Gypsy Blood

by Vernon, Steve

  Liar. Your tongue is hinged at both ends. The dream was yours. You bartered a piece of your hope for vengeance.

  Carnival shrugged. “And if that’s true?”

  If that’s true, then you are more Gypsy than your old man could ever hope to be.

  “I caught you sleeping,” Carnival said.

  It was the only way you could catch me.

  “You trusted me.”

  Poppa shrugged. Carnival felt it, inside and out. It was like swallowing a rear view mirror, your heart kept looking back upon itself.

  Trust in God but tie your horse.

  Poppa kept falling back on these little aphorisms, like step stones in a swamp. They got him over the muddy parts, past the truth and into the fog of self-deception.

  It took you long enough to decide. I thought I might have to throw a rock at you.

  Carnival looked around. “There are no rocks down here. None that I can see.”

  I know. You took mine away from me. You might have at least left me a kidney stone, maybe.

  Carnival gave Poppa his best shrug which is kind of hard to do when you’re standing about half a foot southwest of your shoulders.

  “I’ve been talking to Momma,” Carnival said.

  I know. You think I don’t listen down here? What else do I have to do with my time? I am ears and patience - but listen boy, you should watch out for your mother. She’s not as good as you seem to think.

  “I watch over her better than you ever did, Poppa.”

  I said watch out, not over. She’s worse than you could ever think. Badder than your Poppa could ever hope to be. Death changes a person. It changes their perspective. You don’t think about loss if you got nothing to lose.

  He always said things like that, even back when he was alive. He told Carnival about how evil his Momma was. He was always full of lies, his tongue flapping in the breeze like a long red scarf.

  Carnival didn’t want to hear such words.

  “Watch your tongue, old man, or I’ll cut it out.”

  You know where your knife is.

  Carnival was quiet at that. Poppa kept on talking like a dog on a chain, worrying and working the only bone in sight.

  I told you to leave her to her rest. There’s a reason why I didn’t tell you where I put her.

  “You tell me a lot of things, Poppa. Don’t think that I listen.”

  You dare talk to your Poppa like that?

  “Tell the truth and run. That’s what you always said, isn’t it?”

  I thought you didn’t listen to me?

  “I’m a Gypsy, Poppa. I do what I want, when I want. The rest of the world can go to hell.”

  So what do you want? What do you need that you had to come and see me in person, after so many years?

  “I didn’t say I wanted anything.”

  Why else you would you come? Do you like it down here?

  Carnival grinned.

  So what is it then, eh?

  Carnival said it fast when he finally found the nerve.

  “Is there a cure, Poppa? Is there a cure for vampirism?”

  Poppa spat, red black tissue into the sludge of his meat cage.

  There’s a cure for everything, only none of them work.

  “So what do I do?”

  Heavy dealings, messing with vampires. That’s a bad kind of monkey shit. You are going to need to talk to some dark people.

  “I figured that out all ready. I figured I’d start with you.”

  Poppa barked a razor snap of a laugh. A piece fell off him. He picked the piece up and pushed it back on. The skin blurred like putty and reclaimed its doubtful hold.

  A hell of a thing. Your old man is falling to pieces.

  “No shame for that,” Carnival said. “You must be nearly two hundred years old.”

  Poppa grinned.

  Older than that. But I did it clean. I never took anybody’s blood.

  Carnival gave his Poppa another shrug. It got easier with practice. Anything did.

  So ask me. You see me like this, near death, past death, something that death would turn up its bony nostrils and spit at. You look at me and ask if I want to live?

  “Do you still want to live, Poppa?”

  You’re dead right.

  “This is getting nowhere. You’re having too much fun.”

  You’ve got to ask me the right questions, is all, boy.

  “Listen Poppa,” Carnival said. “You’re wrong when you said you never took anyone’s blood.”

  How so?

  Carnival touched the scar on his cheek. He looked at his Poppa wordlessly. Poppa said as many words back, and Carnival knew he had scored on him.

  “How can I save her, Poppa?”

  You think I would know? I’m just a poor old Rom. Not even that. A shade of a poor old Rom, trapped inside the cage of his unforgiving son’s heart.

  Carnival had good reason not to forgive Poppa. But he didn’t say that. Arguing and wheedling never got anywhere with Poppa. Instead, he played his trump.

  “For Momma’s sake, Poppa. If you loved her, as I love Maya, tell me how I can cure her of her vampirism.”

  Ha! Would you cure yourself of your Romany? That is what she is, boy. A mulla. A wampyre. One of the undead. You cannot cure her of her heritage.

  “How, Poppa? How?”

  How? How? So now he thinks he’s a Red Indian.

  Carnival wouldn’t back down. And Poppa finally relented.

  You’ll want to be talking to the god of blood. That’s deep stuff. Not any place for a lousy card flipper. Maybe your old man ought to help you.

  “You? Help me? Better to ask the devil for a shoe sole.”

  You wrong me boy, but I deserve it.

  “You’re damned right you do.”

  Damned. That’s right. Damned is exactly right. And why? I told you to stay away from the teacups. Why didn’t you listen?

  “Why didn’t you? I don’t do teacups. Just palm and cards. Whatever I touch.”

  Same difference. You tell lies, you sell hope. You should have done better. You could have. You should have followed your Poppa.

  “I wanted a different road,” Carnival said.

  Ha. Some difference. You’re here now, aren’t you?

  Carnival didn’t have an answer for that.

  Like a fish on a hook, you run one way, you run the other. It doesn’t matter. Sooner or later all roads and rivers run for home.

  Carnival didn’t have an answer for that, either.

  Blood runs stronger than the deepest of rivers. This you can never change.

  “Fancy words that don’t matter. What do I do?”

  You’ll need something powerful.

  “Like a god?”

  Poppa looked down at him. It was hard to believe, that such a rancid rotting being could conjure up such great disdain.

  You’re not that big. Talk to the Red Shambler first. And then talk to the city.

  Carnival nodded. It made sense. If anything could help, the city familiar might.

  There’ll need to be sacrifice. It’s got to be bloody.

  “Of course.”

  Blood washes blood.

  “Poppa?”

  Yes?

  ”What did you do with her? What did you do with Momma?”

  The remains of Carnival’s father grated out a dull scraping laugh.

  You think you can catch an old Gypsy sleeping? Not on your best day, boy. Not on your very best day.

  Chapter 34

  Poppa, Alone and Not

  Poppa stood in the darkness.

  Alone.

  There was nothing but the beating of his son’s proud heart to keep him company.

  It was a good cage that his son had built for him. A good sturdy cage.

  Poppa smiled.

  That’s magic. Good magic. Strong magic.

  These things were important to Poppa.

  Poppa was proud but not proud enough to care. He stopped caring long after the gates of Au
schwitz slammed shut on his little sister. He’d watched her soul from the fox burrow he’d taken refuge in. He’d watched it whistle up towards heaven on a cloud of greenish smoke.

  At least she’d gone up.

  He shook the sentiment from off of his rag-tattered soul.

  It is a hard world even when you don’t live in it.

  Then a chill overtook him. A burning hot chill.

  The Red Shambler lurched and oozed from out of the darkness.

  “Did he buy it?”

  You were listening, weren’t you?

  “Did he buy it?”

  Poppa smiled.

  Proud and hard.

  Hook, line and blood stained sinker. He’s going to talk to you first, and then he’ll talk to the city.

  “He’ll summon the Aggregate? Has he that kind of power?”

  If he says he can, then he will. He is my son, after all. If he says he will, then he can. But first he has to eat.

  Poppa stared at the Red Shambler, a hard-as-bullets-singing-homeward kind of stare.

  That is what you’ve planned, isn’t it?

  The Red Shambler laughed like the grating of burnt bones over frozen gravel.

  “That is what is planned,” The Red Shambler agreed.

  Chapter 35

  Love and Dreams Are Bad for Business

  Wake up, boy. You have a customer. Money is ringing at your door.

  A doorbell was ringing, loud and persistent in the back of Carnival’s skull, a bumblebee humming through a shout of yellow roses. He turned his back and stuffed his ears with a pillow case and snuggled deeper into his mattress. He was dreaming a sweet nuzzling softness. The walls were anthems to his brilliance, and high kicking dance girls cha-chaed down the gangplank of his slumbering tumescence. His mother was singing a song in a language he didn’t understand. An old man was dying of cancer. A gypsy girl was piercing her earlobes with a thousand golden earrings. A building was sipping a blood clot soda through a long pink straw. Poppa was drawing pictures on his face.

  Nothing had to be decided. Carnival squatted on a dock on the waterfront. Dark shapes were moving in the waters below him. He was flipping Tarot cards, one after another, an entire deck of Death.

  Wake up, boy. Open your eyes.

  Carnival opened his eyes.

  Call for pizza.

  Carnival picked up the phone without looking and dialed a pizzeria, three blocks over.

  Lots of cheese. I like lots of cheese and fat black olives.

  “Lots of cheese,” Carnival dully repeated. “Lots of fat black olives.”

  He hung up the phone.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” he said to the darkness.

  The darkness whispered and fluttered like a large red moth.

  Who are you talking to boy?

  Carnival wouldn’t answer. He sat and waited, staring at the darkness. There was a knock on the door. Carnival answered it. It was the delivery boy, a young man, all neck and gawk and angle. More color on his face than on the pizza.

  “You ordered a pizza?”

  The boy’s eyes were the naïve blue of cornflowers and cloudless skies. Pale and unwatered by age and deceit.

  “Yes, come in,” Carnival said.

  Freely and of your own will.

  The boy stood at the door, reluctant to enter. “Are you okay mister? Your neck, it’s bleeding.”

  Carnival touched the skin. The boy was right.

  You cut yourself shaving.

  “I cut myself shaving,” Carnival said.

  “That’ll be thirteen fifty,” The boy said, leaning back towards the imagined safety of his car.

  “Come in,” Carnival said. “It’s safe in here.”

  The boy shot a glance over Carnival’s shoulder, as if he saw something moving in the shadows beyond.

  “Mister, I don’t know about coming in. All I know is thirteen fifty.”

  Thirty pieces of silver, no matter how you count it.

  “Here,” Carnival said, holding out a ten and a five, but standing far enough back so that the boy had to enter. “You can keep the change.”

  There is a magic word for everything. I love you worked on most women. I’m sorry, worked on some accidents. Keep the change was a charm. Those three magic words brought waiters and taxi drivers straight to heel. The boy handed Carnival the pizza. He stepped inside, reaching for the change. He didn’t think to ask why his customer was wearing rubber gloves.

  Carnival closed his grip on the boy’s hand.

  The boy looked up, unsure of what was happening.

  Are you going to do her work for her, boy?

  Carnival looked at the boy, tilting his head like a curious sparrow.

  “Be careful out there,” he said, mouthing the words with a soft deliberation.

  And then he let the boy go.

  “Thanks,” the boy said, already running for his car.

  Carnival watched him from the doorway, fumbling at the car’s chromed lock. The night air, kissed his pockmarked skin with wet delight. The boy fumbled the key again, and then the car door was open. The boy clambered inside, all legs and gawk, bent awkward with terror. He was in such a hurry to be gone.

  Maya grabbed him as the car door slammed shut. She pushed her arms through the window glass as easily as water. She yanked him back through the unbroken window. It took four hard tries to break the car window with the pizza delivery boy’s face. He came through the shatter resistant glass, blue-chip-mosaicing about him.

  Maya yanked his unresisting form out through the window frame like a pickled eel. She dragged him into the shop.

  Carnival held the door for her.

  Such a gentleman. Perhaps she will let you keep the change.

  The boy’s eyes were torn wide open in reckless terror. .His Adam’s apple juggled up and down as she guzzled her fill. The blood trailed down his throat like a long red scarf. Carnival watched her feed.

  The pizza lay there, cold and chewy.

  Watch this, boy.

  The night darkened like a slow red shadow. It might have been an hour. It might have been a minute. In the universal scheme of things, time was about as relevant as an election day promise. Just something we thought up to save our sanity. A few arbitrary chalk marks in the Astroturf of existence, just to let us know how far we haven’t got. Maya looked up towards Carnival, her face soaked in the pizza boy’s blood, her eyes as innocent as a cat lapping cream.

  “You still don’t approve?” she asked.

  What could Carnival tell her? He had helped bring this about. To deny his culpability would be nothing more than an exercise in hypocrisy.

  “Come here.” she said. Carnival moved towards her.

  At least he thought he did. It might have been that the room tilted for just one single moment in time. And what the hell did that mean, anyways?

  She touched Carnival’s cheekbone. He felt the ghost of his unshaved shadow tugging towards her phantom touch. The follicles puckered, like they wanted to kiss her fingerprint. She ran her hand down his face and across his throat. He felt the old wound open again at her touch. This is it, Carnival thought. She’ll take him right here and now. Let’s end this dance and drop this curtain like a guillotine, square across my neck.

  Open your eyes, boy. You’re still asleep.

  Maya’s hand slid past Carnival’s throat, over the rounded tombstones of his shoulder blades and down the picket fence of his spine. Carnival arched towards her, his breath catching in an involuntary spasm.

  His heart wanted to pump itself into her aching empty veins. He felt the tidal pull of her urgent need tugging him inward, onward, out. She kissed him, softly on the chest, like she could taste the meat of his heart dangling like a clenched jellyfish in a sack of blood and veins. Could she taste Poppa, Carnival wondered?

  Carnival smelled the blood on her, the tainted taste of graveyards, a moon swallow sang deep in the back of my mind. He wanted to kiss her hard, wanted to tear himself open upon those relent
less teeth, barely concealed by her cool thin bloodless lips. He tore her shirt open, wishing he could tear her flesh open and bury his face into the love cage of her tenderly carved ribs.

  They made love in the pizza sauce and blood.

  A car in the distance honked. Carnival heard a siren howling long and hot in the moonless night. Someone was dying. Someone was breaking the law. He didn’t care. The night was alive with the sounds of distant traffic. He heard a sound like a car colliding with another, or maybe just some kids shoving over a mailbox. The two of them lay there, heaped in the strew of the dead boy’s vital organs, a macabre ménage a trois.

  It should have been messy, but what her skin hadn’t soaked up, the floor boards made short work of.

  Chapter 36

  Punchbuggy, Punchbuggy, No Punch Back

  The Toyota Camry is the car most stolen in North America, but the pizza boy was driving a Volkswagen and Carnival and Maya were stealing it. One of the old beetles. A classic. Yellow punch buggy, no punch back.

  “Do you know how to drive one of these things?” Maya asked.

  “I can fake it.”

  Listen to the bandit. Ha. You don’t look a thing like Burt Reynolds. Where’s your moustache?

  Carnival and Maya got into the car. Carnival started it up and drove until we pulled onto a main artery. Poppa sang Red Sovine tunes until Carnival turned up the radio to try and drown him out.

  They rounded a corner.

  “He was a virgin,” Maya said. “I could taste it. It tasted sweet.”

  “If that’s supposed to turn me on, it isn’t working.”

  Maya looked away.

  Why are you doing this, if it sickens you so?

  That’s a good question, Carnival thought.

  Why was he doing it?

  His memory reminded him of their lovemaking, he could feel the stick of her kisses and the taint of remembered blood, but he still wasn’t convinced.

  Maya kept talking, drowning the radioed-over silence.

  “You can tell, you know. There’s no taint in it. All that repressed passion. Like a wine, tightly corked, the flavors have yet to be soiled.”