Текст книги "Teeth: Vampire Tales"

Автор книги: Neil Gaiman

Соавторы: Cassandra Clare,Catherynne M. Valente,Cecil Castellucci,Ellen Datlow,Christopher Barzak,Kathe Koja,Tanith Lee,Lucius Shepard,Jeffrey Ford,Steve Berman
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

The parking lot was empty, and I was both relieved and disappointed. I’d been modifying my position on Johnny Jacks, but it seemed he had lost interest. People boiled out of the club, several of them bleeding, escorted by Wayne and his colleagues. I spotted Ann Jeanette and Carmen beside a white SUV. Their soaked-through Tshirts drew lots of male attention, but the men who approached them hurried away as if scorched. I asked how they’d done.

– That muthafucka! Ann Jeanette had to take a breath, she was so angry. He give first prize to his Goddamn girlfriend!

– Ted Horton? I asked.

Carmen said, The bitch don’t have enough to fill a training bra and stands here shivering when they pour the water. and she won? Puh-leese!

I assumed they were talking about Sarafina, Ted Horton’s fiancée, a dark-skinned Cuban girl who was flat as an ironing board.

– I swear to God, I’ll kill her, Ann Jeanette said. I’ll kick the shit out of her.

I asked again how they had done.

– We come second and third. Carmen lit a cigarette. I thought there was gonna be a riot, people were so pissed.

She seemed ready to let go of her anger, and I explained that Sarafina had recently lost her job and like as not Ted was trying to help her out.

– Fuck her unemployed ass! Ann Jeanette scanned the lot. That don’t mean she can take money out of my pocket.

– We get this sometimes, Carmen confided. There’s a lot of jealousy, you know. We realize we’re not gonna win all of ’em, but this was fucking ridiculous.

– There they go! Ann Jeanette shouted.

Ted, a runty guy with a Mohawk, was hustling toward the rear of the lot, accompanied by a dark-skinned girl shrouded in a beach towel. They had their heads down and kept close to the wall. Ann Jeanette made a beeline for them, with Carmen at her heels. Ted turned at the last second, too late to prevent Ann Jeanette from spinning Sarafina around and decking her. Carmen leapt onto Ted from behind, riding him piggyback style to the ground, and Ann Jeanette began kicking him.

It was the first serious fight initiated by women that I’d seen, and I was impressed. A crowd closed in around them, cheering the girls on and blocking my view. Between bodies I caught sight of Ann Jeanette rifling Sarafina’s purse. The cops would be coming soon, and reluctantly I headed for the highway, hoping to catch a ride with someone pulling out of the lot. Somebody wrapped me up from behind. I squirmed about and saw Johnny Jacks.

– Let me go, I said.

Something surfaced in his vacant, beautiful face, a flicker of emotion gone too quickly to identify.

– Let me go, fucker!

I managed to wriggle free of the bear hug, but he kept hold of my wrist. His grip was tight and hot like an Indian burn. I tried to pull away and said, I’ll scream if you don’t let go.

– I like you, he said.

The idea that he liked me was suddenly scary.

– Let her go, dude, said a rumbly voice at my shoulder.

It was Everett, my favorite of Momma’s exes, a lanky muscular guy with a gloomy, bony face, gray hair tied in a ponytail, a motorcycle helmet in his right hand, a trucker wallet chained to his jeans. He planted his left hand, big as a frying pan, on Johnny Jacks’s chest and gave him a hard shove – Johnny released my wrist, but the shove didn’t move him as far as I might have expected.

– Yeah? Everett inquired of him. There something you want?

– I like you, Johnny Jacks said to me.

He walked off, his eyes on me, and merged with the crowd.

– What was that? Everett asked.

– Another Friday night at Cracker Paradise. Can I catch a ride?

– C’mon.

I locked my hands around Everett’s waist, tucked my head onto his shoulder, and listened to his flathead growl, to police devils whining like sirens, the wind ripping my hair, wishing the ride would wind up somewhere anywhere different from a crummy Florida bungalow with a weedy patch of grass enclosed by a chain-link fence. The windows were dark when we arrived, and Momma’s car wasn’t in front. A yellow streetlight buzzed overhead and the moths were out in force.

– Thanks, I said, climbing off the bike.

– Somebody ain’t always going to be around to protect you, said Everett. You aware of that?

– Yeah, I guess.

He stared at me gravely – he was the only one of Momma’s boyfriends who looked me in the eye and not about a foot, foot and a half lower.

– You know I bought into that custom parts shop over in Jacksonville?

– Momma told me.

– Whyn’t you come on up? I’ll give you a job in sales. You can stay with me ’til you get a place.

– Everett! I batted my lashes. I didn’t know you cared.

– Least there’d be somebody looking after you. You ain’t doing nothing here you can’t do there.

– You serious? I don’t know anything about bikes.

– Ain’t that much to know. It might give you a chance to get your bearings.

– I’ll think about it. I swear I will.

– Don’t think too long. We need people now. He gunned the engine. You’re a smart girl, Louie. How come you treat yourself like you do?

I started to tell him my name was Elle, but it didn’t seem important right then.

– I got self-esteem issues, I said.

Momma slept in the next morning. There wasn’t anything to eat in the house, so I walked down to the convenience store and bought orange juice and pancake mix and made myself breakfast. After that I cleaned the living room, straightened the furniture, removed fast-food cartons and ladies’ magazines and empty diet pill bottles, and vacuumed the rug. It was still a slum furnished with sprung sofas and patched easy chairs, but I felt accomplished. I watched TV for a while, surfing through a mix of get-right preachers and cartoons. Long about one o’clock I heard the toilet flush.

– Don’t look at me, said Momma, coming into the room, carrying a glass of juice and wearing a robe with a design of winning poker hands. She closed the blinds all around until the room was half dark and plunked herself down in the recliner.

– I must look terrible, she said.

I wanted to tell her she was a female version of Dorian Gray’s portrait, because whenever I saw her, I saw myself in about twenty years, but she would have asked was this Dorian some boy I was fooling with. Actually, she was a pretty woman yet, despite the pills and booze.

– You could at least lie to me, she said.

– You look fine, Momma.

A sigh. What’d you do last night?

– Nothing. I ran into Everett.

– Did you tell him I wanted him to call?

– Forgot.

– Jesus, Louie!

– Elle, I said.

– Whatever. Don’t you listen to a word I say?

I turned up the volume on the TV.

– Here! Let me have that. She pointed at the remote. There’s a real good movie on. We can watch together.

The movie had started. It concerned two girls in a nuthouse – they didn’t appear to like each other and took lots of meds. I tried not to relate it to my home life.

– That Angelina Jolie’s so pretty, Momma said. I wish I could get my hair like hers.

The telephone rang.

– Can you grab that?

I answered and a mellow voice said, How you doing, sugar britches?

– It’s for you. I passed Momma the phone.

– Hello. She sang the word.

After a few seconds of giggling and going, Uh-huh, uh-huh, Momma got up and said to me, I’m gonna take this in the bedroom. Fix me a piece of toast, sweetie. Okay?

I showered, put on cutoffs and a T-shirt, and went out, walking down the middle of the street barefoot, seeing how long I could take the hot asphalt before I had to hop onto a patch of grass. The parked cars were thousand-dollar shit boxes with smeared windshields that made the reflected sunlight look dirty. Every house was the same sort of rat hole; some had Tonka toys and Big Wheels half buried in the yellowish grass. A kid in a diaper stared at me from a doorway, holding an empty Coke bottle in his grubby fist, the TV jabbering in the gloom behind him. It was the fucking Third World.

The guys at Toby’s would sneak me out a beer in a paper sack, but I didn’t feel social and went to the park instead – a scrap of shade with some big azalea bushes and diseased palms and a fountain that gurgled like someone dying. I sat on the retaining wall, digging at a sand spur I’d picked up in the pad of my foot. Ants were scavenging a squashed beetle on the sidewalk. A gleaming black car with smoked windows breezed past. Two women talked in front of the grocery store, both shielding their eyes from the sun, as if saluting each other. A tabby cat emerged from under an azalea bush and stared at me with moderate interest.

– What’s up? I asked.

Nothing, bitch, he said in cat language, and walked off, his tail straight up, showing me his ass.

The black car again – it slowed and stopped beside me. The window rolled down and Johnny Jacks peered out. I wondered how a loser like him had copped such a sharp ride.

– What’s your name? he asked.

– Now that would have been a terrific follow-up question last night. Did it just occur to you?

No response.

– Are you on a holy quest? That would explain your minimalist style. You must be focused on prayer all the time, right?

Nothing.

– Do I still smell nice? I asked.

He tipped his head back – his nostrils flared. Dial soap, he said.

My detectors started beeping. Momma’s favorite movie was Silence of the Lambs. I’d caught Hannibal Lecter’s act.

– Okay, I said. Good-bye.

– Let’s go for a drive, he said, climbing out of the car.

– Are you crazy? Fuck off!

I moved away along the wall.

He came after me, and I said, I’ll scream.

– Why? I mean you no harm.

The words “I mean you no harm” weirded me out even more – he seemed to have learned his English from a phrase book.

He stepped close, and I felt heat streaming off him. Please, he said.

– Leave me the fuck alone!

I crossed the street, glancing behind me to make certain he wasn’t following, and nearly got splattered by a panel van.

– Hey! What’s your problem? The driver stuck his head out. Your life not worth living?

I drank a couple of beers out front at Toby’s, letting the geezers eye-fuck me, and that’s when I began putting together Johnny Jacks and the Djadadjii. Once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and by the time I arrived at Sandrine’s, I was busting to tell her. She was nowhere to be seen, and I knew she was hiding because I hadn’t visited the night before.

– Sandrine, I called.

The river made chuckling noises, rubbing against the bank. Clouds hedged the moon, but it sailed clear. The shack held only moonlight and mirrors. I studied the foliage, trying to find her outline among the tangles of leaves.

– Don’t be pissy, I said.

– I know everything you’re thinking.

I still couldn’t find her.

– You think because you don’t visit me one night, two nights, I won’t mention what I need. What you promised me.

I whirled about, thinking she was behind me, and said, I didn’t promise anything. I said I’d try.

– How can I expect such a stupid girl to understand what I’ve endured? You tell me how alone you are, how much you hunger for life, yet every day you talk to people, you fill your belly, you taste life.

– Everything’s relative.

– You could have more life with me than you can possibly imagine.

– Don’t go there! You tricked me. You made me feel things.

– Oh! Now you’re going to pretend you feel nothing for me? That I put those feelings into your head? All I did was unlock a door you never realized existed. I’ve seen how you look at me.

She melted up from the chokecherry, a paring of a woman seeming no thicker than onionskin, drifting toward me on the breeze – she touched her gauzy breasts, caressed almost imperceptible hips and thighs. A firefly danced behind her forehead, hovered for an instant in one eye.

– I see you looking now, she said.

Frightened, I backed away from her until my shoulders touched the wall of the shack.

– I’ve been patient with you, she said. I could be patient forever and it wouldn’t do any good.

– The Djadadjii, I said. Do they feel hotter than normal people?

Her face emptied.

– I met this guy, I said. He’s new in town. Super good-looking, but a retard. He can barely talk and his skin feels like an oven door. Sound familiar?

I’d meant to warn her about Johnny Jacks, but she had frightened me, and now I wanted to tell her in a way that made her heart race.

– First thing out of his mouth was he liked the way I smelled, I said. Think he smelled you on me?

– Lou. Elle. You have to help me!

– What can I do? Bring you five people? I doubt there’s time.

Fear sharpened her indistinct features. She looked this way and that, agitated, searching for an out.

– Maybe I could do with four, she said. Four might be sufficient.

I realized then what a danger she was to me, and I bolted for the fallen oak, vaulted over it, landing among the hyacinths at the edge of the water.

– Louie!

– Four? You been drilling it into me ever since we met how you needed five.

– You don’t understand!

– Of course I don’t. I’m such a stupid girl. I must be really fucking stupid to trust you. Maybe it’s only three people you need. Two plus me.

We were slightly more than an arm’s length apart, but it might have been in different countries.

– Don’t leave, Sandrine said. Without you I’ll die.

I slogged a few paces through the water, the leathery hyacinth roots snagging my ankles.

– I can explain!

I kept going.

– I’ll show you things, she said. Incredible things. I’ll tell you my secrets. I should have been open from the start, but I thought I’d lose you. I’ll never keep anything from you again.

I clambered onto shore.

– You’re taking my heart!

I slipped on something slick and sat down hard.

– Whore! she screamed. You filthy, disgusting whore! Go ahead! All you are is flabby tits and stinking blood! Touching you makes me sick! You hear? I feel like puking when I’m near you! Do you know what you smell like?

She told me. In detail. I could hear her screaming corrosive insults long after I entered the brush, and perhaps I heard them even after I had gone beyond the range of her voice.

I tracked down Johnny Jacks in the parking lot at Cracker Paradise. He took me into the shadows alongside his car, and there he choked me a little and slapped me. I told him he didn’t have to use force, he could have everything he wanted. We drove to a spot not far from Sandrine’s, and we walked down to the river. Big chunks of anger, boulder sized, were in my head, damming up everything except a leakage of bitterness. I ignored thoughts of what he might do to me – I wanted something to happen, and I didn’t care what so long as it was violent. He hardly spoke, and I couldn’t tell what was on his mind. He might have been no different from the rest of us, mostly urge and raw need, and simply was less capable of expressing it.

We reached Sandrine’s, and he climbed eagerly over the toppled oak. I waited in the river, mud oozing between my toes. The moon was so bright the blue sky was almost a day color. I felt it shining inside me, generating hatred, a cooler emotion directed at her, at all things. Hyacinths with foot-high purplish blooms bobbled against my knees. Johnny Jacks glanced at me, his face expressionless as ever. I thought he would say something, but Sandrine melted up from the rotting boards of the shack, a female pattern emerging from the wood grain, and appeared to coil around him. She didn’t draw him inside the shack, into the place where she slept; she bore him to the ground and sank her fangs into his neck and drank. He moaned once, a frail sound. Every now and then his hand twitched or an arm jerked. As he grew paler, she grew more real. It wasn’t what I had expected, or maybe it was. Part of me was disappointed he wasn’t what I’d hoped. Another part would have preferred to be horrified. Mainly I had a sense of. I don’t know. Closure, maybe. Not the feeling you get when you’re over a crush or have gone past some pain, but like the feeling you have the morning after your first time with a boy. Anxious and a little shaky, worried that you’ve screwed up, but with a bigger anxiety removed, and you’re ready to become this new person you see in the mirror.

Johnny Jacks was still alive when Sandrine lifted her head. Blood flowed from the puncture wounds on his neck, anyway. She flipped hair back from her eyes – blood filmed over her chin and lips, dark and thick as gravy.

– The Djadadjii are cool to the touch, she said. But you knew he wasn’t Djadadj, didn’t you? At the least you suspected.

I had nothing to say.

– Not this month, she said. But next month, the month after. soon we’ll be together.

She lowered her head and drank again, just a sip, and then said, I’m not angry with you. You needed a push, so I pushed you. If he had turned out be Djadadj, well. life is risk. It was only a tiny risk, though.

She closed her eyes and arched her neck, sated and languorous. On her hip a speckle of mud like a beauty mark. She stroked Johnny Jacks’s blond hair.

– He’s beautiful, though. Beautiful enough to be Djadadj.

She rested her cheek against his, her lips parted, baring the tips of her crimson fangs – a scene from one of my mind movies brought to life.

– Go home now, she said. Come again tomorrow night. or wait a month. It’s no matter. Go home and think about what you must do.

When I turned from the tableau of the shack and the two figures lying in the grass and mud, it was as if I’d never seen the river and the sky before – they were so vast and unfamiliar, they almost flattened me.

– Good night, Elle, said Sandrine.

My father’s a battered gray suitcase. He left me with no photographs, no scars, no good-byes, no promises, no postcards, no phone calls on my birthday, no memories whatsoever; but he did leave me that suitcase. To my mind he might as well be a battered old thing whose last name is Samsonite. I lay the suitcase open on the bed and begin stuffing everything I own into it. As I cross back and forth between the closet and the bed, I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror. I see Louie, small-time and ordinary, a bright, slutty girl, still hopeful, soul somewhat in hock to a regulation Sunday school dream, with a nice enough face and body to make it happen. And I see Elle, spooky and hot to trot, with her hungry mouth and Xed-out eyes and reckless ways. She strikes me as a fraud, though I can’t say why. I avoid staring at the reflection, not wanting to see which one will become dominant, disliking both equally.

I latch the suitcase and picture myself working with Everett in the parts store – it seems I already know how that story ends, and it’s the same with every other story I imagine. I realize there are better stories out there, ones with happier endings, but I have no idea how to go about achieving those fantasies of wealth and fame. Chandler Mason could tell me, probably, but look where she wound up.

Momma’s entertaining tonight. The bed frame creaks, the springs shriek, the headboard hammers out a factory rhythm, a relentless machine fury, blam-blam-blamming against the wall. Her flutelike outcries provide a breathy counterpoint.

When I was little, I’d scrunch down outside her door and try to interpret the noises, worried about what was happening. After I discovered sex, I envisioned demons atop her. Monsters. Wild animals. Men with beards and hairy thighs and cloven hooves. Now I close my ears to it. For a murderous instant I see myself appearing naked in her doorway, displaying my fangs.

Lugging the suitcase down the hall is a chore and toting it along the riverbank would be a real pain. Maybe, I think, its weight will determine my destination. I crank open the blinds and the vivid indigo of predawn invades the room. The thrift store furniture looks opulent in the half-light. I perch on the recliner, thinking that if I were Sandrine, I’d have handled my seduction more efficiently and the matter would not be in doubt. Sandrine’s stronger than me, she knows more, she’s more experienced, but how smart can she be? She got herself caught by someone as dumb as a chicken. and she intends to let Elle into her life. Elle’s quick on her feet and rat crafty. A fast learner. She’s capable of using a user like Sandrine.

Who am I kidding?

I’ll fuck up wherever I’m going.

At first light I’ll step outside and hitch a ride to Jacksonville. I can always change my mind. It comes as a revelation, the recognition that Elle is driving this indecisive decision and that it’s Louie who is reluctant to go. I thought it would be the other way around. They’re all scrambled in my head, these roles I understudy, these half-formed characters I inhabit, but I understand now that Elle is frightened of life’s sudden dips and swerves. She endangers herself only when she thinks – sometimes mistakenly – that she’s in control. Louie’s the scary one, the one who Sandrine wants, the one who wants Sandrine. She’s the dreamer, the believer. She’d tattoo a heart on her heart and be true for no reason. She could live on a dime’s worth of hope and make love with a shadow. She’s the kind of girl who’d sacrifice for love.

She’d kill to sustain it.