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by Apache Content: Santa
Monica Beach State Park, CA. 1966 There
is nothing like a sea wind. A true
ocean wind. Nothing that comes off a lake, a gulf, or a sheltered bay is
the same as a wind like the one that blows onto the coast of California straight
from Japan, straight from Siberia, straight from Tahiti and the Sandwich Isles,
scented with thousands of miles of wild water and storms, huge distances that
used to be marked on maps only with dolphins and whales and the warning,
"hic sunt dracones." 'Mare
Pacificum,' he was thinking, 'this was where we stopped.' The Portuguese sailed
on to the Japans, but his people came for this continent only, wound up sealing
it as theirs with their blood and their names, and then disappeared into its
dirt just as they had sent down to the dirt those who were here before them. Only the names lingered, and they fade too.
Like this city's, which his people founded as La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora
de los Angeles, whose mayor now was a German who called it Lasanglees. But
all of that was mortal life, and mortal life quit mattering to him long, long
ago. In an era when the hills here were marked with three or four
missions and the disease and the conversions had barely started. There remained
a big dark cross at Olvera Street that had been here in his time; the rest was
novelty. Which
was fine with him. He liked
novelty. It kept him entertained, and it kept him invisible.
Both good things. The
Santa Monica Pier was always good hunting.
Under the strung lights and the loud carousel was the underlife of any
mortal party: the pickpockets, muggers, buggers, drunks, junkies... they
would be down below, on the lower level or on the beach itself, wandering among
the dark pilings with their frosting of barnacles and algae. Someone
turned up dead down there about twice a week. When
he was in town, even a little more often than that. But
as with all things, in recent decades, records had gotten better.
Police had gotten interested in small matters like little nibbles along
the neck. Better now to grab one in
the dark and take him a mile out to sea after finishing, to let the fish and
crabs add their nibbles, to make the absence of blood less intriguing when the
body came back to shore. If it did. Inconvenient,
but still easier than most kills. And
the rest of the time, there was the club in town, the amusingly named Ash Grove
with its population of mortal folkies and immortal blooddrinkers who listened to
humans wail the blues there through the late hours.
There had even been the old Delta singer who'd walked into the club one
night on a gig, looked around, looked directly at the vampires one by one, his
big dark eyes sliding past the mortals without question or hesitation, muttered
"loup-garou," and gone to the bar for straight whiskey. The
bluesman had opened his first set by saying, "we got the devil heah wid us
tonight folks, so y'all be watchful. This
stage has known the print of the cloven hoof, um-hmm," and then made the
music of a sad, bitter and forgiving angel.
All night. And
he, since he played, had watched the old bluesman acutely, picked up the
fingerings, listened for the fractional syncopations the man could hide in a
simple twelve-note blues. The
artistry, the soul, African transplanted in slavery to the Americas and then
freed to poverty for generations, was far from the gypsy music of his home
country and yet shared some powerful truth with it, the thing that in Andalusia
they called 'duende,' an access to the darkness that was in a human soul, an
alchemy in art that could wring that darkness into a great joy of the heart--
even a mortal one. Or perhaps only
a mortal one, since the artistry of it was beyond his reach, even after nearly
five centuries of loving his instrument... "Esto
es un mujer, Javito," Dominguin had said, putting the small wooden box in
his hands. "Ella llora y ora,
ella quema y queja, y mas que nada, ella canta."
//This is a woman, little Javier. She
weeps and she prays, she burns and complains, and most of all she sings.// His
mind filled now with the image of old Dominguin, the Andaluzeno, native of the
country shaped like a bullshide, who talked about something you couldn't see and
the priests didn't know, something about the soul, which was duende.
It was like the thing that was hidden in women, but also even stronger
that than, little Javier. The
Andaluzeno was telling this to a boy who had none of a man's hair yet, none of a
man's needs, and the instrument that Dominguin said was a woman sat in that
boy's hands like all the mysteries in the world. Something's in there, Javito.
Something that was hidden in the wooden box with its strings pulled from
deersgut, its soundhole covered with a grille like the one between you and the
Father in the confessional... the old words you sent through that grille, bless
me for I have sinned, and the words that always came back, ego te absolvo, I
forgive you... Guitar
notes... the veering of the onshore breeze was bringing the notes of a melody
and a bassline to his ears. He
wasn't so hungry that he wouldn't investigate. A
moment later he was approaching a figure sitting in the sand in front of
lifeguard tower 22, about a third of mile south down the beach. He came up from
behind but didn't touch, simply said, "Hi." The
guitar player didn't react with fear. Stoned
or stupid, maybe. She just turned
around and said "Hi," and then paused for a good look at him. He
was a medium sized man in this era, though he'd been tall in his own.
His hair was black, and the wind was whipping it around his shoulders;
that made him a hippie in this place and time.
His clothing was simple, as it usually was these days; bluejeans, a light
sweater, a fringed buckskin jacket. His
eyes were dark and large, and he had a lush black moustache that ran down nearly
to his jawline, another hippie touch. The
girl was wearing hippie signatures, too. Long
straight hair, parted in the middle and braided into Indian plats.
Jeans and a blue workshirt thickly embroidered with flowers and birds.
And the ubiquitous love beads, just simple glass beads on a string, but
in this time and place they amounted to a whole social and political manifesto.
So they smiled at each other, allies.
And the vampire smiled inside himself, differently. "You
play?" said the girl. He
nodded and reached out a hand, squatting down next to her in the sand. She
passed him the guitar. It was a
cheap instrument, acoustic, strung with poor nylon strings, but it was a guitar
and it came to his hand like a pet. He
corrected the tuning as well as he could, though the strings and posts were both
so bad that the tuning was sure to slip after only a few notes.
Then he let his hands go to work, and his mind go to dreams. She
was a pretty girl, not very formed, very young.
And still small, still a hundred pounds or less.
She was watching his fingers, long and slender fingers with small
knuckles, perfect for a guitarist, as he worked through the Malaguena, and then
went backwards in time to gitano melodies, and forward to the bridges of one or
two songs that were high on the rock n roll playlist that month. "Wow,
you really do play," the girl said. "That's amazing."
She leaned forward, studying the set of his fingers on the strings at
rest. "You should be in a band -- or are you?"
Now her eyes came up to his. "Not
exactly." He had a little
amused smile. "I do backup for
bands sometimes." He passed
the guitar back to her. "You?" She
laughed. "Oh sure. No,
I just..." she looked at him, and decided to say it exactly.
"I play for the wind. I
just make stuff up-- I don't know anything." His
eyebrows went up. Put up, or shut
up. She nodded, resigned. "I
don't know how, you know." He
nodded again. And she was right,
she didn't know how-- but she was finding her way into the instrument note by
note, looking for melodies, looking for resonance... she had a way of coupling
notes that appealed him, telling the same melody twice, as if trying for
counterpoint in the melody and then having an ordinary two-string bass beat
anchoring it. Naive, but enough to
be charming, and something more. It
might be the beginnings of a true musical intelligence; certainly there was a
genuine and individual spirit trying to find a voice in the strings, the mark of
someone who should stay with the instrument.
The accident of tripping across something so close to its beginnings
pleased him. "Why
are you down here alone?" "Why
are you?" she shot back. He
smiled. "I asked you first." His
eyes said, It's not the same, and you know it. A
shrug. "My Mom's out on a date." She looked him in the eyes. "I come down here all the
time. Nothing bad has ever
happened." She thought for a
moment and laughed, "weird stuff, but nothing bad.
There's always someone around." "Like
me," he said softly. "If
you'd been around, I would've remembered," she said, momentarily bold.
"Most of the freaks are down at Venice, not here.
You really play professionally?" "Sure."
Always amusing, the shortcut way of impressing girls.
In one place it's daring the bulls, in another it's a certain accent;
here it's being a boy in a band. He
spoke on impulse: "Want to
come to a session? There's one
tonight." The
girl's face reflected her thought: there
it is. The pitch. The famous
"one thing" her mother said was all men wanted. He
ignored the expression on her face. "Tracks for some local group called the
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band." What
the hell, he thought, everyone has a groupie at a session these days, why not
me? The girls with bangs down to
the eyelashes, the eyes heavily lined with black or brown, over and under.
Some of them with pale blue above it, like that English model.
And all with long straight serious hair, parted in the middle, brushed to
the sheen and texture of cornsilk, and more beautiful than flags in the wind.
They sat in rows along the punchboard walls of the soundproofed rooms,
passed joints and giggled. They
whispered about their rock 'n roll boyfriends, and worried about each other,
because they were predators in their own way. "Thanks,
but no." She smiled.
He looked at the face, still forming, almost nothing written on it by
time yet. "You
think I'm lying," he said, with a small smile. "I
-think- I'm not going to get in your car," she shot back. He
flashed a wicked grin. War.
"You usually pass for eighteen, don't you?
And you're twelve or thirteen, right?" Bang.
A girl pretending to be almost a woman, and she usually got away with it.
No way she could know that this one guy had senses that told him exactly
what hormones were and weren't circulating in her blood.
Or that as he played, he set the rhythm of his thoughts to the heart he
heard beating strongly in her chest, the slightly slowpaced heartbeat of someone
who swam or ran a great deal. She
was reacting to both the strangeness and the correctness of what he said. Fear and pleasure. Be
strange, but not too strange, that's what the hippie chicks want.
Even the babies. "OK,
you're right. I'm complete and
total jailbait, okay?" Lots of intelligence in her smile now. She liked the challenge, and she liked coming out in the open
to be herself. He envied her the
pleasure. "Someone
should be watching you," he said abruptly.
"You're a nice girl." In
his day, such a girl was never alone, not even in the poorest families.
This was a girl who would have a clean life, a moral life, a noticed life
that would be enveloped by other people. Not
his kind. "Oh,
ew, nice?" But she was
relaxing her guard, thought she understood where he was coming from.
She preferred to be recognized as a good girl, because she thought he was
now seeing her as offlimits. Even
dangerous, which was why she had chosen the word 'jailbait.'
And yet to be called nice was just a little more than she could bear. He
grinned again. "Interesting
too," he said reassuringly. "Fascinating, really." "Oh,
go -away-," she said. She was
back in her cloud of nice-girl safety now.
She thought they'd reached some understanding, that they were dealing as
equals again. "No, wait. Don't go away, just hush and play for me some more."
She handed him her guitar. "Yes,
my lady," he said. "As my
lady commands." But he settled
himself comfortably into the sand, retuned the guitar as best he could, and
played more. He played what he
thought her tastes would be, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell and Leonard
Cohen, and found that he'd guessed right. Slightly
intellectual acoustic hippie. She
cooed at him, "wow, you have a nice voice, too."
When she was being perfectly candid, her voice was still at the cusp of
childhood, had a simple music of its own that he liked. "What
grade are you in?" he said. "Ninth."
She misunderstood his incomprehension.
"Really. I just skipped a couple."
He shook his head. He didn't
care. It was something he'd heard
mortals say to youngsters, but he realized he had no idea what came next, after
the answer. "The
session is real," he said. "On
Fountain Avenue." He gave her
an address. "We start at
eleven, if you want to come." She
started to stiffen, and he teased her fear: "Not in my car.
I don't have one, anyway." He
handed her the guitar back. "If
you show up, I'll see you." He smiled a little.
"I have to go catch a bite to eat now."
He started back up the beach towards the pier, stuck with walking in the
sand because her eyes would surely be following him. "Hey--
my name is Victoria," she shouted after him. He
turned around, summoning his current name to mind.
"I go by J.D.," he said. She
waved, and he waved back in imitation, then turned his senses forward, to the
pilings. The dark space where he
belonged, where there should be someone who would not be a nice young middle
class girl trying out fragmentary melodies on her cheap guitar "for the
wind." Someone who would
never, never be reported missing. Someone
whose blood would give him his life in the intimate act that was the wicked
heart and greatest joy of his existence. The act that alone raised the dark
singing inside him, the thing that never quite came from his guitars, the
bloodborne hymn in his body that his teacher and the old bluesman would have
understood as having duende, that dark transformation of death into something
that mixed life and art and was music. ~ Return to "Forever Knight" ~ ~ Return to Apache's Archive ~
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