"Drawing Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brite Poppy Z)

Could they?
Momma and Daddy were far down the road now, small gesturing shapes in the distance. But Trevor could see that they had stopped walking, that they were just standing there. Arguing, yes. Yelling, probably. Maybe crying. But not going away.
Trevor looked down at the page and fell back into the story.


It turned out they couldn't go anywhere. Daddy called a mechanic, an immensely tall, skinny young man who was still almost a teenager, with a face as long and pale and kindly as that of the Man in the Moon. Stitched in bright orange thread on the pocket of his greasy overalls was the improbable name Kinsey.
Kinsey said the Rambler had thrown a rod that had probably been ready to go since New Orleans, and unless they were prepared to drop several hundred bucks into that tired old engine, they might as well push the car off the road and be glad they'd broken down close to a town. After all, Kinsey pointed out, they might be staying awhile.
Daddy helped him roll the car forward a few feet so that it was completely off the blacktop. The body sagged on its tires, two-toned paint a faded turquoise above the dusty strip of chrome that ran along the side, dirty white below. Trevor thought the Rambler already looked dead. Daddy's face was very pale, almost bluish, sheened with oily-looking sweat. When he took off his sunglasses, Trevor saw smudgy purple shadows in the hollows of his eyes.
"How much do we owe you?" Daddy said. It was obvious from his voice that he dreaded the answer.
Kinsey looked at Momma, at Trevor and Didi in the crooks of her arms, at their clothes and other belongings heaped in the back seat, the duffel bags bulging up from under the roped-down lid of the trunk, the three mattresses strapped to the roof. His quick blue eyes, as bright as Trevor's and Daddy's were pale, seemed to take in the situation at a glance. "For coming out? Nothing. My time isn't that valuable, believe me."
He lowered his head a little to peer into Daddy's face. Trevor thought suddenly of an inquisitive giraffe. "But don't I know you? You wouldn't be ... no ... not Robert McGee? The cartoonist who blew the brainpan off the American underground' in the words of Saint Crumb himself? . . . No, no, of course not. Not in Missing Mile. Silly of me, sorry."
He was already turning away, and Daddy wasn't going to say anything. Trevor couldn't stand it. He wanted to run to the tall young man, to yell up into that kind, curious face, Yes, it is him, it is Robert McGee and he's everything you said and he's MY DADDY TOO! In that moment Trevor felt he would burst with pride for his father.
But Momma's arm tightened around him, holding him back. One long lacquered nail tapped a warning on his forearm. "Sh," he heard her say softly.
And Daddy, Robert McGee, Bobby McGee, creator of the crazed, sick, beautiful comic Birdland, whose work had appeared beside Crumb's and Shelton's, in Zap! and the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other and everywhere in between, all across the country . . . who had received and refused offers from the same Hollywood he had once drawn as a giant blood-swollen tick still clinging to the rotten corpse of a dog labeled Art . . . who had once had a steady hand and a pure, scathing vision ...
Daddy only shook his head and looked away.


Just past downtown Missing Mile, a road splits off to the left from Firehouse Street and meanders away into scrubby countryside. The fields out here are nearly barren, the soil gone infertile-most believe from overfarming and lack of crop rotation. Only the oldest residents of town still say these fields are cursed, and were once sowed with salt. The good land is on the other side of town, the side toward Corinth, out where the abandoned railyard and the deep woods are. Firehouse Street runs into State Highway 42. The road that splits off to the left soon becomes gravel, then dirt. This is the poorest part of Missing Mile, the place called Violin Road.
Out here the best places to live are decrepit farmhouses, big rambling places with high ceilings and large cool rooms, most of which were abandoned or sold years ago as the crops went bad. A step below these are the aluminum trailers and tarpaper shacks, their dirt yards choked with broken toys, rusting hulks of autos, and other trash, their peripheries negligently guarded by slat-sided, soporific hounds.
Out here only the wild things are healthy, the old trees whose roots find sustenance far below the ill-used layer of topsoil, the occasional rosebush gone to green thicket and thorns, the unstoppable kudzu. It is as if they have decided to take back the land for their own.
Trevor loved it. It was where he discovered that he could draw even if Daddy couldn't.
Momma talked to a real estate agent in town and figured out that they could afford to rent one of the dilapidated farmhouses for a month. By that time, she said, she would find a job in Missing Mile and Daddy would be drawing. Sure enough, a few days after they moved their things into the house, a dress shop hired Momma as a salesgirl. The job was no fun-she couldn't wear jeans to work, which left her with a choice of one Indian-print skirt and blouse or one patchwork dress-but she ate lunch at the diner in town and sometimes stopped for coffee after her shift. Soon she met some of the kids they'd seen going into the record store, and others like them.
If she could drive to Raleigh or Chapel Hill, they told Momma, she could make good money modeling for university art classes. Momma talked to Kinsey at the garage, who let her set up a payment plan. A week later the Rambler had a brand-new engine, and Momma quit the dress shop and started driving to Raleigh several times a week.
Daddy had his things set up in a tiny fourth bedroom at the back of the house, his untidy jumble of inks and brushes and his drawing table, the one piece of furniture they had brought from Austin. He went in there and shut the door every morning after Momma left, and he stayed in there most of the day. Trevor had no idea whether he was drawing or not.
But Trevor was. He had found an old sketchbook of Daddy's when Momma unpacked the car. Most of the pages had been torn out, but there were still a few blank sheets left. Trevor usually took Didi outside to play in the daytime-Momma had assured him that the Devil's Tramping Ground was more than forty miles away, so he didn't have to worry about accidentally coming upon the pacing, muttering demon.
When Didi was napping-something he seemed to do more and more often these days-Trevor wandered through the house, looking at the bare floorboards and the water-stained walls, wondering if anyone had ever loved this house. One afternoon he found himself in the dim, shabby kitchen, perched on one of the rickety chairs that had come with the house, a felt-tip pen in his hand, the sketchbook on the table before him. He had no idea what he was going to draw. He had hardly ever thought about drawing before; that was what Daddy did. Trevor could remember scribbling with crayons on cheap newsprint when he was Didi's age, making great round heads with stick arms and legs coming straight out of them, as small children do. This circle with five dots in it is Momma, this one is Daddy, that one's me. But he hadn't drawn for at least a year-not since Daddy stopped.
Daddy had told him once that the trick was not to think about it, not in your sketchbook anyway. You just had to find the path between your hand and your heart and your brain and see what came out. Trevor uncapped the pen and put its tip against the unblemished (though slightly yellowed) page of the sketchbook. The ink began to bleed into the paper, making a small spreading dot, a tiny black sun in a pale void. Then, slowly, Trevor's hand began to move.
He soon discovered he was drawing Skeletal Sammy, a character from Daddy's comic book, Birdland. Sammy was all straight lines and sharp points: easy to draw. The half-leering, half-desperate face, the long black coat that hung on Sammy's shoulders like a pair of broken wings, the spidery hands and the long thin legs and the exaggerated bulge of Sammy's kneecaps beneath his black stovepipe pants-all began to take shape.
Trevor sat back and looked at the drawing. It was nowhere near as good as Daddy's Sammy, of course; the lines weren't straight, the black inking was more like scribbling. But it was no circle with five dots, either. It was immediately recognizable as Skeletal Sammy.
Daddy recognized it as soon as he walked into the kitchen.
He leaned over Trevor's shoulder for several moments looking at the drawing. One hand rested lightly on Trev's back; the other tapped the table nervously, fingers as long and thin as Sammy's, faint lavender veins visible beneath the pale skin, silver wedding ring too loose on the third finger. For a moment Trevor feared Daddy might snatch the drawing, the whole sketchbook; he felt as if he had been caught doing something wrong.
But Daddy only kissed the top of Trevor's head. "You draw a mean junkie, kiddo," he whispered into Trevor's ginger hair. And he was gone from the kitchen silently, like a ghost, without getting the beer or glass of water or whatever he had come for, leaving his elder son half elated and half dreadfully, mysteriously ashamed.
The carefully drawn fingers of Sammy's left hand were blurring. A drop of moisture on the page, making the ink bleed and furl. Trevor touched the wetness, then put his finger to his lips. Salty. A tear.
Daddy's, or his own?


The worst thing happened the following week. It turned out Daddy had been drawing in his cramped little studio. Had finally finished a story, only a page long, and sent it off to one of his papers. Trevor couldn't remember if it was the Barb or the Freep or maybe one of the others-he got them mixed up sometimes.
The paper rejected the story. Daddy read the letter aloud in a hollow, mocking voice. It had been a difficult decision, the editor said, considering his reputation and the selling power of his name. However, he simply didn't feel the story approached the quality of Daddy's previous work, and he thought publishing it would be bad both for the paper and for Daddy's career.
It was the kindest way the editor could find to say This comic is a piece of shit.
The next day, Daddy walked into town and called the publisher of Birdland. The stories for the fourth issue were already nearly a year overdue. Daddy told the publisher there would be no more stories, not now, not ever. Then he hung up the pay phone and walked a mile across town to the liquor store. By the time he got home, he had already cracked the seal on a gallon jug of bourbon.
Momma had begun staying later and later in the city after her modeling jobs-having drinks with some of the other models one night, going to someone's apartment to get stoned the next. Daddy didn't like that, had even refused to smoke the joint she brought him as a present from her friends. She said they wanted to meet him and the kids, but Daddy told her not to invite them out.
Trevor had gone into Raleigh with Momma one day. He brought his sketchbook and sat in a corner of the big airy studio that smelled of paint thinner and charcoal dust. Momma stood gracefully naked on a wooden podium at the front of the room, joking with the students when she took her breaks. Some of them laughed at him, bent over his sketchbook so quiet and serious. Their laughter faltered when they saw the likenesses he had produced of them during the class period: the stringy-haired girl whose granny glasses pinched her beaky nose like some torture device made of wire; the droopy-eyed boy whose patchy beard grew straight down into the collar of his black turtleneck because he had no chin.
But on this day Trevor had stayed home. Daddy sat in the living room all evening, sprawled in a threadbare recliner that had come with the house, his feet tapping out a meaningless tattoo on the warped floorboards. He had the turntable hooked up and kept playing record after record, anything that his hand fell upon, Sarah Vaughan, Country Joe and the Fish, frenetic band music from the twenties that sounded like something skeletons might jitterbug to-it all ran together in one long musical cry of pain. Most of all Trevor remembered Daddy searching obsessively for a set of Charlie Parker records: Bird with Miles, Bird on Fifty-second Street, Bird at Birdland. He found them, slammed one onto the turntable. The saxophone spiraled through the old house, found the cracks in the walls and spun out into the night, an exalted sound, terribly sad but somehow free. Free as a bird in Birdland.
Daddy hefted the bottle and chugged bourbon straight from it. A moment later he let out a long, wet, rippling belch. Trevor got up from the corner where he'd been sitting, keeping an eye out for Momma's headlights, and started to leave the room. He didn't want to see Daddy get sick. He'd seen it before and it had nearly made him sick too, not even so much the sight of the thin, stringy whiskey-vomit as that of his father's helplessness and shame.
His foot struck a loose piece of wood and sent it skittering across the floor. Daddy had been doing repairs around the house a few days earlier, nailing down a board that had begun to curl away from the wall. Long silver nails and a hammer were still scattered around the hall doorway. Trevor began to gather up the nails, thinking Didi might step on one, then stopped. Didi was smart enough not to go around the house barefoot, with all the splinters in the floorboards. Maybe Daddy would need the nails. Maybe he would still finish the repairs.
At the sound of the nails chinking together, Daddy looked up from his bottle. His eyes focused on Trevor, pinned him to the spot where he stood. "Trev. What're you doin'?"
"Going to bed."
"Thass good. I'll fixyer juice." Momma usually gave the boys fruit juice to take to bed with them, when there was any in the house. Daddy got up and stumbled past Trevor into the kitchen, slapping one hand against the door frame to support himself. Trevor heard the refrigerator opening, bottles rattling. Daddy came back in and handed him a glass of grapefruit juice. A few drops sloshed over the side, trickled over Trevor's fingers. He put his hand to his mouth and licked them away. Grapefruit was his favorite, because of the interestingly sour, almost salty taste. But there was an extra bitterness to this juice, as if it had begun to spoil in the bottle.
He must have made a face, because Daddy kept staring at him. "Something wrong?"
Trevor shook his head.