Gypsy Blood

by Vernon, Steve

  Every muscle in his body hurt. His heart was banging like a rabid Willy Loman.

  Was this what a coronary felt like?

  Your heart is fine.

  It didn’t matter. He was too damned tired to bother having one.

  He could see the front steps of his storefront.

  If he could just make it there he’d lay back and watch the stars go by.

  Oh look, he had company, somebody sitting on the stairs.

  He didn’t see where he came from.

  This one must have the ability to cloud men’s reason. Maybe it’s the Shadow. Ask him if his name is really Lamont Cranston? Ask him what he thought of Alec Baldwin?

  Carnival ignored Poppa..

  The seated figure spoke.

  “Good evening.”

  He looked at Carnival from the stairs but all the Gypsy could see was the glint of the lamplight upon a pair of thick glass spectacles.

  It was the old tattooist.

  The old tattooist sat on Carnival’s front stairs.

  “Good evening,” the old man replied. “I bid you welcome.”

  Why don’t you invite him in? Offer him your neck, and a quart and a half of hot Gypsy plasma?

  Carnival wasn’t worried. He recognized who the old man was, right off.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen you outside of your shop.”

  “I like the night,” the tattooist said with a shrug. “It’s quiet out here.”

  “It’s also pretty late.”

  “Are you too tired to talk?”

  Ha. He knows you a lot, doesn’t he?

  “Not at all. It’s good to talk to someone who is still breathing.”

  He didn’t ask what Carnival meant by that. Maybe Carnival should have wondered about that, but he’d just talked to the city incarnate, and nearly drowned in the process. A little mystery just didn’t seem all that mysterious to Carnival, right now.

  The old tattooist sat there, like he’d been poured out onto the steps. An old man. He looked a little European. He’s wearing a long black coat, like an old time preacher or an undertaker.

  “I’m just waiting for a client. He telephoned a little earlier. I gave him directions, but it’s easy to get lost in this neighborhood. Besides, there’s a lot of time to change your mind between the bottom of these stairs and the top.”

  “Yeah. I know what that’s like. I’ve seen some clients get as far as the front door, and then turn away, for fear of what I might tell them.”

  The tattooist nodded.

  “I too. The same thing. We are in similar professions. Both require customers with courage.”

  “It’s not that courageous to listen to me gas.”

  “On the contrary, I imagine it takes some nerve to look into your future. You must see a lot of customers.”

  “I see a few. And you?”

  “Not as many as you. I have no signs. I wish I could afford a storefront like you.”

  Carnival tried not to laugh, but the thought of someone envying his financial status made him want to laugh.

  “I thought tattoos were big with the kids these days.”

  The old tattooist looked at Carnival like the Gypsy had offered to show him the inner contents of his lower intestine.

  “Yes, popular but not down here,” the old tattooist explained. “Why come down here when you can get a pretty picture tapped on your skin at the mall. You can get it at drugstores and hairdressers and fashion boutiques.”

  His face darkened. Carnival could see the lines, of ink and weariness, wrinkles and totem marks each carved as deeply as the other. He’d spent some time in his early years on the carnie circuit. He had seen more than a few tattooed men and women. This was different. This guy’s tattoos ran bone deep.

  The tattooist kept on talking.

  “These days, any cartoonist with a knitting needle can call himself a tattooist. The new machines, the new designs, they make it easy.”

  He waved his hands in the air. Carnival could see the useless need, the wasted motion, painted in the gesture. His hands were poets without ink.

  “So where’d you learn your art?”

  “Where do you learn anything of value?” the old tattooist asked with a shrug. “I learned it from my father.”

  “He was a tattooist as well?”

  The old illustrator laughed.

  “No, he was a carpenter. He told me to get a trade, to make some real money. I wanted to draw. He told me pictures weren’t worth anything. He said I needed to learn how to make things that would last. So I became a skin illustrator. A tattoo lasts forever, you know. So I was only obeying my father’s wishes. That’s what he taught me. Be obedient. Always obey his wishes.”

  “What’d he think of it?”

  “I have never seen him again.”

  Well, hell, Carnival thought. The two of us have something in common.

  We both have a reason to hate our father.

  Chapter 61

  Ouija Nightmares

  Olaf’s ghost came streaming right up through the Ouija board, grabbing on to Momma’s pilfered body like a drowning man clutching at an old wrinkled life preserver. Momma felt his cold wet hands tearing at her clothes. Trying to tear her free, to tear her open, to tear her skin. Her sins had found her out.

  Bam.

  She changed sexes. It didn’t help. Even through the masquerade of the old wife killer’s body, Olaf sensed her innate femininity. Even if she’d been all male it wouldn’t really have mattered. Olaf wasn’t looking to fall in love or form any kind of long standing relationship. It was something darker, something baser than that. Olaf was simply looking to take something to have for his own. He wanted to enter her in every sense of the word.

  She felt the eyes of Ouija watching impassively, the sun and the moon gazing up at her as the ghost took hold. The board cared not a whit what happened to her. This was nothing more than her fate, nothing more relevant than that.

  Olaf cared even less. She was just something to go through, something to pierce. It was nothing more than temporary satisfaction. He didn’t know he was assaulting the spirit of the mother of his murderer. Truth was, at this point in time he probably wouldn’t have cared. He just wanted to fuck. Sometimes that’s all there is to it, the act of making two into one, for a while. A bonding, a bondage, a bond.

  This is the darkness that followed me, Momma thought. Now it has finally found me.

  Fucking through the Ouija was like fucking in a sea of alphabet soup. Momma could feel the letters and the numbers of the Ouija wiggling against her skin. All those possibilities, caressing her like an army of blind men fumbling in the darkness. Crawling up her legs and parting them like the pincers of a magnificent giant centipede. It had been some time since Momma had felt this sort of intrusion, and if the circumstances had been different she might have welcomed them. Sex doesn’t end in old age, nor does it end in the grave.

  This wasn’t sex of any kind. This was ectoplasmic rape. He pushed his being inside of hers, sheathing himself within her spirit. This was a larger form of possession. No one, alive or dead, welcomes this kind of invasion. Olaf wrapped himself about her, running through the factors of the Ouija, like a Kama Sutra primer. A is for anal penetration, b is for blow job, c is for cunnilingus.

  “No, no, no.” Momma called, fighting him as best she could.

  If she’d had the time to marshal her powers Olaf wouldn’t have stood a chance. But it had happened so quickly. Penetration was accomplished in the instant it began.

  “No, no, no,” Momma screamed.

  “Yes,” said Olaf, through the mouth of the Ouija, going on and on with his all day rape.

  Momma felt like butter being churned. The pounding assault of the ghost-Olaf was relentless. She was his anvil, and he the blacksmith’s hammer. He beat on her mercilessly. And all the while she kept changing. Back and forth, bam, bam, bam.

  Olaf didn’t care. Jim or Momma, he’d fuck them both. He’d tear their skin off h
ermaphroditically, peeling them down to the spaces between the bone, down to the deepness where all bodies are all the same.

  Momma was dead, and none of this should have bothered her. The rape was but another experience for her to live through. He pounded her like waves on a beach, and like a beach she endured it. None of it truly bothered her, except for the eyes. She could feel Poppa’s probing restless eyes, peering from somewhere in the darkness beneath the shadows, watching her closely.

  And beneath the eyes of her husband’s she felt her son’s gaze and the feeling of that vision tortured her most of all.

  Chapter 62

  No Rest for the Wicked

  The mail in Carnival’s shop had grown to a heap beneath the mail slot.

  He picked up the heap and sorted it. There were two bills he couldn’t pay and three pieces of junk mail. There was no gold leafed declaration nominating his to the psychic hall of fame. No love letters from any sexually frustrated diamond heiresses. Reader’s Digest hadn’t even bothered to let him know that he might be a millionaire.

  Ah, the price of anonymity. Howard Hughes would think you a very fortunate man.

  Carnival tried to pull himself together. It had been a long rough night. He’d argued with the undead fiend he was in love with. She’d left him or just shoved him off. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember.

  Maybe vampiric amnesia is contagious?

  Poppa was there. Poppa was always there.

  “You could tell me what happened, at least.”

  Ha. Some Gypsy. A single night out, and he calls it a lost weekend.

  Carnival was tired and wet. He felt about as resilient as a bag of recycled tampons. He couldn’t wait to get some rest. He was going to fry up some beans with a little garlic. No, on second thought, make that a lot of garlic.

  I recommend garlic and a steak, with a pitcher full of holy water to chase the whole mess down. You need to purge, my son. You need to cleanse yourself.

  Carnival smiled.

  “No, no more water,” he said. “Maybe some sacramental wine. That’d be the ticket, wouldn’t it? Just a little wine.”

  You whine enough these days. Dionysius would be proud of you.

  “I could give lessons to a wino.”

  Like that one-legged Elija?

  “Shut up, Poppa.”

  Shut up. You always tell me to shut up. Haven’t you shut me up enough yet? Locked in your chest, next to your heart? What do you hope to learn?

  “What did you do with Momma’s body, Poppa? That’s all I want to know. What did you do with her body?”

  You don’t want to know that. Besides, you have company. A customer, I think.

  There was a knock at the door. Carnival went to it. It was Doris, the old lady he’d read for, just before Maya had walked into his life.

  She was holding a thin long boning knife.

  “I’ve done it,” she said. “Just what you told me to. I cut him out of my life.”

  Carnival did not have to look that hard to see the blood on the knife.

  “I did it with this,” Doris said, gesturing with the knife. “I sharpened it against the bottom of a china cup. I honed it to a working edge.”

  In his imagination Carnival could hear the wheet-wheet sound of the knife working against the grit of the porcelain cup, as Doris kept talking.

  “I did it while he was sleeping. It wasn’t hard. I slipped one of my pills into a bottle of his beer. I brought him potato chips, before I brought the beer. Those big fat salty kind. He crunched them up and smiled and asked for a beer. He asked for it, don’t you see?”

  “And then you killed him?”

  That’s not pizza sauce on her blade, boy.

  “I didn’t kill him. I cut him free. Like you said. Who holds the knife?”

  Carnival looked at her, so short and dumpy in a soft bluish Aunt Bea kind of way. How could he miss something like that in her? How could he not see that far into her makeup to see the killer hiding behind the old china doll?

  “He drank it fast. He always drank too fast. Even as a baby. I watched him guzzle. Suck it down, and then it sucked him down, and he was asleep. And when he was asleep, I did it.”

  She did it, boy. Just like you told her. Who holds the knife?

  Carnival couldn’t find an answer. He had told her, in a kind of way. She’d come to him for advice and he’d given it to her.

  Take it son, take it by the hilt. Who holds the knife? Admit your responsibility.

  “I stuck it in him, while he slept. He kicked up, hard, and I held him down. He looked up at me once. Momma, he said. Momma. He hadn’t called me that for so long. It was worth it, just for that. I didn’t mind all of the blood.”

  That’s why I hate card flippers. Palm peerers. You tell people things. And sometimes they go and do them. And when they do it, you never know it and you never own it.

  “Come on Doris,” Carnival said. “Come to the table. I’ll give you a reading.”

  Doris smiled gratefully.

  She doesn’t want to hear, boy. She wants to tell. Father, hear my sins. She wants to give you her confession. You don’t need your cards for that.

  “You’ve been having trouble,” Carnival went on. “A reading will clear things up.”

  He smiled, and for the first time in several days his smile wasn’t faked. It would be good to do a simple reading. The routine of it, after all of the blood and murder that had over filled his life over these last few days, would be comforting.

  Do it boy. A good simple reading for Mrs. Hannibal Lector. Get in touch with one of the simple folk.

  Carnival hadn’t had much time to think about his work.

  That’s because you’ve been in a bad relationship. The obsessive kind that forces you to forget about the practical, to forget about you. It sucks up your complete and undivided attention.

  “You know a lot, Poppa.” Carnival whispered.

  I watch Dr. Phil. If you spent more time staring at television instead of cards, you might learn a little about life.

  “I beg your pardon?” Doris asked, a trifle confused.

  “You don’t need anybody’s pardon, Doris. Nothing was your fault.” he smiled, convincingly. “I’m just talking to my spirit guide, is all.”

  He smiled again, and this time it was real. He was looking forward to the reading. He’d missed it. He laid the cards out.

  “I’ll choose the Queen of Cups for you. An old fashioned lady, sitting by a river with an ornate vessel balanced in her hands. Such a burden. A cup, waiting to be filled.”

  That’s what you did, boy. You came and you filled her and she didn’t feel a thing.

  “The Queen of Cups is a traditional kind of woman. I always see her as doing the dishes, with that ornate piece of crockery she reverently holds. Your son, I’d guess.”

  She nodded, grateful for Carnival’s presumption.

  Not a bad guess, given that his blood is on her knife.

  That was the trick behind fortune telling. There were only two questions most folks needed to know. Love, and purpose. Would they be loved? Would they figure out what to do? Mostly it was about love.

  I knew it. You cheat.

  It wasn’t cheating, Carnival thought. A good card reader needs to know the shape of the land he’s going to hunt in.

  Go ahead, make another excuse.

  Carnival laid the cards out, and told her what he saw. He listened to her words, because she needed that more than breath. Her problems lightened, and multiplied.

  “What do I do now? With his things? With my life? How do I go on, after a thing like this?”

  She looked at Carnival, her eyes soft blue lasers. “What do I do with the body?”

  Ha! Another one who has never watched The Sopranos.

  “Deal with one problem at a time, Doris. You have to prioritize. Your son is no longer that much of a problem. Don’t run away. Don’t hide it. Put his hand on the knife. Call the police. They won’t see you behind all that gray ha
ir.”

  Some plan. Columbo would see right through it. He’d chew on his cigar for a while and ask a silly question, and then he’d know. Ha. Columbo was a palm reader.

  “Go home and deal with your problem, Doris. Own it. Face it.”

  You’re talking to yourself now, aren’t you?

  “Yes, Poppa, I’m talking to myself.”

  Doris smiled at Carnival. She’d heard what she’d wanted to find out. A plan. A thing to do. Carnival had pointed and given her a direction. Whether wrong or right her feet would find the way. She gave him his money and he tucked into his wallet.

  He walked her across the floor and reached for the door knob. The door swung wide, nearly knocking him down.

  Maya stood in the doorway, smiling with a mouth full of razors and need.

  “Is she for me?” she asked.

  Carnival’s brief vacation was suddenly over.

  “She’s a little old, but I can still use her,” Maya said. “A girl’s got to eat, don’t you know?”

  Doris looked offended. To tell the truth, Carnival couldn’t blame her. She’d had a tough night killing her son and all. Now here she was, leaving her favorite reader on a fairly upbeat note, confronted by this long haired wild looking woman.

  Give her to the vampire. She’s had a hard life, and will be grateful if you end it tonight. She won’t have to deal with her son’s death. You can give the boy to the vampire too. Call him desert.

  It would tie things up neatly. Chances are the police would never make the connection between a woman’s murdered son, her subsequent disappearance, and a rundown palm reader. It made perfect sense but Carnival didn’t want to do it that way.

  Why, boy? I’m talking sense.

  “I do a lot of things without ever needing to make sense, Poppa.”

  Maya looked at him.

  “Talk to me, damn it. Never mind your Poppa. I want the woman.”

  “She’s a customer, Maya. One of my customers. I just finished a reading for her, and was seeing her to the door.”