She hands me the deck with just one word, or maybe two. Just saying it makes her smile.
“Slap,” Isuzu says, cranking that smile up to its full wattage, “jack.”
Before, when there were still children, concerned parents used to complain about how violent video games were corrupting them. Being the occasional practitioner of for-real violence, I was always amused by these protests. After all, the same people blaming video games for Columbine would be shocked if you pointed out that nobody ever got their arm broken playing Doom, unlike, say, football. And don’t you dare suggest that watching the latest war for oil on CNN is surely more damaging than joysticking a couple of cartoons to death.
I mention this to put my little Trooper’s selection of parental penance into context. From the hundreds of card games out there, Isuzu’s picked the one that actually requires physical violence during regulation play. Slapjack. If I had to pick a game that could potentially trump bad parenting as an explanation for something like Columbine, I think I’d pick slapjack. Unlike Doom or Mortal Kombat, slapjack isn’t slapjack if the players don’t hurt each other.
For those unfamiliar with the game, it works like this: Two players split the deck and take turns throwing down one card at a time, until someone throws down a jack. After that, it’s a race to see who can slap the card first. Whoever does captures all the cards underneath, and also gets to slap the wrist of his or her opponent. The winner is the one with the most cards (and the fewest rope burns) after you’ve run out of jacks. It’s a competition of reaction times and pain thresholds, and not a very fair game for an adult to play against a child. It’s especially not fair when the adult is a vampire and the child’s not. Our reaction times are just too unequal—the forever-stacked deck of predator versus prey. A vampire who chooses to can be like lightning, while his victim is the mere afterthought of thunder. In the old days, before I was benevolent, I could snap my dinner’s neck before it even saw me coming.
In other words, if I want to, I can kick Isuzu’s little ass.
But that’s not the point. I’m sure Isuzu’s mom could have beat her, too. And I’m betting she never did. Instead, slapjack was the game she played to lose, whenever she messed up and needed to make up, like Isuzu and me now. It’s an excuse to let the child spank the parent.
And my little ray of sunshine isbeaming at the prospect.
So I open the deck, get rid of the jokers, split it, shuffle the halves back together, and then do it again. I hand the twice-shuffled deck to Isuzu, who spreads them out on the floor, smushes them around, and then scoops them back together. Clearly, she takes this business seriously. And trust—always a shaky proposition at best—is a luxury she can’t afford. Especially considering my recent behavior. Especially considering I’m playing this game as a kind of punishment for my recent untrustworthy behavior.
So Isuzu deals, we collect our piles, and begin tossing down cards. As luck would have it, I throw down the first jack. It seems to lie there for an eternity before Isuzu notices and then shoots her slow-motion hand to cover it.Slap! She giggles, delighted with herself, and the prospect of giving yours truly what for.
And so I roll up my bathrobe sleeve and surrender my wrist. Isuzu folds in all the fingers of her right hand, except the first two. She raises her hand as high as she can, even arching a little bit backward to squeeze out a few more foot-pounds of pain. She holds it there for a second, letting me anticipate. Letting me sweat. And then, like the arm of a just-sprung catapult, she throws everything she’s got forward, teasing out two quick red stripes on my white, white skin.
I look just like a candy cane, I think, and Isuzu reads my mind.
“You look like a candy cane,” she says.
And I think: Candy canes, lollipops, bad parents, and old vampires—we’re all suckers when it comes to kids.
8
The Luckiest Vampire on Earth
Ifound Isuzu on a Friday evening after work. We passed each other’s trust tests, did our cat-smiling and our rule setting on Saturday. And then came today—Sunday—the day of surprises and new rules and slapjack. I’ve tucked her into bed a few hours before sunrise, and afterward, it occurs to me that Isuzu does more to keep herself alive and unkilled asleep than awake. Awake has proven dicey—lots of mines, eggshells, opportunities for yours truly to screw up. But asleep, theidea of her surfaces and fills my heart with the missing of it. Of her. Asleep, during these few hours before sunrise, while I’m still awake, her absence creates a dead space in my life—a warning. A reminder. With Isuzu asleep, snoring her snores behind that closed door, my apartment goes back to the too-quiet I never recognized before—before it was gone, that is, and only after it returns.
And all that’s left in this dead space at the end of our weekend is this: me, staring down the barrel of Monday, and the reality of what I’ve elected to do. Over the weekend, I seem to have become a father. Or at least a foster father, and of a mortal, to boot. Just like that—snap!—I’m a dad. I’m the dad of a kid everyone I know—and most of the people Idon’t know—would love to kill. I’m a dad with no mom to speak of—not even one in the wings—and even if therewas one, how could I trust her?
And then there’s my day job. Ornight job, really. Vampires don’t have day jobs; we’re all moonlighting in one way or another. But come Monday evening—tomorrow—I’ve got a job I have to go back to. To bring home the pet food. To earn some blood money. A job where day care is not part of the benefits package. A job where I can’t just call in sick.
So the question naturally arises:
How?
How am I going to do this thing I’ve decided to do? How am I going to raise a child and hold down a job and not screw up both beyond recognition?
You know thatTwilight Zone episode, the one called “To Serve Man,” where the title refers to an alien cookbook? In a lot of ways, we’re living that joke. This occurs to me as I’m surfing the Web, looking for “historical” information on how to prepare a child for life. And all I can find is advice about how to prepare a child for a meal in which they’re the main course.
It’s the farms again, hawking their wares on password-protected Web sites demanding credit card numbers and other vital stats before they’ll open their cyber doors. They have digital photos of their “product line”—hundreds of little Isuzus with chocolate-smeared faces and headlight eyes. Under the photos, the current bid. I sit and watch as the numbers click up. Some of the faces have yellow “Sold” signsX -ing them out. I imagine my Isuzu among them.
I get angry.
I turn off the computer.
I go to the window and pull the drapes aside. I look at the apartments across the way, the yellow rectangles of their windows. There are silhouettes in some, actual people in others, and still others are just empty boxes of low-wattage light.
I’ve looked at this same view a thousand times before. It’s never meant much of anything to me. Ground clutter. Just some stuff in the way of my view of the horizon, that point where night and day breaks, our lowest common denominator. But I’ve never looked at those windows like this before. I’ve never looked at my neighbors with such a powerful desire for a machine gun of some sort. Something to riddle and strafe, rapidly and with too many bullets to ignore. Something to help me draw anX through those yellow boxes across the way.
“What made him do it?” the talking heads would ask afterward. Heavy metal? Video games?
Nope.
Slapjack made me do it. Slapjack and a little girl who’s never going to wear a “Sold” sign. Not if I can help it.
Ihave to keep reminding myself that Isuzu escaped. She and her mom, both. And I start wondering yet again how she did it—how Isuzu’s mom raised her on her own, at least up until the point where I found her. How will my parenting skills compare? I know I can lose at slapjack as well as she, and my apartment definitely beats living in a hole, but…
But maybe not.
“What do you think of this place?” “I
t don’t smell like worms.”
Hardly a ringing endorsement, and nowhere near the enthusiasm I expected.
So maybe Isuzu’s living arrangements were broader than the root cellar she called home when I found her. I’m guessing the hole is what they didat night, when they had to hide. It was just for sleep-overs. Strictly no-frills. But during the day, they could hang out anywhere they could get into with a brick.
So what was it like—an average day for Isuzu and her mom? It’s not likely the mom had a job to go to. Raising Isuzu was probably all she had to do, all day long. She could devote time to it. Make it a specialty. Earn best-mom-in-the-world points for no other reason than the fact that she was always around, and not off working some pointless job to earn money to buy stuff that’s just as easily stolen, what with the whole world being asleep when you’re not.
I’m guessing window-shopping played a big part of most days. Let’s say they start rising and shining at about eight o’clock, maybe nine, find a rock, steal breakfast from the nearest grocery store, grab some newspapers on the way out, but not for reading. Instead, they head to the nearest park, find the dog path, let their shit blend in with all the dog shit already there. Look for another rock so they can break into somebody’s place to wash up, maybe do laundry, maybe steal some stuff for the hole that doesn’t involve electricity. Books, say, or candles, or whatever clothing’s been left lying out that fits.
I don’t see them rifling through closets. Or at least not any that involve going into the owner’s bedroom to get to. Why tempt fate? Why tempt your own highly understandable but risky thirst for revenge? Plus maybe—while you’re not looking—maybe Isuzu decides this crypt of a bedroom is just too gloomy for words. And so maybe she throws open the sunproof drapes, and maybe a shaft of light pours in. And maybe this shaft of sunlight finds the world’s un-luckiest vampire, just lying there on the bed, out like a light. And as quick as you can scream “Fire!” that long overdue corpse just goes up—ignites, combusts, immolates itself right there, burning itself down through the padding and the mattress to the box springs, which glow cherry red as other things start catching fire. And it’s all you can do to get you and your kid out of there—unscorched, un-singed, and all in one piece.
Plus, God only knows what kind of kinky vampire sex stuff you might find in some stranger’s bedroom, so…no. No need to be meddling in any vampire bedrooms. Which probably explains why Isuzu has never seen a pillow before, but recognized TV even though there wasn’t so much as a Sony Watchman back at the hole. But why should there be? The hole’s no place to be making unnecessary noise. The hole’s all about talking in whispers, reading by candlelight, breathing in that rich earthyworm smell. That, and sleeping on each other’s old clothes, the better to keep each other company, even in your dreams. The hole’s no place for laughing at vampire sitcoms, listening to the vampire nightly news, watching vampire cops bust vampire perps. The hole’s all about dust-to-dust, us versus them. It’s the place for lying low, and making plans for tomorrow.
Plus, why add batteries to your shoplifting list if you can do all your TV watching during the day? Except…
Except thereis no TV to watch during the day. The broadcast day ends with—the day.Which leaves TV as pretty much just a box for playing DVDs and video games, and that’s it.
Maybe that explains something else that didn’t make sense at the time. After making me cry with that stupid song, Isuzu toddled over to the couch and plopped down in front of the TV. She reached over to the coffee table and snatched up the remote control like a regular pro. But after taking aim and hitting the power button—just as the picture flicked on—she flinched.
“It’s not blue,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
But she couldn’t explain. The lack of a blue screen was just wrong, but it wasn’t like it was broken. It was like it was working super good.This TV made pictureswithout having to load something first. But that’s not how TVs are supposed to work. When you turn them on, the screen’ssupposed to be blue—it was always blue when she did it before, during the day, in some stranger’s apartment. You switch it on, get the blue screen, drop in a disc, and stay away from that door until mom gets back. And when mom gets back from doing whatever needed doing without a six-year-old tagging along? That’s when they tidy up, and leave maybe one piece of furniture in front of the bedroom door for when the monsters wake up.
Sssshhhh…
Tee-hee…
Smile like cats.
And after that, after the window-shopping and videos, I imagine a day full of Frisbee in the park, and dress-up tea parties, and silliness. Just hours and hours of silliness in the bright, sheltering sun. I imagine them staring each other down, repeating everything the other one says, getting into tickle fights. I imagine nonpunitive games of slapjack, just for the fun of it. I imagine a pocket full of chocolate, even though they shouldn’t, even though they’ve sworn to save it. But when she smiles like that…
“Here you go, you little con artist.”
Itry imagining how it happened. How they were found out. Did the mom just get tired of always being so careful all the time? Or did she maybe want to treat Isuzu to something special—for a birthday, or as a reward for being good, or as an apology for some maternal failing beyond the cleansing violence of slapjack? What was she trying to do when she slipped up for the last time?
Maybe it was something stupid, like hitting the same place too many times. Using too much electricity when the world was supposed to be asleep. Too many volts being used during the daytime would be a dead giveaway. Not that the cops could do anything about it when it was happening, but they’d get involved, sooner or later.
It starts with the owner complaining about an unusually high electric bill. The utility company checks its records. And there’s Isuzu and her mom, translated into kilowatt hours. That’s when it becomes a police matter. That’s when the police break out the bloodhounds, who have no problem distinguishing the stink of human sweat from the next-to-nothing vampires leave behind. The dogs bellow and yelp, straining at their choke chains, dragging some K-9 squad rookies all the way back to Isuzu and her mom and…
I look at my front door.
I didn’t hear any barking during the commotion earlier this evening. Or at least nothing I couldn’t write off as coming from the pets whose food Isuzu had liberated. And I haven’t heard any panting, or yelping, or yipping since everything else quieted down. There have been no heavy paws thumping down my hallway, no big nails clawing at my front door…
Yet.
I panic, which feels appropriately parental—but also extremely unhelpful under the circumstances. I need pepper, not panicking. Or pepper spray. I have neither. Ditto, coffee grounds. And rosemary. And thyme. Ido have a vacuum cleaner. I do have a vacuum cleaner that hasn’t been emptied…
…well,ever. I’m a bachelor; cut me some slack. The point is, the vacuum cleaner’s got a vacuum cleanerbag chock-full of dust and allergens. And it’ll have to do.
So I break out the vacuum and pry out the bag. Gray stuff poofs and sprinkles everywhere. I take the bag out into the hallway, trying not to spill any more than necessary. I don’t want to leave any evidence in my attempt to hide the evidence.
Which is how I find myself on my knees, outside my front door, carefully sprinkling a meticulous line of highly stirrable dust between the welcome mat and doorway. A long, thin, manicured line, like a line of gray cocaine for any snuffling bloodhounds that might happen by. Something innocuous, something a casual observer wouldn’t notice, but which a ground-level snout would Hoover up before exploding in a fit of sneezing. And just like that—the trail, the case, their noses—all would be equally blown.
That’s the plan. And that’s why I’m kneeling outside my front door. Or why Iwas. But why am I still on my knees? Why can’t I get up?
I think the answer goes back to my being raised Catholic. That kind of thing gets in your blood worse than being a vampire. It
doesn’t take much to make it flare up. Just a little life flashing before your eyes. Just a little panic. Just an overwhelming sense of how much you’ve got to lose, and how easily you could lose it.
Maybe that explains the little voice inside my head, the one suggesting something it hasn’t suggested in a long, long time:
Pray.
With ana, not ane.
Pray for forgiveness. And help. And like you mean it.
A mortal kid and a vampire dad? Are you kidding?
Pray likeboth your lives depend on it.
Webcams—this is what I’m thinking.
Lots and lots of webcams, and rules, and locks…
Not that this occurs to me originally. What originally occurs to me is duct tape. Or maybe a harness and tether. Or one of those electric dog collars that zaps ’em if they try to leave the yard. And, truth be told, I haven’t ruled out any of these, especially given this evening’s little surprise, but…
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