The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  "Last night," Lourdes whispered. "You and Darlene." She smiled, remembering. Whistler liked to think of himself as so wicked, but it had apparently never crossed his mind to avail himself of the services that he had, after all, hired. It had been Lourdes who'd encouraged him to take advantage of the unconscious hooker, even going so far as to undress her for him.

  (Of course, Lourdes had grown aroused too—there'd been a plump plangent prettiness to the young girl's body, despite the hard usage evident in the track marks along the forearms, in the crook of the elbow and the crook of the knee. Lourdes had stretched out at full length on the bed beside Darlene and watched from inches away as Whistler's face darkened with lust and effort, straining over the inert form. Eventually he'd turned his head to the side. "You like to watch?" he'd grunted.

  "I sure do. You like to watch me watch?"

  "Yes."

  "But when you shoot it, baby, you look at me, not her."

  "Honor bright.")

  And Whistler had been as good as his word. He too smiled at the memory, and as the blood flush reached his eyes, the Creature bobbed to life under the silk comforter. "Is that mine, or Darlene's?" asked Lourdes coquettishly, nodding toward the bump in the middle of the bed.

  "It was always yours, m'dear," was Whistler's reply. "Even when it was buried deep inside her."

  When Lourdes came out of the shower in a white terry Sheraton Park bathrobe some twenty minutes later, Whistler was on the phone, sitting on the bed with his back to her. He turned and gave her a thumbs-up over his shoulder. "Not a problem. I'll call her in the morning. See you tomorrow night. Yes, you stay clean in between, too."

  "Who was that?" She crossed the room to the dresser—he had turned over a few drawers to her, and she'd filled them in the course of the week.

  "Nick." Whistler watched, enchanted, as she let her robe fall to the floor—there was such a confidence, a strength and balance in the smooth play of her calf and thigh muscles as she braced herself to open and close the drawers, and when she turned to the side to step into her white cotton panties, the brief glimpse of her breast in profile nearly broke his heart. "He asked me to call the minister in the morning and offer to upgrade the security system at the Church of the Higher Power. It seems some evildoer is trying to sabotage V.A."

  She turned to face him, and in the instant of her turning, Whistler understood completely Elvis's reputed fetish for white cotton panties. "Now who would want to do a thing like that?"

  "Fortunately, he hasn't the slightest idea. But he gave her the cover story."

  "The one about the stalkers and shit? And she bought it?"

  "Hooker, line, and sinker, as it were."

  Lourdes laughed dutifully as she sat down beside him. "So what's our next move?"

  "I can think of a few moves I'd like to make," he replied, waggling his eyebrows—his butch cut waggled too—and slipping an arm around her to cup the far breast.

  "I mean about V.A. What's going to happen when I don't show up at work tomorrow morning? Nick's already gonna be suspicious of us, and when Beverly rats me out…"

  Whistler stroked the side of her breast with tender concern. "Now now, m'dear. A little faith, a little faith."

  She twisted out of his grasp and turned to face him. Her eyes were soft, but the lines of her mouth had hardened. "My whole life, the only person I could ever count on was myself. It's hard to all of a sudden have faith in somebody else."

  "Then have faith in yourself. I do."

  "You do?"

  "I'll prove it. I'm going to take a shower now, and I'll bet you a penny to a pound—no, a hummer to a night of slavery—that by the time I'm out of the shower you'll have thought of a solution to both the Nick and the Beverly problems."

  "How's that gonna work?"

  "Simple. If you come up with something workable, I'm your sex slave for a night. If not, I'll tell you what I've worked out, while you hum 'God Save the Queen' to the Creature."

  "While he's in my mouth?"

  "Goes without saying."

  He rose from the bed, but she tugged him back down by the waistband of his pajamas. "Wait. Before you leave, I just want to go over where we stand now."

  "All right. Where do we stand?"

  "Okay, well, we've got the minister right on the edge of either trusting us or calling the cops—we could push her either way. We've got Nick and the others suspicious. I don't know how suspicious—did he say how much she told him about what Darlene told her?."

  "She seems to have followed instructions."

  "Okay. But Nick's not stupid, so he probably suspects us—I know I would, after last night." She was thinking out loud now, as Whistler headed for the bathroom. "And we've only got each other for alibis. What we need is a skate-goat."

  "A what?" He stopped at the bathroom door.

  "You know, a skate-goat. Somebody to take the blame, take the heat off us. Especially if I don't show up at work tomorrow."

  "Oh. Well, if I didn't know it was us, I'd suspect January."

  "So would I. But what if she has a better alibi than we do?"

  "Perhaps we should just skip town until things settle down." The bathroom door closed behind him.

  "Yeah, right," she called. "That'd sure take the suspicion off of us. What are you, trying to throw me off the track just to get your blowjob?"

  "No, really." He popped his head back out. "I'm never here for the holidays—why, they'd be suspicious if I were. Do you have a passport?"

  "All Filipinos have passports."

  "Then all you have to do is decide between Greece and—"

  She interrupted him, her eyes narrowed in thought. "You know what, you might be onto something there. Go take your shower."

  She was back a few minutes later, dressed in tight jeans and a loose denim shirt, tapping on the frosted glass door of the enormous shower stall. (The Depression-era theme of the farmhouse ended at the bathroom door: Whistler had never been one to sacrifice comfort for style, particularly if the style was a goof anyway.) "WANNA HEAR WHAT I'VE GOT?" she called over the roar. Whistler had a custom showerhead with the force of a firehose, and a water heater in the basement the size of a small silo.

  "SURE." The shower had a rarely used pause button; he interrupted the stream. "Just let me rinse off, I'll be right out."

  She closed the toilet lid and sat down to wait—she liked to see him when he stepped out of the shower, before he waxed his butch cut. He looked more his age then, and older men had always turned her on. In fact her first lover, not counting fumbles and squirts, had been her sophomore English teacher, whom Whistler resembled, in a classier sort of way.

  "Okay, here goes—slave," she said when he'd emerged, dripping, and wrapped a towel around his still lean waist. "First thing, you offer to help Nick keep the minister cooled out. Go ahead and volunteer to beef up the church's security system. Let him tell her, though, get him in a little deeper.

  "Now she's solid. Then we feed Nick our skate-goat, and he's solid too, and if he's solid, the rest of them are solid, and there's no problem with us going off on vacation."

  He applied his deodorant—some kind of fancy stick with a solid black case and no label. "Close. Very close. Assuming we can come up with a suitable candidate. But have you considered that when we return, we're more or less back to square one?"

  Lourdes stood next to him, pressing against his side. "But what would happen if while we were gone, somehow the minister found out Nick's been lying to her all along?"

  "I don't know," he said to her reflection in the mirror. "What would happen?"

  "I don't know either. But I bet whatever happens, they'll be so busy saving their own asses, they won't have much time to worry about ours."

  Whistler had reached for his razor; he put it back down on the black marble counter. "Now you're cooking with gas. Next step: what have you thought of to throw Beverly off the scent?"

  "I'll give you a hint," she replied. "It starts with you on your knees."


  He raised his eyebrows in respectful surprise. "It's true, great minds do think alike." He dropped to his knees in his black silk pajamas, and proposed to her then and there, in the farmhouse bathroom. "Lourdes, will you marry me?"

  She smiled down at him. "Yes, my darling Jamey. And will you give me a rock the size of Alcatraz to flash at Beverly tomorrow night?"

  "I will."

  "Do I win the bet?"

  Whistler stood up. "Only if we can make it workable by coming up with a scapegoat to take the heat off us, and a trap to be sprung on Nick during our absence."

  "Fair enough."

  "It'll have to be something good, mind you. He's a clever fellow when cornered, that Nick. A regular dancer in midair."

  Lourdes stood up on tiptoe. "So's Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff after the Roadrunner," she whispered into her fiancé's ear. "But sooner or later, he always looks down."

  THREE

  Nick had put the top down on his Corvette and cruised back to Berkeley in style Sunday morning, after staying for Betty's sermon, which had nothing whatsoever to do with anemic babies or exsanguinated hookers. Not only had Betty bought the cover story, she'd been consumed with compassion for the poor Victims, offering her own services as a counselor. He'd managed to put her off when she asked about his own stalker—too painful to talk about, but some day he'd tell her the whole story.

  She was still wracked with guilt when she called him back Sunday evening. "I've felt like such an idiot all day, Nick. I can't believe I actually accused you of being a vampire."

  "I understand perfectly—don't give it another second's thought. Oh, by the way, one of our members—a man named James W.—is going to call you tomorrow morning about upgrading your security system. No, no cost to you. Just a little gift from V.A."

  "All V.A. owes me is a new clock for the meeting-room wall."

  "It's not entirely altruistic—we have our own reasons for wanting to meet in a secure environment."

  "Well thanks." She sounded relieved. "I guess that means I haven't blown it, then?"

  "Blown what?"

  "I haven't scared you away."

  "You mean V.A.? No, of course not."

  "How about Nick Santos personally? Are you still thinking about… what I asked you to think about?"

  "Entirely too much."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just that it's such a momentous thing to try and come to a decision about. My general inclination is to say yes, but then I start thinking about all the details, and all the possibilities, and my head starts to swim. Do I want to be a father? Would you let me be, if I wanted to? Or could I handle just being a sperm donor, if that's what we both wanted? Or could I walk away even if I wanted to—do I have it in me to father a child and then act like it never happened? Not to mention the legal ramifications. I tell you, I almost wish we could just get it over with, and panic later, like everybody else." A pause. A long pause. "You still there, Betty?"

  "Do you really mean that, Nick?" Dead serious now. "Because if you do, all you need to do is hop in that pretty little 'Vette and buzz over here."

  "You mean… ?"

  "If not, you'll have at least another twenty-eight days to think about it."

  The first phrase that came to Nick's mind—Piss or get off the pot—did not seem to be quite le mot juste. Or, as they said in his native Detroit, the mo' juice. Neither did the next: Fish or cut bait. But the third, the one that actually escaped his lips, was, if neither eloquent nor romantic, at least a little more apropos: "Fuck it," he said. "I'll be right over."

  But not directly. On his way to El Cerrito the marquee over the Adult Entertainment Center on the west side of San Pablo Avenue, across from the Safeway, caught Nick's eye (as well it might have: it was pink in color, a dozen feet long by a half dozen high). It occurred to him that he might need a little inspiration even to masturbate—his bitter joke to Betty the week before (about sex having given him up when he gave up drugs) had more truth to it than he liked to admit. Of course, it hadn't been just "drugs," it had been blood, without which regular sex—or even irregular sex—hardly seemed worth the bother.

  He pulled into the lot at the side of the store. As he walked around to the front of the building, he caught himself angling his body away from the entrance even as he approached it: a misdirection ploy: same principle as backing out of a room in stages so it looked like you were walking in.

  Once inside the Entertainment Center, though, Nick was surprised at how cheery the place was, with its pastel walls and counters, racks of glossy magazines, bubblegum pink dildos and glittering handcuffs. The only other thing that had changed much since his last visit to a porn shop was that now there were rows and rows of videos marked "Amateur." It occurred to Nick that they ought to be giving those away, but in fact they cost pretty much the same as the professional product.

  His first thought was to buy a magazine. He sidled past the hetero racks—Big Boobs, Shaved Pussies, Interracial, Couples—to the smaller Men Men Men rack. Then he thought about the logistics of smuggling a magazine into the parsonage under his red James Dean windbreaker, and settled for a deck of playing cards featuring erect penises from around the world.

  Betty came out onto the porch to greet Nick, wearing baggy jeans and a spacious GAIA sweatshirt. She gave him a hug and ushered him into the kitchen. "Are you as nervous as I am?" she wanted to know.

  "I don't know. How nervous are you?" He took a seat on one of the three kitchen chairs—black lacquer ladderbacks with octagonal red Amish-looking designs painted on the front of the top rung, and rattan seats that seemed to be in the process of reverting to their natural state—set around a round water-stained drop-leaf garage-sale table Betty was going to get around to refinishing any day now.

  "I frowed up." She winced as she heard herself. "And regressed, obviously."

  "Oh. Well, I'm not quite that bad. Just a little performance anxiety, is all."

  "But you'll be alone."

  "I'll still have to perform. It's not something I've spent a lot of time at, lately."

  "In that case…" She rose, and left the room; when she returned, she was obviously hiding something behind her back. "I wasn't sure whether you might want this or not." She tossed a derelict old porn magazine on the table. "Someone left this behind after the S.L.A. meeting last year—must have been Show and Tell night or something. I couldn't exactly leave it in the Lost and Found, but I didn't want to throw it away either—it's been at the bottom of my sweater drawer ever since."

  Nick glanced down—the woman on the magazine cover had breasts that were quite literally the size of watermelons. He couldn't help but laugh, and once begun—he must have been more nervous than he was willing to admit—he found himself unable to stop. Every time he thought he had control of himself, he'd glance down at the magazine and lose it all over again.

  Betty's already high color had flamed crimson—she was obviously taking this personally. Nick tried to shake his head—no, not you, not laughing at you. Finally, still guffawing, he reached into his windbreaker pocket, pulled out the still-sealed deck of cards, and tossed it down on the table beside Humongous Hooters.

  "Dicks of All Nations?" Betty shrieked. "Oh my God and Goddess, Nick. Dicks of All Nations?" She collapsed, howling, into the chair beside him, fighting for control, not just of her laughter, but of her bladder. Finally she swung her chair all the way around until her back was to the table, and the offending publications. "I don't know, Nick," she said, when able to produce coherent sounds again. "Do you really think we're ready for parenthood?"

  "I guess we'll find out over the course of the next thirty years or so," he replied, his abdominal muscles aching. "Just like the rest of humanity." He grabbed his deck of cards and followed her up the stairs to her bedroom.

  FOUR

  "I've been thinking it over," remarked Lourdes. "I think you're probably right, we probably could get away with blaming January, even if we have to plant something on h
er, or something." She and Whistler were lying in a Yucatan hammock strung between apple trees out in the orchard.

  Two thick down comforters were spread under them, two rough Hudson's Bay blankets covered them. Their blood sex had been a little gentler this time, a little spacier. Of course, the hammock might have had something to do with that.

  "If we have to. But a more suitable candidate has occurred to me."

  "Who?" Lourdes turned on her side; the blankets slipped further, and the wind across her bare shoulders gave her a delicious chill.

  "Someone who despises Nick every bit as much as she cares for both you and I."

  Lourdes sat up suddenly, and threw the blankets off her shoulders. "Selene?" she said excitedly. "Would she do it?"

  "Con gusto, I'm reasonably sure."

  "Why does she hate Nick?"

  "You know that ragged-edged scar on her throat?"

  "The one that looks like somebody did it with their teeth?"

  "That's because someone did." Whistler grabbed the ropes on either side of the hammock and pulled himself to a sitting position, setting the hammock swaying. "Guess who?"

  "Not our St. Nick?" She threw her arms around him; if he hadn't still been holding on, the resultant heave of the hammock might have thrown him.

  "Easy, easy. Yes, Nick. With his own little pearly-whites."

  "Tell me," she insisted, hugging him tighter.

  "Someday. It's not a story I enjoy particularly—he tore up another witch besides Selene, and caused the death of one of my oldest friends."

  "Bummer," she said solemnly.

  "Indeed."

  She brightened. "At least we've got our skate-goat. Now all we need is the bombshell to leave behind us, and we're all set."

  "Oh, I think you can leave that to me as well," he said mysteriously. "I believe I have the very thing we need, upstairs in my bookcase."

  "Cool. As long as I still win my bet." She could tell she was supposed to ask him what it was, but didn't want to give him the satisfaction—even if she was dying of curiosity. She decided instead to check out the bookcase later, see if she could figure it out by herself.