“I’m looking at the river, but I’m thinking of the sea.”
Something like that. I AM looking at a river right now. And my thoughts are as far-ranging as the sea.
It’s a bright clear night in early September, about three in the morning or so. The writing wasn’t coming tonight. Well it was coming but it all seemed so obvious and stilted once it was down on the page. Sometimes I really wish I was a painter instead of a writer, because welding a brush seems like a more immediate way to get one’s feelings down and preserve them for a time. Or a musician. Charlie “Bird” Parker improvising long, fluid solos in some madhouse club.
The mechanics of writing, of language, sometimes just seem like one more jail cell in the world.
So I decided to quit for the night. Take a walk and try to clear my head.
It’s been a week now since I fed off of Marie. Last night, and still with some reluctance, I finally got rid of her body, burned the flesh and the bones away until there was nothing left. Just the memory of those black hole eyes, of course.
I didn’t see anything in the papers about her disappearance, but, of course, I don’t pick up the papers with any great regularity. There might have been something. But it has been my experience that the police do not put too much manpower in to trying to solve cases like Marie’s. She wasn’t really anybody. A stripper. Bummed around a lot. Maybe she just rode off in the middle of the night with some guy is how the thinking usually goes. I didn’t sense, when I was drinking her down into me, that she had any close friends who were going to make a federal case about her absence.
So maybe I’ll be OK.
Once again.
So I’ve been walking the streets, just thinking and smoking cigarettes. Ended up here at the river like I usually do when I go walking. It’s a nice place to be at night. Quiet and almost solemn. There’s this stone platform here, built right into the bank; it overlooks this cataract where the deep water upstream spills off into a shallower part of the riverbed. In the daytime, if I remember correctly, all sorts of birds: cranes, ducks, etc. used to fish close to that waterfall. I wonder if they still do. The river is pretty polluted now, and all sorts of trash has been dumped here. Pity. I imagine, as I stand there and smoke my cigarette, what it must have looked like over two-hundred years ago: a pure silver ribbon snaking through dense green forest. And the Indians came here to drink and fish, just as the birds do still. I wonder if there are any vampires around who remember that, who saw it with their own nocturnal eyes? It must have been something.
And then I realize, as I stand by the river thinking these things, that I am not alone anymore.
There’s somebody creeping up behind me. My vampire senses have automatically switched on to warn me. He’s (and it is a man, I’m pretty sure by the smell) he’s about ten yards to my left and behind me, lurking, not moving much really. His body is pressed up against this long hurricane fence that runs between the river and this steel and glass monster of a factory where they make plastics and resins and shit like that. Another mausoleum of progress. I can feel his eyes scouring my back. The hairs on my arms are at attention.
Well now. This could be some fun, I think, as I flick the butt of my smoke toward the river, watching the orange cone arc toward the watery darkness.
Again, I have not fed from a human being since my sweet Marie. I was fully intending to take a trip tomorrow to this biker bar I know of downstate, this shithole place where knife fights and hit and runs in the parking lot are not an uncommon occurrence. Another good hunting ground.
But hey, looks like I may not have to do that after all…
I turn and leave the observation platform, get on the bike path that’s sandwiched between the river and the chemical factory, start walking upstream toward Queen Avenue, where there is a bridge. I catch a glimpse of my friend as I do, in the corner of my eye. He is dark and big. Good. Means more blood for me.
I start walking and for a second I am afraid that he isn’t going to do anything after all. Just linger by the fence and watch me leave. But then I hear him. I hear the fence shudder and I hear heavy shoes slide through the wet grass and on to the path behind me.
Goody.
I speed up a bit as I walk. It’s kind of a pleasant game this, being prey instead of predator for once, and I try to sustain the moment, the excitement of it.
He speeds up too. I can hear the thud of his shoes, picking up momentum on the path.
And I can smell him too, among the hundreds and hundreds of night smells—the fish smells from the river, the smells of heaven-knows-what pluming from the chemical factory’s smokestacks. There is liquor on his breath: MD 20-20 or something cheap like that. And I think he’s wearing an old overcoat on this hot summer night. There’s a musty stale scent, like he’s worn that coat one too many days in a row, like he lives in that coat. And there is the smell of perspiration and dirt on his body. He’s definitely no captain of industry.
I hope he has a gun. Or a knife. Now that would be sweet.
He takes his time, but when he realizes that I will soon be coming up on a major intersection, with bright lights and traffic, he begins to quickly pare down the distance between us. Ten feet. Six feet. Three feet. Half a foot from me now. Closer…closer…
And suddenly he leaps up and grabs me, getting me by the throat with the crook of one padded arm, pulling me toward him. I pretend as hard as I can to be startled, just an ordinary citizen caught unaware by a nighttime mugger. I even manage to let out a convincing, theatrical gasp, as he crushes my windpipe with his arm.
“Don’t make a sound, fucker,” he says. His voice is deep and slurred. Dark. “I have a gun and I ain’t above using it.”
“OK. OK.” I squeak. I’m actually disappointed because I can smell that he does not have a weapon on him of any kind. Not even a pocket comb. Bummer.
“I want you to sit down,” he grunts, indicating with his free hand a strip of grass that runs between the fence and the path. His hand is large, black, almost simian in appearance. I notice that his fingernails are chipped and dirty.
“Ok. Don’t hurt me,” I bleat. I’m actually quite impressed with my acting. I’m really getting into the spirit of the thing entirely, letting him imagine that he is in complete control of the situation. I sit down in the grass and the man sits down next to me, grunting a little from the effort. He is huge and black. He is wearing a gray overcoat, the one I smelled earlier. His hair is short and wiry and his fleshy cheeks are covered with stubble. I look into his eyes. They are red-rimmed and as expressionless as Marie’s were after I drained her. It’s really exquisite.
“Stop starin’ at me bitch!” the man says. “I’ve got a gun and I’ll kill you!”
“Sorry…” I avert my eyes and look out toward the river. He is very big. I wonder greedily how many pints of blood he has in him. Seven? Eight? And then there’s the bonus of any alcohol or illicit drugs that might be coursing around in there. Could be quite a high.
“Give me your wallet,” he says, rubbing his pudgy fingers together just under my face. “And don’t do anything funny.”
So I reach into my pants pocket and pull out my cruddy wallet, hand it to him. There’s only about seven dollars in the bill compartment. He extracts the paper and rifles around, disappointed. He looks at me, frowning. Glaring.
“Is this ALL ya got?” he says.
“All I have. Take it.”
It’s really quite a funny scene--Henry the Vampire and John Doe the Mugger sitting here by the river exchanging pleasantries. To any passersby, we might just be two friends out enjoying the summer night. Yes. Two friends.
He goes through the rest of my wallet. Nothing much in there really. A library card I never use any more. My driver’s license, which I believe expired like a month ago and is going to prove a major hassle to renew. A Kroger Save-On Card. Nothing really.
He takes the money, puts it in his pocket, throws the cards and my now empty wallet on the grass. He looks at me in disgust.
“Jesus Christ…I went through all that for five dollars? I should just kill you, motherfucker!”
Seven, but who’s counting? I try to look as panicked as I possibly can. I shake my head. Wave my arms around a bit.
“Please! Oh, please! I’m sorry! Please don’t kill me! I’m too young to die!”
“You’re too pathetic to live” he says, brushing away my wallet and its debris as if they were just some flies he was trying to shoo. “But I don’t feel like wasting a bullet on your sorry punk ass, soooo…”
“Oh thank you sir, thank you,” I gush. It is almost time now. I feel my canine teeth start to tingle in my mouth.
“Yeah, OK, shut up. I’m gonna get up now and you are gonna stay put for awhile ‘til you can’t see me. If I hear you make a squeak, I’m gonna come back and bust a cap in your sorry ass.”
“No sir. No way. I won’t say anything. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”
“You better. Damn. Five dollars. What a fucking waste.”
He shakes his head sadly and then gets to his knees, preparing to stand. And with that, I am on him. The tables are turned. The prey becomes the predator. I sink my teeth into his pulpy, stubbly neck and drink my fill. So much blood. And it does not seem as if he is even surprised, really. His face, his eyes remain expressionless as I drain him. As if he had been expecting something like this to happen all along—another unlucky moment in an unlucky life. And it has been unlucky. I see it all as I drink him down. 9th grade dropout. Father nowhere. Mother almost nowhere, unable to get off of the rock. No chance really for a life beyond drugs and crime to support that life. Prison time. Cheap rooms in hotels. Pawn shops. The whole nine yards, like a case study in some sociology book. The American nightmare festering yet again.
Finally, I drop his body, sated, bloated on John Doe’s cheap blood. Actually, I know his name now. Maurice Jones. I retrieve my seven dollars from his pocket, stuff the plastic back into the compartments of my wallet. I pick up the body as if it were a weightless balloon and take it down to the riverbank. I bury it in a deep grave among some dead trees. And then I head for home, with the warmth of a good meal sitting in my stomach. Thank you, Maurice Jones. RIP.