Sucker (II)
And I thought, what's it take to be him? I’m him. I’m anything I put my mind to!
He takes to scenery for a while, replaces his interest in the flesh. We leave the clubs and ride greyhounds round the lips of the Grand Canyon. He’ll let travellers convince him to play cards, but spend the whole game staring out the window. Wins anyway, if he wants to.
He points out the scraggly trees. “That’s the oldest thing you ever saw, maybe.” To the bare red cliffs. “I’d build a house there. Nicest place you ever saw.”
Some nights he follows lonely strangers off at the stops, eats in furtive shadows. Some nights he only watches them go. A woman in a green dress plays him gin rummy in the back row and asks him what happened to his fingers. “Work accident,” he says. “I got this crisp new deck of cards and I tried this trick here — see — and the edge of the two-diamonds just took ‘em right off.”
She laughs and marvels at the card cascade. “But this isn’t your work, is it?”
“Why, what else you think I do?”
A considering look. It goes on longer than he expects, and he squirms, didn’t expect her to take it serious.
“I think you’re an artist,” she decides.
“An artist!”
“It’s the way you look at the layers in the rock. You’re studying for a painting.”
“Am I, now? Maybe I am!” He laughs, delighted, and shuffles. “But you know, I came over to build a railroad.”
“Came over?”
He puts the cards to the side, zeroing in on a napkin sticking out of her purse. “You got a pen?”
He spends the rest of the ride sketching something on the napkin. He turns and twists it whenever I come near so I can’t see. When she gets off at her stop, he hands it to her, folded up. She kisses his cheek before she goes.
He returns to his seat and whistles through his teeth. “An artist!” he crows. “You hear that? I Gawd! I could be an artist. Hell, I’ve been an artist. I could be a poet, too. I’m whatever I want to be, I’m a poet. See? I get these phrases in my head. My name’s one of them. Ha! Knucklehead Nines, nobody called me that. Just couldn’t get it out of my ear one day Knucklehead Nines, Knulcklehead Nines. And I thought, what’s it take to be him, I’m him, I’m anything I put my mind to!” He giggles and slaps his knee. “So I stuck out my ring fingers and laid the tips on the rail and waited for a train to come.”
He catches his breath.
“The knucklehead part, that came natural,” he says. “I mean, what kinda knucklehead would pull that stunt?”
I sit next to him until the next stop, and when he slides out of his seat he flaps his hand stay down, stay down, looks at me side-eyed as he shrugs on his jacket. “I didn’t mean to make that no confessional,” he says. “You don’t need to get so excited.”
Knucklehead Nines doesn’t stop outside churches, synagogues, mosques, doesn’t flinch at crosses, doesn’t look at them funny or avoid them either, though some do. He says he’s from Alabama, won’t name a hometown. June, our bus breaks down near the California border, and Knucklehead Nines steps out onto the dawn gray street, and the crosswalks are painted rainbow, flags ringing on streetpoles. Two women walk furtively down the sidewalk to the mosque on the corner. There’s a cathedral on the other and a temple down the street. He follows at a distance, not covert.
He pauses at the side of the building, nose an inch from the wall, eyes into the blue mosaic, up in its face. He extends a hand, holds it flat out about an inch from the stone. Stands there very still. “I’ll know if it burns,” he says evenly. “So I can’t touch it, ‘cause if I touch it, I’ll know I can. And if it burns or not, hell, it’s worse knowing either or the other.”
The air itches, so close to a place like this. It hasn’t itched in so long, but it does now. I edge away stepwise til we’re a ridiculous twenty feet apart, me wavering and him standing with his hand raised parallel to the side of the building. He mumbles to himself under his breath, low and constant like a gut string. I hear, “What happened?” and other words I don’t catch.
Finally he turns, fixes his eyes on my face. He strides to me, takes my arm, pulls me rough into the space between the buildings; I let him. He pushes me against the wall with strength that would surprise if I did not know him for what he was, reaches up and presses hard down on my shoulders til my knees are bent and we’re at height. Pins my shoulder with one hand, grabs my jaw hard with the other. Forces his thumb between my lips and pries my jaws apart.
“There, there,” he says. He hooks two fingers behind my top teeth, strokes my soft palate, the backs of my canines. Coaxes my teeth to extension. The half-knuckle rests against my lip. “I ain’t never seen them before. Like pearls, milk teeth…”
I surge forward and crush my mouth to his, wide open, bloody. I sink my teeth into his cheek. He rips nine long gashes through the back of my coat. Rabid in the alley, loosing blood into the trash and stagnant water – I slam his face into the mosaic and I do not know if he burns.
Even with me inside him he rambles on like a child. “Man, what are you?” he asks, and it comes out sobbed. “What are you? Do you know me? Do you know me? O, Lord -“ and as he says the name his skin sears against me. I jolt. “O Lord. O Lord. O Lord - ”
The taste of him is more than I can bear. I find him again that night in the poolhouse.
“Thought I could use a change,” he says, leaning hawkeyed over the table. “Thought you wouldn’t go again, not so soon. Suppose I didn’t wow you. Hit to a man’s ego, I tell you what.”
The cue strikes. The balls scatter. The crowd whistles, and he asks, casual, “Where d’you go?”
My head tilts.
“Naw. Course.” His throat bobs.
His turn again. He leans over, tilts his head down. A few strands fall free from his oiled-back hairline, black strikes against his forehead.
“I ain’t never doing that again, just so’s you know.” A few slides of the cue between his fingers. He changes his angle. “I mean, I didn’t know you could. I think a while ago you couldn’t. I thought it was on account of how you don’t eat, but I ain’t seen you eat nothing, and now there’s enough substance to you I’m still walkin’ funny. Har-har. But it’s disturbing me and I ain’t doing it again. Just consider that what we in the business call a moment of duress.” He wets his lips. “But it was nice,” he says quietly. “Real nice, like.”
His body goes still. The other players round the table look at him strange. They know he talks to himself, one of the well-known quirks of Knucklehead Nines. But it’s not fun when he’s serious like this, not fun when his eyes stay fixed like missiles on the ball.
“I miss praying,” he says. “Nobody knows the prayers I used to say.”
The cue strikes like a gunshot.
Every gambler in Vegas knows him, gambler’s saint, golden calf, they blow his dice, touch his shoes, kiss his costume rings. Behind him in the streets follow the strange and the destitute, learning quickly that the one from whom he wins a few faded pennies or old silver teeth will see it back a thousandfold.
At a dive far from the main strip, he leans against the bar, passing a cocktail back and forth through his teeth in a swirly straw. “I’m anything I want to be,” he says. “I ain’t a sucker. See? I’m them hobos waiting outside. And I’m the neon in the puddles and I’m the stars in the sky.” He sweeps his hand lazily behind him, and the eyes of all the men and women clustered around the bar follow its costume-jeweled glint. “I’m Knucklehead Nines,” he says, extending a finger like a symphony conductor off-duty.
The Spirit of the South, they say, all and none.
He nods, satisfied. “But most of all,” glancing down through black lashes, tinking his nail on the rim of the glass, “I’m wanting to buy you a drink. You want a drink?”
I shake my head.
The swirly straw rolls along the rim of the cocktail glass as he bounces it toward my lips. “C’mon, don’t play coy now,” he says. Six diamonds stuck to the bottom of the glass. He takes it back, laughs, leans back and sleeves his deck with a suit-yourself shrug. Raising his voice, “Folks, I’m feeling generous. Who wants to kiss my rings?”
Then a familiar face pushes through the crowd, scruffier, puffier with days of drink, the dreamy haze in her eyes of the suddenly and catastrophically broke. But the same dress. And she’s smiling.
“The artist!” Nines crows, and his eyes light up with genuine joy. “How long’s it been? You still know me! Share a drink. Come tell me what you think I do now.”
Later that night in the alley behind the bar, he’s stripping off his ruined jacket, shirt, pants, undershirt, down to his naked skin, throwing the blood-soaked clothes into the puddle at his feet, where the green dress loses its color to the muck. The walls are dark and the clouds pissing on us like drunks.
“Man, fuck this mess,” he says, “I liked her, too. I was gonna teach her pinochle, you know, house rules, all special-kind. Man, three days I hadn’t had a drop, not a pang, and then I get the notion to her, her, why her? Sweet little dove-eyes lady.” He hurls his boxers down so hard red droplets splash a few feet up onto the wall. “I’m on a diet. I ain’t doing it no more. You don’t have to, I don’t have to.” Kicks off his crocodile-skin shoes next to the blonde’s glassy eyes. “I’ll be a monk. I’ll be fuckin’ keto paleo, vegan-style.”
He storms back toward the neon street. I offer my coat. He pushes it away.
For weeks, he keeps his word, and withers. His cheeks hollow and the whites of his eyes go tea-stained. His hands shake; he grabs his own forearms hard enough to break the skin, restraining himself from touching the dancers, the players, the lone men on the strip before sunrise.
“I feel great,” he says, shivering, wrapping himself tight in my coat. “I feel me. I feel more me than I felt in, hell, a long time, maybe ever. That’s it, it’s like a fuckin’ – pipe, you just put it down, you stop breathin’, you’re you, you’re just you without the pipe…”
He foregoes the tables. He spends many nights sitting, unblinking, in front of the slot machines. He pours money into them, oceans of money he has no reason to have, swirling away into the lights. Or sometimes he walks the aisles of the machines, squeezing past chairs in a labyrinth of spellbound people. He picks some at random, thin young ones with forty bucks to waste, sagging old men with debts to pay, fat women with throbbing backs hunched over the buttons – and he stands behind them, still, unblinking, watching them hemorrhage into the machines. He does this for hours.
Sometimes he steps forward, past them, and stands beside the machines. Their eyes go to him; in his sequined jacket, his hat, his sleek tie, he is the brighter lightshow. He taps the machine, or blows on a quarter, or kisses the finger they use to press the button, and the next spin spits five thousand dollars into their laps. If they play again, he stays. If not, he walks away. None of them speak to him. Their eyes slide off him and back to the spinning wheels. And it surprises him, makes his eyes wide and his tongue still when he finds himself unlooked at, but as the weeks go on it becomes easier and easier until he has to wave before their eyes or blow in their ears just to be asked his name.
One night he sits on his own at a machine but doesn’t play, just hunches up like a gargoyle and watches the digital display spin and beg and ruminates.
“I been remembering something,” he says, “something about me, now I’m not thinking about my meals so much.”
Minutes pass. He asks aloud, in a high voice imitating no one, “What is it, Nines?”
Looks at me. Looks back to the machine.
“Y’know, I’m anything I set my mind to,” he says, “so how’d I set my mind to being me, this? Who did it to me and did I tell them to?”
“Who, Nines?” he asks again, a note of anger in the mocking. He doesn’t look at me. The lights dance in the black of his eyes, perfect black, sucking black, black that holds anything and pulls anything. Hungry black.
Two hours pass, silent. For two hours, the machine tells him he’ll win if he spins again.
“Man, I don’t even speak English!” he bursts out, jumping to his feet and slapping the machine. It spits out a twenty; he rips it out, shoves it in his mouth, chews, and spits. “Fuck! Who’d I get this voice from? Whose body is this I put it in!” He storms off as he usually storms off, a quick and knifelike swagger, but takes a turn five steps into it and circles right back to where he started. “I got too many people inside me,” he says, finger jabbing in his chest. “I ain’t big enough. I think my first was a white man. Looked a little like you.”
He gets on a bus to Colorado. Furthest north I’ve seen him go. Beside a fire under an overpass, a toothless woman tells him, “You best settle your debts.”
“Me? I got the pot!” Knucklehead Nines says. “You wanna play me a hand and settle up yourself?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not to me. Best settle with him before he catches you out.”
He and cocks his thumb at me. “Who, him?”
“The Devil,” she says.
“Now, that’s what I’m starting to think!” he cackles. When we step on the next bus, the bridge left bloody behind us, the driver charges him for one ticket, but he shakes his head and hands over double. “Two,” he says, “one for me and one for the Devil.”
The driver waves him by, doesn’t hear.
Nines sits with his hands dug into his forearms. His feet hammer the floor. The buses are sacred to him, the traveler’s places, and so the miles pass in agony, as he bites his lip and shakes and doesn’t look at the boys sleeping in the row behind us, until in a sudden flurry he leaps up and wrenches the window open and leaps out into the night.
His heels hit the dirt and I’m already there. “Smooth,” he says, brushing off his shoulders. “I’m Knucklehead Nines. I don’t answer to no doors or speeds.
A beacon shines, a biker bar two miles down the road. He’s shuffling as he goes, nattering over the buzz of the desert night, insects and lightning and the distant cities. “Debts, it’s all debts,” he says. “Guy who loses a penny is a sucker. Guy who loses a million got balls. But, see, you earn a penny when you’re a penny in the hole, that’s the same as earning a million with a million in the hole. Same as. Side to side, the scale stays even. It’s the movement that matters, you catch it up, make the sideways work for you. That’s how you know you’re not a sucker.” He flips out a card and shows it to me with his eyes closed, six diamonds. “You wanna see a magic trick?”
We round the bend to the bar and the deck disappears up his sleeve. There’s music, out of tune, backs pressed to fronts, bandanas and gloves, spilt-whiskey dancing. It’s alive beneath the desert stars, and Knucklehead Nines’s mouth is open.
Inside he beelines for the pool table and mutters, “Just a round.”
I mingle with the light and the smoke while he white-knuckles his cue. They hear him. When he strikes a ball it rolls. “Him? That’s Knucklehead Nines,” says a hairy man at the bar, “biggest shark of the States.” Nines grins, looks around, disbelieving.
He whoops at the end of the shitty band’s set, rings chiming as he claps. He shoves two hundred-dollar bills in their can, then buys a round for the bar to an explosion of cheers. He’s patted, kissed, lifted briefly onto a tall man’s shoulder. He beams and crows, he’s king of the night. “I slept in a drain pipe last week!” he calls and they laugh and laugh.
By the end of the hour he’s stripped the old men around the pool table down to their silver teeth. They can’t manage to glare at him. At the bar, he orders another feast of whiskey for the house, then a few shots of his own. I’ve never seen him try to drink anything but fruity cocktails and he notices me noticing, rolls his eyes and says, “It’s thirsty work, bein’ me again. I’m thirsty.”
He throws his head back and holds a shot glass to his lips, but his mouth never opens. Eyes still closed he lowers it slowly back to the bar. His lashes flutter.
A bankrupt old man has mustered his resolve and come up behind him. The man shuffles and swallows and screws his mouth up while he waits but it doesn’t occur to him, he doesn’t even think, to speak unless spoken to. Nines passes him the shot glass and he walks away appeased, cupping it as if it’s liquid gold. Nines pulls a new glass to the space in front of him from his row of three. Swirls it, drags his skinny ring finger round the reddish rim in the light.
“They love me again,” he says. “I Gawd, I’m thirsty. Ishmael,” looking up at me, “d’you know what I’m thirsty for?”
Wide, dark eyes with the light of the bar sign in them like an ember in a coal. Warm dark. The quirk of his lip over his canine. I put my hand on the back of his chair.
“I learned how to play pool through the window,” he murmurs, his mouth barely moving. “Couldn’t hear a word they said, had to watch them, try to puzzle it out. Barman wore a silver ring with a picture of a sun on it. One night, the girl saw me, pointed me out, and he came out and hit me so hard the sun went through my cheek. That’s how I know to play pool.”
Like a snake, his hand strikes out and catches my wrist. He freezes there vicing me as if he wasn’t expecting to feel it, but he does — the coarse hair trailing up my arm, the flex of tendon and vein.
“Lover,” he says, “I ain’t thirsty.”
What comes next is not something one can watch. So I do not watch. Instead, I am the smoke, I am the light – I am the shattered tube of neon. The mold on the wall that drowns under the first spray of blood. The twang on the guitar when the singer claws for it as if it will do him any good or ever has. Most of all I am standing over the shoulder of Knucklehead Nines as he impales a man on a pool cue to keep him in place – and slashes another’s heel tendon with a broken bottle – and ties a woman to the wall with a fistful of electrical wires. And circles back to sip them, later.
“Please, I didn’t mean no harm,” gurgles the cued one, the last one, as Nines gnaws his open wrist. “I got a wife and kids. I don’t deserve — I don’t! She lied about it. I — I did it, but I didn’t think it’d come out this way — thought she’d learn something, learn to like it —”
“Funny, that’s what he said,” Nines says, unblinking, indicating the man on the ground.
“I got a kids,“ the man says.
“Yup, Hunter and Hannah,” Nines nods.
“Hunter? Yeah, him — I was going to teach him — if they’d just — I’d make amends, if you just give me another chance, Jesus, please —”
“Man, that’s what he said, too,” Nines says, swishing the blood in his mouth and making a face. “I Gawd, it’s always the same, same taste, same story. I haven’t eaten junk like this in a while. I been slacking off, focusing on my mind. Now, I tell you, it don’t go down easy.”
All of a sudden, he drops the man’s wrist and spits, slides off the pool table. He clicks his teeth, beckons me, dusts his bloody jacket, grabs my hand, and saunters toward the door.
“Wait,” calls the man. “Wait, please —”
“Don’t worry,” Nines says, splashing through a dark puddle. “You didn’t get any of mine, so you’ll just die.”
I let him pull me, kicking aside the stools and limbs.
His back is quaking like a fault line. His eyes are rod-straight ahead. “I oughta go,” he says, “That ain’t so bad. I’m sick of the desert and I’m feeling like a change of scene. They say Louisiana’s got houses for all kinds, they say in Mississippi there’s a slot machine at every gas station…” He’s not looking where he’s stepping, cracking and splashing underfoot, and he’s not seeing where he’s looking, because otherwise he wouldn’t be walking out into the sun.
He’s out in the middle of the empty road before the realization hits him, punching out of his chest with a little “H-uh.” He freezes, eyes wide, looks around.
The sky’s a blue screen, the heat wavering up off the road like oil in the distance. His fingers tighten on my hand.
“You coulda told me,” he says.
After that he rides back and forth around the Gulf, a trail of money and blood behind him. Still he cringes from the day, holes up in hotel rooms and bridge culverts, hunched up in the familiar shadow. Someone ought to be following him, he says, after a stunt like that, but nobody does.
“Crying shame, what this country’s come to,” he opines.
He leaves games halfway through, stands up and goes. Doesn’t talk to anyone besides his meals, and even then, half the time he leaves them unfinished. When people look at him he looks away, hides his fingers in his pockets – the substance is back, the magic gone.
“I’ve had enough of junk,” he explains. “A barrel of gas station wine ain’t the same as a thousand-dollar swig. I got a thousand dollars. I got a million. I got Midas fingers! I guess my taste’s caught up with me finally. I must’ve got refined without my noticing.”
He spends a lot of time thinking, sitting with his knees folded up to his chin and his finger-stubs tapping on his lips. For a while I’m with him, offering what warmth I can, and then I am less and less and I can’t quite stay.
Until one day there’s a young man smoking behind the train station, and as soon as Nines smells him his eyes go wide, wide.
“Here’s my special spice,” he says when he can speak again, licking the blood from his fingers. “Tastes like bourbon. It’s crisp! You and me, Bluebeard, we’ll be drinking molten gold from now on, just you wait. You want a taste?”
He proffers his last bloody finger, tilts his head so his neck is bare.
“Finely aged,” he says.
I shake my head.
Over the next few months he ferrets them out. There’s nothing outward to relate them, no special look or sign, no A positive or O, and they’re few and far between. He crisscrosses borders to find them, following the words, the glances, the acquaintances, and the half-remembered ties. He knows them, bloodhound nose. Wrinkles it up at anyone else.
“Some kinda first sin maybe,” he muses, “or a pheromone or maybe a curse or somethin’. Notes of bergamot. I don’t know,” but after long enough, enough dark-eyed men and skinny girls, he’s starting to suspect.
One he finds sleeping in an underpass. He’d just grab her and be done if not for the hint of movement under her arm. He crouches to watch it. A one-eyed kitten, squirming in her tattered scarf.
When she wakes he asks her about it. She says she found it down a drain, just can’t leave well enough alone. “He got nine lives?” he asks, and she shakes her head. “Only one left, probably. Or just half one. Used up all the rest by now.”
Nines grins and wiggles his fingers.
All that evening, he sits with her. He teaches her poker with the pierced cards up his sleeve. She tells him who she was, her gone mother, her brother who hasn’t been answering her calls. Where she came from. How she used to visit Gran but they won’t let her in the ward anymore.
“Gran-mother?”
“Great-great aunt or something,” she says. “I don’t know. One of those people you gotta keep around, ‘cause you’re really all they got and they’re the same.”
“Right,” he says. “Where is she?”
“Alabama.”
“Let me take you out of here. You got a place to stay?”
And she goes with us, sits in the Uber for hours toward Georgia. She says an old boyfriend lives in Atlanta with their son. Nines has money in his pocket that he keeps fingering, meaning, as he whispers in my ear, to buy her and the kitten a hotel room, a hospital stay, a rosary. “I mean it,” he says, starting to shake, “I don’t have to. I can do whatever I want.”
Five minutes past midnight the cab pulls over. The next he’s in the drainpipe under the two-lane highway, hunching over her as she wheezes through the blood.
“This time,” he says, tugging at his hair, “this time, it’ll be the last. I won’t even finish you off. I didn’t like you all that much, even. Not much in there at all. How’d you all get to be so boring? Lord!”
“You…” she says, “At first I thought… you were him… but you don’t look like him… you look like…my…”
“What him?” Nines sighs. “Don’t tell me. Men, I got enough of this already. He either left you or he took something.”
“He… left me… and he took…”
Nines throws up his hands.
To his turned head, the woman says, “But I… I asked him to… to do it…”
“Oh? Why?”
She coughs wet blood. “So it… it’d still be mine…”
He pauses. “Your son,” he says quietly, “you a lot like him?”
“What? He’s… yes.”
“Tsk.”
He knows — last week we were in Atlanta. It was quick and clean.
As he takes in the final few pulses of her heart, I lean in. He waves an arm at me, swatting blindly. “Hey, lover!” he hisses, pulling back with a spray and a shining chin, “back off, huh?”
Even after she’s done he stays there, slumped over her. His jacket’s stained but he doesn’t take it off. Breath like a hammer pounding his back, he rests his head in the hollow of her throat. The kitten’s curled on her sternum. He scratches its cooling ears.
“Back to Atlanta,” he says. “They got music and a building full of fish. We go back there, we won’t need no bottled gold.”
He takes so long to pry himself up he thinks he has to spend the day in the drain pipe, though of course he doesn’t. It’s a psychosomatic fear but I sit in it with him. He deals us hands of rummy, I don’t play so he plays himself. He chatters and jokes, tells me about the other drain pipes he’s been in, the last time he went to Alabama and what he thinks he’ll find there now, flying cars and air balloons going down in puffs of flame. The shadow lengthens and he goes back to the woman’s body where the little fish in the ditch water nibble at her ankles, and he takes two quarters from his pocket and puts them over her eyes, taking care to flip them both heads. He tries to do the same for the kitten, but the dimes won’t stay. The longer he looks at her the more his lips fall open, drawing the dusk over his tongue.
As soon as the sun’s down enough he’s walking, shuffling as he goes, nattering over the buzz of the cicadas and the leaves. “I feel good,” he says.
For weeks, he dances, dices, smiles, and doesn’t have a drop.
When the shaking starts again, he ignores it. When the dealers stop dealing to him, he moves to slots. When the slots stop taking his money, he sits in the back of a whitewashed room that smells of death and fumbles counters on a Bingo card. “Fuckin’ ridiculous,” he mutters. “Ain’t that hard. Ain’t that hard, picking up – whatever this is, fucking plastic, ain’t even poker chips.”
His number’s called. “Bingo,” he says. Louder, “Bingo. Bingo. Bingo.” Still they don’t hear him. Keep turning the crank, pulling balls out of the cage. He’s on his feet now. “Bingo.” The old woman in the seat next to him puts a counter on O. He sends his card and counters clattering to the floor. Swipes for hers, takes him three times til they scatter. She blinks a clouded eye and the aide kneels to gather them. “Fuckin’ BINGO,” Knucklehead Nines roars, and he nearly goes for her saggy neck right there, but he gags at the last second and stumbles from the room. In the hall he falls to the ground and crouches, wrenching at his hair.
“I know,” he says. “I know! Just one! After all I done, that’s nothing, that’s kitten food! One more and then — and then — Lord Almighty, what then?”
I wait, silent. Minutes tick.
“I wasn’t a slut, you know?” he snaps. “You’d think there wouldn’ve have been so many of ‘em!”
He shakes his head.
“What a fuckin’ choice,” he says. “Does everyone get to this, learn to walk in the sun? Is that why there’s so few I can see? Do they choose – choose not to, is this the line? Rather starve than — huh. And you too. I guess you made your choice. It’s not so bad if you’ve got the willpower, I guess. Fuckin’ admirable. Ethical-moral-lacto shit, that’s what makes you light as air.” He swallows. “But I don’t want to go where you go, see, when you’re gone. To me I think it’s hellfire. If I ain’t on earth, I’m in hellfire. I can’t remember but I musta sold my soul to the devil if I’ve lived this long outrunning him. I Gawd, I’ve lived a long time. A long fuckin’ time.”
He looks up suddenly, startled. I crouch over him, overshadow him, tuck him under my arm. My hand finds the crown of his skull, envelops the thick dark hair, pads of my fingers trailing the part. From there, slowly, I sculpt down to his neck, then over the curve of his spine, the knobbles of the vertebrae beneath his cheap sequin suit, the parabolas of ribs, around the emaciated side. His waist drowns in my hands.
He shakes. He stares. “You got so solid,” he murmurs. “Again. Did you really choose to… uh… Oh, no, I don’t like this one bit.”
He wavers. In the next moment, he’s on his feet and off down the hall, blinking hard.
“I know where she is,” he says, “I smell her on me. Me on her. It ain’t so bad. Just one, grand scheme-style. Just taking back something I lost, I need back. Don’t matter if it were a gift. Come on. Come on.”
We go to Alabama.
His last remaining grandchild lies on a plastic sheet, mouth open, breath wet, white skin bruised with age and needle. There are no less than three crosses balanced on the headboard of her medical bed. Knucklehead Nines stares at them a long time, most of the night.
Then, with dawn’s fingers probing the curtains, he goes to the IV bag and takes the plastic in tender hands. He bites it, first slow sips, then deeper, eyes closed, holding tight to the metal stand, until most of the fluid is gone. He moves to the tube, nicks it with one tooth, and the saline sprays from the bag in a neat arc and puddles on the floor. The machine screams once and he lays a hand on it and quiets it. Stares down at the open-mouthed thing on the bed. I step away from the wall and lock the door.
His hands shake. His eyes shake, his lungs. He sticks the tube in the side of his mouth like wheatgrass, half-chews on it while he thinks. Saline runs down his neck.
“Just a little blood,” he says. The voice is high, wheedling, like a child pleading with a parent. “Just a little. I got all the rest, so I can leave some of it, I can. It ain’t so bad, just taking as much as I gave, just as much as is mine. It ain’t even my name on the footboard. Some Winston or Whitman or whatever, huh? They drew a little cross… the pastor’s been here already. You smell that Bible on her? I don’t know what she confessed, if they do confession. I’ll tell you in a second.”
He stares at her for five minutes, dripping saline, stock-still.
“Just a drop, now,” he says, and seizes on her.
Her skin parts hard and gamy. Black eyes fly open, cateracts draining to the corners. Wasted muscles shock alive and yellow nails tear at Nines’s sequin jacket. It takes a violent strength to wrest that slow black blood from her jugular. His jaw works. His body heaves with it. The blood fills him and he is there, more there than ever he has been, his hands clenched on her sheets, his shoulders heaving. He darkens and strengthens to the roots of his hair. The bedframe cracks. “You,” the bastard cries, not knowing what she means – “You, you –” and then the word stops and the mummy mouth lets out a short, senseless scream, a dark and foul breath, and he takes it up in his chest, thrumming, moaning, until her heart is done and he rips himself away, leaving a torn white crater in her throat.
He stumbles back, panting, hiccuping, wiping bloody sweat from his scalp with the back of his hands. Whether it’s sobbing or moaning or laughter that comes from him, there’s no telling. “‘You,’” he coughs, the black blood on his teeth. “You think they told stories about me? Few months maybe I was a face at her grandmother’s window. I don’t recall!” He takes the IV stand in hand, clenches his four-and-a-half fingers and the metal crumples like foil. “Ain’t no more living blood of mine in all the world. Infanticide. Infanticide — oh, Lord, how long’d it take you?”
The room stinks. Her bowels vacate; the body leaks out all he could not take.
Suddenly the heavy, black eyes turn on me, the force of them enough to bruise ribs. “You. You. Get the fuck out. Get the fuck out of her place!”
He flings the IV stand at me. Clearly he still thinks it will go through me, so he gasps when I catch it and throw it aside. The fists of the nurses thud heavy on the door behind me. The sight of me standing there against that pounding shadow, taller, wider than ever he’s seen me, burns into Knucklehead Nines’s eye.
“All right,” he breathes, licking his death-wet lips. “We best get out of here, then, Bluebeard.”
This is chapter two of a three-chapter story. The final chapter will be posted on Halloween.