Blood Music (19 page)

“Oh, no. I was thinking—do you really think there'll be a murder here tonight? It makes it hard to concentrate on the concert.”

“I'm enjoying the music very much. Don't you think there'll be one? He said there'd be one, and he doesn't seem to lie.”

“He. He killed somebody already, yesterday. They don't usually do it twice in two days. There are exceptions—I just can't believe it's a real person, somebody who was somebody's baby once.” Mary stirred and began to wake.

“Here, you take her. I'm going to get us some ice cream.”

“The line will take forever. I don't even dare use the ladies' room, the line is always twenty minutes at these things.”

“Intermission is usually about half an hour. I'll be back by the time the music starts again. Wouldn't you like some ice cream? I think Mary would,” he said, clucking her tiny chin; she smiled with her whole face.

“So she can have something else to throw up in the car? I'd love some. One of those Calippo things, the ices you push up from the bottom.”

“Cherry?”

“Cherry. And an ice cream sandwich for Mary.”

“You'll like that, won't you, lamb? Keep the blanket warm. I'll be right back.” Zelly watched him disappear into the crowd.

“Dante, we can't go into the woods. There's cops all over the place.” The girl spoke with friendly exasperation—Dante and his ideas. Even though they were hidden behind some bushes across the road and thirty feet from the nearest policeman, she whispered. With Dante under the romantic moon it was an adventure. Under the romantic moon, she thought: this will be a memory someday. Me and Dante under the romantic moon. “Sure we can,” said Dante. “It'll be like crossing the enemy lines at Nuremburg or wherever it was.”

The girl laughed. Her name was Ariadne. Ariadne and Dante under the romantic moon. The wine they'd been drinking made everything float. Dante had been her boyfriend for seven months and he liked to do it outside, in strange places, almost in public for God's sake. Now he wanted to sneak past the cordon of policemen and do it in the woods.

“See that one there? He keeps looking over at the bandstand. He's not doing his job. We can sneak past him easy.”

“What about that other one?” The wine had not dulled Dante's quiet step. From close enough to touch him Ariadne thought she was talking to a shadow. She giggled.

“Hush up. We've got to be real, real quiet. This is going to be a blast. This is going to be good.” He ran his hand up the inside of her thigh. The shadow of the policeman turned the indistinct white blob of his face toward the warm yellow light of the bandstand. “That other one is looking at the girls,” said Ariadne.

“You'd give him an eyeful, baby.”

“I thought we didn't want to give anybody an eyeful. I thought we want to get into the woods.”

“We're going to get into the woods. Look—when I say. We'll run—quiet. Crouch down when you run. See that bunch of bushes right in the middle there? Right toward that. I'll hold your hand.” They knelt, shadows in their dark shirts, Ariadne's legs incandescent lines of light, her hair a pale cloud of blond light. The incidental sounds of the crowd above the music—the unmoored phrase, the laugh, the baby's cry—intensified and then faded, the Sibelius lifted up pained and fluid notes toward the distant, romantic moon, a policeman leaned against a tree and looked up at the moon, and two shadows swept across the narrow tar road and into the silent woods.

This must be the madness a vampire feels when it smells blood. Each frail carcass a receptacle only, a delicate stamen that holds the nectar that will make him whole. It is not their sex he wants but their blood, to be inside the blood, to control the blood, the breath, the beat of the heart. Here the music is silent, the stage empty, the crowd thin. He paused and looked at the bandstand, the perfect yellow arc of light and the empty space. What had she said she wanted? Calippo pops. Somebody is going to die tonight.

The knife hung embarrassing and unusable on its short scabbard underneath his untucked shirt. It mocked him, in its decorative green sheath. Like a stupid adolescent fantasy. What would he have done if Madeleine really had seen the man here? (Sibelius had been gentle as a prayer, resigned to some ancient, heavy sorrow, but light, light, on its way to a distant unhearing heaven.) What would he have done? Plunged the foreign unfamiliar blade clumsily into the man's monstrous face, destroyed the sight that had seen so much, stilled the hands that had stilled Cheryl's short, hopeful life? It was not that his nerve failed him but that his sense of the ridiculous cast up images before him: He and Madeleine jumping over picnic baskets and recumbent couples, knocking down old men in lawn chairs, knife held high, with war cries of rage and righteous anger. Or just him, crouched behind a station wagon in the parking lot where he had tracked the man, crouched down waiting as a thousand people thronged past him to get to their cars. Or he and Madeleine in his car, the killer six cars ahead in line as they inched toward the exit of the parking lot.

Madeleine seemed to be dozing beside him; he dared not move, he didn't want to touch her—not yet. To frighten her. His feelings were like a flower growing in a wound. He respected her pain, he would gladly wait forever.

He turned and dared to look at her. She could have been sleeping. She could have been dead. He had only recently seen death; before that he had only lived with the rumor. His mother's coffin had been closed against her smashed face, Cheryl's against his grief. But he had seen Cheryl defenseless on a slab in the morgue, he had been there to validate her existence in death. To say, that is the body that matches that name, those statistics on the driver's license; these are the lips, the face, the eyes behind the compact case and the Pink Lily lipstick, there, and the pathetic cracked funnel of mascara, broken he would never know where or how.

On the grass Madeleine stirred and opened her eyes. She smiled and said, “I'd like some ice cream. Want to be a gentleman, or should we both go?”

She couldn't see; the bright light of the bandstand at the corner of her eye as they ran across the road blinded her now, in the dark with Dante's hand sweaty in her own, leading, clenched. There'd been a sickening adrenaline rush as they swept past the two policemen, waiting an eternity of a split second to hear angry, authoritative voices; then the scuttle of gravel under their feet, loud, so loud, at the far side of the road; then sudden cool air on her face.

They stopped then, just inside the safety of the trees, branches like arms surrounding them. They did not move, and they did not breathe. Ariadne heard a hysterical little intake of breath next to her ear, and Dante's sweaty fingers squeezed her own.

Her breath was ragged and loud in her ears, a thunder in her head. But the vague shapes at the bases of the farthest trees had not moved. Dante squeezed her hand again and they disappeared into the forest, a shadow and a shadow's shadow.

Far behind, the violins took up a plaintive strain and played it to the sky. Ariadne's footsteps were louder than the music. Dante ran his hand up inside her blouse as they walked, his fingers were hot and her skin was cool. They were laughing; they could dare now to make noise.

The web of darkness in front of Ariadne's eyes was dissolving into moonlight and branches. Dante's hands were all over her as they walked. There was a dirt trail and, past picnic tables looming like crouching animals, a little path up a steep incline. At the top Dante stopped to bury his head in Ariadne's hair; she arched her neck and looked up: the full moon smiled back at her. It was light enough, when they moved again, to see a small toad hop up and away, to catch moonlight reflected from the leaves at the corner of her eye. Anticipation of pleasure built between her legs, along the soft down of her arm. Ivy brushed her naked ankles, year-old leaves crunched under her feet, something white shone on the path ahead.

“Dant—” But his whiplashed arm struck her back; a sapling branch struck her cheek. Dante moved ahead, but before his shadow obscured it Ariadne saw: a white calf, a forlorn foot, dark shorts, an obscene expanse of back, blond hair. One arm stretched out above the head, one supplicant hand. The fingers were stained dark. The moonlit dirt under the head and neck was dark. The clotted moonlight could not reflect on that dark puddle. One staring eye, one reaching hand, one forlorn naked foot. When Ariadne started screaming the policemen at the edge of the forest at first mistook the sound for violins.

He had wanted to shout his exultation to the moon, to throw back his head and release the animal roar within. He had stood above her bloody body, blood feeding the earth beneath her neck, the little ants already gathering, surely, to wet their feet in the good sticky nourishing flow. He had stood above her, spent, and as always he was grateful. He could hear the orchestra tuning up an eternity away. His breath was too fast and his hands were sticky. He focused his attention on the discordant, exploratory sounds, catgut and the slow sweep of an arm, air forced upward in a sweet exhalation. Until this moment he had been listening to his own music.

He would have to leave her. She had been given to him, and he had loved her, and now he would leave her to the ants and the forensic experts. Her stillness moved him, caught his groin, but he could not risk having her again. He had to be back before the Schubert began.

He walked softly through the woods, within sight of the lights of the road and the silent dark presence of the police, until he came to the tennis courts. There was a couple playing a desultory game, with twice-bounced balls and laughter. The policeman stationed there was watching the game: when he materialized on a rise above the courts he was not noticed; he was invisible. Walking across the empty parking lot to the van he was invisible; he took off his bloody uniform and changed into an identical one and stepped out onto warm asphalt, invisible. He washed some of the blood off in the van, with washcloths in a bucket half full of water, and he washed his hands again and slicked back his hair with water at a fountain near the tennis courts. The couple was still playing. A policeman regarded him suspiciously. He smiled and nodded reassuringly and the blind man was reassured.

Zelly opened her eyes. The Schubert was beginning. The baby had fallen asleep again where she lay on the blanket, with Zelly's hand on her back. Zelly had fallen asleep herself, the crowd's seashell murmur around her, the air like a blanket, the stars above her as she lay with one hand on her daughter's back.

The bottle of wine on the blanket next to hers was almost empty now; two teenagers lay back looking at the sky, two others were engaged in heated discussion. The old couple on the other side were holding hands. The boys in back of her were quiet: they were not looking for killers anymore. Mary's tiny hands twitched in her sleep.

Zelly looked over toward the ice cream truck; the Schubert had started. A liquid, longing fragment of a melody, a prayer to the sky. There was some movement behind the stage, some change of shift of the police guarding the woods, perhaps: a growing knot of blue. She watched as a rivulet of people drained off the crowd, like a rain stream caught in a seam in the sidewalk; it flowed down and around the corner of the stage, toward the woods. Zelly began to sit up to see better when out of the corner of her eye she saw her husband coming toward her smiling through the crowd, in his upheld hands an ice cream sandwich and a Calippo bar.

T
here was something—in her dream it had been an insistent image, like a drumbeat. Imperative to remember it. Imperative. Something about that word:
imperative.
The high, keening cry cut through the image like a blade through cobwebs; the word and the image and the silent undercurrent like a drumbeat, or a heartbeat, were dissolved like cobwebs. The baby was crying. It had been on the shoe and the baby was crying. Zelly got out of bed and went to her with nothing in her mind at all. Two thirty-five. The cries weren't loud; Pat slept. Zelly's breasts were full and sore; she thought she had been dreaming something unpleasant on account of her sore breasts. There was milk on the mattress again, soaked through the sheet. Zelly brought the baby into bed and lay her on a towel on the damp sheet. There had been something sticky in her dream, something on her shoe.

There is no tiredness like the tiredness a mother feels at two o'clock in the morning. It obliterates linear thinking; all her actions are the actions of an automaton: the crooning words, the gentle touch without thought, a ritual undertaken without even resignation. Whatever the mother has been dreaming will continue to possess her consciousness while she suckles her baby; rain will fall in her mind or she will walk down empty streets.

Zelly lay on her side and looked out the window at the dead light of the street lamp while the baby drank with small, excited snuffling noises. Sometimes there were people up at this hour, spillover from the two bars, one catty-corner across the street and one down the street about a half block.

Mary quieted a little, her tiny breath slowed: milk. Try not to fall asleep, have to put the baby back in the crib. The little mouth was only a faint pull, the little heart beat next to her own. His shoes had had blood on them. Zelly snapped awake; the street lamp shone like the last street lamp on a deserted Earth. The baby breathed easily in sleep. Ought to put her back in her crib. In her dream his shoes had had blood on them. The shoes in the closet or the shoes he had been wearing Friday night? He had several pairs, black and identical, which stood lined up in the hall closet. Blood on the toes, blood down along the side of the right foot where she could see it on the brake pedal.

Zelly hadn't looked at his shoes at all at the concert Friday night. Mary had started crying as the rumor spread, and Zelly couldn't pretend to be calm either. The agitated murmur of the crowd overcame the Schubert, which although it did not stop seemed to halt and die away. Blue poured in from everywhere, and cordon ropes appeared, and the eager crowd began to swarm toward the woods behind and to the right of the stage. Pat sat, his face rapt toward the musicians, his eyes closed and his ears oblivious to rumor. Zelly craned her neck and almost followed the crowd, but Mary on her lap held her back. Legs and feet flowed around them, to the right and behind the stage. The whispers became louder and more shrill. Zelly was anxious for the baby but she felt a nauseating visceral thrill: there had been a killing. Ted Bundy, the superstar of serial killers, had once taken two young women out of a crowded park in Washington State in one day, one after the other, in broad daylight, in a ruse involving a papier-mâché cast and a trailer and a mythical boat, but there had been no police, however shorthanded, to protect that weekend crowd. What evil hand of coincidence had prevailed this night? It could not have happened, but it did. Even Pat was moved to suggest they at least shift their blanket out of the way.