The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  Even when I was human, I wasn’t much of a drinker. I’d have a glass of beer occasionally, or wine with dinner, but I never understood the appeal of alcohol. It was probably just a matter of body chemistry. Some people like it, some don’t. My updated vampire metabolism left me completely indifferent to it. I wasn’t sure if I could actually get drunk, even if I were to try, which I never had.

  An aversion to alcohol might make spending time in a bar somewhat awkward, if alcohol was the issue. But, like most everything else, the real issue was money. Alcohol was just a way to move it out of one person’s pocket and into someone else’s. As long as I was parting with some of mine, no one was likely to object to my distaste for the liquid. I chose a stool at the unpopulated end of the bar. The woman came over immediately and asked me what I wanted. I ordered a Scotch. When she came back with the drink, I gave her a ten and told her to keep the change.

  She looked surprised. “That drink’s only five bucks,” she said, making sure I really wanted to tip her the other five.

  “No doubt worth every penny,” I said.

  She shrugged, went to the cash register, put the ten in, took out a five, folded it neatly and slipped it into her jeans pocket. I took my drink and moved to an empty booth. I didn’t have any particular plan in mind. I thought I would just sit for a while and observe. Not that there was much to see. After a few minutes, one guy got up and fed some change into the jukebox. The guy on the bar stool provided occasional commentary on the TV news, consisting of either “Shit!” or “More shit!” I had to admit, I was in complete agreement, especially with the “More shit!” The lone female customer held up her empty glass indicating the need for a refill. When the drink arrived, I heard her say, “Thanks, Karla,” and thereby learned the barkeep’s name.

  After about half an hour, Karla approached my booth. She saw I hadn’t touched my drink. “Something wrong with the Scotch, honey?” she asked.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “I’m just waiting for the mood to strike.”

  She looked at her watch. “We close in about two and half hours.”

  “Sardonic wit,” I said. Then added, curious to see how she would react, “And a pierced nipple.”

  Anger flashed in her eyes. “What the fuck do you know about my nipples?” she demanded, her fists on her hips.

  “I saw you the other night at the motel across the street. In the parking lot, remember? With the charming gentleman leaking blood.”

  The wheels were turning. She wasn’t happy with my nose in her private affairs. But at the same time, she was curious.

  “You’re not the guy with the car alarm, are you?”

  “No, I just happened to be passing by.”

  “And thought you’d stop and watch the show?”

  “Something like that,” I admitted.

  Her annoyance seemed to pass. “So, what’s it to you, anyway?” she asked.

  “What’d you hit him with?”

  “An ashtray. The stupid fucker backhanded me.”

  There was a cut on her lower lip which was still slightly swollen. I touched my own lip, indicating her injury. She responded by bringing her hand up and lightly touching the swollen area. “You want anything else?” she asked, apparently finished with the conversation.

  “As a matter of fact, there is something else. I’d like to talk to you when you have a few minutes.”

  “I’ll bet you would,” she said, as if she now had me figured out. “That little show last night turn you on?”

  She was a straightforward girl. There was no reason not to be straightforward in return. “It is a business matter,” I said, “but not that kind of business. Something you might find to your liking. Just chat with me for a few minutes when you have a break. If you’re not interested, no problem.”

  She stared into my eyes for a second or two. “You want to chat with me?”

  “I promise to be civilized. If you’re nervous, you can bring an ashtray with you.”

  “All right,” she said, having given it whatever thought she felt it required. “I have a break in about fifteen minutes.” She started to walk away, then added over her shoulder, “Try not to get drunk.”

  •

  I went back to watching the customers, five distinct individuals homogenized by alcohol, then separated again by the same poison into a resigned solitude. They had the look of regulars, but ignored each other, content to mind their drinks. Anything they might have had to say to one another had long ago been drained of interest. Their lives now consisted of the paced administration of a general anesthetic.

  Even without the booze in their blood, they were not an appetizing bunch. Not to my taste at all. There are vampires who will drink anyone’s blood. Others who prefer the blood of one sex over the other. Some prefer children. Some fancy specific human types, like intellectuals or athletes. Others dine on specific ethnic groups, believing their blood to possess some desirable quality. For me, it was strictly a matter of practicality. All those subtle distinctions had a serious drawback. The pickier a vampire is, the harder it is to find a suitable meal. And in the final analysis, the connoisseur’s subtleties are mostly pretense. It’s just a way of trying to make something meaningful out of quenching a thirst. More to the point, it’s just a way of trying to make their lives meaningful. As if the blood of a French female violinist or a teenaged Korean math prodigy might distinguish the belly that digested it.

  Still, I had my own preferences, though they tended to be negative. I preferred to avoid the blood of the physically ill, including that of long-term drug users. A body ravaged by drug abuse is just as unpalatable as one ravaged by viral or bacterial infection. There wasn’t any objective reason for my preference, since, as far as I knew, I was immune to human diseases. My reasons were purely psychological. I just liked to drink healthy blood.

  I also tried to avoid feeding on kids under five or six years old, or on people over 60, or so. There was always an element of risk in killing humans. With few exceptions, people were always accounted for; if not by family and friends, then by the bureaucracies. When someone dies, someone else notices. If the death raises questions, someone always looks for answers. They may not look very hard or very long, but they still look. I avoided the young ones because there wasn’t enough blood in their little bodies to justify the risk. It was more prudent to feed on larger bodies, getting a full nutritional return for the effort invested and the risk involved.

  As for the old folks, I figured once a human reaches 60, they’ve earned the right to drag it out as long as they either choose to or can. They’ve fought a good fight against an unbeatable adversary in a battle that was lost from the beginning. As long as the old and gray weren’t the only solution to my immediate dietary needs, I preferred to let them go their own distance.

  Not feeding on small children was a matter of common sense, an attempt to minimize the chance of undesirable repercussions. My attitude toward the elderly was less obviously pragmatic. On the face of it, it was a curiously sentimental policy for a predator. But there was more to it than that. It grew out of a desire to invest the world with value. It was another of my many attempts to make the world meaningful by drawing lines around my own actions. I wanted to acknowledge that some things were better than others, and I wanted to respect the difference. At one level, I knew my distinctions were arbitrary. I really wasn’t different in kind from a vampire who, for whatever idiosyncratic perversity, only drank the blood of twelve-year-old girls. We were both making arbitrary distinctions. And we were both trying to invest the world with value. We both needed to choose between the better and the worse, even if our choices were based on our own aberrations.

  •

  About fifteen minutes later, Karla came back to my booth and sat across from me.

  “I guess you’re not in the mood tonight?” she said, pointing to my untouched drink.

  I responded by sliding the glass to the back edge of the table. We sat looking at each other. B
eneath the pierced eyebrow, the multiple earrings, the tattoo of a goldfish on her neck, and the garish eye shadow, Karla was a classic Italian beauty: black hair, brown eyes, olive skin, with unusually symmetrical facial features. None of which had any real bearing on anything that concerned me.

  “So, let’s chat,” she said.

  I wanted to accomplish two things: to convince her to take the job, and at the same time, I wanted her to understand that she would be making a serious decision, with serious repercussions if she broke the rules of her employment. Unfortunately, those two things worked against each other. If I gave her an accurate picture of the penalty for breaking the rules, I would eliminate any chance of her accepting the job. In the end, there was nothing to do but try.

  “My name is Shake,” I said, offering her my hand.

  “Karla Lambretti,” she responded, shaking my hand briefly and giving it a good squeeze. “That’s an unusual name. Are you one of those oil sheiks?”

  “It’s Shake, as in, ‘shake, rattle, and roll.’”

  “Shake, rattle, and roll,” she repeated. “Wow, I haven’t heard that in a while.”

  “A little before your time, I guess. How about, ‘shake your booty.’”

  “I get the picture. So, what’s this business matter you want to chat about?”

  “Unfortunately,” I began, “there isn’t any way to make this sound entirely plausible, so I’ll just explain the situation, and we’ll see what you think.”

  “It sounds like I’m not going to believe you.”

  “You might not. But I’m not that concerned about whether you believe me. What I’m hoping is that you’ll accept my offer, anyway.”

  “I’ve only got fifteen minutes,” she said. “So whatever it is, you might want to get to the point.”

  “Let’s start with the why. As luck would have it, I’ve been graced with a rather rare medical condition.”

  “Is it contagious?” she interrupted, leaning back.

  “Not at all. It’s genetic. It isn’t especially debilitating, but it has one very inconvenient side effect: an extreme sensitivity to sunlight.”

  “You mean,” she interrupted, “you’re like a vampire, or something?”

  “Nothing that fantastic. I’m more like a square peg.”

  “A square peg?” she asked.

  I nodded. “You know, the square peg that won’t fit into a round hole. In my case, the round hole is a normal life lived in the light of day. I have to stay indoors during the day and handle my affairs at night. For the most part, this isn’t a problem. But occasionally things come up that have to be done during normal business hours. I’m looking for someone I can depend on to handle those for me.”

  “You want me to run errands for you?” she asked, her face clouding slightly.

  “That would be part of the job, yes. I also need a chauffeur. I don’t drive.”

  “Why not just take a cab? They work 24/7. Too expensive?”

  “I’m not trying to cut expenses,” I said, wishing to give her a better sense of my priorities. “I’m looking for someone I can depend on.”

  She sensed my change in tone and turned her attitude down a notch. “Why me?” she asked, soberly. “You don’t even know me.”

  “It’s true,” I agreed, “I don’t know you. But, to tell you the truth, I was impressed by the way you handled yourself the other night at the motel. Does that seem odd to you?”

  “Well, since you ask, yeah, pretty fucking odd.”

  “It’s not, if you think about it. I live an idiosyncratic life. When I need assistance, it makes sense to consider someone who also has a somewhat unorthodox life style. The person I’m looking for can’t have a husband, two kids, and sell real estate on the side.”

  “So, what? Like, tending bar and turning tricks on the side are the qualifications you’re looking for?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s more a matter of how you go about it. Let’s just say I like your style.”

  She mulled this over for quite a while, staring at me the whole time, as if there was something in my face or expression that would help her decide what to do. This was enough for me to see she was interested and would soon get to the inevitable question. I gave her the time she needed, which wasn’t much.

  “What’s the money like?” she asked.

  Money wasn’t a problem for me. I had a lot of it, and when I needed more, it was relatively easy to get. What wasn’t so easy was finding someone who would do a good job for reasons other than money. Or, at any rate, not only for the money. It wasn’t easy to find someone whose personal integrity, even their sense of well-being, didn’t function like a puppet hanging from the strings of their greed.

  “The money is good, and the job isn’t complicated. You’d be my chauffeur, and run errands as needed. Beyond that, you’re not to discuss me or anything you do for me with anyone else. And, as far as possible, you should try to refrain from asking too many unnecessary questions.”

  Karla thought for a moment, then nodded her head. “These errands I’ll be running, are they legal?”

  “Prostitution isn’t legal.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  She was right, it didn’t have anything to do with it. “I won’t bullshit you, Karla. There may be an element of risk at times. But I won’t involve you directly in anything illegal. And I’ll look out for you. That may sound somewhat... how shall I put it? ...anemic, right now. But you’ll see that it isn’t. I’m not a bad guy to have on your side.”

  I didn’t expect any of this to make a favorable impression on her. There wasn’t any context for her to evaluate what the advantages or disadvantages might be. But she was used to taking risks.

  “So what about the money?” she asked.

  “I’ll pay you a base salary of five thousand dollars a month, in cash. Always and only cash. In addition to the base salary, I’ll pay a bonus for every occasion in which you chauffeur me, and a bonus for every errand you run. The amounts of the bonuses will be entirely at my discretion. They will not be negotiable.” I paused to let her play with the numbers.

  “Five thousand a month, plus bonuses?” she confirmed.

  “Does that sound like something you’d consider?”

  “I’ll consider it,” she said, trying not to smile. “How often will I be driving you and running errands?”

  “That’s unpredictable. There may be times when a month will pass without hearing from me. If that happens, you’ll receive your base salary for that month. More likely, I’ll need errands run two or three times a month, and I’ll need you to drive me somewhere once a week, or so. That’s a rough average. There may be periods when I need you more often, possibly even for several days running.”

  “Can you give me an idea of how much the bonuses would be?”

  “I can, but I’d rather not. I’d rather you work for me for a month or two, and see how it goes. Are you willing to do that?”

  She gave the appearance of considering it, but it was obvious her mind was already made up. “I guess so,” she said. “How is all this going to work?”

  “Does that mean you’ll take the job?”

  “Does that mean you’re hiring me?”

  “Yes, but you have to say to me, ‘Shake, I’ll take the job.’”

  She gave me a quizzical look, then shrugged her shoulders. “Shake, I’ll take the job.”

  “Good. Do you have a cell phone?”

  “No. Do I need to get one?”

  I took a cell phone, a set of car keys, and an envelope out of my coat pocket and placed them on the table. “The cell phone is for you. You don’t need to worry about phone bills. They’ll be paid for you. You do need to keep it charged and with you at all times, 24/7.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not some of the time, Karla. All the time.”

  “Okay, all the time.”

  “When I need you, I’ll call you on that phone. If I need you for an errand, I’ll give you ins
tructions then. If I need you to drive me somewhere, I’ll tell you when and where to meet me.”

  She picked up the phone, opened and closed it a couple of times, then set it back down. “Are those car keys?”

  “They are. Do you know how to get to the corner of Fair Oaks and Manzanita?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a repair shop there called Tony’s. Go there tomorrow morning and ask for Tony. Tell him you’re there to pick up Shake’s car. He’ll probably look at you like you’re nuts, or something. Tell him Shake asks how Linda is doing.”

  “Linda?”

  “His daughter. He’ll have the car brought out to you. It’s registered to Tony, but it’s yours to use as you please. Except, of course, when you’re on duty.”

  “What kind of car is it?”

  “A Dodge Magnum.”

  “Sounds macho.”

  “It may be, for a station wagon. It doesn’t have many miles on it, so go easy for a while, until the engine’s broken in. Have the oil changed regularly, and all that. By Tony. Likewise with any repairs. If you’re not sure about something, just take it to Tony. Not to a different garage. Only to Tony.”

  “And I can drive it anytime I want?”

  “As I said, it’s yours to use as you please. But don’t forget who you’re working for and what takes precedence.”

  “Got it. You say jump, I jump.”

  She said this as a joke, but I wanted her to understand it wasn’t a joking matter. “If you already resent the arrangement,” I said, “we’re not going to get along, Karla.”

  “Sorry,” she said, sheepishly. “I’m not used to being at someone else’s beck and call.”

  “Now is the time to say so if you can’t do it.”

  She was staring at the car keys, holding them with both hands.

  “Yes or no, Karla?”

  She put the keys in her pocket. “Yes.”

  It was what I wanted to hear. “You’re driving an old Honda, right?”

  “It’s not so old.”

  “If you want, you can sign the pink slip over to Tony when you pick up the new car. He’ll sell it for you. He’ll take a cut off the top for his trouble, but he’s fair and he’ll get a good price for it. Of course, that’s up to you.”