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Still, he couldn’t run. Having broken and entered, he had no choice but to see the job through. Groping and fumbling among the roots of a ficus tree, he found soft soil that parted at his touch and he buried the bottle of rum, the sack of popcorn, possum and fish. “An offering to Osain,” Tia Guadalupe had called them. If they didn’t fix Kate Root, at least they would give her pause for thought. An awkward hour or two, and maybe a migraine headache. Vomiting and evil cramps at her monthlies, too, or was she past those? Hard to tell. Crouching, he spat on Osain’s feast in its shallow grave for luck, and began to cover it over. The damp earth felt like ooze, malign; the choke of darkness was a rope. His nerve failing him, he scrambled away from the burial site, banged his skull on a sheeted cage. The sound it made was a muffled chime like a funeral bell. Whirling from it, he saw the whipsnake laughing.

Well, not exactly laughing. More like snickering. But mocking him anyway. His clumsiness and his panic, the dread that had brought him here. 982:
FALLEN
ARCHES
:
a sign of cowardice
. And that was the plain fact. Chickenshit; some squeaming girl. To go in terror of three lousy hairs. To let them shrivel and burn him like this, drag him down into ignorance. Humblemumbling like a peasant, some toothless old woman from El Pajuil. When those hairs should have been a challenge, not a threat. A trial of strength. Like a Holy Grail,
or whatever. Instead of running from them, or plotting to destroy them, he should have faced them headon. Blown on them when he had the chance. Or anything else he desired. Sucked them, bitten them, chewed them up and spat them out. Be possessed by them, yes, if that’s what it took.

Would that have killed him?

Hardly. For a beat, in his self-disgust, he almost went back to Osain’s grave and dug him up again. But the thought of that black slime running on his hands forbade him. What he needed was to get back to Brighton Beach, lay himself down flat on his brass bed beside the El, and try to steal back some of Bombo Garcia’s sleep. When he surfaced, he would face the hairs fresh. Be strong to master them. Flirt them, or tease them, or make them stand rigid and tense. Or bend them back, doubled over, corn sheaves before a storm. With their long stalks curved and graceful. Three swans’ necks waiting to be severed. Bowed helpless beneath the blade. A guillotine. Or a Harvey McBurnette.

T
hese vampires of today, they had it all too easy. In Kate Root’s youth the undead life had been one long heartache. If it wasn’t a crucifix it was garlic; if not dawn, a stake through the heart. But these days, it seemed to her, the damned were a bunch of pampered prima donnas, worse than baseball players. Power, glamour,
la vie en rose
—the world was their oyster. And did they appreciate it? In a pig’s ear. Nothing but moan, moan, moan, from first page to last. She hadn’t the patience. No, really she hadn’t. The paperback flopped from her hand, she stubbed out her Camel on its spine, and settled herself to sleep.

She was a career insomniac, four hours in a night was a banquet to her, but in her middle years she’d devised a routine that sometimes helped. When all else failed, she’d play cricket with Fred Root in his back garden.

Kate batted, he bowled. They used a tennis ball and a dustbin for the wicket, and she’d watch him run in from the lobelia beds, or shamble in rather, a big, ungainly, brick-faced man in baggy flannels and suspenders, his great feet in carpet slippers pointed outwards as he waddled like Charlie Chaplin.
Plates of meat
, he’d called them, but they looked more like frogman’s flippers to her. Flap, flap, double-flap, they went, and her focus moved to his right hand. He held the ball between his second and third fingers, beef sausages, they seemed. In
the moment of release, his little finger flicked sideways, he flipped his wrist. The scuffed grey tennis ball swung down and in upon her, then kicked upwards, knifing straight for her chest and throat. Bodyline, that was called. She didn’t try to smite it, what would be the point? Broken windows were six and out. Her only ambition was not to be hit or hurt. To play the ball down safely. Lay it motionless at the feet of the sweet williams. One dead ball.

Normally it took a couple of overs before she was lulled. But this night the vampires in their vanity had left her drained. Already by the third delivery she felt herself easing away, and the bat handle began to slip through her fingers, when she heard something moving downstairs.

A random and somnolent scuffling, it sounded like a snake sleepwalking. Maybe one of the blind Texans; Maguire must have left its cage unlocked. God’s gift to boghopping, you couldn’t trust him to wipe a parakeet’s ass. Not that a parakeet needed its ass wiped, of course. But you couldn’t have trusted him if it did.

Stumbling down the stairs with a stun-gun in her hand and her dressing gown untied, her hair all in her eyes, she had almost reached bottom before it occurred to her that this might not be a snake; it sounded more like a thief in the night.

For a moment common sense almost got the best of her. But only for a moment. Then a giddiness possessed her, and she burst through the velvet curtain; she took three paces through the room, brandishing the stun-gun like Excalibur.

What was she playing at? She was being a supervixen. The style of desperado in movies who shouted
Freeze!
and
Up against the wall, motherfucker!
, slapping heads and kicking tails, reducing the bad guys to jello. If the intruder had made one wrong move, she would have pulped him. With pleasure. But he didn’t stir. Caught in the act, bending low above the
cash register with his sticky hand in the till, he did not have the decency to stick his hands up. He didn’t even look startled, certainly not terrified. Just stared at the dressing gown slipping her shoulders, and her shape inside her pink nightie with the sky-blue periwinkles at the neck, or were they forget-me-nots? And her legs, her bare legs, exposed to above the knee. And her feet not even in their mules, she hadn’t had the time. And her breasts.

He could see her nipples.

How could he miss them? Whenever she was overheated, at all agitated, they popped right up. Dark and swollen they’d look, absolutely depraved.

Her first reflex was to grab at the errant edges of her gown, pull them shut. Her second was to put away the gun before it hurt someone. And as she laid the gun on the counter, she saw the thief’s hands. They were not full of banknotes, or even the back copies of
Soap Digest
she kept stashed in the cheque compartment. In fact, they held nothing at all. But she knew what he had sought, even so. She knew just what he’d been after.

Wilfredo Whoever; Anna Crow’s pet delinquent.

Of course, she knew. How could she not? With the boy’s eyes still on her under his nice hair, all blurred and smeary they looked, and dreadful in their hunger.

Something broke in her then. Though he had caused her only turmoil, had turned her life to sewage, she could not stand those eyes on her. Anger went from her. So did contempt. “You poor sap,” said Kate.

“It was just …” Wilfredo began, but she had no time to hear his excuses or explanations or any other whines. Already she was bustling around behind the counter, kicking aside sacks of birdseed and dried rape, opening the safe concealed by the poster of Billie and Bo. “Tomorrow night. Seven
o’clock,” she said, handing him Abel Bonder’s knives in their red-leather case, and she flushed him from the Zoo a second time.

She was beat.

Upstairs, though safe in her bed again, she couldn’t stop twitching. Her room was a cell, twelve foot square, and painted flat white. Its only artwork hung crooked, a hand-painted photo of Fred Root, the blown-up frontispiece from his autobiography,
A Cricket Pro’s Lot
, which showed a man with a face like forty miles of bad road, smirking lopsidedly through a hard-scrabble of seams and potholes and ruts. At Worcester in 1926, the very first day of summer, he had ripped out Australia’s heart in a morning, then polished off a beefsteak, a complete veal pie and four bottles of light ale for lunch. But he brought her no help now.

She couldn’t be bothered to straighten him even. All that registered on these walls were their smudges and scars, a landscape so bleak that she snapped out her nightlight, risked the dark for preference.

Immensity. In which swam a boychild tucked into a foetal curl, his spine pressed against a plywood screen. In the next room a wax model of a man’s corpse lay surrounded by plastic lilies, watched over by an illustrated woman. A bottle of brandy sat on a table by an open window that looked out across a funfair to an elevated railroad and a bedroom full of ducks. Or no, not ducks. On second look they were fighting cocks with steel spurs on their legs. One of the spurs pierced an eye. A single drop of blood appeared, and that was when Kate switched her light back on, saw herself in her bedside mirror: a fright, flushed and sweating, her hair a total disgrace.

But desired.

An object of passion.

She didn’t know why this boy wanted her, and she didn’t care to speculate. Wilfredo, Wilfredo … Diliberto, that was it.
But she could call him Wilfred
. With his slant eyes and tiny feet, his olive skin the tint of a lizard’s underbelly. She couldn’t guess what his game might be. But she knew the smell of need.

It made a change, at least. During these last years she had felt like an invisible woman. Men didn’t notice her, other women did not compete. Some little trollop like Anna Crow would give her one glance as she passed, then dismiss her. Spinster, old maid.
A single lady of equinoctal years
. As if she had no sex. As if, deepest down, she didn’t exist.

Anna as in anathema, Crow as in carrion, what gave her the right? A couple of failed marriages, a dose of clap, a few dozen or a hundred one-night stands? Kate herself had been engaged eight times.

Never married, that was true. But affianced, betrothed or otherwise plighted eight times, in five cities and three states, to accredited suitors from all walks and stations of life. A pastry chef, an oculist, a fallen priest, a steeldriving man, a trombonist, an ambulance chaser, a barber, a pawnbroker. All of them had loved her, or that was the word they’d used. And she had liked all of them in return.

In the long run, of course, it couldn’t ever work. Sooner or later they’d find out who she was and what she did, exactly what her history had been, and then the jig was up. Either they lost their nerve. Or, what was worse, much harder to endure, they turned into acolytes. Psychic groupies, forever harping at her for instant visions like so much Reddi-whip, till she couldn’t stand it, she had to blow them off.

The Fifth Dimension? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be
—Madame Vronsky had got that one right. For a certainty, it played hell with your orgasms. Though she’d heard that executioners
had the same trouble. Swings and roundabouts, she supposed. The grass was always greener.

But so much blether. Such a carry-on and commotion just because she had sight. A knack that wasn’t her doing, that she could not even control.

It made her pillow hot on both sides.

It made her wish she’d been a shopgirl or some waitress, free to jump out of her window any night she felt the urge, head for the nearest dance hall and pick up any stranger that caught the light, pull him out in the back alley. Or a cocktail lounge would do. With one of those blue neon signs, the champagne glass and bubbles. Or a bowling alley, even.

That was the only sex she had ever wet-dreamed about. In her teens, when she was in Jeanerette, she’d used to sneak out the back door between visions and hitch a ride on Highway 90. There was a place in New Iberia, the Club Why Not, she’d heard was Babylon on the half-shell. But Charley Root had always caught up to her, and dragged her home intact. Or an approximation thereof, as Ferdousine would say. No mindless abandon for Katy. No such fucking luck.

The year that
Rubber Ball
was a hit.

Bobby Vee, or was it Bobby Vinton? And now it was Snoop Doggy Dogg. And she had rolls of fat behind her knees. Still and all, she was desired.

It almost felt a pity that she didn’t desire him back. Wilfredo Diliberto. Little Wilfred. It almost seemed a loss. But what was a girl supposed to do? She didn’t find him attractive. He didn’t ring her chimes. Did anyone still say that?
Not the cream in my coffee, not the cherry on my sundae. Not the sour cream on my baked potato
. No, he wasn’t.
Not, not, not
.

In the morning, though, she woke to find herself back to twitching. The early sunlight slanting across the white walls
stained them arsenic yellow, turned Fred Root’s crooked grin into a homicidal leer. How could she have slept with his picture at that sick angle? More to the point, how could she have lain awake and thought such thoughts without throwing up?
Not the sour cream on my baked potato. But what was a girl supposed to do?
Give herself an enema, if she could still find the right hole.

All her senses felt overturned, her nerve endings exposed and raw, the way that ex-junkies described when they told you their cold-turkey stories if you didn’t get away from them in time. No extra layers of skin left, no protection. Every sound a fingernail scraped on a blackboard, and every touch another bruise.

The weight was the worst. The gross tonnage of the past. She felt stuffed to bursting with it, bloated like a rotting fish. At the window she tested for shifting breezes, but there were none. Smoke didn’t drift, loose papers on the street were not stirred. Not a thing that Kate could see moved.

It was a day for a bonfire.

She laboured, huffing, on the stairs, her nightie rode her like a hairshirt. And meeting Anna Crow didn’t help. Especially an Anna Crow wearing a long trailing robe of azure velvet, a blonde wig curling down her back and silk daisies garlanded in her hair, silk daisies in bracelets at either wrist. “Ophelia?” Kate asked.

“
La Belle Dame sans Merci
.”

“
Oh what can oil thee, knight-at-arms, alone and feebly squeaking?
I did that at school, it stunk. Miss Etheridge in the Ninth Grade, she wore silk stockings. Real silk. Married a stoker in the merchant marine, but he sank.”