Funny how we keep moving the line on what that sort of thing takes.
Funny how, nowadays, all it takes is some sucker like me, and some stupid, sentimental song. But we’ve already gone over that. No use crying over spilled blood.
Not anymore.
6
Bad Lugosi
Itry.
Note that word choice: “Try.” Not “succeed.”
I try to kill Isuzu. I really do. Honest. After that whole weepy-weepy number over that stupid song, the time feels right, if not for a meal, well, at least for getting rid of the one witness to my…softer side.It’s her feeling sorry for me, for my tears—that’s what does it. That’s the trigger. That’s the last straw blown through the last two-by-four.
That’s it!
That’s your death warrant, you little shit factory!
Perhaps, as a line, that would have come off better spoken. Out loud. Out loud, and not just thought to myself, inside my frequently overcrowded head. You need something like that, I think, in retrospect. Something bad-ass. Something to sell the visuals. Lacking a sinister sound track to reinforce the emotional expectations of the scene to come, all you’ve really got to anchor things is the dialogue and the tone in which it’s delivered. Without the dialogue—without the spooky music or the kick-ass, badass line—all you’re left with is this:
Me, poised like a vampire going in for the slow-motion kill, fangs exposed, mouth wider than wide, my lower jaw unhinging, my hands turned to claws, my fingers shocked all the way open—every tendon stitching every digit to the rest of me, tight, tight, tight—my fingers doing their crawling-tarantula impersonation, creepier than creepy. In other words, what you’ve got isme, doing bad Lugosi, with the sound turned down.
I vant to suck your blood…
Yeah, I leave that little gem unspoken, too. Which is probably the only good call I’ve made so far. Not that it does any good. Isuzu reacts in exactly the way my overly earnest attempt to terrify deserves:
She giggles.
Tee-hee. It’s the loosest and loudest one so far.
“Oh, Marty.” She laughs, pushing me back with her little hand. “Quit teasing.”
And just like that, a six-year-old mortal has successfully ripped my vampire balls off and handed them to me. Nice try, guy. Too bad, so sad. Better luck next time.
“I’mnot teasing,” I insist, and even as I do, I know it’s a lost cause. Anytime you have to explain that you’re not teasing…well, you might as well hang up that shovel, gravedigger, ’cause the hole’s deep enough. Going deeper’s only gonna get you closer to hell.
And oh, I have gone to this hell before…
You know that point in a relationship where you justknow you’ve screwed up and you’re never going to get laid? That point where you’ve played the nice guy for just a bit too long, and the would-be love of your life becomes convinced that you’re too nice to take to bed? She doesn’t want to “ruin the friendship,” blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, that’s the hell I’m talking about. Relationship hell. Dating hell. And I’ve been there more times than I can count, which is why Count Marty remains a bachelor well into his—what?—hundreds. It’s why Marty the Predator sucks when it comes to playing Marty the Dater, and why Marty the Benevolent Vampire prowled strip clubs before the flip, a habit he hasn’t quite been able to shake.
And now it seems that Marty the Predator can’t even pull off Marty the Predator anymore.
Not judging from Isuzu. Not judging from that tee-hee laugh of hers, which has been loosening progressively, going from flat to rounder and rounder the longer she’s around me. Without meaning to, I seem to have lulled her into a completely accurate sense of security.
Shit…
I’ve played the protector for too long, and she just doesn’t believe in my fangs anymore. I’m a puppy now; I’m a kitten. I’m a pet and a playmate with pointy teeth that don’t mean her any harm. They’re just-for-show fangs, that’s what they are.
Shit…
And the kicker is:
A very big part of me doesn’t mind.
If I’m being honest with myself, a very big part of me is relieved. It concurs in her casual dismissal of me, and the threat I represent.
When Isuzu placed her little hand to my chest and pushed back at my presumed teasing, I could have grabbed her wrist and snapped it like a twig. That would have turned her head around on the whole “just teasing” thing. That would have cracked a little sense into her. I could have sipped at the blood spurting from the ripped skin of her compound fracture, could have run my tongue along the jagged bone sticking out until it glistened white. I could have done this while she screamed and thrashed about, and by the time my hungry neighbors broke down the door, I’d be done. I could have tossed her limp body aside like a spent bottle of beer sent shattering against a curb.
I could have done all that. And my apartment could have gone back to being as quiet as it’s always been. The floorboards that always squeak between the living room and bedroom could go back to making their predictable, solitary noise. And me, I could go back to challenging this evening and the next and the next to show me something worth living for.
Go like this,” I say, pushing my nostrils up like a pig’s snout, and Isuzu does.
“Go like this,” I say, making a snorting noise, and she does that, too.
“Say, ‘Th-th-th-that’s all, folks.’ ”
“Th-th-th-that’s all, folks.”
I laugh and she laughs. I scramble her hair and she scrambles mine.
And I’m getting that feeling again—that feeling that forever isn’t that long, after all. Not with a kid around to show you how to spend it. With a kid around, forever doesn’t seem so scary anymore.
And as far as delaying gratification goes, well, that works only when the thing that gratifies is expected to stop. To run out. Expire. If the thing that gratifies has to be rationed, sure—defer, delay, postpone, hold off. But what if the gratification could go on? A little mortal girl has only so much blood to give, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. But laughing! Jesus Christ,laughing. A little girl’s giggles—even muted, even held a little bit back, and down, and hushed. Keep a little girl in food and water and the giggles could keep on coming. And your heart could keep on doing that zinging thing it does when she does, and…
And that’s the good thing about delaying gratification, I guess. Getting a second chance at a second chance. Having the time to find what you didn’t even know you were looking for, before it found you.
“Say, ‘Isuzu’s a stinkbug,’ ” I say.
“Marty’s a stinkbug.”
“Close enough.”
I’m thinking about my dad again.
It’s just a snapshot this time. He’s in the basement, at his workbench, under a cone-shaded lightbulb. A curlicue of smoke ripples up from a half-spent cigarette in the ashtray perched on the edge of the bench. The smoke collects in a hazy halo, circling the light overhead. His tools are spread out on the bench before him: the wishbone of his needle-nose pliers, his Phillips and flat-head screwdrivers, the socket wrench set, a half dozen C-clamps, the tin snips, a clawed hammer, some steel wool, a rat-tail file. There’s a yellowed bar of soap, gouged from the threads of all the bolts that have been drawn across it, to make screwing them into wherever they’re being screwed easier. There’s an open jar of blackened Vaseline for the same purpose, and an oil can for squeaky wheels. And the rest of the bench is taken up with the parts of a bike I’m not supposed to know I’m getting for Christmas.
Bikes for Christmas in Michigan? Talk about gratification delayed.
I’m hiding in the shadows at the top of the stairs, by the way—holding my breath, waiting, watching. My dad takes up a socket wrench, and I can see his wing bones shift under his shirt, followed by the click-click-click of things being tightened. When the clicking stops, my dad reaches over for his cigarette, the long ash breaking off in powdery clumps. He inhales deeply and begins to let
it go when my foot shifts and the plank I’m standing on groans. The blue needle of smoke coming from my dad stops. He turns on his work stool, letting out a slow, skeletal squeak, the flashlight already in his hand, already aimed and ready to blow the shadows back behind me. I blink there, spotlit and waiting for him to say something, to scold, to send me off to bed—something of a disciplinary nature. But he just winks instead, and lets the rest of his smoke go. He smiles, presses a sssshhhh finger to his lips, and winks again. And then he just turns back to his workbench and the scattered bits of my future happiness, awaiting assembly.
So, yeah.
I’m thinking about my dad. Again. Still.
And I’m thinking parentally, too, but not in the what-it’s-like-to-lose-one way. I’m thinking about parenthood in a way I never have before. I’m thinking about what it might be like tobe a parent. How do you know what you need to know? How do you know when to yell and when to wink? How do youbecome the sort of dad who knows those sorts of things?
And what would it be like to be one of those dads for a little girl in a world that’s not built for little girls anymore?
Isuzu and I are sitting in the living room where I haven’t killed her. And it’s been maybe a half hour since either one of us has made a peep. I’m sitting on the couch, my arms stretched across the back, my legs stretched out in front of me and crossed at the ankles. I’ve been watching her for that peepless half hour, while Isuzu’s been lying on her stomach on the floor, drawing with some colored pens I’ve given her. Her ankles are crossed, too, but her legs are crooked up behind her, ticktocking at the pivot of her knees, buttward, floorward, buttward, floorward.
“Isuzu?”
It’s been a half hour. Maybe more. And I need to hear her voice.
“Yeah?”
“What’s your name mean?”
“Dunno.”
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did she say?”
“She said Isuzu was because I was an ‘accident waiting to happen,’ ” Isuzu says.
“And Trooper?”
“Trooper’s ’cause I got big feet.”
Isuzu hasn’t bothered looking up during this entire exchange. And I’m embarrassed to say it, but this thrills me utterly—the fact that she’s ignoring me already. Kind of ignoring me, at least. There’s a taken-for-granted quality to how she’s responding to me that feels…parental. It feels like how a kid treats his parents when there are no birthdays coming up.
“That’s pretty cool,” I say. “My name isn’t that cool.”
“Marty?”
“No. The last one. Kowalski,” I say. “It means ‘lunch meat’ in Detroit.” By which I mean, it was the name brand of a lunch meat made in Hamtramck, a mostly Polish community surrounded on all sides by the city of Detroit. Assuming the same loose standards for translation, I guess Kowalski could also meanA Streetcar Named Desire for peoplenot from Detroit, but I spare Isuzu that footnote.
“What’s lunch meat?” she asks.
“It’s a kind of meat people used to eat for lunch,” I say. “Before,” I add.
“Before vampires ate ’em?”
I decide to let it slide.
“Yeah, kinda,” I say, before changing the subject back to lunch meat. “There were all kinds, back then. Ham. Bologna. Salami, which I used to call ‘spot meat’ when I was your age.”
Pretty slick, eh? How I just slid that little equalizer in there. Sure, I used to be a kid. I was even your age once, kiddo. We’re practically the same person, practically.
“There was kielbasa, too,” I go on, “which is Polish, like me, and hot dogs, and…”
“Mom used to make dog,” Isuzu observes casually. “And squirrel, rabbit, water fish and can fish, duck, a possum once, SpaghettiOs, Snickers, blueberries, dandy-lion salad, yucky beetles, her special chicken à la can opener—that tastes like snake—and…”
And I guess that makes two of us in the slick department. Me, trying to remind her how much we have in common underneath the superficial differences of fangs, cold-bloodedness, and my hundred extra years, while she casually reminds me of what people like me have driven people like her and her mom to do.
Clearly, it’s time to change subjects. Again.
“What do you think of this place?” I ask. It’s a cheap ploy for a little positive affirmation on my part. My apartment isn’t a palace by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m pretty sure it beats living in a hole in the ground.
“I dunno.”
“Well, do you like it?” I prod.
“It’s okay, I guess,” she says, her knees still opening and closing, like a door hinge.
“Just okay?” I ask, my delight at being taken for granted waning steadily.
“It don’t smell like worms.”
Well, call me crazy, but that’s something. And I’m pretty sure I can continue to have my apartment not smell like worms for the foreseeable future. Yep. This parenthood thing’s going to work out just fine.
“That’s why I decided to live here,” I say. “The ad stipulated, ‘No worm smell,’ and I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ ”
I wait for the giggle I’ve developed a fondness for. But none comes. No. All of a sudden, she’s become like a drug dealer with these things. The first few were free, but now that I need them…
No giggles. No tee-hee, either. Instead, what I get is:
“You talk funny.”
And all of a sudden my heart feels like a fish in a barrel, the waterping ing up around it, calamity just a matter of time, and marksmanship.
I used to worry about the way I talked all the time. This was back before, when I was hanging out at places that matched my face age (twenty-one) instead of my mind age (eighty-something). I was self-conscious about how age-apparent my word choices were to the mortals I was trying to survive among, and seduce. I didn’t want to sound like some fifties sitcom kid, spouting dialogue written by adults trying too hard to sound like kids. And so I listened to college radio; I shopped where the pierced and tattooed shopped. I eavesdropped on the chatter coming out of night classes, and followed it into bars where people got into shouting matches about Nietzsche and Tori Amos. Bars where I had to constantly translate my first thoughts into second and thirds: “black” or “African American,” not “colored,” andreally not the other one; “fridge” or “refrigerator,” not “icebox”; “PC,” not “horseshit” or “Give me a fucking break.”
But I thought I was past all that. Apparently not.
“What do you mean, ‘funny’?” I ask, realizing too late how close being taken for granted is to being made fun of.
“I dunno,” she says, casually checking the chambers of her twenty-two, taking a bead on the barrel of my chest, the guppy of my heart.
“Well that sheds a ton of light on the subject,” I snap. “I’m clear as tapioca now.”
She cocks. Fires.
“Yeah,” Isuzu says. “Like that.”
Okay, so maybe Ido talk funny. But that doesn’t mean she has tosay it. Show a little diplomacy. A littlegratitude for my deigning not to kill her. Ah, but she’s already seen through me and my mushy feelings.
Fucking sunshine…
Fucking song.
Not that I say any of this out loud. It’s already been proven that out-loud words and I can’t be trusted around my little judge and jury. So, no. All I say is, “Oh.”
Just “Oh,” while the guppy of my heart floats on its back, waiting for the next round.
Iscrew up about fifty-seven more times before it’s time for Isuzu to say good night for the night. We’ve set up her air mattress in the spare bedroom that I’ve been using as a junk room. The latest argument is about the practicality of having a separate thing called “a pillow.” When I hand her one, she looks at it strangely and begins turning it in her hands, until the pillow slips from its case. She looks at t
he empty sheath in her hands, then at the lump on the floor, and then up at me. The expression on her face tells me that she doesn’t get this joke either.
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