by Anna Roberts
“I think you have a loose floorboard somewhere,” said Blue. “Or a draft. That’s what’s making the light fitting swing.”
Gloria actually cackled. “Oh, he’s got inside your head already, hasn’t it? That boy’s a skeptic through and through – never believed in a thing he couldn’t see or touch.”
“Even if you’re right, I don’t see what my...menses is going to do to help.”
“You read the Bible?”
“Sure. Once.” Before God stretched her faith to breaking point. There were only so many mysterious ways a human being could handle; at one point even poor old Job had thrown up his hands and said ‘Enough’.
“Old ass juju,” said Gloria. “Paint the door with blood, so the Angel of Death will pass over. Of course, they used lamb’s blood because those Hebrews knew way back that there was way too much power in human blood. Especially the womb blood of women. Somewhere the wires got crossed and the boys got their dicks in the mix and it became a dirty thing, but it’s not dirty. It’s power.” She nodded directly at Blue’s waistband. “That blood in your body is your insurance policy, girl. Iron and salt. They can get inside your head for a little while, but you’re too juicy for spirits to burrow right down in your bones and your belly.”
“Spirits?” said Blue, picking the one part of this monologue that she nearly understood.
Gloria picked up a small dustpan and started to sweep the soil from the table. “They like old bones, thin blood,” she said. “That’s why dried up old broads like me make the best witches; we can’t keep them out. Don’t have the strength. But we see things, feel things, fly through the air with the greatest of ease.” She grinned again. “And in return, some bugaboo gets to ride us around like a busted truck.”
“Okay,” said Blue. “Does this have something to do with why you want me to pee in your mason jars?”
“Yup. You’re potent. Strong. My watery old piss isn’t gonna repel a thing.”
Blue shook her head. “Gloria, you’re nuts.”
“So I’ve been told,” said Gloria, scooping up the Jesus leaflet from the side. “But keep your underpants on at night all the same.” She put her glasses back on and squinted at the print. “Holy crap. Another fuckin’ Rapture. How many do they have to have before these idiots catch on that it ain’t happening?”
Blue went into the bathroom to wash her hands. There were mason jars lined up on the wall next to the toilet, looking seedy as hell with their contents of broken glass and rusting nails. She stifled a laugh, thinking of all those white girls who mixed their cocktails in mason jars as a fashion statement, then set them on artfully distressed tables to Instagram them. Gabe had laughed when she told him - “I’ve heard of a rusty nail, but that’s ridiculous,” - and then slyly, still giggling, asked her if she was going to do it.
She had said no with the right measure of amused disgust, although there had been a filthy glitter in his eye that tweaked some deviant nerve she didn’t even know she had. Like most boys he was curious and absorbed in everything that went on between her legs, nudging her knees to opposite sides of his narrow bed so that he could look and touch and lick, his nimble tongue bringing her hips off the mattress with every orgasm.
It was all so new. Her mind kept straying back to him and every recollection came with sense memories so sharp and sweet and strong she thought they’d knock her over; the slight, lovely curve of his ass under her heel, the hard brown silk of his belly as he shifted his angle (Breathless - “Is that okay?”) inside of her. Some silly, crap-fed part of her brain kept muttering that this couldn’t be anything but lust, because every time she thought of him her mind kept returning not to his eyes or his smile but to his cock. Her hands and mouth were still full of the heft of it, the taste of it, the defenseless delicacy of the skin and how his whole body reared and roared towards her with need when she touched him in a certain way.
Dickmatized. Wasn’t that what they called it?
Her bladder ached. Her whole body felt twitchy and tender; her nipples had itched inside her bra all afternoon. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe she really was pregnant. Or maybe she was just weird. She kept thinking of what he would do or say if she came back to him and said - truthfully - “I did it. I peed in one of Gloria’s mason jars.”
He would laugh. She felt sure of that. And then what?
She stepped out of her underpants, a strange, dirty little pulse beating insistently between her legs. As she squatted she began to giggle, partly out of shame, so that the first trickle went wide and dribbled down the side of the jar. I’m a pervert. There’s something deeply wrong with me.
It kept on coming, and for a brief, awful second she thought she wouldn’t be able to stop and that the jar would overflow onto the floor. When it did stop she hung there on her heels for a moment, already disgusted by the thought the warmth leeching through the glass and how it would feel when she lifted the jar.
When she wiped herself off she saw there was a streak of watery red on the toilet paper. She gingerly closed the lid of the jar and nudged it across the linoleum to join the others. She didn’t look at it any more than she had to, but later – every time her own grossness came back to haunt her – she pictured a thread of blood floating in the jar.
Power, Gloria said.
*
He had been listening to the phone ring for so long that he forgot how many rings it took to go to voicemail and ended up speaking over the beginning of the message.
“Hey. This is Mike. Do the beep thing and I’ll smell you later.”
“Fuck.” Charlie hung up again, his heart already skittish in his chest. One minute Bikerman had been blowing up Charlie’s phone bitching about the boundary dispute with the swamp wolves and then the next he wasn’t picking up at all.
“What’s wrong?” Reese stirred on the couch, his little eyes bright with the closest thing Charlie had seen to genuine interest in days. Most of the time the kid just lounged there in a thickening film of Doritos dust, dicking with his phone and staring through TLC shows about fat people and Jesus freak families who collected children like Midwestern grandmas collected Franklin Mint shit.
“Nothing.”
Reese went back to texting, but the spark was still there in his eyes.
“What?” said Charlie.
“What?”
“What’s that look on your face, Reese?”
Reese tried to look innocent, but a smirk creased the side of his cheek. “Was that Mike Hallett?” he said.
“Why?” Charlie clenched a fist, always surprised to find how obscenely good it felt to get mad at Reese. The sofa cushions trembled as Reese began to giggle, a little-boy birdlike sound that seemed far too small for his enormous body.
“What’s so fucking funny?” said Charlie.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” said Reese, still tittering away. “I’m your alpha.”
Charlie rubbed the back of his neck, anger prickling between the bones. Alpha schmalpha – he was a fucking kid. And a fat kid at that. A lazy, spoiled little shit who somehow couldn’t even figure out how to cram food down the right hole. That handful of salted peanuts had done a number on Charlie; ever since those brief, spinning seconds when it looked like Reese was going to choke and croak, Charlie’s brain had been whirling with ‘what ifs’. Sure, he’d always meant to palm the shitty job off on Reese, but the kid had an unexpected talent for limboing under the absolute lowest of bars. If you thought Reese was going to suck at something, the smart thing to do was lower your expectations, because Reese was always going to suck harder than a thirsty twenty dollar hooker with a vacuum cleaner up her ass.
“What’s the big joke, Reese?” asked Charlie, with simmering patience. “Do you know why Mike isn’t picking up his phone?”
Reese didn’t look up from his texting, but his smirk cranked up another notch, a notch too far. Charlie slapped the phone out of his hand, sending it flying into the TV screen and making Reese let out a screech of rage and di
smay.
“Fuck you!” Reese squawked. “What the fuck was the point of making me eat that thing if you weren’t going to respect it?”
“Oh, it’s respect you want, is it?”
“Yes! Yes, I fucking do. Everyone respected my father - ”
“ – everyone was scared of your father,” said Charlie. “There’s a difference. What? You want us to be scared of you now?”
“Maybe, yeah,” said Reese. Jesus, it really was serious; he actually got up off the couch.
It was Charlie’s turn to struggle to keep a straight face. Reese had grease on his t-shirt and orange dust on his sweatpants, which once again had slid past the vast cheeks of his spotty ass. How the hell was he going to scare people? Threaten to eat them?
“Don’t you laugh at me, you meth-mouth prick,” said Reese, but it was a pup’s whimper compared to the psycho roarings of his late and maybe-even-slightly-lamented dad. “I’m still your fucking alpha. Act like it.”
“Whatever, Aretha,” said Charlie. “You never could see the big picture. You want my goddamn respect, fine.” He stooped low with a sarcastic flourish. “I’ll bow and scrape and fetch your fuckin’ Wendy’s and unclog the toilet when you jam it up with your greasy White Castle shits, but it’s not my respect you need to worry about, Reesy-Piecy. It’s them. You know who I’m talking about.”
Reese actually stamped his foot. The floor shuddered. “You said. You said they’d respect me if I did it, and I did it and they don’t. So what do you expect me to do about it?”
“I don’t know. Quit crying to me about it. Why don’t you try crying to them. Pack a bag, cram your ass in a pirogue and paddle off into the swamp, why don’tcha? Go find old Swampking McHillybilly Sisterfucker and whine to him that they’re not playing by the rules. There are no rules any more, moron. Only the ones you define, and you better start defining fast, because if you don’t then we’re going to be looking back at Mike’s little boundary spat as the moment when everything started to go all Thunderdome, capisce?”
Reese’s jowls jiggled. His eyes were pink around the edges. He picked up his phone and sniffed hard a couple of times. “You want to know why Mike isn’t answering your calls?” he said, his lips twisting in one of those little smirks that Charlie knew meant he’d done something really petty and stupid, like when he’d taken a shit on the front seat of Lyle’s new car because Lyle wouldn’t let him sit on his lap and play with the steering wheel. How old had he been at the time? Eight, maybe? Too old for that kind of crap, whatever.
“Okay,” said Charlie. “I’ll bite. Why?”
“I told him. About you and Barb.” Reese started to giggle again. “He’s gonna kill you.”
Yep. There it was. That was the magic of Reese. Every time you thought he couldn’t get dumber, he went and surprised you by pulling some move so pants-on-head, drooling-on-your-shoes fucking moronic that you wondered how the kid even remembered to keep breathing.
Charlie took a deep breath, too tired to scream any more. “Child, you are three hundred fucking pounds of undiluted stupid, I swear to fucking God. What do you think is going to happen to you if Mike the Bike feeds me to the gators for banging his old lady one time? Huh?”
Reese shrugged, sat down and returned to his texts.
“We’re done,” said Charlie. “That’s it. Fuck you.”
Another shrug, and the ghost of a giggle. Charlie walked out, unable to stand the sight of him any longer.
He closed the door behind him, shutting out the sound of the TV. When he sat down he realized he was shaking, partly with anger and partly with the ugly knowledge of just how this was going to go down. Reese was dead already. It was just a question of who and when. The brat wasn’t tough enough to intimidate the swamp wolves into compliance and he sure as hell wasn’t smart enough not to shit in his own backyard.
And once Reese was gone, well, that was it. Carnage. Charlie was old enough to remember the last turf war, and the way it had ended, in blood and burned flesh. There were times when he could still taste it. Nearly fifteen years and his brain and his tongue still remembered. Sometimes he dreamed about the meat stuck between his teeth, wedged right in there, driving him crazy, and then when he finally did manage to dig the gristle out his teeth came with it, leaving his gums full of soft, bloody holes.
Someone was going to have to take control.
Charlie went into the bathroom and gathered up his things. Islamorada. Why not? Just blow on out of here and go back home. Sure, he’d be playing second fiddle to Eli and he wasn’t even sure if he’d be welcome, but it was better than sitting here waiting for the inevitable coup or for Mike the Bike to cut off his dick with a pair of rusty garden shears. Not even swampers would fuck with the Keys, not after what had happened to Lyle; it had just demonstrated that the crazy old broad still had mad skills.
He pictured her standing at the kitchen sink, her sharp profile wreathed in blue cigarette smoke, her hair still holding the last vanilla tint of its fading blonde. “You can’t have two alphas,” she said. “Like roosters in a barnyard. You say you love him, but you’ll fight if you stay, Charlie; it’s just nature. One of you’s gotta go, and you know it’s you.”
He remembered the catch in her voice; she didn’t like it either, but that was the way it was. Just nature.
Something clinked in the bottom of his bag and he reached in to check that nothing was broken. His fingers found the bottle, still half full.
Like a lot of Lyle’s old remedies it looked like plain water, but unlike all the homeopathic bullshit this one actually contained an active ingredient. Colloidal silver. A drop here, a drop there. In his coffee, in his beer. A natural remedy against arthritis, infection and lycanthropy. Sure, it was a little drastic in curing the last, but it did technically stop you from being a werewolf.
Charlie held the bottle up to the light and shook it gently, looking for those tiny, guilty glints in the water. But there was nothing. Easy, undetectable.
Someone had to take control, didn’t they? Sometimes you got pushed into these things, and as he was always telling Reese – you had to step up to the plate.
He turned the bottle over in his fingers and sighed. If he walked away now then Reese was dead, isolated and picked off by a pack of marauding swamp wolves or whoever else wanted a piece of the alpha action. If he stayed he was stuck trying to teach Fatty McCrybaby to steer his way through the minefield of leadership.
Only that stupid fucking peanut had opened a third option, the thing Charlie had always sworn he would never, ever want. And he’d half meant it, at the time. But there were other things to consider, like Reese dialing M for Mike and murder when he wanted Charlie to quit telling him to turn the TV down.
It was only reasonable; the fat little prick was trying to get him killed. You couldn’t blame a man for doing what came naturally.
Charlie poured the contents of the bottle into his hip flask and got up off the bed. He unpacked his toothbrush and his shampoo and set them back on the bathroom shelf. Just nature. That was all. Nothing personal.
He opened the door. The TV blared.
“Come on, Reese. Turn that shit down, willya?”
“No.”
“Reese. This is stupid. Your dad asked me to take care of you, and I’m gonna. Okay?”
Reese glared up from the couch. “Whatever.” The blue light from his phone illuminated his chin, giving him a spongy, undersea look.
Full fathom five thy fucking father lies, what bits of him haven’t been shat out by the gators. And good goddamn riddance.
“I don’t expect you to love me, kid,” said Charlie. “But I do have your best interests at heart. Now come on; quit pouting. Want me to make you something to eat?”
13
Gloria said nothing about the jar in the bathroom. She just accepted it like some kind of disgusting tribute and carried it outside to bury it around the perimeter fence along with the rest.
Blue had always known that Gloria’s wo
rld was not like hers - or anybody else’s, for that matter – but even in her best shape Gloria presented a view so alien that some days Blue felt as though she was living on Mars.
Gloria hoarded feathers and kept a bunch of bones in the cutlery drawer alongside the long-handled sundae spoons. “Sometimes they’re the only way to see what’s coming. Toss ‘em and see where they fall.”
She said this in much the same way as she said the house was haunted, and she’d said that as matter of factly as if she was complaining about subsidence or dry rot. Like the world’s most honest – and bizarre – realtor. “Well, it’s a fixer upper all right – two bathrooms, potential to knock through and a whole bunch of ghosts.”
Gabe came around in the mid-afternoon, bringing with him a better pair of garden shears and another handful of Jesus leaflets. “They’re everywhere,” he said, dumping them down on the table next to the door. “Pain in the ass.” He kissed Blue on the mouth, as casual as if they’d been married for a dozen years. “She okay?”
“She’s good. She’s...Gloria. Are you done today?”
He nodded. “Sea’s turned choppy. And I don’t feel like hosing six different types of tourist puke out of the inside of my boat.”
Blue laughed and he grinned back at her. It was so dumb; whenever they were together it sometimes seemed like all they did was stare at each other until lust made their smiles melt and their hands start roaming all over again. He reached out and touched her face, his fingers pushing into the curls at her temple in a way that made sparks start dancing all over again in her lower belly. So stupid. It was ridiculous to want someone this much, but she never wanted to stop.
He kissed her again and rested his forehead against hers. “Listen,” he said, in an undertone. “I need to talk to you about something...”
He sounded serious and then she realized she hadn’t told him. She was about to when Gloria’s shuffling footsteps approached, making Gabe step away.
“There you are,” said Gloria.
“Here I am,” said Gabe. “What’s up?”
