Then one day she sends the kid off, borrows a thimbleful of cheap perfume from the young mother two doors down, gets tarted up in torn stockings and shoes you’d never seen her wear. She goes out late. Comes home bruised and bloody. Not her blood. You’re intrigued.
A week or so later she sends the kid off again. It’s a cool, cloudy night. And the Irish queen who seemed to be made out of stone has a breakdown. She doesn’t break with sobbing or hysterics or booze; she starts busting things. Dead-faced, dead-eyed, she breaks her plates and cups and saucers, she takes a soup can to the glass parts of the cabinets and the clock and then chucks the can at the bathroom mirror. The neighbors knock and she tells them not to be concerned, she’s cleaning house, and what can they do? You can’t call the cops on a woman for breaking her own shit, and they’ve got their own lousy lives to worry about.
When she’s busted enough bustables, out comes the razor and she starts in shredding the shreddables: bed linens, towels, dishcloths, a picture of FDR, her underthings, her dresses, isn’t this fascinating? Then she draws her bath, and you have a good idea what’s coming, especially since she’s still holding the razor. A woman who cuts up her towels before she gets in the tub probably isn’t planning to dry herself off after, right?
She seems to think about it for a long time, though. And that’s when she cries. Like how unfair things have been to drive her to this place finally hits her and at last she shows a moment of weakness. It’s not like you really know how to love anyone or anything being what you are and all, but whatever affection you felt for her because of her strength doubles now that you see that strength’s limit.
How fast she does it surprises you. Just one wrist, hard, more of a gouge than a slash, across the wrist like an amateur. And what does she do? Gets out of the tub and starts trying to bind the cut with the strips of towel.
But you can’t help yourself anymore.
Not with all that blood.
* * *
“As soon as I clipped myself I saw myself in hell. That’s where suicides go, as I’d long been told, and I supposed I believed it, but not really. It had started to seem to me that the Lord actually wanted it of some of us; that he would just keep shoveling out the misery until we got the idea that we wasn’t wanted here no more. And if he was going to stick us in a second hell because we were sick of the first one, then he wasn’t no better than the worst of us, so what was the point of it? Only, the instant the cold pain of the razor hit me and the blood started fanning out in the water, I saw myself. Jerking like, with my eyes rolled back in my head, in a dark, hot place, my skin as white as ash and burning now, everything burning, and a crowd burning with me. So up I jumped, splashing water everywhere, fetching what was left of a towel and trying to stop it. I started saying Jesus then, but Jesus wasn’t what come through the window.”
* * *
So in you go. Nobody’s going to pay attention to the sound of something else breaking here, so you go through the glass. She doesn’t go to scream, just looks at you like you’re something in this life she hadn’t imagined and she doesn’t know where to put you. Still, you jam your hand over her mouth and start lapping blood from her arm, and oh the salty, frothy, watered-down goodness of it, like the faintest memory of hot broth on a cold day, and now you’ve thrown down her poor excuse of a bandage and you’re nursing straight from her gushing wrist, opening the wound bigger with your big yellow teeth, it’s spraying so fast you can’t get it all in your mouth, it jets on your chin, up your nostril, and this is bad because you’re going to kill her. Or are you?
* * *
“Live or die, he said, and I said live, not because I wanted to but because I wasn’t ready to go to hell. But he kept taking the blood from me, and I’d been thinking it was the devil, but now I remembered Dracula, and what a silly business that was, or had seemed, but here was one like him. And killing me, too, despite his question. So I made the decision to fight him, but it was too late. I’d no strength left. I clawed at his eye once and he didn’t like that, twisted my arm near off and I wanted to yell but couldn’t through his hand, which I bit, and hard, but he paid it no mind. Just kept draining the life out of me until the darkness rose up like a buzzing mass of flies and took my sight away, but I heard knocking at the door again, and then I felt him spit something back in my arm. Just for a second I got my vision back, got a good look at him. Jesus, I wished I hadn’t. I was hoping that wouldn’t be the last thing I saw before I died. But it was. I died just after I felt the air get colder. I died just about the moment I knew he was taking me out the window. Christ, he was hideous.”
Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that part of this little make-believe. You’re hideous. Christ, you’re hideous.
* * *
The vampire who turned Margaret was named John Valentine. Kind of a bad joke, pinning a hearts-and-flowers name like Valentine on a kid after you reached your great Godly scepter down into the womb and gave him a stir. He looked like he’d been squeezed out wrong, one big goldfishy eye, the other one sunk in his head, and what a head. Broad nose and lips on him like he had a little chocolate in the blender somewhere, but his hair was pure dago, black and greasy and not enough of it. He might have had a widow’s peak once, but that peninsula had mostly sunk, leaving one sad little island of hair, one stubborn patch of it he grew out long and put a ribbon on sometimes. He was half-mad, which you might have been if you had literally been sold to a circus. But he was brilliant, too. Brilliant enough to talk a vampire into turning him so he could escape the freak show. Brilliant enough to run schemes, steal and extort his way into property ownership and never blow his cover.
He was big and strong, almost as strong as the Hessian.
He was the only vampire I knew that horses and dogs were okay with; I saw him ride a horse once.
And if it weren’t for John Valentine, Margaret might have left me in that morgue drawer to figure it all out on my own. But she owed him. He had shipped her kid off to live in a home for people like that and bribed them to favor him. He taught her, and made her teach me, and we stayed together, the three of us, until the bright, sunny day when his building collapsed and his box popped open and mine and Margaret’s didn’t. Dumb luck. That was in 1942. But nobody cared about collapsing tenements then. There was this war on.
MARGARET KILLING
NOW
1978
I stood with Margaret in her vault, the mayor’s apartment, surveying the wreckage. Four Hunchers had found their way into the place and it hadn’t gone well for them. She was spitting out the last of the blood from her shot mouth and rubbing her hands, which were sore from what she’d just done to the intruders.
“Never call me your mother again,” she said.
I held up my hands like I wouldn’t dream of it.
“Oh, would you look at this, now,” she said, pointing at a hole in her sage-green velvet couch. Never mind the brain and hair on it, she could clean those off with a stiff brush. And never mind the point-blank gunshot to the face she’d absorbed. It was the bullet hole in her couch that pissed her off.
One of the Hunchers was still alive; she had broken his back and stuffed a sock in his mouth. Now she pinched his nose until he came to, but then she charmed him. “You won’t yell, but you’ll listen and you’ll answer when I ask you something.”
He nodded, his eyes tearing up. He couldn’t see us in the dark and his little gang’s flashlight was smashed.
“Did nobody upstairs warn you not to come down here?”
He shook his head no and started crying.
“Stop yer blubbin’,” she said. He did. I glanced over at one of his friends who had died so fast he fell back on his own legs like a contortionist, his face baggy-looking from the busted skull, one eye bugged, brain in his hair.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
“Course I am. Where did you fine fellas come from?”
> “The Bowery,” he said in a sleepy voice.
“Anybody else know you’re here?”
“No.”
“Anybody gonna come lookin’ for you?”
“No.”
“All right,” she said, nodding. And she rolled him over and fed while he moaned. And then I fed, and he died while I did it, his body seeming to deflate. Ridiculously, I thought of a basketball that would never bounce again, but it wasn’t funny. He had been full of pot but not smack, so my head just got a little achy. Smack makes me throw up.
I thought about Butterbean and his burned Frisbee in the park, the older one saying, You don’t want us, we dirty.
I thought about Gary Combs’s head dropping like a setting moon as he died.
It’s what they’re for.
No, it’s not.
Margaret sat on the couch, her legs crossed, looking at me.
“What was it you wanted to see me about, Joey?”
I told her.
THE STEEPLE OF HIS HANDS
Me and Cvetko in my room.
This was after the three of us pulled the four Hunchers out of Margaret’s apartment and then dragged them down the tracks to Purgatory, a sick rat following us in a woozy S-pattern.
Rats didn’t last long in our tunnels because we kept them covered in rat poison. It didn’t bother us.
Cvetko had his fingers steepled under his chin, waiting for me to say whatever I had come to tell him.
“Margaret says she’s taking the Latins and going to the castle,” I said.
He looked bothered, broke the steeple of his hands and touched his face like he does. He hated killing anyone, but the thought of setting that grim bunch of Puerto Rican killers loose on teeny little kid vampires clearly ate him up. Those guys were killers before they got turned, which wasn’t long ago.
No, Cvetko hated this and I wasn’t in love with it myself.
“We should talk to them,” he said.
“What, the kids? I already talked to them. They just don’t get it.”
“The Latins.”
“Are you kidding? Margaret will flip her shit if we go around her like that.”
He looked at me over his glasses, clearly scared but determined.
“They were still people ten years ago, all of them. Their communities live with three generations under one roof; as brutal as they are, they won’t like the idea of destroying children any more than you or I do.”
“I don’t know, Cvets.”
“Why do you think, Joseph Peacock, that Margaret decided not to call a town meeting?”
I put my hands behind my head. I was lying on top of my fridge like Snoopy on his doghouse.
“I dunno. Just to get it done.”
“Have you been watching television?”
“No,” I lied. “Why?”
“Because you are exhibiting signs of mental atrophy.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
He took his glasses off and polished them, still looking at me.
“It means you are giving me a lazy answer instead of thinking. Now, why does Margaret choose not to bring this up for discussion?”
“Because nobody’ll like it.”
“Precisely. If we talk to her Puerto Rican friends and harden their hearts against her plan, she will, of necessity, call a meeting in order to gather enough strength to deal with the little ones decisively. But the meeting will not go her way because she is not a diplomat. She will have to bend to the will of the group. Let me ask you another question.”
I nodded.
“Rather, why don’t you tell me what my next question is and then answer it yourself?”
I rolled off the fridge and paced. I think better when I’m moving. Not that I could pace far in that cell with Cvetko in it.
It hit me and I stopped cold.
“Why did she tell me? What she was going to do, I mean.”
He smiled at me in that happy-professor, Joey-isn’t-a-retard-after-all way.
“And?”
“And it’s because she doesn’t really want to do it, either. She wants me to stop it.”
He pretended to applaud.
“I would not go so far as to say she actively wants you to stop it. But she does, I believe, want you to share in her guilt by assenting, and she will not retaliate against you even if she reasons out that you betrayed her confidence.”
“Why not? She doesn’t like me.”
“Never forget that you alone remember her when she was a living woman. She has known you longer than any of us. You are no incidental traveler, no Jonah she can cast into the sea for the whale to swallow. Except perhaps for Ruth, you are the closest thing she has to family.”
I guess I never thought of it that way.
THE RACCOON AND THE VAN
“She know you’re here?”
He met us in an unused subbasement below a tienda on Avenue B that sold brooms and mops and cheap cookware, but also candles for different saints. The shopkeepers didn’t know it was there, let alone that it was connected by crawl spaces to active subway lines, and abandoned loops to the west, and to wherever these guys lived. I had never been past this sort of cobwebby parlor. It was about the size of the inside of a McDonald’s. You called these guys by tapping a pipe with a wrench three times, then counting to five and tapping three more. If it was early evening, before they went out, or early morning before they tucked in, one of them would show up within five or ten minutes.
“No, she does not,” Cvetko said.
The other squatted down on his heels, thinking about this. To look at him, he was just a very pale Puerto Rican kid with torn-up jeans and Bruce Lee–looking kung fu shoes, a hooded sweatshirt, navy blue. But his eyes were too dark and small, and he never liked to look at you. If you looked closely at his jeans, you saw that they had been bled on. Plenty. He wasn’t much older than me. A mustache had just been coming in when his clock stopped. He wasn’t the leader, but he was the little brother. What he thought mattered. I didn’t know his name.
He nodded, glanced up at us for a second, then looked at our feet. We should talk now. We did. We wanted to meet with Mapache. His dark eyes went back and forth a couple of times while he thought about it, and I thought maybe Cvetko had been wrong, maybe whatever embers of humanity were left in this kid had just gone cold, we might have missed it by a month. I could only too easily picture him hacking the head off the little British boy or his maybe-sister; he looked closed-off and bitter. I wonder how much choice he had in whether to join his brother underground.
He moved over to the pipe and banged it twice, real gentle. Then once harder. And then he sat really still with his head down like he wasn’t even there; I’m sure this kid could disappear like that, just squat in an alley, cold to the touch and motionless so you never knew he was there till you felt his hand over your mouth.
When the kid heard his brother approach, he lit a candle in the corner, a saint candle from the tienda but with the saint’s face and name spray-painted over. Nobody needed a candle to see, but newer vampires still need a little boost to see well.
Mapache was less creepy than the kid, liked to smile, would actually look at you. The one creepy thing he did was to stand kind of close to you while talking, but I think that was a Hispanic thing in general. He would touch you, too, and vampires don’t touch each other much. Mapache had a big fucking mustache and I know he was Puerto Rickie, not Mexican, but I thought Pancho Villa must have been like this. Big mustache, easy to like, but still a killer. And this guy killed vampires, which isn’t easy.
After we told him what we had to tell, he said, “I see why you came to me. This needs thinking about. I’ll talk to the others, and either way I won’t say nothing.”
“We are grateful,” Cvetko said.
I thought he would go back i
nto the hole now, but he didn’t. He stood even a little closer to us.
“Meantime, you wanna hunt?” he said, grinning like a bastard. His eyes caught what little light there was in the room and shone like raccoon eyes. I later learned from Cvetko that’s what mapache means. Raccoon. At the offer to hunt, Cvetko shifted his weight, which meant he was nervous, but I answered for him before he could cough up some chickenshit excuse.
“Hell yes.”
* * *
I have to give it up to the Latin Hearts; these guys had fun hunting. You’re not going to remember all these names, but there was a husky one who looked older, Gua Gua. I think that means van. He wasn’t quite van-sized, but he was a little more than person-sized. He was the uncle of the two brothers. Anyway, we went to a little alley not too far off 1st Avenue, between a pizza joint and a pawnshop with a shitty saxophone behind the bars, like even the musical instruments here were felons. Gua Gua was all camped out in a wheelchair, blanket around his legs, Greek fisherman’s cap on his head, his greasy hair uncombed. He had a PLEASE HELP BLESS YOU cardboard sign on his lap and a half a milk carton next to it to collect change. Here’s the brilliant part: He parked his rig out in the sidewalk, near the street. If you were actually moved enough by the human tragedy of this big coughing slob on wheels to put money in the carton, you were walking closer to him than the alley and you got by safely. If you weren’t feeling generous but weren’t repelled by him, you walked in the middle of the sidewalk and you got by safely. But. If the phlegmy coughing and the sight of the poor fat fucker drove you far enough away, you walked close to the alley. If Gua Gua sneezed, that meant the coast was clear. And that was bad news for you.
Mapache snatched the first one, an artist-type lady older than she was dressed, wearing a man’s hat and a big pair of round earrings like a second pair of eyes. He moved so fast she didn’t have time to make much noise, just went EEP!, kinda cute actually, but still the younger brother stuffed a pillow over her face, pushed her up against the wall, and went to work on her neck. A little guy they call Bug actually darted up her skirt, sucked her femoral. This whole thing took like forty seconds, during which Gua Gua rolled his chair back against the alley to block the view with his girth. When it was done, he turned around, he was the best at charming, and told her, “Nothing happened to you, lady, just count to five real quiet, then give me your money and go home. Go to bed.” She did exactly as she was told, emptied the green, foldy stuff in her purse into the milk carton and stumbled away in a daze, her scarf knotted around her neck, dripping blood from up under her skirts, but that stopped soon.
The Lesser Dead Page 13