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Present – Bon Temps, Louisiana
“What was it like?” Sookie asked Bill one night, sitting up in bed and leaning over him with her blonde curls askew.
"What was what like?” he parroted.
“Watching the world change! You’ve seen so much! You got to watch the whole 20th century happen. All those changes, like airplanes and presidents.” The thin strap on her camisole was slipping down one shoulder, and Bill watched it in fascination. “Bill!” She smacked his shoulder.
***
1939 – New York City, New York
Bill walked through the streets of New York late at night. The Village was a fascinating place to explore after hours. The students, the activists were always out talking, smoking, feeling something. He liked to stand among them, feeling their warmth and smelling their days’ labors on their clothes. He always tried to be polite later, when he pulled them into the dark corners of the speakeasies and attempted not to leave too severe a mark.
He passed by an open door. Music filtered out, a slow jazz piano with no other accompaniment. Then, a deep voiced woman sang, “Southern trees bear strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood on the root.”
Bill stopped and came back a few steps to lean in the doorway with other listeners.
“The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh. Then the sudden smell of burning flesh,” the woman continued. She stood very still in the center of a makeshift stage. The crowd was silent, a mix of black, white, and brown faces only vaguely lit by the single spotlight on the singer, a curvaceous black woman.
“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck. For the rain to gather. For the wind to suck. For the sun to rot. For the tree to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop.” She finished on a low note without a bang and stepped clear of the spotlight. The crowd was silent. The man next to Bill raised a hand to wipe tears from his eyes. Slowly, as if breaking from their trance, the crowd began to clap.
Bill walked down another block and bit a drunk that had stumbled down the alleyway for a quick piss.
***
1943 – Ramona, California
Bill Compton sat at the counter of the local diner (the only diner) with a plate of carefully deconstructed eggs, bacon, and half spilled coffee. The local paper sat folded neatly on his knee. The headline read that new weapons plant was opening thirty miles down the road and that encouraged the hope of much needed jobs.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
A young black serviceman (a sergeant) and two of his fellow black soldiers in full dress uniform stood just outside the front door. The sergeant removed his hat and ducked his head when the waitress gave the group her full attention.
“Excuse me,” he repeated with a staccato Yankee accent. “We’re passing through, on our way to San Diego. This is the only establishment that we’ve seen in a long while, and we were wondering, if it were possible—”
“You saw the damn signs,” the cook growled from the kitchen window. The black dishwasher ducked slightly and looked at the servicemen from over the cook’s shoulder.
“Freddy…” the waitress started.
“Eh!” The cook waved a fist and disappeared again.
The waitress turned her head back to the servicemen. She looked at the few customers: there was Bill, a couple in the back corner, and a grizzled old man who had very purposefully not looked up from his soup yet. All white. She swallowed. “You boys,” she stuttered, stopped, and started again. “You boys, you come around back. Big John, he’ll make you something.” She pointed at the black dishwasher that still stood in the kitchen window. She waited a moment, looking at her customers again. No one moved. She tried to catch Bill’s eye. Bill pretended to sip his coffee. “Yeah, you come on back!” she repeated and began wiping the counters down furiously.
The dishwasher, Big John, was silent. When the servicemen did not move, he nodded his head once and disappeared from the kitchen window. The sergeant put his hat back on his head and directed his two soldiers out.
Bill closed his newspaper with a snap and left a larger tip than normal.
***
1949 – Muskogee, Oklahoma
He had slept in an old graveyard that evening. His clothes sat neatly folded and undisturbed where he had left them. Long after the moon had begun to rise, Bill started to make his way back toward the road, where he had left the car half hidden behind a grove of trees. Maybe it was the warmth of the night that had encouraged him take his time or the sound of the crickets in the long grass. He could almost pretend they sounded like june bugs, and he could hear his children laughing as they tumbled through the fields.
The smell of meat cooking was faint but sudden in the air. He sped up and almost immediately he could see the fire going next to an abandoned barn. He slowed and ducked down in the tall grass.
Two men held a teenage boy over the fire, back first. The teen was gagged but he still tried to scream. He was pulled up from the flames by the noose around his neck. The remains of his shirt were melted into his back. His hair along with much of the skin on the back of his head had been burned away. His eyes were bulging, and he desperately both clung to his captors and tried to free himself. The men laughed.
“You know what we’re gonna do now, boy?” The grizzled older man pulled the boy close. “We’re gonna hang you on that barn over there. Let the crows get at ya. There ain’t nothin’ for them to eat now. They’ll be grateful for what they’re given.” He tightened his grip on the teenager’s collar and his struggles renewed, still weak but there. “Unlike you, boy.”
“What was it, nigger? What’d you say to my wife?” The other man, much younger, just barely out of his teens himself, was in a pressed button up shirt dirtied with blood and gore. “What was it? Tell me again.” He kicked the dying teen's burnt knees and then what was left of his groin. “What the fuck did you say to her?!” He shoved the teenager back into the fire and held him down with a boot on his chest. The teenager quivered in the flames once, twice, and died.
Bill struck. He bent the older man back so far he snapped his spine. He ripped open the man's throat for good measure, drinking deeply. He dragged the young man down, keeping one of the murder's hands in the fire next to the dead teenager.
“Tell me,” Bill drawled with blood dripping from his fangs. “What did he do that deserved such a violent end?”
The man stuttered and pissed his jeans. “—He—he—”
“He what?” Bill soothed.
“—He—told my wife—she—she—was pretty!”
“Of course.”
Bill drained the man almost dry, but he was still somewhat alive when Bill threw him on the fire with his companion and their victim. He did not ask himself why he waited until the young boy was already dead before he struck. They were only human.
***
1957– Halifax, VA
This was the closest Bill had come to home in a long, long time. He was toying with the idea of crossing down into Georgia and then, maybe... It could be done. It would be a hundred years soon. No one would recognize him in the faces of his grandchildren. He sat at the bar of the highway catch-all, thinking and keeping half an ear open to the world around him.
“It ain’t the world we used to know, Henry. I don’t even know what I fought that war for, if this is what I get for my twilight years.”
“Jim. Hey now. You got a good job, a good house, a good wife. Our kids got a hell of a lot more than we had,” Henry reminded his friend over biscuits and fried eggs. “It ain’t picking cotton. You remember that. It ain’t middling cotton in October. It ain’t fishing and catching rabbits because Daddy can’t feed us all.”
“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it, you old fool. You hear about what they did about those niggers and kikes down in Louisville?”
“No, and I don't want to know,” Henry told him. He shoved a sausage in his mouth for good measure.
His friend shook his head, continuing on as if he never heard. “The police did 'em. All of them. And no one is ever gonna find godless fucking monkeys. No one. You just think about it. They're commies, all of them. What they're trying to fucking do to our country, they fucking deserve it--"
"Be quiet, Jim." Henry glanced at Bill.
"It ain't! Look at what they're doing to--"
"Be quiet!" Henry raised his voice then looked purposefully at Bill when he finally got Jim's attention. Jim turned around in his booth to stare. Bill lowered the beer from his lips and nodded slowly. Jim nodded back.
"You old fool," Jim told his friend as he turned around. "He fucking agrees with me."
Bill drained Jim dry in the bathroom while his friend paid at the cash register.
***
1961 - Boston, MA
Bill sat at the back of the gymnasium that had been hastily converted to a makeshift classroom when the SNCC organizers realized they had a much larger crowd than foreseen. A wiry young black man, with thick rimmed glasses and suit and tie (a stark contrast the to jean wear and unwashed students and even a few professors) was instructing the new recruits on how to properly defend themselves without violence during their protests.
“If the man comes, you get down on the ground and you protect your face!” the lead boy shouted.
One of the young ladies, a black girl in very well made dress in the latest style, knelt on the ground in her shin length skirt then settled on her stomach. She covered the back of her head with her arms and crossed her legs at the ankles.
“You keep your legs tight! Don’t let them get their hands, their sticks at you!” The young man prodded at the girl with the end of a protest sign, making sure the girl squirmed to protect herself as he pushed. “And you protect your sisters!” Another young man, a white boy, threw himself down over the girl’s head and upper body. “They don’t care these are ladies! They don’t care who your mama and daddy are! They’ll kill you. You’re coming into their home. They will kill you, and they won’t think twice about it! What’s the rule?” he shouted at the crowd.
“Don’t stop!” the co-eds and professors shouted.
“I don’t care if he’s police! I don’t care if he’s got his lights flashing! You keep going. You get home, you get witnesses. You stop, you’re dead! What’s the rule?”
“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” the co-ed sitting next to Bill asked. Her hair was very blonde and perfectly styled, matching her carefully pressed skirt and cardigan. “We’re going to help people and do so many good things.” Around them, the students and professors kept shouting back to the SNCC captain.
“It is a little scary though, isn’t it?” Bill prodded. “You could be hurt. You could be worse.”
“Why?” she asked him with her bright smile. “We’re not doing any harm.”
When the young woman stayed on Bill’s arm after the meeting broke up, the young activist leader tapped him on the shoulder. “This ain’t that kind of meeting,“ he intoned. He looked at Bill over his glasses then at the co-ed. She wilted slightly and suddenly remembered a need to return to her dorm and wash her hair. Bill’s mouth twitched.
“We don’t want to see you here no more, man.” Two of the larger male activists appeared behind their leader’s shoulders, giving Bill significant looks.
Bill smiled. The two big men pulled back at the sight of his fangs, but not the leader. He came up to Bill’s shoulders but he stood his ground.
“I said, it ain’t that kind of meeting,” the young man repeated.
Bill let out a harsh laugh. "I am not here for that kind of meeting. You would not see me, if I were."
The young man still stood his ground. "Don't come around here no more, man. We don't want your kind, we don't need you."
The bigger of the two bodyguards grabbed Bill by his shirt collar. "You think I don't know what you fuckers did to us in Alabama? Fuck you!" He made to shove Bill and found his arm broken. He doubled over and vomited at the sight of exposed bone.
Bill coolly regarded the SNCC leader. "My kind ," Bill repeated the word, rolling it around in his mouth, "do not all share the same opinions."
The young man never took his eyes off Bill as the vampire walked slowly out the front door with his hands in his pockets.
***
1967 - Detroit, Michigan
He had been leery when Diane told him the nest was going to return to Detroit. "Won't you be recognized?" he had asked.
Diane had laughed and taken on an exaggerate drawl. "Sure's no, Mr. Compton, sir! Ain't nobody left that'd know my face." She had petted Liam's face and laughed even more. "You white boys sure's took care of that!"
It was now the third day of riots. The almost gleeful looting and police beatings that they had witnessed for the past several days were gone. All the politicians and activists were too afraid of the angry citizens hanging out of windows and off roofs with shotguns to stand on the hoods of their cars begging for calm into their bullhorns any more. They would not even drive by the neighborhood. All pleas for restoration of order and rational discussion were recorded and played over and over on all the radio stations.
Malcolm and Liam would wander the crowds of gawkers around the larger demonstrations, plucking their victims from the crowd with no one the wiser. Diane disappeared into the mobs; letting herself be arrested, and taking her time working through the over crowded, makeshift jails outside of the city. Bill sat in their hotel room. He could smell the fresh blood from the floor below. It had been quiet since the shooting had stopped a few hours before. It was now an hour before dawn.
"We brought you take-out," Malcolm drawled. He dropped a mostly naked black girl at Bill's feet (and she was a girl: no more than fifteen, if that). Her right eye had swollen shut, and there was a vivid bruise and gash across her collar bone. He could see worse around her thighs.
Bill offered his hand to help her up. She looked at his palm, looked at the laughing other vampires, and then looked up at Bill. There was no fear, not anything, in her eyes.
"The police said I was looting," she said slowly. While her jaw was not broken, it was obvious she had lost more than one tooth today. "I said, yeah, yeah I was. My little brother and sister are hungry. Mama's been gone three days. They said I had to pay." She looked up at Bill with empty eyes. "So, I paid. They left me downstairs."
"You should go home," Bill told her, speaking slow and holding the girl's eyes. Compelled, the she stood up on shaky knees. Bill reached out to help her.
"You fucking limp dick!" Liam shouted. Diane rolled their eyes and flopped gracelessly onto the bed.
"That is not an option, Bill," Malcolm drawled. He slapped the girl's hands out of Bill's grasp. She crumbled like a doll on the floor and curled in on herself, staring at the far wall. "She is your snack," his fangs popped forward, "or, she is ours."
"Leave her be! Can't you see what she has been through tonight?" Bill shouted down into Malcolm's face as his fangs slide forward.
Malcolm laughed. Diane cackled. Liam squatted over the girl, the blood from his last kill dripping onto her cheek.
"He's fucking soft," Liam told the group.
"She's human," Malcolm drawled.
"They don't even think she's human!" Diane rolled off the bed and dragged the girl up by her hair. The child did not react. "Why should I care? They don't. I certainly don't! She's a blood bag." Diane licked a line of dried blood from the girl's temple and still there was no reaction. "There ain't nothing left. Fucking do it already."
Bill still hesitated.
Malcolm sighed. Liam, now bored, ripped the girl's throat open and drank deeply. Diane shoved him out of the way and took her fill. Malcolm tsked. "So messy."
Bill ran until he reached a cemetery far outside the city.
***
Present – Bon Temps, Louisiana
Bill rolled Sookie over and loomed over her, then kissed her nose. She giggled. “I stood apart from it a great deal. I am vampire.”
“But you saw things, right? I mean, all the things that just changed around here. It must have been incredible!”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” he drawled. “Humans are still violent and ignorant. Vampires are still bloodthirsty and unchanging. Werefolk are—”
“Hey now,” Sookie interrupted. “You had to see some good things happen. I mean, vampires came out of the coffin because the world was a little more understanding, right? The world got a little bit better. You shouldn’t be such a cynic, Bill.”
Toying with her hair, Billed stared deep into her very blues eyes. “That’s why I have you.”