Lycanthropia

Joel and I sat at the bar in Sade and Dora’s Lounge in the Decatur, Alabama, Holiday Inn; we drank Heinekens from the bottle and wished they were Guinnesses.

It was a bright spring afternoon. Overnight the world had become radically green, and we were a little overwhelmed by it, sitting in a darkened corner of the bar, avoiding the too-blue sky that surrounded us in the glass-and-chrome building. Joel sat with his back to the window; the light shrouded his face in shadows. Occasionally the sun would reflect off passing cars and I’d be temporarily blinded by it.

We made small talk, mostly about Wayne Sides, a photographer we both knew who was finally making a name for himself in New York with a series of black-and-white photographs of the Ku Klux Klan.

Joel was an elementary school teacher and the artist-in-residence of Alabama. We met at a deli where I played guitar and sang folk songs. At one time we had lived across the hall from each other in an old apartment building. Prior to our meeting, I knew him only as an extraordinarily tidy garbage pail that appeared on the curb every Thursday morning; my garbage always resembled the anarchy of my life, a mad collection of plastic and paper bags, pizza and cardboard boxes.

We played at starving artists then, and we were fast friends. But I had since abandoned my artistic ambitions, taken a job as a car salesman and moved out of the apartment into a house I shared with a land surveyor and part-time blues guitarist. Joel and I drifted into different social circles.

So I was pleased, after knocking off work early on a Wednesday afternoon, when I found him in Sade’s. Our conversation was a pleasant escape from a burgeoning and overbearing spring. Joel looked a little thinner than normal, his red hairline had receded a little farther, and his eyes, when I could see them, were bleak and shot through with frenzied red scribbles. I had heard through mutual friends that he had hit on hard times, both financially and artistically, so I bought the first round and when we rolled dice for the second round, I cheated and deliberately lost. “I suppose this one’s mine, too.”

“Yeah,” Joel said. “Rotten luck.”

Joel started talking about Van Gogh and then about all the red-haired geniuses in the world and how they were blessed by God and a chosen race. He knew more about red-haired people than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he used every possible opening in any conversation to further his theory that redheads were destined to rule the world. After twenty minutes of it I remembered why I never visited the old apartment. But we rolled for a third round and I lost again. Soon enough the rest of the lot lizards from the Chevrolet dealership where I worked would stroll in, and they’d rescue me. We’d drift to our portion of the lounge, where we’d drink scotch and bourbon and proposition women and lie about our day’s sales accomplishments. The married men would bail, one-by-one, and the four or five single guys would act a little cockier, hoping to impress a stray female conventioneer or vacationer. Sade’s barmaids were wise to us and had long ago stopped dating any of us, though they still flirted and teased in hopes of healthy tips.

But that would be later. Now I had to listen to Joel’s drone and try to keep my eyes open. He was outlining some of his new paintings in such consummate detail that I envisioned brush strokes, even, and I daydreamed about walking outside and being deafened by a cacophony of green. I know I must have looked relieved when I glanced up and saw Mike enter the building.

Mike was a mutual friend and my co-worker. He was a good thirty minutes ahead of happy hour; four times ahead of his usual laggard entrance. A pudgy guy I did not know—he looked like an accountant—accompanied him. We invited them over, chatted a moment, and then decided to go next door to the restaurant and eat a couple of pounds of boiled shrimp.

In the restaurant, Mike introduced his companion as J: prospective customer, insurance adjuster and good friend. Of course, Mike had developed the art of shmooze to such a refined essence that it was hard to tell whether J was really a friend or just a bit of grease in the mechanism of Mike’s success. He had more “good friends” than China had grains of rice.

With his tiny, pellucid eyes, receding hairline, frail chin and protruding nose, J reminded me of a mole. When we shook hands after our introduction, I felt as though a mole had briefly slipped me a dead fish. His grip was limp and wet. In conversation, he made inconsequential, mole-like comments. I learned that he was the youth director of his church, and I wondered what strange irony had left a man completely void of charisma in charge of anything, much less a hoard of adolescents.

But Mike seemed genuinely fond of him, and as I admired Mike I tried to find in J something of merit. He was soft-spoken, pleasant enough, but his hands troubled me. They were small, pale, perfectly manicured; my good intentions kept stumbling over the affected way he gestured with them. When he left the table to relieve himself, I turned to Mike and asked, “What’s the deal with this one?”

“He’s a sad bird,” Mike replied. “His wife left him about a month ago. Disappeared without a trace. Left him cold. They think she ran off with a lover. I feel sorry for him. He’s a lost sort, don’t you think?”

“Gives me the creeps,” I said. “Did you see those hands?”

“What’s wrong with his hands?”

“I don’t know. They seem too damn clean to me.”

J returned and we resumed our round table conversation. After a while Joel excused himself and went off to develop a lesson plan. Mike sucked down a beer and said he needed to get home. “You ready, J?”

“Yes,” J replied. He extended his right hand toward me. “It was nice meeting you.”

I gritted my teeth and shook his hand: “Nice meeting you. I’ll see you in the morning, Mike.”

That was it. I drifted back into the lounge and joined a table of auto salesmen and engineers. My last glimpse of J was a shot of him climbing into Mike’s car. He carefully opened the door, making certain he did not scratch the surface of the neighboring vehicle. What a benign creature, I thought, and I shuddered at the notion of his passivity.

*

A couple of years later I was working the afternoon shift at a small newspaper in Tennessee, when a story came across the Associated Press wire about a man in Alabama who had murdered his wife in the shower with a baseball bat, dragged her body into the back yard, buried her in a shallow grave and then built a concrete goldfish pond over her. His crime would have gone undetected had he not been forced by financial difficulties to sell his home. The new owners, in a fit of remodeling, destroyed the goldfish pond and unearthed the woman’s corpse. After reading the article three times I telephoned Joel.

“Do you remember J?” I asked once we had dispensed with the polite preliminaries to conversation.

“Mike’s friend?” Joel responded. “Sure. I remember him. Did you know they got him on a murder rap? He whacked his wife. And him an elder in the church. Just goes to show, man, you never can tell about a person.”

My, no, I thought. You never can tell.

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