Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

Solomon’s hogleg digs into my back. The Docks Boss’.44 weighs my left jacket pocket. A round from that in Lydia’s side, lean over and open her door and push her out and take the ramp onto the bridge. See something else.

Lydia puts a finger on the radio dial, takes it off.

– Just acting like you don’t care, Joe, that doesn’t change anything. And it won’t change how you feel if you fuck up and do something cruel and stupid. Something irrevocable.

Kill Lydia and drive away and see something else. Something new.

The first part has its appeal.

The rest of it? Ask me, there’s probably nothing out there worth seeing. Nothing better than a dying girl with no hair.

The bridge slips away and we’re on Leif Erikson Drive. The ocean on our right. I look at it. I’ve never seen it from this close.

Lydia stares.

– I flew over it. I flew over the whole damn thing. Twice. Imagine. And I’ll never do it again.

She leans her forehead against her window.

– Fucking Vyrus.

I glance at her.

– Still talking to Sela?

The muscles in the back of her neck jump.

– Sometimes. She’s Coalition now, but she’s still a friend.

I look at the road, arcing onto Shore Parkway, away from the water.

– She’s fucking the girl.

She turns from the window.

– I know.

I fish a smoke from my pocket.

She looks at the map in her lap, points.

– Cropsey Ave.

I take the exit. Neither of us talks. We hit a red at Neptune and watch the people draining away from the boardwalk where the rides are dark and the arcades are shutting down and the drunks are puking on the sidewalk outside Nathan’s.

She points again and I take a right on Surf.

She starts folding the map.

– Love doesn’t have a reason.

I ignore that nonsense.

She doesn’t.

– Sela and the girl feel something. You can’t do anything about that. And it’s none of your business anyway.

I roll down toward Seagate and pull to a stop and park on Mermaid Ave., around the corner from 37th and the ragged-ass end of the Riegelmann Boardwalk.

– Yeah, funny you should say that about it being none of my business.

I take out the big.44 and flip the cylinder and make sure I filled it with big hollow-point bullets. I did.

– Because I’ve been thinking just those words for the last half a fucking hour.

Lydia points at the gun.

– Planning to use that, Joe?

I drop the revolver in my pocket and take out the hogleg and break it open.

– No plans, just hopes.

She opens her door and swings down.

– Do me a favor, keep it in your pants.

We walk down the sidewalk, windblown sand crunching under our feet. We make for the lights flickering on the far side of the boardwalk.

She inhales sea air.

– Smells good.

I inhale smoke.

– Sure does.

We walk out on the boardwalk.

Lydia stops.

– She could change everything.

I stop.

She’s looking out at the water, a big moon rippling on the waves.

– The girl, Joe. Sela says. Joe. She could change everything.

I drop my smoke and grind it under my heel.

– Don’t talk crazy, Lydia. You’re smarter than that.

And I walk away from her and look down at the canvas tent, painted black and speckled with red gloss, that juts from beneath the edge of the boardwalk, pennants flapping from the center pole, torches burning at the entrance, a big banner cracking in the wind as a tall guy in a top hat and a tailcoat spiels in front of it.

– FREAKS! That’s rightytighty, ladeez and gentilemans! Real! Live! Freaks! Not the cut-rate varietals one finds down the shore! But the Real McCoy! Bearded ladies and tattooed men and wild Borneo savages are best left to the amateurs! Within the folds of this modest tent we will reveal to you actual FREAKS of nature! Creatures that spurn the light of day! Fearful, unnatural sports of fate that were never meant to be! Step up and step in, ladeez and gentilemans! A show unlike any other! A spectacle! A horror show! A festival of disgust and blood! Step! Right! Up!

Lydia comes alongside me.

I look at her.

– Can we leave now, or do we have to sit through this shit?

Apparently we have to sit through this shit.

– Ladeez and gentilemans!

I spill the last unpopped kernels from the red and white striped popcorn box into my mouth and crunch them.

– Know what would make this better?

– Never before on any stage at any time have you witnessed an appetite like the appetite of…The Glasseater!

Lydia is staring through the torch-lit gloom to the tiny stage where the MC gives the tails of his shabby coat a flip and bows as the curtain parts and reveals a scrawny dude in a loincloth sitting at a dinner table with dull silver candelabra and chipped china.

– If it wasn’t utterly exploitive?

Two chubby chicks in thigh-high leather boots, ripped lace corsets, snake tattoos and black lipstick come on stage. One ties a napkin around the Glasseater’s neck while the other places a tray covered by a dented silver dome in front of him. She pulls the dome away with a lackluster flourish, revealing a huge soup bowl piled high with rusty nails, shattered glass, twists of broken spring, bottle caps, chips of razor blades and bent sewing needles.

He takes the soupspoon from his setting, breathes onto it and wipes it in his bare armpit, dips up a helping of the scrap, smiles with broken teeth, shovels it in his mouth and begins to chew with his mouth open as the audience groans and squeals. Blood and bits of torn flesh dribble from his mouth along with shards of steel and glass as he swallows hard and snorts and a fine spray of blood fans from his nostrils.

I toss the empty popcorn box on top of the pile of beer cups, beer cans, beer bottles and corndog wrappers erupting from a rancid trash barrel.

– If I didn’t know he was gonna stop bleeding before he got off stage, and be as good as new tomorrow morning, that would make this better.

The small crowd of Brooklyn hipsters, old-school Coney Islanders, roughnecks and shorties does a collective gross-out and flinches as he spits blood at them and it splashes against the sheet of transparent plastic draped between them and the stage.

The frown on Lydia’s face carves itself a little deeper.

– Waste. Immoral waste.

I poke a finger in the opening of my rapidly thinning last pack of Luckys and count the remainders.

– Not your blood.

She glances at me, shakes her head.

– Is that what you think? Well it is, Joe. It’s mine and it’s yours. And more than that, it’s the blood of the uninfected people watching this spectacle without a notion of what’s going on.

The act comes to an end as the Glasseater autoregurgitates the wreckage, along with a fair amount of blood and fleshy bits, and the curtain drops.

Lydia turns on the bleacher and whispers at me over the hubbub of the crowd waiting for the next act.

– That blood? Someone could have used that to stay healthy another day. And someone, someone completely ignorant of the Vyrus is going to be replacing the blood that asshole just wasted. It’s like watching a Hummer drive by with the windows rolled down and the AC on full blast. Makes me want to puke.

The sound system cranks and Motorhead blisters the speakers with “Jailbait.”

The chubby girls, topless other than crosses of black electric tape over their nipples, sporting ripped satin pantaloons, one carrying twin beds of nails and the other carrying a sledgehammer, come from behind the curtain.

I point an unlit cigarette at the stage.

– Then I’m guessing this act is gonna really piss you off.

The MC raises his arms.