Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “Lemme do one of my own songs now. This one’s called ‘The Scent of ’Shine.’ It’s dedicated to another Demon Lover: my ex-boyfriend Thom. Broke my heart, but at least I got a few songs out of ’im before he left.”

  The banjo player starts the tune this time, a rollicking country beat much different from the lugubrious ballad they just finished. Matt joins in, strumming without a pick.

  The elderberry’s bloomin’ by the river bank.

  I’m drivin’ my pickup truck alone.

  Love these high-summer hillbilly backroads.

  Got to forget you, got to get on home.

  The genre’s familiar, almost to the point of cliché: lonely highways and pickup trucks, plus the simple chord progressions typical of country music. But there are no “hound dawgs” yet, and there is that lyrical reference to the elderberry bloom. And, well, I want him, so I’m predisposed to like what he sings.

  Loved the scent of ’shine on your lips,

  Licked apple pollen from your beard.

  The taste of you was heaven, all right.

  The loss of you, the hell I feared.

  Licked pollen from a beard? Now, that stretches the genre a bit. Something delectable about a meaty, goateed butch boy up there twanging away in the best country-folk tradition and singing love songs full of tasty gay details like licking beards. In a public place, too, here in Bible Belt West Virginia. No wonder he said earlier that he was infamous.

  Matt’s had his own Angus, it suddenly occurs to me. And now, in memory’s sudden distracting mist, his lyrics are beginning to fade, till all I’m hearing is the tone of his voice, increasingly rough-edged with emotion. All I’m seeing is Angus again, naked at the foot of the standing stone, bloodied in the grass, his face as gray as the ashes of the Beltane fire.

  Then, suddenly, the vision shifts, and it’s Matt, crumpled on gray pavement, blood oozing from his mouth. I can smell Matt’s blood.

  Applause again. I shake the mist from my head—talk about wool-gathering. I’ve missed the last half of the song.

  His audience is howling with enthusiasm, obviously delighted to find their lives—difficult amalgam of Appalachian and queer—reflected in his music. Two women near the front are especially enthusiastic. A good-looking lesbian couple, one ash-blonde, one a brunette with high cheekbones. Something familiar about the dark one, I’m thinking, before my eyes return longingly to Matt’s face.

  Matt’s grinning and wincing at the same time, sucking on his right thumb. “Glad you all liked that one. I’ll bet that dumb bastard Reverend Rodney Bates would love it too, eh, folks?” Several of the Bears jeer contemptuously. “Well, talk about sheddin’ blood for your art: I got so carried away with that song, I cut my damn strummin’ thumb on my strings. Time to get out the pick.”

  This is the way a bee feels approaching an orchard, I’m willing to guess. My teeth lengthen and throb. I want Matt naked in my lap and that juicy thumb in my mouth. The thumb to start with, as if I were some sort of huge, suckling, demonic child. Then the rest, inch by musky inch. This one, oh, this one I want to tie tight and top slowly. This man could be more than dinner. If his blood tastes as good as he looks, I may well be on my way toward serious addiction.

  Loving a mortal? I’ve done that before. It’s madness. Better to put my faith in that which moths, thieves and rust cannot steal. Better love mountains at night, the moon slipping behind clouds, the scent of honeysuckle, the precious safety of my solitude. Who knows better than I how fragile the human form is, how easily the skin breaks, the heart stops?

  “The loss of you, the hell I feared.” Oh yes. I’ve been through that too many times in the last couple hundred years. Again I see Matt broken on the pavement. There are bruises on his face. I bend to him, lift his face to mine. He is not breathing.

  The band completes its second set with a few more ballads, a couple more country-queer love songs, then they announce a break and are cascaded with yee-haws, rebel yells, and applause. To my delight, Matt, after unshouldering his guitar, heads straight for my table.

  “Well, guy, how’d you like us? You seemed to recognize that ‘Demon Lover’ thang, ’cause I saw your head bobbin’. Did you like my Hillbilly Homosexual tunes? The local Baptists are all up in arms over ’em.”

  Where did this ache come from? I haven’t felt tenderness this dangerous, this deep, for centuries.

  I want to practice detachment. Toss a glamor over him, lead him into an alley, take a few healthy swallows of blood as intoxicating as mountain-brewed moonshine. Then get out of here. Back to Mount Storm, back to the familiar, the domestic. Back to the ease of indifference.

  But there are his nipples again. Top-hats, Steven used to call them when we cruised the leather bars of London together. They’re hard, stippling the front of his T-shirt atop the fine swell of his pec mounds. And, yes, of course, as if I weren’t in enough trouble—yes, what a fetish, I’m clearly obsessed—love these hirsute boys—David, Steven, Bob—there’s a curl of hair poking over the collar of Matt’s shirt. Dark smoke roiling off an underground mine fire, rising through a fissure in the hills.

  I’m almost hissing with hunger, ready to tear the front of that T-shirt apart and sink my teeth into his chest, feel the blood pump, systole and diastole, into my mouth.

  Luckily for both of us, he has no idea how close he is to death, how easily he might find himself drained utterly dry, the short duration of his life made even shorter. Like some wayward insect, hanging, sad dried husk bound about with silver cord, in a barn-rafter spider’s web. Found in a dirty eddy of the Kanawha River, eyes staring at the sky, neck gashed open.

  No. Too fine to finish so quickly. As a Scot, I should know. Don’t gulp the best single malt. Sip it slowly, frugally. Who knows when you might find such richness again?

  There is this tenderness too, standing between him and his death at my hands. I want, somehow simultaneously, two exact opposites. To hold him down and drink till his heart stops. To lift him into my arms, gently nuzzle his goatee, and defend him from any who wish him harm.

  What is he going on about now? The boy does love to chatter. A well-placed bandana will remedy that, if I ever finagle him onto the four-poster at Mount Storm. “So, yeah, I guess I’ve paid a little bit of a price for the public honesty,” he’s explaining. “It’s a little frightening.”

  Something important here? I begin to listen, tearing my eyes away from the darkness curling over the top of his shirt. “Price? What do you mean?”

  “Man, you’re on another planet. Did that little glass a’ wine go to your head? Want another? Well, yeah, the guy’s name is Rodney Bates. He’s a preacher in Belle, upriver just a ways. I think it’s ’cause of him that I’m gettin’ the phone calls.”

  “Phone calls?” I manage confusedly.

  “Guy, I just mentioned the calls a minute ago. You really must be drunk. Now you really do have to have another glass, just so’s I can have an excuse to drive you home!”

  He grins at his own naughty turn of phrase, pauses, then looks at me with just a touch of uncertainty from beneath his bushy eyebrows. A few seconds of silence settle over our table. The first time this evening I’ve seen him showing anything but macho bluster. The first time he’s shut up.

  He wants me, I realize, and he’s not sure the feeling’s returned. My God, the blabbermouth is insecure beneath all that swagger and chatter. Too endearing. It’s the crassly overconfident ones I like to kill. What color is his hair? I can’t come up with the right word for it.

  Beneath the table, I rub the tip of my boot up his calf and he jumps. Our eyes lock. He looks truly startled. I reach for that place in his mind, so as to pull a little manipulative mesmerism, but there’s no need. He’s already hooked.

  “Drive me home? That can probably be arranged. Eventually.” I smile and stroke my beard. “What about the phone calls?”

  He’s grinning again, relieved at the apparent reciprocity of lust. “Well,” he continues, rushing off into
another spurt of garrulity, “a couple weeks after me and my band—that’s Ken on fiddle, he’s from Montgomery, we call him Montgomery Muscles, and that’s Jonathan on banjo, he’s a NASCAR fanatic, and he’s got the sweetest little tattoo on his . . .”

  “The phone calls,” I prompt him. Damn, where’s a ball gag when you need one? If he weren’t so sexy, I would have been out of here a long time ago.

  “Oh yeah, well, after my band and me decided we were tired of changin’ the pronouns in our country songs, tired of sparin’ the delicate feelin’s of the good folk of Charleston, WV—and we play all over too—at Pipestem and Lost River and—yeah, yeah, stop growlin’, you make me nervous—well, we came out, so to speak, just about six months ago. Started to put some gay love songs in our sets, stuff I write. Well, most folk were fine about it; we’re not all rabid Biblethumpers ’round here . . .”

  “I know. I’m a West Virginian.”

  “No shit? Yeah, you do seem sorta local. But sorta foreign at the same time.”

  “I get that a lot. Scotland originally.”

  “Ummmm, you wear a kilt?”

  “Yep. Occasionally. Tell me about the phone calls within the next minute, and maybe someday I’ll wear it for you.”

  “Yeah? Is it true what they say about . . .”

  “Yes. It’s true. Nothing beneath.”

  “Not even a jockstrap? Now that would be a hot combination . . .”

  “True. Within the next minute, or no kilt.”

  “Okay, dammit. So the Charleston Gazette, that’s the local paper, runs a story on us. ‘Ridgerunners Break the Stereotypes.’ ” All about how we’re the first band ’round here to combine country and folk and queer. Got to admit it’s an unusual combination. Interviewed us, ran a picture. Good excuse to buy a new leather vest for the photo shoot! And check out these new boots! Ariats!”

  “Very sexy. Your minute is up. No kilt.”

  “Oh, shit. C’mon!”

  “One more minute.” I love playing with men’s minds. Auburn hair, almost long enough for a ponytail. The goatee is lighter, a sandy brown. The forearm hair is lighter still, already bleached by the sun. I’m guessing he drives a pickup truck. I’m guessing he’s like Bob, fond of mucking around in vegetable gardens. I’m guessing if I politely expressed a desire to string him up in my Mount Storm dungeon, he wouldn’t put up much of a fuss. Many big furry boys like it a little—or a lot—perverse.

  “Well, it was after the story ran that the phone calls started. Real hateful. ‘Fucking fag, we’re gonna get you, we’re gonna bust your head, we’re gonna frail you dead.’ ”

  “Frail?”

  “You know, frail. Like, ‘Junior, if you don’t straighten up, I’m gonna frail you with a stick.’ Beat, strike. It’s a word we use down home in Summers County. Well, anyway, I don’t mind admittin’ I’m a little scared. I know I’ve got me a decent set of muscles”—he leans back and proudly crosses his hands behind his head, showing off his biceps and just a peek of armpit hair—“but, hell, those bastards always travel in packs. Came out of here th’other week after a set with the boys, and someone’d slashed my pickup tires.”

  Pickup. Exactly. I can see him driving up Gauley Mountain a little too fast, taking the sharp angle of Chimney Corner with a screech of tires, blasting Steve Earle’s “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied” on the tape deck. He’s shirtless. He’s got a WVU Mountaineers baseball cap cocked on his head. It’s hot, high noon, the windows are rolled down, and he can smell the new bloom of multiflora rose. There are twin trickles of sweat running down his sides.

  I haven’t seen the light of high noon since 1730.

  Concentrate, Derek. Focus on something besides your fangs.

  “So,” I marshall my attention, “who’s Rodney Bates? What does he have to do with the threatening calls?”

  “Oh, that motherfucker! I know he’s to blame. At least indirectly. He’s a fire-and-brimstone type out at Belle, preaches every Sunday about what abominations we queers are. Says we’re bound to ‘fry in Hell like sausage patties.’ He’s always appearin’ at town meetin’s to block hate-crime legislation. His congregation crowds in with ’im. Buncha holier-than-thou idiots. Talk about a rich crop of eighth-grade educations! He writes letters to the editor as larded with Bible quotations as a cheap pork chop is with fat. All about how gays and lesbians are predators and pedophiles, all that ignorant shit, y’know? And about how the Ridgerunners are bad role models, tryin’ to recruit kids with satanic music. Makes me wanna barf.

  “Big problem is, ever since Bates started his regular rants, gaybashin’ incidents ’round here have really picked up. Just last week there was a teenaged kid—real bright kid, an actor in some local productions—that got beat up in an alley by a buncha thugs. Got hurt pretty bad. He said they were quotin’ Leviticus while they frailed him with two-by-fours. Now ain’t that pretty? A bunch of big guys quotin’ the Bible while they outnumber some skinny high-school kid. There’s some real men for ya.

  “The same bunch went after Ken the other night outside The Tap Room, that’s the Bear and Leather bar. But he’s pretty big, and he kicked a couple of their asses before cops came around the corner just in time. We’re callin’ ’em the Leviticus Locusts. Or the Leviticus Lice, or Leviticus Lowlifes, take your pick. I’m guessin’ that it’s only a matter of time before I run into ’em, what with my reputation, so I’ve been workin’ out a lot on my punching bag and gettin’ my buddy Jonathan the banjo player to teach me a little Tae Kwon Do. Right now, though”—he grins sheepishly—“I know just enough martial arts to make me dangerous to myself. Th’other day, Jonathan was tryin’ to teach me to kick the punchin’ bag, and I landed on my ass. Still got a bruise. Too many nights drinkin’ beer, too many intimate mornin’s at Krispy Kreme,” he laughs, patting his modest belly.

  You think your ass is bruised now, I think wickedly, blithely. Just wait. I’m guessing that your buttocks are furry and plump and . . .

  Now that image comes again. I have no penchant for Second Sight, despite my Celtic blood. Why am I seeing these things?

  Matt’s on the pavement. There’s a pool of blood spreading around his head. A streetlight glints on broken glass. A two-by-four lies beside him, dark with blood. There’s blood in my beard too. But it’s not Matt’s blood. It’s mine. My own damned tears, salty as the Hebridean sea. I haven’t wept for decades.

  Look around. Where am I? There’s an office across the street. It looks familiar. Big plate-glass windows. Absurd office furniture inside, plastic, futuristic. Lava lamps, for Herne’s sake. And a street sign says . . .

  “Where’d you go, man?” Matt is rubbing the back of my hand. “You sure drift off sometimes. Look, about drivin’ you home, look, I think you’re hot, but—hell, I cain’t help but flirt with a big guy like you, you’re just my type—but I, uh . . .”

  Again that sudden stammering shyness. Sometimes a man’s weakness melts me as irresistibly as his strength. “But you’re not over Thom, right? The guy in your songs?”

  “Yeah. The Little Prick, I call him. Ferret Boy. God, he could lie. He already had a lover, but I was six months into it before I found that out. When they moved to Encino, boy, was I relieved. Especially when a friend told me Encino is, like, the asshole of California!”

  “I understand. I’d just as soon take this slowly too.” I reach over and run my fingers through his goatee. Bushy enough to be braided like a Viking’s. Matt returns the gesture, shyly stroking the silver on my bearded chin with his right forefinger. God, my fangs hurt. Nearby, a fat middle-aged woman clucks her tongue and herds her children out of the café.

  “Ha! See that? Just as well. I cain’t stand children anyway.”

  “We agree on many things, Matt. They’re damned ill-bred these days. Right now I’ve got to leave. I haven’t had dinner tonight, and I’m famished. But here’s my e-mail address”—I hurriedly scratch it on a napkin, then rise—“so keep in touch and maybe one night you can see my kilt. Meanwhile,
” I add, “ be careful of the Leviticus Locusts.”

  “Hey, guy, you got the weak trembles? Me too. Let’s go up the street to that late-night barbeque place. You game?”

  But I’ve already dropped a few bills on the tabletop to cover the wine and headed toward the door. Matt’s confused by my abrupt exit, no doubt, but breathing in his scent for the last hour, then feeling his fingers in my beard . . .

  I’ve got to feed soon.

  Easy enough on a Saturday night. I slip into the shadows of an alley just off Quarrier Street, then shift. Above the leaves of the Bradford pear trees I hover, looking for the toothsome and the solitary. This fire in my gut, the hunger pangs, as if I’d swallowed embers—it makes me impatient, a little surly. I’m so hungry I can for the most part ignore the sudden twinge of moral ambiguity I feel, realizing that I’m a threat lurking in the dark, just like those swine who brought their clubs down on a queer kid’s thin shoulders.

  Then someone familiar strides below. Joe, the hottest cop in town, patrolling the neighborhood. I’ve had him many times before. Always worth a repeat. Bald head, red-blond goatee, cocky as hell. High black-leather boots, Nautilus-tightened physique. I give him a little psychic nudge, and he steps into the very alley where I transformed myself. He lights up a cigarette and leans back, one booted foot propped against the wall. Closes his blue eyes and inhales.

  When he opens his eyes, I am there before him. He jumps and gives a precious little yelp, before I slam one hand over his mouth and with the other shove him back against the wall, holding him there with the weight of my body.

  He smells like beer. I love the fear in his eyes, but that fear and the struggle that accompanies it fade fast. He remembers me. Because I let him remember. And he remembers the pleasure. Beneath my palm, I can feel his lips slowly form a smile. “Bad boy, drinking on the job,” I whisper. His eyes grow dreamy now. Beneath the pressure of my hand he manages to nod his head, and so I unzip his uniform top and run my fingers through that outrageously thick carpet, as dark as his beard is blond. I squeeze one nipple between my thumb and forefinger, his erection stiffens against my thigh, and now I tilt his head back and press my lips to the excited drumming in his throat.