where the snakes get born

On the California highway the lights shine all night.

“You’re one of us,” David says, to Michael or to Star or to nobody.

*

Michael’s voice has grown raw and low — Star howls along to his favorite songs in a rock-and-roll animal cry and he can bring up the low notes, humming against the white pillar of her throat with his arms laced around her middle. Star dabs little glass bottles on her wrists and her throat long after the perfume’s used up but the scent still lingers — she brushes her wrist against Michael’s cheek, and the memory of warmth shivers over him, the memory of making love back when they were both still alive. She leaves a smudge of patchouli along his jawline, and Michael unconsciously goes to rub it away, to erase it.

David comes up to him from behind, feels the way he stiffens when he presses his face against the collar of his denim jacket. David’s cruel mouth is so close. He’s smelling him — smelling salt and burned sugar and head shop perfume and blood. Smelling the traces of Star on him, not just her perfume but the scent of her body and the rusty trace of her mouth. The senses are all different for Michael now, sight and smell interlock in different ways, smell and taste, like it’s one long trip — and now he knows, now he can understand how the others were so close, how they could sprawl together in the ruins of the hotel and not care who they were touching, what they were doing. It was all new. For David this must be getting old.

Michael doesn’t know what he’ll see when he looks into David’s face. He almost killed him once and David had looked — grateful. Michael waits and waits, wanting to be touched. He wants David’s hand to reach around past his leather jacket and past the hem of his too-tight white tee shirt and to creep its way past the sharp ledge of his hip where those lines that bodybuilders have are just starting to show, a weird little ripple of masculinity in the place where Michael has always felt most frighteningly soft, and for his bike-callused hands to find their way past the waistband of Michael’s jeans. If David did it, it would be all right. Any guy who knew David like Michael knows him — he’d want it too, the approval of being touched.

Being dead is a trip, and they’re not going to come down any time soon. There are no rules. David brings him down, down, down to the motel room bed — and Michael doesn’t fight him, not at first. This is the way their bodies come together.

David bites the soft part of Michael’s leg and leaves a double arc of red points oozing through the denim — Michael pulls him up by the hair to kiss his mouth, slumping back with David straddling his thigh. David’s hands make fists in the front of his jacket like he’s going to shake him.

“What are you going to do about it?” David croons in his ear like he’s challenging him to a race. Star is watching them. Her hands are white fists in front of her mouth, a long tendril of her dark hair is twisted across her lips.

Michael grinds out a furious orgasm against him as they grapple together in the dirt — grabbing at his own crotch like he has something there to pull off, eyes squeezed shut into desperate gashes, with David’s mouth tearing a messy line down his throat, his jaw, the softest part of his shoulder. His clit is aching from friction and the scattering diffusion of climax doesn’t end it.

In the end they’re both bloody. David is hard in his jeans. David pulls Star into his lap and takes her, right there while Michael watches. Star’s skirt hitches up to her waist and all Michael can see is David’s hand moving under the storm of spangles, the movement of their hips together, the junction of their mouths. David reaches out and presses Michael’s hand to the small of her back — holding Star where she is. Michael kisses down the track of her spine and listens to the noises she makes, feels the smooth motions of her body.

*

“Go on without me,” David says. Test your strength. Spread your wings. He pushes Michael out toward the ragged edge of the highway — Michael tugs down the hem of his leather jacket, and sticks out his thumb.

The driver who picks him up isn’t such a bad guy. He has big glasses and plays Pete Seeger on tape; Michael feels a brutal pang of homesickness, memories of Arizona and mom in the kitchen. He could be there right now, and not out here in the dark. The driver has big glasses and plays Pete Seeger on tape and he doesn’t give Michael a single look of scrutiny, he has quarters in the ashtray, he doesn’t try to cop a feel or rag on Michael’s long hair—

— and his blood is sweet. Michael leaves him by the roadside, in pieces, and he sticks the cassette tape in the pocket of the dead man’s shirt as a sign.

When Michael turns the car around, David is waiting for him right where he left him. He crosses the highway like a wild animal, leading Star by the hand.

*

In California you can be whoever you want.

There are boys who look just like Michael does, with sharp cheekbones and dangling earrings and full lips, and there are girls who look just like Michael does, walking loose-limbed and big-armed in big white tee shirts with the armholes cut out low. Teased hair and slept-in eyeliner pressed into the creases of their skin. Tight jeans.

Michael follows them with his eyes, hungry. The sounds of the concert recede to a dull throb, a heartbeat pulsing blood.

Out of the lights, in the press of bodies, he presses Star’s curls between his hands and kisses their tangles. Her hands trace the lines of his sides, the tight contours where his tee shirt holds his small breasts down like armor.

“I know you don’t understand this,” he says

“What’s there to understand? David loves you. I love you.” Urgent, sweet — bet she never saw this coming, Michael thinks bitterly. David has never said anything about love. What he says is, you’re one of us.

After the concert, after the hunt, they’re dredged in blood — rolled in it like hungry animals, it’s in Michael’s hair and between his fingers and streaking down his chin. It’s on Star’s mouth and her throat and her hands. They’ve become animals. There are wild dogs along the highways, stray cats strutting through trailer parks, deer and bear.

Star wraps her legs around him, wraps her arms around his neck, and Michael is burning for her, burning. When Michael presses his hand to the cleft at the top of her legs she’s wet like blood.

*

In California you never grow up.

Star tells him a story about a little girl from Colorado who hitchhiked her way on down looking for sun and sea and movie stars and landed under the Santa Carla boardwalk. She tells him how she met David. When Star talks she spins a story, she sets the scene — what band they were listening to on the boardwalk main stage, what David was wearing and how he wore his hair the summer before Michael came to them, where they were when they first made love. When she met the other boys. Why he waited to turn her into one of them.

What about Santa Carla? What about Max? Where are the rest of them? Where did Max come from?

“Don’t say his name,” David says. “He would have liked you.”

Back before radio, on the boardwalk there was a boy — David doesn’t want to talk about who he was before because it embarasses him, or because it’s too long ago, some fifty years or eighty years or a hundred years since he was a living boy with a heartbeat. It must feel like it happened to another person — that’s how it feels to Michael, the divide that cuts clean through his life, the time before David and the time after. Before Michael was Michael at all, that’s a fainter break, a healed break like the time he broke his arm tumbling off a bike and landing wrong — if you probed with your fingers you’d notice the seam and how it mended. But there’s no continuity between David the way he was, David alive, and David what he is now. Michael can’t find it.

Michael tells David about before, about dad and about Arizona and everything that came before David saw some narrow-shouldered stranger making starry eyes at his girl. David’s absolute acceptance could be mistaken for indifference, but not quite. That’s what his love looks like — come as you are. None of them are what they used to be.

Star is dark. She could be his sister. David’s chin prickles with stubble. Michael’s face is smooth. The two of them could be brothers. The three of them are like links in a chain, David and Michael and Star twisting back around to catch each other for eternity.

Sam is still alive — he’s out there somewhere, he’ll grow up, he’ll get his first car and his first hot date and his first job, all the things that guys are supposed to have. Or he won’t — the monster hunter thing will have sucked him under, or one of Max’s peers will have stepped up and rubbed out Santa Carla’s first guild of vampire killers in its infancy. Michael’s brother will grow up, or he won’t. Michael will never grow up.