Night One
The Devil doesn’t approach you with horns and a red tail. He comes at you disguised as everything you’ve ever wanted.
I had just turned seventeen that summer, right before it all happened.
It began when I told my best friend Saucy about my problem and she said she knew a guy who could help someone like me take care of it and to be honest, she usually gave excellent advice for a girl who was notorious for making blatantly reckless decisions.
I snuck out of my trailer at midnight. The sky, black as pitch. I met-up with Saucy at the ballfields by the railroad tracks.
That’s where we were instructed to wait for our ride to go meet this guy.
To kill time, Saucy and I sat in the dugout and rode a couple rails of coke one of us had scored. The ballfields were rundown with weeds sprouting through the infield and crabgrass covering the outfield.
A train whistle howled in the distance like some faint horn playing a mournful tune. The sounds of cicadas circled all around us as headlights pierced the blackness and a car crept into the parking lot, gravel crunching underneath the weight of its tires.
A sleek, black sedan glided up to us like a long, metal and glass shark. Without a word, we grabbed our shit and made our way towards it.
We got in the car and both of us sat in the backseat. I recognized the kid driving. He was older, maybe nineteen. His name was Paul Hostetler but everyone called him P-Ho. I hadn’t seen P-Ho in a few years and he looked a little different than what I remember. He had this thin little mustache and looked like he could handle himself. I was pretty sure he’d known my older brother Rodney but I didn’t feel like asking.
Silence filled the spaces between us for the entire ride.
We drove a long, lonely stretch of highway for a bit, our faces momentarily illuminated by passing streetlights. A large billboard off the side of the interstate caught my attention, standing like a beacon preaching a futile message: JESUS FOR ALL PEOPLE.
Saucy lit a cigarette and rolled down her window just an inch. The heightened sound of air gushed in like a jet engine and I noticed P-Ho staring at her in the rearview, which I thought curious because he hadn’t stared at me the way most men do. In fact, he hadn’t stared at me at all.
I looked older for my age. Saucy, on the other hand, was the same age as me but looked much younger. I never thought she would know what to do with male attention. I don’t why, but I suddenly got nervous and I never got nervous.
I reached over and put my hand in hers and watched her exhale a plume of smoke that trickled outside.
We got off the interstate in some pocket of nowhere and P-Ho made a couple turns down some backroads and on we rode, past desiccated husks of row houses until we finally arrived at an old warehouse.
Inside, the place was dark and dingy and there was a faint smell of blood and I silently prayed that it wasn’t gonna be ours. As the three of us walked quietly down a dimly lit hallway, I heard water slowly dripping out of a pipe nearby.
That’s when I caught sight of an orangeish-colored room glowing up ahead.
P-Ho led Saucy and I inside The Orange Room and when we funneled in, us girls stopped dead in our tracks because of the scene laid out in front of us.
There was a girl sprawled out on a dirty mattress. She was barely clothed and her legs were propped-up, spread eagle. Bound in makeshift stirrups.
The Girl was about our age, maybe a little older and she was groggy, but conscious. She appeared heavily sedated.
There was an older guy, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty, sitting next to her on the bed.
This was Van.
I watched him cut up some lines of coke with a razor blade and he was so adept at cutting it that for a brief moment I believed the blade to be a part of his hand. He was very pale and dressed in all black and wore too much eyeliner and his fingernails were long and dirty and he had fang-like teeth that made him resemble a vampire and everything about him screamed that there was potential here for violence.
He glanced up with a pair of blackened eyes and looked us girls over.
He glared at me longer than he did Saucy because like I said, most men like what they see when they look at me. But the way he stared me made me feel some kind of way. Helpless, maybe, almost as if he looked all the way inside of me and got a good read of the map of my soul. My trance was broken when The Girl on the mattress murmured something and began writhing on the bed slowly.
Both Saucy and I looked at her in horror and Van clocked our concern.
“She’s got a monster in her belly,” he said. His voice was low. Dark.
“Ain’t nobody ask,” Saucy replied in that sassy tone that belied her nickname. Her real name was Sheila but we all just called her Saucy. That’s what I loved about her. Cross her, and she will cut you off with a clear conscience. But don’t think she won’t smile before pulling the trigger on you, either.
“You wanted to,” Van said as he brushed a strand of The Girl’s sweaty hair from her face.
He leaned down and banged a few rails of coke and wiped some of the residue on his gums. Then he looked up at us with impatient eyes that screamed ‘Start fucking talking.’
But we couldn’t. We were frozen with fear, the kind of fear that could bear down on you like a thousand pounds of thunder and steel. The kind of fear that connects you to the traumas of your past.
“Wanna take a ride via Good White Airlines?” he asked. Both Saucy and I looked at one another and he must’ve known all along that we were craving a taste of nose whiskey.
You’re either destined for Hell or you carve your own path, I though to myself as I watched him split the blow into neat little lines.
Saucy bumped first and I could tell the way she reacted it was a dance of a different kind. Top shelf, refined coke. Real high-octane flake, not that jumped on shit we’d get from the low-life pushers at school.
It was my turn. The dope hit all the way home and my nose bled a little and I sniffed and dabbed at it until it stopped. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t coked to the gills.
He looked at both of us, impatiently. “You gonna make me guess which of you called this little tête-à-tête?”
I reached into my bag and pulled out the piss stick and handed it over to him.
That little + sign had changed my world upside down a few days ago and now, here I was, giving it to this vampire to suck the poison out of me.
“How far along are you?” he wanted to know.
“Huh?” was all I could mutter back.
“The baby.” He said it slowly this time, with measured purpose.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Six, seven weeks, I guess.”
I watched him do another bump and throw his head back. The Girl on the mattress was getting restless and he shushed her with a calming stroke of his hand.
“There’s no going back once we do this,” he said matter-of-factly. “You know that, right?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” I said.
“Good,” he said in a hushed tone. “That’s good. Because you can have anything you want in this world except the way it was before.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked, unsure if I even wanted to know the answer.
“It means if you breathe a word about any of this. About me. About what you see here. About what we’re doing here. To anyone. I’ll cut your skagged-out friend’s head off.” He was pointing to Saucy, who simply swallowed the lump in her throat.
All it took was a shift of his eyes and there was understanding between us. He took my silence—my fear—as an agreement.
Meanwhile, The Girl was getting more agitated by the minute and Van got up off the mattress and walked over to the corner of the room.
“What’s she on, man?” Saucy had asked. It was a question I wanted to know since we got there.
Van grabbed a dirty white bucket and a chair from the corner and brought them back over towards the dirty mattress. “That doesn’t matter,” he answered.
I watched him place the chair at the end of the mattress and sit down in it. He slid the bucket over towards him and grabbed a black bag from the floor that’d been hidden from my point of view. He opened the black bag and pulled some items from it as he spoke to us without as much as looking at us.
I watched him prep a syringe and tie a tourniquet around The Girl’s bruised arm, ready to turn her flesh into chaos.
Van dug the rig in The Girl’s arm and the spike filled with blood before he gave her the plunge and I knew the dope hit home when she calmed instantly, the way that a languid, honey-drip high taste of Bad News could do for you.
The Girl moaned blissfully as the opiate worked its magic, then she nodded off a little and Van wiped her sweaty forehead until she was calm enough to do what he did next.
Van reached into the black bag and pulled out a speculum, a clear plastic tube and a siphon, followed by a thin, red cannula.
“P-Ho will pick you up tomorrow night,” Van went on as he attached a blade to the end of the red cannula. Midnight. He will bring you to me. I take care of your problem. Then he will drive you back.”
Van flicked a lighter and waved the flame over the blade to sterilize it. “You don’t talk to P-Ho.”
Van placed a white sheet over the girl’s midsection and put on a pair of rubber gloves. “P-Ho don’t talk to you.” The more he spoke and the more he did whatever he was going to do with The Girl had me more unnerved by the second and that was putting it mildly.
Van reached up underneath the sheet to slide down the The Girl’s dirtied underwear.
My mind raced and I glanced over at Saucy and she back at me. She mouthed “What the fuck” and I shrugged. As much as I wanted to look away… I couldn’t. It was like a car crash and the high from the coke had me all jazzed up and I wanted to scream for help and cry at the same time. But I did neither.
Van took the thin, red cannula with the blade and funneled it up under the sheet, inside the girl. He kept on guiding the line up into her until she felt the pinch from the lance. She whimpered groggily in discomfort and that’s when he removed the cannula and inserted the clear plastic tube in its place inside her.
Then he put the open end of the plastic tube near his lips. “Are there any questions?”
But I was only half-listening. Nothing would allow me to take my eyes off what was transpiring just a few feet in front of me. Finally, I asked him, “Yeah… like, is that hurting her, man?”
“That doesn’t matter, either,” he replied softly.
“What does?” I asked.
“Just that her monster is gone,” he responded.
And then he put the tube in between his lips and drew a deep breath and blew into his end with all of his might and quickly attached the siphon to the open end of the tube and hooked it on the bucket.
Within seconds, dark red blood began to funnel down from her womb, through the tube until it siphoned into the bucket.
As the sedated Girl moaned in heavy agony, Van stood and removed his rubber gloves and tossed them on the grimy floor.
He looked me in the eyes again and walk towards me. I stood still, careful not to draw his ire. But I couldn’t look away from him no matter how much I tried; I felt powerless in his icy gaze.
“You’re some kind of Angel from Heaven,” he said as he brushed my soft cheek with his hand.
What should be and what was rarely aligned. Looking back, if I had just gone through with it, maybe things would’ve turned out differently. But as he began to walk away, I didn’t have the heart to tell him right then and there that I was the farthest thing from an Angel. But I had to say something.
“There’s no such thing as Heaven,” I muttered, stopping him in his tracks.
“Is that so?” he asked back, turning half-around.
“Just that other place,” I said, doubling down. “You know the one…”
###
On the drive back into town, music played softly from P-Ho’s car and I stared aimlessly out into the black void trying to process what I’d just experienced.
I hadn’t been prepared for the type of crazy I witnessed and it was evident that Van was the kind of guy who rides into Hell with a bucket of water.
I tried to forget The Girl but all I’d wondered was how long she’d been there, enduring what she had.
Or worse, what she had done to deserve it.
I tried forgetting the sweat-soaked mattress and the pained look in her eyes but those memories wouldn’t leave me for a long time and I knew the next time I laid down I would be afraid to sleep, for who knew what kind of evil lurked in dark shadows, waiting to uncoil among Van’s ever-shifting land of nightmares.
I noticed P-Ho staring at Saucy again through the rearview mirror.
She must’ve noticed it too, this time. “Hey, man,” she yelled up to the front seat.
P-Ho didn’t answer. He wasn’t supposed to.
You don’t talk to P-Ho. P-Ho don’t talk to you.
“Hey, man, I like this song,” Saucy continued. “Turn it up.”
“Sauce, quiet,” I whispered as I squeezed her hand. “We ain’t supposed to talk to him.”
P-Ho suddenly obliged without saying anything back and turned the volume all the way up and “Nausea” by X blared through the sound system at the highest possible decibel.
Saucy looked at me and smiled and sang along as my brain began to blur the lines of reality.
‘Today you’re gonna be sick, so sick
You’ll prop your forehead on the sink
Say ‘Oh Christ, Oh Jesus Christ
My head’s gonna crack like a bank’…
“Tell him thanks but no thanks,” I blurted out.
Saucy stopped singing. P-Ho turned the music down.
“I’m not letting that freak near me.”
“Rae…” Saucy interjected.
“There’s a fine line between madness and insanity and that asshole snorted it,” I said, wiping a tear away.” I won’t let him touch me.”
“You ain’t got the money to do it like the righteous,” she pointed out.
P-Ho pulled into parking lot of the Marathon gas station, the one across the street from the Waffle House. The gas station was closed for the night and it had rained here and the cement was wet and dotted with puddles.
When we got out, he didn’t drive away. He just rolled down his window. “Tomorrow. Midnight,” he said in a hypnotic voice.
Saucy and I just looked at one another.
“I’ll pick you up at the ballfields,” he continued.
“Didn’t you just hear me?” I hissed back. “I said I’m not-“
“You Rodney’s little sister, ain’t you?” he asked, stopping me.
“Yeah,” I nodded.
His slate-gray eyes went to some place nostalgic. “He was a good dude.”
I didn’t know what to say but I knew he was right.
“Listen, I know a place,” he went on.
“What kind of place?” Saucy asked.
“Like a clinic?” I piled on.
“Nothing like that,” he replied, shaking his head. “It’s place upstate. Crybaby Bridge.”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped.
“Look, you want to get rid of the baby or not?” he asked matter-of-factly.
He took my silence as affirmation that I did.
“Tomorrow night. Be there,” he said just before he sped off down the rain-slick street.
Little did I know at the time, of the events that I was about to put in motion.