by Alex Bledsoe
That left two candidates: Zginski, and the new girl singer Patience. Or it was a vampire he knew nothing about. That was a long shot, since there simply weren’t that many vampires around, and they tended to congregate in cities, not sparsely populated rural areas where their predations would attract attention.
He wrote off Patience as a possibility, which left Zginski. It also brought up the unanswerable question of why.
Zginski pulled back the curtain and again checked his watch by the streetlamp outside. It was three in the morning, and he had to accept the fact that Patience wasn’t coming. Instead of the usual rage at being treated so cavalierly, he felt something unexpected: disappointment.
He turned to the motel bed, where a teenage boy lay asleep in the darkness. Clad only in his white jockey shorts, his erection straining against the cotton, he murmured and tossed but did not awaken. In his dreams he was reliving his deepest sexual fantasy, but was unable to reach completion despite his best efforts.
Zginski touched the boy’s sweaty chest. He was handsome, with brown hair and a dimple in his chin. He played football, an American sport of great violence, so his body was muscular and supple. Zginski intended him to be a gift, something he and Patience could share the way a mortal couple might go out to dinner. Now Zginski was, as he’d overheard on occasion, stuck with the check.
And yet he couldn’t believe Patience would simply ignore him this way. He would reserve judgment until he spoke to her about it, he decided. He would give her the greatest, rarest gift that Baron Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski could give anyone: the benefit of the doubt.
But that still left him with the moaning boy. He considered the alternatives. He could leave him here, and assume he would return home too ashamed to speak about how he’d awoken in a strange motel in his underwear. He could not possibly connect this to Zginski; after all, he had only seen the vampire for a few moments in the gas station bathroom, before the vampire’s influence had rendered him helpless and oblivious.
Or Zginski could kill him.
The boy tossed his head, exposing his jugular. “No,” he whimpered, so softly it was barely audible.
Zginski smiled. Sometimes the universe made decisions for you.
CHAPTER 17
BEAMS FROM THE orange sunset shafted almost horizontally through the frames of the long-shattered windows. In the dusty, pollen-heavy air they made irregular patches of illumination on the debris-covered floor. Pigeons trilled in the rafters. Rats scurried in the walls and under the warped floorboards. And the corpse of a stranger, someone who had overdosed alone and forgotten long ago, was now little more than rags and a skeleton in the oppressive heat. His bony fingers still clutched the remains of a violin, the punch line to an obscure joke.
Patience stood on the crumbling loading dock as she looked over the abandoned, decrepit cotton warehouse. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “So this was your home?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Fauvette said, suddenly embarrassed. She scuffed one tennis shoe self-consciously. “It was just where we slept, really. I found it, and the others joined me after a while. We used the basement and the boiler room for our coffins.”
Patience carefully picked her way around the debris, looking up at the roof. “And you picked this place because . . . ?”
Fauvette shrugged. How to describe the sense that when you’re a walking corpse, the corpse of a building can actually be a comfort? “It seemed appropriate.”
“For a cockroach, maybe.” She instantly regretted the comment. “I didn’t mean that literally.”
Fauvette, shuffling along behind her, kicked at a piece of broken glass. “For a long time, that’s what I figured I was. Something that only came out at night, that had to stay in the shadows and run from the sun.”
Patience shook her head. “So you really thought the sun would burn you up if it even touched you?”
Fauvette nodded. “I never had anyone explain to me what I was. So the only information I could find was in the movies and on TV. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but under the circumstances it seemed kind of silly to put it to the test.”
“That must have been a terrifying way to live. So lonely.”
“I wasn’t living. And I wasn’t alone. I had friends, at least until Rudy came along.”
Patience’s eyes opened wide. “He killed them?”
“No, actually he saved us. And taught us what we are. But . . . some of them did die around the same time, but it wasn’t his fault. Not entirely.”
Patience looked out through the big, empty window frame at the overgrown field that surrounded the abandoned warehouse. She swatted at the gnats that filled the air. “He’s very intriguing, isn’t he? Your Mr. Zginski.”
“That’s one word for it.”
Both were quiet for a moment. Another rat scurried along the wall, its passage loud in the silence. Finally Patience said, “You said he saved ‘us.’ I met Leonardo, the colored boy. Who else?”
“Well, there was Olive, a colored girl. She died. And Toddy, who was a crazy white boy from the country. He died. And Mark, who . . .”
“Died?”
“I don’t know. He said he needed to find out some things, and that he’d be back when he could. It wasn’t like him, but at the same time, with all the changes, maybe it was.”
“Were you and he . . . ?”
“I think we were about to. Then Rudy came along.”
Patience idly lifted a board, sending a fat corn snake slithering for new cover. “And what did Rudy do?”
Fauvette thought about the answer for a long moment. “He made me forget what I am.”
Patience looked up in surprise. “In what way?”
Fauvette stared into space as she spoke. “The vampire who made me took my life when I was still a virgin. This was up in the Kentucky hills, fifty-some-odd years ago. He didn’t mean to make me a vampire, I don’t think, he just didn’t take any precautions to keep me from rising. Only before I rose, but after I died, I was raped.”
It took a moment, but it finally registered. Patience’s eyes opened wide. “While you were dead?”
Fauvette nodded. “The Scoval brothers. The joke around the hollers was that no farm animal was safe when the Scovals started drinking. I was a sheltered little girl, I thought it meant they might steal them and eat them.” She smiled bitterly. “Apparently no corpse was safe, either.”
Patience could think of nothing to say. A virgin vampire was eternally spared any sexual feelings, remaining in a kind of prepubescent netherworld of amused detachment. But Fauvette seemed anything but that.
“Because of that,” Fauvette continued, “I have all the sensations you do. But my virginity is still there. And if I lose it, it comes back the next night.”
“Oh, my God, honey,” Patience said as she comprehended the horror of the situation. “That’s awful.”
She nodded. “It hurts, too. When I lose it. It’s the only thing that does. And it bleeds.”
“It bleeds? Like you were still alive?”
She nodded. “I don’t know why. I don’t know the ‘why’ of anything.”
Patience knelt and wrapped her arms around Fauvette. It reminded Fauvette of the way her mother would come to wake her up, the way she’d snuggle her body against her mother’s full, strong form. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the way that little cabin smelled, the way the wood creaked in the wind or her father’s footsteps across the hard floor. She could see them in her mind’s eye, but the actual memories seemed like mere photographs.
Patience stroked Fauvette’s soft hair. “Honey, I can’t change what’s happened, but I’ll try to make what’s coming a little better for you. I promise you that.” She stood back, kissed Fauvette on the forehead, and said cheerfully, “Now, enough of this. Let’s go back to town and get started on your first lesson.”
“Clora! Clora!”
Clora came down the stairs from her room, having to stop on the second floor as a wave of dizzine
ss hit her. She’d visibly lost weight, although she’d made no changes in her diet or exercise. Along with the weight, it seemed she’d lost the energy or desire to do anything except at night, when he came to visit.
She stumbled into the living room. It was the hottest day of the year so far, and her father had turned off the window-unit air conditioner to save money. The windows were open, but the immobile curtains testified to the lack of a breeze. It was dusk, and the daytime flies were joined by mosquitoes that found every tear and opening in the screens. It often seemed to Clora that they might as well have lived out in the yard.
Jeb sat in his recliner, staring at the TV even though it wasn’t turned on. The only light came from a dim lamp on the side table. A dozen beer cans littered the floor around him. “Yes, sir, Daddy?” she said.
When she saw his teary eyes, Clora knew what he was about to ask. Jeb’s voice was small and pitiful when he said, “Honey, you know what I need, don’t you?”
Clora licked her lips, tasting salt from the sweat. “Daddy, please, I’m awful tired.”
Despite his unruly hair and stubble, he looked and sounded like a little child when he whimpered, “Clora, baby, you’re all I got. Please?”
She felt a pit open in her belly, a mix of fear and excitement. “It ain’t right, Daddy,” she mumbled, hoping this time he’d let it go.
“What?” he snapped in the rage that only came with alcohol. “Are you talking back, girl?”
“No, sir,” she said. The man in the chair now, soaked in beer and lost in the past, was not the father she loved. This man would chase her down and beat her savagely if she back-talked. The other man would reappear in the morning, contrite and apologetic, but that wouldn’t make the pain any less. “I’ll be right back.”
She went into the downstairs bedroom, where Jeb slept when he bothered to leave the recliner. She closed the door and looked at the bed where her mother and father slept, and where she had been conceived. She stripped off her tube top and shorts, then opened the dresser and removed her mother’s sheer black nightgown.
Elaine Crabtree had been dead four years now. The first time Clora had tried on her mother’s clothes, she had felt grown-up and sophisticated, and flounced into the living room to show her father. His reaction had both puzzled and frightened her, and led to the little ritual she was about to enact.
She pulled the garment on, careful not to tear it: she was wider-hipped than her mother. The bottom hem came to the middle of her thighs, and she replaced her own white cotton panties with the matching black ones from the drawer.
She adjusted herself in the mirror, then took the headband that her mother always wore and used it to hold back her bangs. She really did look like Elaine now; the picture on her father’s nightstand could easily have been one of Clora, if it had been taken years in the future and somehow sent back in time.
She turned, and a rush of nausea and dizziness hit her. She sat down heavily on the bed, startling several flies attracted to a stain she didn’t want to think about. She waited for her head to stop spinning. This was the fifth time in two days she’d nearly passed out. Was she sick? Or . . . worse? She’d know about the second option in three more days, since she was as regular as the sunrise. Until then, she did her best to put it aside.
She stood, shook her head to clear it, and turned out the light. Then she went back into the living room.
She stopped in the shadowy entrance and said in a throaty voice, “Turn out the light, Jeb.”
The recliner protested as he leaned over to hit the light switch. Her father could barely see her, but that was part of the trick. She leaned against the edge of the kitchen doorway and began to hum “Ode to Billie Joe,” her mother’s favorite song. Then she began slowly to dance.
“Oh, sweetie,” Jeb said, shifting in his chair. She heard his zipper slide down.
Once when she was a little girl, she had hidden in the dark under the kitchen table and watched her mother dance for her father. Jeb was handsome then, and proud of his wife, and when he took her there on the couch Clora had watched in both horror and wonder. The next time she tried to spy they caught her, but the image was already burned into her memory. Now she mimicked it perfectly, sliding her hands over her own body just as Elaine had done. She looked at the water-stained ceiling, the warped hardwood floor, anything to avoid seeing what her father was doing in his chair.
Thankfully, it never took very long. When he finally croaked, “That’s enough, baby,” she scurried back to strip off the dead woman’s negligee and retrieve her own garments. Her father inevitably passed out after this routine, so she knew she’d have the rest of the night to herself.
This time she tossed the nightgown and panties back in the dresser, grabbed her own clothes, and rushed naked up the stairs to her room. She slammed and locked the door. She was dizzy again, and it was hard to breathe, and for some reason the bug bites on her neck throbbed and itched.
She pulled on a clean T-shirt, grateful for the crisp coolness against her skin. She wanted a shower, but needed to wait until her head stopped spinning. And the place on her neck continued to throb, the way it did when he was near.
Something scratched softly at the open window. “It’s me,” a voice said.
Leonardo was right outside, perched on the roof and running his fingernails lightly along the glass. He smiled when he saw her. She hurriedly opened the window the rest of the way, and he gracefully slithered in.
She threw her arms around him. “I’m so glad to see you,” she cried. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come tonight.”
He held her loosely, surprised and disconcerted by her intensity. “Why? What happened?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t possibly tell him. “Nothing, honey. I’m just glad to see you.” She raised her face to him, eager to kiss his cold lips again.
And then suddenly they were in bed. She was naked, on her stomach, and he sat shirtless on the edge of the mattress. She was breathing heavily, and tingles ran through her muscles indicating she’d experienced a strong climax. But she couldn’t remember it.
She rose on her elbows. Her hair was matted with sweat, and the hot little room smelled of bodies. He’d left the light on again, which meant he must have watched her as they . . . whatever they did. She blushed with shame at the thought.
He smiled down at her. For just a moment, the image of his extra-long canine teeth and the sudden tingle in her neck made her think something so absurd she almost laughed aloud. But it passed in a wave of fresh weakness.
“How was that?” he said, and kissed the tip of her nose.
She couldn’t speak for a moment. “I never knew I could feel all those things.”
He laughed. “That’s what they all say.”
She blushed and said pitifully, “Don’t laugh at me.”
“Why not? If it’s funny, why shouldn’t I laugh?”
“Because it’s not funny. I love you!” Immediately she looked away, unable to believe the words had just burst forth like that. She didn’t see the sadness cross his face, or regret battle with indifference. She only heard him say, “Man, you white girls. You get a little taste of chocolate and it’s all she wrote.”
Clora’s eyes filled with tears and she scooted away from him. “Why are you being so mean to me? I gave you everything.”
He looked at her clinically, as if her emotions were somehow alien to him. He had no real desire to hurt her, but at the same time it was oddly fascinating to witness her crumble this way. In the past his victims only had time for one emotion: terror. Then they died. He said, “I best be going.”
She grabbed frantically at him. “No, please, not yet.”
He untangled her hands and said firmly, “Yeah.”
He pulled on his shirt while she sat up and clutched her girlish, lace-edged pillow to her chest. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Please don’t go.”
He smiled. “Don’t worry, Snow White, I’ll be back.”
Still clutching the pillow with one hand, she grabbed his arm. “Then take me with you.”
He looked into her desperate eyes. Death hovered there now, nearby and patiently biding its time. “No,” he said.
Tears poured down her face. “Why are you doing this? How can you not believe I love you after all the things I did for you?”
He kissed her lightly, perfunctorily. “I believe you, Snow White. Maybe I just don’t care.”
She collapsed to the floor, her face buried into her pillow, sobbing. Leonardo crawled out the window and closed it behind him.
CHAPTER 18
LEONARDO LEAPED FROM the roof to the closest tree and quickly shimmied to the ground. Through the open living-room window he saw Clora’s father passed out in his chair, the dog asleep beside him. The TV displayed a carrier signal, its whine low and insistent.
Leonardo was confused now, and that annoyed him. As a human, he’d hated white folks, a simple and clean emotion that was neither unique nor unjustified. He’d seen the results of carpetbagger racism, watched it feed the self-pity of the poor whites around him, and experienced firsthand the violence that sprang from it. His hatred spared neither young nor old, rich nor poor, male nor female. He hated pretty white girls as much, and for the same reasons, as ugly white boys.
After becoming a vampire, though, his hatred had changed. No longer needing to fear for his life, he prowled the night with an arrogant confidence that often drew the ire of whites. His own brutal revenge on any who dared accost him was one reason he’d ended up in Memphis so far from his birthplace in rural South Carolina. In the city, a single death drew little attention. But eventually the hatred had, if not faded, become something that was more amusement than anything else. How could he not laugh at the certainty that he could quickly and easily kill any of the so-called superior race? How could that not be funny?