"Correct! You win!" She leaped into his arms and kissed him.
Chapter 17
This Month's Makeover: The Faces of Fear
Simon McQueen had once climbed onto the back of a ton of pissed-off beef named Muffin and been promptly stomped into mush in front of an amazed rodeo crowd, and still managed to pinch the bottom of a female paramedic as he was carried away on a stretcher, singing a garbled version of "I've Got Friends in Low Places." Simon McQueen had once picked a fight with a gang of skinheads and managed to render three of them unconscious before a knife in the stomach and a jackboot to the head rendered him helpless. Simon had jumped out of an airplane, fallen off the roof of a Lutheran church, run over a police car in his pickup truck, smuggled a thousand pounds of marijuana across the border from Mexico inside a stuffed cow, and swum halfway to Alcatraz Island on a dare before the Coast Guard fished him out of the bay and revived him. Simon had done all these things without the slightest tic of fear. But tonight, laid out across register 3 in his skintight Wranglers and his endangered-species Tony Lama boots with the silver spurs, his black Stetson pulled down over his face, Simon McQueen was frightened. Frightened that one of his two great secrets was about to become known.
The other Animals were sharing tales of their weekend adventures, exaggerating aspects of binges and babes, while Glint professed to God that they knew not what they did.
Simon sat up, pushed back his Stetson, and said, "Y'all wouldn't know a piece of ass if it sloshed upside your head."
The Animals fell silent, each trying to formulate a new and exciting way to tell Simon to fuck off, when Tommy came through the door.
"Fearless Leader!" Lash exclaimed.
Tommy grinned and faked a tap-dance step. "Gentlemen," he said. "I have reached out and touched the face of God — film at eleven."
Simon was wildly irritated by this added distraction from his worrying. "What happened, you go down to Castro Street and get converted?"
Tommy waved the comment away. "No, Sime — I can call you Sime, can't I? You see, last night, about this time" — he checked his watch — "there was a naked redhead hanging from the ceiling of my new loft, reading Kerouac aloud to me. If I die now, it was not all in vain. I'm ready to throw stock. How's the truck?"
"A big one," Troy Lee answered. "Three thousand cases. But the bitch is, the scanner is broken. We have to use the order books."
Troy's comment jabbed Simon like bad gas pain. He considered going home sick, but without his help the Animals would never be able to finish the truck before morning. A lump of fear rose in his throat. He couldn't use the order books. Simon McQueen couldn't read.
"Let's get to it then," Tommy said.
The Animals threw themselves into their work with an abandon they usually reserved for partying. Razor box-cutters whizzed, price guns clicked, and cardboard piled up in shoulder-high drifts at the ends of the aisles.
In addition to throwing the extra-large load, they had to allow an extra hour to write their stock orders. Normally the orders were done with a bar-code scanner, but with the scanner down, each man would have to go through a huge loose-leaf order book, writing in items by hand. By 5 A.M. they had most of the stock on the shelves and Simon McQueen was considering letting his box-cutter slip and cutting his leg so he could escape to the emergency room. But that might reveal a secret worse than illiteracy.
Tommy came into Simon's aisle carrying the order book. "You better get started, Sime." He held out the book and a pencil.
"I still got a hundred cases to throw," Simon said, not looking up. "Let someone else start."
"No, you've got the biggest section. Go ahead." Tommy bumped Simon on the shoulder with the book.
Simon looked up, then dropped his cutter and slowly took the book from Tommy. He opened the book and stared at the page, then at the shelf, then at the book.
Tommy said, "Order light on the juices, we've got a lot of stock in the back room."
Simon nodded and looked at the book, then at the shelf of vegetables before him.
Tommy said, "You're on the wrong page, Simon."
"I know," Simon snapped. "I'm just finding my place." He flipped through the pages, then stopped on a page of cake mixes and began looking at the shelf of vegetables. He could feel Tommy's gaze on him and wished that the skinny-little-faggot-book-reading-prick-bastard would just go away and leave him alone. "Simon."
Simon looked up, his eyes pleading.
"Give me the book," Tommy said. "I think I'm going to order everybody's section tonight. It'll give you guys more time to throw stock and I need to get more familiar with the store anyway."
"I can do it," Simon said.
"I know," Tommy said, taking the book. "But why waste your talent on this bullshit?"
As Tommy walked away, Simon took his first deep breath of the night. "Flood," he called, "I'm buying the beers after shift."
Tommy didn't look back. "I know," he said.
Jody stood by the window in the dark loft watching the sleeping bum who lay on the sidewalk across the street and cursing under her breath. Go away, you bastard, she thought. Even as she thought it, she felt a measure of security in knowing exactly where her enemy was. As long as he lay on the sidewalk, Tommy was safe at the grocery store.
She had never felt the need to protect someone before. She had always been the one looking for protection, for a strong arm to lean on. Now she was the strong arm, at least when the sun was down. She had walked Tommy down the steps and waited with him until the cab arrived to take him to work. As she watched the cab pull away, she thought, This must be how my mother felt when she put me on the school bus that first time — except that Tommy doesn't have a Barbie lunch box. She kept an eye on the vampire lying on the sidewalk across the street.
Hours passed at the window and she asked the same questions over and over again, coming up with no solution to her problem, and no logic to the vampire's behavior. What did he want? Why had he killed the old woman and left her in the dumpster? Was he trying to frighten her, threaten her, or was there some kind of message to it all?
"You're not immortal. You can still be killed."
If he was going to kill her, why didn't he just do it? Why pretend to be a sleeping bum, watching her, waiting?
He has to find shelter before daylight. If I can just outlast him, maybe… Maybe what? I can't follow him or I'll be caught in the sunlight too.
She went to the bedroom and dug the almanac Tommy had given her out of her backpack. The sun would rise at 6:12 A.M. She checked her watch. She had an hour.
She waited at the window until six o'clock, then headed out of the loft to confront the vampire. As she went through the door she instinctively reached out to click off the lights, only to realize that she hadn't turned any on. If I live through this, she thought, I'm going to save a fortune on utilities.
She left the door at the top of the stairs unlocked, then went down the steps and propped the big fire door open with a soda can she found on the landing. She might have to get back in fast, and she didn't want to be slowed down by keys and locks.
Her muscles buzzed as she approached the vampire, the fight-or-flee instinct running through her like liquid lightning. A few feet away she picked up a foul smell, a rotting smell coming from the vampire. She stopped and swallowed hard.
"What exactly is it that you want?" she asked.
The vampire didn't move. His face was covered by the high collar of his overcoat.
She took another step forward. "What am I supposed to be doing?"
The smell was stronger now. She concentrated on the vampire's hands, trying to sense some movement that would warn her of an attack. There was none.
"Answer me!" she demanded. She stepped up and pulled the collar away from his face. She saw the glazed eyes and a bone jutting from the neck just as a hand clamped across her face and jerked her back off her feet.
She tried to reach behind her to claw her attacker's face but he jerked her to the side. She opened her mouth to scream and two of his fingers slipped into her mouth. She bit down hard. There was a scream and she was free.
She wheeled on her attacker, ready to fight, his severed fingers still in her mouth.
The vampire stood before her, cradling his bloody hand.
"Bitch," he said. Then he grinned.
Jody swallowed his fingers and hissed at him. "Fuck you, asshole. Come on." She fell into a crouch and waved him on.
The vampire was still grinning. "The taste of vampire blood has made you brave, fledgling. Don't take it too far."
His hand had stopped spurting blood and was scabbing over as she watched. "What do you want?"
The vampire looked at the sky, which was turning pink, threatening dawn.
"Right now I want to find a place to sleep," he said too calmly. He ripped the scab from his fingers and slung a spray of blood in her face. "Until we meet again, my love." He wheeled and ran across the street into an alley.
Jody stood watching and shaking with the need for a fight. She turned and looked at the dead bum: the decoy. She couldn't leave him here to attract police — not this close to the loft.
She glanced at the lightening sky, then hoisted the dead bum onto her back and headed back to the loft.
Tommy ran up the stairs and burst into the loft eager to share his discovery about Simon's illiteracy, but once through the door, he was knocked back by a stinging rotten odor like bloated roadkill.
What's she done now? he thought.
He opened the windows to air the place out and went to the bedroom, careful to open the door just wide enough to slip through without spilling sunlight on the bed. The smell was much stronger here and he gagged as he turned on the light.
Jody was lying on the bed with the electric blanket pulled up to her neck. Dried blood was crusted over her face. A wiggling wave of the willies ran up Tommy's spine, stronger than any he had felt since his father had first told him the secret of ball-park hot dogs. ("Snouts and butt holes," Dad had said, during the seventh-inning stretch. "I've got the willies," said Tommy.)
There was a note on the pillow by Jody's head. Tommy crept forward and snatched it off the pillow, then backpedaled to the door to read it.
Tommy,
Sorry I'm such a mess. It's almost dawn and I don't want to get stuck in the shower. I'll explain tonight.
Call Sears and have them deliver the largest chest freezer that they have. There's money in my backpack. I missed you last night.
Love,
Jody
Tommy backed out of the room.
Chapter 18
Bugeater of the Barbary Coast
Tommy woke up on the futon feeling as if he had been through a two-day battle. The loft was dark but for the streetlights spilling through the windows and he could hear Jody running the shower in the other room. The new freezer was humming away in the kitchen. He rolled off the futon and groaned. His muscles creaked like rusty hinges and his head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton — like a low-grade hangover — not from the few beers he had shared with the Animals after work, but from the verbal beating he had taken from the appliance salesman at Sears.
The salesman, a round hypertensive named Lloyd, who wore the last extant leisure suit on the planet (powder blue with navy piping), had begun his assault with a five-minute lament on the disappearance of double knits (as if a concerted effort by a Greenpeace team in white vinyl shoes and gold chains might bring double knits back from the brink of extinction), then segued into a half-hour lecture on the tragedies visited on those poor souls who failed to purchase extended warranties on their Kenmore Freezemasters. "And so," Lloyd concluded, "he not only lost his job, his home, and his family, but that frozen food that could have saved the children at the orphanage spoiled, all because he tried to save eighty-seven dollars."
"I'll take
it," Tommy said. "I'll take the longest warranty you have."
Lloyd laid a fatherly hand on Tommy's shoulder. "You won't regret this, son. I'm not one for high pressure myself, but the guys that sell these warranties after delivery are like the Mafia — they'll call you at all hours, they'll hound you, they'll find you wherever you go and they will ruin your life if you don't give in. I once sold a microwave to a man who woke up with a horse's head in his bed."
"Please," Tommy begged, "I'll sign anything, but they have to deliver it right now. Okay?"
Lloyd pumped Tommy's hand to start the flow of cash. "Welcome to better living through frozen food."
Tommy sat up on the futon and looked at the behemoth freezer that was humming in the half-light of the kitchen. Why? he thought. Why did I buy it? Why did she want it? I didn't even ask for an explanation from her, I just blindly followed her instructions. I'm a slave, like Renfield in Dracula. How long before I start eating bugs and howling at night?
He got up and walked, in his underwear and one sock, into the bedroom; the smell of decay was strong enough to make him gag. It was the smell that had driven him to sleep on the futon in the living room rather than crawl into bed with Jody. He'd fallen asleep reading Bram Stoker's Dracula to get some perspective on the love of his life.
She's the devil, he thought, staring at the steam creeping out from under the bathroom door. "Jody, is that you?" he asked the steam. The steam just crept.
"I'm in the shower," Jody said from the shower. "Come on in."
Tommy went to the bathroom and opened the door. "Jody, we need to talk." The bathroom was thick with steam — he could barely make out the shower doors.
"Close the door; it smells in there."
Tommy moved closer to the shower. "I'm worried about the way things are going," he said.
"Did you get the freezer?"
"Yes, that's part of what I wanted to talk to you about."
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