Blood Music (9 page)

S
he had been walking west on Bleecker Street, walking backward and calling something across the street to a group of people. She was wearing blue jeans and a black blazer. Cigarettes? Going to get a pack of cigarettes. Meet you—and an anonymous voice saying something—“Cheryl?”—but the words were tossed away by the wind and the traffic.

Her hair hung heavy gold almost to her waist. She walked and he followed her. The van was parked two blocks away down on St. Luke's Place and his wife was home putting the baby to bed. The streets were busy, with a festive air. The benign moon hung above a gabled roof. The girl walked with a gangly, unself-conscious stride, she almost bumped into somebody and giggled and apologized; she was tipsy. At the corner of St. Luke's Place she stopped. Her foot stopped first and then the rest of her body, and she did an awkward, pretty little shuffle to keep from falling, and she giggled again.

There was a black cat a few doors down St. Luke's Place. It stretched, and rolled, voluptuously, on its back. The girl walked a few steps toward the cat, speaking softly; he couldn't hear, across the street, what she was saying. He wanted to be ahead of her, waiting, but he couldn't get past her without her seeing him. And there were too many people out to risk jumping her this close to Bleecker Street, anyway.

The girl crouched down to touch the cat, and her hair swung down and touched the ground. When the cat ran away she remained crouching, unconcerned, and he watched her as he walked toward her. Somebody in a gray car honked at him, but she didn't notice that. He stopped about ten feet behind her. When she stood she didn't turn back toward Bleecker, she just stood uncertainly and he was sure she was smiling. When he came up alongside her she turned her smile toward him. It lit up her plain face.

“Excuse me?” she said; she hadn't heard him.

“The Midtown Tunnel,” he said. “I'm afraid I've gotten myself lost again.”

“Oh. I do that, too. You go—you've got to get up to Fourteenth Street and then east—it's easier if you go up Bleecker, I mean east, until you get to—wait, I can't remember if the park goes down that far.” She was pointing the wrong way; a minute ago she had been pointing the right way. Her voice was astonishing, young and honey-pure. It was the first time he had ever heard one of them talk—and he knew she would be one of them. And he wanted her to talk some more.

“Like the scarecrow,” he said, crossing his arms and pointing in both directions. The girl laughed. “Like the scarecrow,” she agreed. They had begun walking west down St. Luke's Place, although she seemed unaware of it; “I don't know this part of the Village,” he said.

“I don't either. I'm the worst person to ask for directions.” Like honey, like spun sugar. He could listen to her forever.

“But you know once you get to Fourteenth Street,” he said.

“Oh, everybody knows that. Oh, sorry. I guess not, huh?” Her laughter was beautiful too. The cat for some reason followed them for three or four houses, a small black shadow out of the corner of his eye.

“I can't remember how far down the park goes,” she was saying. She didn't seem to mind walking down the street with him, after all the street lamps were bright and there was a young couple across the street, arm in arm (and not seeing them at all), and a group of guys up ahead in muscle T-shirts, earnestly talking (and not seeing them), an old woman talking encouragement to her squatting dog (and he could see that she didn't see them either). In the middle of the city, in the middle of a crowded street, there would be, he knew, no witnesses. And she felt safe.

The cat dropped back, abruptly sitting to wash its hindquarters. The image was burned into his mind now, one leg stretched up and away like a can-can dancer's, dark against a dark pocket of space that the streetlight didn't reach: he thought about the cat as he walked along and chatted with the girl. It was a spring night, ten o'clock, and across the street the couple walked with melded hips, and the moon hung like a stage prop.

When they got to Seventh Avenue he expected her to be put off by the sudden rush of traffic, the barren corner; crossing Seventh Avenue meant changing neighborhoods, from the Village proper to the West Village, away from the tourist haven of Bleecker and MacDougal. He expected her to look south where there was nobody, just red taillights running in rows like a vast, undisciplined school of fish. North the lights were white. They emphasized the bareness of the corner, the shelter of the dark residential street behind them and the darker leafy street far away across the intersection. The girl was telling him about the time her aunt's sister-in-law drove her car the wrong way toward the entrance of the Midtown Tunnel during a road test; she stepped into the street and he moved his arm to stop her and he almost touched her. She stepped back up onto the curb and laughed and looked around. White lights, red lights.

“Oh,” she said, “what is this, Sixth Avenue? I don't think I've been this far west—” She took a step backward. He could feel her wholly conventional apprehension: she didn't want to be impolite.

“If I could offer you a lift—” and she took another, more resolute step away from him, and he knew he had misjudged her drunkenness. “God, that was a stupid thing to say, wasn't it?” he asked, shaking his head ruefully. “I'm sorry. Sometimes you forget, you know, how dangerous it is for women. How careful you have to be. I'm really sorry.” It was easy to forget that it was really just like talking to any girl.

“Oh,” she said, “that's all right. I was looking for a place to get cigarettes, actually—” as though she owed him an apology for her suspicion—“and I seem to have gotten lost myself.”

“I think there's a candy store about a block down St. Luke's,” he said, moving into the street as the light turned green in front of them. There was no candy store. “I'd offer you one but I quit about six months ago.” He held his empty hands out and his wedding ring caught the light from above—the streetlight, the moon.

The girl shrugged and followed him. “My car is this way,” he said. “I was having a few beers with some friends and I'm on my way back to the car. But I forgot to ask how to get back to the Midtown Tunnel.”

“I'm with friends, too. They're waiting for me back at—I forget the name of the bar. Kenny's something?”

“Kenny's Castaways.”

“If you know so much, how come you don't know how to get to the Midtown Tunnel?” He suddenly became aware of the saliva in his throat, his clenched teeth: don't leave me now, don't turn away—just a little bit more, half a block—don't leave me. She wasn't talking any longer and he was afraid he had spoken aloud. “I've always—”

“Look at those curtains,” she said, pointing. “I've always wanted lace curtains. But John says they make him think of old Italian women.” John. The lover? The husband? She was very young, and she wore no ring. The boyfriend, John. It always amazed him when he read the things they said in the paper, later. It amazed him that they knew anything at all about what he was doing. This girl was his, given to him out of the sky, the moon; she could have no antecedents. “My car's up here,” he said casually. “The store is on the corner, up ahead. I just want to get a map out of the glove compartment, just a minute. Then you can show me what everybody else already knows.”

“Just from Fourteenth Street.”

“I remember I came down what, Second Avenue?” He reached casually for his keys. The couple had turned the corner at Seventh, and there were no dog walkers along the length of the street, there were no figures at the windows of the old brownstones, there were no lovers sitting in the shadows of the ivy-covered stoops. She was standing two feet away from him under the arc of the streetlight, digging through her purse. She was completely unconcerned, unaware of any danger. He wanted to hear her speak again.

“I've got a map in here somewhere,” he said; the van door let a flood of light out onto the sidewalk. Her lips were pursed with the particular female concentration of trying to find something in a pocketbook. When the light hit the sidewalk she looked up and smiled. “This darn bag,” she said, and he was touched by that “darn”; that would become part of the memory. That, and her voice, and the way the light hit her hair.

She walked over to the van, right up to the door, and turned her back and held up her pocketbook at an angle to catch the light from inside the door. What was she looking for? She had come with him. She had trusted him. Now she was waiting for him. There was an old handle of a hammer in the glove compartment, something he had never used before but had always wanted to use. It felt light in his hand, as though it were only an extension of his hand and not a separate thing.

Just as he reached for her she started to turn. “I think I remember,” she said. “You go—” Her surprise was so great—her honey head bent, a little spot of skin at the nape exposed, the silver dangle of a feather-shaped earring at her ear, her honey voice music at the altar of his sacrifice—that for a moment he didn't do anything. They stood, his arms around her in a parody of love, and then he struck her with the handle, just like that, silent, and her breath was a tiny
ooh
of exhalation and she slumped and he caught her. There was no sound.

The simplicity of her falling, of his striking and her falling, enraptured him. He held her dead weight a moment and everything else was silence, and then he felt a familiar throbbing in his groin where her back slumped against him. He held her with his right arm while with his left he opened the sliding back door of the van. It made a terrible noise, rusted and full of accusation, and he scented up and down the street for movement, commotion, but there was none. The door squeaked and there was no one else at all on the street and the young woman in his arms did not move.

As he shoved her limp body into the van her pocketbook dropped. Nothing spilled out. He could see lipstick and tissues and a silver key chain, an address book, a nail file, bank-machine receipts—all the commonplaces of an anonymous life.

When he drove away he stopped partway down the block to look in the rearview mirror at the quiet street behind him: was there a telltale gleam in the gutter under the streetlight? A lighter, a compact, a lipstick case that had fallen from the girl's purse and rolled under the van? There was nothing. She had never been there.

She had lain in the van while he drove west. He hadn't hit her very hard but he had hit the tender skin above the first vertebra. He had driven all the way over to the West Side Highway before she stirred. A low, guttural animal moan. He wouldn't have recognized it as that honey voice.

He stopped the van; of course he was where he wanted to be, over by the Riverview Hotel, where the whores flagged down the cars on the highway and the clientele changed every fifteen minutes. He had turned the van off onto a side street, Bank or Eleventh or Horatio, where it was quiet, where there were sure to be no dog walkers, no loving couples. The action was on the highway; there was nobody in sight here on the quiet street.

The girl stirred, and moaned again, and he was above her, with one hand on her neck and the other unzipping his fly. For a moment she did not struggle. Her right pupil was enormously dilated. Her face took on an exaggerated look of surprise, like a character's in a comic book. It was funny. What did his smile look like to her?

With his hand on her neck she was silent now. Her eyes closed much too quickly and he almost spoke to her, but he would have had to loosen his grip to keep her conscious. He didn't know that the next morning he would be reading her name in the papers; there was only this moment, and this was something that was happening only to him, this heat between his legs, this fluttering pulsebeat under the thumb of his right hand. Her open mouth emitted a low, hollow counterpoint to the cacophony in his head, the images colliding as they always did: he could not tell whether he was in his van or on cold asphalt, could not hear the cars passing on the highway a block away. The voices were inside him or outside, screaming or singing. The hollow moaning went on and on and on, like improvisation on a cello. The pulse fluttered and his groin expanded and she opened her eyes abruptly, like a doll, toward the ceiling, and mouthed something—“Please”—he was coming, hacking at her and coming, there were tears in her eyes, the knife in his hand like part of his hand, echoing something—lazy, stupid, lazy, stupid—a violin was screaming and the blood was as dear as his own blood, she was looking up and there was a propulsion like coming, a red spurt and her eyes were open and there was nothing to see there at all, just the dirty ceiling of the dirty gray van.

T
here were footsteps coming down the long hallway: the skittering clack of a woman's high heels. He was crouched somewhere, behind a wall or under a stair, where the space was too small for his man's body.

High heels against cement. The footsteps were getting closer, and faster as they got closer, and with the fall of each stiletto heel against the cold cement came the sound of shattering glass.

There was only one way to stop the footsteps (which had gotten heavier, louder, a man's heavy workboot now). He had done it before. There was something cold in his hand. The footsteps were running and they were almost to the room where he crouched hidden; there was somebody pounding at the door.

The knife was cold in his hand. “I can't let you in, even if you have her blond hair. I killed them all. I will kill them all. All the pretty blond ones.” He raised the knife and the heels left a skid on the dirty linoleum floor and she was looking at him and he raised the knife and she said, “You killed me too. You killed me too, you killed me too,” and he drove the knife into her eye.