by Poppy Brite
It was one of the rare nights that Molochai, Twig, and Zillah spent apart. Zillah slept on the blanket with Jessy, hidden between cases of whiskey, cupping her breasts in his hands. Molochai slept in Christian’s room above the bar with Christian and Twig cuddled close to him, their mouths still working sleepily at his wrists.
Below, far away on Bourbon Street, the mounted police rode their high-stepping steeds through the crowd, chanting, “Leave the street. Mardi Gras is officially over. Leave the street. Mardi Gras is officially over,” each one ready with a sap for a drunken skull. And the sun came up on the Wednesday morning trash in the gutters, the butts and the cans and the gaudy, forgotten beads, and the vampires slept with their lovers, for they preferred to do their roaming at night.
Molochai, Twig, and Zillah left town the next evening after the sun went down, so they never knew that Jessy was pregnant. None of them had seen a child of their race being born, but they all knew that their mothers had died in childbirth. They would not have stayed around.
Jessy disappeared for nearly a month. When she came back to Christian’s bar, it was to stay for good. Christian gave her the richest food he could afford and let her wash glasses when she insisted on earning her keep. Sometimes, remembering Molochai’s blood smeared around Christian’s mouth, remembering Zillah’s fragrant sperm inside her, Jessy crept into bed with Christian and sat on top of him until he would make love to her. He would not bite her, and for that she beat at his face with her fists until he slapped her and told her to stop. Then she moved quietly over him. He watched her grow gravid through the sweltering oily summer months, lazily shaped her tight distended belly and her swollen breasts with his hands.
When her time came, Christian poured whiskey down her throat like water. It wasn’t enough. Jessy screamed until she could scream no more, and her eyes showed only the whites with their silvery rims, and great gouts of blood poured from her. When the baby slipped out of Jessy, its head turned and its eyes met Christian’s: confused, intelligent, innocent. A shred of deep pink tissue was caught in the tiny mouth, softening between the working gums.
Christian separated the baby from Jessy, wrapped it in a blanket, and held it up to the window. If its first sight was of the French Quarter, it would know its way around those streets forever—should it ever need such knowledge. Then he knelt between Jessy’s limp legs and looked at the poor torn passage that had given him so many nights of idle pleasure. Ruined now, bloody.
So much blood to go to waste.
Christian licked his lips, licked them again.
Christian’s bar was closed for ten nights. Christian’s car, a silver Bel Air that had served him well for years, headed north. He drove up any road that looked anonymous, along any highway he knew he would not remember.
Little Nothing was a lovely baby, a sugar-candy confection of a baby with enormous dark blue eyes and a mass of golden-brown hair. Someone would love him. Someone human, away from the South, away from the hot night air and the legends. Nothing might escape the hunger for blood, might be happy, might be whole.
Toward dawn, in a Maryland suburb full of fine graceful houses, dark grassy lawns, long sleek cars in sweeping driveways, a tall thin figure draped in heavy black clothes stooped, set a bundle down on a doorstep, and went slowly away without looking back. Christian was remembering the last night of Mardi Gras, and the taste of blood and altars was in his mouth.
The baby Nothing opened his eyes and saw darkness, soft and velvety, pricked with sparkling white light. His mouth drew down; his eyebrows came together in a frown. He was hungry. He could not see the basket that cradled him, could not read the note in spidery handwriting pinned to his blanket: His name is Nothing. Care for him and he will bring you luck. He lay in the basket snug as a king cake baby, pink and tiny as the infant Christ in plastic, and he knew only that he wanted light and warmth and food, as a baby will. And he opened his mouth wide and showed his soft pink gums and yelled. He yelled long and loud until the door opened and warm hands took him in.
PART ONE
Fifteen
Years
Later
1
The night wind felt wonderful in Steve’s hair.
The Thunderbird was huge. It always drove like a fucking monster, but tonight Steve felt as if he were piloting some great steamboat down a magic river, a river of shimmering asphalt banked by pine forest and thick, rioting expanses of kudzu. They were somewhere far outside Missing Mile, somewhere on the highway that led up to the Roxboro electric power plant and, beyond that, the North Carolina-Virginia border.
Ghost was asleep beside him, his head hung out the window on the passenger side, his pale hair whipping in the wind, his face washed in moonlight. The bottle of whiskey was propped between Ghost’s legs, three-quarters empty, in danger of tipping despite the limp hand that curled around it.
Steve leaned over and grabbed the bottle, took a healthy swig. “The T-bird has been drinking,” he sang into the wind, “yes, the T-bird has been drinking … not me.”
“Um,” said Ghost. “What? What?”
“Forget it,” Steve told him. “Go back to sleep. Have another drink.” He drove faster. He’d wake Ghost on the drive home, to keep him company. Now he wanted Ghost to stay asleep awhile longer; there was bad business ahead. Dangerous business. Or so Steve liked to think of it.
Ghost took the bottle back and stared at the label, trying to focus on it. His pale blue eyes swam, narrowed, sharpened only slightly. “White Horse,” he read. “Look, Steve, it’s White Horse whiskey. Did you know Dylan Thomas was drinking at a pub called the White Horse the night he died?”
“You told me. That’s why we bought it.” Steve crossed his fingers and tried to will Ghost back to sleep.
“He drank eighteen straight whiskeys,” Ghost said, awed.
“You drank eighteen straight whiskeys.”
“No wonder my brain is sailing with the moon. Sing to me, Steve. Sing me back to sleep.”
Just at that moment they crossed a bridge that seemed to bow under the weight of the old brown T-bird, and Steve saw moonlight shimmering on black waters, so he raised his voice in the first song that came to mind: “Silver southern moon … for ten years I thought I was born of you.… Silver moon, I’ll be back someday.…”
“That’s not the way it goes. I should know, I wrote it.” Ghost’s voice was fading. “Oh, silver southern moon … tell me your sweet lies, then let me drown deep in your eyes.…”
“Somedaaay,” Steve joined in. He and the whiskey sang Ghost to sleep, the whiskey with its somnolent amber song, Steve with a voice that cracked when he tried to hit the high notes. Behind them the river passed in silence; the lowest-hanging branches brushed the water, and the leaves rotted on the bough. The moon spread like butter on the black river, and Ghost’s eyes closed; with his head pillowed on the hump between the seats, he began to dream.
They bypassed Roxboro, but Steve saw the power plant on Lake Hyco, lit up all glowing green and white like a weird birthday cake, its million pipes and wires and glass insulators and metal gewgaws reflected in the lake. On the way back, if Ghost was awake, they’d drive up there to a hill Steve knew and look out over the pastures and the lake and all the glittering Milky Way. An hour or so after passing out Ghost was usually raring to go again. His dreams gave him new strength. Or made him laugh or cry, or sometimes scared the shit out of him.
Steve put his hand on Ghost’s head, smoothed back wisps of hair from flickering closed eyes. He wondered what was unfolding beneath his hand, beneath the thin bone, inside the orb of ivory that cradled Ghost’s weird brain. Who was born and murdered and resurrected inside that skull? What walked behind Ghost’s eyelids, what lithe secret phantoms tapped Ghost’s shoulder and made him whimper deep in his throat?
Ghost often dreamed of things that were going to happen, or of things that had already happened that he couldn’t possibly know about. These premonitions could come when he was awake too, but the one
s that came to him in dreams seemed to be the most potent. More often than not they were also the most cryptic. He had known when his grandmother was going to die, but then so had she. Though surely painful, the knowledge had given them the time they needed to say goodbye.
Goodbye for a while, anyway. Ghost had inherited his grandmother’s house in Missing Mile, where he and Steve lived now. Steve had spent plenty of time in that house as a kid, watching Miz Deliverance mix herbs or cut out cookies with her heart-shaped cutters, building forts in the backyard, sleeping over in Ghost’s room. Even now, five years after her death, Steve sometimes thought he felt the familiar presence of Miz Deliverance in a room, or just around a corner. He imagined this was something Ghost took for granted.
Suddenly unnerved by the prospect of touching Ghost’s dreams, Steve put his hand back on the wheel.
They drove past a graveyard full of softly rotting monuments and flowers, an abandoned railyard, a barbecue shack whose sign advertised GRAND OPENING EVERY FRI AND SAT NITE. A rabbit darted across the road. Steve braked, and Ghost’s head rolled back and forth on his thin neck—so fragile, so fragile. These days Steve was paranoid about something happening to Ghost. Ghost was spacy, sure, but he could take care of himself. Still, Steve couldn’t help watching out for him, especially now that Ghost was the only person he felt like spending time with.
They had other friends, sure, but those guys mostly wanted to go out drinking and smoke weed and talk about Wolfpack football at the state university over in Raleigh. All of which was okay, even though the Wolfpack was always pretty shitty, but Ghost was different. Ghost didn’t give a flying fuck about football, Ghost could drink everybody else under the table and not get a damn bit weirder, and Ghost understood all the shit that had gone down over the past few months. The shit with Ann. Ghost never asked Steve why he didn’t forget about Ann and get himself a new girlfriend; Ghost understood why Steve didn’t want to see Ann or any other girl, not for months and months, maybe not ever.
Not until he could trust himself, anyway. Right now he did not deserve the company of women. However lonely or horny he got, he had it coming to him for what he had done to Ann.
He played with strands of Ghost’s hair as he drove, winding them around his fingers, marvelling at their fineness, their silvery-gold luster. Just to feel the difference, he ran his hand through his own coarse hair, hair the color of a crow’s wing, hair that stood up in wild loops and cowlicks. His hair was dirty, and he noticed that Ghost’s was too. Steve hadn’t been taking care of himself—he’d gone days without a shower and over a month without washing his clothes; he’d been late for his job at the record store three times last week; he was putting away a twelve-pack of Bud every day or two—but he hoped it wasn’t rubbing off on Ghost. There was such a thing as being too damn sympathetic. Steve’s hand felt greasy. He wiped it on his T-shirt.
They were here. Steve had no idea where, but he saw what he wanted: the faded light of an ancient Pepsi machine sitting outside a fishin’ -and-huntin’ store, casting dim red and blue shadows in the dirt of the parking lot. Steve swung the T-bird in and killed the ignition. Ghost’s head had slipped onto Steve’s knee, and he eased out from under it. There was a little dark spot on the knee of Steve’s jeans. Ghost’s spit, Ghost’s drunken sleeping spit. Steve rubbed it into the cloth, then absently put his finger in his mouth. A faint taste of whiskey and molasses … and what was he doing sucking someone else’s spit off his finger? Didn’t matter. Ghost was lost deep in dreams. Time to go to work.
Steve fished in the backseat. Cassette cases—so that was where Ann’s damn Cocteau Twins tape had ended up. Steve had always hated it anyway, the girl’s feathery voice that was supposed to be so angelic and the ethereal-seasick wall of sound. Empty food bags and a veritable sea of beer cans. Finally he dug out his special tool, a length of coat hanger bent into a hook at one end. He wondered if he ought to pull the T-bird up so it was hiding the front of the Pepsi machine. No, he decided; anybody out driving this time of night is probably on business just as shady as mine.
With a last glance at Ghost, Steve knelt, fed the wire into the coin-return slot of the machine, and wiggled it around until he felt it catch. He tugged gently and seconds later was blessed by a shower of silver. Steve scooped the quarters, dimes, and nickels out of the dirt, shoved them into his pockets, hustled back to the car, and got the hell out of the parking lot.
Twenty fast miles later, Steve had the radio on a rock station and Ghost was trying to decide whether to rejoin the living. “Are we still in North Carolina?”
“Yeah.” Steve turned Led Zeppelin down and waited for the stories. Ghost always told Steve his dreams, and they were sometimes coherent, sometimes nonsensical and lovely, and almost invariably a little frightening. Ghost sat up and stretched, working out his sleep cramps, Steve saw a flash of belly where Ghost’s sweatshirt parted from his tie-dyed pants. Pale skin, golden hair sparse and curly. Ghost looked out the window for several miles, his brow furrowed, his eyes puzzled. That meant he was remembering. Steve waited, and Ghost began, haltingly, to speak.
“When they were young … they were the world’s darlings. The world’s opinion meant everything to them, even though they tried to pretend it meant nothing. Their town was even grayer and muddier when they pranced along the streets after midnight, and the rooftops bent to kiss their dyed hair. They wandered through the shops putting their delicate fingerprints on the window glass and china, touching anything colorful or sweet, pinching things between thumb and forefinger as if to grasp the town in both hands would dirty them. Sully them.” Ghost rolled “sully” over his tongue as if it were scuppernong wine; in his thick Carolina voice the word took on a dark, rich flavor. “Sully them. The big boys at their school shouted things at them, black dirty things that stank of toilet-wall scrawls and smeared basins. But those boys never fought them because they knew the twins were magic. Everyone knew the twins would go away to the city someday, where they could pick rhinestones out of the cigarette sludge in the gutter, and the moon would be as aching and vivid as neon cheese in blue velvet sky. And they did. They went to New Orleans.”
Ghost stopped, looked away down the train track they were crossing. Tiny colored lights shone far down the line, fairy lights, Christmas lights, though it was only the middle of September.
Steve closed his eyes, remembered the road, opened them again. “Go on,” he said. “What happened to them in the city?”
“Artists put them in films. They were twins, and the hip crowd loved the perversity of that. Their mirror-image pornography was art. They were Donatello Davids, skinny and beautiful, not heavyset like Michelangelo’s. Androgynous striplings who outlined each other’s bones in lipstick. And they were allowed every art and luxury and perversion the city held because of their overrouged lips and their sluts’ eyes and the poetry of their hands.
“They grew jaded, tired, but still insatiable on their own mattress. They lived and lived and saw the first lines appear around their eyes. They saw years of liquor, expensive cigarettes, drugs and passion etch themselves on their movie-starlet faces. They watched the mirror as they would have watched a quicksilver film of their death, in a cold heat of fascination, dread, clutching each other. They bit at each other’s throats in desperation, thinking to regain beauty in blood, to drink the pulse of life. But their blood was thin, grainy, mixed with other substances—no longer the rich purple fountain they had once known. They went out less, spending whole days flat on the mattress like two dry sticks side by side, forgetting to eat, watching the cobweb cracks in the ceiling plaster widen, spread like the tracery on their faces. They—”
The high stupid scream of a siren split the night open. Ghost’s voice trailed off. Blue light pulsated in the rearview mirror, turned Ghost’s face pallid, made the litter of beer cans seem to whirl and dance.
“Shit,” said Steve, trying to decide whether to pull over. His mind spun with the blue light: the store and the Pepsi machine were
forty fucking miles behind! No one had seen him jimmy the machine, no one. Would he go to jail? Would Ghost go too, as an accessory to the crime he had slept through? Ghost would lie, say he’d planned it, trying to take some of the heat off Steve. Ghost was only twenty-two, Steve a year older. They had their whole lives ahead of them and an open bottle of whiskey in their hands … Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Steve’s mind raced, and the radio got louder, and the siren ripped the night apart, and he heard Jimmy Page wailing on guitar and then Ghost’s voice, not at all panicky, saying, “Pull over, Steve, pull over, you dumb fuck!”
Steve wrenched the wheel to the right, braked hard, and they skidded on the surface of the dark road and slowed … slowed … stopped, gravel spraying from the tires, a thin trail of black rubber behind them. But they were whole and safe, and so was the car, and most blessedly of all, the police car was passing them, siren still screaming, light still whirling like a cold blue dervish.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” said Steve, and let his hands drop from the steering wheel, his head fall back against the seat. He was aware of Ghost reaching over to kill the ignition, putting his hand on Steve’s shoulder, moving closer across the seat. No questions (why are you so paranoid about the cops tonight, Steve? just carrying a couple of joints? or maybe jimmying Pepsi machines again? or hiding the raped and gutted corpse of your ex-girlfriend in the trunk?), no accusations (we coulda been KILLED!), just the gentle, wordless comfort of Ghost’s hand on the back of his neck, Ghost’s thoughts inside his head.
For a few moments Steve accepted the comfort gratefully, thirstily. Then he remembered who he was (Steve Finn don’t need nothin’ from nobody! No, not much, not much), straightened up, and shook Ghost off. Ghost withdrew, understanding all too well. Understanding maddeningly. Steve wanted to hurt Ghost, to stop the waves of complacent sympathy pouring from the passenger seat. But Steve could not find the words to hurt Ghost, and if he had found them, he could not have made himself use them. The best he could come up with was “Don’t you call me a dumb fuck.”