Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  Yeah, right.

  Me, I blinked a couple of times, squinting through the haze of junk muddying my head. The werewolf was rushing towards me on all fours, quadrupedal-like—you know, one thing I always wondered about, ever since I set eyes on my first werewolf, is why the hell they’re called werewolves. Because, trust me, they look about as much like a wolf as Benjamin Franklin looked like Paris Hilton.

  Anyway . . . where was I?

  Yeah, right. Big silverback werewolf rushing at me and the dope rushing through me. That moment was, indeed, a dizzying mixture of opiate joy and sheer fucking terror. All I really remember is, in this order, dropping the syringe, stumbling back against the oak, tangling my feet in the shoulder strap of my bag, and managing to scream just once before it was on top of me. That’s an awful lot, really, all things considered. Thinking back on it, I don’t know what astounds me more, that I remember those details, or that I did anything at all but scream.

  Just my douche bag luck, this wasn’t one of the scrawny mutts. Lots of them are, the weres, all ribs and mange and that dazzled cast to their eyes that comes from too much moonlight and empty bellies. This was one of the huge sons of bitches, maybe three hundred pounds of slobbering lycanthropic sinew and shiny white teeth barreling nonstop boogie towards me through the trees. Truth is, even if I’d not been high, and even if I’d had a couple minutes warning, and even if, say, I’d been holding, say, a Remington 870 12-gauge pump-action mounted on an M16 assault rifle with that sweet under-barrel configuration, even if I’d had that much firepower right there in my hands, all loaded, safety off, and my finger on the trigger, my ass would still have been grass. Sometimes, there’s just no sidestepping your well-earned impending doom.

  I remember its breath. Pretty much ripe summer roadkill, crossed with whatever you’d find in the Dumpster out behind a Korean restaurant. Then I remember the pain when it tore into me, pain like the holy hand of God grabbing hold, hanging on tight, and sinking “His” grimy, omnipotent fingernails straight into (of all places) my ass.

  And then I remember the hissing thing dropping out of the tree onto the werewolf’s back and dragging it off me.

  After that, the events of that unfortunate August evening by the Scituate Reservoir get more than just a little fuzzy. I don’t know whether it was the blinding pain, the very excellent heroin, or acute stress reaction (what you laypersons call “shock”)—probably it was the combination of all three—but I fainted. First time ever in my whole life, I fainted dead away.

  Okay, not dead away, because I do have a scant few hazy memories of being carried from somewhere to somewhere else, and of being in the backseat of an automobile that had that new-car upholstery fragrance. I remember music, too. Roy Orbison singing “Only the Lonely,” like maybe when I’d fallen by that oak I’d landed in the second reel of a David Lynch film. After that, nothing, nada, niente, until I woke up on a filthy mattress in the corner of a filthy basement. I was lying facedown in a cooling puddle of my own drool, and the air around me was dank and smelled just about as bad as a steamy face full of werewolf breath. Not quite exactly, but very almost. More eau de mold, less roadkill, but still. It was plenty enough to make me gag a couple of times. I tried to sit up, but that didn’t work out so well, at which point I groaned and lay right back down again. In that same cold pool of my own saliva. At least it wasn’t puke. If I had a muscle that didn’t hurt, I was unaware of its existence. Cramps, runny nose, sweating buckets, the chills straight to my bones—so it didn’t take me long to figure I’d been out six, twelve, maybe as long as twenty-four hours, long enough since my last fix for withdrawal to set in. Oh, and my butt was burning like I’d taken a double barrel of rock salt down there.

  “You’re awake,” someone said. The voice was unmistakably female, but only just barely. Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense, unmistakably and only just barely; you had to be there. The voice was, in fact, only just barely even human. It came from the other end of the mattress, down past my Chucks, and a bit off to my right. With shaking hands, I fumbled for the coffin-handled Bowie knife I kept strapped to my belt pretty much anytime I was wearing pants, but it wasn’t there. Big damn surprise. I know.

  “If I were you,” said that voice, “I’d worry more about saving my strength. You’re going to need it.” I shot back something brilliant, maybe “Fuck you.” Or “Get bent.” Then I thought for sure I was going to throw up, and she said, “There’s a pail to your left,” like she’d read my mind. She hadn’t. It doesn’t take supernatural powers to see when a junky in the agonies of cold turkey withdrawal—what German junkies call weltschmerz, and don’t ask how I know this shit—is about to toss her cookies. I expect my face had gone green as a head of cabbage on Saint Patrick’s Day right about then.

  “I’m not gonna fucking puke,” I barked at her. Okay, yeah. That was just dumb bravado and wishful thinking.

  “Yes, you are,” she assured me.

  “Fine,” I muttered. “Let me get there in my own time.”

  “You’re hurting.”

  Another astute observation.

  “Where’s my bag?” I asked. “Give me my bag, and I promise you, lady, I won’t be hurting anymore.”

  She didn’t answer right away, and I lay there on the mattress shivering and wanting very sincerely not to vomit.

  “Perhaps you lost it when you were attacked,” she finally said. “Or, perhaps, when I found you, I didn’t bother retrieving it, and you’ll never see it again.”

  “Perhaps you could make up your mind and stop jerking me around. There’s shit in there I need.”

  “Drugs. Your needle,” she said, just cool as a moose. No, forget that. Ice fucking cold, that voice was so cool. “The spoon, the tourniquet. Why would I give you any of that? Assuming I didn’t leave the bag lying there where you dropped it by the tree?”

  I gagged again, caught my breath, and managed to whisper, “Because maybe you’re not a total cunt.”

  “But maybe I am,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew she was grinning ear to ear. “Maybe I’m the worst sort of cunt you’ve ever had the misfortune to cross paths with, Miss Siobhan Quinn.”

  Okay, an aside here. Yeah, that’s my name, the name my third generation Irish-American, Roman Catholic mom and pop bestowed upon me in a spastic fit of Gaelic pride or whatever. And yeah, it sounds like one of those Young Plucky Vampire Hunters or, worse yet, like the women who write those trashy ParaRom paperbacks you see on the racks at the Stop & Shop or Shaw’s. No one, and I mean no one, calls me Siobhan. You call me Quinn, which is my last name, or you keep your fucking trap shut.

  “So, at least you hung on to my wallet,” I said.

  “At least I did that, yes. Though, I confess, I knew your name a long time before I read your driver’s license and library card.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked. “And how’s that?”

  “People know your name. You haven’t exactly been discreet. We are a fairly close-knit community, but then you might already know that. Yes?”

  Which cleared up a few of my just-how-much-shit-am-I-in questions right then and there. I needed to review my options, even though I knew I had diddle jack in that department. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, so you clutch at straws. I tried to relax, willed my limbs to go limp and the ache in my chest and guts to back off a smidge, but I might as well have been hoping for divine intervention or a squad of heavily armed Jesuits to come storming into the basement with fire hoses that spewed holy water. I lay there, panting into the filthy mattress, wondering how long until the vampire grew bored enough and hungry enough to finish me off. I didn’t bother to inquire why she’d taken on a werewolf to “save” me. These fuckers, they got their own unfathomable reasons, and most times trying to make sense of it just gives me a headache. Which I already had, thank you very much.

  “You killed the werewolf?” I asked, because there was clearly nothing to be gained from more questions about the fate of my bag and the life-giving s
tash therein. “You took it out.”

  “It’s dead,” she replied, only those two words and no more, as if that said everything there was worth saying.

  “Something personal?” I pressed.

  “I hate dogs,” she said.

  I laughed. Must have been the shittiest excuse for a laugh in the whole history of the whole wide world, and I gagged a few more times before I could speak again. “So, least we got that in common.”

  “Do we? Are you certain of that?”

  “Maybe not.” I sighed and started thinking about the whereabouts of my rig again. I belched, tasted bitter, scalding bile and swallowed. “Can I ask a question?”

  “I don’t see why not,” the vampire replied. (I know I haven’t explained just how I knew she was a vampire, but I’m betting people never pause to meditate on how it is a stone-cold Pink Floyd fan knows the first few chords of “Wish You Were Here.” Okay, never mind. Lousy analogy.)

  “And you’ll answer it?”

  “If the mood strikes me,” she said. “Ask me, Siobhan, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  I wiped at the sweat on my forehead. “You’re a fucking tease, but you know that.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “Why the fuck am I still alive?”

  There was a long moment of silence—in books, it’s called the “pregnant pause”—and then she said, “Because I haven’t yet killed you.”

  I tried to laugh again, but almost threw up again. Then the cramps hit hard, and I don’t know how long it was before either of us said anything else. Maybe five minutes, or maybe less.

  “Would you like me to elaborate?” she asked, once the pain in my guts temporarily retreated to merely an excruciating throb.

  “You have me on pins and needles,” I wheezed.

  “There’s no single reason, Siobhan—”

  “Stop calling me that. No one fucking calls me that.”

  There was a contemplative snick-snick-snicking sound then, and I tried not to think what the vampire was doing to make such a sound or what it might mean.

  “As you wish, Quinn. There’s no single reason. There is, rather, a tapestry of reasons.”

  “Reason number one?”

  “Some time ago, back in the winter, you murdered my lover, and my daughter. Her name was Alice, but I doubt you bothered with introductions. You tracked her to Swan Point Cemetery, cut off her head, then sliced out her heart, which you burned. You filled her belly with bricks, sewed it shut again, and sunk her body in the Seekonk River.”

  “Yeah, well . . . floaters make people suspicious. Reason number two?”

  “I delight in irony, and here I have before me a killer of killers, God’s butcher, an executioner of monsters, who’s just been bitten by a werewolf. And I want to watch.”

  I told her I was trying not to think too hard about that part. The being bitten on the ass part, and what it meant.

  “But, you have to admit, it’s ironic.”

  “Occupational hazard,” I replied, eyeing the pail she’d provided, because it was only a matter of time. And the time would be sooner, rather than later. “Is there a reason number three?”

  “There is, as it happens. I need a weapon. There are worse things out there than you, or me, or that dog you had the run-in with last night. There are things you’ve never even glimpsed.”

  I shut my eyes a moment, wishing I had the strength to brush my sweaty, straggly hair out of my face. “Always sort of suspected that,” I whispered. It’s okay to whisper with vampires. Fuckers can hear a pin drop in a hurricane. “This has what to do with keeping me alive?”

  I’m not going to lie. I’d been bitten by a werewolf, and you know how that goes. The old wives’ tales and movies don’t get everything wrong, and I’d rather the vampire finish me off than have to do the job myself. If this made me a coward, so be it. No one gets to be the brave girl all the goddamn time.

  “I need a weapon,” she said.

  I laughed again, hard. A deep and wholehearted sort of laugh, which finally cost me whatever was in my stomach. For the next few minutes, the rusty pail by the filthy mattress was my dearest companion. When the hurling subsided and there was only the bliss of dry heaves, she said, for the third time, “I need a weapon.”

  And I replied hoarsely, “Then you’ve got the wrong little black duck. Maybe you haven’t noticed—”

  “I know your history, Quinn,” she interrupted. Vampires love to interrupt, by the way, because they never doubt that whatever they have to say is vastly more important and/or interesting than whatever you were in the process of saying. Anyway, she continued. “Your childhood, your parents, the guilt, all those years on the street, what you’ve learned since then . . .” She trailed off, letting the thought go unfinished, and this seems like as good a time as any to insert what comic-book nerds would refer to as my “origin story.” You know, like how Superman was born on Krypton, but his parents bundled him into a rocket and blasted him into space right before the whole planet went kablooey. Or how Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider. Like that, only I didn’t exactly get the cool superpowers, and, I’ll tell you up front, mine’s probably gonna come off like a plea for sympathy, reading as much like a sob story as an origin story. But—and this is as good as scripture—I’ve never wanted anyone’s sympathy, and I’m not about to start in now. So, it’s just a story. It is what it is, take it or leave it.

  So, fade to black, and we’ll get back to the vampire’s moldy basement in due course. Fade in to me at age twelve and those third-generation Irish Catholic parents I mentioned earlier.

  * * *

  Pop was a deadbeat alcoholic, and Mom was the sort who thought all the world’s ills could be solved by praying the rosary and never missing midnight mass. How’s that for perpetuating the stereotype? The first twelve years or so, we had a fairly stable routine that involved his drunken rampages, and her beads, and my doing my best to keep my head down. Sadly, that last part didn’t usually work so well. Pop would get a bellyful of Murphy’s and whiskey, and I’d get a shiner or a busted lip because there were dirty dishes, or the litter box stunk, or my left shoe was untied, or anything else inconsequential he could latch on to as an excuse to beat the living daylights out of his child.

  Oh, and I should add he was absolutely fucking obsessed with the notion that Mom was a slut who’d slept around on him, and that I was not, in fact, his kid. It really didn’t make much difference to me, one way or the other. Though I did sometimes like to pretend that Pop was right, and my real father was some decent, straightlaced sort of guy with a good job and nice house, who loved his wife and kids, and maybe played golf every now and then. The golf part always seemed very important to me. I watched a lot of old sitcoms on Nick at Nite’s TV Land, and I pictured that imaginary real dad as Fred MacMurray or Gomez Addams, or maybe Ozzie Nelson. Regardless, it was a clean life, my imaginary real father’s life, and he’d never even seen the likes of that roach-infested Cranston shithole where we were living, because Dad hadn’t paid the rent and we’d been evicted from our sumptuous Pawtucket shithole.

  Finally, not long after my twelfth birthday (nope, no pony), Pop laid into Mom like he’d never laid into her before. She was late with supper. He beat her with a bar of soap wrapped in a dish towel until she was unconscious, and then he used his fists. I watched the whole thing from the kitchen cupboard. When he was done, he left, and I’m the one who called the paramedics. I hid outside, keeping vigil until the ambulance showed up, and then I turned tail and ran. And, in one sense or another, I kept running for years, even if I never went any farther than the abandoned warehouses and squats in North Providence and Olneyville.

  I met other kids, and they all had stories of their own, right? On the street, everyone has a story. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, that sounds like a line from a Dashiell Hammett novel. Well, to my knowledge, it’s not. If I’ve plagiarized anyone, I’ve done so unwittingly. Anyway, like I was saying, North Providence, whe
re I found a tribe of other runaways, a loose confederacy of street urchins that would have made Charles Dickens proud. Sometimes we looked out for each other. Other times, it was every urchin for him – or herself. I drifted from tribe to tribe.

  Sometimes, I made it on my own. Other times, I found men—and women—who enjoyed the company and/or carnal services of someone my age, and it would keep me off the street for a few nights. I never really felt especially exploited by the peds, though I suppose I ought to have. But after my father, shit, that was Heaven and they were almost good as guardian angels. They fed me, and let me bathe, and sometimes bought me clothes, a winter coat, a new pair of shoes. The sex seemed a small enough price to pay. Most of us kids turned tricks, whether in back alleys, parked cars, in motel rooms, or bedrooms. It was a good way to supplement the Dumpster diving, panhandling, and shoplifting. You did what you did to get by, and, more often than not, dignity was just something that got in the way of staying alive. The way we saw it, and the way I still do, dignity’s not a right, it’s a privilege.

  There was sour coffee from Cumberland Farms (sometimes the clerks let us have that for free), loads of Sweet’N Low, and those packets of salsa from Taco Bell. No one cared how much of that shit you stuffed into your pockets. There was vodka and beer when we got lucky. There were a hell of a lot of stale Dunkin’ Donuts.

  Later on, the vampire would remark that I seemed awfully literate for a street-junky dropout. Truth is, it’s usually pretty dull out there for Providence’s wretched refuse. There’s a whole lot of time on your hands between foraging and dodging the police and the gangs who want to fuck with you. A whole lot of boredom. You deal with it best you can: sex, drugs, conversation, walking the tracks. I knew two girls who decided they’d be hobos, both of them all full of Depression-Era romance of life of the rails. They jumped a boxcar headed for Manhattan, and we never heard from them again, so maybe they found something better. I can’t even remember their names. I like to think the two of them, they’re still out there somewhere and they’re okay.