by John Everson
VIGILANTES
OF
LOVE
by
John Everson
* * * * *
e-Book Edition
Copyright © 2010 by John Everson
OTHER BOOKS
BY JOHN EVERSON
NOVELS:
Covenant
Sacrifice
The 13th
Siren
NOVELETTES:
Failure
SHORT FICTION COLLECTIONS:
Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions
Vigilantes of Love
Needles & Sins
Creeptych
Deadly Nightlusts: A Collection of Forbidden Magic
Christmas Tales
VIGILANTES OF LOVE
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
“Preserve,” copyright 1994.
First published in Eulogy #6, 1994 and in Black October #4, 2003
“Hard Heart” copyright 1994.
First published in Sirius Visions #4, 1994.
“A Time for Music,” copyright 1997.
First published in Plot, 1997.
“Calling of the Moon,” copyright 2000.
First published in the anthology TransVersions, 2000.
“The Humane Way,” copyright 2001.
First published in 1000 Delights, Sept. 2001.
“After the Fifth Step,” copyright 2002.
First published in Twilight Tales Presents… Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies, April 2002.
“Trick and Treat,” copyright 2003.
An alternate version appeared as “Holidays” in Crossroads #17, 1997.
“Lovesong,” copyright 2003.
“Seven Deadly Seeds,” copyright 2003.
“Frost,” copyright 2003.
“Anne’s Perfect Smile,” copyright 2003.
“A Lack of Signs,” copyright 2003.
“Christmas The Hard Way,” copyright 2003.
“The Right Instrument,” copyright 2003.
“Vigilantes of Love,” copyright 2003.
All stories copyrighted by John Everson.
All stories reprinted or published by permission of the author.
e-Book edition as a whole is copyrighted by John Everson, 2010.
Cover photos and design by John Everson.
Original Print Edition edited by Tina Jens. Lisa Rogers Lowrance, copy editor.
Except for fair use for purposes of review, the reproduction of material from within this book for the purposes of personal or corporate profit, by photographic, digital, or other methods of electronic storage and retrieval, is prohibited. This book consists of works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
For more information on this and other John Everson titles, please visit www.johneverson.com
First Print Edition, April 2003
First e-Book Edition, December 2010
e-ISBN: 978-0-9779686-9-5
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION:
The Songs of Love
STORIES:
Calling of the Moon
Lovesong
A Time For Music
Trick and Treat
After the Fifth Step
Seven Deadly Seeds
Preserve
Hard Heart
Frost
Anne’s Perfect Smile
A Lack of Signs
Christmas, The Hard Way
The Humane Way
The Right Instrument
Vigilantes of Love
ABOUT:
About The Author
Dedication
For Geri, who taught me
about fighting for love.
Acknowledgements
Many of these stories would never have seen print but for the encouragement of some very special editors, and I want to thank Marybeth O’Halloran, Pat Nielsen, Shane Ryan Staley, Dave Barnett, Tina Jens and many more for their critiques and encouragement over the years. Whatever seeds I planted, they helped grow. I’ve been richer for the nurturing.
INTRODUCTION: THE SONGS OF LOVE
Love is a funny thing. It can make life worth living, and it can make life a living hell. Poets and songwriters have opined on its dichotomies for centuries, but that hasn’t changed the essential warring nature of human emotion. Driven by love, we will alternately lie, cheat, kill, kiss, caress and serve. It’s an insubstantial thing, this emotion, and yet its power rivals religions, kings and common sense.
The stories in this volume explore some of the strange intersections of love, from the bent bonds of the parent-child relationship to the stirrings of first amour and the bittersweet torture of adult love tasted and tempered by time and lust.
Love is like fire – it can warm you when you’re cold, protect you when you’re alone, and burn you if it rages out of control.
Love is also like a song. And many of these stories revolve around music, from a child’s faery flute to a piano carved out of a most unusual substance. Music has amazing powers: it can catch and seduce a lover, as well as heal a broken heart after that lover is gone.
These stories are all love songs – to a genre of music and a gone-but-not-forgotten favorite record store, to cities special to the heart, and to the lover’s best friend; the moon.
I hope you’ll revel in these stories and celebrate the many faces of love... even when the love turns evil.
–Tina L. Jens
Chicago, IL
March 2003
~*~
CALLING OF THE MOON
Six months have gone since Eva passed on. And still I wrestle with the memories she left me. I fear those nights, the cool fingers of moonlight creeping like airy feelers across the sill, the Oriental wall hanging, the carpet.
Before you say what I know you’re thinking, let me tell you – my remembrances of Eva were not memories of silken touches beneath the hidden folds of white tablecloths or amid the cool cotton sheets of her bed. Eva was not a lover to me, though now I sleep in her bed. But I loved her just the same. She saved my life because of her sight… but I was too blind to save hers.
Have you ever watched an accident and known, seconds before the splintering, shattering crash of impact, that one car is aimed inexorably at disaster? “That guy’s going to hit him,” you say to yourself, and then, pow, slam, scream, he does. That must be how Eva saw me.
Oh, it was nothing so dramatic as a car careening into a wall or a man perched to jump from a ledge. I wasn’t waiting to throw my body upon the algaed rocks of the ocean when she came along and swept me back to my senses. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.
Sure, I was on the street, but it could have been months, or years – or never – before I got the courage to finally jump from the edge to become waterlogged fishbait in the bay.
“You need to open your eyes,” she said the first time we met. In fact, I think it was the first thing Eva ever said to me.
At the time, my eyes were blurry slits wishing away the light, but even so I could see that hers were dark pools of brown, her hair a shelf of granite, slight curls like the chiseled locks of a Grecian statue. She was a solid woman, and an intense one. If cover girls commanded attention with the set of their proud breasts and dripping gloss lips, Eva commanded at least as much attention with the hawkish fierceness of her gaze, the whiplash shock of her tongue. I was drunk the first time she spoke to me, and still drunk the last.
I haven’t touched a bottle since.
“Yeah, and what is there to see if I did?” I mumbled back at her, a cesspool of pity and pathos. I could have been the poster c
hild for “poor me.”
“Open them and find out,” she insisted.
I shooed her with a flopping hand. “Time enough for that tomorrow. When it’s light out.”
“You strike me as the sort of man who might see most clearly by the light of the moon,” she said. “But suit yourself.”
And with that, she walked away, blue and white checked housecoat swishing at her thick white ankles. I noted the attitude of that walk blurrily, then turned my limited attention back to the sidewalk.
There were some fascinating crack patterns near the bricks of the bar behind me, and some ants that evidently couldn’t quite dig their way to China, but had at least come up from beneath the earth near Chinatown. I curled into a ball and kissed the earth they walked upon.
I didn’t aspire to much in those days. King of ants and street lice I was, and proud of it. Well, maybe not proud – the hours sucked and the clothes stunk – but certainly not too put-out about the situation. I didn’t care. Not about the old lady with the heavy brown eyes, not about the stink on my mud-stained grey trousers, and not about the blur in my vision.
“G’night ant,” I slurred at the creeping black creature near my face, then prepared to join him in the land of the undead. I hope his cousin is still ferrying souls to the right side of the river, I thought and then I was asleep in the comforting arms of the sidewalk.
Life was a simple downward slide.
“Just knock when it’s morning, I’ll open the door.”
That’s what Eva promised the first morning I was due to deliver her coffee.
That was her fee. I brought her a super grande Starbucks (a buck eighty at the time) and she gave me three dollars. Not a major income for one day, but shit, it bought a burger without the need to panhandle for two or three hours. The thing of it was, she never paid me up front – smart on her part. So those first few days, it was like I had no job. I had to hold onto my dollar commission to buy her coffee the next day just so I could make another buck the next morning. But it worked out. She tossed me a five on one of those first days and ended up making ten bucks that first week. So I came back.
Every morning at 8 a.m. I delivered a Starbucks to her door.
“I’m too old to be hiking down the block at that hour,” she told me. “You’re already there. So you get me my coffee and I’ll pay ya.”
She kept her word, and I kept mine. Pretty soon, she devised some other projects that pulled me off the street during the afternoons. She had one of those top-of-Nob Hill houses with an old-fashioned charm. Which, to most folk, simply means big upkeep. And it did. That house needed painting and caulking and new window screens and trim… I did it all for her that summer, ’til the house looked just like all the other tall thin reach-for-the-sky gables. Complete with garish pink paint. I tried to talk her out of that, but she wasn’t a lady to listen when she’d made up her mind.
“See that green house over there?” she pointed when I complained about the paint she’d picked. I grimaced.
“Well, I’m not asking you to paint it green now, am I?” she said, as if that simple fact made garish pink alright.
I didn’t care much, though – she gave me fifty bucks for the paint which I knew I could get for under twenty, so who was I to argue? It wasn’t my house. Best thing about it was, while thirty dollars of profit might not seem a lot to people who make that in an hour, I knew that so long as I was working on Eva’s place, she’d be bringing out sandwiches and snacks and a can of Coke now and then. So that was thirty bucks free and clear. And on top of that, she gave me ten dollars a day for the labor.
I spent a lot of time at Eva’s place. Every now and then, she’d call me into the house, sit me down at the honey pine table she used in her kitchen.
“How are you seeing these days?” she asked me one time, just after I’d finished giving her old Chevy a tuneup. Don’t know why she had me do it since I’d never seen it out of the garage – thought I’d choke to death on the blue smoke the first time I got it turned over.
“Ma’am?” I asked.
“Cracks in the sidewalk and stink in your nose aren’t the only bit of life open to you’s what I mean.”
Eva wasn’t nothing if not blunt.
I nodded. Taking a soaring double somersault leap off the Bay Bridge wasn’t seeming quite as seductive since the day Eva had walked by my private slab of public concrete.
She was an odd one. Some of her stories were crazier than the tales of fame, fortune and bent-over babes that I’d heard about for months out on the street from cross-eyed bottom feeders who you could track by smell for three blocks. They claimed to have been to the big time and back, but I knew better. The big time wouldn’t leave you high and dry like we were. No angel had ever fallen this far, not even the black one.
I loved to listen to Eva talk. About growing up in a small English castle out in the country or of how she chased a man all the way to Israel before abruptly chalking him up as a fool’s errand and instead joining a kibbutz. Was it all real? I don’t know. It sounded as flaky as any street talk, but for some reason, I believed her. She had a son shuffling papers somewhere in Africa for a blue chip and a daughter whose occasional letters from Des Moines were always covered in smiley face stickers and smelled faintly of soapy perfume. I knew because one of my duties quickly became picking her mail up at the post office.
While her life, in story, seemed a grand adventure and her sometimes hard-to-swallow retellings profoundly rational, I had to admit that she had a deep-end thing going on about the moon. She first explained it to me over a lunch of peanut butter and cherry jelly, while I was on a break from painting the shutters. Pink. Geez.
“It’s coming ’round again tonight, I can feel it,” she proclaimed while I was in the midst of tonguing the chunky glue off my palate. For a moment, I thought she meant her period, which had to be a memory two decades past, at least. But Eva would talk about anything, so I wasn’t too surprised.
“I can never sleep when it does,” she said, her voice growing far away, dreamy. Her face relaxed then, and as the lines smoothed away, I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d once been.
It’s so hard to look at old people as anything other than old, but I guessed that Eva had once been a beautiful woman. The kind who trails allure like incense. I could imagine a line of men chasing her as she followed her faux Romeo to the land of the Bible.
I didn’t know what to say, so I played the employee. “Ma’am?” I said, once I unstuck the roof of my mouth.
“The moon,” she answered while reaching over to wipe a dollop of cherry jelly from my face with a cloth napkin.
“I can feel its pull when the moon is full. Always have. When I was a girl, my mother used to wake in the middle of the night and find me wandering in the topiary during the nights of the full moon. I never remembered how I got there. The doctor just said I was sleepwalking, but my mother soon realized that my walking episodes coincided with the phase of the moon. She would padlock the outside of my door once a month to keep me inside.”
She looked at me searchingly then and said, “Most people are too wound up in their lives to listen, but you’ve been out on the street during the full moon. Have you ever felt its tug?”
I shook my head no and she sighed, disappointed. “It gets stronger for me every year. It probably sounds crazy to you, but after all, they named lunatics after Luna, yes?”
I laughed along with her quiet chuckle, not knowing what else to say. She did sound a bit off.
“Sometimes, as a young woman, when I did sleep during the night of the moon, I would feel my soul pull away from my body and drift upwards, outwards, towards the window where the silvery light was reaching inside. I would look down at my own sleeping face and wonder, just for a second, who that was sleeping in my bed. And then the shock of who I was seeing, that realization would hit me and I’d panic, reaching out for my body and I would fall, inward, and wake up gasping for air.”
She paused then, a c
rooked smile on her face. “A couple experiences like that and I began to close my shutters each month. I wondered where the moon would take me, but I wasn’t ready to go just yet.”
It was several weeks later when I first felt that pull myself. Maybe it was the power of suggestion and my strong imagination working in tandem, but I know I felt something.
I was walking late along the water near the Embarcadero, and the lights of the Bay Bridge gleamed blurrily through the fog rolling in. The red warning lights blinked for aviators like angry fireflies and a snow-white cloud snaked around the metal struts below. The omnipresent San Francisco fire engines blared fuzzily in the distance, and above me, I felt the cool white hand of the moon on my back.
She was gentle but firm. It was as if, for a second, both my feet left the ground and I was propelled forward. My arms pinwheeled to restore my balance.
Two steps farther forward and I’d have been swimming.
I jerked around to see who had pushed me. There was only empty sidewalk.
I started to jog, telling myself it was nothing, and a little exercise would get my blood flowing. I’d just been falling asleep on my feet. But my jog turned into a run which took me all the way to the dollar-a-night hotel I was calling home just off Taylor Street.
In moments I’d left the cool creamy gleam of the moon on the bay behind for the echoes and fog of the inner city.
The next morning, I was at Eva’s place extra early, waiting for those gaudy pink shutters to open. On any other day of the month, I could have yelled through an open screen. She loved to feel the air slide across her at night, she said. Her windows were almost never closed in the spring, summer and fall. But last night belonged to the moon, and Eva hid from her hand. The hand that I now believed I had felt.
