In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

She sees her brother’s socked foot kicking.

  John’s hand, pounding at the stranger’s shoulder.

  And blood. Blood dripping thick and red upon the sheets.

  Later, he moves in close to her, and his blade touches her skin across the muscle that joins her shoulder and neck, and the flesh divides, and the pain is not sweet or exquisite. She stands there, looking at the ruin of John upon the bed, Luke crying against the dead boy’s chest. Blood flows from her neck and over her collarbone, beneath her patchwork dress, into the hollow between her breasts. She does not move as the pale man touches his lips to her skin and whispers his promises: how the fear growing daily in her belly since she and Matthew coupled in the barn will be no more, how the kiss of immortality is a never-ending kiss—

  lies, all lies, he is a liar

  —how the only pleasure she will seek will be the hot, pure pleasure of blood.

  She closes her eyes, on the verge of the abyss, and now he opens the inside of his own left arm with his knife. His cold skin touches her lips like fire as he shoves the wound crudely against her face. He is laughing, roaring with the wind. She comes back to this plane and understands what she is meant to do, and what he has bid her do, and she seizes his arm and plunges her face into the gash like a woman in a desert, come to a river.

  Outside, the storm tears at the little clapboard house, and the sand piles up against the walls and windows in deep, suffocating drifts. The doors of the barn peel away, and the horses inside run screaming into the choking dark.

  She wakes in a musty, oil-smelling corner. Dim light. A steady rocking rhythm beneath her. Lightning and thunder outside. A horrible, high-pitched screeching, metal on metal. A boxcar. Her eyes adjusting to the dark. I am on a train. How long, she wonders, her head thick. How did I even get here? She has no memory of anything, not right away.

  She sees him: the pale man in the ragged coat, sitting at the far end of the boxcar on an upturned apple crate, hunched over and shivering, and most of it comes back to her.

  Matthew and John. Dead.

  A smile in the lantern light. A terrible, gut-turning grin.

  A knife.

  Blood.

  The pale man sits with a lantern at his feet, a deck of cards in hand. He tosses each card at the upturned pipe of his tall black hat. Every third or fourth card sails neatly into the hat. The rest litter the straw around it. He is a living corpse. The whites of his eyes are shot through with red and the dark pupils are milky. Veins pulse like worms beneath the skin over his temples.

  She sits upright against the boxcar wall.

  But Luke, little Luke. He is not dead. Pa will return and find the baby. Dig out the porch from the dirt the storm left and find the crying, hungry baby. All is not lost.

  Even as she thinks this, she touches her own stomach and feels the sticky residue of something between her thighs—

  no oh no no no

  —and she knows: the life inside her is gone, as smothered by the thing that happened as the house itself was buried by the storm.

  She gives out a low, keening sound, which trails away into silence.

  The pale man watches her for a while, then stands from the crate and disappears into shadow, staggering with the shifting weight of the boxcar on the tracks. She hears a scuffling, and soon he steps back into the soft circle of light cast by the lantern near the crate. He lumbers toward her, dragging her last living brother by the arm. The boy wears only underclothes, his face dirty and streaked from a long night of crying, bits of hay clinging to his plump bare legs. The pale man draws the boy up in the crook of his elbow. He reaches into his threadbare coat and takes out the short curved knife and before Ruby can find her voice to speak the boy’s name, his throat is cut. His body tossed to fall still-twitching on the boards at her feet.

  She knows that she should scream. That she should cry. That this should somehow break her. But she only stares at her brother’s upturned face, small and round and gurgling, and the longer she stares into his fading eyes, the less human she feels. Her very soul is draining from her body as surely as the boy’s life drains from his. And something else, she realizes, is filling the emptiness.

  “Eat,” the pale man says. He turns back to his apple crate, where he sits to watch her. A strange look of expectation on his sallow face. As if she were a stray animal, a thing to be tamed.

  She does not move. She touches her brother’s cheek, puts her hand upon his chest, which is rising and falling but slowly, slowly. She takes away her hand and sees the blood on the tips of her fingers. Bright crimson and warm.

  “Eat,” the pale man says again. “For both of us. Make me strong again, child.”

  And then it happens, as sudden as day dropping away to night: the hunger inside her wakes. It shakes off sleep and steps out of its cave and into the night, a new and steaming thing, and above it the stars look down with cold indifference upon its single, murderous intent.

  She touches her fingers to her lips.

  What am I now? she wonders. What evil thing am I?

  She eats.

  New Orleans

  September 19, 1980

  Only the blood makes us real.

  The thought comes to her out of sleep like the last of a dream burning up across the dark. She wakes in a narrow gravel alley between two vaults, curled beneath a rough blanket. Distant I-10 traffic thundering along the overpass, a purple twilight sky arching above the cemetery. The dream the same as the day before and the day before that: she, alone on the porch of a farmhouse where the winds tear the plains and shake the walls. One hand to her brow, squinting against the merciless sun upon the land, the crops outstretched before her and dying for lack of water and money. Soon a great black cloud of topsoil comes rushing over the fields, blotting out the day, burying tractors and barns and houses and lives. The year is 1935, and she is a girl named Ruby, and there is no rain that summer. Only wind and sun and dust. And the coming of the stranger, his long, lean shape distant on the road, just ahead of the storm. Her pale man.

  Gone now, she thinks. Disappeared from her side less than a year after Borgo. She, waking one sundown to an empty bed in a rich hotel high in the Ozark Mountains. Wrapped in the white bed linens beside her like a cruel farewell upon a pillow: the corpse of a beautiful boy-child, no more than five or six years old, his throat slit. The blood all run out and cold. The mockery of a parting gift.

  Only the blood makes us real.

  She tosses off the blanket—found in a Dumpster the night before—and wanders among the crumbling tombs in the early dark. She has no body heat and so, despite the hot and sticky evening, she walks in her jacket with her hands deep in her pockets. Shakes off the groggy shadow of day-sleep. Votive candles burn outside crypts, dripping wax along the bleached dry marble. She imagines the bones inside, shelved and peaceful and cared for. Somewhere in this cemetery, she knows, is the grave of a man who famously took pictures of prostitutes and scratched out their faces. She forgets his name. She looks down at her hands and sees the first faint cracks in the webbing between her fingers, her own monstrous blood scratching her out. She has not fed since leaving Mississippi. Since the truck driver. He tasted sour, off. She has not been—

  real

  —hungry since.

  She rounds a corner and finds a group of kids—two boys and a girl, grungy long hair and beards and the girl half-naked and covered in bruises—huddled at the end of a narrow path between two vaults. They’re tying off their arms with rubber tubes and putting needles in their flesh. Above them, a great white marble angel spreads its wings, hides them in her shadow, which is long in the rising moonlight. The angel has no head.

  She turns away, disgusted by their smell—the stink of need.

  She goes over the wall and up Ursulines, then onto Chartres. Makes a slow circuit around Jackson Square, where the psychics camp out with tables and crystal balls and Tarot cards. She lingers where an old man with a white beard makes music on the rims of glass bowls filled wi
th water. Candles burn on his table and light the bowls with a honey-golden glow. She likes the music he makes: high and delicate and fragile. It reminds her of something she can’t place, the hum of a woman’s voice, perhaps her mother’s. Whatever it is, it is human, and most things human left her long ago.

  Like him.

  He had not been human, her pale man, but yes, he had left her, too.

  She turns back into the heart of the Quarter, finds a shop door to sit in. She holds a cigarette, hunkered down in her dirty, ragged jeans, a Led Zeppelin T-shirt beneath the denim jacket. Here, it will not be long before someone—a college boy, a bartender, a busker with a horn—offers her a light. Tonight, it is a piano player in a fedora, on his way to a gig at a bar where he bangs out tunes in a corner while people wait for tables. He smells of cheap cologne. She takes his wrist between her fingers as the light is offered. Her stomach rolls like a bark on an unsettled sea. Her blood rushes. Her heart pounds. But she hesitates.

  I move through this city like a rat in the walls, she thinks. Like a spider in the highest darkest corner. The souls who wander out of the bars and juke joints and cafes in the small hours of the night are lost and forgotten. No one misses them. I once ate a priest in Savannah, Georgia, she thinks. Christmas, 1954. I lured him down to the river, away from his Bible and his God. I touched him and he saw in me the true eternal.

  Now, she looks up into the dim brown eyes of the piano player, a light scruff on his neck where she will drink, the match burning forgotten between his fingers. She remembers the face of the boy her pale man had left on the pillow at the hotel in the mountains, a pair of glassy eyes the same color as this piano player’s and just as vague, just as stupid in death. The oddest of things to remember, so many years between now and then. She hears her pale man’s voice—Love is not our lot, Ruby, only blood—and lets the piano man’s wrist drop. He steps back, one heel of his black wingtip missing the drop of the curb, and stumbles backward into the street. He drops the burning match with a hiss and sucks his thumb, then moves on down the street, slowly remembering he has a gig at some restaurant, a place to be.

  She’s leaning against the wrought-iron fence that encloses the rear courtyard of St. Louis Cathedral—where the statue of Christ with his arms outstretched stands tall and impotent—when a girl and a boy go rushing past, the girl moving quickly to stay ahead of the boy. Rue can scent the musk they leave in their wake, he a soldier in his army fatigues, the girl in a short blue skirt and heels, she the one he no doubt writes letters home to, letters that never get answered. The girl is eighteen, maybe nineteen. Half a block up on the corner of St. Ann, the girl rounds on the boy and plants the flat of her palm against his chest, stopping him cold. There, a fight plays out on the cracked sidewalk, the couple’s shadows long and wild on the broken pavers.

  The hour is late, and the Quarter has emptied save the nighthawks who cross in the warm, small circles of lamplight between streets.

  The fight gets loud, then louder.

  The girl spits an insult at the boy.

  Next comes the firecracker snap of the soldier’s hand striking flesh.

  Rue feels her own pulse quicken, instinct rumbling deep down. Hunter. Killer. Terror. She feels the pangs in her teeth and sinuses, these so like the pangs she once felt below her waist when she was human and seventeen, the ache and need for something primal to happen. Her senses open up and the world floods in. She can taste the dirt between the sidewalk pavers, the green grass growing up through the cracks, the salt in the air, the bogs and the muddy slick lizard stink of alligators miles away.

  The girl runs. She staggers on the broken sidewalk, then bends and hops out of her heels, one at a time. Clutching the shoes against her breasts, she runs. A drunken, jagged kind of run, headed nowhere but away from what’s behind. Beneath the dripping iron balconies and past the darkened, shuttered galleries.

  At first, the soldier lets her go, turning in a half-circle and scratching his head, as if he does not know what to do. Then he whirls and puts his boot through the glass pane of a rickety shop door. After that, he gives chase.

  Rue waits a count of ten, then steps away from the fence and follows.

  The ache has spread through her gums and jaw and down the back of her neck and into her gut, and her heart beats inside the cage of her chest like the wings of a frenzied bird. She walks quickly, nerves alight. She listens for the soldier’s footfalls, for the girl’s voice. She hears the distant rumblings of a garbage truck trundling through the streets, the light clop of a horse. She can still smell them, a salty umbilicus stretching between boy and girl, but it’s growing fainter, mingling with the myriad sour, foul smells of the city. Mold and urine and shit, booze and puke. Horse and kitchen grease and the ripe, vinegar stink of restaurant garbage. Wet stones. Rosemary. Engine oil. Their smell grows fainter. She turns down a side street and goes quickly past a high-walled courtyard, banana trees behind iron spikes and broken colored glass set in stone. She turns onto Dauphine, and here, stretching left toward Canal and right toward Esplanade, are the crooked quiet stoops of houses that have stood since before this country was new. They are silent, dark. And the boy and the girl are gone.

  She can feel it: the hot surge rolling in to break.

  She has lost them.

  In the middle of the street, she closes her eyes, breathes deeply.

  Once, twice, thrice.

  From an alleyway between a white slatted fence and the nearest house, a glass bottle rolls across asphalt.

  She looks around. The street is wide and wet and empty.

  Another sound: a low, soft sigh of pleasure, and something rustles behind the fence. She moves slowly along the boards. Peers around the corner.

  The solider presses the girl against the rough brick of the house, his fatigues around his ankles, her legs wrapped around his waist. He holds her with his hands beneath her and thrusts quietly into her, and her face against his shoulder is tight with a grim, fervent pleasure. She gasps, her arms around his neck. Her fingers arching like claws, digging into the olive fabric of his collar, the skin on his sun-browned neck. The girl’s bare soles, Rue notices, are black with the filth of her flight through the streets. Her shoes lying crooked upon the pavers.

  Rue steps back from the scene and looks down at her own cracking skin on the backs of her hands. She touches the locket at her throat, the one she sometimes forgets she wears. The one that bears the picture of herself in one half, a boy in the other. She forgets she wears it because the metal is cold upon her skin, and her skin is even colder. Her hand slides along the chain, touches the small white scar at the base of her throat, and it hits her as no feeling has in years, a wave that washes the hunger from her blood and leaves her aching with a deeper, more human kind of hurt: I could stand tall beneath a midnight sky bejeweled with the whole of the Milky-Damnéd-Way, she thinks, but here, on this street, now, among these post and brick and plaster sentinels and two stupid children rutting in an alley, I am small. I am nothing. I am fast on my way to the land of not-real-a-tall.

  She lets go of the locket at her throat.

  Only the blood makes us real.

  The boy groans, and the girl presses her face into his ear and whispers the name of God.

  Rue walks away.

  Fort Worth

  September 22

  Rue step-staggers from the bus in the predawn light, her long trek across the South come to its end at last. She has been moving between the last of summer’s long days, time and light always against her. By day she has slept in mildewed, threadbare motels and rest stops and culverts. Before New Orleans, it was in the narrow bunk of a truck driver’s cab, where the truck driver himself lay cooling and red and damp beside her, his truck idling along an off-ramp between Pascagoula and Gulfport. Now, stomach turning over like an engine that does not know it’s dead, she heads up Ninth Street, the air in this city dry and hot and stiff as it hurries her along beneath a moody orange sky. She hugs her arms against her den
im jacket, long sleeves to cover the cracked and peeling skin. Sunglasses to hide the burst capillaries in her eyes, the ones that come when the blood no longer tolerates the hunger and turns its red teeth upon itself like the mad, crazed thing it is, and the body turns to dust and dying. Four days now without fresh blood. Not eating but moving, only moving, when the sun goes down. The long southern road. Curled into a tight ball of pain at the back of a bus, head pressed against the glass, arms crossed over her stomach to hide the noises her gut makes. Hair a tangle, knees of her jeans near black with dirt and mud.

  She turns right on Throckmorton. Two blocks up, then a left on Seventh, moving west, away from the rising sun, her purpose singular: shelter.

  There is a park and beyond the park a river and after the river a bridge and beneath the bridge a close, thick darkness. She slides down the grassy embankment, following the broken sidewalk to the bridge, where she can see the dart and flutter of small black shapes against the warming sky. She hears them as they return to their roosts among iron and concrete, a chorus of high-pitched voices that weave together into a single teeming blanket of night. Here she climbs over a metal railing and down into a hollow corrugated pipe that juts out over the river.

  On hands and knees in the dark, the trickling damp, she waits and listens, and the faint sound that comes back to her down the length of the long pipe is that of a man breathing, snoring. And so she crawls far back to where a fetid stink awaits in a clump of rags that rise and fall, and her hands move up and over the rags to separate them from the flesh of the one sleeping beneath them, her fingers encountering a rough, wiry beard, and though the stink is terrible, she takes up a sliver of coffee can from among the garbage at her knees and jabs apart the flesh where neck joins body, and the blood that courses out over the beard is hot and dry like the Texas wind, and the body beneath the rags begins to flail and kick and the sounds echo back down the pipe and out over the river and are drowned by the constant high trill of the bats beneath the overpass.