Blood

Blood is Vato’s partner in the V & B Tow Company, a tow-truck operator whose work repeatedly places him at the edge between ordinary roadside business and Vineland’s stranger affairs. His partnership with Vato supplies a running vein of comic banter, but it also gives Blood a consequential role in the closing episode involving Brock Vond: he helps bring Vond to the river of the dead and bids him farewell as he crosses beyond the living world.

Identity and Work

Blood works alongside Vato in a towing business that has to judge not only which cars are worth taking, but whether recovering them will actually be profitable. At a late hour in the Woodbine Motel parking lot, the partners cruise slowly in their Custom Deluxe, Mi Vida Loca, assessing the vehicles available to them. Their selection is not simply a matter of choosing the most expensive cars. They distinguish among owners and likely outcomes: a Rolls-Royce owner might turn a recovery into a good-humored encounter and leave a tip, while dealing with a Mercedes owner could make the job a poor proposition. The work, as their account makes clear, depends on reading people as much as cars.

Blood explains that some vehicles reach the company and are never claimed. Rather than leave such cars indefinitely, the partners set a price and sell them. When Takeshi asks what sort of car Blood means, Blood names a Ferrari; the exchange becomes a running joke about what question Takeshi will ask next. Blood briefly takes Takeshi’s head in his hands and turns it playfully, while Takeshi mistakes Blood’s laughter for the martial cry that precedes an attack. The comic misunderstanding puts the pair’s physical ease and Blood’s teasing manner on display without changing the practical point: unclaimed vehicles become inventory.

Partnership with Vato

Blood and Vato work as a close-knit pair whose conversations often turn routine business into performance. When Vato begins a story about their work, Blood picks it up and directs it toward Takeshi, explaining the problem of unclaimed cars. Elsewhere, Vato compares a situation to a football team he has backed, and the partners launch into an elaborate handshake patterned after 2001: A Space Odyssey. They turn, slap their palms behind their backs, and vocalize the musical motif while Takeshi and DL watch from beside the truck. Their shared jokes and rituals make the tow operation feel less like a formal enterprise than a partnership with its own language.

That rapport also underpins their introductions to the clinic. Vato gives Takeshi a business card promising access to the V & B Tow Preferred List, a continuously updated catalogue of vehicle make, model, year, condition, and special features. Blood adds that the pair are tired at that hour. The scene joins a real service—the information list—to the partners’ comic salesmanship, presenting their business as both organized and idiosyncratic.

Encounters at the Karmology Clinic

The following day, Vato and Blood turn up unexpectedly at Takeshi and DL’s Karmology Clinic with material about Vietnam and Ortho Bob Dulang. Their account mixes wartime memories, stories about transactions and officers, and a stubborn but incomplete impulse to speak plainly. The narrative does not resolve every element as fact: some of what they tell is identified as war stories, some as cheerful invention, and some as a confused certainty that never quite becomes a direct explanation. Blood’s appearance therefore brings the clinic not a neat case history but a tangle of recollection and performance.

As the tow operators become better acquainted with Takeshi and DL, they learn about the Death Palm, the Kunoichi retreat, the Puncutron, and DL’s year-and-a-day sentence. The subject provokes lively discussion between the partners, and Vato wants to make it a sitcom, imitating an entire studio audience whenever it comes up. Yet neither Vato nor Blood offers the clinic’s practitioners unsolicited advice. Blood’s part in this relationship is thus twofold: he and Vato turn the story into comic material among themselves, but they refrain from assuming authority over the people whose experience they are discussing.

Thi Anh Tran and the Tow Company

Blood and Vato’s business also includes Thi Anh Tran, whose place in the company develops from an obligation rooted in their military past into an equal partnership. After Gorman Flaff’s death, a chaplain gives the two men a letter that introduces Thi Anh’s name. Years later, after she has earned an accounting diploma, Vato and Blood hire her in recognition of their commitment as her godfathers. They soon recognize her value and make her an equal partner. By then, the narrative observes, the two men are so wary of upsetting her that they would do nearly anything to avoid it.

That history gives Blood’s work with Vato a wider frame than the tow truck and its customers. Their decisions about the company are shaped by a continuing connection to Thi Anh, first through a promise and then through her authority as a partner. When a call comes in asking for Vato, Blood relays that Thi Anh wants to speak with him and immediately asks whether he has done something wrong. The exchange is comic, but it also registers her standing: a request from her is enough to make Vato’s partner suspect trouble.

Thanatoid Calls and Vond’s Farewell

The V & B Tow Company is nearly the only towing outfit in the county willing to handle vehicles connected to the Thanatoids and the complications surrounding them. One emergency call comes from Shade Creek after a vehicle goes over a mountain road’s edge and ends up in an apple tree below. Vato and Blood answer with the same dry banter they bring to other jobs, joking about whether they are headed in the right direction. Their willingness to take this call establishes them as practical intermediaries between the ordinary towing trade and the Thanatoid community.

Their final consequential appearance comes late in the story. One quiet evening, Blood and Vato watch a televised basketball film in their Vineland workshop. As Lakers supporters, they find other things to argue about: Blood raises Jack Nicholson’s sunglasses, and Vato counters with a jab about the pair’s own eyewear. They watch the film to its tearful conclusion, and no calls interrupt them. Around midnight, the phone rings. Vato answers and learns that Brock Vond is stranded, with a helicopter on the mountain and a car in a ditch.

The partners go out in the F350, El Mil Amores, and its headlights appear to Vond along the dark road. His account of how he came to be there is indistinct; he recalls little before finding himself in an unfamiliar, failing car with a dead battery. Blood and Vato’s arrival draws him onward to the crossing, where the passage into the land of the dead is explained as a separation of bones from the rest of the person. Blood’s final contribution is a goodbye to Vond. After a career defined by roadside recovery and the retrieval of unclaimed vehicles, Blood helps escort someone who cannot be returned to ordinary life. The tow partners’ routine service has reached its most absolute destination: not a repair shop or a claimant, but the far side of the river.