Bite Club

by Hal Bodner

  She’d even instructed Clarence to wear long sleeves, but when he showed up in a bright blue designer button-down shirt, she’d rushed out to purchase him a tan oxford. She explained to his astonished disbelief that Hercule and others of his race shied away from bright colors as being garishly ostentatious and in poor taste. In fact, by the time she was finished with the do’s and don’ts of werewolf etiquette, poor Clarence and Sally were totally confused and certain that, within two minutes of greeting their guests, they would commit some horrifying transgression that would haunt them for the next two or three centuries.

  Sylvia took full advantage of the lupine’s rather middle-class tendency to be easily impressed by displays of obvious wealth. She indulged her spleen with malicious glee by gracing herself with her best jewelry—some of it literally priceless. On a gold chain around her neck, she wore a five- carat teardrop-shaped diamond that had been given to her by Marie Antoinette. On one wrist she wore a stunning undocumented Faubourg bracelet set with gorgeous dark green emeralds; on the other was a cunningly crafted pink-gold serpent with a huge deep red ruby clutched in its jaws. Topping her look was a smart black cloche, held in place by a Victorian jet-and-diamond hat pin. Over her right breast she’d pinned a jeweled cameo brooch of porcelain depicting a wolf baying at a ruby moon. It was with great regret that she had decided to part with it, making it a gift to Hercule’s wife, Lillian, in thanks for his agreement to meet.

  Despite the gift, however, and despite Sylvia’s having taken great pains to avoid offending anyone, the meeting was a disaster. What she hadn’t counted on was the werewolves’ insularity; since they were quite capable of taking care of themselves in isolation, they simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, grasp the concept that they were part of a larger community that needed their help. Hercule was distantly polite throughout Sylvia’s pleas. He listened attentively, but it was clear to all present that he had already made up his mind to let the vampires drown in their own blood, so to speak.

  And to be quite honest, despite the seriousness of the occasion, Sylvia had difficulty concentrating sufficiently to summon up her most eloquent oratory style; there were simply too many distractions.

  Jacques not only persisted in chewing on the furniture but also made a terrible nuisance of himself, delightedly running his claws up and down the walls of the recreation room, shredding the wallpaper. It had been specially designed and put up only six months before at a cost of ninety-five dollars a square yard. Sylvia cringed at the thought of what replacing it would do to her condo assessment fees.

  Several of the nieces were bored with the whole proceeding and amused themselves by grooming each other. Hercule had strictly forbidden anyone from changing form once they arrived for fear outsiders might see. Thus, some parts of the gathering began to resemble a lesbian orgy as the young women who had chosen to enter on two feet instead of four alternately licked each other’s hair or nipped gently at her neighbor’s skin in search of fleas.

  Jacques’s mother finally corralled him by the scruff of the neck and deposited him at the foot of her chair where he amused himself by digging into the carpet. Sylvia silently added the price of replacing the hand-woven Berber to her mental tally of the evenings’ mounting costs.

  To Sylvia’s initial relief, Jacques’s father cuffed him roundly when he realized that his offspring seemed intent on destroying anything his eager little paws could come in contact with. But her relief turned to alarm as Jacques’s mother objected strenuously to this treatment of her beloved pup and soon, fangs bared and growling deeply in their throats, the two squared off to settle their differences in child rearing in the traditional lupine fashion. The recreation room began to sound like the kennel of the SPCA during feeding time. Fortunately, in his one show of deference to the vampires’ sensitivities, Hercule commanded them to stop before actual blood was shed.

  Sylvia strove gamely onward, trying to make her point to Hercule, interrupted by a more or less steady stream of startled growls and pleas of “Excuse me” and “I’m terribly sorry” from Clarence and Sally as they moved around the crowded room, dispensing refreshments and treading on various tails of those who had arrived in lupine form.

  In short, the meeting was a catastrophe. The werewolves remained unconvinced that the killings in Los Angeles could possibly have anything to do with them. In the unlikely event that they were somehow affected, they felt they were perfectly capable of taking care of their own, thank you very kindly.

  Several hours later the werewolves began to shuffle out as Sylvia sank, exhausted, into a chair to survey the final damage to the room. She’d managed to extract a reluctant promise from Hercule that he’d reconsider his position—if he were given irrefutable proof that humans were growing suspicious that they might be sharing the planet with several other intelligent species.

  It would probably take a front-page article in the Times, thought Sylvia tiredly. “Werewolf stalks Mayor in Lincoln Center” or “Vampire Attack at The Met” might do it.

  The last to depart was Hercule’s mate, Lillian. Sylvia had always liked her. A stout, plain woman, she possessed the trait, rare in werewolves, of being addicted to gossip and was remarkably talkative for a member of her race. Of all the guests, she had been the only one other than Hercule who had paid any attention to Sylvia’s monologue, and at times, Sylvia had almost sworn she’d seen expressions of concern and sympathy cross Lillian’s frumpy features.

  “My dear,” Lillian gently rested her hand briefly on Sylvia’s bowed shoulders. “I cannot promise much. But I will speak to him.” She knelt and briefly planted a kiss on both of Sylvia’s cheeks in the French manner and quickly waddled out after her husband and family. She paused in the doorway and, with a shy backward glance, touched the brooch pinned to her blouse and added softly, “Thank you.”

  Well! thought Sylvia with surprise. Perhaps something will come of this evening after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As Barbra Streisand loudly bemoaned the loss of Nicky Arnstein from the CD player, and Barbara Stanwyck shrieked, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” from the television set, Troy considered that, all in all, his life was a happy one. As Troy and the talking pictures had been born within a decade or so of each other, his deep-seated love affair with Hollywood and the Silver Screen seemed almost inevitable. Now, slightly more than three quarters of a century later, he was proud of himself, figuring that his contribution in helping to convince Chris to relocate to the land that gave birth to Schwab’s and the Brown Derby was not insubstantial. In short, Troy was blissfully happy. Now if only he could think of some way to make Chris stop merely talking about staying and actually want to do so...

  Troy’s only regret was that the days of the musical movie extravanganzas he’d so loved in his youth were long gone. However, with the advent of videotape and DVD, Troy had amassed a huge collection of Hollywood musicals and frequently spent his days sitting mesmerized in front of the television screen, fantasizing that he was dancing with Fred Astaire or being crooned to by Gene Kelly.

  Born in 1927 on a small farm just outside of the small town of Wetherby, nestled deep in the hills of South Carolina, Troy had been a Depression baby. When he was six, his mother took him to the theater for the first time; the film was 42nd Street. Troy had been entranced. From the instant the gold velvet curtain parted to reveal the huge screen, its white surface splashed with pink and blue spotlights, Troy fell in love with Hollywood. During the years that followed, on the rare occasions when he could afford to go see films, Troy could be found seated sixth row center at the Wetherby Palace Theatre, blissfully enraptured. At twelve, he’d begged his mother to take him to see The Wizard of Oz when it opened and doubled up on his chores for three weeks in anticipation of her promise to do so.

  The movies provided his only escape from an otherwise dreary existence. His family was poor, as was most of the rest of the town. Shorter than any of his siblings and far prettier than a boy had any right to be, he w
as constantly the object of cruel practical jokes played upon him by his three older brothers, whose favorite game was to hog-tie him and leave him hidden in the hayloft of the barn overnight, cold, frightened, and hungry. His father barely tolerated him; Troy was never strong enough to do the heavier work around the farm. He was stricken with uncontrollable bouts of sneezing whenever the hay was mown; even cutting the sparse grass on the front lawn of the house reduced him to an attack of watery eyes and gasps for breath.

  He couldn’t help harvest the garden as the sight of a bug or worm reduced him to petrified hysterics; to this day, the thought of anything possessing more than four legs filled him with shudders of loathing. And, to be quite honest, he’d never been keen on four-legged animals either. The mere thought of being alone in the stall with Mabel, the gentle family cow who was three or four times Troy’s size, put him into a state of terror. He even had difficulty with dogs and cats. A German shepherd had knocked him down once when he was a toddler and he was badly bruised; he’d been uncomfortable with anything larger than a Pomeranian ever since. As for cats, a nasty scratch from the farm’s tabby when Troy had tried to get a closer look at a litter of kittens, put him off felines for good. Worse, his disabling allergies extended to, not only dogs and cats, but chickens and geese as well.

  Living on a farm, where everyone must pull his weight as a matter of survival, his father made the mistake of figuring that if his youngest son was no good with the livestock, maybe he could be trained with a more mechanical goal in mind. One day, when Troy was about twelve, Jeremiah Raleigh set him to painting the house. But after falling off the roof twice and covering himself with more paint than he’d been able to get onto the shingles, his father forbid him to ever touch a paintbrush again.

  Mr. Raleigh gamely tried another tact. He carefully explained the use and purposes of each tool in his toolbox, certain the look of intense concentration on the face of his younger son meant that some of the instruction was taking hold. But Troy’s abilities with tools were even weaker than his skill with a paintbrush. His father set him to practice by pounding a dozen or so nails into a spare board and watched in chagrin as Troy managed to bend every one. They tried screws, but Troy’s only talent seemed to be in stripping the threads. As for watching his son try to use a handsaw, Jeremiah’s predominant emotion was shame.

  After the eldest of his two sisters died suddenly of a summer chill, Troy’s mother began to enlist his aid with the housekeeping. She quickly realized that if she wanted her home to withstand the ravages of a fiery cataclysm, she’d need to keep him away from the stove. If she intended the few china heirlooms to she possessed to survive, she’d best not set him to dusting. In fact, the only thing he seemed to be able to do without causing a disaster was to help her with the dishes and mop the floors. On her forty-fifth birthday, however, she’d made an amazing discovery. Troy had invaded her rag-bag and, with amazing adroitness, sewn her a beautiful set of new curtains for the kitchen windows. With a sigh of relief and the hope that, perhaps her son was not a total walking disaster area, she’d set him to work and he’d become invaluable, mending and repairing the family’s clothing and reducing her workload.

  Although she loved all of her children deeply, Charity Raleigh could never quite figure out what she and her husband had done wrong when it came to Troy. To their dying days, in 1949 and 1951, respectively, they were confused by their youngest son, who had an inexplicable penchant for trying on his sisters’ crinolines and who was given to recurrent attacks of the vapors.

  In 1940, Mr. Horace Grenham, the effete owner of Wetherby’s sole dry goods store, took pity on the increasingly attractive thirteen-year-old boy and offered him a job, sweeping and dusting for a few dollars a week. At first content only to have the pleasure of surreptitious glances at the blond-haired youth as he performed his menial tasks, Grenham found that Troy’s bright smile and affable sense of humor worked wonders with his female customers. He was also scrupulously honest, and Grenham began to place him behind the counter more and more frequently.

  Grenham began to notice Troy’s increasing gauntness as things became financially more desperate for his parents and his four remaining siblings. His initial physical admiration for the boy having become somewhat avuncular, Grenham made certain that the youngest Raleigh was well fed. His kindness transformed the formerly frail youth. In a matter of months, Troy grew several inches; for the first time in his life, he looked older than his years rather than younger. His shoulders broadened and his chest and arms became hard and muscled as a result of his stacking and carrying heavy bolts of cloth and large sacks of flour, sugar, and feed.

  Grenham took silent pride in having the unanimously acclaimed handsomest young man in town as his number-one assistant. The single women of the town began to spend more and more time in his store, flirting outrageously with the oblivious Troy, and sales continued to increase. Troy was given a series of small raises, the lion’s portion of which was dutifully handed over to Jeremiah and Charity Raleigh who, at last, found some purpose in the existence of their strangest and most disconcertingly beautiful child.

  In 1953, more than a decade after he came to work for Grenham, Troy’s life was drastically and irrevocably changed by three events, all happening within several days of each other. The first was entirely unexpected: Horace Grenham died, passing away quietly in his sleep of heart failure. Troy’s sorrow when his natural parents had passed on a scant few years before had been mild compared to the almost debilitating grief he experienced at the loss of his surrogate father.

  At the funeral, Troy was subjected to an even more severe emotional beating. Grenham’s sister, a middle-aged, bovine woman with an equally bovine adult son, arrived from Mobile, Alabama, to attend her late brother’s interment and, despite the fact that she and her brother had not spoken for more than twenty-five years, she assumed ownership of the store. Meeting Troy at the grave site for the first time, and accepting his offered handshake of condolence with evident distaste, she loudly announced to all present that “this nancy boy will continue working in my shop only over my dead body” and fired him on the spot.

  Returning home much later after wandering in the rain for hours, alone with his shock and grief, he was greeted at the door by his eldest brother, Jeremiah Jr., who informed him that he had heard the news from the funeral and could not, in good conscious allow a pervert like Troy to continue living in a house with his young nieces and nephews—especially since Troy would no longer be able to contribute his fair share to the household expenses. Troy’s sister-in-law, teary eyed, had done him the favor of packing his belongings for him and two small suitcases and a single, large white, cloth bag sat lonesome on the front porch, steadily becoming drenched by the rain.

  The next day saw a desolate Troy ensconced in one of the twelve rooms of Wetherby’s solitary hotel; the proprietors of both local boarding houses had heard the news and refused to allow him to stay. He grimly surveyed his meager savings and realized that he had, at best, two weeks before complete penury.

  The Lord, however, works in mysterious ways.

  Less than a week later, having finally exhausted what scant employment prospects Wetherby had to offer, Troy returned early one evening to the hotel, head hanging low in abject despair. Passing through the hotel’s small lobby, he barely noticed the chestnut-haired young man checking in and arguing with the ancient bellhop about the difficulty of getting his luggage, a huge trunk and several smaller bags, up the stairs.

  Sitting dejectedly at his table in the dining room later that evening, breakfast and dinner being included in the room rental, he looked up in response to a loudly cleared throat to behold the handsome young man standing beside his table.

  “Hi,” said the man. Troy felt an odd stirring in his chest as he met the youth’s piercing green eyes.

  “Hi,” he replied.

  “My name is Christopher. Christopher Driscoll.” The man smiled, showing blinding white teeth. “My friends call me Chr
is. I’m new in town. Just arrived tonight and, well...” he smiled again, shyly this time, “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone here. Are you alone?”

  Troy nodded, speechless, absorbed in the faint play of the light off the auburn highlights of the stranger’s dark brown hair.

  “May I join you? I’m not very hungry, but I could sure use the company.” Without waiting for a response, he pulled out a chair and sat across from the startled Troy. He held out a hand in greeting. “Do you have a name?” he asked kindly.

  “Troy. Raleigh.” Troy took the offered palm in his own. “Pleased to meet...” Although Chris’s hand was surprisingly cool, Troy felt a strange warmth traveling up from his right hand along his arm, down across his chest and settling deep into the pit of his stomach.

  “Do you live in town?” asked the stranger.

  Tears welled up in Troy’s eyes as the emotional burdens of the past week crashed into him with stunning force. His breath began to come in great heaving gulps as, panicked at the realization that he was about to embarrass himself in front of this attractive stranger, the dam broke and the sobs came.

  Suddenly, Troy found himself crying desperately, supported by the surprising strength of the stranger’s arms, face buried in the man’s chest. The other occupants of the dining room looked on in various attitudes of disbelief, disgust and shock, but the strange young man totally ignored them, soothing Troy’s anguish with soft words while gently caressing his blond hair.

  The two had remained together ever since, city after city, home after home, through good times and hard times, through bitter arguments and tender reconciliations, even through life and death.

  Today, however, Troy’s thoughts were far from Wetherby, South Carolina. He’d been looking forward to a double feature of The Opposite Sex and On the Town, an old favorite, passing the day away with Dolores Gray and friends. But upon returning from Hanna and Gustav’s, Chris had spoiled his plans with snide comments about the deplorable state of Troy’s housekeeping and Chris’s inability to find a clean shirt. Troy lamely argued that Chris had gone through more clean clothes in the week since they had arrived than the chorus of No No Nanette, but Chris was implacable, accusing Troy of a hefty contribution to the backlog of laundry with his irritating habit of trying on an outfit, wearing it for twenty minutes, and then tossing it into the hamper or onto the floor in favor of something more alluring. Realizing that Chris was under extreme tension, Troy felt he was trying to be cooperative in suggesting that Chris simply give him the credit cards to go shopping. After all, even in California, the fashion designers persisted in designing a winter line.