by Varian Wolf
“Just watch out for him, Bart.”
I didn’t think anything of the conversation. So a neighbor’s dog had run off and might butcher some cats –all for best, considering how I felt about cats. There was nothing noteworthy or unusual about the conversation. That’s what I thought.
But the woman, along with the thing that had her so upset that night –that putrid, fucked up thing, would turn out to be a tremendous pain in the neck for me later on, in so many ways. If only I had been vigilant…but I was busy scarfing chicken, and I quickly lost interest in the conversation and wandered back toward the den without giving the event further thought.
“Oh, you didn’t get me anything?”
Yoki looked pitifully at me. She immediately began stealing chicken from me in retribution. Before long she had the whole leg bone to gnaw.
Ferguson was playing reverently, but very badly, due to his blood alcohol level, much to the amusement of the gathered party. A couple of students were pretending to dance to the music, equally badly. Jesus Christ actually lay down and put his tiny forepaws over his ears. He whimpered dolefully.
“Henry, you ape, give it up! We’re all getting drunk just listening to you,” said Rathstein, reentering the room with flair.
“You push off, you” Ferguson belched, “ape. The city’s gone to the dogs, and I intend to go with it. If any of you are signing up for my classes next semester, don’t. I teach as badly drunk as I play drunk, and, do be advised, I intend to be drunk from here on out. To hell with all this cap…” he stumbled on the word, “capitalistic…democratic…republicanism, all this voting. Hanging chads, swinging chads, biflureated chads…God save the Queen!”
“God save the Queen!” Yoki seconded with the remainder of my chicken in her mouth.
The pretty-good-for-a-kid student spoke up again. “Dr. Rathstein, why don’t you play something?”
“Yeah, play something, Dr. Rathstein!”
“Please play!”
“No, no. Not tonight,” Rathstein protested ingenuinely.
Ferguson quit hashing away at the keys and bellowed, “Go on, play for them, you old nag. It’s what you’ve been wanting all evening.”
A few more protests, and Rathstein succumbed…to his own vanity. Ferguson abandoned the bench, and Rathstein secured it. With some small ado, he began to play what others identified as The Antiques Roadshow theme, which garnered laughs. He then settled down into something more serious, Beethoven, by request, to the silent delight of all his rapt listeners.
In the middle of the first movement, my favorite drunk girl stomped into the room, on the arm of a female friend and wielding a diet cherry cola can like a queen’s scepter, and, apparently oblivious to everyone’s quiet attentiveness to their host’s rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, made an announcement.
“Does anybody know what happened to all our fried chicken?”
At first, people ignored her, but, red-faced and long hair tangled, she went on.
“Steph and I brought it, and we didn’t get any of it, and (belch) now it’s gone.”
Rathstein stopped playing in response to the escalation in her voice.
Now, I have been accused of opening my mouth when I damn well shouldn’t, when no good can possibly come of it, when it is likely to get my teeth knocked out of my face or worse. This was just such a moment.
“I took the last piece, and I gave it Yoki. It looked like community goods to me.”
Of course no one else owned up to the crime.
Yoki stood holding the telltale femur and half-pelvis of a chicken thigh. There was just no hiding where at least that much of the chicken had gone. I figured I would take the heat off her, so I’d let the gnomes in.
I watched as the blonde’s face took on the expression of someone who had just caught her husband in the back of a jalopy with another woman –and I was that other woman. Her forehead wrinkled up and her mouth twisted meanly.
I tell you, fried chicken is a powerful force in the universe.
Surely, if wonderful Yoki had said what I said, there would have been no problem. The two would have been hugging in seconds and calling each other “carebear.” Alas, Ogre Annie had said it, she who brings out the worst in all people, who turns good people to homicide, who incites shipmates to mutiny, who causes minor earthquakes.
By now everyone was listening and watching. Let it be known there were witnesses.
Of course I threw gasoline on the fire.
“You don’t look like you need to be eatin’ anything else anyway.”
Bleach Blondie seemed to explode all at once. It was as though pressure had been building inside her for some time, like Old Faithful, and I just happened to get in the way at the crucial moment.
“You bitch!” she exploded. “That was our chicken. We brought it! Who do you think you are?”
“I’m Annie,” I said acidly.
Her friend tried to calm her. She put her hand on Blondie’s arm and said, “Trish, come on. It’s no big deal. They screwed up. We can eat something else.”
Trish wouldn’t be placated, even by her friend’s skewed logic. The power of the One Wing (okay, thigh) was too great. She yanked her arm away from her friend angrily and even shoved her friend back.
Yoki was upon us in a second. She tried to placate Trish, but even Yoki’s honey tongue couldn’t put the fire out.
“Don’t you get in my face, bitch!” she snapped at Yoki.
Then, unexpectedly to probably everyone except me and my hyper-vigilance, she hauled off and slapped little Yoki across the face.
I retaliated in a second, without a thought. I punched the buggering blond right in the nose and watched as she fell to the floor.
I drew my fist back and shook the sting out of it. Trish immediately burst into tears. Blood ran down from her nose onto her cleavage and pretty pink halter top. I wondered why Jesus Christ wasn’t attacking her like a barracuda; a man down would seem his natural queue to go all apeshit. People started gathering around. I instinctively reacted to them as though they might attack me next. I eyed them all, but no one came near me.
I checked on Yoki. She was on the verge of tears –violence was not her thing. But she was looking at me with her familiar “you’ve done it again, and how am I going to get you out of this one” look.
Ferguson loomed overhead.
“My goodness, Trish Danes. What have you gone and done this time? Has someone finally socked you in the nose?”
Others tried to console Trish. Someone ran for ice. But Trish would have neither consoling nor ice. She clambered to her feet, her face all tears and blood and flushed cheeks, and she made a inept try for me.
A lot of hands stopped her. She spat curses at me, then calmed enough that the others released her. Through the whole thing, amazingly, she managed never to drop her soda can. She shook off their hands, spit at me, missed, and stormed her way through the crowd towards the front door. Her friend Steph glared at me also, then followed Trish.
“Hightailing it so soon, Trish old gal? I always would’ve thought you’d’ve had more in’ve…uh…you’ve,” Henry Ferguson called after her, followed by a large belch.
“Trish got really hurt, Dr. Ferguson,” the Mozart-shirted boy explained, eyeing me.
“Good for her,” he continued, undaunted. “Builds character, something she could use lots of.”
No one argued with him.
“Come on, old man,” Cynthia said, steadying him. “I think it’s time to get you home before you say something that gets you fired.”
“I have tenure.” Ferguson slurred. Then he leaned toward me. “I never had the chance to meet you, girl. What’s your name?”
“Annie,” I answered.
“Annie,” he breathed liquor fumes and slurred in my face, “I’ve got to pack it in now, but before I topple over I just want to say –and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: keep up the good work.”
Cynthia smiled at everyone apologetically and direct
ed teetering Ferguson away from the crowd.
“Trish is not a member of the Political Society,” Yoki said, also apologetically.
I perused the cuts and incipient swelling on my first two knuckles.
“So, Yoki.” Came Rathstein’s voice disquietingly close behind me. “Your friend is full of surprises.”
“That’s why I love her,” Yoki answered. “Not the first time she’s saved me from a beating. Golly! Did you see how she socked that tart! Right on the nose!”
“I saw,” Rathstein answered dryly, “and I saw her break it. That girl is going to have medical bills.” He said to me, “She just might bring this back to you.”
I didn’t answer him. I was through talking for the night. I was through with him. I was through with everything.
“Yo, your ride is leaving,” I said.
“Oh, I’m coming,” she agreed, possibly a smidgen sobered by the sting in her cheek.
Yoki said a few goodnights, Rathstein being one. I didn’t care to read his looks. But Yoki made it quick, gathered Jesus Christ up from his place on the carpet, and within two minutes we were headed out the door.
Jeanne left too, off with another friend.
I closed the red door behind us with a huge inner sigh of relief.
Yoki and I went down the walk. The drunk girl had spilled her soda on the way out. It sprawled from its crumpled can onto the walkway in a dark puddle of stickiness. Yoki stepped in it, cursed in irritation, and wiped her foot on the lawn before proceeding.
“She’s not even here and she’s still pissing us off,” she said. She turned to me, “Quite a night, my girl. I bet I’ll never get you to a party again.”
“Maybe,” I yawned, “one with all the people safely sequestered in cages.”
“Ooh,” she cooed, “sounds kinky. So, what did you think?”
“Somebody makes really good fried chicken.”
“No, silly. What do you think of Rathstein?” she asked, suspecting my reply.
“He’s fifty years old and hits on you like a nineteen-year-old.”
“You can’t blame old Bartholomew for that. Everyone does it.”
She scratched Jesus Christ’s little, scruffy head. In an unprecedented show of placidity, he was already out like a light.
“A blundering zeppelin of patronization.”
She poked me.
“He’s a type, Yoki. He’s not my type.”
“When will I get to meet your type?”
“You’re a sly one.”
“When? At the Riff? For the Demonseed concert?”
“I’m not thinking about that tonight. You’ve already killed your share of my brain cells.”
Maybe I would have been nicer to her if I had known that that night, such as it was, was the last normal evening Yoki and I were going to have together. Normal was going to change real fast.
As we pulled away, this time to the sound of Elton Jon’s “Rocket Man” from Yoki’s spaceship mix, I looked out into the night, and I wondered not if Yoki would ever meet Vampire Miguel, but if Vampire Annie would ever eat Yoki.
10
Wrecked to Hell
Miguel met me on the steps of the Banana Grove. This time, he was warm –not 98.6 degrees –but warm for him. He had very recently fed, but that did not keep him off me.
“Aren’t we playful tonight,” I commented as his hands went to places I would have decked anyone else for touching.
He pinched me.
“Ow!”
“You did not tell me you had a tattoo there.”
“Yeah, because I knew you’d make a big deal out of it.”
“How could I not with what it is?”
“If you tell anyone about it, I’ll skin you alive –uh, I mean dead. –Ow! Would you stop it? Old Man’s right over there.”
He was doing that thing with my neck again.
“What is up with you?”
“I have tasted you, Annie,” he whispered in my ear.
“Oh, so now you get to rub scent on me like a cat every time you see me? Newsflash: there’s no one else around here to compete with. So give me some air. Air!”
I pushed him away. He grinned, showing all his teeth, but it wasn’t his teeth that got to me, it was the look in his eyes, like he had some wicked surprise for me and could hardly wait to make it known.
“Creepy,” I said, pointing. “Just creepy.”
We were on our way back from our (my) favorite little café near Jackson Square, playfully jabbing the voodoo dolls we had made of each other at a craft table and pantomiming the trauma supposedly caused by each jab, when the first thing happened. We were on the opposite side of the street from the crack house where the local dealer brokered his deals, when Miguel suddenly stopped dead and put an iron hand on my chest, stopping me dead too.
I had the good sense to shut up and listen, but not the sense to quickly recognize the danger that he had. There was a commotion coming from the dealer’s porch. I caught something about “holding out on us,” an objection to that assertion, followed by a threat and a classic “you know what we can do to you.” It sounded like a standard organized-crime smackdown to me, and I was about to politely suggest to Miguel that we continue on our way in adherence to the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy of the streets, when I saw why he’d suddenly gone all predator in the middle of our stroll. In the shadows of the porch I couldn’t make out the stranger’s features, but as he turned to face us, for a second in the glow of the street lights, his eyes flashed. They flashed the way a cat’s eyes flash when they are struck by the light just so, the way a dog’s or owl’s or any other thing-that-can see-in-the-dark’s do. Those eyes glinted, and then their owner stood facing us from the shadows, motionless, staring.
For a second, no one moved, not me, not the dealer cowering against the wall nor the man whose eyes had betrayed him as a creature of the night, and not Miguel. You could have cut the proverbial tension in the air with that proverbial knife.
Miguel was the first to move. He relaxed. His stance eased. The hand holding the voodoo doll (of me) dropped to his side. His shoulders un-squared. Then he simply stared, and then and there I took a lesson in immortal social relations. He did not take his eyes off the other. He did not nod or acknowledge him in any way other than to watch, impassively, as though at a great distance. He seemed utterly confident, calm.
The other was anything but. After a moment looking like a treed bear, he bolted. He jumped the porch railing and shot down the street like nothing I had ever seen, like a cheetah…or like a gazelle. It was very clear what had happened here, and his was not the action of a top predator.
The dealer, who hadn’t really had time to react to any of this, vanished quickly into his house.
“Walk,” Miguel said.
“Walk where?” I asked quietly.
“With me.”
We did. We did not walk to the inn. We did not walk back the way we had come. We walked to the next street and circled around, back to the peopled areas, slowly, calmly. But Miguel did not play. He put the doll into his pocket. He was watching, listening, tasting the air. I could tell, because I knew him.
“In a moment,” he said with no change in demeanor, “I am going to take you over these rooftops. Do not react. Keep walking.”
I obeyed, and very shortly we were airborne.
Vampires do not fly, at least, not that I know of, but they can sure seem to if you’re human, and you see one jump from the street to the top of a building, or if one carries you fast, like if you’re me. I’d had a few of these opportunities, and they generally involved fleeing the scene of something.
I hardly knew where we went. I just watched the ground, the buildings, and the cars fly by like they were in time-lapse. We zipped through the city and across a bridge over the broad, dark Mississippi with cars and trucks running nearly abreast us. I think that was the fastest he had ever carried me. The time at the hotel he’d been wounded, but now he was well-fed and in top form
, which I would later learn is a really big deal when it comes to vampire performance. They need their regular oil changes.
So was it fun, racing across the ceiling of New Orleans in the arms of an immortal, flirting with gravity but never really succumbing to it, dancing over people’s heads so nimbly they never notice, like some invisible, blood-sucking sugarplum fairy? All I can say, good people, is go out and get yourself a vampire. Everyone, just drop what you’re doing, drop that remote or that needlepoint or that porno mag, and go get one. Sell the truck, sell the boat, sell the Mercedes if you’ve got one, and go get a vampire. Get one now.
The trip was over all too soon, but I figured my frequent flyer miles would have earned me another for later. Miguel set me down on a patio, beside the biggest pool I’d ever seen, with a house the size of a courthouse in front of me. It was new construction, with all the chicness of the new south, with a stucco exterior, big windows, and mood lighting coming from landscape lights strategically placed in the verdure. It was a mansion with all the trimmings, situated beside a tall levee on the Mississippi, strategically-placed trees and shrubs and an imposing wall concealing it from the prying eyes of neighbors.
Something about the naked men playing with foam noodles in and around the pool suggested to me whose domicile this was.
“Oh, fuck,” was all I had to say.
“Wait here,” Miguel said, and went inside.
“Oh, great.”
I pushed a puff of hair that had popped out of its cornrow away from my face and eyed the naked men in the pool. They eyed me back.
“Who is that?” one of them said.
“How should I know? I don’t travel on that side of town,” answered the second with a British accent. He looked a hell of a lot like the guy who had come into The Chow House behind Yoki and I the day before –right before Andy had turned up in my parking space. In fact, he looked exactly like him, which didn’t surprise me.
“Oh, be nice,” said a third, with an islander’s accent. “The poor thing looks lost.”
“She must be if she’s here,” said the first.
I was checking out their teeth. None of them appeared to be packing…not in their mouths, anyway. Under the water was a different story.
