by Meghan Tifft
“No I won’t. I promise.”
“I don’t understand,” she said after batting back the outer door, and from the avid look on his face she wasn’t even sure that he did.
He didn’t kill her that night—he sat on a bench with her and played cards. She took him to the bus depot, where it was warm. Match after match of War and Go Fish in the dead, waystation light. Why wouldn’t he leave her be? Why couldn’t he say goodnight and go? How much worse was this going to get?
Now that she was dating him, it was the same sense of peril but she had started to notice a fading indifference to it, like a cup of tea gone tepid on her desk. It was there, she could drink it, and it was no longer blowing its curtain of steam. She couldn’t decide if he was Dracula or he wasn’t. She didn’t know if it even mattered. If he wanted to murder her he would murder her.
“You don’t mind?” she said to her mother in the kitchen.
“Why should I mind? It’s your life.”
“What if he murders me?”
Her mother stopped the sink and looked at her. She seemed to be whittling out a private thought. “Oh, you’re not scared of him.” Her mother graveled in her throat and batted her hand. “You have no reason to be. You’re his problem and he don’t even know it yet!”
“No I’m not.” Lucinda went to the plant alcove and picked up the shotgun. She aimed it at her bedroom wall.
“Who put that there?” said her mother.
“What?”
“Who put that there?”
Lucinda looked at the gun and then at the alcove, with its dripping greens in front of a whitewashed window. “I don’t know.” Lucinda turned back. “Would this go through if I shot it?”
Her mother smiled. “Oh I love you,” she said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Lucinda asked.
Her mother seemed to be waiting for something, an answer to another question in the air. “Why is that window always so scummy?”
Lucinda found herself unable to go here or there in her mother’s line of questioning. “I washed it.”
And then Lucinda had a feeling. Her mother’s smile opened a great gory chasm in her.
“Did you,” said her mother.
“Did I what?”
“You know,” her mother repeated.
“No I don’t,” said Lucinda.
“Oh, no.” The ember fairly baked her to ash.
“What are you talking about?” said Lucinda. “I did wash the window yesterday. I was doing it. The gun wasn’t even here.”
“You weren’t either. For a while.”
“What? Wait a second,” Lucinda was slowly realizing that what her mother had done was make a liar of her. She hated when her mother did this—her favorite crafty line of questioning that turned her upside down by the toe only to dangle her over the pot of her own hooliganism. Except most of the time it was only Warren’s hooliganism and Lucinda was getting blamed for it.
“You took it out of the house.”
“No I didn’t.” Who knew who took it out of the house? Probably Warren.
“No I didn’t,” her mother mocked her. “You’re following him. I know you want to see what he does.”
That part was true. And there was nothing wrong with that. “I just told you,” Lucinda said. “I have to stay safe.”
“Oh but you’re not safe.”
Before Lucinda could argue with this direct contradiction of her mother’s former pronouncement, her mother salted out a shaker of laughter as if she thought this was actually a joke. “Did you like that?” she asked, as if she had just accomplished some clever wordplay that had gone over Lucinda’s head. Lucinda was so over this conversation, but her mother was still going. “You are your mother’s daughter, missy! Don’t you know it! Washing windows!” She wiped a tear and then without preparation her hand grabbed out and pushed the gun backward with Lucinda attached. It was a love push. Lucinda dropped the gun. The sludgy feet propped across the room then spasmed with a rake of surprise. The dog sprang into its delirious expanse of air and broke its dream against the wire of its cage.
“That isn’t even loaded.” Her mother beamed with vicious pride. “And here you are toting it around in the dark, ready to get yourself arrested. Oh, you’re ready,” she said.
“I did not—”
“You’re all grown up and ready!”
“What?” said Lucinda, recoiling further like a beast from a poker. “What are you talking about?” She hated how her mother made her feel like she was crazy. There was just no arguing with her.
Her mother dived at her with a rabid smile. “Pack your bags,” she said. “You’re moving out!”
The Apples
“I’m going to call Warren,” Dracula says, coming out of the shower. He smells something.
“I have to tell you something,” his girlfriend says.
“Again?” The blitzing floodlight outside the window turns the air to mechanical torchlight. The birds have flown away. He can’t stop thinking about her mother wanting him for dinner.
“I’ve been following you.”
This, thinks Dracula, is bluntly discomfiting. Maybe this is what she was trying to tell him before.
“Okay,” he says. He waits for more. It seems like there’s going to be more. His girlfriend still has not turned on a light. She’s sitting in the dark and he can see the book of matches on the table with the bills.
“You were following me?”
“You’re not—” Now his girlfriend is biting at the nubs of her fingers, like a busy raccoon. “You’re not really doing anything.”
Why does she seem embarrassed?
“Why do you go to the bus depot?”
It doesn’t seem like something he should be ashamed of. “They have a TV there I like,” he says.
“You like a TV?” Lucinda has dropped her hand to prowl at him with her eyes. She seems almost to think there’s a revelation in this.
“No. It’s just—a show. I like a show.” Is he clamming up now under her fidgety attention? “It’s not—I just go and sit—” he doesn’t feel like this is at all important. “It’s almost dark in this one—where the lighting is—”
“Squalid,” she says.
She seems edgy, and not very nice about any of this. Dracula remembers that she was the one following him.
“We should just get a TV,” she says.
Dracula blows a brisk breath. “We don’t have money for a TV.”
Lucinda nods. “I quit my job,” she says, as if to corroborate.
“What? You quit your job?” Now his girlfriend is back to her biting—a glum, spacey look on her face. “You did?” he says. He finds himself realizing that they will not have enough money to pay rent this month.
Lucinda doesn’t even answer him. “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a long time.”
“A long time? You mean this didn’t happen today?” Dracula scuffs the beads of water from his brow, finally exasperated.
“No—” Lucinda flutters this off with her fingers. Apparently that’s not what she meant. Apparently she meant the other thing. The one she wanted to tell him. “I mean, I saw you,” she says.
“You saw me?”
“In the window,” says his girlfriend.
Dracula looks out the window. He tries to think of a window. “I don’t understand.”
“That day,” she says.
Dracula knows she means night. “What day?”
He gives all his knuckles a crack. He can’t stand around waiting to see how her salt-and-peppering of fact and innuendo will eventually taste—it’s time for her to tell him something. “Can you please just tell me?”
She opens her mouth. He knows she doesn’t like his tone. Her eyes appear to dirty on something behind him and Dracula can’t help it. He looks over his shoulder. The bedroom door with its many little holes is hanging partway open as usual. The dart is there in the wood. He turns back.
“You said you’re going to c
all Warren?” His girlfriend is reaching for the matches.
“Yeah,” says Dracula. “Does that have to do with something?”
“I just realized.” She pokes her tongue out and pinches something off with her fingers. A flake of fingernail. She puts it back in her mouth. “That’s exactly what he wants you to do.”
Dracula is at his end. “Well, what else am I supposed to do? What does this have to do with anything?” He can’t stand her pigeonholing him right here in this place and then giving him exactly the runaround that keeps him in the dark.
Lucinda looks at him. She seems to want to make a suggestion. A real one. He skids a snippy breath, waiting, telling her he’s waiting. Then she clams up and doesn’t say anything. Her mouth goes to clabber and for an answer she lights another match and plucks a single hair out in front of her face. She watches it fizzle away. Lucinda seems to find this exquisitely satisfying. She’s pretending he’s not here.
“Please. Come on,” says Dracula, and she doesn’t seem to like this either. It’s his tone. It’s his terrible tone.
“Fine,” she says, “call Warren.” Her voice is brittle as burnt plastic. She puts the match out on the table.
Dracula shakes his head.
“You’re really in a sour mood,” he says. He knows it’s not the right thing to say. Not after what she told him. She seems to want him to know already what she means. It’s whenever she tries to be direct, when there seems to be something important to say, that she climbs to the edge of this pit and lurches all the way over before she even gets the words out. She’s somehow irretrievable after that, like an animal in a well. Dracula blames her mother for this. Her mother has put her down that irretrievable well and, Dracula reminds himself, her mother has been here today. Doing something. He tries to find temperance in this.
“You know I’m doing this for you,” he says.
“Gee thanks.” She razors this out without expression. “I love it when you hunt birds and not girls.”
“I wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t let them out.” Had she let them out? Dracula’s breath is scuffing out in abject annoyance. He doesn’t understand why they are having an argument right now. “I thought this is what you wanted me to do,” he says and picks up the phone. Lucinda can’t give him any corroboration. She shrugs, but her eyes seem to be brimming with ripe, bruisy panic. He is not sure why she would look like this. “Warren,” he says, when her brother’s loping hello comes through the line at him. A brief fraternal feeling trots up on him. “I need your help tonight.”
“I’m driving the truck,” Warren says. Lucinda’s brother works for UPS, just like Dracula. Dracula was the one who got him the job. “I’m meeting someone after so we have to do it while I’m on shift.”
They make plans to meet at eight. Dracula offers to get Lucinda takeout. He just wants to see what she’ll say.
She’s putting the book of matches in the drawer. “I’ll just call one of my friends. Maybe go down to that noodle place.” She has arranged her face. She seems to be trying to give him a nice enough goodbye. “Good luck,” she says. “Knock ’em dead.”
“Ha ha,” he says. “Theater humor.” He gives her a kiss, only a peck on the temple, and he can’t help thinking they have both just slighted each other.
Outside, the moon is hung low and tarnished over the buildings, like a doorknob stuck up there to taunt him. Dracula goes down the cantilevered steps and feels them tremble slightly under his weight. He feels too unsteady, floating away from that inside abyss into this tilted void. He feels just like that moon, dangling on a door that’s open all akimbo. A white owl sits atop one of the vacated dorms, watching. The unfallen apples dangle in poison clusters from the trees. Rotten ones freeze at his feet. Dracula has been juggling three of them.
“Skank, where’s your cage?” Warren is walking up.
“Missing,” says Dracula, suspicious. He’s gotten somewhat used to Warren’s way of talking. “You didn’t see it earlier at your mother’s house?”
“No. Wait a second.” Warren appears to think, his blond hair slung like sheet metal over his eyes, his mouth fading to a contemplative slit. “No.”
The cage started out as Lucinda’s mother’s, and the dog used to sleep in it. But the dog is dead now.
“I didn’t see it,” says Warren, as if Dracula still needs convincing.
Dracula is not convinced, especially now that Warren has tried on purpose. He never knows what to think about this family. They don’t seem to like each other and yet they seem to be telling protective lies around each other all the time. They’re actors in some cheap intrigue he can’t decode. Warren often seems the most delinquent and also the least calculating of the bunch, which ought to make him the easiest to deal with, and maybe he is. Dracula hates to be thinking of Lucinda now, because she isn’t that bad, not in the way Warren is.
They are all actors, but Lucinda is the only one with actual acting aspirations, and it shows. The classes she takes at the local community college, the campus upon which Dracula and Warren are currently loitering, seem to fill her entire life these days. Dracula supposes that’s normal, for a theater group that’s putting on a play. Dracula stanches his distaste and flaps open a black garbage bag as Warren makes a hammock of his brown uniform shirt. He plops the fruit into the hammock with gloved hands.
“Come on,” he says. “Hurry up. I thought you’d have done this by now.”
Dracula should have. He has been lost in preoccupation. He still can’t think of a time Lucinda could have seen him, not one where he was doing something unseemly. This bothers him in a way he didn’t expect.
Without a cage, Dracula will only get tonight’s meal. He appreciates Warren’s help but he knows there’s a rank opportunism in it. Tomorrow he’ll have to do this all over again, and the next day and the next until he finds a cage. As they walk toward the library with their ammunition, Dracula can already feel the fidgety stillness sifting the air, the frail open current of little wingbeats, soft rearrangements in the dark. It makes him twitchy and dismal with appetite.
He isn’t a big fan of the next part. The bleat of distress, the feathered commotion, the body plummeting like a podgy pouch of coins, the dull plop in the dirt. It’s worse without a cage because after each one he has to run up and sink into it right there, like some gory ghoul, squatting on his haunches to hide himself from all the windows. As they creep up under the eaves, Warren cocks his arm and sends an apple soaring, catching a dull stony light. Dracula doesn’t even see the target until a body flounders and propellers to the ground. His aim is uncanny.
“Got one.” He looks at Dracula. “Go do,” he says, his eyes lit up with frisky interest.
Wishing he had a little more privacy, Dracula approaches the stunned lump, its wings twitching faintly, its breast heaving, and imagines it brained into some beautiful dream, swinging through clean, cold skies, a ruby sun off in the distance, and he probes past the soft ashy purse of feathers and the tender sleeve of flesh until the breath of heat touches him, and his teeth roll past the sinews of nerve and vessel and break into the bag of blood. A tingling fury pixilates the seconds as he siphons it off.
Fifty minutes later there’s a pile to his knee and he and Warren stop throwing fruit and stand over it. In the dark it looks sculpted of some metal alloy, the glimmering flint of bellies and heads and the black cast iron of beaks and backs. The beady augur of many eyes looks out and beyond.
Dracula flaps open the mouth of his garbage bag.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking them to the dumpsters.”
“Oh no. No. We had a deal.”
Dracula stands back, already lit to combustion. He was afraid this was coming. He wants right now to sear some indictment into this before Warren gets out of hand. He is pretty sure they never had a deal. Only that the first time they did this Warren had an idea.
“This is fucking phat!” he said that time. This time his slang is much less corpulent, m
ore relaxed and calculated. “We’ll just do it neat this time,” he says. “Easy on the eyes, so they want to see it and sling it.”
Okay. Dracula scorches breath. He wants to shout his veto but he seems mismatched to the mood already and unable to intervene. Warren takes off his backpack and kneels down. Just like he did the first day.
That day, he said, “I just had a fucking gorgeous idea. This is perfect.” Warren unzipped his bag and pulled out two spray cans. He shook them both at the same time, like a beer commercial.
“You’re going to spray paint them?”
He walked around and around the pile of birds, as if deciding on an angle of incursion, eyes hooded and looking in with quiet introspection.
“I’m confused,” Dracula said.
Warren shook his head, not looking at him, his gaze grossly slickened with lust. “It’s art, man! It’s fucked up!” He hissed out a jet of glowing pink and began to paint the birds.
Dracula stood there, transfixed, as Warren circled the pile on bouncing haunches, absorbed in his project, kneeling down and tilting his head and thrusting back up to his feet to study its progress and stooping back down until the fumes of his labor were dizzying both of them.
“Wow,” Dracula said when he was done, not sure what to think or how to feel. The pile frothed with candy-acid hues. “That’s…” He did not want to be caught anywhere near it.
Warren was drizzling his name on the cement beside it in green paint. “Let’s go.”
Ever since then he’d been begging Dracula to do it again. “I need to do it regularly, like installments, for people to catch on.”
“Catch on?” said Dracula. He’d had a cage to put the stunned birds into by then.
“Like Banksy.”
While he didn’t like the laboratory disaster of doing the thing in the bathroom it was better than the congested dog runs of the inner city. “Banksy? What are you talking about?” said Dracula. He wasn’t really listening. The polluted wood was the only place he could do this with any dignity but it was too far to go every night. Every now and then he did a camping trip.
“Come on. This is art. This is massive!”
