Vampires Never Get Old, page 3
“It’s the Blood River Boys’ song,” I say, voice high with excitement. “The one we were just talking about!” I’d never heard it before, but it had to be it. Since when did Landry put that on the jukebox?
A thrill rolls down my spine as the fiddle joins the melody with a minor note, and I’m not sure if it’s the music or something else that’s making the room feel colder and the night darker out there beyond the thin windowpanes.
“I didn’t pick this!” Neveah complains. She slams her hand against the player again. “It just started on its own.” She shoots me a suspicious glare. “If this is some kind of sick joke, Lukas…”
“He said, ‘Wrath is my birthright and woe my first swaddling, blood for my feast as I take what is owed … The harvest is coming, and we reap what’s been sowed.’”
“I didn’t do it!” I protest, laughing. “You did it. If anyone’s playing around, it’s you.”
“Well, you make it stop!” Her voice rises, panicky, and I realize she’s serious. I drop the mop, letting it clatter to the floor, and take three quick steps so I’m close enough to reach around the back of the jukebox and hit the emergency OFF button.
For a minute I think it’s not going to shut off, like we’re in some horror movie and the thing has a life of its own, but sure enough, the machine cuts off, just like it’s supposed to.
Silences rushes in. The lights behind the counter dip with the electrical surge, the neon signs in the windows blink off and then power back on with a high-pitched whine. And something out in the night howls.
My skin prickles as a solid rush of fear rolls up my back. Neveah and I exchange a look.
“We are never letting Brandon tell us scary stories again,” she says, nervously rubbing her hands up her arms.
“Sure thing,” I say, absently, eyes drawn out into the night, searching. But for what, and why exactly, I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling …
Neveah shudders like it’s cold. “I just told you that if you sing the song, those freaks are supposed to appear, and then you play it? Don’t you think that’s a little much?”
“I told you I didn’t do it.”
“Well, somebody did!”
A shadow passes by the window. Something’s out there, moving through the parking lot. Probably a raccoon or a skunk. But bigger.
“Probably Brandon,” Neveah mutters.
“In the parking lot?”
“What? No. It was probably Brandon who set up the song.” She peers out the big front windows. “What do you mean ‘in the parking lot’?”
“Nothing. Just thought I saw animals in the trash.” Maybe it was Brandon. Scaring the shit out of us would be his idea of fun. But still. How would he have set it up beforehand? And Landry would never go for that sort of thing. She’s pretty uptight about the jukebox.
“I want to go home,” Neveah says, thrusting her hands in her hoodie pockets. “This is all too much.”
I sigh. I want to go home, too. The night feels sour now, as if the joke’s on us and we’re not in on it.
She pulls her phone out of her pocket, swipes it on, and types furiously. “Where is Brandon? I knew he should have waited for my shift to end.”
“I can give you a ride.” Even as I say it, I’m wincing. Maybe it’s too much, too presumptuous. Like I said, we’re not really friends.
She glances up, and I can see the calculations run across her face: surprise, suspicion, hesitation, and then all that finally loses to her desire to get out of here as soon as possible.
“Okay, sure. Why not.”
I grin, strangely relieved. Maybe being rejected for offering her a ride home would have hurt more than I want to admit. It’s not that I like Neveah that way. I don’t like any girls that way. She knows that. But I’m the town loser. Nobody wants to spend too much time with a loser. It might rub off.
She bends and picks up the mop where I dropped it, hands it back to me. I gesture toward the rag and spray bottle on the counter. “It’ll be faster if you help.”
She exhales disapprovingly but slouches over to the counter, grabs the cleaning supplies, and gets to work. I start mopping, and we clean in silence, neither of us much wanting to try the jukebox again. But I can’t get that song out of my head, and before I know it, we’re both humming it.
We realize it at the same time and stop. Neither of us look up, an unspoken agreement to pretend like that didn’t just happen, but the horror still lingers on my skin, in the faster-than-normal beat of my heart.
Around midnight, we call it good enough. Neveah helps me put away the supplies, and I let her out the door first, locking up behind her. I pause in the parking lot, eyes scanning for the shadow of movement I saw earlier, but there’s nothing there. I tell myself it was probably just a raccoon, like I thought.
* * *
My old car putters through the empty streets of Blood River. I wouldn’t even own a car if I had a choice, but I need a car to get my mom to her weekly doctor appointments at the hospital in the next town over. That’s also why I got the job at Landry’s. My paycheck, what little there is of it, goes into paying off this piece of junk, and anything left over goes to Mom’s medical bills.
Blood River isn’t very big. About four square miles of gridded streets. We’re two dozen miles from the main highway. It’s one of those towns that was important back when the railroad ran through here and the grain silos were full, but now, with the big interstates and airplanes and nobody growing grain much anymore, people don’t come here. Blood River is what some folks would call a dying town. I mean, there’s the diner, and the high school football games are pretty popular on Friday nights, and there are a few places trying to draw in tourists for white water rafting or fly-fishing in the nearby river, but the only thing we’re really famous for, what gave the place its name, is a massacre.
Not so popular with tourists.
We pass the old graveyard and trail through the empty streets, past overgrown yards and single-story bungalows with paint peeling from the planked sides. I take the corner Neveah tells me to and we roll up to a trailer on blocks and a smattering of dead cars parked haphazard in the gravel out front.
“This is me,” she says.
I pull over. We haven’t said much the whole ride.
She opens the passenger-side door. The little light in the ceiling goes on, and I can see her face. Her skin is a peachy white, pretty much the opposite of my brown skin, and her hair is a bottle yellow, showing darker at the roots. Her nails are long and bright blue, little rhinestones embedded on the tips. She pauses, one blue-jeaned leg sticking out, the rest of her body still in the car. She looks over at me, bottom lip caught between her teeth, hazel eyes too big.
“What is it?” I ask, wary.
“Thanks for the ride,” she says. “I know people give you a lot of shit in town for being—”
“Native?”
“Gay.”
We both flush hot and embarrassed. The silence stretches like another lonely block of this trash heap town.
“I’m sorry about your eye,” she says in a rush.
My heart speeds up a little, but I frown like I’m not following. “How do you mean?”
“How Jason Winters beat the crap out of you, how he and the Toad Twins always beat the crap out of you. How that’s the reason you never go to school. Well, that and your mom being sick.”
I stare at her blankly, willing her to shut the hell up.
“I figure that’s why you like the Blood River Boys story so much. It’s like a fantasy, right? The idea of those Boys coming to rescue you from your shitty life in this shitty town.”
My face heats up, the flush creeping down my neck. “My being interested in the Blood River Boys has nothing to do with any of that,” I lie flatly. “I just like a good story.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Because if it were me…”
And I know she is not going to take the hint. “Good night, Neveah,” I say, reaching over and pushing her door open a little wider.
She frowns.
“Good night!” I repeat.
She leans back into the car and reaches for my arm. I shrink back. It’s an automatic response, not personal, but it leaves her hand hovering in the air. The overhead light catches in the rhinestones on her nails. She pulls her arm back and says, “I am trying to be nice to you. Trying to be sympathetic.”
“Keep it,” I say harshly, and even as the words leave my mouth, I regret them. But I don’t know what her kind of sympathetic means. It smells like white girl pity to me, and I don’t want Neveah’s pity. I throw a meaningful glance at her trailer, the beaters in her driveway. You’re not better than me, I say, without saying a thing. Just look around.
Her faces twists up, and my stomach slips to my feet like a deadweight. I’m being a jerk and I know it, but I won’t take it back.
She nods once and slides out of the car. Closes the door, and the overhead light goes off, casting me into the darkness.
Shame blankets me and I groan, rubbing a hand over my face. Why did I do that? No wonder I don’t have any friends. No wonder Jason Winters likes to kick in my face. I’m kind of an asshole.
I wait for her to walk to her door, and once she’s inside, I pull out, gravel rolling under my wheels. I’m halfway down the road, trying desperately to not think about what Neveah said, when I realize I’m humming that song again. The Blood River Boys ballad.
Later, after it is all over, I’ll wonder if things would have turned out different if I’d said something. Apologized for being a dick, admitted what I wanted and why the Boys fascinated me, how I felt about my mom and everything. Maybe Neveah could have said something, conjured some words or a warm touch that would have changed things. But I didn’t, and she didn’t, and things went the way they did in our dying town named after a massacre.
* * *
The next morning I catch myself singing the Blood River Boys song in the shower. And later as I’m boiling eggs for breakfast. And again when I’m prepping Mom’s medications for the day, laying them out in their little individual bowls so she doesn’t have to guess the dosage.
And I know I’ve got to face a hard fact. Neveah may not believe in the Blood River Boys, but I do. I believe in them with my whole heart. A heart that feels like it’s slowly crumbling to dust in my chest, a heart so damaged that I sometimes feel like it’s a wonder it pumps at all.
Back last year I figure my heart was normal enough for someone my age. But then my cousin Wallace died of a drug overdose, and my friend Rocky moved away, back to his dad’s place in the city, and then, just as the school year started, Mom got sick. At first no one believed Mom’s illness was serious, least of all me, but by October she was in and out of the hospital and the doctors were giving her less and less time and then Mom sat me down one night after she had been especially bad, wheezing and coughing through dinner, and told me the truth. She wasn’t getting better. In fact, she was getting worse. “This will be our last Christmas together,” she said, point-blank, just like that. “You’ll be eighteen soon enough. Better get used to being on your own.”
But the thing is, I don’t want to be on my own. Some kids would, I know. They’d see it as independence. Freedom. And it’s not like I don’t want that one day, maybe? Just not this year. I mean, I already lost Wallace and Rocky and now it’s going to be Mom. And I think that if I’m not careful, I’m going to lose myself next.
* * *
“Hey, Landry,” I ask, as I lay bacon on the flat grill. “When’d you put that Blood River Boys song on the juke?”
Landry’s doing the books in her office, but she’s got the door open so she can keep an eye on things, namely me. The cook called in sick, so I’m stuck covering the dinner shift in the kitchen. The diner is so small that I do a bit of everything. Janitor, cook, server. I don’t mind. It means more money in my pocket come payday and more meds for my mom, and most people’s tastes are simple around here. As long as I can break eggs and dress a burger, I’m good.
“What song?” Landry says, decades of cigarette smoke turning her voice to a grumble. “I ain’t changed a song on that box since before Ronald Reagan was president.”
“No?” I shrug and grab the next waiting ticket. “Maybe I just never saw it. So that means something’s wrong with the juke. Neveah was trying to play her song last night and the wires got crossed. Played the wrong song.”
Landry gave a noncommittal grunt. I busy myself with the order and, once it’s done, slide the plate through the window for the server to pick up. I ring the bell, and Fiona appears, all smiles. She takes the plate and disappears.
I turn to retrieve the next order and Landry’s right there, inches from my face. I yelp in surprise, jumping back a half mile. “Jesus, Landry, don’t sneak up on me like that!”
She peers in close. I can see the wrinkles on her face, the rheum that covers her left eye. “That song’s only appeared once on that jukebox, and that was before the Finley boy went missing. They say he called it up, and so it came.” She narrows her eyes. “You got a hankering to listen to that song?” she asks, voice hard. “Bad things happen to boys who sing that song.”
“No,” I say automatically. “I was just telling you what happened. I-I don’t want to…” I brush my hands together, nervous. “I didn’t sing that song.”
She peers at me some more. “Okay.” And then she shuffles back to her office.
“Why do you have it on the juke if you don’t want anyone singing it,” I mutter, and if she hears me, she ignores me.
* * *
I’m closing again, and this time Brandon’s on time to pick up Neveah.
“She’s in the bathroom,” I say, as I unlock the door to let him in to wait.
He answers with a grunt that could mean anything. He was okay the other night when he was talking about the Boys, but now he barely acknowledges me. Like I said, nobody wants to spend too much time with a loser. But what Landry said is on my mind, so I ask.
“You ever hear of somebody named Finley?” I ask, trying to keep my voice neutral.
He’s got a wad of tobacco in his mouth, and he eyes me, jaw working like a cow chewing cud. “Dru Finley?”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
“Everybody knows about Dru Finley. He used to live here, back in the eighties. Big baseball star. Everyone thought he was going to make it to the major leagues. Then supposedly he snaps one night and kills his mother, father, two sisters, and a little brother, but they never find him or a body. Just his family, exsanguinated. Do you know what that means?”
I shake my head.
“Bloodless,” he whispers. “Someone drained all their blood.”
“How’d that happen?” I say, my voice breathy.
“Who knows? But the bigger question is what happened to Dru? Maybe he ran when the killers came and never looked back. Maybe he got kidnapped. Nobody knows.” He widens his eyes theatrically. “Why do you want to know?”
“No reason. Someone mentioned him today.”
“Yeah, well, whatever happened, at least he got out of this shit town, right?” He chuckles at his own tasteless joke.
Neveah hustles out from the bathroom. “Ready?” she asks Brandon without even looking my way. I guess she hasn’t forgiven me for being rude the night before. Brandon kind of gives me a nod and then he’s following his sister out the door.
Once their car is gone, I lock the door again.
The jukebox glows in the corner.
I walk over and stare at the song selections. My heart is thumping, loud in my ears like a warning bell, but I’ve been thinking about it all day. I have to know.
My guess is that it doesn’t matter what button I push, that they’ll all do the same thing. So I close my eyes and reach out a hand. Press a random button and wait.
Fiddle, drums, and banjo. And then that voice. “As I walked by the river, the moon my companion, I spied a young fellow, an amiable lad…”
And this time, I listen. The whole way through. And when it’s done, I play it again, and this time I mouth the words, remember the phrases, the rhyme and rhythm of it. And on the third time, I sing.
I let the words come bubbling from my throat, trickling across my tongue and past my lips, and once I’ve started, they feel like a flood, like the Blood River itself, a force unstoppable and powerful and ancient. And I put everything into it. All the stuff I’ve been feeling about being alone, the injustice of Jason and his friends bullying me, my mom dying, every scared part of me. My crumbling, dusty heart. And I let it all go.
When it’s over I feel wrung out. I hobble over and collapse in the nearest booth, panting. Wishing for a cold glass of water, but I’m too tired to walk over and get one.
And I wait.
And … nothing.
I wait thirty minutes, and then thirty minutes more, and there’s no movement in the parking lot, no dimming lights, no chill. Just me and some scary stories and my wretchedness. I press my cheek against the cool Formica and let the tears leak from my eyes. After a while, I sit up and use my cleaning rag to wipe the tears away.
I get up, my bones feeling a thousand years old. Make it to the car. Drive the empty streets home. Check in on my mom.
I collapse into bed, no different than I was when I started this awful day.
* * *
He comes the next day. I’m back at Landry’s Diner. It’s late, a half hour until closing, when I notice him. He’s in the booth farthest from the door, the four-seater by the jukebox where I’d wept like a little kid the night before. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat, which is what I spot first, and a dark denim jacket. He’s got boots on, not unusual around these parts, and they’re propped up on the opposite seat. They’re black, too, and the leather catches the light and makes them gleam.
The brim of his hat is pulled down to cover his face, so all I catch is a sliver of pale skin and a slice of easy grin as I approach him.
