Sucker (III)
The last of his blood sustains him a long time.
The last of his blood sustains him a long time. He gets to thinking maybe this is it. Even when the hunger comes back he doesn't acknowledge it for a few weeks, wraps that empty spot in velvet and tries to pass it off to me.
"Sure you did it," he says, eyeing me, our noses close. "You had kids, I'll bet, lots of 'em, wouldn't be able to keep the ladies off all this… y'know, port cities, islands? Barmaids and captains' wives, fuckin' — tavern wenches — Ha! was it tavern wenches back then? That's nice."
The flickering dark of an empty matinee. Though he won't kiss my mouth he has taken to climbing in my lap, hands braced against my cheeks, and tracing my features for hours with eyes and hands and sometimes lips. In the filmlight he studies me with the focus of a girl studying a treasured doll and moves me that way too— sit here, open mouth, tilt head back, blink.
My features were not so distinct before, even that day in the church alley. He strokes my mustache, amazed at the vivid bristle, stares into my eyes and knows the color.
"Did you have a castle?" he asks. "Once you got rich on the whale oil, see, you had a castle — I'm making this up, mind, so as to keep my nerve — where you hired lawyers to come be your company and sent your daughters up to their beds — yes, daughters, you ain't a sons man — and drank them dry for weeks. You'd savor it." He sculpts the hollows of my eyes. "But you wouldn't sail off anywhere unless there was some real good lure. You'd settle. No excitement. That's where I'dcome in. I'd walk up through your big gates uninvited and challenge you to a game of cards. Then I'd play you under the table and you'd be huffy and want to kill me stone dead, right there. But you'd ask me to stay on account of my pretty face."
On the screen, a woman screams. He leans in and tastes my cheekbone, the wrinkles at the corner of my eye.
"And if I left you'd follow me, like you do now," he says. "And you'd try not to, 'cause of propriety, 'cause of conscience or 'cause you'd think I'm so damn annoying I ought not to live forever, but eventually you'd do it to me. Yeah, you would. You'd think about it all the time." He hums, then plants a swift kiss on my nose and tries to swing a leg off me. I grab his waist to keep him in place, and he stays, laughing. "But what would I be doing in Europe? Naw, that ain't how it happened."
He looks behind him. A gunfight flashing. He sticks his thumb in his mouth and chews it pensively.
"But you did do it," he says. "You musta did it too. To someone." He glances at me. "What was your… was there that little bar for you too?"
But before I could have given an answer at all, if I were so inclined, he waves the question out of the air and returns his attention to my face. My chin, my jaw, my teeth. Pricks his thumb on his canine and lets a little blood well from it. Then presses it to my lips, paints it slowly on my mouth and down my chin.
I watch his eyes. He sits back, smiling, and admires his handiwork until, though I try not to, I lick it off.
He laughs. Quick and wet, he swoops down and joins his open mouth to mine. I surge up to him, grab his shoulders and fix him to me — but as I start to bite he pulls away. I hold him but he struggles. "Naw, naw," he says, "take it as a gift." I let him go.
The movie ends, Nines's fingers drumming on mine.
It still takes him some time to realize what he's hungry for. He even tries to go back to the old way, again, always, the strippers and the travelling salesmen: “No, no, no,” he says each time, at the last moment, before the last pulse of the heart's blood, once with the victim already catatonic and draping himself against him. “I got a taste for fine dining now,” he says, dropping the bloody man, “shoo.”
Dreaming in the back of the night bus, there is an old white-bearded imam. A few stops in and a rabbi gets on, shuffles to his own seat, puts in a pair of bright orange earplugs, and also falls asleep.
Knucklehead Nines laughs and laughs. "Hey, ain't it the setup for a joke? Lover, guess the punchline."
But he makes no move. He goes quiet watching the old men's eyes twitch. Despite the shaking his cards never stop in his hands, the smooth, constant, liquid swish.
"Depending what you count as pigs' blood," he says pensively, "I could be a holy man."
He considers trying them. Wonders if it's holy blood he wants. He doesn't, though. He leaves the bus without talking to either, which is strange. Perhaps it's the first sign.
It takes a lot of bars, a lot of lonely nights, a lot of men and women left sleeping in motels. When he finally admits it to himself he doesn’t say it aloud, but I know. Because of how he tries to get away from me. How he dodges between subway cars, ducks into allies, loses himself in the crowds on the casino floors.
I find him on a street corner in the early morning, baring his teeth. “Ain’t no slop for this little piggy, now,” he snaps. “You disappointed? Wanna fatten me up, huh? You wanna bring me one? You got a fuckin’ thing for that, huh, Bluebeard?”
I shake my head.
He actually does get out of my sight. This is rare for him, now. I follow his smell to the roof of the building overlooking the train station. There he stands like a shadow, coat in the wind, sequins reflecting all the rainbows of city lights.
He glances back to me. His eyes gleam.
“I been around a long time." Slow. “A long time. Longer’n most, I’d suspect. Why do you think that is?”
He’s holding his hands out over the edge, over the tracks. One bare, in the other a hole-punched casino ace.
“How many people, to keep me around all this long, long time?” he asks. “How many of ‘em in me now? Gnawin’ at me, laughin’ at me. Oh, he’s a funny man. He is a funny little man.”
He rolls his head back round to look forward. A train pulls in, sleek, modern, black metal.
“Yeah,” Knucklehead Nines says. “And what do I do with it? I made it. I live the life I want. This is the fuckin' American dream. I made that all myself. The streets of this country are paved in gold, you know, and I walk them, on, and on, and on, and on.” His mouth splits. “Hah. ‘Cause what else is a man supposed to do? I ain’t no sucker.”
He brings the card edge down his wrist like a strike of flint. Blood wells from the tear, iridescent black in the city night. Drops break off and fall down, down, scatter on the gravel beneath the rails. I do not step forward.
“Back where it belongs,” he says, watching it fall. “Iron and dirt.”
There is a moment, then, where Knucklehead Nines seriously considers throwing himself off of the building. I see his eyes widen, the thrill in them as he rocks on the precipice, delighting that the thought has finally reached him, after all these years wandering at the edge of his mind, bribing the guards and hopping trains. New, exciting.
Then he flicks the card into the wind and shrugs and turns away. “Ain’t far enough. Lot of bruises for a gesture, huh?”
He jerks his chin to beckon me down the fire escape with him. I come.
“I can’t even die," he says conversationally, sinking hand over hand. "I’ll live forever. I don’t care who I eat. I been a cannibal all my life, this ain’t no different. What do I got to cry about? They got a statue of me going up in Vegas that’ll stand past when the pyramids fall.” He stops, turns out to the wind, hanging by one arm, and bellows, “YOU HEAR ME? I’M KNUCKLEHEAD NINES, AND I’M THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH!”
The trains bleat their answers far below.
It takes him a long time to find one. He has no idea where to start. Hungrier all the while, his skin fades, he won’t meet my eye. Now I’m helping him up stairs, buying his bus tickets. Knucklehead Ninces frequents cemeteries, museums. Spends a time circling the burlesque dancer in New Orleans, the veteran in Vicksburg. Charred rumor wafts toward him but each time he finds the fires cold, the bones long-buried and the spices spilled.They don’t frequent the casinos, any of them in the South but me, ‘cause they know he’s there. He has to give up the lights a while and hang around at used car dealerships, under bridges, park benches, draped in the bloody and tattered remains of his sequined suit.
"I thought there was more," he mutters in the civil war memorial, the huge dome turning his throat to pipe organ. "I only ever did it to one. But she was… I didn't like what it did to her none. Must've been half a dozen she did, mostly singers she liked, opera singers, see, and then whoever they wanted. Real obvious, cursed-haunted shit. Say, for a while some man was gonna make a TV show. Or, no, musta been a book…"
But there're no opera singers outside the mutterings of old patrons in their beds, half-remembered stories, wisps on the wind. Even the older ones, he starts to suspect, are gone to ground, or gone. It worries him. Most of them are only dead to fire or flood, I know, but I don't tell him.
"The dog, the dog," he says, his blue fingers tangling mine. "The bitch, we need her back. I liked her." Six weeks in those bloody basements. What, that dog with the scar, I heard she gone west, they tell us. I liked that beast, and her owner was a legend, they tell us. Immortal. Now there's a feisty one! Nines leans in kaleidoscopically but that last man has little more to say. "She bites," he explains. "I should hope so," says Nines.
West and west and the scent gets no stronger. He gets no thrill watching the dogs tear each other apart now. Doesn't jump, doesn't bet. His eyes still jutter around, flashing from side to side, face to face, but there's no smile now over the frenzy. His mouth hangs open and dark.
Then he looks up into the eye of a camera.
"What?" he asks the operator.
"They're streaming it," he tells him. "What do you mean, what, that's where the money comes from these days."
In front of them, a dog gets its throat torn out.
I never understood technology. To me even now the only source of light is flame. Nines is better, talked to people about sports and late night television, hailed cabs, played to the cameras for the crowds on the vegas strip. Still sometimes he'd mix himself up and ask about radio shows. There was a world and he had no interest in it. There bets were made alone, and he never bet alone.
But he wins a favor off a young man outside the grocery in the rain, and he tells the man to take out the device in his pocket and ask it some questions. He does this again and again.
When he goes up to people with this gamble in mind, it bears mentioning, he's seen. When he uses the drivers' license swindled off another man to get a library card, and plants himself at the old computer in his tattered sequins and rain-stained hat, his ringfingers make contact with the keys — he types one letter at a time. Doesn't fade so badly, now he's caught the scent.
On the screen a man begins to speak, and Nines presses his nose to it and breathes deep.
Alive and iron, it leads him to the cocktail party at the Florida winter nest of a rich man who sells the world the secret to wealth, through a trick of light and numbers. Of course his real secret is he cashed out before the Dust Bowl and then later bet on a bit apple, but he can't tell them that, no, he tells them it's because of genius.
The house is a mash of cubes and roman columns and overgrown because he can't keep a steady landscaper. Outside the garden wall Nines's skin flushes, breathing speeds, and he lifts himself to peer over the high fence through the autograph trees. “Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, you didn’t tell me what that smell does to you.”
He leaps the fence, swaggers up and offers a cigarette to the waiter leaning against the back door. The boy speaks only in Spanish, Nines only in English, but he keeps his eyes trained on the boy’s all that time, the embers glinting in his red tapetum. He’s understood.
After two minutes the boy slips out of his uniform, takes Nines’s flower pattern shirt, and goes off whistling into the dark hedges, bare-legged, barefoot.
Nines shrugs into the waiter's clothes, chewing the end of his cigarette. He stares into the service entrance, twitches running through his shoulders and brows. “This’s gonna be some work,” he says. “You wanna cut the bullshit and give me some of yours? Naw,” he refuses himself. “Naw, naw, fuck that, though.”
All that effort to get himself a disguise, and once he’s inside he beelines straight to the rich man. People drape around a blue-lit pool, sipping cocktails. Others talk on the balconies, or loom over screens on the couches inside. Nines catches shoulders in the crowd, half-knocks a few women into the water.
The rich man is in the hot tub, his arms around two young blond women. Once in front of him Nines stops short and drops his platter of horderves into the water.
“What the hell –” the rich man barks.
“No Hhablo Ing-lls,” Nines thick-American drawls, and hauls him onto land by the arm.
All the time, the rich man fights, unable to comprehend what Nines is, that such a smaller body can overpower him with such little effort. They receive little more than a few uninterested glances as Nines drags him through the crowd, then up the stairs and into the master bedroom.
Three women in domestic uniforms lay on the bed, brown-skinned, blue-lipped, still, but breathing. Nines scoffs in disgust.
He heaves the rich man to the floor, sets one boot on the center of his chest and holds him there. The realization finally dawns in his eyes.
“Please,” he says. “If there was a rule, I’m sorry I broke it. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell me anything. I don’t even know who he was. I’m so young. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Nines curls his lip. “You ain’t that young.”
“We’re of a kind, aren’t we?” the rich man begs. He wraps his pleading hands around Nines’s shoe. “Hey, man, look. I’ll follow you. I've been hiding for so long. I’ll do anything! Was it you? Were you him? I’ll do anything you want!”
He tries to kiss Nines’s ankle. Nines kicks his cheek hard enough it crunches.
“You don’t even know these ladies’ names, do you?” he demands, steps off and pitches toward the bed, pulling his hair. “Fuck, one of them could’ve been an artist! Fu-uck. Naw, he ain’t worth my time… he ain’t worth my first. I don’t want his shit in me, shit, naw, I might well throw it up…”
He turns back to the rich man, red-eyed. Sniffs. His throat bobs.
“I gotta think on this,” he murmurs, as if the words come from another person.
He stands, snaps the rope from one worker’s ankles. He has it round the rich man’s neck before he can even think to fight. Nines yanks the rope and the rich man chokes, clutches at the noose, but his eyes go soft with relief.
Nines looks up into my eyes. Then he hauls the rich man out his own window into the wet mosquitoed night.
The rich man's name is Eddie.
Biting his nails on the bus to Tampa: “How old are you? Is it age that makes you stronger, or number of kills, or your, uh, sire?”
Crunching mosquitoes outside an airboat shack: “What’s your name? What’s the name of… that thing?”
“Okay, where are we going?” again and again. “How long are you gonna keep me?”
He puts on a false slang to disguise his age. But it spills from him, his life story, without any lie or disguise, maybe for the first time. Whatever he remembers, he says, one long, rolling confessional as we ride north. He talks about the YouTube channel, how he once tasted the vitamins he sells in another man's blood — "But that was an accident," he says, "he looked like a girl from behind." Millions of people bought his book so they could sell it to their own friends. He did work hard on it, he says. He believes everything he wrote in there, tells us for a good long time how he would've made his millions even now, if he was born in this century.
Nines hates to listen, plugs his ears, only ever looks at Eddie out the corner of his eye. Yet his body tells another story. Like a flower to the sun, he leans, as Eddie talks. His nostrils flare and his skin grows warmer.
If Eddie catches him with his fingers out of his ears, then he’ll look at him fully, pupils wide, almost hypnotized. Though it makes him sweat, once he really meets Nines’s eye Eddie can’t stop himself. He talks about the money he stole from his father. He talks about the girl he raped at a party almost a century ago at Yale. He has always felt guilt for that.
Almost like Nines is dragging the confessions up his throat like hooks, compulsive, constant. They disgust Nines and fill him, press on the edges of his teeth – horror, jealousy, lust. He has a creeping sense, too, that if Eddie were apt to say all this to any stranger he would not have lived as long as he has. Must be fear. “'Sides, how’s he remember all that?” Nines asks, picking his nails with a three of hearts. “Man, I don’t remember my own name.”
Then he stops, the card wedged halfway under a fleck of keratin. He looks at me, eyes wide, dead, horrified.
“I,” he breathes. “I…” His breath comes quick, sharp, like a running dog’s. “You’ll never get it. You’ll never get that out of me til I’m dead and fucking gone, I swear to you right now.”
Eddie’s throat is white where the rope roughs him. He never tries to take it off except once, and that time Nines seizes him by the back of the neck and throws him halfway through the wall of a bus stop.
At first, he doesn’t risk leaving Eddie. He can slip any bind and Nines knows I won’t watch him in his stead. Eventually he realizes Eddie won’t leave anyway, same as he won’t cut the rope round his neck. The thought doesn’t occur. He's waving at CCTV cameras, letting men take pictures standing next to him with their arms crossed on the street. They don't ask about the rope.
No, no more big Florida houses and cocktail parties for Eddie – he knows Nines would be there if he ran.
So for a few days Nines takes to leaving him. Ties him to shower bars and bike racks. Walks the streets on his own, freer, lighter, goes to the pool bars where Eddie would stick out like a suit jacket among wifebeaters. Nines wets his fingers in whiskey, asks women to bet with him which side of his hand the drips will roll down.
Once I let him leave me. Eddie cocks his head and nods at me, false-casual, toying with the cuff of his suit jacket. “So you, what’s your deal?” he asks. “Seems like you follow him around. Are you another one like me? Or some kind of thrall or something? Are you, uh… what I become?”
It disturbs him how still I stand, how I don’t look at him while he speaks.
“I know you’re lovers," he says. "You can talk freely. I see how you touch each other. I don't care. It doesn't bother me.” He brushes off his jacket to show how much it doesn't bother him.
When I say nothing, he coughs. “Okay. Where else do you go, then? When you’re not here?”
Scratches his rope.
“Alright, bro,” he says. “Can you get me some blood?”
Tiring. I am with Nines, then, in a park. Nighttime, the pale flowers blooming on the vines. Where he walks, the streetlights dim. He notices me, smirks; his steps take on a lilting rhythm, like a man in a musical. He sits at a bench and takes out his pack of cards, begins laying them out on his knee.
"What you don't understand, Eddie — and this is what I'd say to him, mind, if I thought he ought to know…" He trails off. I don't recognize the game he's setting up. "This is ancient," he says, indicating the cards. "Roman Roulette… or Egyptian… I don't remember who invented it. One of them. Or the Aztecs. See, the secret is you have all these gods, and so does the other guy." Setting the cards down, he holds up both his hands with the thumb pinched to the fingers, puppets. The left talks along with him. "So you..." The right hand opens and seizes the left. "See?"
He folds the cards back into the deck and tucks it up his sleeve. He stands, turns to me, reaches out and dusts off my coat breast.
There are a few more walks in the park. But then one day Nines leaves Eddie and forgets where else he means to go. The waitresses won’t take his orders. Remembering those days before he killed his bastard scares the swagger out of him. He refuses to leave Eddie again, and hates him for it.
Tampa, Tallahassee, up to Atlanta. We coop up days since the rich man still burns in the sun. Knucklehead Nines paces the mold-streaked motel floors, casting glances at Eddie, whose cheeks too have turned ghoulish and sharp.
“I’m getting hungry, man,” Eddie says. “You're some kind of… monks. Reformists. I get it. I get it, I admire it, but look. That's not me. I get hangry. Okay? I can’t control myself. I've tried, I promise I have, but in the end it was better for everybody if I just —”
"I ain't trying to fix you, Eddie," Nines says. "I don’t want nobody else dyin’ on your account, you hear?"
"And I admire that," Eddie says. "That lifestlye…"
"Lifestyle?" Nines scoffs. "Look at us now. Before you, we were living the American dream."
“Please," Eddie''s on him. "Look, I know you must not get as hungry now. I know you're trying to help me. But you must remember. Just let me – that crackhead at the pool outside, see her? no one will miss –”
“I Gawd, this is really it,” Nines grabs Eddie by the shoulders and stares into his graying face. “Oh, I smell it coming like a coal train cross the desert, I tell you,” Nines says, fast and low, “I tell you, I got my neck out on the rail and I smell it coming like a cloud of black smoke. Shoo, like preacher’s blood.”
He turns his head, his eyes close, his nostrils flare. Then he slaps himself, reels back.
“P-please,” Eddie squeaks. “Please, just — just a drop, alright? Please. Please. Please – Sir? Sir? What about you, sir – Bluebeard?”
“Don’t you call him that,” Nines snaps. He leans back in to Eddie and Eddie cringes away, closing his eyes and hunching against the wall. “You ain’t worth what you already owe, alright?” Nines shovds a finger into his chest. “Listen to what I say to you, boy, and by God you might even wise up a bit, alright?”
“I don’t even know what you want from me!” Eddie says, and in a burst of strength manages to push him back.
Nines staggers and grins. “No?”
“You must know something!” A desperate note, louder than Eddie’s been in weeks. “There must be something, someone who knows about us, what we are. You – you must know what we are! You’ve been around so long –”
Nines seizes him by the jaw and slams him against the wall. “I know what you are,” he says, low and real close. “Eddie. You’re my dog. You want a muzzle, boy, that’ll shut you up? Beg me for it. I got no respect for your kind, bone-gnawing, devil boy, not a trace of man in you, not a speck of art.”
Eddie starts to say something. Nines slams him back again, nostrils flaring, teeth gleaming in the low light.
“Go on and bite me,” he says. “Go on. Try.”
Long, long silence.
“Please,” Eddie whispers. “I’m so hungry. It’s like it’s eating me from inside. It’s filling my teeth. I – sir, I’m dying. I’m actually dying.”
Nines leans back. Nods slow. “Yuuuuup.”
He hawks and spits a gob of red on the floor at Eddie’s feet. As he swaggers off I watch Eddie’s drawn face twist and consider whether he’s hungry enough to lick Nines’s blood-spit off the floor. He is.
We move on to Jackson. Nines tries to teach Eddie blackjack. Doesn’t have the head for it. At a gas station advertising SLOTS $5 DAIQUIRIS he wanders the aisles, crinkling the Hostess wrappers, shaking the peanut bags, til the cashier asks he need something? He buys cheap vodka soda and gives it to Eddie in the slot room, who starts drinking it, dribbling it out, drinking more. It's something. The cashier watches through the rubber door. He leaves Eddie winning twenties and goes outside to the pumps. He takes one out and flutters the trigger, letting a little tricker of gasoline spatter the concrete.
The broker comes out with a styrofoam daiquiri in his hand, sipping, gagging, sipping, gagging. “You get the cashier?” Nines calls. Eddie shakes his head. Nines goes and takes the rope up again and pulls him down for a pat on the salt-and-pepper head.
“Will you just tell me who you are?” Eddie asks. “Please?”
“Ha!” Nines spreads his hands to the corn fields, the cracked pavement, the SLOTS $5 DAIQUIRIS, the highway; before he can answer a tall pickup drives buy, shouts something indistinct thrkigh the open window, and Nines grins wide, wide, laughs like it’s carrying him up high to the crop duster above the fields and roars, “I’m Knucklehead Fuckin' Nines, the spirit of the South!" Whooping the phrase, kicking cans and crumpled soda bottles, he walks out into the middle of the street and whirls with the swerving cars as if in a dance.
The rich man looks at me, as if trying to catch a moment of solidarity between us as the audience to Knucklehead Nines. I meet his eye and smile. The daiquiri falls out of his hand, splatters red on the asphalt.
The next evening, he comes to Nines with an offer.
"Let's go west," he says, roped to a new radiator, pulling back the towel he'd draped over his head to hide from the daylight through the curtains. "There's a meetup there. I said I'd go."
No response.
"I haven't posted anything in weeks," Eddie tries. "People will start to miss me."
Nines curls his lip. "Nobody's missing you."
"You want the FBI on our tail?" He doesn't get it. "Besides, there'll be fans of a whole bunch of guys. Lot of young kids, alone, maybe their first time travelling. It'll be easy, even for you. Man, I swear I could eat an arena."
Nines scoffs. "I ain't following you."
"You ain't going anywhere, buddy!" Eddie bursts out. "We're in Mississippi. What are you doing?" He sits up, strains against the rope. "Fuck, man, let me get a car. Any car. I'm tired of busses. I'm tired of starving. I'm tired of trying to be better and I'm starting to think that you aren't so much of a saint as you pretend to be. Man, if you were a normal person, they'd never let you out in public. Look at you! They ought to put you on so many pills you forget your own name!"
He swallows, sits back. Nines watches him from the bed, head tilted like an owl.
"I ain't interested in you," Nines says slowly. "It ain't just that you ain't cooked. I don't want you. I don't like you. There ain't nothing to you, Edward, what I want in me."
Eddie stares up at him miserably. "Then what are you keeping me for?"
Nines's face goes blank. His brows creep slowly up his forehead.
"Right," he says, bemused. "Right… You're a betting man of a kind, right, Eddie? Well, I'm a better stock broker than you ever were, simply 'cause I set my mind to it. I ain't no sucker. Why play for a bad pot?" Nines clicks his teeth and glances at me. There's a spark in his eyes. "You take us to that conference, Eddie. I know how to mind my investments."
Eddie's relief carries him through the next night. Gamy and worn, he makes it to the rental car facility. Throwing his silver card down on the desk, nearly leaving it behind: "I don't care how much it costs, man. Anything. I'll take anything."
This doesn't inspire the worker to trust Eddie with a car. Nines, savvy, lifts Eddie's phone from his pocket and shows the man a video of Eddie talking in his three-Tesla garage — and then he's amenable.
As we're leaving, Nines stops and looks back. "Hey," he tells the rental car salesman, tapping his desk with his right ringfinger stump. "You think I'm kinda funny-lookin'?"
The guy swallows. "Y-yeah."
"I'm Knucklehead Nines," says Knucklehead Nines. "This is Eddie, from YouTube. And we're going west to a convention to kill a whole lot of people."
He smiles, raps once on the desk, and walks away. The guy stares after him.
Eddie chases the sunset in a sleek gray sedan. Nines refuses shotgun but sprawls across the back, his head in my lap. The whole time, Eddie's talking — crypto, politics, about the sons he wanted and never had — and Nines has his ears covered. When his eyes close he almost looks asleep, his black hair mussed across my thigh.
"What's it for, Eddie?" Nines interrupts Eddie, just for the sake of interrupting. "This great big U. S. of A."
"For?" Eddie asks. "Like, for a person? Or the way a machine is for something?"
"No, no, no. Is it for the games? For money? For dog fights? For moving coal from one place to another? For killing whales? The people, Eddie, for the people… what are the people for?"
"For us?" Eddie chuckles. "Well, you know what they're for."
"That's still not my meaning." Nines frowns. "Or maybe it is."
"What do they favor, that's what you mean," Eddie says. "Hm. Well, really, all a man's in favor of is himself." He drums on the steering wheel. "They do some things out of kindness, they say, but really it's exchange. I give you this gift, so it'll come back around to me. They're — feudal, in a way. People like that. They want that. They want to give to someone who has so much more than them that the return of that gift is… inconsequential, rote. It's like — the farmer gives his lord ten percent of his acre's worth of potatoes, and in exchange the lord protects his life and family — that's not an equivalent exchange. But the peasant loves it. He seeks it out. Because he feels like he's the one who's decides that it happens."
Nines turns his face into my thigh. "Jesus fuck," he says, muffled.
During the days, Eddie pulls over and shuts himself in the trunk. He's not ungrateful, he assures us, but he's had his fill of hotels, if that's alright. With the sound of the door slamming over him, Nines shifts around and says, "How did that come from me?"
He gets up, as he gets up each dawn, and starts walking through the sun. He flinches, as he flinches every time. He finds the nearest gas station — five miles away, this time — and buys a pack of cards, and to the cashier he says, "I'm Knucklehead Nines, pool shark, gambler, the guy who bet on the losing dog. I'm headed west, with Eddie from YouTube, to a convention."
Glassy-eyed, they nod.
Once we reach the edge of the city, it still takes almost a full night to get to our destination. Long ago it would've taken a week, Nines stopping in every restaurant, tipping every dancer, knowing every bartender. Now he watches the signs roll by impassive, the barest crease between his brows.
At the convention center, projecting itself with the blank concrete authority of a Roman statehouse, nobody even recognizes Nines, but they recognize Eddie.
"Man, where have you been!" cry endless friends as they gravitate toward him, touching him, clapping his shoulders, tweaking his cap. "Let's take a photo. Let's talk. Have a drink! I never see you around anymore. Always at night, it's like you're a cryptid. What happened to your podcast? What's with the rope?"
Eddie smiles. His cheeks flush. The darkness softens beneath his eyes, the sharpness wanes; even his beard seems fuller. He answers the questions, takes the pictures, puts on the lanyard, starts to joke about the rope, waggling its end and winking.
Nines is his shadow. No one pays him any attention in his tattered suit and his figeting hands, save to glance at him and turn away, mouth pressed flat, searching idly for the security guards.
Eddie's found a group of men who shave their beards in the same way as him. "Guys, I want to do a panel," he says, half-drunk and not on beer. "Can I do a panel?"
"Yes, yes," they all say. They're unsure who has agreed, who has given up his months-planned spot. But the next night in the latest slot of the day, Eddie stands at the front of a small room with a microphone in his hand. There are two dozen people here enraptured. Half of them do not know him. But they have come.
When he speaks it is a string of nonsense words: he says, "I've been with a guy called Knucklehead Nines. I've got something very exciting going on. Look at this rope. It's an awesome rope. At least, I think it's a good rope."
Women laugh. Men nod. Eddie waves the rope end around like a limp little snake. And then he glances at Knucklehead Nines, and Nines quietly shuts the conference room doors.
It startles Knucklehead Nines in a way it does not startle me. At the start he doesn't know how to be among the lights, the walls, the motion. He stands in the way of a spray of carotid blood, coughs and wrinkles his nose, ruined face and shirt. He retreats to the wall, dodging bodies and chairs. Blinking rapidly, he looks at his own hands, lets the card deck fall clumsily from his sleeve.
Shuffles.
Shuffles.
Shuffles.
For a moment, with the sound, the familiar feel, he understands it. For a moment he becomes the room, as he used to be the casinos, the bars, the laughter at two tables, the lights, the chances, the music, the human smell. It's enough to get him thinking again.
He's in the corner, his eyes two-stepping around the room, but not seeing the blood — he's looking at the windows, the doors. He's tasting the wind, crossing his fingers. "Come on. Come on," he says, "I got this bet going…"
But in time the movement stops and the lights go off and the thing he waited for has not come.
Eddie's glutted in the center of the room. Nines stares at him. His hand twitches forward, then back. "Still time," he murmurs.
He goes to Eddie, and Eddie looks up at him. The hunter's glass slowly fades from Eddie's eyes, and he rolls his head back and starts to laugh.
"Look at this!" he says, flinging his arms out to the field of organs around him, this reeking temple. "This is what I meant!" He stares into Nines's pin-fixed eyes. "You get it," he says. "I know you do."
"Get up," Nines says.
Eddie's smile dims, only a little. As if on a string, he draws himself to his feet. He's taller, broader, reddened in the teeth and the flesh. He looks down on Nines with a light in his eyes as if he has only just realized he can look down on him, only just noticed the relation of their bodies.
"This is my temple," Eddie says. "There is no guilt in it."
His hand flashes out, seizes Nines by the chin. Forces his head side to side.
"Look. Look," he says. "Have you ever done anything like this, Knucklehead Nines? Have you ever reached?" Nines sighs. Eddie shakes his head. "No. No, of course not. You're a small man, Knucklehead Nines. You're not a monk, you're just crazy." His fingers tighten on Nines's jaw, and he lifts, his muscles bulging, pounding, with all the life that has filled him. "You're so light," Eddie says, smiling wide, his lips bulging over his long, distended teeth. "You're not a vampire, you're a shade."
"Oh, Ed-ddie," Nines sighs, rolling his head back. "All that stuff I told you in the park, and you think we're vampires?"
Eddie's hand would've spasmed in confusion and his nails would've cut Nines, not enough to kill him, enough to bleed, but before it does I am there, I have the rope, and Eddie is choking backward and Nines falls heavily to his feet.
Knucklehead Nines looks at me. "A motel," he says, "should be. Fuck if I care which." He appends another pet name for me, one he has not used before: "Janus."
Eddie strains toward the sounds of people as we leave the bloodly little room but when we reach the building doors he's humbled. "But it's light out," he says. "Uh. Oh, please, it's light out." He laughs, high in his mouth. "Please, I didn't mean — I can do better, I didn't mean —"
Nines goes through the doors and I haul Eddie after him. He comes to the light howling and covered in blood; raises his hands to shield himself and cries and bares his fangs and all the while thinks he is dying, never realizes it is just the sun on skin. When I cast him into the roach-streaked motel room out of the sun he's missed for a hundred years, he weeps and tries to kiss my shoe.
Nines has none of that. With disgusted little toe-taps he herds Eddie out of our way and drags me by the hand into the bathroom and closes the door.
"I'm sorry," Eddie bays, like an abandoned dog. "I'm sorry, I'll never do it again. I'm guilty, I feel the guilt now. You gotta believe me. I'll tie myself up. I'll cut off my fingers, I swear, just don't — don't —"
Nines shoves a towel under the door to muffle his words. Then he bends his knees and falls slowly forward, and rests his head against the moldy door, and closes his eyes.
“I’m stalling,” he says, so much quieter than he was not long ago, when all the world's dice were cast on the tips of his fingers. “Maybe I wasn't thinking at all back then. But I think I went back out in the sun not ‘cause I knew it wouldn’t hurt me no more but because I wanted to feel it try. Didn’t know before I tried. I took the warmth and the gift back and I didn’t care for it. I hate it, walking out there. I got used to the nights. I Gawd, I know I’m stalling.”
He looks up at me. Crow-dark eyes, thin, chapped lips.
“I don’t like feelin’ my back’s in a corner, you know, lover. I don’t like playing a stacked deck, for me or the dealer, you know? I ain’t no sucker.”
He sighs, presses his forehead into the door. Hits it. Then lays his palm flat against it.
“Fuck, I fucking hate this guy, and I like her,” he says. “You sure it can’t be anyone else? Someone I don't give two shits about? Naw. Never could be and won’t. Hell. She'll get something out of it that I won't, at least. For a minute. She doesn't have an ounce of him in her already; I do.” His mouth twitches and twists, tounge probing his aching teeth. "And if it doesn't work — well. Same difference in the end. All goes to the same place."
His face screws up. I lean down, I touch his cheek. My thumb sweeps away a bloody tear.
His dark hair, matted and uncovered. His face, streaked and gray. His jacket, ripped and stained and manged of its sequins. All these years, he has pulled me. Like watching a star implode.
Outside, in the main room, a yelp — a scuffle, an intake of breath. Then a wet half-silence. Nines lets it drag for a few moments, out of politeness, before he shrugs the threadbare jacket off his shoulders, hangs it on my hands, and pushes through the door.
I remain in the bathroom, standing near the blank mirror. I have a respect for such things and leave them private.
Still I hear her say: "At least I am no longer hungry."
"That's good to hear," he says, "I hope."
"If I am to live, I will play to win," she says. "And if not, then you will finally know."
"Know what?"
"How to lose."
The sound of Eddie's body falling limply to the floor. The sound of her standing, brushing herself off. Paws slamming, fast, on the dusty carpet — a strike, a thud, a bite.
The low, wet lap, lap, lap.
When I come out he's shuddering atop the body of the big black dog. Her huge black paws still twitch.His hands are buried in the fur of her neck, his spine jolts with every pull of blood. I like to see him this way, in these moments, but I turn aside.
Her breaths slow, slow, stop. A final huff. And she is still.
He breathes in deeply, catching her air in his nose. He breathes out. He braces his fists on his legs as his eyes unroll, and, slowly, he sits back. He stares down at her, the scant drops of blood on the carpet. His breathing returns to normal. His eyes unglaze. Flushed, veins pounding. I can hear it. My nostrils flare, half-remembering that same hot pump. He smells full, sweaty, virile – if virile were such a thing as we can be.
He presses his thumbnails into his ringfinger stumps until they go white, trying to master himself. “You know, this is some bull-shit,” he says, his voice thick and strained. "It weren't nothing, what she was holding out on me. Careful as me, sadder, too, didn't know nothing. She scared me before, you believe that? Really did. Now it was easy." He closes his eyes. "She knew I'd be here with him, I made sure of that. I bet she would come anyway… can you believe I did that?"
His eyes flick open. He gets to his feet. He steps toward me, pupils flashing, anguished red. “Here I’ve been, spitting myself out for you," he says, jabbing a finger in my face. "I been turning over the fire, long as I’ve known you, muchlonger than that, and what do I get? What do I get? Huh, Ishmael, what?"
His hands fumble for the iridescent tie at his throat stained with a single ruby of blood, tears and flings it away, stumbles forward. “There I was thinking I was hunting you. Man, am I sucker? Am I a whale?” His voice spikes upward, breaking like a crow’s call: “Worse, is it a service? You gonna tell yourself you do it on our behalf? I won't rest at peace, man! I got too many, too much death on me to die! …I know you smell it on me."
His eyes fix on me halfway through unbuttoning his collar. His nostrils swell. For the first time he smells me.
"Gawd, what was she? Was it the men what worshipped her or the dogs? I see you got teeth now,” he says. "You got breath in you now I can feel on me from here. Cheat. Liar. Fuck, are you the reaperman?” He rips off his shirt and throws it to the ground. “And I done fell in love with you! God damn!”
I take one step toward him. All his strings snap at once. He thuds to his knees on the carpet, bloody, half-naked. I freeze. He falls toward me until his head rests against my shin, heavy and hard.
Dark, crow-feather hair, spreading from a whorl at his scalp. He turns down and sinks sideways, presses his face into my trouser leg.
“It hasn't been so bad," he murmurs. I feel his lips moving through the fabric. "I lived the dream for a while."
He sighs, brushes his cheek down my shin.
"They liked me. I Gawd, they loved me. I met so many beautiful people. I felt it in my soul. I was the pulse — I had my fingers on it." He drags his cheek on me, catlike, feeling the scratch of the fabric on his face, the muscle. "I was singing. I was dancing round like a cat's cradle. I loved people from Carolina to the canyon. Lettin' them kiss my fingers, bite me til I bled. See, I always thought something was mine if I could get my blood all over it." He closes his eyes and turns his head. "I did love them. All of them. Now I only…"
One hand sculpts up my leg, probes the back of my knee. The other comes down to my boot, drags fingernails over the leather. “It’s that I ain’t got any more secrets to tell you," he says, a choked, tiny voice. "Not really. There ain’t nothing more to see. This is the life I lead, this is how I’d do it the rest of my days, if I could. Gawd, what a sad little thing.”
He hunches down, pulls up the leg of my trouser and kisses my ankle, deeply, open-mouthed, wetting all the course hairs on his tongue.
He pulls back and says nummbly, “You even got a taste now."
I reach down, touch his chin, just the barest brush of fingers, and bring him up to stand before me. I watch him, the bob of his throat; the fluttering carotid; the slide of blood from his head down his body, down his neck, his bare, skinny chest, between his ribs. His black, liquid eyes, a doe's.
I open my mouth.
Nines steps back instinctively, breathing in. I grab his waist and force him closer. It's a hard grip, bruising, and could be much harder, but he doesn't fight. Though every inch of him strains backward, he shuffles closer, closing his eyes, and I arc over him and sink my teeth into his neck.
It floods me.
"Fuck, that hurts," Nines says tremulously. "Fuck."
The heat of it. Pulsing, pushing — the gush, forcing itself into my mouth, down my throat, filling my belly, the warmth aching and bursting outward — I seize him by the small of the back, fall upon him, crush him to me. His hands come up to grip my convulsing shoulders, dig into my coat and deeper and into my bones, tight with agony.
"God damn you," he gasps. "God dammit, how many — how many others? How many like me? You must've had a dry spell, but — ah — was it all — fuck, but am I just a name to you? Do you even know my name, you even understood a word I said?"
His knees give out. His weight falls on my arms, and I sink with him, to the floor, looming over him and pressing him down, bending him backwards, just to be closer to the heat, the heart, that fills me — it strums me, deep in my chest. I groan.
"You better know my name," he hisses, holding me so tight my coat rips around his fingers. "It's a good fucking name. I'm famous. I'm a dog. I ain't just a body, you bastard, you fucking bastard, I ain't a demon, I ain't a mark. And I ain't. no. goddamned. sucker." He heaves a big breath. "I'm Knucklehead Nines, the spirit of the goddamned South."
He's gray, starting to spasm. His body heaves with mine, every muscle in my core locking, seizing, as I strain to pull it all from him. Sounds are forcdd out of me, pained, animal grunts. He cringes. "Hush…"
With every pulse his grip on me grows weaker, his fingers slowly twitching out of my coat. Jerkily, he drags his hands up my back, my shoulders, the nape of my neck. As his shoulders hit the carpet they come to rest in my hair, tangling there, pulling, and then gentling.
He tucks me to him. He strokes my hair. "Okay," he says. "Okay."
He shushes me. Shh-hh-hh, the pulsing, the swallowing, the breath. No language serves. And my own sounds join it, weave into that rhythm, so that it seems the sound comes from both of us.
Then he is finally quiet.
I pull back from him. His skin is ash, yet fuller somehow. The drawn, hungry look has drained from his face; softened, the hollows beneath his eyes and the juts of his throat. The body, no longer wasted but only the lean, the sun-kissed, underfed workman. The tongue stilled, unknown.
For a time I sit there looking down at him, warm with the flush of the take. All he has said, all he has forgot — it swirls, settles. I feel him in me. Awakening truths long-buried, as all true things tend to do.
I lower myself until my mouth is on his ear, and I whisper to him my name.
Then I push myself to my feet and lean over the corpse of Knucklehead Nines, and cough and spit a gob of blood onto him. This is not an insult. Knucklehead Nines's body was full of all the blood he ever drank; it fills me, and I taste every drop as it passes through his lips, every woman, every man, every artist, every dog. I pass a portion back to him. It is a gift.
Bu the time I leave him the smell is already blooming from his throat. His muscles go rigid and his bones begin to crack, caught up by their centuries of use. His body leaks all the fluids that are not blood. The droplets bead,fall and stain the carpet below him: water from the eyes, bile from the lips, and clear, sour lymph from the stubs of his ringfingers.