John Steakley - Vampire$

“I’ve got an idea,” I whispered.

“Love to hear it,” he whispered back over his shoulder.

“Let’s run away.”

He leaned back in, smiling. “Normally, I would consider that a brilliant move. My first reaction, come to think of it. But where do we run?”

“How about across the river? We could bide out in Big Bend until morning.”

He sat back on his heels, picked up the bottle. “I can think of at least six reasons why that’s a bad plan,” he replied taking a sip. He wiped his mouth. “And all of them are snakes.”

I laughed. “Then what do you suggest.”

“Well,” he replied, closing the blanket-thing back across the gap, “if we stay here I figure we got a fifty-fifty chance.”

I frowned. “You mean they’ll either find us or they won’t.”

We had another drink. The woman had two more. We talked. The woman said nothing at all until, some five or twelve drinks later, she decided to change her name to “Fifteen dollar American.”

We drank and talked some more, about another half hour, before she decided to change it to “Five dollar American.”

Fickle.

Somewhere into the second bottle, after the third and closest wave of mob rustling occurred just outside, we, Felix and me, decided to make ourselves a pact.

We were clearly doomed, we decided. So the thing to do was to tell each other, in these the last moments of existence, the Major Truths About Our Lives, like passengers on a falling airliner.

Which is how I found out he was a drug smuggler and he found out I was a narc.

It’s funny now but at the time I was pissed as hell. Well, grumpy, anyway. Felix laughed, knowing, as per the pact, that I couldn’t do anything about what he told me. Until I pointed out to him that neither could he tell anyone else about me and then we were both quiet. And then we both had another drink.

And then we both said, “Fuck it!” in unison, and laughed.

It was fun.

What was strange about it was me being so surprised in the first place. I mean, what the hell else did I expect Felix to be, way out there like that? It’s just that he wasn’t at all the type or something.

Something.

Anyway, about then two bad things happened in a hurry. The first was that horrible woman deciding to change her name to “Free” and leaning back and pulling up her dress and spreading her legs so wide you could see her liver.

I swear to God it gave me vertigo.

The second bad thing was her husband showing up through the other door.

I’d figured the other door was rusted shut or something. The rest of the place looked like it should be, anyhow. And maybe it was, but ol’ Hubby just slid it open with a flick of his wrist and there he stood, all six and a half feet and two hundred plus pounds with a headless chicken in one hand and a bloody machete in the other.

Next to his wife he was the ugliest human I’d ever seen.

“I think I know how the boxcar got down here by the river,” whispered Felix from beside me.

I whispered back without taking my eyes off Hubby. “He carried it down here on his back.”

And then the woman, the wife, screamed and Hubby roared and Felix and I were scrambling around and that machete was slashing through the air flinging drops of bright red chicken blood and the candle got turned over onto the cardboard furniture and flames rose up and the woman jumped between us and the giant to protect her furnishings and Felix and I used that moment to basically run screaming into the night.

Except Felix stopped long enough to grab the tequila and I got my metal wristwatch stuck in the blanket-curtain over the doorway and ripped it off when I jumped through into the weeds.

Outside, the mob was waiting.

Not close enough to see us. Not yet. But close enough that they were about to and close enough that there was no way to get around them and close enough for them to see the flickering light from the boxcar almost immediately and start toward it.

Too damn close, in other words.

“C’mon, Felix!” I hissed. “The river!”

“Hell, no!” he hissed back. “The snakes!”

We were running out of time. I grabbed him. “Fuck the snakes!”

And then he grabbed me back, all calm for a moment, looked me right in the eye, and said, “That’s really sick!”

I just had to laugh. He was just too weird.

But in the meantime we were in a bad spot, stuck between two groups anxious to pound on us, and we needed a plan.

To this day I still don’t know how we got up that tree, as drunk as we were, and as scared, and the whole time giggling insanely. It was pure Looney Tunes, but we did it. It cost me a lot of skin on the bark, but Felix shinnied right up using only one hand.

He carried the tequila in the other. Incredible.

So we sat up there and watched as the mob and the monster came together. Reminded me a lot of Frankenstein, with all those lanterns bobbing and that huge Hubby roaring. I don’t think he was much smarter than he looked because he thought they were us for a while, hammering on a half-dozen or so before they calmed him down. Then they got about halfway organized and all of them started searching for us.

Never looked up, though, and never came near us, though I think they may have heard us giggling once.

They were very persistent. Kept us up there all night long. Felix and I spent the time swapping sips from the bottle and gabbing more about ourselves like we had before. It was dumb as hell, I guess. But it was also our tree.

I told him a lot more about Viet Nam than I’d ever told anyone else and was frankly amazed at his considerable knowledge and understanding of that war, coming as he did from the sixties generation. He told me a lot about what he did and I listened to all of it and couldn’t make sense of any of it. Felix only smuggled marijuana, though he had been offered fortunes to run heavier dope. He didn’t seem to make very much money at all, in fact.

He didn’t even smoke the stuff. Hated it.

I was about to ask him what the hell he was doing there when we got onto the subject of brown heroin and the Cuban connection and the rest of it. He confirmed everything we’d heard, including the danger for his brand of amateur along the border. His own supplier, he said, regularly used Cuban ports and Cuban radar assistance to cross the Caribbean. Or had, until Fidel had started going into business for himself.

At first I thought he was just being upfront and straight about our pact when he went into such elaborate detail concerning his trade. But then I realized that he was also taking advantage of it. Every time I would later run across this info I would have to toss it out and he damn well knew I would stick to it.

How? How does anybody know about anybody? Sometimes you just do. I told him about me. He told me about him. Nobody else’s business.

Our tree.

He was getting out that month. He wanted to live. He didn’t want to join and he didn’t want to fight. He was worried about his partners, though.

“They’re young and greedy and stupid and they think that kind of craving makes them tough,” he said once, cupping his cigarette coal against a sighting from the now-scattered posse. He sighed. “And they know all the excuses.”

I asked him what he was going to do and he said, “Nothing,” and I knew he meant it. As long as they didn’t involve him, it was their choice and their life.

It got very quiet there for a long time. Dawn was coming and the searchers had given up and it was a bit chilly until the wind died down. The last thing I remember was our finishing the bottle at last telling elephant jokes. Felix knew a thousand elephant jokes.

And then I woke up in the Rio Grande.

It was the sound, more than the water, that scared me at first. Splashing in from several stories up makes quite a racket. And then the water was in my scream and my ears and cold and moving but the sun was there somewhere and then I was awake enough to realize where I was and pretty soon after that awake enough to remember what swimming was and that I could do it. I lived.