Lycanthropia

On the morning of the day Norman “Twigs” Morton was killed by a vampire, he awakened thinking of his upstairs neighbor’s legs — more precisely, wishing his ceiling were made of two-way glass, so he might answer the jangle of his alarm clock by staring up at her long limbs. Twigs was a leg man, and proud of it. His upstairs neighbor represented for him the culmination of all things wonderful. As he said often enough in the Moon and Six, “Her gams start at her neck and go all the way to the floor.” They didn’t, of course, except in Twigs’ twisted imagination; but when I pictured her, I envisioned his neighbor as a head and a pair of shoulders perched atop 6-foot stems. A rose, by any other name.

The Moon and Six is a bar out on Alvarado that caters to an odd mix of drunks and recovering drunks, who are distinguished only by the color of their drinking straws. Like the rest of the 12-steppers in the room, on the evening of Twigs’ death, I nursed a red straw drink (in my case a virgin club soda with a twist of lime). Over the course of the same evening Twigs drank a fifth of Wild Turkey one neat, blue straw highball glass after another. The only apparent effect it had on him — other than a slight slurring of speech — was in making him more gregarious and daring, which is why he proposed, about a third of the way into the night, we measure his neighbor’s legs.

“I’ll bet a hundred dollars against a dime they’re 40 inches long if they’re an inch,” Twigs boasted.

Others in the room, anxious for a little action on a night that was, so far, dull as the backside of a butter knife, cocked their ears in our direction, awaiting my reply.

“How are we going to know?” I responded. “I’ll not simply take your word for it, Twiggy, no matter how good a fellow you are.”

Twigs mused a moment and said, “We’ll go up to her apartment with a tape measure and lay the rule to ’em.”

A chorus of eavesdroppers sounded assent. Things in the hobgoblin night were finally looking up, and one or two of the more enthusiastic howled at the moon.

“What?” I said. “You think she’s gonna invite us all into her home and give us a go at her inseam?”

“Why not?” Twigs asked.

I shrugged, unable to argue the point. One of the eavesdroppers worked uptown at a Hong Kong tailor’s, and she volunteered a tape measure from her purse. So off went Twigs, the tape measure slung over his shoulder and streaming out behind him like ticker tape clinging to the sleeve of a national hero, a parade of drunks and recovering drunks following, and me, my Wayfarer shades hiding my eyes even at night, taking up the rear. We stumbled down the street to Twigs’ apartment building, and he and I rode up to the 9th floor, where his upstairs neighbor lived. The drunks and recovering drunks, three elevator cars of them, trailed behind, babbling like a gaggle of geese who had just learned Mother Goose had hatched a duck. Twigs reached tentatively for the doorbell when a bourbon-inspired drunk thundered, “Hell, Twigs, let her know you’re here,” and cracked three solid thumps on the door with the meaty sledgehammer of his fist. Everyone jumped, and a guy from down the hall looked out of his apartment and quickly retreated into oblivion. We could hear his half-dozen locks slamming shut.

But if Twigs’ neighbor was alarmed or intimidated, it didn’t show on her face. She opened the door wide, and most of the shorter drunks and recovering drunks craned their necks to see the question mark on her face. She was a tower of woman, six-foot-four, at the very least, and stunning, from the abundance of her straight, jet hair to her dark doe’s eyes to her exotic, crimson mouth. She had a body built by Fisher, all sleek lines and feline automotive curves, and her legs — almighty! — her legs were the stuff of liquid dreams, long as an endless highway and the color of coffee with lots and lots of cream. She looked out into the sea of drunken and recovering drunken humanity and said, cool as a March morning, “Yes? May I help you?”

And there was old Twigs, a good foot shorter than the woman, staring up at her like she was America and he was Christopher Columbus. He said, as a man might utter a prayer, “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but could you help us settle a bar bet?”

An annoyed expression crossed the woman’s face, then faded as a miasma fades in sunlight: She could not help being swayed by Twigs’ unclouded adoration. “Pardon me?” the woman asked.

“A bar bet,” said Twigs. “I’ve bet this gentleman” — here he gestured in my direction — “a hundred dollars that your inseam measures 40 inches or more. And all these people” — he meant the drunks and recovering drunks — “ have side bets. So, ma’am, a lot of money is riding on your willingness to let me measure your inseam.” Twigs gestured with the yellow ticker tape measure.

“My name’s Madelaine, not ma’am,” said the woman. “And I’m holding the end of the tape nearest my, um, thigh, if you don’t mind.”

The party exhaled a collective sigh of relief as Twigs handed the woman the zero end of the tape measure and then knelt at her feet to read the results. Drunks and recovering drunks stared over one another’s shoulders awaiting Twigs’ verdict.

“Forty-two inches,” said Twigs.

A cheer went up from at least half the gallery, and even the losers were impressed with Twigs’ enormous cojones. I said, “Almighty,” and tossed Twigs a dime. He caught it in midair, flashed me a grin and reluctantly left his fawning position on the floor.

“I owe you a drink for this one, Twigs,” I said.

The raven-haired Madelaine was a bit put out: “I thought you told me the bet was for one hundred dollars,” she said.

“I wagered a hundred against his dime,” Twigs replied.

“My name’s Norman,” said Twigs, and offered his hand to shake. “But everybody calls me Twigs. Care to come for a drink with us? We’re headed back to the Moon and Six.”

Madelaine took his hand and smiled at him. “I don’t mind if I do,” she answered. “Wait here and I’ll get my purse.”

So Twigs hit the jackpot twice in one night. Whoever said a man can’t be lucky both at the gaming tables and at love was probably a loser on both counts. That night Twigs was a winner all the way around.

Everyone tried courting Madelaine’s attention on the way to the bar, but she had clearly attached herself to Twigs and me. Well, mostly to Twigs. I just happened to be along for the ride. But, the ride was beautiful. Earlier, the day had been filled with gray drizzle that the night transformed into a Las Vegas glitter of neon strobes, incandescent lights and shimmering reflections. When we got to the Moon and Six I still hadn’t walked all the melancholy out of my boots, so I slipped Twigs a twenty and told him the first round was on me. I reassured Madelaine I was coming back, and I walked on toward Broadway with my hands buried in the pockets of my long, tobacco-colored duster coat. On Broadway the glare from the lights and the street was so intense it reminded me of a clouded midday, and I recalled a time when light didn’t hurt my eyes and I walked, unshaded, even in the full sun. I’d grown sensitive in recent years, my skin allergic to sunlight and my eyes painfully blinded by it. I blamed it on the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Blaming the ozone was a lot easier than facing the truth. I slipped into a Broadway bar and flirted a while with a waitress, finally convincing her to meet me after her shift for a late snack. Then I went back to the Moon and Six.

∞

Twigs and Madelaine had installed themselves into a dark corner booth where they flirted and traded intimacies during my absence. They were past the point of hand holding and into the realm of neck nuzzling by the time I returned. Twigs called me over and we made a bit of small talk, but I was smart enough to excuse myself in a minute or two and find my way to my usual spot at the bar. I ordered a red straw club soda with a twist. Jonesy, the bartender, nodded in the direction of the booth and said, “That girl got the longest legs I ever saw on a woman. Damn, she good looker, too.”

“She is that, Jonesy,” I agreed.

The Moon had a good jukebox, and on any given night couples would load it up with slow tunes and shuffle out to the small dance floor for a grope. Most evenings Twigs and I would sit around making fun of them, but tonight he was with them, a full head shorter than his partner, his face buried in her generous cleavage. She’d lean in toward him and tell him things. Old Twigs: What a salesman. It wouldn’t be long before they left the bar headed somewhere more romantic, somewhere they could be more intimate.

In a little while Twigs came to me and said, “We’re going over to the subs to hear Mozart. You want to come?”

Mozart was another habitue of the Moon and Six who earned his pin money playing cello in the subway late at night. He always played near dark corners so lovers could load him up like a jukebox for a twenty and trust him to make heart-rending music and look the other way while they became better acquainted. It was definitely not the spot for a third wheel, and Twigs knew it — but he had to be polite.

“No, Twigs,” I said. “Jonesy needs me to keep him straight. Besides, I have a date later.”

“Good man,” said Twigs, and he clapped me on the shoulder before walking carefully back to the table, collecting Madelaine, and exiting the bar.

“Whooo,” said Jonesy a half-hour later. “That Twigs, he tanked to the max. He tanked so bad he walkin’ straight.”

It was not until that moment I realized they might both be in more than a little danger. “You know something, Jonesy,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

I paid my tab and hurriedly left the bar, raced down Alvarado toward the nearest subs entrance, and then stood kicking at the concrete loading platform, waiting for the next train headed east. Twigs and Madelaine not only had a half-hour lead on me, they had also not fought through the Broadway crowds just exiting shows and looking for transportation. By the time I arrived at Mozart’s station, a full hour had passed since Twigs left the bar.

Of course, I was too late. Already a crowd had gathered around the subway track near the stop and was staring down at the unfortunate accident. The place crawled with police. Before I edged through the press of people to view the body, Mozart collared me and said, “I tried to warn her, man, but she wouldn’t be stopped. I’m sorry, Jake. Honest I am.”

“It’s okay, Mozart,” I reassured him. “I’m the one who let her leave with Twigs.” I shook him off and forged on.

Madelaine lay on the track in four neat pieces, her head and legs severed from her torso by the subway that didn’t see her until it was too late. Unaccustomed to drinking, she had gorged herself on Twigs’ 2.0 alcohol-tainted blood and was blind drunk when she staggered out onto the platform and stumbled across the track. The train ran completely over her before anyone had the sense to stop it. Now she was just another statistic in the city’s mass transit safety record, and a bizarre statistic at that, one I could ill afford to bring me and those like me heat from law enforcement officials. So I found Mozart and had him play a hypnotic tune while I floated out onto the track and put a wooden stake through Madelaine’s heart. Ancient myth claimed vampires could be killed by severing their heads from their bodies, but I had never seen it work in practice, and there was no use letting a dismembered head and limbs and a squirming torso draw attention to the rest of us. Better safe than sorry.

Fortunately the incident on the track drew attention completely away from Twigs. Most people passed him by as just another drunk sleeping it off in the subway, so Mozart and I were able to squirrel away his body without incident.

∞

A couple of nights later I was sipping a red straw club soda with a twist when Twigs sauntered in all cool and confident and dressed in new threads with a little jingle in his pocket. He looked like a million bucks. Perching next to me on a barstool, he ordered a virgin Bloody Mary and sat with his elbows against the bar, eyeing the crowd.

“Damn, Jake,” he said. “This is great. But I have headaches that won’t quit and my eyeballs feel like they’re on fire.”

I reached into my coat pocket and handed him a pair of Wayfarer shades. “These’ll help both problems,” I told him. “In a month you’ll be navigating the city like a pro.”

“I been meaning to ask,” Twigs said, “when was it for you, Jake?”

“Eighteen-seventy-two,” I told him. “I was herding cows on the Great Prairie when I met a gypsy girl. Prettiest girl you’d ever want to know. We didn’t have Wayfarers in those days. A man just had to suffer.”

A little later Twigs said, “Shame about those legs.”

“A damned shame,” I agreed.

I spotted a pair of college girls sitting in a booth across the room. Fresh blood. I ordered another club soda and twist from Jonesy before gliding over to introduce myself and my eternal companion.

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