Gypsy Blood (22 page)

Love and Dreams Are Bad for Business

W
ake up, boy. You have a customer. Money is ringing at your door.

A doorbell was ringing, loud and persistent in the back of Carnival’s skull, a bumblebee humming through a shout of yellow roses. He turned his back and stuffed his ears with a pillow case and snuggled deeper into his mattress. He was dreaming a sweet nuzzling softness. The walls were anthems to his brilliance, and high kicking dance girls cha-chaed down the gangplank of his slumbering tumescence. His mother was singing a song in a language he didn’t understand. An old man was dying of cancer. A gypsy girl was piercing her earlobes with a thousand golden earrings. A building was sipping a blood clot soda through a long pink straw. Poppa was drawing pictures on his face.

Nothing had to be decided. Carnival squatted on a dock on the waterfront. Dark shapes were moving in the waters below him. He was flipping Tarot cards, one after another, an entire deck of Death.

Wake up, boy. Open your eyes.

Carnival opened his eyes.

Call for pizza.

Carnival picked up the phone without looking and dialed a pizzeria, three blocks over.

Lots of cheese. I like lots of cheese and fat black olives.

“Lots of cheese,” Carnival dully repeated. “Lots of fat black olives.”

He hung up the phone.

“I hope you’re hungry,” he said to the darkness.

The darkness whispered and fluttered like a large red moth.

Who are you talking to boy?

Carnival wouldn’t answer. He sat and waited, staring at the darkness. There was a knock on the door. Carnival answered it. It was the delivery boy, a young man, all neck and gawk and angle. More color on his face than on the pizza.

“You ordered a pizza?”

The boy’s eyes were the naïve blue of cornflowers and cloudless skies. Pale and unwatered by age and deceit.

“Yes, come in,” Carnival said.

Freely and of your own will.

The boy stood at the door, reluctant to enter. “Are you okay mister? Your neck, it’s bleeding.”

Carnival touched the skin. The boy was right.

You cut yourself shaving.

“I cut myself shaving,” Carnival said.

“That’ll be thirteen fifty,” The boy said, leaning back towards the imagined safety of his car.

“Come in,” Carnival said. “It’s safe in here.”

The boy shot a glance over Carnival’s shoulder, as if he saw something moving in the shadows beyond.

“Mister, I don’t know about coming in. All I know is thirteen fifty.”

Thirty pieces of silver, no matter how you count it.

“Here,” Carnival said, holding out a ten and a five, but standing far enough back so that the boy had to enter. “You can keep the change.”

There is a magic word for everything. I love you worked on most women. I’m sorry, worked on some accidents. Keep the change was a charm. Those three magic words brought waiters and taxi drivers straight to heel. The boy handed Carnival the pizza. He stepped inside, reaching for the change. He didn’t think to ask why his customer was wearing rubber gloves.

Carnival closed his grip on the boy’s hand.

The boy looked up, unsure of what was happening.

Are you going to do her work for her, boy?

Carnival looked at the boy, tilting his head like a curious sparrow.

“Be careful out there,” he said, mouthing the words with a soft deliberation.

And then he let the boy go.

“Thanks,” the boy said, already running for his car.

Carnival watched him from the doorway, fumbling at the car’s chromed lock. The night air, kissed his pockmarked skin with wet delight. The boy fumbled the key again, and then the car door was open. The boy clambered inside, all legs and gawk, bent awkward with terror. He was in such a hurry to be gone.

Maya grabbed him as the car door slammed shut. She pushed her arms through the window glass as easily as water. She yanked him back through the unbroken window. It took four hard tries to break the car window with the pizza delivery boy’s face. He came through the shatter resistant glass, blue-chip-mosaicing about him.

Maya yanked his unresisting form out through the window frame like a pickled eel. She dragged him into the shop.

Carnival held the door for her.

Such a gentleman. Perhaps she will let you keep the change.

The boy’s eyes were torn wide open in reckless terror. .His Adam’s apple juggled up and down as she guzzled her fill. The blood trailed down his throat like a long red scarf. Carnival watched her feed.

The pizza lay there, cold and chewy.

Watch this, boy.

The night darkened like a slow red shadow. It might have been an hour. It might have been a minute. In the universal scheme of things, time was about as relevant as an election day promise. Just something we thought up to save our sanity. A few arbitrary chalk marks in the Astroturf of existence, just to let us know how far we haven’t got. Maya looked up towards Carnival, her face soaked in the pizza boy’s blood, her eyes as innocent as a cat lapping cream.

“You still don’t approve?” she asked.

What could Carnival tell her? He had helped bring this about. To deny his culpability would be nothing more than an exercise in hypocrisy.

“Come here.” she said. Carnival moved towards her.

At least he thought he did. It might have been that the room tilted for just one single moment in time. And what the hell did that mean, anyways?

She touched Carnival’s cheekbone. He felt the ghost of his unshaved shadow tugging towards her phantom touch. The follicles puckered, like they wanted to kiss her fingerprint. She ran her hand down his face and across his throat. He felt the old wound open again at her touch. This is it, Carnival thought. She’ll take him right here and now. Let’s end this dance and drop this curtain like a guillotine, square across my neck.

Open your eyes, boy. You’re still asleep.

Maya’s hand slid past Carnival’s throat, over the rounded tombstones of his shoulder blades and down the picket fence of his spine. Carnival arched towards her, his breath catching in an involuntary spasm.

His heart wanted to pump itself into her aching empty veins. He felt the tidal pull of her urgent need tugging him inward, onward, out. She kissed him, softly on the chest, like she could taste the meat of his heart dangling like a clenched jellyfish in a sack of blood and veins. Could she taste Poppa, Carnival wondered?

Carnival smelled the blood on her, the tainted taste of graveyards, a moon swallow sang deep in the back of my mind. He wanted to kiss her hard, wanted to tear himself open upon those relentless teeth, barely concealed by her cool thin bloodless lips. He tore her shirt open, wishing he could tear her flesh open and bury his face into the love cage of her tenderly carved ribs.

They made love in the pizza sauce and blood.

A car in the distance honked. Carnival heard a siren howling long and hot in the moonless night. Someone was dying. Someone was breaking the law. He didn’t care. The night was alive with the sounds of distant traffic. He heard a sound like a car colliding with another, or maybe just some kids shoving over a mailbox. The two of them lay there, heaped in the strew of the dead boy’s vital organs, a macabre ménage a trois.

It should have been messy, but what her skin hadn’t soaked up, the floor boards made short work of.

Punchbuggy, Punchbuggy, No Punch Back

T
he Toyota Camry is the car most stolen in
North America
, but the pizza boy was driving a Volkswagen and Carnival and Maya were stealing it. One of the old beetles. A classic. Yellow punch buggy, no punch back.

“Do you know how to drive one of these things?” Maya asked.

“I can fake it.”

Listen to the bandit. Ha. You don’t look a thing like Burt Reynolds. Where’s your moustache?

Carnival and Maya got into the car. Carnival started it up and drove until we pulled onto a main artery. Poppa sang Red Sovine tunes until Carnival turned up the radio to try and drown him out.

They rounded a corner.

“He was a virgin,” Maya said. “I could taste it. It tasted sweet.”

“If that’s supposed to turn me on, it isn’t working.”

Maya looked away.

Why are you doing this, if it sickens you so?

That’s a good question, Carnival thought.

Why was he doing it?

His memory reminded him of their lovemaking, he could feel the stick of her kisses and the taint of remembered blood, but he still wasn’t convinced.

Maya kept talking, drowning the radioed-over silence.

“You can tell, you know. There’s no taint in it. All that repressed passion. Like a wine, tightly corked, the flavors have yet to be soiled.”

He tried not to listen, but it was hard. A hook in his brain tugged him this way and that. They drove into the industrial side of town. Carnival looked for a warehouse or an empty lot. He was still wearing gloves. He’d bought a couple of pairs of rubber gloves from the convenience store.

Nice and disposable.

“Are you angry?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He let his breath blow out all at once, trying to hang on to control.

You need to lie better than that, if you ever hope to be a real Gypsy.

“Great. Be a Gypsy. Join the club and learn to play the guitar like Django Reinhardt. Slaughter prepubescent pizza boys for fun and profit.”

They drove down another street in silence. When Maya spoke again Carnival nearly jumped out of the car. She wasn’t breathing and he couldn’t see her in the rear view mirror. He had forgotten all about her.

“I am made this way,’ she softly said. “I don’t glitter. I don’t recite poetry. I don’t aspire to any of the accepted Goth posturing. I kill and I feed. It’s not something I can change.”

Carnival shook his head like a stubborn bull. “Anything can be changed.”

“Is that why you told me you loved me?” she asked. “Because you wanted to change me?”

Answer her boy. Try and tell the truth. You’re a bad liar, anyway.

Carnival tried to change the subject.

“Accepted Goth posturing?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.

“I thought you’d like that.”

“So what made you this way?” he asked.

“I was born this way.”

“Nobody is born this way. Nobody just starts out being a vampire.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

Ha. Your debating technique is amazingly mature. What next, great arguer? Will you double- dog-dare her to change?

A breath of silence bled out between them.

Maya spoke again. “I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.”

Carnival spotted an open back lot. No lights. Probably deserted.

“How far back can you remember?” he dug a little deeper. “How about the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember the guillotine? The Civil War? The pyramids?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have read a newspaper. Listened to gossip? Watched CNN?”

“I’m old. That’s what I know. Older than wristwatches. Older than calendars.”

“You’re not impressing me.”

“I laugh at you humans. So scared of us. Yet you worship us. You make movies and write books about us. Someday we will rule you.”

“Do you think?”

“I know. I’ve been watching you, for so many years. Destroying the earth. Raping the air. You wrap yourselves in cream and fabric like gooey mummies as you shred the ozone. Soon you will have to hide from the sun. Soon you will only be able to come out at night.”

Carnival heard the smile in her voice, but also the panic. She was still trying to hide from the fact she couldn’t remember her past.

Maybe vampires are susceptible to Alzheimer’s?

“How soon is soon to someone older than the Gregorian calendar?” he asked.

She smiled. “Soon enough. Soon enough the time will come and that’s where we’ll be waiting for you. Out in the night.”

Sure, Carnival thought, hanging out at your local palm reader’s.

She still hadn’t answered his question.

Carnival hated secrets. Especially when they’re not his own. He stopped the car. They were far enough back in the shadows that they wouldn’t be caught. He opened the door. He could be stepping out into a gang ambush but he wasn’t worried. Why should he? He had a vampire for company.

“This is kind of against the law,” Carnival said. “I could get in a lot of trouble.”