Blood and Sawdust

by Jason S Ridler

  Maybe they were boyfriend and girlfriend, Malcolm thought. Maybe she just liked vampire bodyguards. Milkwood didn’t know the guy or he’d have recognized him, but he’d known who Lash was…

  Malcolm gripped the heavy dagger with both hands and brought it up to his face. The blade was dull. He wondered if the Sword of Damocles the Judge had talked about was bigger. Whoever the hell Damocles was.

  He fished out the scabbard and tucked the blade inside, then dropped the whole deal in his front right pocket. Everything seemed covered in blood or glass or blades or signs of insanity. Dizzy, he stumbled but secured a seat on the bed, gripping the scrambled sheets on his sides. They were sticky with blood and he wiped his hands on a clean patch. Fears gripped his head: Milkwood getting his ass handed to him, Malcolm’s passport torn to pieces in the Judge’s busted hands, Samson chewing on severed fingers.

  He gripped the knuckle that Lash had soothed and a phantom lick of the sensation hummed over him. Sitting in a room of death, blood and broken glass, and all he could think about was how nice it would be…

  He squeezed his hands shut. Then opened them. Then turned them over.

  Just the barest scratches lay from where his palms had pressed in the broken glass. “Christ,” he thought. “I got off lucky. These should be torn to shit.”

  Soon, the shower in the bathroom stopped running. A few minutes later, Milkwood emerged, wearing a fresh black shirt and a different pair of stained jeans. There was pink in his cheek. The wound on his neck was gone but for a thin dark line. He ran his fingers through his hair to slick it back like thick black trails against his scalp. “You okay?” he said, low and heavy.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Had better days. And yes. She was a friend.” He snorted and shook away a thought before taking a packet of sugar from his back pocket. “This is getting too weird, kid. And dangerous.” He sat on the bed and it sank inwards under his ass and forced Malcolm up and out like a seesaw. Milkwood tore the packet open and downed the white powder, swirling it around, then slurping it back. “Kid, I’ll still fight in the tourney. I’ll get you your passport back, give you all I have and more. But I’ll not go near that woman who teased your balls today. I can’t. And I would stay the hell away from her if I was you.”

  Malcolm’s knuckle ached. “But she’s our only honey pot.”

  His lip curled. “One who sent this kung fu shithead to eat my friend, cut my head off, and chew you raw.”

  “Why would she do that? This bozo was probably just a jealous old boyfriend. Maybe she likes…guys like you as bodyguards.”

  Milkwood pushed himself back on the bed, lying against the frame. “More likely she let him find out about me, wanting to see if the latest addition to her brood could rip the spine from my back.”

  “Latest addition? I thought you said there weren’t that many of you?”

  He shrugged. “That depends on her.”

  “Where does she get them all? You guys come from a factory or something?”

  Milkwood crossed his arms. “Do the math, Sherlock. You’ll feel better if it comes to you on your own.”

  Malcolm stifled the nasty comeback on his lips and tried to focus. But it cracked open like an egg in his head, and her classy beauty filled mind. Always beautiful. Forever sinfully gorgeous. “No way. She’s like you?”

  Milkwood glared at the busted TV, cracking his neck, left to right. “Yep.”

  “But she was out in daylight.”

  “Like I told you. Long as you eat, you might as well be normal for a good part of the day. But unlike me she knows how to sire. Fancy word for turning civilians into us.” The words seemed rotten, the way he chewed them before spitting them out.

  Malcolm grabbed his knuckle. “Huh. So, is she the one who—”

  “Yep.” Milkwood’s lip twitched, and the embers of his eyes flared. “She’s the one who raped me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE JAGGED EDGES OF the broken TV, and the heart of the screen—hollow, surrounded by cracked lines like white veins on a dark carcass—all of it consumed Milkwood’s attention like a deep hunger, forcing his mind away from the thug, the bo shard, and eating his old friend; the trembling in Cindy’s eyes as he shushed her under the warmth of the shower, telling her it was okay, that Brody was okay, her warm sad smile draining of colour as her life leaked out into bright red swirls of the drain. The pain in his neck like a forge blasting the side of his head. His lips on her savaged neck…

  What the fuck am I?

  “Raped?” Malcolm’s voice was a distant echo.

  Milkwood stayed corpse quiet.

  “I didn’t know that…could happen,” Malcolm said. “To a guy.”

  “You saying I’m lying?”

  Slowly, as if he were approaching a cobra, Malcolm spoke. “No. I believe you.”

  “No. You don’t.” The busted innards of the TV were old. A throw away model like he’d had as a kid. All it lacked was a pair of chewed bunny ears. “And I know why. You’ve seen her. About a hundred pounds of lust shoved in an itty-bitty sack. Right?”

  Malcolm nodded.

  Milkwood gazed deep into the jagged void looking back at him. “And she always will be.”

  * * *

  There was a brightness of recall when Milkwood thought of the life he’d had before she sired him. Even the warm melancholy of his old existence had a sheen of happiness, of vibrancy, a warmth that was getting harder and harder to recognize.

  It was strong now, because this was the city where it all happened: the autumn crispness, the way it melded with the soft, fresh scent of the St. Lawrence, a smell he could only barely remember, like a hum in his dead blood. Five years he’d been gone. Five years running. And still that day was tightly etched on the back of his skull.

  A Tuesday. Trivia Night at the Brown Owl Pub was awaiting him after he finished the night shift at the bookstore, filling in for Cindy as she studied all night for an exam. Milkwood counted the till, vacuumed, and put all the stray titles back on the shelf, leaving the place in better shape than he’d found it when Morgan opened that morning. Smart guy, Morgan, but lazy as shit on valium. God bless the slacker generation and their patron, Saint Cobain.

  A Tuesday. The most mundane of days. Nothing really on TV. Nothing really going on in the city until Thursday. So the Brown Owl sucked in a handful of trivia nuts and boozers for electronic trivia. For anyone else, a slice of boredom. But for Francis Milkwood Mace, he would not have missed it for the world.

  He had a champion to defeat.

  Unlike any other night at the pub, he was able to get a booth by his lonesome, order the usual, and try not to think about how he was slowly becoming a townie that wouldn’t ever bust out of the bonds of his old home town to make something more of himself.

  “Hey Francis,” Rachel said, putting his pint of Newcastle Brown before him. “Ready to face the Fonz?” Rachel was the perky kind of pretty that almost always got what it wanted in a small town, but would likely be lost in the shuffle in New York and LA, hence why she had never left Kingston. Why be a small time princess when you can be a white trash queen?

  “Yep. What’s the prize?”

  She smiled, looking through him and straight at her tip. “My undying love and admiration?”

  “Finally, I find a good use for my history degree.” It was a lame joke for a lame exchange on another lame night where he’d yet again have a few beers and give her a large tip for bad service.

  Lame.

  She brought him his controller, some chips, but his adversary was nowhere to be seen. He craned his neck to the TV screen where the match would be held, put in his name, Commodus, after the worst Roman emperor of them all, the moron who pretended to fight in the arena as a gladiator and thought he was the second coming of Hercules. Until that Russell Crowe movie, no one got that reference. “Rachel,” he said while she zooted by with a handful of eye-stinging hot wings that gave off more radiant heat than a nuclear weapon. “Have y
ou seen the Fonz? He hasn’t logged.”

  “Oh, Thomas?” She leaned in close for some melodramatic whispering. “He’s chatting up a pretty thing at the bar.”

  “Really?”

  “I know. Hell must have froze over.” Rachel strolled off and Milkwood craned his head to look at the bar, but the first thing he heard, piercing through the din of the stereo’s love affair with Boston’s “More than a Feeling” was her laughter.

  It fritted, bubbling through the air. A dirty laugh, Milkwood thought. As if more than humour were hiding in the sound waves. And if there was one thing he was used to, it was the laughter of women, men, and all points in between.

  He followed the dirty notes until he caught her, talking to Thomas, who was prattling on and on as if his OCD mouth could not stop shooting the shit about cartoons he loved as a kid, and why today’s sit coms have bad theme songs, and how only Japanese monster movies rock…

  She sat with her back to the bar, legs crossed and coloured creamy pink beneath her skirt, one foot lazily tapping what Bossman Oscar called “Come fuck me” pumps. A pink and white power suit top hid small but firm breasts, and a wave of strawberry blond hair rolled down one side of her face like Veronica Lake, hiding a high cheekbone beauty. She had a scoop nose with a sharp tip, giving her smile a gasping quality. But, instead of thin lips there were big, sharp, rich rose petals stained a dark, rich pink. Make-up as immaculate as those of the magazine cover girls Milkwood tried not to stare too hard at during his shift at the bookstore. The only difference was her glasses. Black, wire thin, classy, and somewhat out of place.

  And she sat, enthralled, by the kinetic conversationalist and DVD rental clerk Thomas Riely, AKA The Fonz, AKA an even bigger dork than Milkwood. And somewhere inside his sympathetic ear, Milkwood wanted to cheer the guy, raise his glass to an underdog getting to chat with a high maintenance girl who, he hoped, wasn’t blind or retarded.

  Instead, he fumed. Maybe if Morgan hadn’t left the store in such sad shape, maybe if he hadn’t wasted much of the day actually doing returns instead of just preparing to cash out and go, maybe if he hadn’t got here later than usual, that fine piece of arm candy would be enthralled with his deep and penetrating knowledge of First World War strategy and tactics…

  He chuckled. If maybes were dimes, I’d maybe have a million. But there was a certainty Milkwood had learned in his thirty years spinning around the sun, a lesson carved in his heart and balls from glaring at the glamour girls on the magazine rack, to all the pretty Rachels working their mojo on the lonely and liquored, and that was simply this: some things were forever out of the league of guys like Thomas and Milkwood.

  And yet…there she was.

  “Looks like he’ll be distracted,” Rachel said, looking down at Milkwood, wiping her hands on her apron. A bitter smile cracked her face with pursed lips. Rachel was now face to face with big-city beautiful, and being small town gorgeous couldn’t compare. So much so, she was slumming with Milkwood. Not surprising. Thomas was her best tipper. She barely had to smile in his direction and he’d be ordering more drinks, snacks, and other excuses to have her serve him before dropping a big load of twenties into her lap.

  He was tempted to say “Jealous?” But he shoved in a fry. “We’ll see. Maybe she has a greater threshold tolerance for discussing sitcoms featuring black kids small for their age, but I doubt it.”

  Rachel smiled, staring daggers at the woman in cream, then patted Milkwood’s shoulder. “Kick his ass.”

  Rachel stalked off to her next customer, and the screen above Malcolm flashed. TRIVIA MASTERS!

  The battle began. Names appeared on the bar like Team Totally Tits and The Stalins (you couldn’t put in Hitler, but the Soviet Dictator was kosher for some reason), but they were just dilettantes. Three beers later, Stalin and Company had packed up its limp brains and headed home, leaving Commodus to face the Fonz.

  Maybe he had something to prove, but the Fonz was in rare form, answering even the history questions right. Which made Milkwood suspicious as he devoured the chips and goofed on questions like “What is Tony Soparano’s daughter’s name?” or “On the show Friends…”

  Gah. Modern pop culture zoomed by Milkwood faster than his shitty dialup internet connection could handle, and with no TV he was always having his ass handed to him on the pop culture side of the street. But where was the Fonz getting his history knowledge on the Inquisition, the Eastern Front, and the conversion of Rome to Christianity?

  Milkwood had been second place all night, and it looked like Thomas was going to take home the gold. Again.

  The next question appeared. “What Was D-Day?”

  Milkwood snorted, even Thomas should know this one. He peered from his booth and saw…the beautiful creature whispering in his ear.

  She was glad-handing him answers on world and military history? It had been Milkwood’s long and considered opinion that beautiful woman hated history as much as he hated soap operas. But there she was, eyes sparkling as she ran her hair over one ear and whispered to Thomas. Milkwood was surprised the Fonz’s erection hadn’t blasted a hole through the bar.

  Then her eyes flashed at Milkwood. Her mouth stopped moving. Then a playful smile curled.

  Milkwood dropped eye contact and ate a fry. There was no rule that you couldn’t have friends help…but Thomas and he had always gone tête-à-tête, one-on-one, in some primitive electronic gladiatorial combat. And now he was going to win champion of the universe by a cheat.

  Rachel walked by. He raised his hand to get her attention, and a small fantasy pierced his head: he’d ask her to help him with the pop culture questions, she’d do it for a lark, and they’d win, and he’d treat her to dessert at the end of his shift and she’d agree because she’d just witnessed how sexy a fat-assed, assistant manager of a book store can be, and it would be getting late and he’d drive her home and nothing would come of it because the fact was she was still out of his league by a light year and setting himself up for such a heart-stomp was no way to end a Tuesday—

  Rachel appeared, eyes wide and breasts forward. “What do you need?”

  He swallowed dryly. “Another pint. And the bill.”

  She nodded and smiled.

  Malcolm went back to his console, eyes on the screen to see if the Fonz had gotten the answer right—

  Nope.

  What? Milkwood thought. How could someone who knew Torquemada was the leader of the Spanish Inquisition not know that D-Day was the nickname for the start of the Normandy invasion? Unless…she’d given him the wrong answer.

  Dirty laughter tickled him.

  His beer came, but he barely acknowledged it or Rachel’s weak interest in the game. Milkwood was focused on cleaning the Fonz’s clock. Something hardened in his head. A determination that was tied to the gal’s sick laugh.

  Slowly but surely, after three rounds of history and politics, Milkwood was turning a corner, tying the Fonz and getting that screen where they showed the two cartoon horses running on a track “neck and neck”.

  With his last pint in him, the final question arose. The subject: BRITISH HISTORY.

  A hand slapped the bar. “Fuzzbucket!” Surprisingly for an aging and condescending Gen-X kid, Thomas never swore. The fact that he came this close to motherfucker meant he was steamed.

  Milkwood exhaled, and took a long pull of his beer. He’d had one pint more than usual for a Tuesday Trivia night, but he was feeling good. Watching PBS on his black-and-white TV had made him a bona fide anglophile, From Miss Marple to Monty Python to the wives of Henry the VIII.

  He stole a glance at the beauty.

  She held Thomas’s arm, smiling wickedly, eyes focused on the screen for the next question. But her smile grew the longer he stared. She re-crossed her legs and he pulled himself out of the pretty picture.

  Get a grip, idiot!

  He waited for the question, itchy finger in his controller.

  “What famous British family is credited with creating
the first museum?” As the clues revealed themselves, Milkwood nailed C: Ashmolean.

  Thank you, boring PBS documentaries!

  Tapping his beer glass, he waited as the possible answers vanished: Smithsonian…Windsor…Livingston…

  C!

  Milkwood stood, hands in the air, imitating Thomas’s victory moves. “Ashmolean! I’m champion of the world!”

  The woman was glaring, as if he’d just called her name. Thomas gave him a stink face. “Congratulations Francis. Enjoy your fluketastic victory.”

  “Know what’s great about you, Thomas?” Milkwood said. “You’re very graceful in defeat.”

  “Know what’s great about you, Francis? Nothing.”

  “Knock it off,” said Stu, the bartender, an aging hippy with a throat destined for lung cancer. “You’ll scare off our customers.”

  Milkwood laughed, sloppy and more than a bit fuzzy from the pints. “What customers? Besides us?” He snorted, then looked back at Thomas. “Better luck next time, champ. Might try reading…a book sometime.”

  Her laughter made him weak. She was still gawking at him. It was uncomfortable to have that kind of beauty hooked into you. For no reason, Milkwood bowed, then went to the can. Peeing on the ice in the urinal, his focus was taken with all the crazy headlines that Stu stuck on the Bristol board in the shitter to be eye level with his patrons. Almost all were from the Weekly World News, home of wonderful bullshit articles presented as truth, like the adventures of their loveable nightmare creation Batboy, who was running for president, or how Google Earth had discovered Atlantis. Milkwood wondered what it would take to write for those rags beyond basic literacy and an idiotic sense of humour? It would be a hell of a lot easier than saving up for grad school, becoming the professor you swore to dad you’d become, living the heady intellectual life of an academic, writing important books no one reads and fucking beautiful grad students who worship you, after you have tenure, of course…