I drank a couple of beers out front at Toby’s, letting the geezers eye-fuck me, and that’s when I began putting together Johnny Jacks and the Djadadjii. Once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and by the time I arrived at Sandrine’s, I was busting to tell her. She was nowhere to be seen, and I knew she was hiding because I hadn’t visited the night before.
— Sandrine, I called.
The river made chuckling noises, rubbing against the bank. Clouds hedged the moon, but it sailed clear. The shack held only moonlight and mirrors. I studied the foliage, trying to find her outline among the tangles of leaves.
— Don’t be pissy, I said.
— I know everything you’re thinking.
I still couldn’t find her.
— You think because you don’t visit me one night, two nights, I won’t mention what I need. What you promised me.
I whirled about, thinking she was behind me, and said, I didn’t promise anything. I said I’d try.
— How can I expect such a stupid girl to understand what I’ve endured? You tell me how alone you are, how much you hunger for life, yet every day you talk to people, you fill your belly, you taste life.
— Everything’s relative.
— You could have more life with me than you can possibly imagine.
— Don’t go there! You tricked me. You made me feel things.
— Oh! Now you’re going to pretend you feel nothing for me? That I put those feelings into your head? All I did was unlock a door you never realized existed. I’ve seen how you look at me.
She melted up from the chokecherry, a paring of a woman seeming no thicker than onionskin, drifting toward me on the breeze — she touched her gauzy breasts, caressed almost imperceptible hips and thighs. A firefly danced behind her forehead, hovered for an instant in one eye.
— I see you looking now, she said.
Frightened, I backed away from her until my shoulders touched the wall of the shack.
— I’ve been patient with you, she said. I could be patient forever and it wouldn’t do any good.
— The Djadadjii, I said. Do they feel hotter than normal people?
Her face emptied.
— I met this guy, I said. He’s new in town. Super good-looking, but a retard. He can barely talk and his skin feels like an oven door. Sound familiar?
I’d meant to warn her about Johnny Jacks, but she had frightened me, and now I wanted to tell her in a way that made her heart race.
— First thing out of his mouth was he liked the way I smelled, I said. Think he smelled you on me?
— Lou. Elle. You have to help me!
— What can I do? Bring you five people? I doubt there’s time.
Fear sharpened her indistinct features. She looked this way and that, agitated, searching for an out.
— Maybe I could do with four, she said. Four might be sufficient.
I realized then what a danger she was to me, and I bolted for the fallen oak, vaulted over it, landing among the hyacinths at the edge of the water.
— Louie!
— Four? You been drilling it into me ever since we met how you needed five.
— You don’t understand!
— Of course I don’t. I’m such a stupid girl. I must be really fucking stupid to trust you. Maybe it’s only three people you need. Two plus me.
We were slightly more than an arm’s length apart, but it might have been in different countries.
— Don’t leave, Sandrine said. Without you I’ll die.
I slogged a few paces through the water, the leathery hyacinth roots snagging my ankles.
— I can explain!
I kept going.
— I’ll show you things, she said. Incredible things. I’ll tell you my secrets. I should have been open from the start, but I thought I’d lose you. I’ll never keep anything from you again.
I clambered onto shore.
— You’re taking my heart!
I slipped on something slick and sat down hard.
— Whore! she screamed. You filthy, disgusting whore! Go ahead! All you are is flabby tits and stinking blood! Touching you makes me sick! You hear? I feel like puking when I’m near you! Do you know what you smell like?
She told me. In detail. I could hear her screaming corrosive insults long after I entered the brush, and perhaps I heard them even after I had gone beyond the range of her voice.
I tracked down Johnny Jacks in the parking lot at Cracker Paradise. He took me into the shadows alongside his car, and there he choked me a little and slapped me. I told him he didn’t have to use force, he could have everything he wanted. We drove to a spot not far from Sandrine’s, and we walked down to the river. Big chunks of anger, boulder sized, were in my head, damming up everything except a leakage of bitterness. I ignored thoughts of what he might do to me — I wanted something to happen, and I didn’t care what so long as it was violent. He hardly spoke, and I couldn’t tell what was on his mind. He might have been no different from the rest of us, mostly urge and raw need, and simply was less capable of expressing it.
We reached Sandrine’s, and he climbed eagerly over the toppled oak. I waited in the river, mud oozing between my toes. The moon was so bright the blue sky was almost a day color. I felt it shining inside me, generating hatred, a cooler emotion directed at her, at all things. Hyacinths with foot-high purplish blooms bobbled against my knees. Johnny Jacks glanced at me, his face expressionless as ever. I thought he would say something, but Sandrine melted up from the rotting boards of the shack, a female pattern emerging from the wood grain, and appeared to coil around him. She didn’t draw him inside the shack, into the place where she slept; she bore him to the ground and sank her fangs into his neck and drank. He moaned once, a frail sound. Every now and then his hand twitched or an arm jerked. As he grew paler, she grew more real. It wasn’t what I had expected, or maybe it was. Part of me was disappointed he wasn’t what I’d hoped. Another part would have preferred to be horrified. Mainly I had a sense of. I don’t know. Closure, maybe. Not the feeling you get when you’re over a crush or have gone past some pain, but like the feeling you have the morning after your first time with a boy. Anxious and a little shaky, worried that you’ve screwed up, but with a bigger anxiety removed, and you’re ready to become this new person you see in the mirror.
Johnny Jacks was still alive when Sandrine lifted her head. Blood flowed from the puncture wounds on his neck, anyway. She flipped hair back from her eyes — blood filmed over her chin and lips, dark and thick as gravy.
— The Djadadjii are cool to the touch, she said. But you knew he wasn’t Djadadj, didn’t you? At the least you suspected.
I had nothing to say.
— Not this month, she said. But next month, the month after. soon we’ll be together.
She lowered her head and drank again, just a sip, and then said, I’m not angry with you. You needed a push, so I pushed you. If he had turned out be Djadadj, well. life is risk. It was only a tiny risk, though.
She closed her eyes and arched her neck, sated and languorous. On her hip a speckle of mud like a beauty mark. She stroked Johnny Jacks’s blond hair.
— He’s beautiful, though. Beautiful enough to be Djadadj.
She rested her cheek against his, her lips parted, baring the tips of her crimson fangs — a scene from one of my mind movies brought to life.
— Go home now, she said. Come again tomorrow night. or wait a month. It’s no matter. Go home and think about what you must do.
When I turned from the tableau of the shack and the two figures lying in the grass and mud, it was as if I’d
