Vile Blood by Max Wilde Page B

would ever emerge from this depression. If the years of insults and slights, the loss of his flock and his reputation (Tincup reduced to a meth-cooking whoremonger in this desolate borderland) had finally overwhelmed him. Even the comparisons with Moses in the desert that he’d drawn to cheer himself had no effect, and his prayers had increasingly come to feel like a conversation with himself.
    Then Drum—the venal Goliath—had brought forth a sign. A message. The Martindale girl’s eyeglasses winking at Tincup on the porch, signaling that his banishment here in the desert was drawing to an end.
    What she was he did not know, nor did he care to know. Even if she was the very Devil incarnate, she was a boon. A gift. Nothing less than a blessing. And his mind, more agile than it had been in years, was already formulating a strategy to win back the prestige and riches he had lost. With that knowledge came desire, and as T incup stared over his fat penis at the reflection of the child’s face in the mirror, he felt his full powers restored.
    A faint cloud of bluish smoke hovered around the bedside lamp that was the only light in the room. A glass meth pipe, a sugary little trail of white powder and a Milky Way matchbook (printed back in the optimistic 1950s, showing a cartoon rocket against an acne-burst of stars) were evidence of the drug Marisol had fed to the child.
    The girl had coughed and retched after the first puff, and Marisol had taken her from Tincup’s sight lest she offend him and douse his arousal. Taken her to the bathroom, where he’d heard water running and the toilet flushing, before they’d returned and Marisol seated the stunned girl at the make-up mirror.
    Marisol had filled another pipe and sat beside Tincup on the bed as she smoked it—he never touched his product—sucking so hard on the glass that her cheeks kissed. She held the smoke in her lungs, little tendrils escaping her nose and pursed lips, before she leaned back, her black hair falling almost to the bed, closed her eyes and opened her mouth, releasing a boiling cloud of smoke that left her face invisible for a few seconds. When the smoke cleared Marisol sat slumped, staring at the wallpaper inches from her nose—interlocking atomic-age geometric shapes—that peeled from the plaster. Then she smiled and said something in Spanish that Tincup, occupied with his own medication, didn’t catch.
    Energized, Marisol had busied herself with painting the child. Pink lips. Blue eye shadow. Rouge accentuating the flat plains of the girl’s peasant face.
    Marisol nodded and said “ Bueno ” and then, “ Bueno! Bueno! ” when she looked across at the blood-engorged man.
     Tincup raised his arms wide, palms to the heavens, and said, “Come to me.”
    Marisol eased the child to her feet, the girl unsteady, her dark eyes unfocused, and lifted the dress over her head, revealing the flat boyish body beneath. Then she untied her own robe and let it fall, heavy breasts asway as she led the child to the preacher man on the bed.
     

18
     
     
     
    “What men just plain won’t accept is that we’re driven by the same urges they are,” Minty said. Skye didn’t reply, lulled almost to sleep by Minty’s hand stroking her hair. “And those desires you have, girl, they’re one hunnerd percent natural.”
    Oh no they’re not, Skye thought, but she held her tongue.
    Minty, still caressing Skye’s hair as she fired up a smoke one-handed, said, “Now your brother’s a good man but Lord knows he’s cold.” Drawing on the cigarette, little furrows creasing her powdered skin and red lips. “I know what he seen and done the day his wife died would have driven most men mad but that don’t change the fact that he’s an emotional retard.”
    “Gene’s been good to me, Minty. And he loves Timmy.”
    “He can’t understand that you’re a woman now,” Minty said, as if Skye hadn’t spoken. “With a woman’s needs.” She puffed some more, then