by Alex Bledsoe
Fauvette said, “I’ve heard that song. Something about ‘She put a bullet through her broken heart’?”
He nodded. “ ‘She put a bullet through her broken heart, to spite the ones betraying her/But her soul, seeking the Pearly Gates, found her hatred was delaying her.’ ”
“My mama used to sing me that,” she said, looking down at a spot on the bar. She grabbed a cloth and polished it clean. “I hadn’t thought about it in a long time.”
“I take it your mama’s not around anymore?” he said sympathetically.
She shook her head, then smiled. “Ah, but that’s a dull story. Yours is fascinating. So what did you do?”
“I found out that Patience only played the Human Bean one night a week . . .”
. . . and no one at the club had any idea what she did with the rest of her time. She also had no listed phone number. So late that afternoon I drove down her street, parked my car at the derelict church next door, and sneaked through the weed-infested cemetery to get a better look at her house.
I saw no sign of life, or even recent habitation. I scotch-taped a Xerox reproduction of the song lyrics to the front door, along with the admonition to meet me at the Human Bean that night.
I waited at the coffeehouse, breathed its pot-saturated air, and ate five packs of Twinkies, two bags of chips, and all the peanuts the waitress could find. And at sunset, just as the college crowd began to drift in, I looked up and saw Patience Bolade next to me.
“Hi,” I said, and stood. She watched me with a neutral expression. “Sorry, if I don’t stand when a lady approaches my table, my mother turns in her grave. Would you like to sit down?”
She wore almost the same outfit, a simple black sleeveless dress and big dangly earrings that looked like Christmas tree ornaments. She sat in the offered chair, back straight, hands in her lap.
I lit a cigarette — a regular one — and offered the pack to her, but she shook her head. “I never smoke . . . cigarettes,” she said, and after a moment added, “So how did you find out about me?”
“Well, to be honest, I used a private detective.”
She nodded. “I see.” She closed her eyes and her shoulders sagged a little. “I guess I should be relieved. I knew it couldn’t last, that if I did it long enough, someone would notice. Still, I hate to see it end.”
“See what end?”
She gestured at the coffeehouse. “This. This . . . sanctuary. In the time I’ve been playing here, no one has had to die. If I write the songs well enough, and perform them with enough honesty, I can live off the energy of the crowd. It’s such a relief not to have to be” — and she shuddered at the thought— “bloodthirsty. You have no idea.”
“Apparently not,” I agreed. “Just what are you talking about?”
She stared at me. “I . . . what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about signing you to my label.”
She sat very still for a long moment. “Wait . . . what do you think that song means? ‘The Girls with Games of Blood’?”
I shrugged. “Hell, honey, I don’t think it means a thing. You want to name yourself after a dead girl, dress in black, and sing songs about how miserable you are, that’s great. It might even start a trend. All I know is, your effect on a crowd is amazing, and I think you, and me, and my company can all make an awful lot of money.”
She leaned close to me, and her full lips turned up with just the hint of a smile. “You’re serious, aren’t you? That’s all you’re interested in.”
“It’s my job.”
Now she really grinned. “Yes. It surely is. But I’m afraid my previous answer has to stand. What I do can’t be broken down into vinyl grooves or magnetic tape strips.” She stood and offered her hand. “Thank you for your kind words. I wish you luck.”
I took her hand. It was ice-cold. Then she left, swallowed by the hazy night. And neither I nor anyone else ever saw Patience Bolade again.
The story finished, he watched Fauvette for a reaction. The girl’s face was impassive, but neither amused nor doubtful. He’d expected to be gently mocked, as he was every other time he told the story. “So,” he said after a moment, “what do you think?”
“I think you were probably well shed of her,” Fauvette said.
He looked at his watch, sighed, and put some bills on the counter. “The Next Big Thing waits for no man. Thanks for listing to me . . . Foovette?”
“FAW-vette,” she corrected.
“Fauvette. Hope to see you again soon.”
He stood and walked out of the empty bar. When he opened the door, afternoon sunlight blasted in, overcoming the air-conditioning with no effort. Fauvette instinctively winced and looked away, even though she knew by now that sunlight was nothing to fear. Old habits died hard, and hers were older than most.
She bent to retrieve a fallen stack of napkins, which took several moments after she dropped them a second time. When she stood the door opened again and a woman carrying a guitar case was silhouetted against the sun, her long hair swaying as she looked around.
“You’re letting out the air-conditioning,” Fauvette called.
“Oh. Sorry,” the woman said, and stepped inside. She walked to the bar, propped the guitar case against it, and climbed onto a stool. “Is the manager in?”
Fauvette started to answer, then stopped. The woman appeared to be in her early twenties, with long black hair parted in the middle. She had heavy eyebrows and wore dark lipstick. Her face was pleasantly round, and a low-cut peasant blouse showed white cleavage and pudgy upper arms. And despite the heat outside, she showed no signs of sweat.
The woman frowned uneasily at the scrutiny. “Is something wrong?”
“Did you see the man who just left? In the baby-blue leisure suit?”
“No. Why?”
Fauvette bit her lip thoughtfully before speaking. “This is a weird question, but is your name by any chance . . . Patience?”
“Yes,” the woman said guardedly. “Do we know each other?”
Fauvette leaned her elbows on the bar and rested her chin on her hands. For a long moment the two women looked at each other. What they saw went beyond their mutual gender, and into the realm of unmistakable recognition that comes when one vampire recognizes another.
“Do you believe,” Fauvette said at last, “in absolutely out-of-this-world, mind-boggling coincidence?”
CHAPTER 2
AT THE MOMENT Fauvette met Patience, two other vampires drove an old Ford pickup with a camper shell along a county road to the east of Memphis. The vehicle’s worn shocks transmitted each pothole and asphalt irregularity, and the scalding summer heat made the road shimmer ahead of them. Cornfields filled with rows of drought-stunted plants rippled past.
The vampire in the passenger seat looked like a typical urban black teenager. He wore a Memphis State tank top, faded denim jeans, and Converse high-top sneakers. He carried a pick comb tucked into the back of his Afro. But his eyes were cold, distant, and ancient, the only visible sign that Leonardo Jones had been the walking dead for over half a century.
At the moment Leonardo’s attention was entirely focused on the vampire behind the steering wheel. This one wore a black shirt buttoned to the wrist and neck, crisp new jeans, and black leather boots. His long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. He appeared to be around thirty years old, slender, and physically rather small. Yet like Leonardo, his true nature shone in his dark eyes.
Finally Leonardo spoke. He almost had to shout above the engine and the wind through the open windows. “C’mon, man, ’fess up. You killed Mark, didn’t you?”
Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski shooed a fly from his face. The hot, sticky wind reminded him of a long-ago trip through Spain. “No,” he said simply, “I did not.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Why do you question my honor in this matter?” Zginski’s lilting middle-European accent had faded somewhat, but his archaic speech patterns remained.
“Come
on. I seen the way you look at Fauvette. You and Mark both all broke out in monkey bites over her.”
“I did not kill him.”
“Oh, so he just conveniently left so you could be the only rooster in the henhouse? Awful nice of him. And he left you his wheels, too. Man knows how to treat his enemies, I’d say.”
“Mr. Luminesca left the keys to the truck in the warehouse,” Zginski said patiently. “I took them, but made no secret of it. If he wishes them returned, I will do so.”
“And in the meantime you get a sweet ride out of both things, right?”
Zginski glanced at him in annoyance, then looked back at the road. He had only been driving for a few weeks, and had yet to relax into it. His latest long-term victim had taught him in her newer, better automobile, and he could easily have used that vehicle instead of the decrepit truck. But someone might recognize it, and he did not want to risk being connected to her publicly.
“I do not know why Mark left,” he said. “I was not his confidant. If he told Fauvette, she has not mentioned it. But he was, and is, certainly free to go his own solitary way. Most of us do. The fact that we three remain companions is, in my experience, unique.”
Even as he spoke, the meaning of his own words struck him anew. The uniqueness could be due to the fact that he’d shared his blood with Fauvette, Leonardo, and the now-vanished Mark in order to save them from destruction. It had been an impulsive thing in the heat of a crisis, and he’d waited for the ramifications to appear ever since. Perhaps his growing tolerance of Leonardo, whose Negro blood and peasant’s attitude should have infuriated him, was the first real sign.
“And you had a lot of experience being a vampire, right?” Leonardo said. “All that time over in Europe, running around like Count Dracula?” He laughed and shook his head. “Shit, man. Sometimes I think you just tell us stuff to see what you can make us believe.”
“You are free to think so.”
Leonardo tapped his fingers on the side-view mirror. The wind blew down his arm and inside his tank top, causing it to ripple against his skin. After a moment he said, “So when you going to tell me how to do that wolf trick?”
“What makes you think it is a trick?”
“ ’Cause, ain’t no way a man can turn into a wolf. So I figure you know how to make folks think they seeing a wolf. Is that right?”
Zginski smiled. “You are free to think so.”
As Leonardo laughed, Zginski watched the trees flash by, the summer sun cutting through the branches in stripes of debilitating heat. When Zginski first met these vampires, they had been convinced the sun would destroy them, just as the movies and television shows depicted. They lived in an abandoned warehouse and still slept in coffins, with grave dirt for mattresses. They acted, in fact, more like parasites than predators, roaming the Memphis shadows and lurking like cockroaches just beyond the light.
He had traded his understanding of their true nature for their knowledge of this era. He had spent sixty years in limbo, from the time a golden stake pierced his heart in 1915 to the time it was removed in 1975; in addition to driving, which now fascinated him the way electricity once had, he had learned much about this new time. Most ironically, he had discovered people were just as greedy, cowardly, and pathetic as they had always been, despite the great leaps in technology. He would fit into this world just fine once he mastered its devices.
Leonardo looked at the directions written on the back of an old envelope. “Okay, that’s the third time up and down this stretch of road. We lost.”
Zginski slowed the truck. There was no traffic in either direction. He took the envelope from Leonardo and perused it. “We traveled the correct highway into Appleville, and made the proper turn onto this county road. If there is an error, it is not in our diligence.”
“You gonna ask directions?”
“Certainly. What sensible man would not?” He did an awkward U-turn and drove back to the one mail box they’d passed. The name on it was incomplete: only the letters BOL remained. It marked a driveway that disappeared into a thick stand of pine trees.
They emerged at one end of a long, unkempt lawn that was browned by the drought. At the far end rose a two-story house that, like the landscaping, looked sun-battered and dried up.
Zginski stopped the truck. He reached out with his vampiric senses, but in their daylight-weakened state he could not tell if anyone occupied the house. It certainly looked neglected, if not fully abandoned.
The house was built in a mixture of Greek and Colonial Revival styles, with columns around the front door and a carriage entrance on the building’s left end. A tree shadowed part of the roof, the branches just touching the shingles. The brickwork was intact but gaps in the mortar indicated incipient weaknesses. The shrubbery grew tall and unwieldy, blocking most of the lower windows. Yet someone had recently painted the columns to a height of about ten feet. Was this a restoration in progress, or one abandoned?
As if sensing his uncertainty, Leonardo said, “I saw mail in the mailbox. Somebody must live here.”
“Go and ask if they know where the Crabtree family lives.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you are less threatening than I am.”
“You really ain’t learned shit about the South, have you?” But Leonardo opened the door and dutifully trudged down the driveway toward the house, muttering to himself about Zginski’s racial cluelessness.
The four big columns rose to a level with the second-story roof, sheltering the porch and front door. Hornets and dirt daubers had long ago claimed it, and buzzed warnings that Leonardo ignored. Footprints showed in the dust and detritus, although none were as recent as Leonardo’s own. He sensed no life inside, but thanks to Zginski he knew the sun weakened his powers.
He knocked firmly on the door, then stepped back. A short distance away, hidden behind a row of thick untended shrubs, he saw the black fence around a private cemetery. A lone mausoleum rose among the few tombstones. The lords of this decrepit manor would rest inside it, and their families and children in the ground around it. He knew that if any black people were buried on this land, their graves would be untended and likely unmarked.
After a long moment he heard the door lock click open. He put his hands in his pockets and lowered his head, a submissive stance that would, he hoped, prevent any trouble with the white folks.
The door opened no more than six inches and an elderly female voice said, “Yes? Oh, good Lord, a colored boy. What do you want?”
“Ma’am, I’m looking for the Crabtree farm. Am I anywhere near it?”
He glanced up at the source of the voice. He could make out the general silhouette of a small-framed, stooped woman in a floor-length dress long out of style, but could see no detail.
“Dark Willows?” she repeated. “You’re looking for Dark Willows?”
“Yes, ma’am. My boss is supposed to pick up a car there, but we can’t seem to find the turnoff.”
She peered past him to the distant truck. Zginski stood beside it, plainly Caucasian even at this distance. The old woman seemed to take that as a comfort. She said, “Tell your employer to go past the four-way intersection and look for the sign on the right. Their driveway is considered its own street by the state.”
“Past the intersection,” Leonardo repeated. “That’s what we did wrong. Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome. Now you run along.” She closed the door, but he knew she’d peek out to make sure he did as he was told.
As he walked back to the truck, he shook his head at the sheer predictable madness of it. Even when a man dies, the color of his skin still puts him in his place. Of course, to be fair, most black folks who died didn’t keep walking around. So perhaps his experience wasn’t really typical.
“Did you get the information?” Zginski asked.
“We go past that four-way stop. It’s on the right.”
“Ah. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” Leonard
o mumbled as he got back in the truck.
They followed the old woman’s instructions and found the state-issued green sign proclaiming DARK WILLOWS ROAD. Below it was a yellow diamond-shaped marker that said DEAD END. One corner was ragged from a close-range shotgun blast. The name on the mailbox confirmed the location: CRABTREE.
Dark Willows Road was no more than two gravel ruts with a grass strip in the middle, so narrow there was no room for two vehicles to pass. The house was hidden from the highway by thick stands of trees, but once it came into view Zginski stopped the truck and leaned forward to stare through the windshield.
Like the other house they’d just visited, this one stood two stories high at one end of a large, neglected lawn. But it was a considerably larger structure. The porch went along the entire front of the building and around either end, with columns braced by arches holding up the awning roof. The windows beneath it were tall and narrow, and when opened allowed those inside to directly exit onto the porch. The place carried the unmistakable aura of wealth and grandeur, of a home built to the specifications of a man used to getting his way.
Then Zginski blinked back to the moment. The house was in terrible disrepair: sections of shingles were missing, shutters were lost or broken, and one column stood at an angle so that the end of the porch sagged. Many of the windows were glassless and boarded up. For fifty feet around the house the yard was mostly dirt, with three old tractors parked in it. The sun-baked weeds protruding through the engines and empty tire rims said they had not moved in months.
“That is a shame,” Zginski murmured to himself. “I had no idea that houses of such scale existed outside the city.”
Leonardo, still annoyed by the old lady, snapped, “It’s a goddam plantation house, you know that, right? A hundred years ago I’d have been worth no more than them busted-down tractors.” He pointed to a row of roofs visible in the overgrown field to one side of the house. “See those? Slave quarters. Dog houses, except people like me were the dogs.”