Gypsy Blood (5 page)

Maya looked down at the chair rung. One eyebrow shot up like a short black sunrise. Her expression reeked of undead disdain. He had that effect on most women.

“Not sharp enough,” she said. “If you’re going to stick me it’s got to be sharper.”

He wished for the time to unsnap his pocket knife and whittle a point, but wishing, like his stake, was pointless.

Maya held up her palm, like a Native American Indian in a bad cowboy movie. Carnival watched her palm. Suddenly she was Mandrake, Svengali and Kreskin rolled into one. He didn’t want to look but he had to. He stared at her palm. It was like staring at a whirlpool in an ocean. It was like falling headfirst into a canyon full of naked want.

Somewhere down there in the heart of the vision, Carnival saw Poppa.

Poppa was covered in worms and maggots. He looked like an explosion in a noodle factory. The long red scarf tangled at his feet like a snare. He had his arms opened wide. It looked like he was trapped. Carnival couldn’t believe his inner eye. He didn’t think anyone was strong enough to trap his Poppa.

Help me boy. The memories are drowning me.

Was this real, illusion, or a dream? None of it mattered one bit. Carnival grabbed Poppa, trying to yank him free. He felt the line wrap about himself, inside himself. He felt it tightening. He felt like Tarzan wrestling the mother of all boa constrictors. Only this was colder than any mere snake. Cold and dead and hungry. He felt it sucking, drawing him inwards, amoebic hunger, like one of those creeping vines that can strangle full grown sunflowers.

That’s the truth. Forget about movies. Forget about fangs. Vampires, the real ones, they never bite. Not at first. They sucked. We’re talking death by osmosis. There was just one hope. Carnival pulled free of the dream vision. He reached down through the endless line and grabbed at the broken chair wreckage. He rose up, clinging to a pair of chair rungs like a drowning man clinging to a couple of drifting match sticks. He crossed the rungs, holding them outwards. He tried to think of Van Helsing. The Pope. Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, and Evil Knievel.

Pray, boy!

Poppa was right. Carnival recited the one rosary prayer he remembered.

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was crucified, died, and was buried.”

Some of the lines were wrong but he must have been doing something right. The lifeline loosened. Carnival felt a kind of hope being born. Maybe he would make it.

He kept on praying.

“He descended into hell and on the third day He rose from the dead, ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand of God.”

Damn. He couldn’t remember the last of it, something about communion and resurrection. Not that good of a thing to be praying for, given what he was facing.

Keep praying!

He tried another prayer. One his uncle told him to use when the bullies gave him grief.

“Saint Michael the
Archangel
defend us in our day of battle; protect us against the deceit and wickedness of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray.”

St. Michael did the trick. Just that quickly Carnival was free, cowering behind the refuge of an overturned card table, brandishing a makeshift crucifix in the face of a hungry she-devil.

Pray boy. Open your eyes and pray.

Carnival kept on praying, falling back on the Lord’s Prayer like a blind man toppling into the heart of the world’s darkest mosh pit.

“Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

She swatted the card table out of the way. The part of Carnival’s mind closest to his wallet mourned the loss of a perfectly good card table and chairs. The sensible part just kept on praying.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done...”

She laughed the kind of laugh that crows laugh over unpicked bones.

“...as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread...”

She swatted the Tim Allen cross from his hands. Carnival swallowed hard. The bottom fell out of his hope. He felt his daily bread grow slowly moldy.

Damn you boy, pray!

Carnival made a cross with his fingers. For an instant he thought about chanting “The power of Christ compels you, the power of Christ compels you,” but he figured she probably wasn’t much of a movie fan. She caught Carnival by the throat. She held him close enough to smell the stink of the graveyard dirt she’d slept beneath.

“My people are older than your people,” she said in a voice that sounded like a toad that had somehow learned to speak. “Older than His people.”

He was terrified, but he tried not to show it.

He did pretty well.

He managed not to soil his pants.

“...our father, our father...”

He isn’t listening. Neither am I.

Maya kept squeezing, choking Carnival out. Laughing flash bulbs splashed on and off before his eyes. “Little gypsy boy. You mouth your prayers, yet you haven’t stood beneath a cross in more years than you will admit.”

It was true. He hadn’t been to church since Christ wore short pants.

“Your words are wind; smoke that slips from the chimney I will make of your open throat.”

She squeezed harder. He felt his blood quiver in his veins, aching to be sucked clean.

“Holy Mary, mother of....” he wheezed.

She shook him like a broken baby rattle and threw him to the floor. He lay there face first, staring down at a tarot card that had fallen when she upended the card table. The card called the hanged man.

A card of untapped potential. Untouchable power. Sacrifice.

Strangely enough, he didn’t feel comforted.

“I spit on your Christian Mary,” the vampire said. “I spit on your mother.”

That did it, more than anything else. Nobody insulted Momma
.
Carnival stared at the hanged man and thought of Momma hanging onto her death-chair. As the she-demon picked him up he found the strength to speak.

“Vampire,” he said, spitting the word like a swallow of bad mouthwash. “You mock me. You say my words are empty. Yet only last week I slept with a gypsy girl whose piss was warmer than what passes for your pitiful blood. Her laugh was a gift from heaven. Her heart beat like a thunder of roses. You have nothing to match her.”

She squeezed tighter, but Carnival was inspired.

Tell her, boy.

“Take my life. Drain it. It’s full. You are empty. You have nothing. No children, no love, no happiness. I know. I’m a gypsy. I have seen your palm. You live in the grave, and no matter how far you travel that’s no life at all.”

He thought about dying. He wasn’t afraid just inconvenienced. He wished for the time to make a will but what the hell. He had nothing worth bequeathing and no one to bequeath it to. His favorite chair was broken. He was lying about the gypsy girl. Truth was, he hadn’t been laid in months. And right now his prospects didn’t look so hot.

He kept talking. The words lacerated his throat like running ribbons of razor wire.

“As dead as you’re about to make me I have more future than you. That gypsy girl will tell her children about the night I tripped over her father’s pig trying to sneak into her camp and was chased by hounds and the children will laugh and I will be reborn in their laughter. Who have you made laugh, bitch? Who has smiled for you? Who will remember you and grin?”

Maya hissed like an angered python. She slammed him hard against the wall, concussing the last gasp of breath from his lungs. The room swam. Bright spots of goodbye polka danced about his eyes.

Fight, boy, fight!

He felt her teeth kiss his neck. He felt the weight of her nonexistent breath haunting his skin. For just an instant he swore he felt a bite. And then she screamed and the room turned over as she threw him to the floor.

He fell beside his broken card table. His arm felt broken. He didn’t have time for pain. He tried to rise. If he greeted death today, he’d do it on his two good feet. He was his Momma’s son. He was a gypsy.

Maya let him stand. She stood there, staring at something far beyond his vision. He waited for her to finish him off, but she did nothing. Somewhere amidst all of the lies he had told he had hit upon the bone of truth.

He wished he could see what she was seeing. She was staring at something so unimaginably vast he couldn’t begin to say what it was. She began to moan. The building shook. If the tattooist upstairs was tattooing an angel on a sailor’s back, he just gave her an extra breast.

Maya kept moaning.

Imagine the shrieking of Mary as the centurions nailed her true love to a couple of two by fours. Multiply that by one hundred and thirteen times the square root of the sun.

Carnival covered his ears for fear of going deaf.

Finally she stopped screaming. The corner of her left eye bled a single crimson tear. It fell to the floor with a hiss like a snowflake on a hot stove. Carnival counted heartbeats, wondering how long he had left to live.

She leaned over and kissed him. Her kiss was cold and warm at the same time, like holding an ice cube in one hand while sticking your other into a pot of hot water. He thought she was getting set to bite him. Part of his mind thought - "Good. Get it over with." The other part wasn't thinking anything at all.

Wake up boy. Open your eyes.

“Do you know,” she asked with a lopsided grin, hung halfway between heartbreak and hooray. “I haven’t seen a sunrise since your grandfather’s grandfather first drew breath.”

Her voice was strained - as if he’d been strangling her and not the other way around. It cracked like the door of an unopened secret.

“And what are you going to do about that?” he asked.

She smiled without showing teeth. Carnival was grateful for that small mercy.

“I think I will stand,” she said. “Outside your door, to watch the sun rise one final time.”

She walked to the door. Opened it, and was gone.

Good. It’s over.

“No it’s not, Poppa.”

You’re not going to follow her, are you?

“Why not? I want to see what happens. Another step into the unknown, right Poppa?”

Why ask me? It’s all unknown. The future’s dark as a moonless night, dark and unchartable, no matter how many cards you flip.

Carnival followed the vampire outside the door.

Shiv, Like Shove

W
hat are you doing, boy?

Carnival wasn’t certain. He was hooked, unable to turn away, a reluctant Pomeranian being dragged on a Pit Bull leash. Maybe that lifeline still had some tug in it. He sat down on his front step. Maya stood beside the lamppost. Beneath the sign that spoke of redemption and damnation.

Ha! Some choice.

The two of them, vampire and possessed Gypsy, waited for the sun to rise.

While they waited, a car slowed down beside her. The driver was a man. Carnival didn’t know what the driver wanted. He probably thought she was the basement woman who took in sailors. The man in the car leaned out and spoke. Carnival couldn’t hear his line, but he heard Maya laugh. Just once. Bitter and sweet and lonely like a very old child. It was the laugh that did it. Before he’d heard her laugh he could have watched her burn. She was just a monster, after all. Just a thing that tried to eat his soul but then she laughed and the Galahad hidden inside Carnival’s soul started talking.

Get out there boy, was what the old knight said. Get out there now.

And damn it, Carnival listened.

Don’t do it boy. Let the bitch burn.

Yet beneath Poppa’s voice Carnival heard another. Soft, like a hiss, like a knife being drawn. Telling him to move. Willing it. Carnival tried to fight the voice. He didn’t want to move but he couldn’t help himself.

Let her burn. She made me shut up.

“For that I should canonize her.”

You don’t own a cannon. And it wouldn’t kill her anyway.

And again that voice, soft and low. Move. Carnival fought it. All the way he fought it.

“What do I do, Poppa? I don’t want to watch her die.”

So look away.

The man in the car kept talking. It bothered Carnival, to see the man talking so familiarly to Maya. What was this feeling, he wondered. Jealousy?

Look away.

“I can’t do that, Poppa.”

Then look ahead.

“What do you mean by that?”

You’re the fortune teller. Look ahead at that man, and tell me what you see in store for him.

Carnival looked.

What do you see?

What did he see? A quiet dumpster. Wheels, rolling, bump-bump-bump. The waiting ocean, looming ahead like something larger than he could ever dream.