Wolves of the Calla (39 page)

Lupe Delgado was thirty-two, an alcoholic almost five one-day-at-a-time years from his last drink, and had been working at Home since 1974. Magruder had founded the place, but it was Lupe Delgado who invested it with real life and purpose. During his days, he was part of the maintenance crew at the Plaza Hotel, on Fifth Avenue. Nights, he worked at the shelter. He had helped to craft Home’s “wet” policy, and had been the first person to greet Callahan when he walked in.

“I was in New York a little over a year that first time,” Callahan said, “but by March of 1976, I had . . . ” He paused, struggling to say what all three of them understood from the look on his face. His skin had flushed rosy except for where the scar lay; that seemed to glow an almost preternatural white by comparison.

“Oh, okay, I suppose you’d say that by March I’d fallen in love with him. Does that make me a queer? A faggot? I don’t know. They say we all are, don’t they? Some do, anyway. And why not? Every month or two there seemed to be another story in the paper about a priest with a penchant for sticking his
hand up the altar boys’ skirts. As for myself, I had no reason to think of myself as queer. God knows I wasn’t immune to the turn of a pretty female leg, priest or not, and molesting the altar boys never crossed my mind. Nor was there ever anything physical between Lupe and me. But I loved him, and I’m not just talking about his mind or his dedication or his ambitions for Home. Not just because he’d chosen to do his real work among the poor, like Christ, either. There was a physical attraction.”

Callahan paused, struggled, then burst out: “God, he was beautiful.
Beautiful!
”

“What happened to him?” Roland asked.

“He came in one snowy night in late March. The place was full, and the natives were restless. There had already been one fistfight, and we were still picking up from that. There was a guy with a full-blown fit of the dt’s, and Rowan Magruder had him in back, in his office, feeding him coffee laced with whiskey. As I think I told you, we had no lockup room at Home. It was dinnertime, half an hour past, actually, and three of the volunteers hadn’t come in because of the weather. The radio was on and a couple of women were dancing. ‘Feeding time in the zoo,’ Lupe used to say.

“I was taking off my coat, heading for the kitchen . . . this fellow named Frank Spinelli collared me . . . wanted to know about a letter of recommendation I’d promised to write him . . . there was a woman, Lisa somebody, who wanted help with one of the AA steps, ‘Make a list of those we had harmed’ . . . there was a young guy who wanted help with a job application, he could read a little but not write . . . something starting to burn on the stove . . . complete
confusion. And I liked it. It had a way of sweeping you up and carrying you along. But in the middle of it all, I stopped. There were no bells and the only aromas were drunk’s b.o. and burning food . . . but that light was around Lupe’s neck like a collar. And I could see marks there. Just little ones. No more than nips, really.

“I stopped, and I must have reeled, because Lupe came hurrying over. And then I
could
smell it, just faintly: strong onions and hot metal. I must have lost a few seconds, too, because all at once the two of us were in the corner by the filing cabinet where we keep the AA stuff and he was asking me when I last ate. He knew I sometimes forgot to do that.

“The smell was gone. The blue glow around his neck was gone. And those little nips, where something had bitten him, they were gone, too. Unless the vampire’s a real guzzler, the marks go in a hurry. But I knew. It was no good asking him who he’d been with, or when, or where. Vampires, even Type Threes—
especially
Type Threes, maybe—have their protective devices. Pond-leeches secrete an enzyme in their saliva that keeps the blood flowing while they’re feeding. It also numbs the skin, so unless you actually see the thing on you, you don’t know what’s happening. With these Type Three vampires, it’s as if they carry a kind of selective, short-term amnesia in their saliva.

“I passed it off somehow. Told him I’d just felt light-headed for a second or two, blamed it on coming out of the cold and into all the noise and light and heat. He accepted it but told me I had to take it easy. ‘You’re too valuable to lose, Don,’ he said,
and then he kissed me. Here.” Callahan touched his right cheek with his scarred right hand. “So I guess I lied when I said there was nothing physical between us, didn’t I? There was that one kiss. I can still remember exactly how it felt. Even the little prickle of fine stubble on his upper lip . . . here.”

“I’m so very sorry for you,” Susannah said.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said. “I wonder if you know how much that means? How wonderful it is to have condolence from one’s own world? It’s like being a castaway and getting news from home. Or fresh water from a spring after years of stale bottled stuff.” He reached out, took her hand in both of his, and smiled. To Eddie, something in that smile looked forced, or even false, and he had a sudden ghastly idea. What if Pere Callahan was smelling a mixture of bitter onions and hot metal right now? What if he was seeing a blue glow, not around Susannah’s neck like a collar, but around her stomach like a belt?

Eddie looked at Roland, but there was no help there. The gunslinger’s face was expressionless.

“He had AIDS, didn’t he?” Eddie asked. “Some gay Type Three vampire bit your friend and passed it on to him.”

“Gay,” Callahan said. “Do you mean to tell me that stupid word actually . . . ” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“Yep,” Eddie said. “The Red Sox still haven’t won the Series and homos are gays.”

“Eddie!” Susannah said.

“Hey,” Eddie said, “do you think it’s easy being the one who left New York last and forgot to turn off the lights? Cause it’s not. And let me tell you,
I’m feeling increasingly out of date myself.” He turned back to Callahan. “Anyway, that
is
what happened, isn’t it?”

“I think so. You have to remember that I didn’t know a great deal myself at that time, and was denying and repressing what I
did
know. With great vigor, as President Kennedy used to say. I saw the first one—the first ‘little one’—in that movie theater in the week between Christmas and New Year’s of 1975.” He gave a brief, barking laugh. “And now that I think back, that theater was called the Gaiety. Isn’t that surprising?” He paused, looking into their faces with some puzzlement. “It’s not. You’re not surprised at all.”

“Coincidence has been cancelled, honey,” Susannah said. “What we’re living in these days is more like the Charles Dickens version of reality.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You don’t need to, sug. Go on. Tell your tale.”

The Old Fella took a moment to find the dropped thread, then went on.

“I saw my first Type Three in late December of 1975. By that night about three months later when I saw the blue glow around Lupe’s neck, I’d come across half a dozen more. Only one of them at prey. He was down in an East Village alley with another guy. He—the vampire—was standing like this.” Callahan rose and demonstrated, arms out, palms propped against an invisible wall. “The other one—the victim—was between his propped arms, facing him. They could have been talking. They could have been kissing. But I knew—I
knew
—that it wasn’t either one.

“The others . . . I saw a couple in restaurants, both of them eating alone. That glow was all over
their hands and their faces—smeared across their lips like . . . like electric blueberry juice—and the burned-onion smell hung around them like some kind of perfume.” Callahan smiled briefly. “It strikes me how every description I try to make has some kind of simile buried in it. Because I’m not just trying to describe them, you know, I’m trying to understand them. Still trying to understand them. To figure out how there could have been this other world, this secret world, there all the time, right beside the one I’d always known.”

Roland’s right,
Eddie thought.
It’s todash. Got to be. He doesn’t know it, but it is. Does that make him one of us? Part of our ka-tet?

“I saw one in line at Marine Midland Bank, where Home did its business,” Callahan said. “Middle of the day. I was in the Deposit line, this woman was in Withdrawals. That light was all around her. She saw me looking at her and smiled. Fearless eye contact. Flirty.” He paused. “Sexy.”

“You knew them, because of the vampire-demon’s blood in you,” Roland said. “Did they know you?”

“No,” Callahan said promptly. “If they’d been able to see me—to isolate me—my life wouldn’t have been worth a dime. Although they
came
to know about me. That was later, though.

“My point is, I saw them. I knew they were there. And when I saw what had happened to Lupe, I knew what had been at him. They see it, too. Smell it. Probably hear the chimes, as well. Their victims are marked, and after that more are apt to come, like bugs to a light. Or dogs, all determined to piss on the same telephone pole.

“I’m sure that night in March was the first time Lupe was bitten, because I never saw that glow around him before . . . or the marks on the side of his throat, which looked like no more than a couple of shaving nicks. But he was bitten repeatedly after that. It had something to do with the nature of the business we were in, working with transients. Maybe drinking alcohol-laced blood is a cheap high for them. Who knows?

“In any case, it was because of Lupe that I made my first kill. The first of many. This was in April . . . ”

This is April and the air has finally begun to feel and smell like spring. Callahan has been at Home since five, first writing checks to cover end-of-the-month bills, then working on his culinary specialty, which he calls Toads n Dumplins Stew. The meat is actually stewing beef, but the colorful name amuses him.

He has been washing the big steel pots as he goes along, not because he needs to (one of the few things there’s no shortage of at Home is cooking gear) but because that’s the way his mother taught him to operate in the kitchen: clean as you go.

He takes a pot to the back door, holds it against his hip with one hand, turns the knob with his other hand. He goes out into the alley, meaning to toss the soapy water into the sewer grating out there, and then he stops. Here is something he has seen before, down in the Village, but then the two men
—
the one standing against the wall, the one in front of him, leaning forward with his hands propped against the bricks
—
were only shadows. These two he can see clearly in the light from the kitchen, and the one leaning
back against the wall, seemingly asleep with his head turned to the side, exposing his neck, is someone Callahan knows.

It is Lupe.

Although the open door has lit up this part of the alley, and Callahan has made no effort to be quiet
—
has, in fact, been singing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”
—
neither of them notices him. They are entranced. The man in front of Lupe looks to be about fifty, well dressed in a suit and a tie. Beside him, an expensive Mark Cross briefcase rests on the cobbles. This man’s head is thrust forward and tilted. His open lips are sealed against the right side of Lupe’s neck. What’s under there? Jugular? Carotid? Callahan doesn’t remember, nor does it matter. The chimes don’t play this time, but the smell is overwhelming, so rank that tears burst from his eyes and clear mucus immediately begins to drip from his nostrils. The two men opposite him blaze with that dark blue light, and Callahan can see it swirling in rhythmic pulses.
That’s their breathing,
he thinks.
It’s their breathing, stirring that shit around. Which means it’s real.

Callahan can hear, very faintly, a liquid smooching sound. It’s the sound you hear in a movie when a couple is kissing passionately, really pouring it on.

He doesn’t think about what he does next. He puts down the potful of sudsy, greasy water. It clanks loudly on the concrete stoop, but the couple leaning against the alley wall opposite don’t stir; they remain lost in their dream. Callahan takes two steps backward into the kitchen. On the counter is the cleaver he’s been using to cube the stew-beef. Its blade gleams brightly. He can see his face in it and thinks,
Well at least
I’m
not one; my reflection’s still there.
Then he closes his hand around the rubber grip. He walks back out into the alley. He steps over the pot of soapy
water. The air is mild and damp. Somewhere water is dripping. Somewhere a radio is blaring “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Moisture in the air makes a halo around the light on the far side of the alley. It’s April in New York, and ten feet from where Callahan
—
not long ago an ordained priest of the Catholic Church
—
stands, a vampire is taking blood from his prey. From the man with whom Donald Callahan has fallen in love.

“Almost had your hooks in me, din’tcha, dear?” Elton John sings, and Callahan steps forward, raising the cleaver. He brings it down and it sinks deep into the vampire’s skull. The sides of the vampire’s face push out like wings. He raises his head suddenly, like a predator that has just heard the approach of something bigger and more dangerous than he is. A moment later he dips slightly at the knees, as if meaning to pick up the briefcase, then seems to decide he can do without it. He turns and walks slowly toward the mouth of the alley. Toward the sound of Elton John, who is now singing “Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my
lii-iife
tonight.” The cleaver is still sticking out of the thing’s skull. The handle waggles back and forth with each step like a stiff little tail. Callahan sees some blood, but not the ocean he would have expected. At that moment he is too deep in shock to wonder about this, but later he will come to believe that there is precious little liquid blood in these beings; whatever keeps them moving, it’s more magical than the miracle of blood. Most of what was their blood has coagulated as firmly as the yolk of a hard-cooked egg.