Teeth: Vampire Tales

For a time I heard him shouting and battering through the underbrush. I moved away from the noise and tried to circle behind him but lost my bearings. After hiding for half an hour or so, I thought he must have given up. A big lopsided moon was on the rise and I could smell the river but had no other clue as to where I stood in relation to the graveyard. I located the river and trudged along the bank, detouring around thickets, figuring I’d head north until I recognized a landmark. Crickets sizzled, frogs belched out loopy noises, and beams of moonlight chuted down through the canopy, transforming the bank into a chaos of vegetable shapes spread out across the irregular black-and-white sections of a schizophrenic’s checkerboard.

If I hadn’t cut him, I told myself, he would have probably slunk away. It don’t do to piss off that kind more than you have to, Momma said. Otherwise they’re liable to get obsessed.

I pushed back a palmetto frond, ducked under it, and stopped dead. The salesman stood about forty feet away in a slash of moonlight, thigh deep in weeds and gazing out across the river with a pensive air, as if he were rethinking his goals in life. He’d shed his jacket and was shirtless — the shirt was wrapped around his left hand, the hand I’d sliced. A thin shelf of flab overhung his belt.

I retreated a step, letting the frond ease back into place, and he looked straight at me. I could have sworn he didn’t see me, that he had simply caught movement at the corner of his eye and been put on the alert. Then he sprinted toward me. I ran a few steps and pitched forward down a defile, gonging my head pretty good. Dazed, I realized I’d fetched up among ferns sprouting beside an abandoned shack. The door hanging one-hinged. Roofless. The moon shone down into it, but the light inside was too intense for ordinary moonlight — it cast shadows that looked deep as graves and flowed like quicksilver along spiderwebs spa

— Bitch!

The salesman spun me around, gut-punched me, and slung me through the door. Next I knew he had me straddled, pi

A ghost.

That was my first thought, but she had more the look of animation, a figure with just enough lines to suggest a naked woman, her colors not filled in.

The salesman scrambled to his feet, and she seemed to flow around him like a boa constrictor, locking him into an embrace and drawing him toward the back room, where they vanished, slipping through a seam that opened in midair and then closed behind them, leaving no trace. I don’t believe he made a single sound.

I had a strong desire to leave and got to my knees, but the effort cost me and I blacked out. When I came to, I heard her humming an aimless tune. I slitted my eyes and had a peek. She sat cross-legged by my side. She was more defined and her colors were brighter, though they were still ashen. except for a single drop of blood below her collarbone. She smiled, exposing the points of her fangs. I scooted away from her, but she had me and I knew it.

— Don’t fret, cher, she said. I won’t hurt you.

She noticed the blood drop, touched her finger to it, and licked the tip clean. I was too scared to speak.

— That man, she said. You’re safe from him now.

My head had started to clear and I felt the creep of hysteria. Is he dead?

— Not dead. He’s. waiting for me.

— Where is he? What’s going on?

— He’s where I sleep. Go slow, now. Calm yourself and I’ll tell you all about it.

Just her saying that had an effect on me — it was like she’d turned down my temperature.

— I’m Sandrine, she said. And you are.?

— Louie.

She repeated the name, pronouncing it like she was giving it a long, slow lick.

— If you want to go, I won’t stop you, but it’s been such a long time since I had someone to talk to. Sit with me? For a little while?

I didn’t have any run left and I felt drowsy, scattered. My eyes skated across the mirror pieces. In each of them was Sandrine’s face — pensive, fearful, frowning, in repose, moving as if alive. Hundreds of Sandrines, almost all of her, were trapped in those fragmented silver surfaces.

I must have spoken, because Sandrine laughed and said, I’ve been talking to them forty years and they haven’t answered yet. For a pretty girl like you, though, they might just whisper a little something.

Cracker Paradise lies about four miles east of DuBarry on State Road 17 and consists of a spacious one-story structure of navy blue concrete block set on a weedy patch of white sand that’s round as a bald spot and surrounded by slash pine. It doesn’t sport a huge neon sign like some roadhouses, just a little plastic MILLER HIGH LIFE sign above the door, and it has a slit window that’s been painted over so you can’t see in. When I was younger, Momma would leave me locked in the car while she partied, assuming glass would protect me from the men who peered in. I used to create fantasies about the place based on glimpses I had of the interior when the door swung open. Even today, now I’ve been inside a few times, it remains a kind of fantasy. I’ll hang out in the parking lot, sipping on a wine cooler slipped me by one of Momma’s friends, and picture slinky waitress queens dancing barefoot on sizzling short-order grills and serving slices of fried poison to travelers in bathroom fixtures, while out on the purple-lit bash and rumble of the dance floor, checkout girls from the Piggly Wiggly, acne-blemished counter girls from Buy-Rite, pretty-for-a-season Walmart girls with clownish face paint and last decade’s hairdo, they shake themselves into a low-grade fever, they make suggestions with their hips that turn the loose change in men’s pockets green, they slice hearts and pentagrams on the beer-slickered floor with their spike heels, looking to give it up for love-only-love and a cute duplex in Jax Beach.

A few nights ago, a hot July night with the moon causing the sand to give off sparkles and silvering the hoods of the cars encircling the club, and a couple of hundred rednecks jammed inside, I stood in the parking lot smoking with two girls from New Jersey, A

Carmen nudged my breasts and said, You should enter, hon. They’re paying out to fifth place.

I told her I was sixteen.

— Sixteen! My gawd! A