The Vampires

by John Rechy

  “Yeah!” Rev insisted, his eyes only inches from her face, as if to penetrate the black veil. “And he had two others—two birds on his chest flying down toward his nipples!”

  “No!” la Duquesa regained control more quickly this time.

  Alerted, Malissa moved in on the veiled figure. The hint, the clue! The game! The confession!

  “Don’t look into her eyes—look away from her rings!” Albert warned the queen again.

  “He was gentle, he purified me of my lurid past,” la Duquesa said. Eyes closed, she leaned forward again to mime the kissing of the grave.

  Swiftly Rev stood before the kneeling figure, his crotch thrust toward her.

  La Duquesa’s eyes opened on it. She recoiled quickly.

  “You met the Duke in the glasshouse,” Rev hurled viciously at the kneeling queen in mourning. “You saw him for the first time in jail.”

  Blue remembered: The ugly, gray, monster building where you were booked after being arrested: heavily glassed, barred: the “glasshouse.” Remembered: A fat, ugly detective: “He told us!” Now Blue shook the words. But remembered: A courtroom the color of dirty sheets. The blue rubber with the star. “Isn’t this your trademark, boy?”

  “The Duke! In jail?” la Duquesa tried to recover. “How dare you!”

  “Yeah!” said Rev, encouraged by Malissa’s smile. “He was busted—one of many times. Your duke was just Duke, that’s what they called him—and, baby, like he was just a petty hustler. You saw him in jail: He’d been busted for armed robbery—and you for masquerading in drag!”

  ‘‘I was never in jail,” la Duquesa protested.

  Staring sadly at her, Albert stood closer to her.

  “Yeah, you were, baby,” said Rev. “And so was Duke.”

  “Superb!” Malissa’s hands swirled excitedly, as if to frame a perfect confrontation.

  Topaze looked at her desperately. He would have to move soon—somehow!—to topple Rev!

  Dazed, as if reality were pulling at her too strongly—and the beaded rattles of the black man and black woman needled her painted eyes even behind the veil—la Duquesa said: “He loved me!”

  “Shit,” Rev sneered. “I knew Duke. He dug getting queens hot over him. He took them for whatever they had, he even made them hock their goddam drag clothes!”

  “Your dark prince!” Malissa mocked.

  “I remember you, baby,” Rev told the queen. “I tried to recognize you from the first—only you kept covering your face with that crazy black drag. But with all that shit you just laid on us—man, I connected! The glass mansion—that’s the joint, man! And the men who announced you were cop-pigs who brought you in handcuffed. Baby, I remember you now—you’re the hung-up queen who bailed Duke out of jail— . . .”

  Gathering her dignity and her black veils, la Duquesa rose. “He loved me,” she said softly.

  “He never even let you get near him!” Rev ground on. “Man, he laughed about this queen who kept giving him bread and he never even let her touch him!”

  La Duquesa’s eyes overflowed with black, painted tears. She turned to the priest, as if he could stop the cruel violation of her dreams.

  The priest wrenched his eyes away from her. (Another painted face!)

  “Yes,” la Duquesa’s sad voice asserted now. “Yes, I did see him the first time in jail—and my heart embraced him, instantly! It’s true I bailed him out. I borrowed money, I sold and hocked things. Then I arranged to meet him in a park after I got him out. I even gathered some flowers for him.” (“I love you, Duke,” she remembered her words to him; “I’ll always love you—just you, Duke!” He took the flowers and started plucking the petals, smiling his half smile.) “And he loved me,” she asserted.

  “You never even made it with him!” Rev fired.

  “Yes! Once— . . .” la Duquesa blurted.

  “Oh, yeah!—yeah, that’s right, I remember,” Rev said. “And, man, how he laughed about it. One night, when he was stoned— . . .”

  La Duquesa remembered: Yes, stoned, drunk. I had dressed especially for him. My favorite gown. Green velvet. It had sequins.

  “. . . — he let you blow him,” Rev finished. “Then he tore your drag dress!”

  (The scattered sequins, like gleaming tears on the floor.) “He loved me!” la Duquesa’s words erupted passionately.

  “He didn’t even let you finish him off,” Rev laughed savagely. “He jerked off on your false tits and face, man! He used to describe your face smeared with makeup and cum!—he said he thought he was coming in colors!”

  “I would have conquered the cruelty!” la Duquesa asserted. “My love would have made him gentle—if the cops hadn’t killed him!” She turned to the others: “They shot him down on the dirty street, like an animal—the filthy cops! If not,” she said slowly, her voice breaking, “if not, my dreams— . . . Yes!” she insisted. “Yes, he would have come to love me—I know it; I just know it! And he did, before he died!”

  “The pigs got him when he was running away. He left this other dude behind,” Rev laughed. “They shot the Duke.”

  “I heard the shots, I rushed to him, I knelt over him, I held his head,” la Duquesa went on. “The cops tried to pull me away. ‘I’m his wife!’ I cried. The Duke opened his eyes. Just once. And his lips parted, about to form a kiss.”

  “About to say, ‘Shit,’” Rev said contemptuously.

  “No! At that moment he loved me, truly, at last!” la Duquesa knew. She moved stonily like someone accompanying a corpse to burial. “If he had lived, it would have all, all, all, all been true,” she insisted. “And his love would have destroyed Freddy forever.”

  “Freddy?” Rev questioned. Secure in what he saw as his regained stature, he drew out his knife—to him, the symbol of his regained courage—and he began in rehearsed toughness to file his fingernails.

  “Yes—Freddy,” sighed the queen. “That was— . . . That used to be my name— . . .”

  “Yeah!” Rev trampled on the memories erected from her longing dreams. “Duke used to call you Miss Freddy; he even did an imitation of you.”

  The queen’s face tore with pain, the veil was glued with tears to her cheeks.

  Angrily, “There is your purity, Richard!” Karen said abruptly.

  As if in reaction, Richard’s face whirled toward Valerie.

  Valerie said to him: “You wanted to corrupt her memory of love!” But she was facing Paul.

  “It wasn’t real.”

  Valerie heard the words; but—her eyes closed suddenly because what was revealing itself as reality was glaring too harshly at her—she was not sure whether they had been uttered by Richard. Or Paul.

  Suddenly, knowing the seizure of power could not wait, Topaze lunged at Rev, grabbed the knife. The midget stood before him, the sharp weapon inches from Rev’s crotch.

  Rev looked down in terror at Topaze. “What the hell— . . . ?” he started.

  Topaze laughed. The point of the knife touched Rev’s cock.

  “Don’t!” Albert shouted.

  “Please—take him away!” Rev pled in a shaken voice.

  The priest moved toward the two. How far would such scenes actually be allowed to proceed by those in control? The mere outline of violence?

  “Cut his yellow balls off!” Bravo shouted. “Cut!” She made a savage motion with her whip.

  Topaze drew the knife back as if to slice.

  The priest advanced.

  “Please— . . .” Rev begged. Perspiration draped his face, his body.

  Her words forming like icicles, Malissa said slowly: “Why don’t you grab Topaze quickly, Rev? Just one swift move, that’s all it requires. Certainly you can overcome him.”

  Topaze understood Malissa’s words as a taunt at Rev. The midget held his position, secure in Malissa’s approval.

  “But . . . if I . . . don’t— . . .” Rev looked at the knife, ready.

  “Try,” said Malissa; her voice was hard ice now. “You have nothin
g to lose.”

  “Except his balls!” Bravo flung.

  The midget’s hand jerked back.

  “Enough!” Malissa crowned the midget the obvious victor. “Enough, Topaze. We have all heard—and seen—Rev’s confession. Twice.”

  His momentary restoration of power squashed by the midget—the probation withdrawn, and so it had all been for nothing!—Rev stared at Malissa in open hatred.

  Imitating Rev, Topaze strutted away, dropping the knife.

  His eyes still buried deep into Malissa, Rev retrieved it.

  They had allowed Rev to proceed in the terrible exposure of the queen. Then they had permitted the midget his horrible charade. Slowly, they were discarding those whom they trapped. Yet might they still avenge themselves? Jeremy braced. This was just the beginning of the fierce war.

  Like a black shadowy statue, la Duquesa stood between Savannah and Tor: also shadows.

  The mamaloi and the papaloi: Their rattles: They waited: Sinister dormant weapons.

  “I want to confess!” It was Blue.

  “Confessions belong in the confessional,” Jeremy said instantly.

  “No. Confessions long to be screamed out—not to fade into meaningless whispers,” Richard contradicted.

  “Yeah,” Blue agreed vaguely. The fixed smile, the intense serious eyes. “A righteous confession, man,” he said. This public confession would be his way of forcing the priest, finally, to listen. And why? It was that answer which Blue would attempt to extract.

  “Confession—without absolution— . . .” the priest said again.

  “If Satan does extract confessions as the price for entering hell,” Mark said with a smile, “what kind of absolution would there be, then, Malissa?”

  The priest looked at the boy. “How can you allow your son to listen to this— . . . ?” he repeated to Richard. “To expose him to all this blackness! You deprive him of the right to make the correct choice.”

  “To the contrary, he can choose more clearly—whatever the correct choice may be,” Richard said. “But the only proof would be if he confronted another raised in an atmosphere more to your approval, Father. Then who would— . . . ?” He paused. “Who will survive?”

  Like a sudden antagonist, Mark faced the twins.

  Lashing out in fury, Tarah said: “What makes people mere objects in your experiments, Richard? We’re not blind to your power to manipulate.”

  “A knowledge of corruption—is that power?” Richard said. He turned to Blue. “You wanted to confess.”

  “And willingly choose whom to confess to!” said Malissa excitedly. “Perhaps you should begin, ‘Satan, forgive me for I have done good!’” she parodied the rite of confession.

  “Don’t allow this,” Jeremy said to Blue. It was suddenly as if Blue’s confession, withheld, would seal his own. “It’s a mockery.”

  “A mockery?” sliced Malissa. “A mockery to confine life to whispers in a darkened booth—that, yes, is a mockery! He should confess to us, Father, who have knowledge of what you call evil. We can measure it. Whereas you, how can you measure evil? How can you absolve what you don’t understand? Or do you understand? Do you, Father Jeremy!”

  Embarrassed immediately after he had done it—but having responded to a powerful compulsion—Jeremy made the sign of the cross, swiftly: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!”

  Malissa hissed: “In the name of Satan, His son, and the Black Angel! . . . Now the scales are balanced, Father! Your side and ours! Now the sides are poised evenly! Now the confession can be heard and weighed—by both sides.”

  “Maybe, finally, there will be only one side,” Mark smiled.

  “How dare you use those words of sacrilege before me!” the priest accosted Malissa; he could not face the boy.

  “How dare you use those other words before me?” Malissa flung back ferociously. “Does it occur to you that they affront me as powerfully as mine do you?”

  17

  The priest turned from the woman.

  “Run away!” Mark hurled at him.

  “Not ever again,” the priest said firmly. “I’ll face all of you.” Now he looked directly at Mark.

  “Confess!” rasped Malissa to the priest.

  “Not to you!” said the priest.

  “We’ll see,” said Malissa.

  Blue said quickly: “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.”

  “Satan, forgive him, for he may have done good!” Malissa intoned.

  “Don’t tell them anything!” the priest yelled at Blue.

  “I want you to fucking listen, goddamnit!” Blue shouted back. In the grotto the priest would have walked away from the worst. Here, caught in the microscopic scrutiny of the others, it would be much more difficult.

  Yet the priest had turned away angrily.

  Mark reminded him: “You were never going to run away again; you were going to face us now.”

  The priest did, his eyes black like coals about to burn.

  Blue had gambled correctly. “Now both sides, like they’re listening, man; and finally I’ll know where I’m at,” he said, almost imploring.

  “Help him to find which side!” Malissa said to the priest.

  Again Richard was withdrawing from the tight cluster. He would listen from a distance, separated. He knew—and Malissa knew now: Whatever Blue would confess would be determined paradoxically by the priest—even by his resistance to it.

  Now from the symbolic glass chamber which contained his life, visible but separated from all but himself, Blue’s words would come, willingly: without preparation, at times forming out of sequence on the acid-coated fringes of his mind, which would open expelling the dam of memories: images trapped in a dark, shattered kaleidoscope: “I had never seen Mr Stuart, though he must have seen me, somewhere,” he began. “The Blue Woman, she’d heard of me. Like Mr Stuart, uh—diggit—he was only a telephone voice that called to refer me to clients: I was so popular people made appointments way in advance: Sometimes they just grooved seeing me naked. Man, I began tripping: like looking past a mirror, swimming in it very still while you’re standing before it and it’s really glass. But all that love—people digging me, my bod, righteous paying for it, but it wasn’t enough, I didn’t really fucking want any of them—and after the sex, man, I rushed to myself in the mirror.”

  Savannah glanced at her reflection in a large mirror among the panels of gold, waiting silhouettes on the wall; between her and it: an empty corridor of space. Within it stood the fading outline of her former image: the mirror now linking the row of panels with her own reflected gold silhouette.

  “And that is your confession,” said the priest hurriedly to Blue.

  The mamaloi and the papaloi faced Blue, but their rattles did not hiss.

  “No, man,” Blue said inevitably. “It’s about Cam.”

  Cam. The priest’s body tensed, as if before an enemy. “What did Cam look like?” he heard himself ask. The echoing irrelevance of his question struck him. He had asked it only to withhold the parody of confession, and not because the answer was important to him, he explained to himself.

  Blue glanced at the priest. Like you, he thought. But he said: “He was. . . very handsome.” And then he was lulled backwards, across time past, and his voice snagged on a memory: “Cam, I didn’t— . . .” he started. “I met the Blue Woman— . . . I rode in her silver Packard— . . . Cam.” His mind tumbled over the gravestones of buried memories: “The Blue Woman had this crazy pad in the hills, we drank acid, man. The whole day was a trip; and the night—the night, diggit, man, it was like riding on a black bird flying against the sun!” His words—conveying his mind’s images—swirled like a multicolored ribbon in a reckless wind.

  “You already carried the inverted star of Satan?” Malissa attempted to shape the confession.

  “Uh—what? The star— . . . Satan’s sign has the ram’s head inside the pentagram, man. . . . Diggit, I wanted the star on my cock first. Oh, yeah, su
re, I already carried it,” Blue said. “I even had it put on the blue condoms.”

  ‘‘You warned your victims with it,” came Richard’s controlled voice.

  It seemed important to Tarah that she protest at that moment. Yet she was fascinated into attention by the spectacle of this beautiful blond youngman—so young, so corrupt. In sudden reaction, she grasped for the image of Gable.

  Blue’s voice rose: “Then Mr Stuart kept calling to tell me my clients had canceled my assignments; he kept saying they preferred Cam!” Calmly, the torrent of his memories ebbing: “The Blue Woman,” his words went on like a tape spliced out of sequence, “she drove around looking for me in her silver ride. Diggit, it had black curtains. Her chauffeur wore chains, man; he was like one of her slaves. She was beautiful—young, with blue makeup, man. At night she painted her body blue and pasted white feathers on it. She was searching for me because—uh—she had—diggit—uh, what? Oh, yeah, you know, uh, man, oh, what? Oh, she heard I carried the sign. But not the ram’s head inside the star.” Now he frowned and smiled at the same time—the heavy black eyebrows glowering over the curled lips: as if dual memories, one terrible, the other amusing, were vying for this mind. “Then the murder happened,” he said.

  Looking at Blue, Jeremy thought in resignation: I will confess. He corrected his thoughts quickly: He will confess.

  “There was a trial,” Blue stumbled. “They had the blue rubber there. Twenty-four eyes in that jury box. On me, man.”

  Something buried—overheard—surfacing. A trial! Murder! Daniel! Their mother! Valerie felt trapped in an avalanche of fire.

  “The card of Death!” Malissa reminded them at Blue’s words.

  Blue retreated now within the mist of his ravished mind: “A huge pad in the hills. The Blue Woman’s. There was a pool surrounded by inverted crosses. And people, men and women—their faces painted in many colors; their bodies almost naked. Painted all red, once—a procession of blood, they said. . . . Cam! . . . At the trial— . . .”

  The word badgered Valerie’s awareness: A trial, a trial, a trial!