Teeth: Vampire Tales

Slice of Life by LUCIUS SHEPARD

I’ve never done it with another girl, but Sandrine gets me thinking how it would be. She’s got the kind of body I wish I had, long legged and lean, yet with enough up top to keep boys happy. Her nose is too big and beaklike for her narrow face, but after you study on her awhile, it seems to settle in above her generous mouth, becoming part of her beauty. The light that shines her into being, reflecting off God knows how many shards of mirror, makes it difficult to judge — most times she’s scarcely more than a sketch with a few hazy details — but I figure if all her color was restored, her hair would be jet-black and her eyes dark blue like the ocean out past the sandbar on a sunny day.

She says I’ll never leave her, that we’re two of a kind, and who knows, maybe she’s right.

If you’re born in these parts, in one of the sad, savage, broken towns along the St. John’s River, now reduced to cracker slums. shells of old mansions with fallen-in roofs and busted-out screens on the front porch and people inside gray as the weathered boards, moldering amid live oaks and scrub pines. Surrounded by a prefab debris of bait shops and trailer parks and concrete block roadhouses where redneck coke dealers shoot nine ball for crisp new hundreds and bored fifty-dollar hookers sit at the bar wishing for a Cadillac to bear them away on one last windy joyride. Towns like this, towns like DuBarry, Sandrine says, they stain you with their colors and make you vulnerable to their deceits. You can go to Dallas or New Orleans or somewhere they speak a foreign language, you can live there the rest of your days, but that won’t change a thing. No matter how far you travel or how long you stay, you never feel real anywhere else and you’re always living a measly cheat of a life that makes you think you’ve got to get over on folks even when you’re doing just fine playing it straight.

I’ve never been south of Daytona or west of Ocala or north of Jacksonville, so I’m no expert, but maybe Sandrine’s got a point. People who return to DuBarry after years of being away, you can see the relief in their faces, as if the pressure is off and they can’t wait to start dissolving in the heat and damp of the town, like the pigs’ feet atop the counter down at Toby’s, mutating in their jar of greenish brine.

Take Chandler Mason.

After graduating from FSU she headed for New York, where she hired on at ESPN. She started out reading the news on one of their sports talk shows and before long she landed a job as a sideline reporter for NBA games; then, a few years later, suddenly, with no reason given, she was back in DuBarry, strutting her stuff in designer clothes. Whenever she strolled by, the men sitting in rusted lawn chairs out front of Toby’s would develop a case of whiplash. Following a whirlwind courtship, she married Les Staggers, an ex-marine who teaches phys ed and algebra at County Day, and popped out three kids, put on fifty, sixty pounds, and now when she passes, the men in the lawn chairs say something like “Must be time to water the elephants,” and share a big laugh. She goes on a liquor run a couple of times a week, weaving an unsteady path to the ABC store, wrapped in a cloud of diaper stink, and on Sundays she accompanies Les to Jacksonville Beach, where he’s a deacon in some screech-and-holler church. Otherwise she stays home with the blinds drawn and her brats yowling, drinking gin-and-Frescas, the TV on loud enough to drown out the twenty-first century.

Sandrine says that’s the best I can hope for, unless I help her, unless she helps me, and I can probably expect a whole lot worse, considering my reputation.

— Go fuck yourself, I tell her.

— That’s all I ever do, says Sandrine.

This matter of my reputation has come under fire from predictable quarters. Boys who I won’t let touch me write my name on bathroom walls and talk about the things I’ve done with them, things they’ve only heard about. They go to singing “Louie, Louie” whenever they see me coming. Louie’s short for Louise — it got tacked on me in grade school for being a tomboy, and ever since they started with that dumb song, I’ve been trying to convince my friends to shorten it further and call me Elle. Not that the singing bothers me so much. but it’s annoying and I think Elle’s a name I’ll grow into someday. Old habits die hard, though. I expect I’ll be stuck with Louie for as long as I hang around DuBarry.

Momma told me once that the tales people carry about me make her cry herself to sleep.

— Excuse me, I said. I sleep right across the hall and what I hear coming from your room don’t sound a thing like crying. What it sounds like is you and Bobby Denbo bumping uglies. Or else it’s Craig Settlemyre. I can’t keep those two straight.

— I’m a grown woman! I’ve got the right to a life!

— Some life, I said.

My faculty advisor at County Day, Judy Jenrette, has expressed sincere concern that my promiscuity is an outgrowth of low self-esteem. I tried to nip this concern in the bud by assuring her that my self-esteem was just dandy, but judging by the way she pressed her lips together, her chin wobbling, I suspected that she thought to see her younger self in me and was repressing an Awful Secret that tormented her to this day. Before I could prevent it, she unburdened herself of a dismal story about teen pregnancy and its consequences that I must have watched half a dozen times on Lifetime Television for Women, only this came without the hot guys.

— I appreciate you letting me hear that, I said. I honestly do.

Judy snuffled, dabbed her eye with a tissue, and forced a shaky smile.

— That story don’t apply to me, though, I said. We’re different breeds of cat. You were in love. Me, I fuck because I’m bored. And living here, if I’m awake I’m bored.

— Language, Louie!

— I’m taking birth control and no one gets near me without a condom. If I got pregnant, you better believe Momma would drag me to the clinic and sign those abortion papers. Having me around is bad enough for her love life. A baby would just about finish her off.

Judy said that pregnancy wasn’t her only worry, that sexing it up so young would cause me to have emotional issues. She handed me a pamphlet on Teen Celibacy with a photo on the front of cheerleader types who appeared to be overjoyed by not getting any. I read enough of the pamphlet to get the basics — if you saved yourself for marriage Jesus would love you, Coke would taste better, etc. — and then Googled the company that produced it. They turned out to be the subsidiary of a corporation that made its mark selling baked goods. This led me to speculate that doing without caused you to eat more cupcakes and that a generation of diabetic Teen Celibates were victims of a duplicitous marketing campaign. Who knew there was profit to be had from negative pimping?

Where Sandrine lives is off a blue highway a couple of miles south of DuBarry, a tore-down, two-room fishing shack tucked into a hollow on the riverbank, camouflaged by ferns and fallen beards of Spanish moss, hidden by chokecherry bushes and a toppled oak out front. You’d never spot it unless you were looking for it, and you wouldn’t go near it unless you’d lost your mind. What’s left of the place is roofless, crazy with spiderwebs and rotting boards so crumbly you can rip off pieces with your hands. If you go inside, you’ll find that every inch of the walls and part of the floor is covered with glued-on shards of mirror, and if you trespass on a night during a period between three days either side of the full moon, chances are you won’t be coming out again. Sandrine can’t compel you like once she could, but she’s got enough left to slow you down. You’ll see her stepping to you and you’ll stumble back in fright, even though you’re not sure she’s real, and then you see the hungry glamour in her eyes, and that holds you for a second.

A second’s all it takes.

She won’t talk much about the past — she prefers to hear about my life, a life I’d gladly leave behind. Some nights, though, I get her going and she tells me things like she was born in 1887 in Salt Harvest, Louisiana, a little Acadian town, and was turned when she was twenty-three by a fang who left her to figure out on her own what she’d become. She’s been living in the shack since 1971, sustaining herself on whatever animals happen along. Frogs, mainly. She hardly ever supplies much detail, but we were sitting on the toppled oak one night, right at the boundary beyond which she cannot pass, watching the water hyacinths that carpet the majority of the river undulate with the current, their stiff, glossy green leaves slopping against the bank, and I asked how she’d come to be stranded there. She had just fed and was more substantial than usual, yet I could see low stars through her flesh and, when she shifted position, the neon lights of a roadhouse on the opposite bank. Sweet rot merged with the dank river smell, creating an odor that reminded me of the rained-on mattress in Freddy Swift’s backyard.

— Djadadjii, Sandrine said. I’ve heard them called other names, but that’s what Roy called them. He’s this fang I traveled with in ’71. and for a while before that.

— What’s jajagee?

— Not jajagee. Djadadjii.

Mosquitoes plagued us, but Sandrine didn’t seem bothered. She looked off south toward the roadhouse.

— They look like humans, but they’re not — they mimic humans. Roy heard that this old Jewish magician bred them in the seventeenth century to hunt fangs. They’re stronger than fangs and they can do one piece of magic. That’s what binds me here. Why I’m like this. The Djadadj that ate Roy, he couldn’t eat anymore, so he salted me away for later.

— And left you here forty years?

— Maybe he got hit by a bus. Or maybe he forgot. They’re not very smart. But sooner or later, he’ll remember where he stored me, or else another one will sniff me out.

She nailed me with a stare I felt at the back of my skull. That’s the best can happen unless you help me, she said.

— Do we have to talk about this every time I come out? I’m thinking about it, okay?

She kept staring for several seconds and then sighed in dismay.

— It’s not the easiest thing to wrap your head around, I said. Becoming a serial killer.

— I do the killing.

— Yeah, but I have to lure them here. That’s even more disgusting.

— Listen, Louie. I.

— Elle!

— I’m sorry. Elle.

A distant plop came from the center of the river, where there was open water.

— I only need five, she said.

— I know what you need. It’s not like you never tell me.

— One a night for five nights. Then I’ll be strong enough to break free. There must be five people you hate in town. Five like that first one.

— You have to give me more time.

We sat quietly, caught in our bad mood like two flies in a puddle of grease. I thought to say I had to go, but I didn’t want to go. Sandrine wrestled with a hyacinth stem and snapped off a lavender bloom and offered it to me. When I accepted it, her fingers brushed mine and I felt a blush of heat, like I’d rubbed my fingertips fast over a rough surface.

— Does Djadadjii magic work on regular people? I asked.

— No. They don’t care about you, anyway. They’re only interested in fangs.

— Suppose you get clear of this. What’ll you do?

— Maybe South Carolina. There’s a group of fangs there who’re well protected. They’re not fond of outsiders, but I’m tired of being on my own. It might be worth the risk.

— What if you weren’t on your own?

— If you were with me, you mean?

I shrugged. Yeah.

— I’d probably stay here.

That alarmed me. In DuBarry?

— No, no. Florida. Most of the fangs in this hemisphere are in Latin America and.

— How come?

— It’s easier to get away with killing there. Of course it’s a trade-off. Since most fangs are there, most of the Djadadjii are, too. The one that caught me, he’s only the fourth I’ve seen up here. and the first three were over a century ago.

A bug crawled from beneath a petal of the bloom Sandrine had plucked, and I laid it on the oak trunk.

— You all right, cher?

— Tell me some more about the Djadadjii.

— I don’t know much more. They all have wide mouths. Their mouths expand. They could swallow a football if they wanted. They could bite it in half. And they have a refined sense of smell. If a fang’s been near you, they’ll pick up the scent. Roy told me they’re all beautiful and the ones I’ve known were beautiful. and dumb. Dumb as chickens.

A fisher bird swooped low above the hyacinth, and the faint chugging of a generator came from somewhere upriver.

— Take off your top for me, said Sandrine.

— I. I don’t.

— I won’t touch you. I know you’re shy and you’re not ready, but I want to look at you this once. She pretended to pout. It’s not fair you can see me and I never see you.

Hesitantly, I reached back and undid the strings of my halter. I fitted my eyes to the red winking light atop a water tower across the river and held the halter in place for a second; then I let it fall.

— God, she said. I’d forgotten.

— What is it? I asked. Is.

Shh! She reached down to the river and cupped her hand and scooped up some water and let it trickle between her fingers onto my breasts. Cool and lovely, little rivers spilling over my contours. I felt beautiful and grand, a hill divided by tributaries. My skin pebbled where the water touched me. One nipple poked up hard.

The halter slid off my lap. Sandrine handed it to me and told me I could put it back on.

— No, it’s okay. My hair curtained my face, hiding my excitement. It’s nice. sitting here like this.

One afternoon when I was fifteen and feeling downhearted, I hitched out to the old boneyard set in a fringe of Florida jungle south of town and sat beside the big gray angel, drinking from a pint of lime-flavored vodka I’d lifted from Momma’s stash. Forty years ago a bunch of DuBarry kids went skinny-dipping at night in the ocean near St. Augustine. Their bodies were never found (it’s assumed they were caught in a riptide) and the town put up the angel beneath a twisted water oak for a memorial. They must have skimped on the sculptor, or else they were going for something different. or maybe getting vandalized four or five times a year has taken a toll, because except for more-or-less regulation wings, it resembles the husk of a half-human female insect nine feet high. The grave tenders have gotten slack about scraping paint off it, and the statue has acquired a crusty glaze over the head and torso that makes it look even weirder. Used to be there were some goth kids who lit candles and sang to the angel, but that provided an evangelical preacher with an excuse to rev up his campaign against devil worship and their parents smacked the goth out of them. Now kids come there to bust bottles on the headstone and howl and dry heave and screw, and I guess some believe they gain power over death by pissing on the angel or smearing it with paint, behavior the town apparently deems more in keeping with the moral standard.

I got pretty smashed and lay on my back, thoughts drifting from one depressing topic to the next, watching the dusk and then darkness settle in the oak boughs. A car purred along the dirt drive, its engine so quiet I heard the tires crunching gravel. Headlights swept over me. I figured it for kids and didn’t pay any attention. Someone came to stand above me — the salesman who had given me a ride out, a chunky middle-aged bald guy in a madras jacket.

— You still here? he asked.

— Naw, I said, wondering foggily what he was doing there — he’d told me he had stops to make in Hastings and Palatka.

He toed the empty vodka bottle and then stuck out a hand. Come on. I’ll ride you into town. This ain’t no fit place for a young lady.

Calling me a young lady must have pushed my daddy button, because I let him haul me to my feet. He had doused himself with cologne, but I could smell his sweat. He pulled me close and ran a hand along my butt and said thickly, Man, you are one sweet-looking piece of chicken.

I started to freeze up but recalled Momma’s advice.

— There’s a motel down near Orange Park that don’t ask no questions, I said.

I didn’t think he bought my act. He held me tightly and seemed confused; then a smile split his doughy face.

— Damn! he said. I was halfway to Hastings before I realized you were putting out signals.

All I’d done in his car was not look at him and grunt answers to his questions. He gave my breast a squeeze and I rubbed against him and said in a breathy voice, Ooh, yeah!

— You like that, huh? he said.

With my free hand I hiked up my T-shirt, exposing the other breast. He played with it until the nipple stiffened, then grinned like he was the only one who could work that trick.

— I been watching you for must be an hour and a half, he said. Here we could have been having some fun.

He placed his hand on the small of my back, the way you’d squire a prom date, and steered me toward his car — a crouching animal with low-beam eyes. I broke free and kneed him in the crotch. He puked up a groan, grabbed his jewels, and bent double. A string of drool silvered by the headlights unreeled from his lips. He went down on all fours, breathing heavy, and I kicked him in the side. That’s where I departed from Momma’s plan of action. Instead of running like hell, I grabbed the vodka bottle and busted out the bottom on a headstone and told him if he didn’t get the fuck gone I’d slice him. He came at me in a clumsy run, a hairless bear in a loud sport jacket, cursing and reaching for me with clawed hands. I slashed his palm open and lit out for the trees, leaving him screaming in the dirt.

For a time I heard him shouting and battering through the underbrush. I moved away from the noise and tried to circle behind him but lost my bearings. After hiding for half an hour or so, I thought he must have given up. A big lopsided moon was on the rise and I could smell the river but had no other clue as to where I stood in relation to the graveyard. I located the river and trudged along the bank, detouring around thickets, figuring I’d head north until I recognized a landmark. Crickets sizzled, frogs belched out loopy noises, and beams of moonlight chuted down through the canopy, transforming the bank into a chaos of vegetable shapes spread out across the irregular black-and-white sections of a schizophrenic’s checkerboard.

If I hadn’t cut him, I told myself, he would have probably slunk away. It don’t do to piss off that kind more than you have to, Momma said. Otherwise they’re liable to get obsessed.

I pushed back a palmetto frond, ducked under it, and stopped dead. The salesman stood about forty feet away in a slash of moonlight, thigh deep in weeds and gazing out across the river with a pensive air, as if he were rethinking his goals in life. He’d shed his jacket and was shirtless — the shirt was wrapped around his left hand, the hand I’d sliced. A thin shelf of flab overhung his belt.

I retreated a step, letting the frond ease back into place, and he looked straight at me. I could have sworn he didn’t see me, that he had simply caught movement at the corner of his eye and been put on the alert. Then he sprinted toward me. I ran a few steps and pitched forward down a defile, gonging my head pretty good. Dazed, I realized I’d fetched up among ferns sprouting beside an abandoned shack. The door hanging one-hinged. Roofless. The moon shone down into it, but the light inside was too intense for ordinary moonlight — it cast shadows that looked deep as graves and flowed like quicksilver along spiderwebs spanning broken windows and gapped boards. Shards of mirror covered the interior walls, reminding me of those jigsaw puzzles that are one color and every piece almost the same shape. I picked myself up and was transfixed by the image of a bloody terrified girl reflected in the mirror fragments.

— Bitch!

The salesman spun me around, gut-punched me, and slung me through the door. Next I knew he had me straddled, pinning my arms with his knees and fumbling one-handed with his zipper, telling me what he had planned for the rest of our evening. When I made to buck him off, he slammed my head against the floor. He gaped at something behind me and I rolled my eyes back, wanting to know what had distracted him.

A ghost.

That was my first thought, but she had more the look of animation, a figure with just enough lines to suggest a naked woman, her colors not filled in.

The salesman scrambled to his feet, and she seemed to flow around him like a boa constrictor, locking him into an embrace and drawing him toward the back room, where they vanished, slipping through a seam that opened in midair and then closed behind them, leaving no trace. I don’t believe he made a single sound.

I had a strong desire to leave and got to my knees, but the effort cost me and I blacked out. When I came to, I heard her humming an aimless tune. I slitted my eyes and had a peek. She sat cross-legged by my side. She was more defined and her colors were brighter, though they were still ashen. except for a single drop of blood below her collarbone. She smiled, exposing the points of her fangs. I scooted away from her, but she had me and I knew it.

— Don’t fret, cher, she said. I won’t hurt you.

She noticed the blood drop, touched her finger to it, and licked the tip clean. I was too scared to speak.

— That man, she said. You’re safe from him now.

My head had started to clear and I felt the creep of hysteria. Is he dead?

— Not dead. He’s. waiting for me.

— Where is he? What’s going on?

— He’s where I sleep. Go slow, now. Calm yourself and I’ll tell you all about it.

Just her saying that had an effect on me — it was like she’d turned down my temperature.

— I’m Sandrine, she said. And you are.?

— Louie.

She repeated the name, pronouncing it like she was giving it a long, slow lick.

— If you want to go, I won’t stop you, but it’s been such a long time since I had someone to talk to. Sit with me? For a little while?

I didn’t have any run left and I felt drowsy, scattered. My eyes skated across the mirror pieces. In each of them was Sandrine’s face — pensive, fearful, frowning, in repose, moving as if alive. Hundreds of Sandrines, almost all of her, were trapped in those fragmented silver surfaces.

I must have spoken, because Sandrine laughed and said, I’ve been talking to them forty years and they haven’t answered yet. For a pretty girl like you, though, they might just whisper a little something.

Cracker Paradise lies about four miles east of DuBarry on State Road 17 and consists of a spacious one-story structure of navy blue concrete block set on a weedy patch of white sand that’s round as a bald spot and surrounded by slash pine. It doesn’t sport a huge neon sign like some roadhouses, just a little plastic MILLER HIGH LIFE sign above the door, and it has a slit window that’s been painted over so you can’t see in. When I was younger, Momma would leave me locked in the car while she partied, assuming glass would protect me from the men who peered in. I used to create fantasies about the place based on glimpses I had of the interior when the door swung open. Even today, now I’ve been inside a few times, it remains a kind of fantasy. I’ll hang out in the parking lot, sipping on a wine cooler slipped me by one of Momma’s friends, and picture slinky waitress queens dancing barefoot on sizzling short-order grills and serving slices of fried poison to travelers in bathroom fixtures, while out on the purple-lit bash and rumble of the dance floor, checkout girls from the Piggly Wiggly, acne-blemished counter girls from Buy-Rite, pretty-for-a-season Walmart girls with clownish face paint and last decade’s hairdo, they shake themselves into a low-grade fever, they make suggestions with their hips that turn the loose change in men’s pockets green, they slice hearts and pentagrams on the beer-slickered floor with their spike heels, looking to give it up for love-only-love and a cute duplex in Jax Beach.

A few nights ago, a hot July night with the moon causing the sand to give off sparkles and silvering the hoods of the cars encircling the club, and a couple of hundred rednecks jammed inside, I stood in the parking lot smoking with two girls from New Jersey, Ann Jeanette and Carmen, who intended to compete in the wet T-shirt contest later that night. They were good-looking, gum-snapping, tough-talking girls in their early twenties, with frosted hair and big boobs, and they wore bikini thongs and Cracker Paradise Tshirts. They told me they were on the run from Ann Jeanette’s boyfriend, who was connected and owned a recycling company in East Orange. Both girls were secretaries with the company, and they had stumbled across some paperwork they weren’t supposed to see. The boyfriend ratted them out to a Mafia guy, and they had to leave town in a hurry. Since then they’d worked their way down the East Coast, heading for Miami, where Carmen had friends, entering wet T-shirt contests to pay for a few months out of the country. They claimed to win most of the contests they entered and considered themselves pros on the circuit.

Carmen nudged my breasts and said, You should enter, hon. They’re paying out to fifth place.

I told her I was sixteen.

— Sixteen! My gawd! Ann Jeanette flicked ash from her Kool — her fake nails were gold with tiny black diamonds. You’re very mature for sixteen. Don’tcha think she’s mature, Carmen?

— Extremely, Carmen said. You gotta watch it with a figure like yours. Ann Jeanette’s little sister was wearing a C cup in junior high and by the time she’s your age, she needed a reduction.

— I’ll be seventeen soon, I said. I don’t think they’re going to get much bigger.

— Oh my gawd! Ann Jeanette rolled her eyes.

— All the women in her family are big, said Carmen. You should see her mutha. The poor creetcha! Believe me, hon. They can get a lot bigger.

Two high school boys leaned against the bed of a pickup farther along the row, watching us. When they started singing “Louie Louie,” Ann Jeanette took note of my embarrassment. She strolled over to the pickup and talked to them for half a minute. By the time she came back, they had hopped into their truck and were trying to start the engine.

— What’d you say? I asked delightedly.

— Fucking winkie dicks, she said.

Carmen gave her a hug and kissed her cheek and said, Ann Jeanette’s badass!

— I hate fucking winkie dicks. Ann Jeanette inspected her nails and appeared satisfied. Men suck! It’s true, they can be stimulating, but most of ’em are winkie dicks.

— We should go in, Carmen said. That guy runs the contest is a real pisser. We could lose our spot.

— The scrawny bitches they got in there, they can’t afford to lose us. Now if Louie here were competing, we’d be in trouble. Ann Jeanette planted a sloppy kiss on my mouth, startling me, and said, Maybe we’ll see ya after, doll.

They fluttered their hands in a wave and walked away arm in arm, wobbly in their high heels on the uneven ground.

I hopped up on the fender of a car and shut my eyes and thought about Sandrine. She’d be angry at me for not visiting her, but I was sick of being pressured and thought that when I visited her tomorrow night, the pressure would be off — no way I could bring her five live bodies in the next couple of days, so she wouldn’t pester me about it and we could relax. I heard a blast of music and crowd noise as the door opened and looked in time to see it swing shut. This blond guy had stalled in midstride outside the door and was staring at me. After a second he came over. He was too old for me, twentysomething, but he was way beyond cute. He had blue eyes with long pale lashes, and his mouth was so wide and beautifully shaped I wanted to touch it, to make certain it was real. He was almost pretty, like a gay guy, but he didn’t have that vibe. I thought I might expand my age limit for him. When he leaned against the fender, I felt the temperature go up a notch.

— I like the way you smell, he said.

— That’s because I shower regularly.

He nodded soberly, as if a daily course of hygiene was an intriguing concept, something he might one day consider. His conversational skills seemed limited, but I figured he was nervous, so I said, What do you mean, I smell nice? Do I smell springtime clean or minty fresh or what?

He appeared to struggle with the question.

— Where you from? I asked.

— Up north, he said. I have a job.

I scrunched around, brushing his arm with my hip. His skin was hot, but he wasn’t sweating.

— Is your job with the CIA? I asked. That’s why you’re being circumspect? Because you’re a spy and you’ve been trained to guard against the likes of me?

His mouth hung open — I thought his circuits might be fried. To test my theory, I asked his name.

— Johnny, he said. Johnny Jacks.

The notion of doing a moron with a retarded name like Johnny Jacks. it didn’t sit well. The last guy I’d gone with on the basis of his looks alone lay there afterward, thumping the side of my breast again and again, laughing to see it jiggle.

— Well, Johnny. I slid off the fender. I’ll catch you later.

He started to follow me toward the door, and I turned on him and yelled, Stay! Sit! Don’t follow me, okay?

I opened the door a crack and asked Wayne the bouncer if he cared to join me for a smoke and help fend off someone annoying. Wayne said, It’s too damn hot. You can sit inside.

The AC made me happy — my sweat beads popped like champagne bubbles. Ted Horton, the radio deejay who oversees the wet T-shirt contests, did his spiel, the microphone blatting and squealing. The crowd whistled and yelled. Wayne wouldn’t let me peek around the corner at the stage, and all I got to see were the geezers shooting pool at the rear. I played with Wayne’s ink stamp, pressing it to my wrists, imprinting several dozen blurry Cracker Paradise logos. He scowled and snatched it away. Ted announced the winners — I couldn’t make out the names — and the crowd turned ugly. They cursed Ted and he cursed them. “Fuck you” were the first words of his I heard clearly. Wayne shoved me back out into the heat.

The parking lot was empty, and I was both relieved and disappointed. I’d been modifying my position on Johnny Jacks, but it seemed he had lost interest. People boiled out of the club, several of them bleeding, escorted by Wayne and his colleagues. I spotted Ann Jeanette and Carmen beside a white SUV. Their soaked-through Tshirts drew lots of male attention, but the men who approached them hurried away as if scorched. I asked how they’d done.

— That muthafucka! Ann Jeanette had to take a breath, she was so angry. He give first prize to his Goddamn girlfriend!

— Ted Horton? I asked.

Carmen said, The bitch don’t have enough to fill a training bra and stands here shivering when they pour the water. and she won? Puh-leese!

I assumed they were talking about Sarafina, Ted Horton’s fiancée, a dark-skinned Cuban girl who was flat as an ironing board.

— I swear to God, I’ll kill her, Ann Jeanette said. I’ll kick the shit out of her.

I asked again how they had done.

— We come second and third. Carmen lit a cigarette. I thought there was gonna be a riot, people were so pissed.

She seemed ready to let go of her anger, and I explained that Sarafina had recently lost her job and like as not Ted was trying to help her out.

— Fuck her unemployed ass! Ann Jeanette scanned the lot. That don’t mean she can take money out of my pocket.

— We get this sometimes, Carmen confided. There’s a lot of jealousy, you know. We realize we’re not gonna win all of ’em, but this was fucking ridiculous.

— There they go! Ann Jeanette shouted.

Ted, a runty guy with a Mohawk, was hustling toward the rear of the lot, accompanied by a dark-skinned girl shrouded in a beach towel. They had their heads down and kept close to the wall. Ann Jeanette made a beeline for them, with Carmen at her heels. Ted turned at the last second, too late to prevent Ann Jeanette from spinning Sarafina around and decking her. Carmen leapt onto Ted from behind, riding him piggyback style to the ground, and Ann Jeanette began kicking him.

It was the first serious fight initiated by women that I’d seen, and I was impressed. A crowd closed in around them, cheering the girls on and blocking my view. Between bodies I caught sight of Ann Jeanette rifling Sarafina’s purse. The cops would be coming soon, and reluctantly I headed for the highway, hoping to catch a ride with someone pulling out of the lot. Somebody wrapped me up from behind. I squirmed about and saw Johnny Jacks.

— Let me go, I said.

Something surfaced in his vacant, beautiful face, a flicker of emotion gone too quickly to identify.

— Let me go, fucker!

I managed to wriggle free of the bear hug, but he kept hold of my wrist. His grip was tight and hot like an Indian burn. I tried to pull away and said, I’ll scream if you don’t let go.

— I like you, he said.

The idea that he liked me was suddenly scary.

— Let her go, dude, said a rumbly voice at my shoulder.

It was Everett, my favorite of Momma’s exes, a lanky muscular guy with a gloomy, bony face, gray hair tied in a ponytail, a motorcycle helmet in his right hand, a trucker wallet chained to his jeans. He planted his left hand, big as a frying pan, on Johnny Jacks’s chest and gave him a hard shove — Johnny released my wrist, but the shove didn’t move him as far as I might have expected.

— Yeah? Everett inquired of him. There something you want?

— I like you, Johnny Jacks said to me.

He walked off, his eyes on me, and merged with the crowd.

— What was that? Everett asked.

— Another Friday night at Cracker Paradise. Can I catch a ride?

— C’mon.

I locked my hands around Everett’s waist, tucked my head onto his shoulder, and listened to his flathead growl, to police devils whining like sirens, the wind ripping my hair, wishing the ride would wind up somewhere anywhere different from a crummy Florida bungalow with a weedy patch of grass enclosed by a chain-link fence. The windows were dark when we arrived, and Momma’s car wasn’t in front. A yellow streetlight buzzed overhead and the moths were out in force.

— Thanks, I said, climbing off the bike.

— Somebody ain’t always going to be around to protect you, said Everett. You aware of that?

— Yeah, I guess.

He stared at me gravely — he was the only one of Momma’s boyfriends who looked me in the eye and not about a foot, foot and a half lower.

— You know I bought into that custom parts shop over in Jacksonville?

— Momma told me.

— Whyn’t you come on up? I’ll give you a job in sales. You can stay with me ’til you get a place.

— Everett! I batted my lashes. I didn’t know you cared.

— Least there’d be somebody looking after you. You ain’t doing nothing here you can’t do there.

— You serious? I don’t know anything about bikes.

— Ain’t that much to know. It might give you a chance to get your bearings.

— I’ll think about it. I swear I will.

— Don’t think too long. We need people now. He gunned the engine. You’re a smart girl, Louie. How come you treat yourself like you do?

I started to tell him my name was Elle, but it didn’t seem important right then.

— I got self-esteem issues, I said.

Momma slept in the next morning. There wasn’t anything to eat in the house, so I walked down to the convenience store and bought orange juice and pancake mix and made myself breakfast. After that I cleaned the living room, straightened the furniture, removed fast-food cartons and ladies’ magazines and empty diet pill bottles, and vacuumed the rug. It was still a slum furnished with sprung sofas and patched easy chairs, but I felt accomplished. I watched TV for a while, surfing through a mix of get-right preachers and cartoons. Long about one o’clock I heard the toilet flush.

— Don’t look at me, said Momma, coming into the room, carrying a glass of juice and wearing a robe with a design of winning poker hands. She closed the blinds all around until the room was half dark and plunked herself down in the recliner.

— I must look terrible, she said.

I wanted to tell her she was a female version of Dorian Gray’s portrait, because whenever I saw her, I saw myself in about twenty years, but she would have asked was this Dorian some boy I was fooling with. Actually, she was a pretty woman yet, despite the pills and booze.

— You could at least lie to me, she said.

— You look fine, Momma.

A sigh. What’d you do last night?

— Nothing. I ran into Everett.

— Did you tell him I wanted him to call?

— Forgot.

— Jesus, Louie!

— Elle, I said.

— Whatever. Don’t you listen to a word I say?

I turned up the volume on the TV.

— Here! Let me have that. She pointed at the remote. There’s a real good movie on. We can watch together.

The movie had started. It concerned two girls in a nuthouse — they didn’t appear to like each other and took lots of meds. I tried not to relate it to my home life.

— That Angelina Jolie’s so pretty, Momma said. I wish I could get my hair like hers.

The telephone rang.

— Can you grab that?

I answered and a mellow voice said, How you doing, sugar britches?

— It’s for you. I passed Momma the phone.

— Hello. She sang the word.

After a few seconds of giggling and going, Uh-huh, uh-huh, Momma got up and said to me, I’m gonna take this in the bedroom. Fix me a piece of toast, sweetie. Okay?

I showered, put on cutoffs and a T-shirt, and went out, walking down the middle of the street barefoot, seeing how long I could take the hot asphalt before I had to hop onto a patch of grass. The parked cars were thousand-dollar shit boxes with smeared windshields that made the reflected sunlight look dirty. Every house was the same sort of rat hole; some had Tonka toys and Big Wheels half buried in the yellowish grass. A kid in a diaper stared at me from a doorway, holding an empty Coke bottle in his grubby fist, the TV jabbering in the gloom behind him. It was the fucking Third World.

The guys at Toby’s would sneak me out a beer in a paper sack, but I didn’t feel social and went to the park instead — a scrap of shade with some big azalea bushes and diseased palms and a fountain that gurgled like someone dying. I sat on the retaining wall, digging at a sand spur I’d picked up in the pad of my foot. Ants were scavenging a squashed beetle on the sidewalk. A gleaming black car with smoked windows breezed past. Two women talked in front of the grocery store, both shielding their eyes from the sun, as if saluting each other. A tabby cat emerged from under an azalea bush and stared at me with moderate interest.

— What’s up? I asked.

Nothing, bitch, he said in cat language, and walked off, his tail straight up, showing me his ass.

The black car again — it slowed and stopped beside me. The window rolled down and Johnny Jacks peered out. I wondered how a loser like him had copped such a sharp ride.

— What’s your name? he asked.

— Now that would have been a terrific follow-up question last night. Did it just occur to you?

No response.

— Are you on a holy quest? That would explain your minimalist style. You must be focused on prayer all the time, right?

Nothing.

— Do I still smell nice? I asked.

He tipped his head back — his nostrils flared. Dial soap, he said.

My detectors started beeping. Momma’s favorite movie was Silence of the Lambs. I’d caught Hannibal Lecter’s act.

— Okay, I said. Good-bye.

— Let’s go for a drive, he said, climbing out of the car.

— Are you crazy? Fuck off!

I moved away along the wall.

He came after me, and I said, I’ll scream.

— Why? I mean you no harm.

The words “I mean you no harm” weirded me out even more — he seemed to have learned his English from a phrase book.

He stepped close, and I felt heat streaming off him. Please, he said.

— Leave me the fuck alone!

I crossed the street, glancing behind me to make certain he wasn’t following, and nearly got splattered by a panel van.

— Hey! What’s your problem? The driver stuck his head out. Your life not worth living?

I drank a couple of beers out front at Toby’s, letting the geezers eye-fuck me, and that’s when I began putting together Johnny Jacks and the Djadadjii. Once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and by the time I arrived at Sandrine’s, I was busting to tell her. She was nowhere to be seen, and I knew she was hiding because I hadn’t visited the night before.

— Sandrine, I called.

The river made chuckling noises, rubbing against the bank. Clouds hedged the moon, but it sailed clear. The shack held only moonlight and mirrors. I studied the foliage, trying to find her outline among the tangles of leaves.

— Don’t be pissy, I said.

— I know everything you’re thinking.

I still couldn’t find her.

— You think because you don’t visit me one night, two nights, I won’t mention what I need. What you promised me.

I whirled about, thinking she was behind me, and said, I didn’t promise anything. I said I’d try.

— How can I expect such a stupid girl to understand what I’ve endured? You tell me how alone you are, how much you hunger for life, yet every day you talk to people, you fill your belly, you taste life.

— Everything’s relative.

— You could have more life with me than you can possibly imagine.

— Don’t go there! You tricked me. You made me feel things.

— Oh! Now you’re going to pretend you feel nothing for me? That I put those feelings into your head? All I did was unlock a door you never realized existed. I’ve seen how you look at me.

She melted up from the chokecherry, a paring of a woman seeming no thicker than onionskin, drifting toward me on the breeze — she touched her gauzy breasts, caressed almost imperceptible hips and thighs. A firefly danced behind her forehead, hovered for an instant in one eye.

— I see you looking now, she said.

Frightened, I backed away from her until my shoulders touched the wall of the shack.

— I’ve been patient with you, she said. I could be patient forever and it wouldn’t do any good.

— The Djadadjii, I said. Do they feel hotter than normal people?

Her face emptied.

— I met this guy, I said. He’s new in town. Super good-looking, but a retard. He can barely talk and his skin feels like an oven door. Sound familiar?

I’d meant to warn her about Johnny Jacks, but she had frightened me, and now I wanted to tell her in a way that made her heart race.

— First thing out of his mouth was he liked the way I smelled, I said. Think he smelled you on me?

— Lou. Elle. You have to help me!

— What can I do? Bring you five people? I doubt there’s time.

Fear sharpened her indistinct features. She looked this way and that, agitated, searching for an out.

— Maybe I could do with four, she said. Four might be sufficient.

I realized then what a danger she was to me, and I bolted for the fallen oak, vaulted over it, landing among the hyacinths at the edge of the water.

— Louie!

— Four? You been drilling it into me ever since we met how you needed five.

— You don’t understand!

— Of course I don’t. I’m such a stupid girl. I must be really fucking stupid to trust you. Maybe it’s only three people you need. Two plus me.

We were slightly more than an arm’s length apart, but it might have been in different countries.

— Don’t leave, Sandrine said. Without you I’ll die.

I slogged a few paces through the water, the leathery hyacinth roots snagging my ankles.

— I can explain!

I kept going.

— I’ll show you things, she said. Incredible things. I’ll tell you my secrets. I should have been open from the start, but I thought I’d lose you. I’ll never keep anything from you again.

I clambered onto shore.

— You’re taking my heart!

I slipped on something slick and sat down hard.

— Whore! she screamed. You filthy, disgusting whore! Go ahead! All you are is flabby tits and stinking blood! Touching you makes me sick! You hear? I feel like puking when I’m near you! Do you know what you smell like?

She told me. In detail. I could hear her screaming corrosive insults long after I entered the brush, and perhaps I heard them even after I had gone beyond the range of her voice.

I tracked down Johnny Jacks in the parking lot at Cracker Paradise. He took me into the shadows alongside his car, and there he choked me a little and slapped me. I told him he didn’t have to use force, he could have everything he wanted. We drove to a spot not far from Sandrine’s, and we walked down to the river. Big chunks of anger, boulder sized, were in my head, damming up everything except a leakage of bitterness. I ignored thoughts of what he might do to me — I wanted something to happen, and I didn’t care what so long as it was violent. He hardly spoke, and I couldn’t tell what was on his mind. He might have been no different from the rest of us, mostly urge and raw need, and simply was less capable of expressing it.

We reached Sandrine’s, and he climbed eagerly over the toppled oak. I waited in the river, mud oozing between my toes. The moon was so bright the blue sky was almost a day color. I felt it shining inside me, generating hatred, a cooler emotion directed at her, at all things. Hyacinths with foot-high purplish blooms bobbled against my knees. Johnny Jacks glanced at me, his face expressionless as ever. I thought he would say something, but Sandrine melted up from the rotting boards of the shack, a female pattern emerging from the wood grain, and appeared to coil around him. She didn’t draw him inside the shack, into the place where she slept; she bore him to the ground and sank her fangs into his neck and drank. He moaned once, a frail sound. Every now and then his hand twitched or an arm jerked. As he grew paler, she grew more real. It wasn’t what I had expected, or maybe it was. Part of me was disappointed he wasn’t what I’d hoped. Another part would have preferred to be horrified. Mainly I had a sense of. I don’t know. Closure, maybe. Not the feeling you get when you’re over a crush or have gone past some pain, but like the feeling you have the morning after your first time with a boy. Anxious and a little shaky, worried that you’ve screwed up, but with a bigger anxiety removed, and you’re ready to become this new person you see in the mirror.

Johnny Jacks was still alive when Sandrine lifted her head. Blood flowed from the puncture wounds on his neck, anyway. She flipped hair back from her eyes — blood filmed over her chin and lips, dark and thick as gravy.

— The Djadadjii are cool to the touch, she said. But you knew he wasn’t Djadadj, didn’t you? At the least you suspected.

I had nothing to say.

— Not this month, she said. But next month, the month after. soon we’ll be together.

She lowered her head and drank again, just a sip, and then said, I’m not angry with you. You needed a push, so I pushed you. If he had turned out be Djadadj, well. life is risk. It was only a tiny risk, though.

She closed her eyes and arched her neck, sated and languorous. On her hip a speckle of mud like a beauty mark. She stroked Johnny Jacks’s blond hair.

— He’s beautiful, though. Beautiful enough to be Djadadj.

She rested her cheek against his, her lips parted, baring the tips of her crimson fangs — a scene from one of my mind movies brought to life.

— Go home now, she said. Come again tomorrow night. or wait a month. It’s no matter. Go home and think about what you must do.

When I turned from the tableau of the shack and the two figures lying in the grass and mud, it was as if I’d never seen the river and the sky before — they were so vast and unfamiliar, they almost flattened me.

— Good night, Elle, said Sandrine.

My father’s a battered gray suitcase. He left me with no photographs, no scars, no good-byes, no promises, no postcards, no phone calls on my birthday, no memories whatsoever; but he did leave me that suitcase. To my mind he might as well be a battered old thing whose last name is Samsonite. I lay the suitcase open on the bed and begin stuffing everything I own into it. As I cross back and forth between the closet and the bed, I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror. I see Louie, small-time and ordinary, a bright, slutty girl, still hopeful, soul somewhat in hock to a regulation Sunday school dream, with a nice enough face and body to make it happen. And I see Elle, spooky and hot to trot, with her hungry mouth and Xed-out eyes and reckless ways. She strikes me as a fraud, though I can’t say why. I avoid staring at the reflection, not wanting to see which one will become dominant, disliking both equally.

I latch the suitcase and picture myself working with Everett in the parts store — it seems I already know how that story ends, and it’s the same with every other story I imagine. I realize there are better stories out there, ones with happier endings, but I have no idea how to go about achieving those fantasies of wealth and fame. Chandler Mason could tell me, probably, but look where she wound up.

Momma’s entertaining tonight. The bed frame creaks, the springs shriek, the headboard hammers out a factory rhythm, a relentless machine fury, blam-blam-blamming against the wall. Her flutelike outcries provide a breathy counterpoint.

When I was little, I’d scrunch down outside her door and try to interpret the noises, worried about what was happening. After I discovered sex, I envisioned demons atop her. Monsters. Wild animals. Men with beards and hairy thighs and cloven hooves. Now I close my ears to it. For a murderous instant I see myself appearing naked in her doorway, displaying my fangs.

Lugging the suitcase down the hall is a chore and toting it along the riverbank would be a real pain. Maybe, I think, its weight will determine my destination. I crank open the blinds and the vivid indigo of predawn invades the room. The thrift store furniture looks opulent in the half-light. I perch on the recliner, thinking that if I were Sandrine, I’d have handled my seduction more efficiently and the matter would not be in doubt. Sandrine’s stronger than me, she knows more, she’s more experienced, but how smart can she be? She got herself caught by someone as dumb as a chicken. and she intends to let Elle into her life. Elle’s quick on her feet and rat crafty. A fast learner. She’s capable of using a user like Sandrine.

Who am I kidding?

I’ll fuck up wherever I’m going.

At first light I’ll step outside and hitch a ride to Jacksonville. I can always change my mind. It comes as a revelation, the recognition that Elle is driving this indecisive decision and that it’s Louie who is reluctant to go. I thought it would be the other way around. They’re all scrambled in my head, these roles I understudy, these half-formed characters I inhabit, but I understand now that Elle is frightened of life’s sudden dips and swerves. She endangers herself only when she thinks — sometimes mistakenly — that she’s in control. Louie’s the scary one, the one who Sandrine wants, the one who wants Sandrine. She’s the dreamer, the believer. She’d tattoo a heart on her heart and be true for no reason. She could live on a dime’s worth of hope and make love with a shadow. She’s the kind of girl who’d sacrifice for love.

She’d kill to sustain it.