Milk-Blood (8 page)

Chapter Nine: Lilly Meets Jervis Close Up

I was itching all day at school. My skin felt
achy and oozing and tingly. My nose was full of wet, draining snots, and I felt hollow inside even though I ate some. When it came time to write our assignments in our green folder, I wasn’t sure if I could make it. I was worried somebody would see me sweat. I wondered who you talked to here if you had to go to the hospital. I knew if they called my dad it would be hard for him to pick me up.

I can make it. I can make it.
As long as everybody here leaves me alone.

But they didn’t. The
counselor called me down to her office and had me talk to another lady who was with her. She wore a badge, had a big brown bag, and asked me all sorts of questions. My answers were short. “Nobody was hurting me,” I told her, “I am skinny because I don’t eat my dad’s dinner,” “I have a heart defect so ask my doctor.” They were disappointed in me when I left. Whatever they wanted to pull out of me, I didn’t want to give it to them. Time to go home.

I had on a blue hoodie with long drawstrings, and underneath my skin was moist with c
old sweat. It was not the sweat that drips down your skin, but the kind that bubbles all over you and stays there. My stomach felt like I had to poop, but there was not much in my tummy anyway.

The plastic seats of the bus ride bounced
and jiggled my body, and the screechy bus noises vibrated through my temples. I closed my eyes and clenched my whole body together.

“
What’s up with you?” an older boy asked.

“
My heart. I’m getting it cut tomorrow. Don’t get close.”

They left me alone and I got off at my stop. I
avoided eye contact with Ciara and Ciana’s mom but she saw me anyways.

“We’ll watch you walk home,” she said.

I smiled back and looked at the ground and walked fast down the sidewalk as they watched me. It wasn’t long until I heard their door slam shut and they weren’t looking anymore. The only thing in sight were cars rushing too fast down the street.

Why
should I rush? There was no Nelson to go to. He wasn’t home. I had to get to something, I just didn’t know what.

The smell of the burnt house was in the air.
I looked up at the second floor where the window used to be. The big dark opening looked back down on me. If somebody was up there, they’d be able to see everything, but right now, all above was empty and quiet.

I
stared at the house the same way I always do, and it helped me forget some of my hurt. It was like a painting where the little details were different each day, and I had to try and guess what had changed. I noticed when the grass changed colors out front, noticed when a new piece of garbage was on the front lawn and when the stray dogs had split the bags open and flung the trash all about. In the spring, I noticed when new trees sprouted from the cracks on the porch. I could always tell if anything different was spray-painted on the sides. The day they boarded it up a year ago (that didn’t last) I dreamed it before it even happened.

People try to take care of houses
and people with heart defects, but it just doesn’t last.

I
stood and waited. Usually the man inside was pacing, smoking, mumbling about something, sometimes even other people were with him. But not this time. Nothing moved. Just dead silence.

My gut
gurgled like a gross potion was swirling inside, and I felt ready to have diarrhea. I put my hand over my belly as if I could calm it down. Nothing helped. I needed to move, to put something in me, to go somewhere, to call someone. Maybe if I just take Digoxin at home it can help. I can smash it up and eat it the way Dad does with pills to make them work better. Maybe just a peanut butter sandwich will help, but the bread was probably gone. Or tuna. I know there’s tuna, but that always tastes gross, and I can never work the can opener right.

Or I could take one of
Grandma’s Ensure drinks. Dad got mad if I did that, and Grandma always knew when I stole one even if she was asleep and couldn’t possibly see me. Every time I’d sneak one, Grandma would smack her lips like a zoo animal super loud. She wouldn’t stop until I finished the drink. Made me feel like I was making her starve, and like she was always watching me.

But Uncle Nelson
. His stuff would make me happy. He needed to be home soon. Maybe he would come home today. If not I will have to find someone else. I know some boys who know how to get H. I can let them know I am like them, that I can cuss and be as cool as anyone. Maybe I can get an older boyfriend who would hang out with me. I know a bunch of boys… (Darren Marshall, Cory Raymond) but they wouldn’t want a skinny-ass freak like me.

Somebody had to
help me or I’d go to the hospital and they would put the mask over me so they could cut me open and it would all go away and…

Then
I saw something in the grass. It was a foot. A big orange boot. I traced the leg up to his body.

It was the man
, the same one as always, lying in the grass. I never been this close to him but there he was lying there right in front of me. His arms were crossed on his chest and his big octopus fingers were locked together. His mouth was slack and open but his eyes were closed. His skin was a strange color, like mine, but older. His hair was scraggly, not long, but like an old man beard. He wasn’t moving. Maybe he was dead. Or drunk. I looked up and down the sidewalk—nobody was in sight, and who knows if my dad was even home.

I liked that I could see him and he couldn’t see me.
Like watching a lion up close at the zoo. His eyelids seemed so flimsy, with barely an eyelash on them. His nose was big and round like a clown’s nose. You could tell he didn’t bathe. He wore a green army jacket that seemed way too warm, and some dirty purple clothes were under his head.

Then
, like a ray of the sunshine peeking from behind the clouds, his eyes opened and he was staring right at me.

He didn’t
even stir when he woke up like people do, his eyes just flipped open, like he knew I was watching him. I thought to run but something stopped me.
I can handle him. I can do this
.

“Hey Mister.
”

He didn’t say anything back.
Next to him was a bottle whose blue label was faded like it had been there for a year. There was a crumpled white McDonald’s bag near his head and a drink with the straw sticking out. And tucked at his side, as if he thought nobody could see, there was a syringe. It lay on a twig, sideways, so that together they made a cross.

My feet shuffled
ready to move down the sidewalk and cross the street, but my head craned forward to get a better look.
He had a needle.
How good it would feel to get poked right now. Relief. A rush of nice blood would warm my insides. My stomach got mushy just thinking about it.

He didn’t move, and the more I stared, the more his faced turned
purple-red, like pimples were growing out of his skin. He was an odd monster, like me. He got to his knees, and I took a step backwards, staying out of arm’s length.

“
Hey Mister,” I spoke again.

He pulled himself up
to his feet, keeping his eyes on me like he was afraid I would attack him or rob him. I didn’t look away but stared right back.

“Your
family. They not home,” he said

“How do you know
?”

“Oh
, I just know. I know you.”

“
You been using the H mister?”

He glanced to his sides and his eyes fixed on the needle.

“Shut up. What do you know about that?”

“I know things.
I done H. What the fuck you think I know?”

I have sworn
before, but this one tasted different on my tongue and dried it up. I waited for him to react. Instead he said nothing and barely moved. His skin glowed red. His head tilted, like a dog questioning something. It seemed he was listening to a radio station in the other room, some noise that I couldn’t hear.

“Needle done make you,
needle gonna break you. Now get away before…”

He
didn’t finish his sentence but swatted his hand in the air like batting a fly.

I
took a breath and turned to go home. I had no energy, my bones and muscles ached, and my skin was melting off of me. I was defective. It was too much.

I knew what to do
and came up with a plan. The hospital. I hated it there but it was better than being here. I would take too much of my medicine. The whole bottle all at once. I would call the ambulance myself. They would come and bring me to the hospital. Tonight. I can be there soon. Dad won’t have to drive me.

The more I thought about it the more I wanted to be there
. The white walls and hallways all lit up. Clean blankets. Nurses and medicine. IVs would hurt but the medicine might make me feel better until I could figure this out. And in the morning there would be hot eggs and toast.

It was time to go.
I leapt from the sidewalk with two great bounds. My backpack bounced off my shoulders. I was almost to the street and hoped the front door would be open, but if not, I would sneak in through a window on the roof and get inside no matter what.

Then
I got tackled from behind.

A huge heavy mass
barreled into me, and my little bones smashed to the ground. I knew who it was by the stench. His breath smelled like raw hamburger meat. His skin seemed hot like the outside of a toaster and it glowed red just the same.

His hands clenched so tight
that the bone in my arm was getting crunched. His fingers clamped down, and he dragged me across the ground. Each tug pulled at my shoulder socket. I screamed, not in words, but in noises and cries like a car alarm to make others hear. I couldn’t kick, my legs were behind me, he was in front. Nobody came so I screamed louder. He dragged my body across the ground and I felt it getting scratched. He had me at the front porch and started to pick me up. I felt so small. The dark mouth of the front door waited.

“Not gonna hurt you
my girl,” he kept saying. But he already was hurting me.

My
dad would come. He had to. Someone would come.

The man
scooped me up off the ground and I was engulfed in his arms. My arms and legs were tangled up in a ball. I tried to break free but he had everything bunched up so tight I couldn’t do a thing. My hand would start to wiggle and get loose, or my foot moved and tried to kick, and he’d rewrap it back into his grasp.

He was strong.
A monster. Nothing like the nearly dead man lying in the grass. And he was crazy. Crazier than any of my dad’s friends or Uncle Nelson or anybody. I could feel the crazy.

I heard his boots
go
boom boom boom
over the steps of the porch, and he carried me through the doorframe. I turned with one last scream and got a glimpse at my house across the street. Nothing. He was right, my dad wasn’t home—just my Grandma somewhere sleeping, and nobody to help.

*
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR – I need some dirty, raw, and primitive emotions to write this next chapter. Like tapping into a memory I look inside my shadow self, and let the hurt come forth. Here’s what I find:

Chapter Ten: Lilly Trapped Inside

The air inside the house
was like a bunch of dust particles that stuck in my lungs. I couldn’t get oxygen out of the dirt I was breathing. My heart banged inside my chest. It was ready to explode. It felt like the house wanted me there, like it was hungry and I was its food.

“Stop, stop,
” I screamed again and again as if he couldn’t hear me even though he had me wrapped up in his arms, carrying me into the house. I wanted to say more—to tell him that I was born with a heart defect, to say that you can see my veins because of cyanosis, that I don’t have a mommy.

“Y
ou think I don’t know that?” the man said, like he could hear me think. “You think I don’t know? You don’t even know who I am. Well you will know, you will see. And you do have a mommy, and she’s here. And you even have a daddy.”

The man looked down at me.
He was carrying me tender and soft in his arms, the way someone would carry a dead body or their newborn baby. But this was all wrong. The house was full of ash and smelled like it was still burning. He carried me through the dark tunnels of the hallway. Shadows of old furniture seemed like people sitting on the ground, watching me, but nobody helping. This couldn’t be happening. It was like something had grabbed me and stuffed me into a nightmare.

We went into a room that was the darkest of them all. There were no windows, just a big wooden board where
the window used to be, and the tiniest slice of light shooting out its side. A pile of clothes were on a mattress that lay in the corner. He swung his arms forward and dropped me on them. I landed on what felt like a bunch of dirty, moist rags, but I was free.

Do I run? What was happening? He stood before me, legs to his side, waiting to see what I would do.
I had to decide. I leapt up to dash away, but with one arm outstretched he held me down.

“
Stop it. Just stop it. You here now. You okay. I got something for you. You hungry? You hungry, right? I know this. I’ll get you something. You try to leave, I’ll put you in the basement. There’s others down there. You wouldn’t like that.”

Others?
He left the room and I sat there and imagined the others. I thought about how dark it would be down there. I hated basements. I didn’t move.

Plus he was getting me something.

The sound of his boots down the hallway echoed. The room smelled like a fireplace. I curled my legs up into a ball and looked around. Next to the bed were lighters, tin foil scraps, shoes that didn’t match each other, and a book. I grabbed the book and tried to read the faint outline of the cover in the dark. Too dark to see.

I stared at the book cover, and a voice came into my head like somebody else was reading it.

James and the Giant Peach

It
wasn’t my voice, it was a boy’s voice. I looked around the room. The walls were dripping with darkness. Stains from smoke were everywhere. I could hear the man’s boots. He was back.

“Here you go,” he said,
and tossed a paper bag that landed next to me on the mattress pile. It was the white McDonalds bag from out front.

“There’s a full cheeseburger in there.
From last night. Not so bad.”

I opened the bag and
the McDonalds smell rose to meet me. There was crumbled up napkins and a fry wrapper inside. I reached in and pulled out the cheeseburger. It was smashed like a small saucer, but I unwrapped it, looked up at him, and took a bite. The bun was a bit hard, but the grease made my mouth water.

“Eat you tiny creature. I got more for you
.”

I finished the first half in two bites. Acid
sprayed out from the sides of my mouth, and my stomach felt a burn, but I knew once I swallowed down the cheeseburger, it would soak up the fire inside. I took another bite, and noticed how much I was trembling. Shaking so bad I had to steady my fingers so I could eat. The burger was okay, but I still felt so wrong.

“Now,
I know you not okay. Let me look at you though.”

He got down on one knee, and it reminded me of the way
doctors will look into my eyes and then listen to my heart from the front and the back. His face got close and I could see dirt in the pores of his skin.

“You
like the H then little one? You like to shoot it in your skin? Well I got something to inject into your arm. That’s what I do.”

“
I just want to go. When can I go home?”

“
Home? You don’t think this is home?”

“It’s strange here
and my daddy is going to kill you.” That felt good coming out of my mouth, and I meant it. I waited for him to get angry. I couldn’t keep looking at his eyes, so I looked at the door. It was cracked open. There better be a sound from outside soon. Or somebody needed to come. With each breath I took, the linings of my lungs and nose filled up with tiny particles of this place. I would smell burnt up myself by the time I left.

“
You think it strange. I know, I know. Strange is you doing dope when you just a tiny thing. But I was like you. People were scared of me, and I was scared of things that weren’t there. Heroin turned things off and made me feel so much better. Safe. Strong. Fell in love with it. You and me, we got H for parents we do.”

I thought about going for his eyes.
Poking his eyes out like my daddy told me to. My fingers wouldn’t squish them one bit. My nails weren’t long enough but were just chewed up stubs. I could try to kick him. Maybe I would do that in a minute. So far he was just talking. Maybe he would just talk and then let me go.

“What you mean by that?”
I said chewing the last bite of the burger.

“
You living without your parents. No Mom, no real Dad. You need something.”

“
I got something. What you got? Why don’t you get a job?”

“I got a job. It’
s master of this house. Master of the whole yard. That’s how I met your mother.”

He was waiting for me to react to what he
said, I could feel it in his breath. My body felt dark, like the room was seeping inside of me. I was drowning in it and had to go.

I felt
around for something to grab, like a brick or scissors or a shoe. My hand smoothed over the pile on the bed but there was nothing but the book. I picked it back up, held it on my lap, felt the cardboard spine, and wondered if I could use it to bash the man on the head. Probably wouldn’t hurt much, it’s just a book. I wished I was in school, at the library, with the teachers yelling at us to be quiet but the boys not listening and the teacher giving up. I would read this book and not goof around and be perfect.

I felt
a warmth in my ear, like the breath from someone’s whisper, and I heard the boy’s voice again.
James had a mom who died too. He lived with some terrible people after that,
he said.

I
flipped the book closed and looked down. I decided to obey the man but when my chance came I would dart out of here. There was still no noise from outside. Not a car door slamming. Nothing. Just the sound of another whisper.

James
got away in the Peach.

I couldn’t help but glance to my side, first my right, then my left, then up.

“You hear them too? You do, I know you do,” the man said, pointing his finger, accusing me.

“
They’re in here. Voices. Somes real clear like the boy, like your mom. That’s right. She’s talking to me now. Saying things like she never had a chance with you. Like you will love her. Like she wants you to join her. I hear her voice and understand. But other voices are just tiny bits of dirt in a pile so they all get mashed together. And now you’re trapped here with them. Trapped real good.”

“I’m not trapped.
You can’t keep me here. I’ll get out.”

“You trapped alright, but I
will be the one to get you out, no worries. There’s always a way out if you just look in the right place. Especially since you are just a piece of me, and we got some different ways me and you. Let me tell you a story about me, since you’re home with me now.”

He held a finger in the air, and I clenched on to the book, listening to him but ready to smash it on his head if he got too close.

“My dad was the real devil, you see. An animal-hurting, Jervis-beating red devil. And God Damn he loved the H just like you do. Except he went to jail all the time, you see. I was always in hospitals for being crazy and he always went to jail, until the fucker finally died in jail. I didn’t know until I saw the box of his remains when they sent them home. Moms always wanted him to die, but I think she was mad she wasn’t the one who killed him.”

“
’Your dad died and left me with a piece of shit car, a bottle of ashes, and you,’ she said, and made me and my dad’s ashes stay downstairs. So I stayed down there, but I’d come up and steal from her all the time. Stole her money, her jewelry. Whatever. Pawned stuff. All for some H. Always coming back to the basement to get high. Living was good.

“
But my moms had enough. She locked me down there one day. Banged the door shut with nails. Gave me a bucket to piss in and told me she’d let me out in three days after the poison was out of me. Three days in my own fucking tomb. I pounded on the door for hours. I called her names, I told her I would kill her when I got out. It didn’t work. I was so far gone I wanted to scratch and claw out every bit of my cramping skin. I couldn’t.

“
The voices came back to me. It was my own skin cells talking to me. They were butchering each other. Sucking the marrow out of each other like little cannibals since I had no H
to feed them. The darkest pain was in my back. It was like black burning liquid was boiling inside. It was torture…”

His words faded off and so did his gaze.
The man wasn’t even looking at me anymore but up and to the right, like he was staring through the walls to space. He barely knew I was there. I could hear his breath, like his nose was broken, and I clenched my hands on to the pile of clothes I was sitting on. I grasped the book, and waited to scream if I heard a car door slam outside.

“But I was not through. I
searched the basement for hours to find something to get me high. Everywhere. Anything to stop the pain. A half a Vic. A roach of a joint. Nothing. The place felt like a grave, and I just wanted to die in it. Just me and dad’s ashes.

“So I took him out.

“You see, when I was high I would play with dad. I would pour him on the table and push the piles into little mountains, knock them back down again, all to see what he was made of. My red-devil dad shot more dope than anybody we know. When I looked at those grey ashy lines, I thought,
maybe there is enough dope burnt out of his body to get me by
. That’s what I thought for the longest time, how much smack has been left in those ashes.

“
And then I heard it. I heard his voice, like an old man’s whisper. ‘SON,’ he said, ‘YOU NEED SOMETHING TO FIX WITH. SHOOT SOME.’

“
I was crazy, see, crazy as I am now and crazy as you will always be. But the grey seemed to rise in the air and speak to me.

“
’ASHES OF BURNT UP SMACK. GO AHEAD, BOIL IT AND FIX UP.’

“
Bullshit, I thought, of course, but he kept talking, saying over and over, ‘BOIL IT AND FIX UP.’

“
Maybe there is dope left in there, I thought.

“’
THERE IS. THERE IS,’
he said.

“
Where else would it go? I thought.

“
’IT’S HERE.’
He told me.

“
No time for cotton filter or none of that shit that me and you don’t use anyways. This was my dad. Fuck you Mom, I thought, fuck you. I boiled it up
.

“
It was chunky in the syringe and dark oil in the barrel, but I hit the vein. And ahhh yes. It was like an angel had come to me. Like every cell that was butchering my insides had laid down its knives and the smooth warmness was around me again. You see what I mean? The ashes were an army and fought back the evil sickness that had invaded my body down there. I could see the dark ashes travel through my veins. I could see them good as you can see your own veins.”

He put a finger on me. I flinched, thought about punching him, but instead just listened.

“I felt so god damned blessed then like I was sprouting wings my own damn self. Best milk-blood you ever had. Music filled the basement the days I was down there, like a nice violin with my veins as strings. I shed my old skin and grew a new one. When my moms finally ripped out the nails, opened the door, and came down…well, she saw what I was, and…I ain’t gonna scare you with that story, but she never bothered me again. I became a Red-Man.

“
So now I do things. I do lots of things. One of them’s filling me up with the right kinds of people, and the other is filling peoples up with the right parts of me
.
I been changed forever. That’s how you got in your momma, and that’s how come you’re like me.