Gypsy Blood (19 page)

He clambered the rest of the way down. It looked like some sort of tunnel. Maybe the old house used to be owned by bootleggers. Or was part of the underground railway. Maybe this whole thing was some sort of elaborate trap.

Down at the bottom he looked around. There was a whole room down here. An old table that looked like it came from out of a monastery. Big and heavy and carved out of something that might be oak. Swamp oak, maybe. He could smell the dankness down here. He wished he had thought to bring a light. There might be rats.

To hell with it. He dragged Elija’s body into the corner. He heard music coming through the walls. Damn. By his calculations, he was a wall away from the lady who took home sailors. So close he heard her radio playing. “Brandy, You’re A Fine Girl”.

Poppa started to sing again.

“Shut up, Poppa.”

Carnival hated that song. He hated the lies and the good byes and the sailor making easy words. There was a law stating easy listening radio stations had to play that tune three times daily. The music got louder, just a wall away or maybe an entire dimension. Do radio waves travel through dimensions? Carnival didn’t know.

The music kept playing. Poppa kept singing. Carnival laid Elija out as comfortably as he could.

“There you go. You won’t have to stand anymore. Probably not get thirsty, either. This is for the best, isn’t it?”

There wasn’t any answer. Carnival wanted to tell him he was sorry. He wanted to apologize for what he’d done. What was the point? Dead was dead.

You ought to say something. A Gypsy needs a sense of ceremony.

“I’m no Gypsy, Poppa.
Poshrat
. That’s what you call me. Halfblood.”

Still, Poppa was right. Something had to be said. An old prayer came to mind.

“Outcasts of destiny, second cousins to the wind, steal your purse, leave a curse, the caravans of Romany,” Carnival whispered. “Go with God, old man. Walk the hard road and grin into the sunshine as it fades away.”

It seemed appropriate. The old beggar was an honorary Rom, anyways. Lived by his wits and lived out doors. Hell, he was more Gypsy than Carnival ever was.

“Romany” a voice whispered from out of the darkness.

Carnival stared. There was nothing there at all.

“Are you down here, Poppa?”

Of course I am. Where else would I be?

Only it wasn’t Poppa. Carnival saw something moving in the darkness. It looked like the glint of a pair of spectacles. When he got closer, he saw nothing.

“Damn.”

He watched the pipes dripping.

Stranger things, Horatio.

“You’re damned right, Poppa. There are strange things. There are stranger fucked up way out things.”

He needed a drink, but nothing red.

While he looked for a bottle upstairs, he could hear the soft buzzing of the old tattooist’s needle.

He wished the old man would stop.

Didn’t the old bastard ever sleep?

He sure couldn’t.

Redecorating

T
he tattooist kept working. Any trace of the boy had long vanished beneath the tattooist’s patient needle. He had never worked so deeply before. Part of him was not in complete control. There was a darker force flowing and moving the tight tiny circles of his hand, forcing the needle to dance through skin and bone and deeper still, painting the walls with the young boy’s blood.

The artist in the old man’s soul soared and sang at the intricacies he achieved. He could not believe the fineness of each stroke, each pain filled segment of his painstaking creation. He was undressing the boy’s bones, getting down to the stark truths hidden within. The red truths, written in careful pain filled calligraphy, the codes of time and immortality spelled out one turgid blood cell at a time.

You can’t do this, a practical voice warned inside him. You can’t work this finely.

Yet a loud scabrous red shout howled down any hind-sighted second guessing. He was touching on diademic realities only glimpsed by a few ancient cosmic pointillists. The blood spattered and stained the age soiled walls. The designs, once caged on sheets of cheap vellum, now capered and danced in a mad red arabesque.

The old tattooist worked a little deeper on what was left of the boy, working down through skin and protoplasm, down into the bone and the soul meat, deeper than surgeons, deeper than microscopes, deeper than god had ever intended. The needle, burred and chewed in eager wet chugs, worked like a rabid woodpecker, like the lashing of invisible angel tongues.

While something older, far older, squatted in the red stained shadows, lurking and looming with unholy fascination, its great cavernous nostrils inhaling the fine red mist, panting like a hellhound at the needle conjured breeze.

It was a dark scene, a red scene, and in time even the mad old tattooist closed his eyes, and the Red Death held dominion over all.

...So This Transvestite Walked Into a Bar...

H
ank Banyon had tended bar at the Guilty Lily for over twelve years and he’s got the war wounds to prove it. Fucked from the ground up was how his wife put it just before she left him for an unemployed vacuum cleaner salesman. What really sucked was how she referred to her infidelity as a “trade up”.

Hank had it all. Hypertension and mature onset diabetes. A life he hated on his good days. A sinus infection that had gnawed and napalmed the insides of skull for over three long years. Myopia and a nervous tic around his left eye beating like a blowfly at a dirty broken window. The only thing kept him going was his job. Not that he loved it. He just didn’t mind it, was all. There was nothing too hard about standing in a tired bar, waiting for his shift to end. He could endure it.

Until today.

At first glance it didn’t look like much, just this old guy leaning on the bar. Short and stocky, looked like he used to work for a living. He kind of reminded Hank of one of the seven dwarves - Grumpy, Dopey, or Maladjusted.

No big deal. Old guys drink. What the fuck else can they do?

Only Hank wasn’t quite sure if this old guy was even a guy. If he blinked his myopic eyes really fast, the old guy became a woman. It wasn’t cross-dressing. Fuck latent homosexuality. It was more like one of those three dimensional holograms. It was just like this woman kept fading in and out of the picture. One moment it was an old guy, leaning against death and damnation. Then the next thing - bam, it’s this old woman, looking twice as dead and scary as hell.

“Buy a girl a drink?” the old guy asked.

Bam. It was a woman again, only not just any woman. She looked weird, like Morticia Addams weird. Hair as gray as smoke, with one of those big foreign looking hawk noses. Big MacDonald arched eyebrows with wrinkles echoing and arcing out over her eyebrows like the wings of a snow white raven. She wore a white felt beret like some kind of French queen. It looked like the cap of a mushroom, jaunty on her gun gray hair. There was a long red scarf, tattering down.

Bam.

A man again. Maybe it was Hank’s tic, or his bad eye, or some kind of hormonal shift. Maybe he was dreaming. Or maybe he’d just gone fucking batshit crazy.

“I said how about a drink?”

Bam.

The old woman was back again, and weirder. She was Gypsy weird, like crystal balls and card reading weird. It was fucking nuts.

“Drink first,” The old guy said. And then the woman was there. “Nuts later. Salted are good. Cashews even better.”

Hank shook his head.

“Are you some kind of mind reader?”

The old guy shrugged. “
Reading
’s easy.”

Bam.

The old woman was back. Her white felt beret swiveled on top of her head like a gun turret. It looked like it was looking straight at him and taking aim.

Bam.

“Understanding’s hard.”

Bam.

“How about that drink?”

Finally it got through. Whatever the old guy was, he wanted a drink. That was easy.

“What you want?” Hank asked. “Beer?”

The old guy got a sneaky grin on, like he was telling the world’s dirtiest joke.

“How about a zombie?” he asked.

Then he started laughing. Every couple of laughs he’d pop back into a she. Like one of those flipbooks where you’d turn the pages fast to see Tarzan swinging through the trees. Only it looked like this Tarzan was swinging from both sides of the grapevine.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“All right,” Hank said. “That’s enough of that.”

He reached under the bar for the bat. A black Louisville Slugger. Most days he hardly touched the damn thing. It was more like insurance, was all, something good to have but better not to need. He felt his fingernails skittering along the polished ash and then all at once the wood got soft. Like the baseball bat needed some ginseng or a dose of Viagra. Then he felt scales. He heard a hiss like a secret whispered in the dark and then the baseball bat moved. It's going to bite me, Hank thought. He didn't know why he thought that. Bats don't change shape, do they? A bat couldn't bite, could it?

Hank let the bat go without a word, his hand doing the thinking for him. He knew he’d been trumped but good. The old guy kept laughing. Hank didn’t see what was so goddamn funny but he knew what he had to do. Maybe he didn’t know shit about turning baseball bats into rattlesnakes but he sure knew how to make a zombie.

He made it fast but carefully. The light rum, the amber and the dark, it mattered how you put the separate parts in. Put the lighter stuff down under, so the heavy stuff would sink down and color it. He didn’t have any papaya juice. Who the fuck would? He added an extra splash of pineapple, figuring his customer was too damn busy swapping sexes to worry about taste buds.

He poured it quickly. The old guy slugged it back like he’d just crawled tongue first across an acre of salt pork. The drink hit the old guy harder than the baseball bat would have. He changed his sex at least three times while he was gasping for his breath.

“Damn,” the old guy wheezed. “That sure tasted good. I’ve been drinking nothing but dirt and dew these last half dozen years.”

Dirt was right. The old guy looked like he’d just crawled out of a mud wrestling tank. Dirt on his knees mixed with grass stains. Dirt under his fingernails and dirt dug into the furrows of his wrinkled knuckles. Only that wasn’t the worst of it. Worse was the one standing behind the old guy. That one looked like a frigging accountant. That one looked like the sort of guy would come in here looking to fuck with Hank’s bar license; except for the seaweed hanging off his face and the crabs scuttling through his hair.

Hank just stared. The old guy slammed the empty glass down.

“Another,” he gasped.

Sticks and Stones

I
t was early morning - that cold gray slice of time that hovers right before the dawn. The liar’s hour when all cats looked black and you couldn’t trust the shadows.

Maya was gone.

The trapdoor was gone too.

Or was it?

Carnival didn’t know. He didn’t know much of anything.

Open your eyes, Val my boy. Will you lay beneath the pennies forever?

“I have to make up my mind, Poppa. That’s just what Maya told me. So that’s just what I’m doing.”

So flip a coin.

“Gypsies don’t flip coins. You taught me that. Flip a coin, you might lose it.”

Good boy. You remember. Gypsies don’t flip coins. We throw rocks.

Carnival remembered. It was one of the few good memories he had of his Poppa. He saw it now, clear as photographs. His Poppa standing in a field beside the wagon.

“We throw rocks and why not?” Poppa said. “That’s how gaijin dealt with us for centuries. See a gypsy? Throw a rock. A cure-all better than fresh bottled snake oil.

And then he’d showed Carnival how to do it.

“To start, you lay a stick in the dirt. Can be any stick. That’s the beauty of it. No fancy tackle needed. Then you pick up a rock. Any rock. Then throw it. Or drop it, if you’re not feeling particularly aggressive. If it falls to the right of the stick it’s a yes. To the left, a no. And there you have it. Instant free choice.”

Yet Carnival knew, even then, that not all questions are yes and no. Some questions were like knives. Like dissection. Some questions cut you, like interrogation. Others you got to cut, finer and finer. If there's a point to this you'll probably want to count how many angels are dancing on top of it.

So Carnival thought of a question and said it aloud.

“Do I want to see Poppa?”

Hell. Did he even need to see Poppa? It had been so many years. He didn’t need to throw a rock to figure out this one. Carnival and his Poppa did not part on good terms. They didn’t part at all. History’s a long rope, and family’s a chain. It’s blood that ties you, blood, and a whole bloody mess of knotted viscera. Half a thousand times he told himself he wouldn’t think of poppa.