It’s as I’m going through the desk drawer that I brush past the computer, and notice that it’s still warm. Warmer than me and the rest of the room, at least. I jiggle the mouse and the screen blossoms on; the AOL icon is still ghosted over from having been used last. I try to sign on but don’t know her password. Of course, I don’t need a password to get into her file cabinet, which is still available offline from her last sign-in. I double click and scan the roster of emails sent, and received, and autosaved to the hard drive. There’s a lot of porn spam, which is disappointing, but unavoidable if you’ve spent any amount of time in the online chat rooms—which it seems Isuzu has.
And then there are the emails—the real, nonjunk emails that explain the panic and echoing silence I find myself in the middle of.
From: I_Trooper
To: Farmers_daughter
There are dozens and dozens, desperate little Ping-Pong balls of need and longing and—I’m sure—absolute bald-faced lies on the part of whoever the hell this farmer’s daughterreally is. I read just enough to learn that he claims to be twelve, mortal, a farm runaway, and, of course, a girl. “Her” current living arrangements are—shall we say—vague, as is his refusal to meet with Isuzu sometime during the day, “when it’ll be safe for our kind.” The last email, dated from the night before, is from Isuzu to this lying online creep and includesmy telephone number—the landline, not the cell—and the times I’m expected to be away.
I hit star 69—that self-cannibalizing bit of Zen numerology—and take down the number. It’s within the area code and only an hour and some change old. I dial it, but get a busy signal. Of course. They’ve probably taken the phone off the hook. They wouldn’t want to be interrupted—at least one of them wouldn’t. On a hunch, I replace the last three digits of the number with zeros.
“Sundown Motel,” the voice on the other end says. “Front desk. How may I help you?”
I ask for the cross streets. Get them. Leave.
I’ve got an ax in the trunk. It’s been there for the last few years, ever since Clarissa’s first killer’s “suicide.” So I’ve got something. I’m ready. I’ve got something for whatever the fuck kind of door I find at the Sundown Motel (and abattoir). I’ve got something that’ll work just as well on whatever the fuck I findbehind that fucking door.
I brace myself for the sight of it, diminishing my expectations to a couple of pathetic pleas.
Please…don’t rape her. Don’t make her be deadand raped.
Please…let it be quick. Don’t make her suffer. Don’t nurse her like a bloody bottle of beer at last call, sipping her to death and backwash.
Andplease …when the ax hits your neck, justdie. Don’t gowhy ing me, don’t try to plead or come up with excuses. Just keep your fucking mouth shut…
…and die.
Idon’t knock.
I don’t listen for a “Who’s there?”
I don’t offer a setup for a punch line.
I’ve got the punch line right here in my hands, as I swing it over my head and wedge it into one of the Sundown Motel’s surprisingly sturdy doors.
Not that it matters.
Not that the door was locked to begin with.
And when the unlocked door swings open, and the ax handle slips through my hands, it’s just like everything else in my world on this godforsaken night.
Air.
I’m holding…air.
And then the door hits the inside wall just hard enough to jar the ax loose, followed by the soft, heavy clunk of hardware hitting the cheesy, shag-carpeted floor.
Dolls.
That’s the first thing I see, after the door does its surprise open-sesame routine.
Dolls, scattered like they might be scattered in a careless teenage girl’s bedroom—kid stuff treated with just enough disrespect to hide the love still felt. Among the dolls are yellowing copies of16 Magazine, Tiger Beat, Betty and Veronica comics.
In the center of the room, a little table is set up for tea, and something involving cosmetics. The hostess and her guest are dressed up in dresses that are too big for them, wearing sunglasses and rouge that stands out quite a bit more on one set of cheeks than it does the other. The two little girls—the little girl and the “little girl”—sit cross-legged next to the table, their pinkies raised along with their empty teacups, stuck, frozen,in medias …sip.
Their four dark lenses are pointed right at me. Me, bent and fumbling for my ax. Me, fumbling to apologize for the ax hole in the door, and feeling like an ax hole myself.
The four dark lenses raise together as if choreographed, revealing eyes—Isuzu’s human pair, her friend’s far darker set.
“Marty,” Isuzu says. “Meet Twit.”
“Twit?”
“Short for Antoinette,” Twit says.
“People don’t call you Toni?” I ask, which is not the first question I was expecting to ask. Of course, my expectations have been batting zero all evening.
“Yeah,” Twit sighs, a weary, much older person’s “yeah.”
“You see,” Twit goes on, “it’s like this. After a while, you stop trying to change what people call you, ’cause the harder you try, the harder they laugh, and the only way to get anything back is to just embrace your stupid nickname until it’s just the sound of what people call you.” Twit taps her ear, smiles some fang, shrugs. “Just air ripples tickling those tiny bones we got inside us, right about here.”
“Some of us have tinier bones than others,” I say, baiting our little Screamer to reveal herself for what she really is. “So, how old a Twitare you, anyway?”
“How old do I look?” she says, propping her little girl’s chin on top of her little girl’s fingertips, batting her fake big-girl lashes.
“You know what I mean,” I say, “and I’m not gonna play that game.”
“So what kinda gameare you playing, if you don’t mind me asking?” Twit looks me in the eye, then back at Isuzu, and back to me. “I don’t notice much of a family resemblance.”
“Yeah,” I say, my “yeah” as old and weary as Twit’s when I asked about her name. “Yeah, see. We’re not going there, either.”
“Okay,” Twit says. “Guess that just leaves tea and makeup.” She smiles again, showing a bit more fang this time. “Care to join us, Marty?” she asks, already handing me an empty cup.
The story of Twit’s and Isuzu’s relationship is all there in the emails—if I’d had the luxury of wading through them before tearing into the night, heart in my throat, ax in my trunk. It started as I had assumed with lies on both sides, including digital proxies. Isuzu began by passing herself off as a much older vampire, with a face age of about twenty-one and a history very much like mine. Twit, on the other hand, looked almost exactly like she really does, with the exception that her fangs had been digitally removed, and her eyes rehumanized.
Like a lot of Screamers, Twit had gone online posing as a mortal child, looking for an adult vampire “with a taste for veal.” Not all Screamers became Screamers to save them from dying too young; some were Peter Panned to serve as sex toys for vampiric pedophiles. I haven’t talked to Father Jack about that, either. He didn’t do it. That’s all that matters.
Twit wasn’t a sex toy Screamer, by the way, but shewas karmic payback for those that made them. This is as close as we get to a silver lining on this one. You see, after the change, the tables turned for those pedophiles stalking innocence online. Now the stalkers are stalked, some by their victims, some by horny, run-of-the-mill Screamers desperately needing to be needed. That was Twit’s story, and hers is just one sad case in a thousand. Just read the personals:
“Shirley Temple seeks Bloody Mary.”
“Thumb-sucker ISO bloodsucker.”
“Me: Lolita; you: Lestat.”
Isuzu’s reasons for being online are screamingly obvious in their own way. I abandoned her—just like the puppy I’d given her name to, just like Father Jack. And so she became me and went online, perhaps looking for
a replacement, or maybe insight into what made the Martin she knew tick. That she modeled herself after me isn’t so surprising. The only safe way for her to be online was as a vampire, and I was the only vampire she really knew. I can just imagine her little heart beating when she saw Twit’s screen name, made that “farm” connection, sent her first, tentative email. The charade continued for a week or so, Isuzu playing the maybe-pedophile, while Twit filled her messages with girly mortality.
Eventually, though, slips occurred and confidences were gained. Eventually, both confessed to their fakery, followed by their whole, ugly, honest-to-God truths. It was all online, that anonymous nowhere where lies and truth are both somehow easier than either is, face-to-face. So, Twit confessed her Screamer status and Isuzu her real age, sex, and expiration-datedness.
It was Twit who asked if friendship was possible. Isuzu, to her credit, took a lot of convincing. There were apparently Instant Messaging sessions that went on for hours and would read like the transcript of a hostile witness’s cross-examination—if the IMs had been saved, that is, which they weren’t. But both sides swear to the substance, and that I’d be proud of the precautions Isuzu took before agreeing to meet.
“First, I’ve gotta email her a picture of me standing next to a yardstick to show I’m really shorter than her,” Twit testifies. “Then it’s the scale, to show she’s got the weight advantage, too. Followed by the webcam of me downing like a gallon of blood with the TV tuned to the news in the background, so she knows it’s happening live, and still—still—she shows up with…” Twit pauses. “Show him what you showed up with.”
Isuzu pulls out the same bread knife she used on me, all those years ago. The same one she planned on using against Clarissa’s killers. The serrated edge has the same swoop-swoop-swoop as a cartoon bat wing, but done in stainless steel. My reflection in the blade is the same as before—stretched Giacometti thin, almost to the breaking point—though the blade itself looks like it may have seen some action since then.
I should probably worry about that. I should probably say something. But I’m tired, and relieved, and I’ve reached my paranoid quota for the evening.
And so I keep quiet, instead. Smile. Nod. Hold out my pinky, tip back my teacup.
Sip air.
25
Out
Hey, Killer,” Rose says as I get dressed. She’s moved out of her apartment and into the one where Isuzu isn’t. Our sex place.
“Hey, Demon Bitch Goddess,” I say back. You gotta have pet names, right?
She’s still naked, and lying on her stomach in bed, her legs crooked back and ticking—just like Isuzu when she’s coloring. I shake my head. Erase that image. The comparison is getting dangerously apt. Rose’s face age is in its early twenties, and she looks even younger than that. Isuzu’s real age is sixteen, and she looks older. A few more ticks, and they’re taking the same classes in college.
Rose is holding a coffee cup with both hands. She sips. Ticktocks. I focus on the cup—her least Isuzu-like trait at the moment.
“You know what I was thinking?” she asks.
What she’s been thinking about for the last few years. Getting married. Hitched. Till-Death-Do-Us-Parted. “What?” I say, tightening my belt before tucking in my shirt.
“I was thinking…”
“Shit,” I say.
“What?”
I lift my shirttail, showing my buckled belt. “Why am I always doing that?” I ask, unbuckling, tucking, rebuckling.
“I blame the shirt,” Rose says. “It wants to be free.”
“I knew I loved this shirt.”
“It doesn’t want to be pinned down.”
“Damn fine shirt,” I say. “But you were saying?”
“I was just saying the shirt suits you,” Rose says, rolling over on her back, sprawling her full, vengeful nakedness at me. She stares at the ceiling. “It matches your…”
She trails off. She lets it hang, what it is of mine that my shirt matches.
Instead: “Tell Isuzu to be ready by ten,” she says. “And the same goes for the munchkin.”
Isuzu, Rose, and Twit.
Not everyone knows the first names of their Fates, so I guess I’m lucky in that regard. In no other way, sure, but you take what you can get. Me, knowing the trio that’ll do me in—that’s what I get, and, well, okay.
The Weird Sisters have decided to “bond,” you see. Do “chick shit.” “Gyno stuff.” In other words:
Make my life a living hell.
“Where you off to?” I ask, watching the three of them heading doorward.
“Out,” they chime, in stereo plus one.
Requesting details, specifics, bad influences to be encountered along the way there, whereverthere is? Wasted breath. Talking to the walls. If details were part of the agenda, “Out” wouldnot have been the answer. “Out” translated into English is:
You donotwant to know, boy-with-dick.
“When…?” I hazard.
“Whenever,” they chime back, their giggles echoing up the long hallway leading out.
Isuzu, Rose, and Twit.
And a place called Midnight Cowboys.
Cowboys aren’t the only thing they’ve got. They’ve also got firemen, and policemen, loinclothed and business-suited men, football players, and even one priest—though he works only Wednesdays, when the women who are into that sort of thing know they can find it. The stereotypes are worn. Literally. Clothes make the man, after all. They also make the muscles bulge when worn too tightly, and the audience gasp, when shed to the quick ripping of Velcro.
Rose had gotten free passes as a professional courtesy and figured Isuzu could use the education, while Twit could use about 150 couch dances. Isuzu still had her fake fangs from our Fairbanks adventure, Rose still had her mom’s clown makeup to help tweak down my little girl’s blush, and all three wore sunglasses so no one of them stood out. Isuzu’s just sixteen, but looks older. Not that apparent age is any barrier, not with Twit in tow.
There have been several field trips such as this already, all scheduled around the spring and fall, when it isn’t hot enough to sweat or cold enough to see your breath. The intention is to provide crash courses in Girlese to help turn Isuzu into the young woman she’s becoming. To help make sure Isuzu turns into something other than—as Rose puts it—“a mini Martin.”
“But I thought you liked me,” I said, my voice feigning the wound.
“Yeah,” Rose said back. “See. It’s like this. You, but smaller, with tits and no dick. It’s not a look with a lot of future.”
“I see.”
“More like ICU,” Rose said. “Fashion intensive care. But I think we can save her.”
And so I let her try. At sixteen, Isuzu is no longer a hostage to the Screamer department. Taking her hand, Rose has led her away from the ironic Pooh bears, the tongue-in-cheek Tiggers, and headed straight for the aisles of adult womanhood, the two of them like a couple of sailors in Bangkok on leave. I supply the credit card and then just sit back as the boxes and bags are unpacked to the expensive ssshhh of rustling tissue paper.
“Stunning.”
“Beautiful.”
“Yes!”
The vocabulary of not-getting-grief-later is easy to learn, and I did. Eventually, I got it down to a simple appreciative “Mmm-hmm,” dispensed with a nod, perhaps a fingertip tapping at my smiling lips.
“Mmm-hmm.”
The rest of this is secondhand.
Hearsay.
Inadmissable in court.
Has to be. I wasn’t there. And it’ll be embellished, too—by me, filling in the gaps with what my tortured imagination imagines it was like. I’ve never been to Midnight Cowboys, but I’ve been to places like it—places where the cowboys are smaller, and cuter, with tits and no dicks. It’s just a matter of translation, when you come right down to it. A kind of drag, in reverse.
Of course, I also have the accounts of Isuzu, and Rose, and Twit to go by.
/> That—and what they showed on TV.
You never think about the things you don’t think about, the things that are just there, part of the background, part of the routine. Rose still dances a couple of nights a week. Dance bars are part of her background, her routine. The way they operate, the way they are—those are just some of the things she doesn’t think about.
The other things you don’t think about are the opposite things, the things thataren’t part of your background, that fall so far outside your personal experience that you don’t give them a second thought. For Rose, for instance, having a body temperature that’s anything other than room temperature—that falls into this second class of unthinkables. Just like the room temperature of dance bars falls into the first.
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