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  It took a few minutes for the baby-blood to come on. While he was waiting he checked out his voice mail from the kitchen phone, a two-piece wood and brass wall model, a perfect replica of the phone in Lassie's farmhouse kitchen save for the touch-tone buttons adorning the inside of the handpiece. Nick's was the last message. Whistler listened impassively, replaying it once to jot down the address of the church on the chalkboard next to the phone before erasing the message.

  Then as the crystalline clarity of the baby-blood buzz began to build—it wasn't like other drugs, not even like other blood highs—he looked down at the lad in the little crib at his feet, and an idea—rather, a revelation—sprang up full blown and shiny bright. On baby-blood, all ideas sprang up full blown and shiny bright, with the force of revelation.

  "I do believe an opportunity has arisen," he remarked confidentially to the infant. "Instead of going right back to that nasty old hospital, how would you like to visit El Cerrito instead?"

  Still reserved, but playful now—another effect of the baby-blood—he cocked his head for the reply, then glanced over at the chalkboard. "Yes, darling, that's what I said: the godforsaken flatlands of El Cerrito."

  FIVE

  Betty Ruth eased herself down into the hot juniper-scented bubble bath she'd been promising herself all day, in lieu of the celebratory drink she wanted so badly. Inch-high votive candles were balanced around the sink and on top of the toilet tank and the wicker hamper; inside each of the tiny bath bubbles flickered an even tinier juniper-green flame.

  "A three-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar-a-month miracle," she sighed, and her sigh echoed through the tiny bathroom of the two-story parsonage that took up the front third of the Church of the Higher Power—only a narrow back staircase connected it with the church proper. Upstairs were a small bedroom, the bath, and an unoccupied nursery, all with low slanted ceilings; she used the ground-floor living room for her clients, though often as not the counseling sessions ended up at the kitchen table.

  Being something of a unrecovered workaholic, Betty had brought a notebook into the bath with her—she facilitated a small group of battered lesbians that met on Saturday mornings, and she wanted to review her notes from the last meeting—but she couldn't get her mind off her answered prayer.

  " 'Three nights a week.' That's pretty much it, word for word. For word, for word." Betty knew that answered prayers usually meant trouble: "Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it," was a common theme not only in Sufi tales and New Age texts, but even in old horror stories like "The Monkey's Paw." She recalled with a shudder how the bereaved mother's prayer for her dead son's return was answered when his mangled corpse dragged itself to her front door.

  But Betty's uneasiness, she suspected, was not entirely based on superstition—she'd been around recovery programs for quite a few years now, and had never heard of one that kept itself anonymous, as well as its members. She'd even gone so far as to thumb through her twelve-step source books—no V.A. of any description.

  "Anonymous Anonymous," she said, pushing back her bangs and patting her oft-neglected forehead (her gray-brown hair had been cut in the same weatherproof dutch boy for the past twenty years) with a steaming wet washcloth. "Oh well, I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later."

  Then, as she let herself sink down into the welcoming heat until her chin brushed the steaming surface of the water: "I guess an addict is an addict is an addict." With a puff of breath she blew the bubbles away from her mouth, in order to finish her thought. "As long as the check clears, that is." And with a final tight-lipped but satisfied grin, as if to say Oh what a naughty girl am I, she disappeared beneath the billowing juniper-scented waves of foam.

  It couldn't have been more than twenty minutes later—the water was still warm—when Betty was awakened from a delicious half-doze by the sound of the double doors slamming in the church below. That's funny, she thought. I could have sworn I locked them. She climbed out of the bath and toweled off hastily, then threw on her shabby corduroy bathrobe and hurried down the musty back staircase, which was so steep and sharply angled that light from the bare bulb at the top barely reached the door at the bottom.

  She paused before that door. A smart person would not turn that knob, she thought, remembering poor Carol Knox, the Walnut Creek minister who'd been murdered by a pregnant schizophrenic Satan-worshipper in the mid-eighties. A smart person would go back upstairs and call 911. Then she heard what sounded like a kitten mewling.

  "Another abandoned kitten." She was both annoyed and relieved. "What am I, the SPCA?" But when Betty opened the door she felt a cold breeze blowing through the church, and saw the double doors at the far end smashed inward. Then she heard the mewling again, coming from a back pew; this time she recognized the sound and went racing barefoot down the aisle, ratty bathrobe flying out behind her.

  Chapter 2

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  ONE

  Lourdes Perez opened her refrigerator door, then knelt to retrieve a clear plastic drip bag of blood from behind a cabbage in the vegetable crisper. It was nearly empty—squeeze and shake it as she might, less than half a shotglass was all she could wring out of it. More than enough to get her out of bed this Saturday night, barely enough to get her out of the house.

  Normally she would have taken a bag home with her on Friday, but that bitch Bev had been watching her like a hawk since Thursday. Still, even knowing that her stash was nearly empty, it had taken all the willpower Lourdes possessed not to polish it off before going to bed this morning—she'd settled for a couple Halcion instead. Lucky thing Bev had offered her the standby shift tonight—she didn't know what she'd have done otherwise.

  When her hands had steadied, Lourdes spent a quick fifteen minutes at her vanity, pulling her glossy black hair into a tight bun, and applying eye shadow externally and Visine internally to her oval-shaped brown eyes. She got her coloring, her eyes, and her wide-bridged nose from her Filipino father. Her mouth, though, was her Okie mother's, thin lipped, neat and hungry: tonight she smoothed on a rich Persian red lip gloss that contrasted nicely with the cream-white cowl-neck wool sweater she'd laid out on the bed.

  She chose her beige skirt last. It had to be a skirt because she had only two clear goals for her Saturday night, the second of which was to get laid. And when Lourdes seduced a man, she liked to take her clothes off standing up, while he watched—it sort of got things started off on the right foot. For that purpose, jeans were unsuited—too ungraceful, no matter how good they made her butt look.

  The first of her goals, of course, was to procure a bag of blood. She checked her purse to make sure she had the keys to the bank, and hustled out the door practicing the little twitch at the end of her normally liquid stride that would set her skirt a-sway, thereby compensating for her temporary lack of jeans.

  Later Lourdes would tell herself that she'd had a premonition at the door of the West County Blood Bank; more likely the little frisson she experienced as she turned the key was associated with the fact that she was, after all, about to commit a crime, albeit a misdemeanor. And once in, she'd apparently felt confident enough to be whistling the we will we will rock you refrain as she let herself into the cold-storage room.

  The whistling stopped cold when she let herself out, though: Somehow Beverly had materialized in the middle of the office. Behind her, blocking the exit, was a dyke—looking heavy in a crew cut and a woolen poncho, and both of them were looking serious as a heart attack. Two heart attacks.

  "Oh, hi Bev," Lourdes managed, but it fell so far short of casual that she might as well have performed a double take and a pratfall.

  "Hi, Lourdes," said Bev, with what for her was a degree of pleasantness. "Would you like to show me what you've got in your purse there?"

  "Not particularly," was the reply. Lourdes had been popped before, though never for blood, and if all her experience (getting busted by her parents for masturbating or stealing their booze and cigarettes, then by truant office
rs for ditching, and by teachers for drugs, and later by Modesto cops for D.U.I, or just for hanging out with the wrong crowd) had taught her one thing, it was that they always had their minds made up in advance how they were going to deal with you.

  No matter who had caught you, or what they said, they already knew whether they were going to ground you or expel you or send you to counseling or take you to jail or let you off with a warning. This may or may not have been an accurate perception, but it was definitely liberating: all you had to do was see how it played out, and then you could give them the appropriate response: sorry or thank you or fuck you very much.

  So she didn't even bother to open her purse for the two women, and if she fought at all, it was for mastery over herself—not to let them see how badly shaken she was. And after they'd asked her to have a seat and told her they knew how she was feeling because they'd been there themselves; after they informed her that she had a problem and that they'd like her to come with them to meet some people who'd had the same problem; even after she realized it was counseling they had in mind and responded appropriately (thank you out loud, fuck you sideways under her breath), the sense of panic still threatened to overwhelm her.

  The only way she could stave it off was to persuade herself that they were talking about some sort of twelve-step or support group for kleptos, and throughout the drive to El Cerrito (they let her follow them in her car, which she suspected was some sort of by-the-book we-trust-you-so-trust-us bullshit), whenever the panic threatened to boil over, she clung to that little piece of denial like flotsam after a shipwreck. That's all it is, the stealing. They think my problem is the stealing. The alternative—whatever it might be—was too awful to think about.

  TWO

  The battered lesbians had not gotten their money's worth out of a nearly sleepless Betty Ruth on Saturday morning, as the police hadn't finished with their crime scene—laying out reels of yellow tape, measuring the doors and taking samples of the splintered wood, stomping around the lawn looking at footprints they themselves had made, and dusting the pews for fingerprints—until nearly three. They also drank lots of coffee and squawked on their walkie-talkies (Who could they be talking to? Betty wondered. Every cop in El Cerrito is already here) and interviewed her over and over.

  This last annoyance was at least partly her own fault: having fallen desperately in love with the baby in the fifteen minutes it had taken for the cops and the paramedics to show up, she had surrendered it with a lame wisecrack, and after that things were out of her hands.

  Or, as the detective from Martinez who'd been the last to interview her had put it: "Reverend Shoemaker, I personally don't believe you're our kidnapper here. I personally don't really suspect that you drove out to Martinez and took that baby, then brought him back here, smashed in your own church doors, and called nine-one-one. But when I give my chief a report stating that the abducted infant was returned by a childless female who was overheard by a responding officer to have stated—" He'd flipped back through his leather-bound notebook. "—and I quote: 'I wanted a baby in the worst way, but this wasn't exactly what I had in mind,' you can understand that he's going to have a few more questions, and I'd better have the answers for him. So—" He glanced down at the notebook again. "You told the lady from Child Protective Services that you've been trying to have a baby for a year, and were feeling hopeless, and that time was running out for you?"

  "No no no." Betty felt her rosy cheeks growing hot—she'd assumed she and the woman from CPS were having a woman-to-woman communication. "I said I've been looking for a suitable sperm donor for a year. And I didn't say I was hopeless—I said the men were hopeless and sperm banks were too expensive. As far as time running out, all I said was that at my age, if I didn't make a decision soon, time would make it for me." What a conversation to be having with a cop.

  "And that is… ?"

  "The decision? Whether to have—"

  "No, your age."

  "I'm forty-one." For another few weeks, anyway. But unless they asked for her date of birth, that would be her own damn business.

  Then, after the cops had left, there was still the problem of the doors—they'd helped her get them closed again, but only by propping them in place. But a quick glance around reminded her that there wasn't much in the church proper worth stealing, so she settled for locking the office and meeting-room doors, and bolting both staircase doors behind her on her way back up to the parsonage.

  She'd spent the remaining hours before dawn lying awake trying to read, listening for prowlers, and finally drifting off to something like sleep with her palms crossed against her chest as if she were still holding the baby, feeling that warm life in her hands again, and that tiny heart beating against her breast.

  But then, too soon, the battered lesbians, and the cajoling of the scrap wood from Dolan Lumber, and the rounding up of the volunteers to fix the doors, and then in the afternoon two new clients for couples counseling. Ho hum. He wanted more sex and less nagging; she wanted vulnerability, and for him to clean the toilet when it was his turn. Betty could have done it in her sleep—and very nearly did.

  After the session, exhausted though she was, she knew she'd never be able to get to sleep without calling the hospital to find out how the baby was doing; within ten minutes of receiving the news that he was a little anemic but otherwise thriving, Betty was dead to the world.

  When she awoke again, the sky beyond the live oak branches that shaded her window was black, and she felt momentarily dislocated in time—normally when she awoke in darkness it was to the silence of the early morning hours. Then she glanced at the Dream Machine on her bedside table (it had cost a few dollars more than the other clock radios, but she felt it was worth it for the name alone), saw that it was 8:25, and realized she was supposed to be meeting Nick out in front of the church in twenty minutes.

  She hurried out of bed and into the shower, a quick glance at the dresser mirror having confirmed that her hair was a disaster area and that pillow lines scored one cheek. It seemed to her that a gay man would notice that sort of thing. He might not care, but he'd notice.

  After her shower she opened wide the window to avoid worsening the damp-rot problem. Unable to afford the necessary repairs, the best she could do was keep the bathroom aired out until another miracle happened along. Still, she was determined not to pray to her Higher Power for this one—didn't want to seem greedy.

  "But if You felt like doing it on Your own," she remarked casually on her way down the back stairs, "we've got a low bid of ten thousand five. That's without a cushion, though, so You might want to make it twelve even, just to be on the safe side."

  She hesitated again at the bottom of the staircase, then, reprimanding herself for her timidity, drew the bolt emphatically, and threw the door open with a crash. She immediately felt silly for her dramatics: the church was as peaceful and calm a sanctuarial presence as it had been before the break-in, with only a hint of sawdust in the air, and a slight crack of light knifing in at the far end, where one of the newly repaired double doors no longer hung quite flush against its jamb.

  Nick came strolling up the shady walk at precisely 8:45. It was a tranquil Saturday night in El Cerrito, or as tranquil as it gets in the flat-lands, what with the constant hum of traffic along San Pablo Avenue, and the intermittent roar of the BART train along the elevated tracks. Under the shadow of the live oaks the churchyard behind the twisted black wrought-iron fence seemed only a few gravestones short of Dickensian to Nick, but the church building itself was a solid and reassuring presence.

  "I fell in love with that building the first time I saw it," he called to Betty Ruth, who was waiting for him at the church doors with her hair still damp from the shower. "There's something so… familiar about it."

  "Everybody says that. It's the proportions. I figured it out one time—it's built to the exact proportions of a Monopoly hotel."

  He backed up a few steps and cocked his head. "Exactly! All it needs is a
coat of red paint."

  "Not for a church, I think."

  "No, I suppose not. What happened to the doors? I didn't notice any of this last night."

  "Nothing serious. Somebody broke in, but they didn't do any other damage."

  "Did anything get stolen?"

  "No, nothing taken." Quite the opposite, in fact, she thought, but she'd already decided to tell as few people as possible about the baby. She held up a piece of paper and a magic marker, and changed the subject. "So did you want me to put up some signs, with arrows down to the basement?"

  He pursed his lips, pretending to think about it. "Nooo. It shouldn't be necessary. It's a closed meeting—all our meetings are closed—and everyone has directions."

  "Suit yourself."

  The Church of the Higher Power was as plain inside as out—wooden pews, low unadorned altar, three high narrow windows set in each long wall. "What was this building before it was the CHP?" he asked as she closed the doors behind them.

  "It was built by Holy Rollers back in the twenties. Nothing fancy—but sturdy. The '89 quake didn't even faze her."

  "No, they did a nice job," Nick agreed. "See how these pews are pegged with contrasting wood instead of just nailed?"

  There was a smudge of fingerprint powder on the back of the last pew—quickly Betty stepped forward to brush it away, then wiped her hand on the back of her roomy jeans. "Are you a carpenter?" she asked him.

  He shook his head. "No, just a dabbler. But I appreciate fine workmanship." He turned around to examine the doors. "That's why it's such a damn shame to see that."

  Together they looked over the hasty repair work—a blaze of new wood at the hinge of one door, a sheet of stark knotty plywood nailed over the jagged hole in the other. "I know, but it'll have to do," she said finally, torn between appreciating what might be concern and resenting what might be criticism. "We don't exactly have a lot of cushion built into the facility budget."