Vampire Blood (7 page)

“Are you all right?” she cried. “Is there anything broken?” There was blood coming from somewhere, but she couldn’t tell where at first. There were ugly scratches on his face from the bushes.

Maude stood gaping at him from behind her, her face white.

“Naw, don’t think so, Jenny,” he moaned, looking up at her, dazed, pain and disbelief racing across his weathered face. “I got so dizzy. I fell,” he muttered as if he couldn’t believe it. He clutched his right arm closer to his side. “My arm hurts.” He winced as she barely touched it.

“Oh, Dad! I knew this would happen. You fell. You actually
fell!”

“No joke,” he snapped back at her, annoyed. He was visibly trying to pull himself together, make light of it. “I’m fine, Jenny. Just a sore arm, that’s all, a couple of scratches. I’ll be okay. Heck, I’ve fallen countless times in my life. No big deal. Your mom always said I had bones like rubber. I bounce and never break a thing.” He attempted to smile, but instead, pain suffused his face.

“Sure, you’re just a rubber band man.
Look at you.
”
Jenny’s
face was streaming with tears, and her eyes registered horror as she discovered every new injury: bruises and cuts down both his arms and a growing lump on the front of his head.

“You’re bleeding. You’re hurt!”

“Stop that caterwauling, girl.” He shoved her helping hands away.

He got halfway to his feet, and with a screech of pain crumpled to the ground once more like a deflated balloon.

“Darn. Must have bruised something,” he muttered, his eyes slightly glassy.

“Ernest P. Lacey!” Maude fussed as she settled down next to Jenny and looked accusingly at her old friend. “What have you gone and done now?”

“Well, Maude, what does it look like? I tried to fly and didn’t make it.” He pouted. “I slipped off the damn walk board.”

“You think you’re some kind of monkey or something, climbing around like a teenager? When are you gonna learn that our old bones are brittle, easy to break. You should be more careful, you old fart.”

“Nothing’s broken, I told you, both of you,” he reiterated through clenched teeth. “Women! Always making mountains out of molehills.”

“Jenny, we better take him to the hospital. I think he’s broken something, no matter what he says.”

“Don’t need no damn hospital, I tell ya. I’m not hurt that bad.” He yanked away from Maude and Jenny, glaring at them.

“Fibber,” Maude mumbled, tsk-tsking.

“Jenny,” His gaze swung towards his daughter, “can just take me home, where I can clean up some. Then it’ll be fine. Fallen before, like I said; never hurt bad once. Never had to go to no hospital, and I’m not starting now.”

“Yeah,” Jenny replied sarcastically, getting irritated at his obstinate attitude. “And we don’t want to break the record now, do we?”

Her dad continued to sulk, huddled on the ground, broken and bleeding.

“Stubborn as a damn mule,” Maude interjected flatly under her breath to Jenny, shaking her head.

“A weekend coming up to rest, and I’ll be good as new Monday. Take my word for it, Maude. Jenny, take me home.”

“Go ahead, Jenny, take the old codger home, if that’s what he wants. Can’t talk no sense into old fools.”

Jenny stood up and helped her dad to his feet. He moaned, and she felt his full weight shift onto her. He was in pain, and they both knew it, but she’d begun to suspect something else.

“You two have done enough work for today.” Maude took his other arm. She helped walk the invalid to the car. “Looks like we might be getting some rain here soon anyway.”

Thick, angry looking clouds were scudding in, and the wind had the taste of water in it. It had come in so sudden.

“I’ll clean up things for you; put your scrapers, paint, and brushes on the porch when I’m through...ready for Monday.”

Jenny slid grateful eyes to her old friend. “We’d appreciate that a lot, Maude. Thanks.”

She helped her dad into the passenger’s seat, and she got into the driver’s side. Through the open window, she promised Maude, “We’ll be here extra early Monday morning. We’ll make up the lost time.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Maude said. “Take this.” She slipped a piece of folded paper out of her pocket into Jenny’s hand, whispering so her father wouldn’t hear.

“In case he decides to go to the hospital anyway, or if you two need it.” She winked.

By the feel of it, it was a check. “Thanks,” Jenny whispered back, warmly squeezing Maude’s wrinkled hand. It was all she could think of to say.

Jenny started the car and pulled out onto the road before she popped the obvious question. “You don’t have medical coverage, do you?” It wasn’t accusatory, merely a statement of fact.

A few moments of heavy silence. Jenny looked over at her father. He was leaning against the seat, his eyes clenched shut in pain. His face drained.

“Nope.”

The scratches, bites, whatever they were on his neck, were vivid red, puffy.

“You’re going to say now that you can’t afford it, right?”

“Yep,” he said testily. “Rates kept going up and up. Couldn’t see paying that much a month on a gamble.”

He wouldn’t be eligible for Medicare, either, until next year. Jenny shook her head sadly as she maneuvered the station wagon down the road. She hated driving his car. It reminded her of a tank. A rusty, noisy tank.

Thank goodness, the farmhouse was only about a mile away.

“Dad, at your age you need it.”

No answer.

“Well, at least, next year there’ll be Medicare. You’ll have coverage, then.”

“Charity,” he snarled from the corner as they bumped down the road. “Never have taken charity, never will. I got my pride, Jenny.”

His pride. Forever his damn pride.

“Dad, Medicare isn’t charity. You paid taxes all your life. It’s your due.”

“Still charity,” he grumbled again. “Don’t need it.”

Jenny sighed aloud, tired and sick of worrying about her wayward, persnickety parents. She wasn’t allowed to tell them how to live their lives; all she could do was worry to death about the both of them, while they drove her slowly, completely insane.

“Sure, Dad. Is pride going to stop the pain you’re feeling right now?” she threw at him. “You need to go to the hospital. We have money. Maude paid us in advance, so we can afford it.”

“She didn’t have to do that, just because she felt sorry for us.” Resentment tinged his voice. “Won’t stand for peoples’ pity, neither.”

Jenny finally lost her temper. “She didn’t—,” but her father cut her off.

“I don’t want to go to the dern hospital! You hear me! Just take me home. This is your father, Jenny, telling you this. Just obey your father like a good child.” His eyes closed, his mouth puckered in anger. Jenny had rarely seen him so agitated.

It shook her.

Jenny’s face hardened, and she simply nodded.

She didn’t utter another word until she’d deposited him inside his front door and helped him into the house. After she’d aided him in cleaning his cuts and scrapes with a warm soapy washrag, and they’d fought over whether his arm was broken or not, she helped him to bed.

Making him as comfortable as she could, she prepared him something to eat. He refused to touch it. He was asleep by the time she’d covered the food and stashed it away in the refrigerator.

Outside, the storm clouds had accumulated swiftly, hiding the sun. Distant peals of thunder echoed miles away, growing louder, coming closer.

Before she left, she squeezed his car into the rickety garage behind the farmhouse and made sure his doors and windows were closed and locked. He always left them wide open. Then she strolled home across the field to her trailer.

The walk helped her. It cleared her head.

The wet scent of rain wafted achingly on the warm air. Black-edged clouds were coming in now like a stampeding crowd of wild stallions. Jenny could smell the salty ocean mingled in with the tang of the dying grass. It was amazing how quickly the bright summer’s day had changed into a hazy, darkening late afternoon.

She was so infuriated at her father she could have screamed.

Instead, she stopped to caress and murmur loving words to Black Beauty and Lightning, her dad’s two swaybacked bony horses.

They’d come up eagerly to her the minute she climbed the pasture fence. Jenny gently mounted Lightning’s broad back and let him take her home at a slow walk. Black Beauty happily cantered behind as the clouds grew more menacing above them.

She peered into the gathering white mist. It was strange, the mist. She’d never seen anything quite like it. Thick as split-pea soup, treacherous as it swirled around the horses hooves.

She kept Lightning to a sedate trot, even though he wanted to frisk, and wouldn’t let him jump anything. Poor old beast, she thought, as she pushed Black Beauty’s velvety nose away from his flank playfully. The two horses never went anywhere without the other. Jenny’s thoughts turned melancholy as she watched them together.

Why couldn’t her parents be that faithful to each other in their old age?

Jenny slowed her horse down, turned and rode the long way across the field, her thoughts full of her early childhood. How her and her brothers used to ride every day in this very field when they were young.

They’d had a lot of horses once. Eventually they were all sold over the years for debts. The family could never get ahead.

Thus had their secure childhood slipped away in fragments, more each year.

Remembering her teenage years with still painful embarrassment—her mother’s clever evasions when the bill collectors had started coming out to the farm angrily demanding their money or never having enough for the final bill when she was sent to the grocery store—Jenny prodded Lightning into trotting a little faster. As if she could outrun the memories.

That was when her mother had really begun drinking.

The wind had picked up, and the mist attacked them like something hungry and alive. Lightning began to snort and prance nervously, his eyes rolling as if he were afraid of its curling fingers, and Jenny finally jumped down. With a light slap, she sent him towards the barn before the storm hit. She watched the horses gallop off together and then she headed home. The ground crunched beneath her feet, and the rising wind whipped at her loose hair.

It was getting cooler. It felt good on her sunburned skin.

She scrambled over the fence that ran along behind her trailer and slid in the back door as the first sheets of rain hit.

Once inside, she slumped at the kitchen table. She felt too weary and disgusted to do more than sit and stare at the darkening windows. The rain drummed against the outside of her trailer like mad tapping feet, making her feel as if she were in a giant, black belly of some primitive sleeping carnivore.

The shadows were beginning to claim the day. Inside it was dark.

She got up and groped her way by touch through the living room, until she found the lamp and switched it on.

Soft light flooded the gloomy corners and scared the monsters away.

The trailer was a cramped, no-frills twelve-by-thirty footer she’d bought in St. Augustine’s with the last of her savings after her divorce. She’d pulled it all the way down here behind her brother Joey’s old truck that she’d borrowed three months ago and parked it. It wasn’t much: a cramped kitchen, a long, narrow living room, one bedroom and a bath—but it was all hers. She’d fixed it up real pretty. It was home.

Better than having to go live with her dad.

She’d refused to take any money from Benjamin when she’d divorced him, wanting nothing from him but her freedom.

Not feeling like going into town, she opened the refrigerator’s freezer and yanked out a frozen dinner. Turkey and mashed potatoes. Her favorite. She popped it into her tiny microwave oven and pressed the correct buttons. She left it humming behind her as she moved into the next room and collapsed on the flowered sofa.

She’d been doing a lot of deep thinking all day.

God,
she pleaded, as she hung her head in her hands and the drops of rain tap-tap-tapped, dancing on her tin roof,
don’t let me end up like my parents. Old, broke and alone. Not like them,
she begged the emptiness.
Please.

She wiped the tears away.
I don’t have to end up like that if I don’t want to,
she told herself firmly.
I
still have time. I can still change life.

By God,
she thought fiercely,
I’m going to find a way to do it, too.

I have to.

She let her eyes rest on the cloth-covered lump on the bottom shelf of her bookcase. Her laptop. The one she hadn’t touched in years. For some reason she hadn’t gotten rid of it. It was out-of-date. Might not even run if she plugged it in.

She pushed herself off the sofa, walked over, and uncovered it. Dusty. She opened it and ran her fingers across the top of its familiar keys then gazed up at the books lined up neatly on her small bookcase.