Drawing Blood

by Poppy Brite

He brought up his mail and sat back in his chair.

  And the message filled his screen, flashing like Bourbon Street strip-club neon, pulsing like a vein in a junkie’s fevered temple.

  LUCIO. THEY ARE ONTO YOU. THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE. THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. RUN.

  The Greyhound bus was slow and hot and nearly empty. It smelled mostly of smoke and sweat, a tired smell like the ends of journeys, but underlying that was a faintly exotic sweetness that twined into the nostrils like opium smoke. Probably the industrial strength disinfectant they used to slop out the rest room at the back of the bus, but to Trevor it was the smell of travel, of adventure. At any rate, it was an odor he knew as well as that of his own skin. He had spent a good part of the past seven years on Greyhound buses, or waiting for them in the quiet despair of a thousand cavernous terminals.

  The Carolina countryside rolled past his window, summer-green, then dusk-blue, then a deepening, smoky violet. When he could no longer see by the dying sunlight that came through the window, he switched on the small bulb above his seat and kept drawing, his hand moving to the rhythm of the Charlie Parker tape on his Walkman. Now and then he raised his head and stared briefly out the window. All the cars had their headlights on, rushing toward him in an endless dazzling stream. Soon it was so dark that he could see only his own hollow-eyed reflection in the glass.

  The fat redneck occupying the two seats in front of him heaved a great sigh when Trevor turned on the light. Trevor was dimly aware of the man shifting in his seat, making a show of tugging his John Deere cap down over his eyes, his body giving off a strong stale odor of cheap beer and human dirt. At last he turned completely around and stared at Trevor over the back of the seat. Neckless, his head looked like a jug resting on a wall; the skin of his face was seamed and damp and blotchy, nearly leprous. He might have been nineteen or forty. “Hey, you,” he said. “Hey, hippie.”

  Trevor looked up but did not remove his earphones. He always listened to music at a very low volume, and he could hear fine with them on. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you, who the fuck you think I mean, him?” The redneck gestured at an ancient black man asleep across the aisle, toothless cavern of his mouth gaping, gnarled hands twisting around the nearly empty bottle of Night Train in his lap.

  Ever so slowly Trevor shook his head, never looking away from the redneck’s bleary, glittering eyes.

  “Well anyway, you mind turnin’ that goddamn light off? I got a real bad headache, you know?”

  Hangover, more like. Trevor shook his head again, even more slowly, even more firmly. “I can’t. I have to work on this drawing.”

  “The fuck you do!” More of the redneck’s head rose over the seat, though there was still no neck in evidence. A large scarred hand appeared as well. Trevor saw black half-moons of dirt under each thick nail. “What’s a freak like you drawin’ that’s so goddamn important?”

  Silently Trevor turned his sketchbook around so that the redneck could see it. The light showed every detail of the drawing: a slender woman half-seated, half-sprawled in a doorway, head thrown back, yawning mouth full of blood and broken teeth. Her left temple and forehead were smashed in, her hair and face and the front of her blouse black with blood. The draftsmanship was stark and flawless, the frozen agony eloquent in every line of her body, in every stroke of her ruined face.

  “My mother,” Trevor said.

  The redneck’s fat face quivered. His lips twitched; his eyes went shocked, momentarily defenseless, then flat. “Fuckin’ freak,” he muttered loudly. But he didn’t say anything else about the light, not for the rest of the trip.

  The bus turned off the interstate at Pittsboro and got on the narrow two-lane state highway. It stopped for minutes at a tiny dark station in Corinth; then there were no more stops, and it was irrevocable, it was true, he was really going back to Missing Mile.

  Trevor looked back down at his drawing. A line appeared between his eyebrows as he frowned at it. How weird. In the lower right-hand corner, without being aware of it, he had labeled the drawing. And he had labeled it wrong. In big, dark block letters he had printed the name ROSENA BLACK.

  But his mother’s name had been Rosena McGee. She had been born Rosena Parks, but she had died a McGee. Black was the name Trevor had chosen for himself years ago, the name he drew under.

  He didn’t erase the mislabel; it was too heavily penciled, would fuck up the paper. He wasn’t much for erasing anyway. Sometimes your mistakes showed you the really interesting connections between your brain, your hand, and your heart, the ones you might otherwise never know were there. They were important even if you had no idea what they meant.

  Like now, for instance. Coming back here might be the biggest mistake he’d ever made. But it might also be the most important thing he had ever done.

  He couldn’t remember his last sight of Missing Mile. His mother’s friends had carried him out of the house that morning, and that was all he had known for a while. Only one of them, a man with large, gentle hands, had been brave enough to edge past Bobby’s dangling body and pry Trevor from his niche between the toilet and the sink. The next thing he remembered was waking up in a blank white room, smelling medicine and vomit, then screaming at the sight of a tube that snaked out of a bag hanging by the bed and ran straight into the crook of his arm. The flesh where it went in was puffy, red, sore.

  Trevor had thought the thing was alive, burrowing into him as he slept. He would never really trust sleep again. You closed your eyes and went somewhere else for a few hours, and while you were gone, anything could happen—anything at all. The whole world could be ripped out from under you.

  The nurse said Trevor had not been able to hear people trying to talk to him, and could not eat or drink. The tube had pumped ground-up food into his arm to keep him from starving to death, or so he understood it. He was embarrassed to find himself wearing a diaper. Even Didi was too old for diapers. Then he remembered that Didi wasn’t anything anymore but a memory of a smashed shape on a stained mattress. His family had been dead five days, had been buried while Trevor floated in that hazy twilight world.

  The doctors at the hospital in Raleigh called it catatonia. Trevor knew it was Birdland. Not just the place where no one else could touch you, but the place you went when the real world scared you away.

  After it became apparent that no relative or friend of the family was going to claim him, and a series of cognitive tests proved he was functional (if withdrawn), the court declared Trevor McGee a ward of the state. He was placed in the North Carolina Boys’ Home on the outskirts of Charlotte, an orphanage and school whose operating budget had been shaved to the bone the previous year. There was no foster family program, no special training for the gifted, no therapy for the disturbed. There was only an enormous drafty pillared school building and four outlying dorms all built of smooth gray stone that held a chill even in the heart of summer. There were only three hundred boys aged five to eighteen, all kept crew-cut and conservatively dressed, each with his own personal hell and none of them much inclined to help ease the weight of anyone else’s.

  The place seemed to have no color, no texture. Trevor’s thirteen years there were a collage of blurred edges, featureless gray expanses, empty city streets sectioned into little diamonds by the chain-link fence that surrounded the Home and its grounds. His room was a cold square box, but safe because he could draw there without anyone looking over his shoulder.

  Most of the other boys used sports as their escape, built their dreams around athletic scholarships to State or UNC. Trevor was painfully clumsy; except for his right hand, his body felt wrong to him, like something he wasn’t entitled to and shouldn’t have. He dreaded the afternoons he was forced out to the playing fields with his gym class, hot dusty tedium broken only by occasional panic when someone screamed at him to run or swing or catch a hurtling ball that looked like a bomb falling at a thousand miles per hour out of a dizzying clear blue sky.

  His life at the Boys’ Home had
been neither good nor terrible. He never tried to make friends, and mostly he was ignored. On the rare occasions that a group of predators chose him as their next target, Trevor returned their taunts until he goaded them into attacking him. They always attacked him eventually. Then he would hurt as many of them as badly as he could. He learned to land a hard punch with his left fist, to kick and claw and bite, anything that did not risk his drawing hand. He usually got the worst of it, but that particular group would leave him alone afterward, and Trevor would mind his own business until the next group came along. From things he read, he suspected it was a lot like prison.

  The state had cut him loose at eighteen with an option to attend vocational school. Instead, Trevor headed for the Greyhound station and bought a ticket for as far as the hundred dollars in his pocket would take him.

  He had traveled haphazardly in those years, zigzagging between cities and coasts, picking up work here and there, occasionally selling a sketch or a comic strip for the price of a bus ticket, often more. Sometimes he met people that under other circumstances he thought he might have called friends. At any rate, people in the real world were more interesting than any he had met in the Home. But as soon as he left a place, these acquaintances were gone as if erased from the world.

  He never let anyone touch him. Mostly he preferred to be alone. If he was ever unable to draw, Trevor thought he would probably die. It was a possibility he always kept tucked away in a corner of his mind, the comfort of the razor or the rope, the security of poison on the shelf waiting to be swallowed. But he wouldn’t take anyone with him when he went.

  He had not cut his hair for seven years. He had never had a permanent address. He seldom visited a town or a city more than once. There were only a few places he avoided. Austin. New Orleans. And North Carolina, until now.

  His twenty-fifth birthday had recently come and gone, celebrated only by the crossing of state lines, a thing that always exhilarated him a little no matter how often he did it. Trevor often came close to forgetting his own birthday. All it had meant in the Boys’ Home was an ugly new shirt and a cupcake with a single candle on it, reminders of everything he didn’t have.

  And besides, his birthday was overshadowed by the more important anniversary just after it. The anniversary that fell tomorrow.

  Twenty years since it happened, and every year strung heavy as a millstone round his heart. Four-fifths of his life spent wondering why he wasn’t dead. It was too long.

  Recently he had started having a dream of the house on Violin Road. All through his childhood Trevor had dreamed of that last morning, that bloody morning that seemed to drip through his memory like molasses, dark and slow. That was a familiar nightmare, infrequent now. But this new dream was different, and had been coming several times a week.

  He would find himself sitting in the little back bedroom Bobby had used as a studio, staring at a blank sheet of paper on the drawing board. Trevor usually drew comics in his sketchbook, but Bobby had used looseleaf paper for Birdland. Only there was no Birdland on this sheet of paper. There was nothing on it, and he could think of nothing to put on it. It stared him in the eye and laughed at him, and Trevor could almost hear its dry sardonic whisper: The abyss stares back into you? Ha! Nothing to see but a liver pickled in whiskey and the ashes of a million burnt-out dreams.

  Awake, Trevor couldn’t imagine not being able to draw. He could always make his hand move. An empty page had always been a challenge, a space for him to fill. Awake, it still was. But in this dream, the blank sheet of paper was a mockery.

  And he didn’t drink whiskey, or any other kind of alcohol. He had never taken a drink in his life.

  Trevor found that this dream bothered him more than the ones in which he saw his family dead. Drawing had been the only thing he cared about for such a long time. Now he was beginning to understand how the loss of it could drive someone insane.

  He started to worry: what if the hollow, paralyzed feeling of the dream infiltrated his waking life? What if someday he opened his sketchbook and his hand went stiff, his mind numb?

  The night he woke up with a broken pencil in his hands, the edges of the wood as raw as a fractured bone, the sound of the snap still echoing like a leftover shred of nightmare through his lonely boardinghouse room, Trevor knew he had to go back to the house. He was sick of wearing his past like a millstone. He would not let his art become one too.

  The bus passed a wreck just outside Missing Mile, a small car crumpled in a ditch, sparkling shards of glass picking up the whirling red and blue lights, making the scene seem to revolve psychedelically. Trevor cupped his hands to the window, pressed his forehead to the glass. Paramedics were loading someone into the ambulance, strapped to a stretcher, already punctured with needles and tubes. Trevor looked straight down into the person’s face and saw that it was a girl, maybe close to his age, face drenched with blood, chest crushed in, eyelids still fluttering.

  Then—he saw it—the life left her. Her lids stopped moving and he saw her eyes freeze on a point beyond him, beyond anything he would ever see in this world. The medics kept moving, shoved her into the ambulance and slammed the doors, and she was gone. Yes, she was gone.

  Great, he thought. An omen. Just what I needed.

  A few minutes later the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Farmers Hardware Store, the flatiron-shaped building that stood lone and proud among lesser downtown structures like the prow of some landlocked ship. A small ticket office at the back and a bench in the parking lot served as Missing Mile’s bus station. The Greyhound groaned to a stop alongside the deserted bench.

  Trevor hoisted his backpack and made his way down the aisle, then down the steps. His feet touched North Carolina ground for the first time in two decades, and a shiver ran through him like a tiny electric chill. No one else got off.

  The bus had seemed hot, but the humid swelter of the night outside made him realize it had been air-conditioned. The air pressed like a soft damp palm against his face, delicious with the scents of honeysuckle, wet grass, hot charcoal and the rich oils of roasting pork. Someone nearby was cooking out tonight.

  The smell of barbecue made his stomach roll over, then growl: he was either sick or starved. Years of institutional food had blurred the two sensations. The Boys’ Home was not quite Dickensian, but second helpings were neither kindly looked upon by the cafeteria ladies nor much desired by the boys.

  Maybe by now Missing Mile had somewhere to eat besides that greasy diner. But if not, the diner would do. Trevor decided to take a walk through downtown. He couldn’t go out to the house yet. Not at night. He was ready for anything, but he was still scared.

  He would be there tomorrow, for the twenty-year reunion.

  Trevor only hoped he was invited this time.

  Kinsey knew tonight was going to suck. Rima was scheduled to work, and Rima was gone, finding someone else to rip off, having raw meat scraped out of her womb, coking up her little brain until it spun like a whirligig, or maybe all of the above.

  So Kinsey would be working by himself. Terry Buckett’s new band Gumbo was playing. Owner and manager of the Whirling Disc record store, Terry also played drums and sang whenever he could get a gig. Gumbo was one of the Yew’s biggest draws now that Lost Souls? were on the road, and it would be a busy night.

  To distract himself, Kinsey decided to have a dinner special. It would make him even busier, but he loved feeding his kids. He ran through his limited repertoire. Curry? … no, it would take too long … lentil soup? no, he’d had that one twice last week … gumbo, for the band … but his skills weren’t up to it, and there was nowhere to get fresh seafood, and he never had been convinced you could make good gumbo anywhere but New Orleans. The Mississippi River water gave it that special flavor, maybe. At last Kinsey decided tonight would be Japanese Night.

  He hiked home and put together a quick broth from some elderly vegetables and a few pork bones in his freezer, loaded it into his car, and drove slowly back into town
so as not to slosh it. The railroad tracks were tricky, but he managed them with aplomb. In town, he stopped at the little grocery next to Farmers Hardware and bought twenty packages of Oodles of Noodles and several bunches of green onions. The rain had stopped, which meant it would be even busier.

  Back at the Yew, Kinsey took down the chalkboard over the bar, selected a piece of purple chalk, and with a flourish Wrote JAPANESE NOODLE SOUP! $1.00!

  If anyone ordered the special, Kinsey would ladle up a bowl of his homemade broth, pop in the noodles, throw away the sodium-laden “flavor packet,” and zap the whole thing in the microwave he kept behind the bar. The green onions were for a garnish, and he set to chopping them into small, fragrant rounds. It was getting near eight. The band wouldn’t start until ten, but the kids often started drifting in this early to drink and eat and talk. Sometimes he opened the club at five for happy hour, but he hadn’t been happy enough today.

  An hour later the Sacred Yew was nearly full. Admission was free until ten. After that he would have to find someone to work the door. That was never hard: all the door people had to do was collect money, shoot the shit, and watch the band for free. If they were of age they got a free beer too. The club served no alcohol but beer—bottled, canned, and draft. Still, the vagaries of North Carolina law made the Yew a bar and forbade the presence of those under twenty-one.

  For the place to be an all-ages club—as Kinsey had intended all along—it must qualify as a restaurant as well. Hence the noodle soup, the sandwiches, the odds and ends of snacks he served. At first making the food had been a bother. Then he grew to like it; now his cookbook collection was rapidly expanding. Regular customers gave them to him all the time, and Kinsey chose to take these as a compliment.

  Some of the kids he knew, the ones from Missing Mile and surrounding areas, most of whom attended a nearby Quaker school called Windy Hill. There was a public high school too, but the kids there were mostly metalheads and shitkickers; Kinsey knew some of them, had even helped them work on their cars, but they didn’t like the music at the Yew.