The Collected Short Fiction, page 13
His father was crouched beside him. They stared at it together in amazement, grinning like a pair of blissed-out lunatics.
Joshua heard a gentle rapping on his door.
“I’m going to the store,” his mother said. “I’m gonna get something for your fever. Is there anything you want for dinner?”
“I’m not hungry.”
He waited for her car to pull out of the driveway before he swung his legs out of bed and tried to stand. He could do it as long as he kept one hand on the wall. He couldn’t believe how tired he was. His whole body felt cold, and he couldn’t feel his fingers. It was coming tonight. The certainty of it inspired no excitement, no joy, no fear. His body was too numb to feel anything. He just wanted it to happen so he could get past this miserable stage.
He shuffled out of his room and down the hall. The vampire needed to feed on him once more, and he wanted to get down there before his mother got back.
As he passed by his brother’s door, though, he stopped short. Somebody was whispering on the other side.
He opened the door to find his little brother lying prone on the floor, half under the bed. Late afternoon shadows gathered in the corners. His face was a small moon in the dim light, one ear pressed to the hardwood. He was whispering urgently.
“Michael?”
His brother’s body jerked in alarm, and he sat up quickly, staring guiltily back. Joshua flipped the light switch on.
“What are you doing?” Something cold was growing inside him.
Michael shrugged.
“Tell me!”
“Talking to Daddy.”
“No.”
“He’s living under the house. He wants us to let him back in. I was afraid to because Mom might get mad at me.”
“. . . oh, Mikey.” His voice quavered. “That’s not Dad. That’s not Dad.”
He found himself moving down the hall again, quickly now, fired with renewed energy. He felt like a passenger in his body: he experienced a mild curiosity as he saw himself rummaging through the kitchen drawer until he found the claw hammer his mother kept there; a sense of fearful anticipation as he pushed the front door open and stumbled down the porch steps in the failing light, not even pausing to gather his strength before he hooked the claw into the nearest latticework and wrenched it away from the wall in a long segment.
“We had a deal!” he screamed, getting to work on another segment. “You son of a bitch! We had a deal!” He worked fast, alternately smashing wooden latticework to pieces and prying aluminum panels free from the house. “You lied to me! You lied!” Nails squealed as they were wrenched from their moorings. The sun was too low for the light to intrude beneath the house now, but tomorrow the vampire would find the crawlspace uninhabitable.
He saw the vampire, once, just beneath the lip of the house. It said nothing, but its face tracked him as he worked.
The sun was sliding down the sky, leaking its light into the ground and into the sea. Darkness swarmed from the east, spreading stars in its wake.
Joshua hurried inside, dropping the hammer on the floor and collapsing onto the couch, utterly spent. A feeling of profound loss hovered somewhere on the edge of his awareness. He had turned his back on something, on some grand possibility. He knew the pain would come later.
Soon his mother returned, and he took some of the medicine she’d bought for him, though he didn’t expect it to do any good. He made a cursory attempt to eat some of the pizza she’d brought, too, but his appetite was gone. She sat beside him on the couch and brushed the hair away from his forehead. They watched some TV, and Joshua slipped in and out of sleep. At one point he stared through the window over the couch. The moon traced a glittering arc through the sky. Constellations rotated above him and the planets rolled through the heavens. He felt a yearning that nearly pulled him out of his body.
He could see for billions of miles.
At some point his mother roused him from the couch and guided him to his room. He cast a glance into Michael’s room when he passed it, and saw his brother fast asleep.
“You know I love you, Josh,” his mother said at his door.
He nodded. “I know, Mom. I love you, too.”
His body was in agony. He was pretty sure he was going to die, but he was too tired to care.
A scream woke him. The heavy sound of running footsteps, followed by a crash.
Then silence.
Joshua tried to rouse himself. He felt like he’d lost control of his body. His eyelids fluttered open. He saw his brother standing in the doorway, tears streaming down his face.
“Oh no, Josh, oh no, oh no...”
He lost consciousness.
The next morning he was able to move again. The fever had broken sometime during the night; his sheets were soaked with sweat.
He found his mother on the kitchen table. She had kicked some plates and silverware onto the floor in what had apparently been a brief struggle. Her head was hanging backward off the edge of the table, and she had been sloppily drained. Blood splashed the floor beneath her. Her eyes were open and glassy.
His brother was suspended upside down in the living room, his feet tied with a belt to the ceiling fan, which had come partially free from its anchor. He’d been drained, too. He was still wearing his pajamas. On the floor a few feet away from him, where it had fluttered to rest, was a welcome home card he had made for their father.
The plywood covering the open stairwell had been wrenched free. The vampire stood on the top stair, looking into the deep blue sky of early morning. Joshua stopped at the bottom stair, gazing up at it. Its burnt skin was covered in a clear coating of pus and lymphatic fluid, as its body started to heal. White masses filled its eye sockets like spiders’ eggs. Tufts of black hair stubbled its peeled head.
“I waited for you,” the vampire said.
Joshua’s lower lip trembled. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t get his voice to work.
The vampire extended a hand. “Come up here. The sun’s almost up.”
Almost against his will, he ascended the stairs into the open air. The vampire wrapped its fingers around the back of his head and drew him close. Its lips grazed his neck. It touched its tongue to his skin.
“Thank you for your family,” it said.
“. . . no...”
It sank its teeth into Joshua’s neck and drew from him one more time. A gorgeous heat seeped through his body, and he found himself being lowered gently to the top of the stair.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” the vampire said.
His head rolled to one side; he looked over the area where the second story used to be. There was his old room. There was Michael’s. And that’s where his parents slept. Now it was all just open air.
“This is my house now,” the vampire said, standing over him and surveying the land around them. “At least for a few more days.” It looked down at Joshua with its pale new eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed out.”
The vampire descended the stairs.
A few minutes later, the sun came up, first as a pink stain, then as a gash of light on the edge of the world. Joshua felt the heat rising in him again: a fierce, purging radiance starting from his belly and working rapidly outward. He smelled himself cooking, watched the smoke begin to pour out of him, crawling skyward.
And then the day swung its heavy lid over the sky. The ground baked hard as an anvil in the heat, and the sun hammered the color out of everything.
The Way Station
First published in Naked City, July 2011
Beltrane awakens to the smell of baking bread. It smells like that huge bakery on MLK that he liked to walk past on mornings before the sun came up, when daylight was just a paleness behind buildings, and the smell of fresh bread leaked from the grim industrial slab like the promise of absolute love.
He stirs in his cot. The cot and the smell disorient him; his body is accustomed to the worn cab seat, with its tears in the upholstery and its permanent odor of contained humanity, as though the car, over the many years of carrying people about, had finally leached some fundamental ingredient from them. But the coarse, grainy blanket reminds him that he is in St. Petersburg, Florida, now. Far from home. Looking for Lila. Someone sitting on a nearby cot, back turned to him, is speaking urgently under his breath, rocking on the thin mattress and making it sing. Around them more cots are lined in rank and file, with scores of people sleeping or trying to sleep.
There are no windows, but the night is a presence in here, filling even the bright places.
“You smell that, man?” he says, sitting up.
His neighbor goes still and silent, and turns to face him. He’s younger than Beltrane, with a huge salt-and-pepper beard and grime deeply engrained into the lines of his face. “What?”
“Bread.”
The guy shakes his head and gives him his back again. “Maaaaaaan,” he says. “Sick of these crazy motherfuckers.”
“Did they pass some out? I’m just sayin, man. I’m hungry, you know?”
“We all hungry, bitch! Whyn’t you take your ass to sleep!”
Beltrane falls back onto the bed, defeated. After a moment the other man resumes his barely audible incantations, his obsessive rocking. Meanwhile the smell has grown even stronger, overpowering the musk of sweat and urine that saturates the homeless shelter. Sighing, he folds his hands over his chest, and discovers that the blanket is wet and cold.
“What... ?”
He pulls it down to find a large, damp patch on his shirt. He hikes the shirt up to his shoulders and discovers a large square hole in the center of his chest. The smell of bread blows from it like a wind. The edges are sharp and clean, not like a wound at all. Tentatively, he probes it with his fingers: they come away damp, and when he brings them to his nose they have the ripe, deliquescent odor of river water. He places his hand over the opening and feels water splash against his palm. Poking inside, he encounters sharp metal angles and slippery stone.
Beltrane lurches from his bed and stumbles quickly for the door to the bathroom, leaving a wake of jarred cots and angry protest. He pushes through the door and heads straight for the mirrors over a row of dirty sinks. He lifts his shirt.
The hole in his chest reaches right through him. Gas lamps shine blearily through rain. Deep water runs down the street and spills out onto his skin. New Orleans has put a finger through his heart.
“Oh, no,” he says softly, and raises his eyes to his own face. His face is a wide street, garbage-blown, with a dead streetlight and rats scrabbling along the walls. A spray of rain mists the air in front of him, pebbling the mirror.
He knows this street. He’s walked it many times in his life, and as he leans closer to the mirror he finds that he is walking it now, home again in his old city, the bathroom and the strange shelter behind him and gone. He takes a right into an alley. Somewhere to his left is a walled cemetery, with its above-ground tombs giving it the look of a city for the dead; and next to it will be the projects, where some folks string Christmas lights along their balconies even in the summertime. He follows his accustomed path and turns right onto Claiborne Avenue. And there’s his old buddy Craig, waiting for him still.
Craig was leaning against the plate-glass window of his convenience store, two hours closed, clutching a greasy brown paper bag in his left hand, with his gray head hanging and a cigarette stuck to his lips. A few butts were scattered by his feet. The neighborhood was asleep under the arch of the I-10 overpass: a row of darkened shop-fronts receded down Claiborne Avenue, the line broken by the colorful lights of the Good Friends Bar spilling onto the sidewalk. The highway above them was mostly quiet now, save the occasional hiss of late-night travelers hurtling through the darkness toward mysterious ends. Beltrane, sixty-four and homeless, moseyed up to him. He stared at Craig’s shirt pocket, trying to see if the cigarette pack was full enough to risk asking for one.
Craig watched him as he approached. “I almost went home,” he said curtly.
“You wouldn’t leave old ’Trane!”
“The hell I wouldn’t. See if I’m here next time.”
Beltrane sidled up next to him, putting his hands in the pockets of his thin coat, which he always wore, in defiance of the Louisiana heat. “I got held up,” he said.
“You what? You got held up? What do you got to do that you got held up?”
Beltrane shrugged. He could smell the contents of the bag Craig held, and his stomach started to move around inside him a little.
“What, you got a date? Some little lady gonna take you out tonight?”
“Come on, man. Don’t make fun of me.”
“Then don’t be late!” Craig pressed the bag against his chest. Beltrane took it, keeping his gaze on the ground. “I do this as a favor. You make me wait outside my own goddamn shop I just won’t do it no more. You gonna get my ass shot.”
Beltrane stood there and tried to look ashamed. But the truth was, he wasn’t much later than usual. Craig came down on him like this every couple of months or so, and if he was going to keep getting food from him he was just going to have to take it. A couple years ago Beltrane had worked for him, pushing the broom around the store and shucking oysters when they were in season, and for some reason Craig had taken a liking to him. Maybe it was the veteran thing; maybe it was something more personal. When Beltrane started having his troubles again, Craig finally had to fire him, but made some efforts to see that he didn’t starve. Beltrane didn’t know why the man cared, but he wasn’t moved to examine the question too closely. He figured Craig had his reasons and they were his own. Sometimes those reasons caused him to speak harshly. That was all right.
He opened the bag and dug out some fried shrimp. They’d gone cold and soggy, but the smell of them just about buckled his knees, and he closed his eyes as he chewed his first mouthful.
“Where you been sleepin at night, ’Trane? My boy Ray tells me he ain’t seen you down by Decatur in a while.”
Beltrane gestured uptown, in the opposite direction of Decatur Street and the French Quarter. “They gave me a broke-down cab.”
“Who? Them boys at United? That’s better than the Quarter?”
Beltrane nodded. “They’s just a bunch a damn fucked-up white kids in the Quarter. Got all kinds a metal shit in their face. They smell bad, man.”
Craig shook his head, leaning against the store window and lighting himself another cigarette. “Oh, they smell bad, huh. I guess I heard it all now.”
Beltrane gestured at the cigarette. “Can I have one?”
“Hell no. So you sleeping in some junk heap now. You gone down a long way since you worked for me here, you know that? You got to pull your shit together, man.”
“I know, I know.”
“Listen to me, ’Trane. Are you listening to me?”
“I know what you gonna say.”
“Well listen to me anyway. I know you’re fucked in the head. I got that. I know you don’t remember shit half the time, and you got your imaginary friends you like to talk to. But you got to get a handle on things, man.”
Beltrane nodded, half smiling. This speech again. “Yeah, I know.”
“No you don’t know. ’Cause if you did, you would go down to the VA hospital and get yourself some damn pills for whatever’s wrong with you and get off the goddamn street. You will fucking die out here, ’Trane, you keep fucking around like this.”
Beltrane nodded again, and turned to leave. “You better get on home, Craig. Might get shot out here.”
“Now who’s making fun,” Craig said. He tried to push himself off his window, but the glass had grown into his head. His shoulders were stuck, too. “It’s too late,” he said. “I can’t go home. I’m stuck here forever now. God damn it!”
“I’m goin up to the white neighborhood,” Beltrane said. He avoided looking at Craig, turned his back to him and started to walk uptown.
“Yeah, you go on and get drunk! See what that’ll fix!”
“I’m goin to find that little Ivy, man. She always hang out up there. This time I’m gonna get that girl.”
“I can’t understand you anymore. My ears are gone.” And it was true: Craig had been almost wholly absorbed by his window now, or maybe he had merged with it. In any case, his body was mostly gone. Only the contours of his face and his small rounded shoulders stood out from the glass; his lower legs and feet still stuck out near the ground. But he was mostly just an image in the glass now.
Beltrane hurried down the street, feeling the beginnings of a cool wind start to kick up. He glanced behind him once, looking for Craig’s shape, but he didn’t see anything.
Just the empty storefront staring back at him.
Beltrane stands in front of the mirror and watches his face for movement. He exerts great concentration to hold himself still: the slopes and angles of his face, the wiry gray coils of beard growing up over his cheeks, the wide round nostrils—even his eyelids—are as unmoving as hard earth. The skin beneath his eyes is heavy and layered, and the fissures in his face are deep—but nothing seems out of place. Nothing is doing anything it isn’t supposed to be doing.
He’s standing over one of the sinks in the shelter’s bathroom. It has five partitioned stalls, most of which have lost their doors, and a bank of dingy gray urinals on the opposite wall. After a moment the door opens and one of the volunteers pokes his head in. When he sees Beltrane in there alone, he comes in all the way and lets the door swing closed behind him. He’s a heavy man with high yellow skin, a few dark skin tags standing out on his neck like tiny beetles. Beltrane has seen him around a little bit, over the couple of days he’s been here, kneeling down sometimes to pray with folks that were willing.
“You all right?” the volunteer asks.
Beltrane just looks at him. He can’t think of anything to say, so after a moment he just turns his gaze back to the mirror.
