Vile Blood

by Max Wilde

  “To take the boy.”

  Junior stared at her expressionless profile. She was chewing gum and she blew a bubble, a pink balloon swelling from her mouth for a second before she popped it with a smack.

  “Go on.”

  “Don’t know nothin’ more. Expect it’s some kinda sacrifice, you’re intendin’.”

  “He talk to you often?”

  “The Devil?”

  “Uh huh.”

  She shrugged. “We’ve conversed since I was a kid. Since I kilt my step daddy.” She turned to look at him. “I can help you take the boy.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “You’re a cripple.”

  “I’m recuperating.”

  “Whatever.”

  They drove for a minute and he stared out at the wasteland and understood that she had been sent to him.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can help.”

  “There’s but one thing I would ask in return.”

  “Mnnnn?”

  “When the time comes for you to kill me, that you do it with some ceremony, so I’m assured of a passage to the other side.”

  There was something almost touching about her formal locutions. He could see her hunched over a computer in an internet café, twisting a lock of her hair, chewing gum, reading aloud from some web arcana: 666.com, beelzebub.com, gotothedevil.com.

  But he had to concede that this Della was a fellow traveler, no matter her provenance, and as they cruised along the freeway, Junior couldn’t help but marvel at the nature of things. The blonde girl at wheel was a dead ringer for boy’s aunt. The Deputy’s sister.

  Skye.

  And, of course, the boy was just bait. Skye Martindale was the flame drawing Junior ever southward.

  45

  It was the perfect cliché, fodder for untold pulp novels and B-movies: a road through the desert, a young blonde hitchhiker and a huge, tattooed trucker with more gums than teeth and a mind like a pit latrine.

  A cliché, sure, and no less annoying for Skye that the trucker was a woman.

  “So, where you headed, little lady?” the bull dyke asked, double-clutching and shifting down, shouting over the banshee howl of Steven Tyler.

  “I told you.”

  “Yeah, but once you get to that town, you got some young stud waiting all hot and hard?”

  Taking her little nicotine-yellow eyes off the road and undressing Skye, who felt a moment’s fear before she remembered who she was and what she could do.

  “No,” she said.

  “What, you don’t like men? Hell, that’s okay, I don’t much care for ’em neither.”

  “I like them fine, but I’m single right now.”

  “Single and rrrrrr-eady to mingle,” the woman said in an attempt at a game show voice.

  Skye looked out over the desert, ignoring her, calculating the distance home.

  The dyke latched onto Skye’s knee with her right hand, the fingers wrinkled and gingery, nails bitten and filthy, each digit encircled by a ring: skulls, swastikas and poker dice.

  Skye wanted to rip the bitch’s hand off and slap her with it but she found a smile somewhere. “Really, hard as you are to resist, I’m just not into women.”

  “Don’t knock it till you tried it.”

  The fingers crabbed up Skye’s leg, getting too close to her zipper to ignore. She grabbed the woman’s hand and swung it back onto the gearshift.

  “Whoa, that’s quite a grip you got there. I like that.” The trucker laughed, undeterred, and started pumping at the brakes, working through endless gears, the rig bucking and seething as it slowed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, you’ll see, little lady. You’ll see.”

  The semi crunched onto the shoulder and came to a stop. The trucker turned and reached for Skye, the dockland stink of her lust thick in the air.

  Skye, controlling The Other the best she could, pushed the woman away with just enough juice to shift her backward. The bitch cackled and swung a fist that connected with Skye’s jaw before she had a chance to see it coming.

  She was dazed for a moment, felt hands at her belt, sweaty fingers probing inside her pants.

  The Other kicked in and Skye surfaced from the swoon and returned a punch that shattered most of the bones in woman’s face and skull, killing her instantly.

  “Oh shit,” Skye said, eyeing the impossible gear shift and pedals.

  Hell, she could just about drive Minty’s little automatic.

  Skye opened the door and jumped down, her sneakers crunching on the gravel. The road stretched empty in both directions.

  She started walking toward home, listening for the sound of a vehicle. Heard only the call of a buzzard gliding on a thermal high above.

  46

  “He was a good man,” Doc Farnsworth said, standing beside Gene at Milt Lavender’s bedside

  “He was.”

  Gene, searching for words of greater significance, came up empty. A long way from the teenager who’d quoted T.S. Elliot and Marlowe and was tipped to go on up to the city to take a diploma in letters. A man who’d pruned himself back, scaled down his ambitions, adopted the small town locutions that were the stuff of his everyday.

  To mask his emotional autism he took his uncle’s hand in his own. He expected no moment of transcendence and wasn’t disappointed. It was just the hand of a dead old man who had been winnowed to the bone by cancer, skin cooling now the last charge of life had left him.

  “Where’s the nurse?” he asked.

  “Gone to row some other poor sonofabitch across the river Styx. I swear, that woman is Death’s own handmaiden.”

  Farnsworth, tall and well covered, with a flushed face and a thatch of white hair, chuckled as he clapped Gene on the back. He turned and lifted his battered bag from a chair beside the bed.

  “I’ll give you a moment, Gene, then I’d appreciate a word in the parlor.”

  Gene nodded and the doctor wheezed his way out, closing the door, lighting a cigarette when he was in the passageway.

  Gene sat down, adjusting the creases of his uniform pants. “Uncle, remember you givin’ me a piece of advice when I was maybe twelve or thirteen?” The dead man didn’t reply. “You said, ‘Gene, never kick a fresh turd on a hot day.’ Well, I’ve gone and dropkicked a pile of shit, and it’s messed up my boots real good.”

  He slumped down in the chair, his chin resting on his chest, eyes fixed on the poorly rendered oil painting of a vase of flowers that hung crooked on the wall. He sat for a while, the muffled tick of the grandfather clock reaching through the parlor wall, then he stood and left the room without a backward glance.

  He found Farnsworth sitting with a tumbler of whiskey and a cigarette. The doctor held up his glass.

  “I reckon Lavender’s not about to object to me drinkin’ his liquor. Can I fix you one?” Gene shook his head. “Okay, I’m switchin’ hats now, and talkin’ as mayor of this sorry-assed town. Consider yourself sworn in as acting sheriff.”

  Gene shook his head. “Nossir, I’m not available.”

  “Bullshit, Gene. We all know you’ll be the next sheriff come election time.”

  “I won’t be running.”

  “What nonsense is this?”

  “I’m fixin’ to quit, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Quit the sheriff’s department?”

  “And the town. Me and my boy both. Just as soon as I get me a full tank of gas and a good set of tires.”

  “Is this some kind of grief got hold of you?” Farnsworth said, battling his way out of the chair.

  “Nossir. Just think it’s time we moved on,” Gene said. “Swear in Bobby Heck.”

  “Bobby Heck is a goddam retard.”

  “But an honest lawman.”

  Farnsworth fixed his clever eyes on Gene. “Somethin’ you want to tell me, Gene?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Well,” the old man said, shaking his head, but he took Gene’s hand when it was offered.
<
br />   Gene retrieved his hat from near the door and fixed it on his head, his eyes finding his haunted face in the glass of the faded portrait. Letting himself out of the house, he walked across to the cruiser, ready to fetch his boy and ride north until the road ran out.

  47

  Reverend Jimmy Tincup came to consciousness with something tickling his manhood that lay shriveled on his fat belly. Opening one eye—an effort, the lids were gummed together by pus—he saw a fly feeding on the glaze of semen dried on his foreskin.

  When he tried to lift his right arm to scare away the fly he was unable to move it and became convinced that the cocktail of booze and aphrodisiacs that he’d been living on these past days had resulted in an aneurism. Panicking, he managed to jerk his left arm aloft and swatted at the fly, which lifted off lazily and droned away out the open door into the blinding daylight.

  Still unable to move his other arm, Tincup saw that it was tethered to the bed frame by a headscarf, and little flashbacks of last night detonated like dirty bombs in his insulted brain. A cornucopia of whores. Mescal. And even—he was ashamed to recall—scalding lungs-full of the Milky Way’s product; breaking a commandment about not sampling his own wares.

  Tincup sat up and coughed, a gout of phlegm landing on his pallid thigh.

  “Marisol!”

  What had been intended as a shout emerged from his chest as a whisper. He tried again. No different. His voice had fallen victim to the alcohol and the drugs.

  Tincup loosened the headscarf holding his wrist and stood, waited until the tilt-a-whirl ride ended, and got himself to the bathroom where he puked long and loud until he was dripping sweat, a beard of vomit dangling from his chin.

  He wiped his face on a make-up smeared towel, found a robe lying on the floor and covered himself. He searched the room for his phone and found it lying in a nest of milky condoms and blister packs of Viagra.

  He squinted at the phone. No messages. What the hell had become of Drum and his mission?

  Battling to focus, Tincup prodded at the face of the phone until he saw Drum’s name appear, and hit the green button. The buzz in his ear was painful, so he held the phone away from his head until he heard Drum’s baritone.

  “Why the fuck haven’t I heard from you, Sheriff?” he asked, finding remnants of his voice, before he realized he was listening to Drum’s message. He waited for the beep—got him flinching—and told the giant to call him. Immediately.

  When Tincup dropped the phone and lurched toward the door he became aware of some commotion coming from one of the rooms that encircled the empty swimming pool. Male and female voices, shouting.

  Pausing in the doorway, the sunlight lasering his eyes to blindness, Tincup could hear curses in both English and Spanish, the slam of more than one car door and the sound of vehicles driven in anger.

  Shielding his eyes with a shaky hand, Tincup saw a silver Audi and two pick-up trucks heading for the road at speed. Marisol, barenaked, stood in the doorway of the room opposite, her breasts heaving as she howled and one-fingered the departing convoy, drawing an audience of whores and meth cookers.

  “Marisol!” This time Tincup’s voice emerged at almost true volume and she turned to him, standing with her hands on her wide hips. “What’s all this commotion?”

  Marisol ducked into the room and emerged wearing a pair of fluffy mules and nothing else. She held the hand of the naked child whore who was bleeding from the nose.

  The woman and the girl came over to Tincup. “Those men, they want for this child to do things that are disgusting.”

  For a moment Tincup was intrigued: what could possibly disgust a harlot from the borderlands? Then his instincts as a businessman kicked in.

  “Did they pay?”

  “They no pay.”

  He seized her by the throat. “Just what kind of a whore are you?”

  She slapped his hand away. “I no more your whore. No more. And not this child.”

  Tincup shook his head. “I think you may care to rephrase that.”

  “Rephrase your needle dick, motherfucker.” Tincup took a step back as the big naked woman, her flesh hot and hard, came at him. He saw she held a cell phone in her hand, in flagrant contravention of his edict, and she shoved it in his face. “Look at this.”

  He looked. A stream of photographs showed his late wife Holly lying dead in the single-wide. Holly lying beside a shallow grave in the desert. Holly covered by a mound of rocks.

  Tincup looked up into the face of the whore. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “You gonna pay, you bastard. You gonna pay big, or I’m gonna Twitter your motherfucking ass.”

  And with that Marisol took the girl’s hand and marched off, her great haunches rolling, the child a wisp at her side.

  Tincup was rendered dizzy and he sank into one of the chairs on the porch, where he sat for some time, regarding the bleached and peeling Milky Way sign. Then he went inside and found his phone and dialed Drum again. Got the same message.

  Searching for his clothes, Tincup somehow got himself dressed in his black suit and creased white shirt. He ran a hand through his hair, found his car keys and went out to the old Eldorado—once-red paintwork now a dirty brown, upholstery torn and molting—that hunkered in the scant shade of the sign.

  Tincup fired up the engine and, pursued by dust and smoke, he set course for the road.

  The drive to town was mercifully short and within ten minutes he was among the sagging buildings and advancing decay. He stopped outside Drum’s house, heartened by the sight of the sheriff’s cruiser parked in the driveway.

  Tincup levered himself from the car and hurried down the pathway. “Drum! Goddamit, Drum, where are you?”

  When he knuckled the door it creaked open.

  Tincup stepped into the cluttered parlor, his eyes taking a few moments to adjust to the gloom. What he saw almost felled him. Yards of intestines were draped across the furniture, blood dried thick and viscous on the floor. Drum’s head was impaled on a hat stand, empty of eyes and tongue, skull flapped back to show half his brain had been eaten, tooth marks vivid in the jelly of his lobes.

  For Tincup God had become a threadbare concept and the Devil a convenient stick with which to beat recalcitrant disciples, but as he took in the carnage he experienced a resurgence of his faith. And if there were a battle between God and the Devil the preacher had no doubt in his mind about who was winning, and, like Moses, he knew it was time to get the hell out of the wilderness.

  48

  The abandoned gas station was just as Junior Cotton remembered it: the trio of rusted pumps standing vigil over a concrete forecourt stubbled with weeds; the flat roofed workshop, windows empty of glass; the sun-faded Mountain Dew vending machine on the porch of the looted store.

  Lifting himself from the Chevrolet, his muscles cramped after the long hours of driving, Junior stretched, taking in the parched landscape. When he adjusted the peak of his cap to cut the glare he saw the Milky Way sign poking up out of the rock and sand not a mile away. He wondered if Tincup was still there, and what remained of his flock.

  He heard the scratch of a flint and turned to see the girl beside him, firing up a cigarette with her Zippo. He hadn’t allowed her to smoke in the car.

  “This where we gonna keep him? The boy?” she asked, exhaling fumes.

  Junior nodded.

  “The building don’t look none too secure.”

  “Come,” he said, walking unsteadily toward the pumps.

  Della fell in beside him and hooked her arm through his, supporting some of his weight. Anybody seeing them would have taken them for sweethearts with a fascination for the flyblown detritus of the last century.

  Junior stopped and leaned on one of the disemboweled pumps, its counter frozen forever on seven dollars and fifty-three cents.

  “See that?” he asked, pointing at metal manhole cover sunk into the concrete. She nodded and he said, “Lift it.”

  Della crouched,
cigarette gripped in the side of her mouth, eyes squinting against the smoke, and gripped the handle welded onto the cover. He could see the strain in her body as she tried to move it, but it wouldn’t budge. She took a drag on her cigarette and coughed smoke.

  She stood and said, “Wait.”

  He watched her disappear into what had been the workshop. After a minute she returned carrying a length of pipe about three feet long. She shoved the pipe through the handle, jammed the one end into the concrete and leaned all her weight on the other.

  The manhole lifted and she let it fall back onto the concrete.

  She peered into the interior, took the pipe and dropped it down the hole. After a second it clanged and echoed inside the empty gasoline storage tank.

  “I see where you’re going here, but won’t he suffocate?”

  “Not if we leave the manhole open just a crack. Anyway, we don’t want him alive too long, do we?”

  She nodded, sucked the cigarette to nothing and flicked the butt away.

  “When do we take the little fucker?”

  The sound of a car speeding down the potholed road got Junior sliding behind the pump, staring through its gutted interior as an old Eldorado came bumping into view. When he saw the silver Hollywood hair flapping in the breeze he had to laugh.

  Junior Cotton believed in living in the moment, remaining alert to the pure potential of the now where there was no such thing as a coincidence—it was all synchronicity, all part of a greater, grander scheme.

  As his mama had said, “Dear heart, any old dullard can plan, but the person who can improvise, now they’re touched by magic.”

  So, as Tincup flew by toward the Milky Way, his face a pickle of consternation, Junior turned to the girl and said, “You say you like killing people?”

  “I do believe I have acquired a taste for it.”

  “Then let’s go kill somebody.”

  He let her help him back to the Chevy and directed her toward the Milky Way.

  How elegant this all was. Before Junior took the boy of the lawman who’d once bested him, before he drew the heat of thing the boy called his aunt, he needed to test this girl, Della. Needed to see she wasn’t all hat and no cattle, as his mama used to say, putting on a drawl thick as molasses and making him laugh and laugh and laugh.