Love in Vein

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Chris thought about this and took another drag on the joint. “You said you feed on more than just blood and the fertilized egg. You take the emotions, too.”

  Geraldine killed the joint. “Yes, all the emotions the woman ever felt toward the man who fertilized that egg. I’ve destroyed marriages that way, emptying a newlywed bride of her love for her husband along with her ovum. I’ve also healed rape victims of their trauma, taking away the pain and fear and sense of violation. I can be a monster or a saint.”

  At some point, Chris wasn’t sure when, they’d started holding hands. She shouldn’t be feeling so damned content, not barely an hour after her shocked nausea, but she was. Everybody had their secrets; everyone was something of a monster inside. At least Geraldine’s secret was such a material one. She did what she had to do to live, that was all. It’s not like there was anything worse that Chris could find out about her.

  “If I was a more charitable sort, that would be all I did,” continued Geraldine. “I’d work at a Rape Crisis Center and become a regular angel of mercy.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I’m a sybaritic bitch. I need variety, pain and joy. I hope you liked my mussels, but could the best cause in the world make you eat nothing but them all your life?”

  Instead of answering, Chris leaned into Geraldine and kissed her. “You must have seen a lot,” she said when their lips parted. “Over all the years, I mean. Just how old are you?”

  “Old enough.”

  The evasion didn’t bother Chris. “Ever meet anybody famous?”

  “Dorothy Parker, once. She had a great horsey laugh, and made a joke about my height. I saw Billie Holiday perform. A few decades later, I was in Judy Collins’s apartment when Leonard Cohen played ‘Suzanne’ for the first time.” Geraldine sang a couple of bars in a lilting contralto.

  When she stopped, Chris imagined that the rustling branches continued whispering the tune. “Why did you come here?”

  “To be somewhere else. New York isn’t what it once was. There was that article, couple of years back, that listed Greensboro as one of the best places in the country to live.”

  Chris snickered. “Lots of locals were smug about that. The rest of us had a good laugh.”

  She stroked Geraldine’s face and Geraldine kissed her hand. She touched Chris’s finger with her tongue, then with something that slid out from beneath that tongue, something long and prehensile, that coiled around Chris’s index finger like one of the worm snakes she sometimes rescued from Roscoe’s jaws. Unlike a snake, it was warm and wet.

  “You can’t scare me,” said Chris. “Not anymore.”

  They lay back together, and Geraldine began massaging Chris’s hand, gently kneading the knuckles with her fingers, working the palm with her thumb, and Chris felt her body relaxing by inches, the tension gradually draining from her hand, her arm, her shoulder. She lay on the rough wood, warm and pitted and too soft for splinters, and looked up at the branch-screened sky through narrowed lids. Cicadas were singing around them, trilling their mechanical trill, and if she listened intently, she could also hear crickets and katydids and, somewhere farther off, the baritone lullaby of frogs. Some sort of beetle crawled across her ankle, but that was okay, bugs didn’t bother her. Fireflies flashed their mating beacons in the trees overhead, like tiny novas in the sighing branches.

  Stoned, content, yielding to the night’s chorus and Geraldine’s soothing touch, she never heard the man approach. He’d crept up through the park behind them, rather than sliding down the hill from the sidewalk where the streetlights flickered. The monkey bars groaned and rattled and there he was, a dark shape pulling himself up into view, stinking of dirty clothes and fortified wine.

  “Don’t scream,” he hissed. “I got a gun.”

  Something glinted in his hand, sure enough. Before Chris could even consider how to react, Geraldine lashed out. The weapon dropped onto Chris’s foot, landing heavily enough that she knew it was real, and the man’s hand crunched in Geraldine’s grip. He made a gurgling sound until Geraldine cut him off, shushing him like a child.

  “Sssh,” she said, almost gently. “Now it’s your turn not to scream.”

  Oh Christ, it had been so fast, and this on top of everything else! Chris fumbled for her Zippo, flicked it, finally got it lighted. The flickering light revealed a dirty, gnarled face framed by a dirtier brown beard and faded red bandanna. She recognized the man as one of the regular panhandlers on Tate Street, the rat-faced little cracker who could usually be found drinking Scorpio from a paper bag in front of Ben and Jerry’s. His bloodshot eyes were glassy, his features frozen in a grimace of pain and surprise, and his breath whistled through the gaps where his teeth were missing.

  Geraldine let go of his hand, which definitely looked broken. “You got a knife on you?”

  “Yeah,” he said tonelessly, eyes fixed above and beyond them.

  “Good. Once we’re gone, use it to cut off every toe on your left foot. When you’re done, I want you to eat them. Wait until we’re out of the park.”

  Geraldine vaulted lightly off the platform. “Come on, Chris; let’s leave this creep to his meal. If he’d hurt you, he’d be eating his dick.” Chris wished she was frightened by what happened, by the tone in Geraldine’s voice, but no, even this she could accept. Was she that obsessed? Had Caryl Anne Fugate felt this way about Charlie Starkweather? It didn’t matter. As she backed away from their would-be assailant, who still clung to the side of the platform like a monkey, her foot touched his gun. She was familiar with pistols, had once practiced at the shooting range for the better part of a summer. Acting on impulse, she picked it up, checked the safety, and put it in her purse. Then she jumped off the opposite side of the platform, not landing as lightly as Geraldine.

  Geraldine helped her to her feet and brushed leaves off her. “Don’t worry. He won’t start cutting until we’re gone.” She seemed to be able to see in the dark, for she led Chris back up the grassy hill to the lighted sidewalk, steering her around holes and roots.

  “Did you take the gun because you thought you might need protection from me?”

  Chris looked back down into the darkness, where their would-be mugger (or rapist) was just a dim shape on top of the shadowy platform. She wondered how hard it was to cut off a toe with a pocketknife or switchblade, especially when not using your best hand, and if you could a swallow a big toe without choking. “No. It’s given me an idea, though.”

  “Which is?”

  She wondered if Geraldine could read her mind. “I’ll tell you next time you need to feed.”

  Five weeks later, they took Geraldine’s Honda down I-40 to Fayetteville. Geraldine had the entire Mary Poppins soundtrack on cassette, and they listened to it as they drove, singing “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” and “Spoonful of Sugar” together, with Chris soloing on “Tuppence in the Bank” and Geraldine on “Feed the Birds.” They stopped at a Stuckey’s on the way, where they had meatloaf and fried chicken, and Chris grossed Geraldine out by buying a Pecan Log and a bag of the orange-marshmallow atrocities called Circus Peanuts. Coming through Fort Bragg, some GIs in a Jeep made predictably crude remarks, and Geraldine later said she thought about putting a glamour on them to make them go form a daisy chain on the parade grounds, but the light changed too soon.

  Chris’s father still lived just the other side of the base, right off Bragg Boulevard, a garish ten-mile avenue of Putt-Putts, pawnshops, strip clubs, and used car dealerships, all of them even tackier than such establishments normally are. She’d checked Directory Assistance, then called and gotten his answering machine. But she’d not left a message; the visit was meant to be a surprise. “I doubt he’s changed the lock,” she said, “not in the six years since I left. If he’s not home, we can wait for him.”

  The yard was more overgrown than she remembered it, the house smaller, the piss-yellow paint flaked and peeling. Someone had knocked the head off the lawn jockey, and the dogwoods
were in sorry shape. The porch swing looked as if its warped slats would break if you sat on it, if its rusted chain didn’t. There was a Sports Illustrated, a Southern Bell phone bill, and a Reader’s Digest stuffed into the small mailbox, and she rang twice without getting a response. Maybe he wasn’t in.

  She was fumbling in her purse for the old key when the door opened. Her father stood there in paint-splattered shorts and a dirty, tobacco-stained T-shirt. His sagging man-tits and beer belly were far more prominent than they’d been when she left home, and his hair was much receded, the red peppered now with gray. His smile exposed nicotine-stained teeth.

  “You girls selling something? I don’t mind, when you’re both so pretty.”

  “No, Dad, we’re not selling anything.” Recognition had already dawned in his eyes before she opened her mouth, before he’d quite finished speaking. His smile died. “Chris.”

  “Yeah, it’s me. This is Geraldine.”

  He wasn’t as tall as she remembered, certainly not as tall as Geraldine, whom he didn’t even look at. “I don’t know why you’re here, Chris, but I don’t want you in my house. Not after what you did.”

  During her last year at home, Chris’s father had been dating Peggy Jo, a divorced RN from the local VA hospital. The month before Chris walked out the door, he’d even proposed to her. Peggy Jo had a five-year-old daughter cursed with the name of Cissy, and Chris didn’t want the child to endure any worse hardships. Before running off to Greensboro to live with her maternal Aunts Selma and Anne, she’d written Peggy Jo a long, detailed letter. She later heard the engagement was called off.

  “Still bitter about Peggy Jo, huh?”

  He looked like he’d been slapped, and his right hand balled up into a fist, but he didn’t raise it. He’d seldom ever raised his hand to her when she lived at home. “Get out of here,” he said through clenched yellow teeth. “You got something to talk about, you can call me on the phone.” He started to close the door, but Geraldine casually put out her arm and stopped it.

  His face was very red until he saw the gun in Chris’s hand, and then it went white. Chris knew that Geraldine could have controlled him, but she wanted to do it this way.

  “Invite us inside, Dad.”

  “You come to rob me, Christabel? You’ll be disappointed. I don’t own shit anymore. Hell, I’m about to lose this house.”

  Geraldine put her other arm around Chris, who leaned into her. “I don’t care about your troubles, Dad. Invite me and my girlfriend in or I’ll blow your brains out right here on the stoop.” Thankfully, no neighbors were in sight. If he proved obstinate, she might have to let Geraldine take over after all.

  That wasn’t necessary. With an exhalation that might have been a sigh, might have been a mumbled prayer, he backed down the hall, letting them inside. Chris locked the door after them.

  The living room was rearranged, and the old goosedown couch was replaced by a sagging vinyl one, brown foam showing through where its cushions were split. The mounted smallmouth bass still hung over the mantel, dust heavy on its glass eyes. The old stereo, a deluxe sixties hi-fi system with huge speakers, was gone, and from the crummy picture on the TV she could tell the cable was disconnected. The big armchair was still there.

  “Take your pants off and sit in the chair,” Chris said quietly.

  “Are you crazy?”

  Geraldine watched, cool and distant, her face impassive. “It might be easier if I took over.”

  Chris shook her head. “Not yet. Do as I say, Dad, or you’re dead.” She put a bullet in the sofa to emphasize her point.

  The little .25 was loud in the dark living room, if not so loud as guns in the movies. Fortunately, the nearest houses weren’t close enough for her to be worried about the neighbors hearing anything. Her ears rang and the room stank of gunpowder, drowning out the odor of beer and mildew.

  Chris’s father stood there, his eyes bugging out, his mouth open as wide as that of the varnished bass on the mantel. A big blue vein had appeared in his temple, one Chris could not remember ever seeing before. Although his face was still deathly pale, his ears had gone bright red.

  “You crazy bitch!”

  “Next one goes into you, Dad. Now take off your pants and sit down.”

  He did. Unlike the protester last month, he wore respectable boxer shorts. At Chris’s order, these came off, too.

  Chris handed the gun to Geraldine. “Shoot him if he moves a muscle.” She knew Geraldine could handle this with less fuss, would probably have to cast a glamour over him soon, but she wanted him good and scared first. People under Geraldine’s control were too calm.

  Chris undid her belt and kicked off her jeans, then wiggled out of her panties. She pulled her T-shirt over her head and unhooked her bra. “Like what you see, Dad?”

  “Please Chrissie, I got a heart condition…”

  The familiar “Chrissie” spurred her into action, snarling in anger. Grabbing him by the ankles, she pulled him bodily out of the chair, so that he landed with a thump on the floor. She looked down at him, flat on his fat ass, his hands thrown up for protection. “Okay,” she said to Geraldine. “Give him an erection.”

  The tumescent penis also looked smaller than she remembered it. His eyes had gone glassy, but she thought she could still read something in them. Let him stay aware of this, she thought.

  “Can you make him stay like that, even if we leave the room?”

  Geraldine nodded, neither approval nor disapproval on her alabaster face. Chris took her by the hand and led her down the hall to her father’s bedroom, where she pulled the dingy sheets off the mattress. “Okay,” she said. “Get me good and wet.”

  It took a while, under those conditions, but eventually Geraldine’s tongue worked its spell. “I’m sorry you have to watch this,” said Chris as she got up. “If I could do it without your help, I would.”

  “That’s okay,” said Geraldine, wiping her lips with a tissue. “I made you watch once.”

  Back in the living room, Chris’s father still lay on his back, penis pointing at the ceiling. Still lubricated by passion, Chris slid on top of it and began moving up and down. “Pick up the gun,” she said to Geraldine. “Come close and hold it on him, but give him control of himself again.”

  “Oh God,” mumbled her father on the floor. “Oh God oh God oh God.” His erection, however, remained firm.

  “She’s going to kill you as soon as you come,” said Chris through gritted teeth. “You wanted this all these years, to be inside me. Now you are. How long can you keep from coming?”

  His eyes were rolled back to the whites, sweat streaming in rivulets down his red-and-white face. His lips moved, but all that came out of his mouth was spittle and a long, blubbery groan.

  Chris bounced up and down, urging him on, snarling, pushing on his flabby chest, his doughy, sweat-matted male breasts yielding beneath her stiffened palms. She went dry almost at once, gritting her teeth against the rough friction of his penis, hoping he wouldn’t lose the erection. Just when she thought he’d never be able to come, that he’d go soft inside her, she felt him spurt. His mouth was open wider than ever, roped with spittle, big blood vessels flaring in his forehead and smaller ones in his eyes. A wet rattling sound was coming out of his mouth, which began filling with blood from his bitten tongue.

  “Jesus!” said Chris, shooting backwards off him, scuttling into Geraldine’s steady legs. “Shit, is he dying?”

  His body arched, his head and heels thumped into the thin, dirty carpet, then he was still. There was one wet, wheezing breath, a second, then no more. Chris heard nothing but her own heart, her own breath.

  Geraldine walked to him and checked his pulse. “Even if we dared call an ambulance, I don’t think it would be on time.”

  Chris pulled on her pants and shirt, stuffed her underwear into her purse, fumbled for her shoes. “Tell me it worked, please, just tell me it worked, that I won’t be stuck with this!”

  Geraldine knelt be
side her. “Easy, honey. Easy. It worked.”

  All fortitude gone, Chris clutched her leg like a child, her face suddenly wet and stinging. “Take me out of here, please,” she whispered, ashamed of her own weakness.

  Geraldine helped her up. “It’ll be over, soon. No more bad dreams.”

  Chris struggled to regain something of herself. “I hope not. I didn’t want him dead.” Taking a deep breath, she found she could stand, could walk. The worst was done, the worst of all worsts; only the final purification remained, and that could be done somewhere else, away from this place of the dead.

  The weather had changed while they were inside; the horizon pregnant with rain, thunder booming somewhere beyond Fort Bragg. “Great,” said Chris sourly, pointing at the sky. “It’ll be a long drive in this.”

  Geraldine opened the car door for her. “That’s okay. We can stop at a motel and listen to the storm. There I’ll make it all better.”

  An hour later they were in bed in an Econolodge in Sanford, making fierce love on the cheap but clean motel sheets, Chris’s back arching and her hands clenching sweatily as Geraldine’s mouth whispered secret words inside her, thunder rolling outside, lightning flashing through the blinds. The power went out, but that was okay, there in the cool darkness where nothing existed but the two of them, Chris’s cunt and Geraldine’s mouth, the touch, the tremors, the stirring deep inside, the purging flood. As before, there was pain, but also as before, it quickly receded, and the rush of pleasure was stronger this time, a torrent of what William Blake might have meant by Crimson Joy. Her blood was the Blood of the Lamb, absolving all as it flowed out of her into Geraldine.

  “I want to be the only one who feeds you,” said Chris when she could talk. “The only one. Sweet blood and tender tissue, and emotions you never tasted before.”

  Geraldine kissed her and Chris probed with her tongue, tasting her own fluids in Geraldine’s mouth. They lay like that for some time, the pale thin girl and the ruddy voluptuous one, one sticky at the crotch, the other at the mouth, their arms and legs entwined, listening to the storm’s roar and murmur. The thunder rolled past, fading in the distance, and then they could hear only the rain falling, hammering the motel roof, rattling the window frame and the housing of the air-conditioning unit, washing the world clean.