A small child stood by the side of the road, a girl seven or eight years old but as thin as an old woman, dressed in a blue smock far too large for her. One sleeve dangled, half torn off. The child was swinging something in her hand. Christian drew the car up next to her and rolled his window down. The girl stared up at him. Her eyes were gray, as washed out as the sky.
“Can you tell me where I am?” he asked.
The girl lifted one knobby shoulder, then let it drop. From her hand the object still swung—a rat, its fur matted with the dust of the road, its head and forequarters mangled, dried.
Christian made himself look back at the girl’s face. Her pale eyes seemed depthless; he could hardly tell where the irises faded into the whites. He caught the sour brown odor of death from the rat, the faint tang of dried blood. “What’s the name of the town?”
The girl regarded him with her bottomless gaze. There was something wrong with the symmetry of her face. Her eyes were unevenly spaced, her forehead too low, the line of her brow crooked. Christian realized he was looking into the face of profound retardation. This was one of the few gazes that could meet his own: it did not fear, because it did not know.
He thought briefly of taking her into the car. The smell of roadkill, dry and fetid as it was, made him edgy with hunger. The nourishment from the boy at the river’s edge was fading out of him. But he disliked the sight of her crooked mouth and the various knobs of her body. Christian had often gone hungry because of his weakness for beauties.
Wanting to leave the little girl behind, he touched the toe of his boot to the gas pedal. But in the rearview mirror he saw her empty eyes staring after him. The mangled rat swung from her hand.
The town was a few miles down the road. In comparison to the trailers and scrubby dirt yards of Violin Road, the buildings here looked square and sturdy. The shops on the main street were colorful in the lethargic heat of the day. A boarded-up storefront cast a baleful blind eye every few blocks, but such things did not bother Christian. He was looking for dark windows, for neon beer signs lit deep within shadowy interiors. There must be a bar. Somewhere in this town must be a place where the townspeople could drink, fight, pass all the long hot nights, spend their paydays away. Any redneck bar would do.
Christian was beginning to wonder whether he might not be in one of the dreaded dry counties of the South when a blue beer light caught his eye at last. The door of the place was a thick slab of pine carved with twisted letters: THE SACRED YEW. He eased the Bel Air over to the curb. There was always work for a good bartender.
Kinsey Hummingbird was an excellent bartender.
He was also the confidant of troubled youth from Missing Mile and surrounding counties. Bad kids, depressed and terrified kids, kids who found themselves adrift in the Bible Belt—all came to Kinsey as if he were some sort of benevolent Pied Piper. Before he opened the Sacred Yew, he had been a mechanic at the garage where his father had worked before him. It was not unusual to see Kinsey’s long thin legs sticking out from under a car while some forlorn teenager sat nearby talking to Kinsey’s sneakers. The metalheads, the hippies born decades too late, the sad ones swathed in black—all came. Kinsey Hummingbird was their guru; Kinsey Hummingbird was their oracle.
When his mother died in the terrible fire out at the mill, Kinsey received a substantial settlement and was able to open the Sacred Yew, or as the kids referred to it, “the Yew.” Sometimes he looked at his club and felt a twinge of guilt that his mother’s gruesome death had paid for it—she had fallen from a blazing catwalk and been impaled screaming on a row of spindles—but the truth was that Mrs. Hummingbird had always disliked her only son and had never troubled to hide it. Kinsey spent most of his own childhood trying to figure out what he had done to make her feel so mean. The Bible she spent all her free time reading said to love your neighbor. Seemed like it would say something about loving your own son too.
Kinsey was a whittled beanpole of a man, well over six feet with that apologetic stoop so many tall thin men have. He always wore a cap with a feather in it pushed back over his stringy hair. The club was his private dream. Frequently he stared around at it in awe, expecting it to disappear before his eyes, hardly able to believe he had made it happen. The insurance money had paid for it, but he had built the stage, he had begun booking the bands, he had concocted the little menu of finger sandwiches and homemade soups so that the club would qualify as a “restaurant” and kids under eighteen would be able to come in without getting carded, though they had to show their IDs to buy beer.
The Sacred Yew was a place for Kinsey’s children. After the first precarious year he made money, but that was not why he did it. He wanted the kids to have someplace to go. He wanted them to have someplace where they could be happy for a while.
But sometimes it was a backbreaking job. Long ago he had learned that to make it go smoothly, he had to attend to every detail himself—the booking, the ordering, even the decor. When there was no one else to do it, he also had to make the soup and sandwiches and tote all the kegs and cases of beer. A week ago he had fired his latest assistant bartender for serving beer to a fourteen-year-old, trying to put the make on her. The boy was astonished when mild-mannered Kinsey Hummingbird blessed him out, came within an inch of slugging him, then gave him his walking papers. But the Yew could lose its license for a thing like that. Nobody fucked with Kinsey where the Sacred Yew was concerned.
So he had been tending bar solo for a week. Steve and Ghost from Lost Souls? helped him out sometimes—Ghost, whose grandmother had left him her house and all the money he would ever require to live on, would do it gratis. But just now they were busy practicing a bunch of new songs. They played at the club once a week or more, and they were his biggest draw. People came from as far away as Raleigh and Chapel Hill to see them. They were getting good, and he wanted them to practice.
But Kinsey was tired. So when the guy walked in and said he’d tended bar in New Orleans for twenty years, Kinsey hired him on the spot. He wasn’t fazed by the funereal clothes and the cold pale face, or by the fact that the guy was even taller than him and maybe skinnier. When you ran a club, you met plenty of weirdos. This particular weirdo struck him as a good bartender.
“Christian, hm? Were your folks Holy Rollers?” That could drive anybody to a life of bartending.
The guy shook his head. “It’s a family name.”
“Whatever,” said Kinsey amiably.
That same night, Christian fell back into the routine of popping bottle tops, tapping kegs and drawing foamy draft beer into plastic cups, replying to small talk without really hearing it. The bar seemed primitive: Kinsey served no liquor or even wine, only beer, and not many varieties of that. Without shots to set up, without Sazeracs and Hurricanes to mix, Christian felt he was hardly working.
Gradually and gratefully he came to realize that this was no redneck bar. He saw children in black, which he had not expected in a small southern town, and he watched them and began to know their faces. But he would wait. Some of these children might be drifters or flotsam from the state university in Raleigh, but he could not afford to be greedy too soon. He had waited before. Soon someone would come to town, alone and a stranger, someone he could take safely.
His wages from the bar would not be quite enough to pay for the trailer he rented—it was on Violin Road, but it was cheap—and the gasoline to drive to work each night. On his way north he had seen wooden stands by the side of the road. They sold flowers, fruit, trinkets. Behind his trailer was a scrap heap and a great thicket of roses rioting wild. Christian cut the huge blossoms and wrapped their stems in newspaper. In an overgrown patch of garden he found a few stunted pumpkins, a few gourds gone dry on the vine. He got some sixpenny nails and a hammer from the hardware shop in town, dragged several boards out of the scrap heap, put together a stand and painted a sign.
When the sun was not too bright, he drove around the outskirts of Missing Mile and set up his stand on different corners. S
ometimes people stopped to buy from him; he answered their chatter with the practiced glibness that came from a few centuries of bartending. From behind his dark glasses he watched their faces and their throats, wondering how long it would be until his mouth began to water at the smell of their blood.
Christian would stay in Missing Mile as long as he could, and when he had saved some money, he would fill the tank of his Bel Air and start driving north again. North was where Molochai, Twig, and Zillah might be, and he still thought of finding them. Sometimes at night he would take out the three bottles of Chartreuse he had brought from New Orleans. He read the legend on the green-and-gold foil label again and again, thinking of Wallace Creech and the children of the French Quarter and the dirty slow river, but he never cracked the seals on any of the bottles. He still remembered how the green fire had blazed through him on his last night in New Orleans.
15
By ten o’clock the next morning, Nothing was so hungry and lonely that he almost cried from sheer relief when the biker stopped and picked him up.
Sleeping in a barn hadn’t been any fun. He’d gotten out of the rain for a few hours, but he woke up sore, hunger nibbling at his stomach and the taste of dust and rotten blood in his mouth. When he stumbled out of the barn, morning sunlight blinded him for a moment. Nothing squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them a crack, cautiously. The countryside glistened in green splendor around him. Tendrils of vine crept up the side of the barn, poked inquisitively through a hole in the roof. He closed his eyes again and breathed the smell of sunlight drying up last night’s rain.
Back on the highway, not many cars went by. None stopped. He saw some men eating biscuits and drinking coffee in a pickup truck, and saliva rushed into his mouth. He spat on the side of the road; to swallow hunger-spit would only make him hungrier. Experimentally, he put his hand on his stomach. Through the damp cloth of his T-shirt, it already felt more hollow. Surely his hipbones were sharper than they had been two days ago. He lit a Lucky and sucked up the smoke as if it were orange juice.
The next half hour crawled by. Nothing walked slowly along the shoulder of the road sticking out his thumb whenever a car went by. Everyone in the cars stared at him, but no one stopped. Then he heard the growl of a motor around the bend he’d just passed. Something was coming down the highway fast—no car, no decrepit pickup. A motorcycle. A big one. He stared pleadingly as it approached, and when the driver saw him, the bike slowed and pulled up short beside him.
“Where you headed?” the biker asked. The question already seemed familiar.
“Missing Mile, North Carolina.” Nothing wasn’t sure if he was really going there, but the name had become a sort of talisman.
“Yeah? I’m going to Danville. That’s almost over the Carolina border. Hop on.”
Nothing had never been on a motorcycle before, though he had always wished he could drive one. This was a heavy bike, chopped and channelled, chrome winking through a layer of highway dirt. Nothing stood looking at the machine until the biker said, “You want a ride or not?”
“Yeah, sure.” Nothing looked up into the biker’s face. White-blond hair going dark at the roots, frazzled by wind. No crash helmet. Enormous hollow eyes, as round and glowing as a bushbaby’s. Eyes like little moons, set back in gray hollows of bone. A young-old face, road-tough yet somehow melancholy, hanging over the turned-up collar of a black leather jacket. “What’s your name?” Nothing asked.
“Spooky,” the biker told him, and it seemed right.
Nothing climbed up behind Spooky and wrapped his arms around the biker’s waist. Under the heavy jacket Spooky’s body felt loose-jointed, thin as a whippet. The wide saddle thrummed; it was like climbing astride something living. Then Spooky let out the clutch, and the bike leaped forward. The wind pummelled Nothing’s bare head, blew his hair straight back, stung his eyes. He wondered whether they were going very fast.
Around noon they stopped in a little town and got a bucket of fried chicken, which they ate in an old tumbledown graveyard some miles down the highway. Nothing wolfed the crisp flesh and sucked at the bones, but Spooky only picked at a drumstick, peeling off shreds of meat and shoving them listlessly into his mouth. Nothing licked the grease off his fingers and leaned back against the door of a crumbling family vault. The iron bars shifted beneath his weight, and Nothing waited to see whether he would spill in among the bones. The door held. A little disappointed, he looked back at Spooky. The biker’s hands were shaking now.
“Shit,” said Spooky. “Are you cool? I need to fix.” He mimed jabbing something into the vein of his arm.
“Oh,” said Nothing, understanding. “Oh. Sure I’m cool.” He tried to look cool. “Who do you think I’d tell?”
“Just gotta be sure. You never know.” Spooky dug through the pockets of his jacket and pulled out several objects. A tarnished silver spoon, a dirty shred of cheesecloth, a cheap plastic lighter. From the saddlebag of the bike he took a Thermos full of water. Last, he reached into some inner compartment of his jacket and removed a flat lacquered box inlaid with a bright scene of tropical birds. He opened it reverentially; Nothing half-expected silver light to spill out, bathing Spooky’s face, engulfing him. But inside the box was only a plastic bag full of little foil packets, seemingly hundreds of them. And there, as innocuous as a dull gray viper, the syringe.
Nothing watched closely, trying to look as if he had seen it all before. Spooky removed his studded leather belt, shrugged off his jacket, and pulled the belt tight around his upper arm. His skin was faintly damp, mottled. He poured a little water into the spoon and shook a grainy white powder out of one of the foil packets. Then, as if remembering his manners, he glanced up at Nothing. “Oh, hey, you want to fix?”
“Yes,” said Nothing without thinking. If he thought, he might panic. Dead rock stars flitted through his mind. William Burroughs chided him.
“I’ll do you first. You’re just a kid, you don’t know how to do it. You might shoot an air bubble.”
Nothing closed his eyes as Spooky unbuckled the belt from his own arm and drew it snug around Nothing’s. He stroked the inside of Nothing’s elbow, pressing down, smoothing out the skin. His touch was very gentle, but had no sexual quality to it. All of Spooky’s erotic energy seemed to go into the handling of his drug.
“Okay, here’s your vein. Keep your finger on it.” Spooky held the lighter under the spoon until the mixture started to bubble. Then he laid the cheesecloth over the surface and drew the solution into the syringe. Spooky’s hands were steady now.
“Still got that vein? Okay, hold it…” He held up the syringe and flicked the needle’s tip with his finger. “Don’t worry. I can smell you’re scared, but this is good shit. There goes the bubble. Safe as milk, like Nick Drake used to say. Okay. Okay…” He bent over Nothing’s arm and probed the soft flesh with the needle. “There you go.” Spooky drew back the plunger. A diaphanous swirl of blood filled the syringe. Nothing realized he had been holding his breath.
“My turn.” Spooky mixed the solution again and injected himself with a cool eagerness. He shivered when the needle went in. A moment later Spooky just seemed to start fading. His eyelids fluttered, and his voice began to drag like a record played at low speed. As Nothing watched, those luminous bushbaby eyes slipped shut.
Nothing felt the junk spreading through him, tendrils venturing into his hands and his legs, turning his blood as clear and pure as water. He didn’t feel sleepy at all. His mind was sharp, cold. He felt as powerful as a god.
Spooky was completely gone now. He slumped against the vault, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, harsh. His mouth was slightly open. Nothing saw the tip of his tongue glistening.
Nothing moved closer to Spooky, moved so close that he was almost on top of the biker. He encircled Spooky’s shoulders with his arm. At the neck of Spooky’s dirty white T-shirt his skin was chill, sweaty, goosepimpled. With the tip of his finger Nothing stroked Spooky’s throat and found the spot under
the ear where the pulse beat. He left his finger there for a moment, then shook his head. What was he thinking? If you bit somebody there, you might kill him. Instead he picked up Spooky’s limp arm and bit at the soft skin of the inner elbow, where Spooky had fixed.
The vein was already open, and the blood began to flow easily. From somewhere deep in his stupor, Spooky whimpered. A child’s sound. Nothing sucked harder, trembling. He’d never really tasted anyone else’s blood before. No more than a drop here and there, by accident, as when Laine had cut his finger in Jack’s car. That night seemed long ago. Now Spooky’s blood filled his mouth and ran down his chin mixed with spit, and the coppery sweetness of it mingled with the sweat from the biker’s skin, and Nothing pressed closer and licked the last of the blood away. He couldn’t take too much; he didn’t know how much would be dangerous. Never mind that he wanted to eat Spooky, to swallow him whole. The junk-laced blood tasted so good, so pure.
It hadn’t lasted long enough. He leaned against the vault looking at Spooky. Spooky’s hair drifted across his face, stirred by the wind.
It might rain again. Nothing picked up the leather jacket and carefully covered Spooky with it. He knew he couldn’t stay here until the biker came to. He might notice the fresh wound. And Spooky would probably beat the shit out of him. Nothing looked at the slack face one more time and touched his fingertip to Spooky’s tired lips. Then he walked away from the graveyard and headed for the road again.
Maybe it was the effect of the heroin, but what he had done did not seem strange to him. Erotic, yes; sneaky and a little mean, yes—but not strange. He had wanted the blood. He had even been hungry for it. And it had made him feel better, had settled his stomach, just as the albino’s sperm had.
Lost Souls Page 13