A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

THE DREAMING

  Burning, molten lava flows from between the legs. Lightning flashes all around. Straight, bright flashes, streaking out of the darkness. Sharp edged.

  Running. Out of breath. Ground soft. Like flesh. Grass like hair. Ahead, a dark valley, hills, caves. Two pools beyond. A comic book panel with a cloaked figure standing, wearing the face mask of a cartoon girl, pointing. The dialogue balloon is filled with words. Endless, unknown words. Black, restless lines and squiggles. Rushing past, like a column of ants.

  Ray, pudgy and wobbly on his feet, in the comic book panel with the figure. His baby sister Jennifer on all fours at his feet. Blond mop shakes all over when he nods his head looking at the words that pass through the balloon. Jennifer has a knife between her teeth. She crawls away, and Ray follows. The cloaked figure looks at them leave.

  Michael. Bone thin. Like a staff. Cloaked figure picks the staff up and throws it like a spear. Off panel.

  Todd clutching the cloak, looking out from behind the figure. Figure pats his head. Todd smiles. Beams. Cute, innocent. Looks up at the words, skips away.

  Myturnmyturnmyturnmytum

  Cartoon mask. Can’t see, want to see.

  Run.

  Lightning, cold in the hand. Shining bright.

  Chasing the words in the balloon.

  Floating high above the soft ground.

  It was a time …

  Run wild and free …

  Whose blood …

  THE REAL

  Leo held the Christmas card in his trembling hand, staring at the handwritten note below the printed holiday greeting.

  “Come home, my little lion. You’re the last.”

  The card wasn’t signed. There was no return address on the envelope. The stamp cancellation told him the card had been mailed from his hometown in New Jersey.

  He knew who had sent the card.

  Leo finished the last of the vodka. Straight and warm, out of the bottle. It burned in his stomach. Melted walls in his mind. Fueled a need to get out of where he was, move, change. Escape. He went to the bedroom and put on clean, black jeans and a black leather vest. Stared at the picture of his wife and three-year-old daughter on the dresser. Their eyes were cold, their smiles empty.

  Left the apartment wearing a trench coat. Went out into the night filled with Christmas lights blinking from windows and people coming home from the last shopping weekend before Santa Claus paid their kids a mythical visit. Leo shook his head. Amazing how kids believed that story. He blushed at the memory of his own boyhood beliefs.

  He got into the old Toyota. Windows frosted, motor cold. The crisp air burned the smells of his apartment—urine and damp clothes—out of his nostrils. He took deep breaths as the engine warmed up. Closed his eyes. Wondered what he was doing.

  He hardly ever went out on weekends anymore. Not since Carmen left with their Lisa. Going out was dangerous. He forgot too much when he went out.

  Got lost. Like in his dreams, chasing things he didn’t understand. Before, whenever he became lost, Carmen had been around to find him, pull him into the now. Going out without anyone to find him and remind him of where he was supposed to be was risky. The last time, he’d disappeared for a week before he remembered. Seeing a workman on up on a pole had done the trick. He’d paid a doctor to give him a medical note to excuse his absence. Even then, when he went back to work at the telephone company his supervisor said he’d almost lost his job for not calling in.

  He drove out of the building parking lot, got on to the highway going down to the city.

  He needed to think. To figure out if he should ignore the card, or go back to his home town and find the sender. He knew where to look. He remembered that much. Probably better to throw the card away, keep on living his life the way he’d been living it. Just like it would have been better for him to stay in his apartment tonight.

  He felt the pull to go back to his childhood home. Like the pull of an open drain on a tub full of warm, bloody water. He shook his head. Why not go? He had nothing to lose. Nothing was left. But he was afraid. Something was waiting for him. A shape, a shadow. Sharp bone pushing into the meat of his arms. A face, glowing in the darkness. Words. A story, a terrible story.

  Carmen always said he should think about where he was going with his life. Think about why he did the things he did. Decide what he wanted, what he was willing to give up. But thinking was so hard. Ideas shifted, warped under his scrutiny. Words melted together. Actions and their consequences lost their connection when he tried to imagine the future. Nothing seemed real in his head. Carmen and Lisa, they were the most solid things in his mind. But even they were turning into ghosts with time. And the harder he tried to see what was real, to contain himself in the solid structures of his everyday life, the stronger the need became to run away. He wanted to hold himself together. But sometimes the pressure to fly apart was too much.

  Sometimes surrendering seemed to be the only answer.

  The road took him to the city. He found the place he liked. Parked, left the trench in the car. The man at the door, a mass of muscle in leather pants, was new but the girl behind him in the cage taking money remembered him. She smiled and winked as he went in.

  “Tish is in there, if you want her,” she said.

  Leo paused, searched for the words to capture what he wanted to say. Failed. He looked down, grunted, went in. The woman’s laughter drowned in the fast, rhythmic music that welcomed him along with the smell of sweat and perfume.

  Colored lights strobed across the crowded room. People wiggled and slithered on a tiny, packed dance floor in front of a table that served as a stage. A tall blonde in a red-sequined dress did her best to strut as she mouthed the words to the song pulsing in the air. Men and women sitting around small round tables shouted at the woman on the stage, at the dancers, at each other. Two women standing at the bar looked him up and down as he squeezed between them and ordered a drink. “Rough trade,” one said, rolling her eyes. The other giggled, staring at him with her lips parted. He paid for his drink and withdrew. The one who had spoken ran her tongue over her lips when he looked back at them.

  He found a spot against the wall and watched with a crowd of quiet middle-aged men in suits with briefcases between their feet. Sprinkled among them were younger men, smooth shaven, their delicate features accentuated by makeup. The traffic to the single bathroom was heavy.

  Tish startled him, appearing out of nowhere. Strawberry blonde, this time. Long lashes. Sinewy legs and arms exposed by a black velvet mini dress. With her high heels, she looked down on him. She pushed him against the wall, ground her thigh into his crotch, brushed her lips against his.

  “Hey, lover, it’s been a while,” she said, voice husky. Her breath was sweet, like cotton candy.

  Leo grunted. The men alongside him stared at them. One moved his hands into his pockets.

  “You smooth talker, you,” she said, smiling. “You want to move back in with your momma? You know you want to, don’t you, honey? Momma’s been waiting since the last time you ran away, you bad boy, you.” She leaned back while holding on to his arms and looked with exaggerated surprise at the bulge growing in his crotch. “Well, looks like my little honey bunny misses his momma, don’t it?” She grabbed his ear and led him on to the dance floor. Her nails bit into his flesh.

  They danced pressed against each other by the crowd. Tish kept her gaze locked on to him, ran her hands over his body, nibbled on his nose and ears. She pulled out his wallet and rifled through the bills with one finger. Her lips pursed. She replaced the wallet and playfully slapped his cheek. “Momma’s gonna have to turn you out and send you into the street to make some money,” she said. Threw her head back and laughed.

  After a while she took him by the hand and led him to a dark corner by the bathroom door. Pale yellow light leaked from the crack between the door and the floor. Every time someone entered or left, the aroma of sickly sweet disinfectant washed over them. Tish held his head, kissed his mouth,
thrust her tongue into his mouth. He held her tightly, rubbed his crotch against her hip, against the soft bulge between her legs.

  “Let’s go inside,” she whispered in his ear, breath hot against his skin. “Momma has a bedtime story to tell you.”

  “Home,” he said. Home was a bare-walled apartment cast in the shadow of solitude somewhere north, on the other end of the road he’d taken here. Home was a room filled with a mirrored wardrobe and a lumpy sleeper couch and a white and gold vanity table under piles of makeup cases and boxed perfume bottles, with Arthur Goldman written on the mail box downstairs and Tish spelled out in rhinestones on a red velvet banner over the window looking out on a fire escape and a wall.

  Tish nodded, knocked the top of her head against his and giggled. “I know you ain’t gonna stay with momma, but momma don’t care. Maybe you stay the night? Two nights? We’ll see. Maybe if I tell you some good bedtime stories, you’ll stay a little longer. Just let momma say good night to some of her friends, okay?”

  She walked away, melted into the press of bodies. The door to the bathroom opened and a slender young man poked his head out. His gaze met Leo’s. Leo went into the bathroom. The young man followed him.

  Inside, a single overhead bulb illuminated the two closed stalls with feet sticking out from under the doors. Grunts and moans fought against the thumping music coming from outside. Leo walked to the space between the two unflushed urinals and slipped his belt out. He handed the belt and a twenty to the young man, then removed his vest.

  “This isn’t really my thing,” the young man said. The makeup around his eyes was smudged.

  “Just do it,” Leo said. “Quick. Hard.”

  After five strokes, Leo told him to use the end with the buckle. He took three strokes, then turned and took the belt back and let the young man wash his back with toilet paper and brown sink water. He put on his vest and went back out.

  Tish was talking with a group at a table near the stage. An older man was holding on to her wrist and giving her a pleading expression. She was laughing, shaking her held, caressing the side of his face.

  Home was a place in New Jersey. A darkness that stretched into the past and the future from the now. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Leo left. He needed words to say yes, or no. He needed words to think, to figure out what he needed, wanted. To make a decision.

  But the words were bound to the face in the darkness, locked in the terrible stories that lurked beyond the borders of his memory. Whose blood?

  My turn.

  Come home, my little lion.

  He drove the car into the night, heading for New Jersey.

  THE WAKING

  “Whose blood do you want it to be?” she’d answer, after I’d asked whose blood dripped from the knife I held in her story. And she waited for my answer. Silence cocooned us, darkness squeezed us together until her glowing face seemed to shine inside my head. I hung on to the silence, because there was no answer in me.

  “Don’t know? Then let’s find out. You took the knife out of the kitchen, Leo. My brave little lion. Sharp and shiny, it was. Long and heavy and cold.” And so I’d find out whose blood was on the knife. Sometimes it was my father’s.

  “You went into the living room. Your father was home for a change. Not out with your mom, or at a friend’s house or at a late meeting or party he had to go to for work. He was watching TV. That new floor model he’s been wanting. The room was dark, except for the glow of the screen, and your father’s face and hands shining like moons in the night. A baseball game was on. The Yankees were losing. Your father’d stopped cursing at the players and the umpire, like he’d stopped cursing at you when you quit Little League and wouldn’t try out for any school teams. Your father’d had a few. The empties were on the side table next to his chair, on top of some brief he’d given up reading. One can lay on its side on the carpet. You knew there was going to be a fight about that tomorrow, when your Mom came down and saw it.

  “You came up next to your father. He didn’t see you. Didn’t see the knife in your hand. His eyes were half closed, not like he was studying the game but like he was falling asleep. His mouth was open, like he was about to kiss somebody. But he wasn’t. Drool crawled out of the corner. You could see his tongue in there.

  “The other team hit the ball. The crowd made some noise. Your father snorted. The black dots of his eyes rolled in your direction. And you went cold. Cold between your legs, on the bottom of your feet, all up and down your backbone.

  “Hi, Dad,” you said. Like you always do in the morning when you leave for school and he’s coming down for breakfast, and at night when he comes home from work.

  “And he didn’t say anything, did he, Leo? No, he didn’t say hi back, or curse at you, or ask you how you’re doing. He just looked at you, like you didn’t belong to him. Doesn’t he do that, Leo? Look at you like you’re something that dropped in on him, from the sky. Or like something that just crawled out of the sewer, and makes him sick just to think about. He looks at you like a bill he’s gotta pay, but doesn’t want to.

  “He gave out a long sigh. It smelled like beer, and sour milk, and piss. It was the same sound he made when you told him you won first prize in an art contest at school. When you told him you didn’t like fishing. When you cried when he teased you for losing to him in checkers.

  “And then he looked back at the TV. Like you weren’t there. Like you were a nightmare he was having and had to ignore.

  “And that’s when you did it, right, Leo? Brought the knife up, just like in that movie about the motel. Up, way up. And down. Up and down. Screeching music in the air. Up and done, in and out. And it was over, my brave little Leo. Yes, it was. Over and down with, finished for good. No more silence, no more cold.

  “And afterwards, you came to live with me, my lion. Brave and free and wild. And what fun we had, what delicious, lovely fun we had.”

  She always knew the little things. Sometimes the blood on the knife belonged to my mother.

  “She was still in bed the morning you came into the bedroom still wearing your pajamas. Sitting up, but with her eyes closed. Your father had already left for work. There was no school. It was just the two of you. Alone in the house. The sun was coming in through the window, and the comforter was shining like a coat of fresh snow over your mother’s body.

  “You put the tray of breakfast you’d made on the edge of the bed. Scrambled eggs and bacon. Toast you’d buttered yourself. Coffee. A little vase with some flowers you’d cut from the garden as soon as your father’d left.

  “Smells like breakfast,” she said, not opening her eyes but smiling. Her voice was honey, thick and sweet, like it always was in the morning when she was just waking up.

  “You leaned against the bed. Steam was rising off the eggs, bacon and coffee. A charred, smoky smell filled the bedroom. You were sorry about the smell because it overpowered your mother’s scent. You were also happy about the smell because it hid the sour stink of your father and what he did with your mother at night that sometimes made her cry.

  “Your mother opened her eyes and looked out the window. The sunlight made her eyes brighter. She looked at you, reached out, rubbed your shoulder and arm. Her hand was warm and strong. Her fingers dug into the muscle of your arm, and they said ‘mine’ to you. And you wanted to say yes. Yours.

  “Then she looked at the breakfast tray. The calm, beautiful expression on her face shattered like a broken window.

  “What did you do?” she wailed. “My God,” she said, her voice rising like a storm wind, “it’s all burnt. It’s disgusting. My kitchen, what does it look like? My frying pan! The stove!”

  “She threw the tray off the bed. Bacon and eggs flew across the floor. Coffee splashed against your leg. Burned your skin through your pajamas.

  “You didn’t cry from the hurt.

  “Instead, you reached for your mother, didn’t you, Leo? Tried to comfort her. Tried to say you were sorry. Say you’d clean the mess up. Yo
u climbed on to the bed, like you used to when you were smaller. One knee up on the mattress, then the other, then hands on either side of her body as you lay your head down on her chest. But the mattress was quaking, the comforter shifting like a restless sea from your mother’s kicking legs. So instead you stretched out and tried to snuggle up against her. As if you were going to sleep next to her. Like you used to. When you were little.

  “And she laughed. Not the soft, gentle laughter she gave to people over the phone. Not the loud, rolling laughter you heard sometimes when she was locked in the bedroom with your father. This was the sharp laughter that came out when she fought with your father. Short barks erupting out of the dark pit of her mouth. You remember that laugh, don’t you, Leo?

  “ ‘What, now you want to go to bed with mommy?’ she asked. ‘You want mommy to make it all better? Well, you’re not a little boy, anymore. You can’t get into bed with momma. You’d be as good in here as you are in the kitchen.’

  “Then she threw you off the bed. Pushed you, kicked you, until you fell on the floor. The comforter followed you down there. Covered you heard, your body. All of a sudden it was hot. You couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think or see. Drowning in the white comforter, in the smells of the burnt breakfast. Laughter cutting into you.

  “Your hand found the knife you’d put on the tray. You grabbed it. Stood up, slashed at the comforter. Wanting to make it go away. Your knife found something hard, and you pushed the blade. Someone cried out. You pushed again. And again. The white comforter turned red.

  “And it felt good, didn’t it, Leo? To be doing the cutting, for a change. You didn’t mean to, I know, but it happened, and it’s all right. Because afterwards you came to live with me, and we had such fun together. Living wild and free, like the brave little lion you are.”

  She knew, as well, the secret things.

  On those nights when more than one set of parents went out, Tracey had to sit for either some combination of Michael, Todd, Ray and myself or all of us. No one else could be trusted. Sleepovers would be arranged, and she’d be there with us. Because for us, she was always available. She’d let us watch TV, then beat us at board and card games in a way that didn’t make us feel bad. Afterwards, filled with chocolates and milk and sitting at her feet, we’d find out the blood on the knife belonged to the teacher who’d kept us in detention, or the corner news stand owner who never let us read comics at the rack, or the creepy old man who sat all day at the back of the park and watched us play ball.