Or…
Isuzu could be stopped before she runs out of cable. This could happen as a result of (1) another skater, (2) several other skaters, (3) an invisible portal to another dimension that swallows her up whole, leaving just the smoldering split end of the jumper cable and perhaps one singed mitten, or (4) a bank of loose snow conveniently located at the edge of the rink.
Now, I know that our experiences up until this point may suggest a bias toward that whole invisible-portal thing, but as luck would have it, Isuzu hits the edge of the rink.
Now the snow in Fairbanks—that which hasn’t been trampled into concrete by dozens of Sorel boots—tends to make for poor snowmen. It’s not the good,packing kind, but the powdery sort that tends to stay loose. So when Isuzu hits the bank, it sends up a puff of snow, just as if she’d hit a pile of feathers. And she lies there, on her back, laughing her older kid’s laugh while the stirred-up snow falls back down on her like one of those Christmas globes. She throws out her arms to either side and lets them flop down, kicking up more puffs of snow, more laughter, more feathers, more pieces of Christmas, raining down on her like the grace of a merciful God.
And me?
I just stand there. Watching. Smiling. Catching my breath. Feeling a true father’s heart beat inside my vampire chest.
After the skating rink, there’s the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, the bumper cars, a quick puke stop, and then, finally, the thing that all the rest of this has grown up around, the ice sculpting contest. Now, you might think that sculpting falls somewhere between fishing and chess, as far as spectator sports go. But you’d be wrong. After all, anything involving chain saws and blowtorches is bound to have a certain amount of crowd appeal.
Thisis the PG portion of our evening.
Each artist starts with an eight-foot-by-eight-foot block of solid ice and is judged not only on the quality of the final product, but also on the amount of time it takes to produce. So we’re not just talking chain saws and blowtorches here—we’re talking chain saws and blowtorches being wielded at limb-endangering speed in an effort to produce something beautiful as fast as vampirically possible.
By the time we arrive, the artists have already been at it for a while, the competition area already littered with discarded bits and chunks of ice the size of cinder blocks, bricks, ice cubes, snow-cone shavings. Every few seconds another chain saw bites into a virgin corner of its block, sending a fresh blizzard geysering into the spotlit night. “Oooo’s” are followed by “aaaa’s.” The farting of chain saws. The hiss of propane.
The shriek of a mistake.
The gathering up of fingers. The spurting of arterial blood. The sizzle of the klutz’s neighbor as he burns away the spatters that weren’t part of his original design.
Over there, a unicorn rises out of its block; there, a polar bear, rearing up on its hind legs. There, there, and there, a totem pole, Rocky and Bullwinkle, the sculptor himself as centaur. Chain saw exhaust and ice fog mix to erase the feet of the artists, so that they seem like moving sculptures of themselves, rising magically out of the landscape.
The ice is as clear as glass, the sculptures acting like weird lenses, twisting the light that falls through them, stretching it, shrinking it, making it balloon. Passing behind their creations, the artists become giants, then dwarfs, then giants again. But it’s the torches that make the most of these optics, making the sculptures glow orange and red and cobalt blue, seeming to burn from the inside and out, but coldly. Oh, so, so coldly.
And Isuzu’s dark lenses catch it all, her little fake-fanged mouth anO of pure awe.
Back in the car, returning to our hotel, I ask Isuzu what part she liked best. I figure it’ll probably be skating or maybe the bumper cars, but am crossing my fingers for the sake of art.
She looks at her skates, lying on the floorboard in front of her. The snow and ice have slid off, are making puddles, or dark wet spots on the skates’ red leather. She looks up at me. She looks at the frost feathering the inside of her window.
“All the people,” she finally says, picking the one thing I can’t improvise for her back home—not with all the greasepaint or basketballs or jumper cables in the world.
16
Clarissa
It starts about a month after we get back from Fairbanks. Singing. I can hear Isuzu singing in my ear, during my walks with Father Jack. It’s after I’ve tucked her in, after prayers and lights out, after double locking all the doors leading in or out. She sings in a whispery, lullaby voice and I just assume she’s singing herself to sleep. But then the baby talk starts.
And so I make an excuse of looking for some misplaced keys. That’s when I find the thing, stuffed under her pillow. Of all the toys I’ve made her, I’ve never made Isuzu a baby doll. It just never occurred to me. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. Now it looks as though Isuzu has decided to correct my oversight for herself.
“Crude” does not even begin to describe it, and neither does “sad.” I thought she gave up on the whole sock puppet thing after Fairbanks, but apparently I’m wrong. Instead, the sock puppets have metastasized into this. She’s stitched several together, making arms, legs, the trunk of a body and head. The stuffing seems to be a combination of dryer lint and the leftovers from her last haircut. The face is drawn on with Magic Marker, big baby eyes, a perky nose, a tiny bow-shaped mouth. The big eyes radiate big lashes like the rays of some kid-scribbled sun.
“Who’s this?” I ask, trying not to sound angry, or jealous, or confrontational.
“Clarissa,” Isuzu says.
“And what is Clarissa supposed to be?”
“A baby.”
“Are you her mommy?”
“She doesn’t have a mom,” Isuzu says, before adding, “anymore.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Am I her daddy?” I ask.
But Isuzu just grunts over my too-needy heart, and goes on coloring.
Am I ever going to be a mother?” Isuzu asks, not too much later.
I wish I could say that this is the first time I’ve heard that question, but it’s not. It’s the first time for Isuzu, sure, but back when I was vamping strippers one at a time, the question came up again and again.
“What do you mean I don’t have to take the pill anymore?” one or another would ask, after I’d run through the do’s and don’ts and can’ts of vampirism. “I can still have kids, can’t I?”
“You can have the sorts of kids that don’t have to be potty trained, but the other kind? No.”
It was usually right after these conversations that my brand-new vamplings got their first glimpse of how fast their fellow vampires can heal. As they watched the slashes on my just-slapped cheek zipper shut, their mouths would inevitably drop open as ifthey’d been slapped, and then the pink tears would start.
“I’m sorry,” I’d say, leaving out what for, or for whom.
“Maybe,” I lie, now, to Isuzu. “Maybe not,” I add, to soften the lie.
Isuzu stands there staring at me, hugging Clarissa to her prepubescent chest. There’s more to my yes-no answer, and she’s prepared to wait.
“There are all sorts of different ways to be a mother,” I say. “Maybe you won’t be a mom like your mother was, but that’s okay. I’m not a dad like my father was but I wouldn’t trade places for anything in the world.”
“Is that because he’s dead?” Isuzu asks, not trying to be mean, just trying to play it a little older than she is.
“No,” I say. “It’s because he had to put up with me.”
Isuzu smiles. She puts Clarissa’s dirty little sock hand on the back of mine. Pat, pat. There, there.
“Plus, he didn’t have you,” I say, winning two hugs—one from Clarissa, and the other from her maker.
There are all sorts of different ways to be a mother.”
That’s what I told Isuzu, and it’s true. Especially nowadays. Especially with all the non-mommy vampires out there, all the childless vampire couples looking for a little two-
legged buffer to put between themselves and each other’s throats.
And so the marketplace has obliged a needy demographic yet again, turning children into a special effect. CGI, mainly. Computer-generated infants who grow up at the click of a mouse. A vampire couple who wants to raise a child—a child they won’t have to protect from other, less nurturing vampires; a child they won’t be tempted to uncork themselves for a special occasion, like a bottle of pricey wine—such couples usually start their quest with a trip to the software store. Several packages are available—SimKid, VirtualTot, and Microsoft’s WinKid, among others. All of them work pretty much the same way. Digital photos of the would-be parents are shuffled, recombined, morphed, and then “infantilized,” yielding a virtual version of the crapshoot previously played by genetics. And after that it’s pretty muchWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets the dancing Internet baby.
The level of artificial intelligence used in most programs is pretty crude because most such programs never go beyond the cute years in their basic versions. If you want your virtual child to get past its eighth birthday, you have to buy the upgrades, which are notoriously poor sellers.
It should be pointed out that these programmed children are unlike anything ever known in either the pre- or post-vampire-ascendant worlds. They embody the easiest, most parentally appealing aspects of both the mortal and the vampiric. Like vampires’, the child’s diet is simplicity itself and never leads to anything as distasteful as changing diapers. Like vampires, these virtual children sleep the sleep of the dead during the day, and during the night cry just enough to suggest the general ambiance of babyness without ever actually trying anyone’s nerves. The programmers omit such things as birth defects, learning disabilities, and childhood diseases, although the occasional software bug has sneaked through. WinKid, in particular, was notorious for its frequent crashes, followed by the “Nap Time” pop-up box, which could be cleared only by “rebootying” the computer.
Far more telling is the number of bugs reported that turn out not to be bugs at all, but design features aimed at making these user-friendly tykes more “realistic.” Like: It always insists on drinking blood from a special cup. Like: The special cup keeps changing. Like: It doesn’t seem to understand what the word “no” means.
More often than not, these non-bug “bugs” get fixed anyway. After all, when Darwin meets the marketplace, only the most customer-friendly survive—and you’re only as good as your tech support.
Please hold.
So, who should we have be the father?” I ask, assuming it’s a no-brainer. I’ve already loaded her photo, and am about to drag my own into the program when Isuzu says:
“Bobby.”
“Who?”
“Bobby Little,” Isuzu says, kicking my startled heart while it’s down.
“Why Bobby Little?” I ask, meaning, why not me?
“He’s funny.”
I’m funny. Italk funny. We’ve already established that.
“He’s got eyes like me,” she goes on, meaning not like mine. Not all black and vampiric and impossible to read.
“And he knows good songs,” she concludes, meaning the happier Beatle ones.
It’s probably silly of me to feel jealous, but I do. Hell, I’m still jealous of that collection of dirty laundry she calls Clarissa. What’s the point of being jealous if you can’t be silly about it?
“Well, I don’t have a picture of Bobby Lit…,” I begin, as Isuzu reaches past me, clicks a few times, and Bobby’s smiling face fills the screen.
“You get that off the Web?” I ask, and Isuzu nods.
“Okay,” I say, giving in. I click (sigh) and drag (sigh) and let WinKid mix their too-young faces into the face of my virtual (sigh) grandchild.
“What should we call her?” I ask when the morphing’s done.
“Clarissa,” Isuzu says. “For my mom.”
My hands freeze over the keyboard. She’s never mentioned her mother’s name before, and I’ve never asked. Now I don’t have to. Now I just have to find something to fill the stunned silence I feel myself falling into.
“Clarissa Little?” I ask, finally. “Or Cassidy?”
Isuzu thinks about it. She mulls the possibilities.
“Kowalski,” she says, finally, giving me back my heart like a present for Father’s Day.
17
Them
Isuzu seems to be growing out of her clothes a lot faster than before. Her bones seem to be lengthening at an alarming rate. And I seem to be spending more time than usual in the JCPenney Screamers’ department, buying new this, new that.
The Screamers’ department, by the way, isn’t really called that. Not officially. It’s called “Just Right” at JCPenney, “Big Hearts” in Kmart, and “Small Packages” at Marshall Field’s. Sears has a line it calls “Kenmore-or-Less,” while at Target, the sign over the aisle just says, “Reaching for the Stars.”
“Who fuckin’ sez?” a Screamer shopping next to me wants to know. She tilts her head in the direction of the sign marking the aisle we’re standing in.
“Just Right,” the sign says, hanging there well over both our heads.
“Fuckingaddingfucking insult tofucking injury,” she mutters, gesturing toward the other sign, set at approximately eye level for a Screamer such as herself.
“No Shouting, Please,” it says. There’s a picture of a disembodied pair of lips with fangs, pursed in front of a disembodied hand, a single finger raised, the better to ssshhhh you with.
“Fucking fascist bastard goat fuckers,” she goes on muttering. “Oooo, that’s cute. What size is it?” She grabs the blouse I’m holding, the one I think Isuzu might like. I let her. I’m not stupid. I’m also pretty sure it’s too big for her, seeing as the Screamer in question comes up to about my chest, while the top of Isuzu’s head is now just shy of my chin.
“Fuck,” the Screamer blurts after checking the tag, and just before throwing the blouse, hanger and all, backward over her shoulder, aiming for the aisle floor.
“Sorry,” I say, catching the blouse before it hits tile.
“Fuck you,” the Screamer says, waddling around to spread joy on the other side of the rack.
Isuzu’s bed is made.
That’s the first bad sign.
When I get back from my latest trip to Penney’s with a couple of bags full of new clothes, I can see her bedroom door open, and the made-up bed inside. She never makes her bed unless I tell her to. And I never tell her to because I don’t make mine, either. The last time she made her bed was just before our trip to Fairbanks—before she knew such a thing was even being planned—and I found her in the bathroom with a full garbage bag jammed into the open window. She’d filled it with everything she could from her closet, her shelves, the cupboards in the kitchen dedicated to all that human food of hers. At the time, she’d planned to make her escape under cover of sunlight, while I was still sleeping. But by sunset, she’d only managed to get as far as getting the bag jammed halfway out the bathroom window.
“Hey, Miss Trooper,” I said. “Planning a little vacation?” At the time, I was more amused than worried, partly because the look on her face was so serious.
This time, the look on her face is just as serious as she strolls out of the kitchen, holding the bread knife that originally introduced us in one hand, and in the other, a quart bottle of Xtreme Unction that’s been replaced with gasoline. She’s got several yards’ worth of extension cord coiled over her shoulder, and is wearing every black thing she owns. Her face is smeared with black shoe polish.
“I didn’t know it was homicidal minstrel night,” I say.
“Funny, Dad,” she says. “Ha,” she adds, dryly. “Ha.”
“You seem to have plans,” I say. “May I—”
“I’m gonna go find ’em,” she says.
“Who?”
“Them,”she says.
“Them?” I say, still not getting it.
“Could you hold this?” she
asks, handing me the bread knife. She tries the door as I stand there, looking at my own reflection in the knife’s blade. It’s about a foot long and serrated.
“Key?” she asks, holding out her hand.
And then I get it. Them. Clarissa’s killers. She’s going to find and kill her mother’s killers; with the help of this knife, that gas, maybe just tie them up with that extension cord and leave them outside for the sun to get. She’s older and taller and stronger than she was when she tried and failed with me, but I’m still not very optimistic about her prospects. With a little luck and the upper body strength of, say, an O. J. Simpson, she might send one of them to an (extremely) premature grave.
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