Fat White Vampire Blues

by Andrew J. Fox

  B.B. King came on the radio, singing “The Blues Is All Right.” It was a song about being sad, but the way B.B. sang it, so enthusiastic and joyful and glad about being alive, Jules felt his sour mood evaporate. He began drumming his fingers on the steering wheel again. The Caddy passed beneath the sign for Interstate 55, and Jules took the turnoff that would lead him north to Lake Maurepas.

  At that late hour, the elevated highway was deserted. The Caddy was an isolated blob of light gliding swiftly above a slumbering landscape of cypress tree stumps and wooden fishing shacks. Alligators silently stalked nutria, plump water rats, through a maze of swamp grass. Jules carefully watched for his favorite exit, a fishermen’s route to a narrow dirt road by the water, half a mile from the closest camp. He spotted it, then gingerly braked the Caddy to a near crawl and aimed its big white hood down the off-ramp.

  Jules felt Bessie’s hand squeeze his thigh. “We near your place, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “But you’re gonna kill me. I just remembered that I left the keys to my camp back at my house in town.”

  Her hand immediately left his thigh. “You did what? What’n hell we gonna do now?”

  Damp gravel crunched beneath the Caddy’s whitewall tires as Jules parked close to the turbid water’s edge. “Don’t sweat it, baby. Cab’s got a backseat as big as Alaska. Nobody’s gonna bother us out here. It’ll be just like we’re inside the cabin. I promise.”

  “Shee-yit. I does all my lovin‘ in the backseat of a damn car.”

  Jules cut the ignition. “Hey, at least dinner was A-One, huh?”

  “Yeah, you right,” she reluctantly admitted. “Dinner was plenty good.”

  Jules turned the key just enough to keep the radio and power accessories running, then opened his door and lowered himself slowly to the gravel. The air was surprisingly cool; Jules figured it must be their proximity to all the water. “You’re gonna have to get out for a bit. Takes me a minute to move the seat all the way forward.”

  Bessie didn’t budge. “Ain’t no snakes around here, is there?”

  Jules sighed heavily. By now, he was shaking with hunger, and all the coffee he’d drunk felt like acid at the bottom of his stomach. “No, baby. And if therewere any around, the car would’ve scared ‘em all off. C’mon now.”

  Bessie slowly swung her door open and tiptoed down to the ground. Jules pressed a switch on the door sill, and the electric seat groaned into life, moving forward at the pace of continental drift. Two minutes later it had gone as far as it could, the seat cushion mashing into the dashboard.

  “Can I get back in now?”

  Jules walked around to the back of the car. “Just another minute, okay?” He opened the trunk and removed a folded plastic tarp and a sheet-cake-sized foil baking pan. Then he opened the driver-side rear door and awkwardly spread the plastic tarp over the seat. The baking pan he placed on the floor.

  Jules walked around to the other side and opened the back door for Bessie. “What’s that plastic wrap doin‘ there?” she asked, her voice more than a little petulant.

  “Them’s genuine cowhide leather seating surfaces. Gotta take good care of them, or they won’t look worth a shit. Didn’t your mama used to put slipcovers on her good couch? Same principle here. Big folks like you and me, we’re liable to make quite a mess when we’re doin‘ our business. Gotta take care of the seats.”

  Bessie turned up her nose, but she obligingly crawled onto the tarp-covered seat, dumping her Mardi Gras beads on the floor. Even with the front bench kissing the steering wheel, it was still a snug fit. While she was squirming to make herself more comfortable, her hand brushed against the baking pan. “And what’sthis here thing doin‘ here for?”

  Jules peered into the dark space. “What’s that? Well, I’ll be damned. Some dumb-ass customer must’ve left that there earlier this evening. Well, guess it won’t do us no harm.”

  Jules waited until Bessie stopped squirming, then he commenced the arduous task of climbing in on top of her. Trying to slide forward, grasping for handholds, was like struggling to scale a woman-shaped mountain of Jell-O.

  “Hey! Watch with the knee, buster!”

  “Sorry, baby.”

  Finally, his overtaxed heart pounding from exertion, Jules reached what he figured was his optimal position. His cold nose nuzzled Bessie’s warm, fragrant neck. Jules tried to sort out the different elements that made up her scent. Cinnamon, for sure. A hint of chocolate, or maybe cocoa butter. And unmistakably, the smoked tang of the sausage she’d eaten an hour before. He kissed her neck, his salivary glands working double time.Ah, bless you, New Orleans… greatest food in the whole goddamn world…

  “Oohh baby,” Bessie cooed, “you be shakin‘ all over-”

  “Yeah, baby, it’s been too long, it’s beenway too long-”

  Aretha Franklin’s voice boomed from six speakers, declaring to all Manchac swamp,“What you want, baby I got it!” Jules surrendered to his appetite, a desperate, living hunger that knew it would soon be sated. He nibbled her now moist neck, searching out her jugular vein. He couldn’t find it. He nibbled harder, frantic, but all he could sense was flesh and more flesh, a nigh-impregnable collar of blubber.

  “Oohh baby, the way you bitin‘, you mylover — man, baby.”

  “Yeah, baby, sure,” Jules stuttered, his voice laced with real terror.

  Bessie shifted beneath him. “But how we gonna get all these clothes off now? The way you got us jammed in here, we’s like pig’s feet in a full-up jar. I can’t move hardly nothin‘-”

  “Uh, you letme worry about that, huh?”Shit! He had to think of something. He honestly didn’t think he had the strength left to make it back to the city and start all over again. His armpits were soaked with sweat, despite the cool breeze that blew up the back of his shirt through the open door. He kissed her neck mechanically, his mind racing. She moaned again, louder this time, and the flesh of her neck shimmied beneath his parched lips. Then he had an idea. A desperate ploy, but it might just work. He reached his hand under her dress, praying that he remembered where everything was. Her legs parted slightly, but there was still a formidable obstacle course for his thick fingers to overcome. It was like playing blindman’s bluff in quicksand. Okay, there were her panties; he was moving in the right direction. Please,please let him remember Bingo! He must’ve hit the magic spot, because her moaning took on a new, deeper timbre, and her back and neck arched with pleasure. Suddenly, her neck had contours-her thick jugular appeared through the flab like Atlantis rising from the deep. Instantly, before it could submerge again, Jules bit deep.

  “Oh baby, you the greatest!”

  Okay, not as deep as he would’ve hoped.Jeezus, it’s like bitin‘ through elephant hide. But the first tiny trickle of blood was heaven. Jules gathered the dregs of his strength and worked his jaws like a punch press, plunging his sharp canines deeper.

  “Ouch-aaohww baby! Cut it out! You hurtin‘-ekkk!”

  Suddenly blood surged into his mouth with the force of a fire hose. Jules gulped it down as quickly as he could, but even his most ravenous efforts couldn’t prevent waves of overflow from splashing into the pan on the floor below. Her blood was manna, caviar, ambrosia.Oh, the incredible amazing richness-! He gulped and swallowed so prodigiously that his body forgot to breathe, but he didn’t care. The fresh triglycerides her blood teemed with hit his system like the purest heroin ever mainlined. The Cadillac spun around him; his ears filled with heavenly music (could that be his dear, long-departed mother’s angelic voice leading the choir?); the warm, spasming body beneath his seemed to liquefy, simultaneously caressing every molecule of his vast form with omnipresent pleasure.

  He had no idea how long he remained on top of her. By the time a series of annoying sounds pulled him back to full awareness (sounds, he soon realized, that were coming from himself, as he alternated between belching and sucking the last few rapturous drops from her neck), Bessie’s body had gone cold. He wanted nothing more
than to lay his head back down upon her soft, cool neck and doze for a week, but he glanced at his watch and realized that sleep would be suicide. Groaning at the injustice of the earth’s unpausing rotation(why can’t there be more hours in a night?), he forced his somnolent muscles into action, ignoring their protests as he pushed himself, massive posterior first, out of the Caddy’s scarlet-soaked backseat. He was careful not to upset the baking pan, which was filled to the brim with precious, New Orleans-prime crimson nectar.

  He made his way slowly to the trunk, still fuzzy-headed from his enormous meal. Inside were a half-inflated spare tire, assorted pieces of a tire jack, a pile of old newspapers that he’d been meaning to take to a recycling bin, two badly wrinkled spare shirts, a pistol, a potato, and a crate filled with empty glass pickle jars.

  Wishing ruefully that he had some slack in his pants pockets, Jules balanced the potato and the pistol atop the empty jars and lifted the crate from the trunk. He rested the crate on the great bulge his stomach made as it sagged over his belt, then turned halfway around before realizing that his weak knees couldn’t support both him and his cargo. Muttering with irritation and impatience, he set the crate down on the damp gravel and pushed it along with his foot as he maneuvered back around to the open door.

  Twice, the potato rolled off the top of the jars and bounced into the water. Twice, Jules cursed a blue streak as he fished it out, until he decided it would be better to leave the pistol and the potato by the water’s edge anyway.

  Back at the car, he pushed Bessie’s stiffening legs out of the way and sat uncomfortably on the doorjamb. He took a bottle of sodium citrate solution from the crate and poured some into the pan of blood, in order to prevent clotting and extend freshness, a trick he’d learned from Doc Landrieu. Then he began plucking jars out of the crate, unscrewing their tops and dipping them carefully into the blood. After five minutes of cautious labor, he had filled eight jars. The ninth jar he hugged between his thighs as he gingerly tilted the pan above it, securing the last few precious red droplets. He held this last jar in his left hand and its top in his right, hesitating. He stared at the jar’s viscous contents, glistening almost black in the dim moonlight, and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, what the hell. I’ll need all the strength I got for what I gotta do next. A little lagniappe won’t kill me.”

  He lifted the jar to his gore-stained lips. Already the blood had lost some of its freshness, tasting only like vintage Chardonnay instead of nectar of the gods; he floated in the clouds a few minutes, rather than being shot to Mars in a rocket. Returning to terra firma, he felt embarrassed and guilty at his lack of willpower.Hell-that jar could’ve gotten me through a couple of dry nights. Disgusted with himself, he threw the empty jar as far out into the swamp as he could (it was a pathetic throw, but he tried not to notice). Then he forced himself to stand.

  “Night’s not gettin‘ any darker. Time to get to work, son.”

  After ten minutes of sweaty, joint-grinding exertion, he had managed to drag Bessie’s body out of the Cadillac and down to the water’s edge. Grunting, he sat heavily on the alga-stained gravel. He picked up the pistol, a cheap Saturday night special he’d bought in a pawnshop, and the wet potato, his poor-man’s silencer. He stared at Bessie’s face, gone a milky chocolate instead of its normal dark chocolate, still frozen in an expression of pained surprise. Suddenly, sitting next to a dead woman in an empty swamp, ghostly silent except for the rumble of a distant car on the highway, Jules felt unbearably lonely. The space behind his eyes was pounding, and he was feeling a little sick. Who would fix him his chamomile tea, to settle his stomach? In all the long decades since his mother had passed, there had been no one to fix him tea and bring it to him in bed. No one except Maureen, his one great love, the woman whose bite had forever transformed him. And she hadn’t spoken to him in ten years.

  He briefly considered loading Bessie back in the car, taking her back to his house, and letting nature take its course. She’d been an okay companion. Not a scintillating conversationalist, but at least she’d appreciated his music. And she’d be lively in the sack, for sure. He set the pistol down and gave her another look.

  He frowned. “Naww. What the hell was I thinking? Look at her. She’s got an appetite bigger than mine, even. No willpower. No self-control. Too softhearted and softheaded. Let her become a vampire and before you know it this town’ll be up to its ass in homeless little-old-lady vampires, bringing the heat down on the rest of us. And then the gig’ll be up. Naww. Just get it over and done with.”

  In all his years of undead life, Jules had only made another vampire once. Maureen had lectured him long and hard about predator-prey ratios and how important it was to keep the number of vampires in New Orleans strictly limited. He’d only done it once, when he’d been dying for a sidekick, a pal. And he hadn’t been all that happy with the way things had turned out.

  “In this business, you’ve gotta be ruthless. Pity’s good for nothing but a stake through the heart.”

  His lower back spasmed with sharp stabs of pain as he rolled Bessie over onto her stomach. He squashed the potato onto the.38’s stubby barrel, then rested the potato at the base of Bessie’s skull, where her brain stem would be.Wipe out the brain stem, and a corpse stays a corpse. Just like Maureen had taught him so long ago, back when pistols had been more elegant things. Jules pulled the trigger.

  Plufff.

  Knees aching, he rolled her body into the swamp and gave it a good push. It floated into an island of tall grass and partially disappeared. With any luck, it would sink into the mire before the sun got too high. And if somebody ended up spotting it, it wouldn’t be any big deal. The cops would call the killing a drug hit, or conjecture that the victim had been some whore dumb enough to double-cross her pimp. That was a great thing about New Orleans. Dead bodies were nothing extraordinary.

  Jules pulled the plastic tarp from the Caddy’s backseat and rinsed it off in the water. Then he folded it up, stuck it under his armpit, and dragged the crate of blood-filled jars back to the trunk. Damn, his crummy knees really hurt tonight. He opened the trunk, peeled off his red-stained shirt, threw it on top of the spare tire, and pulled on a relatively fresh one. A glint of silver at the bottom of the trunk caught his eye. It was the head of his cane, poking out from beneath the tire. Jules pulled it out. It was a good old cane. He’d bought it back in his salad days, when a sharp-looking silver-headed cane had seemed exactly the fashion accessory for a young vampire-on-the-make. It was more than a fashion statement now. On nights like tonight, he needed it.

  TheD word flashed through his brain.Diet. As much as he hated to think it, it wouldn’t go away. His damn knees kept reminding him. For the sake of his health, he had to lose some weight.

  Jules cut off the radio on the forty-five-minute drive back to the city. He was in one foul, low-down mood. Why couldn’t pleasurable things just be pleasurable and that was that? Why did the world have to be so complicated and twisted, so that the things you loved best were the very things that were worst for you? Even from behind the closed sun visor, hidden from his sight, the newspaper clipping taunted him.NEW ORLEANS.FATTEST.CITY.IN.NATION. He wanted to crumple it up. He wanted to tear it into a hundred tiny pieces, toss them out the Caddy’s window, and watch them sink into Lake Pontchartrain. But he couldn’t make himself do it. The damn clipping would just stay in his head, anyway.

  Back in the city, driving along Tulane Avenue on his way back to the French Quarter, Jules approached the imposing edifice of St. Joseph’s, the largest church in New Orleans. His mother had taken him there for Mass every Easter when he was a boy. Compared with their neighborhood parish church in the Ninth Ward, St. Joseph’s had been immense, easily the biggest building little Jules had ever set foot in. The stained-glass windows looked a thousand feet high, and he’d imagined that every Catholic in the state of Louisiana could fit inside, with room to spare for folks from Mississippi.

  Tired and dejected, wanting to rest
a minute, Jules pulled over to the curb in front of the church. The area had been gorgeous when he’d been young, a neighborhood of mansions to rival those on St. Charles Avenue. Now the church’s closest neighbors were a check-cashing joint, a cheap-jack furniture store, and a twenty-four-hour greasy spoon patronized mainly by housekeeping staff from the nearby LSU Medical Center. Jules hadn’t looked this long at a church in years. Back in the late 1960s, after Vatican II, Jules had satisfied his curiosity about the controversial changes by attending evening Mass at this very church. His mother had raised him right, after all; even half a century as a vampire hadn’t eradicated his upbringing, and he’d been nostalgic for his old churchgoing days. Sure enough, the switch from Latin Mass to English had made a difference for Jules. The priest’s intonations had merely caused him to be violently sick to his stomach, instead of making his skin smoke and his hair catch fire.

  So why had he stopped in front of St. Joseph’s tonight? Jules listened to the hum of traffic from the nearby elevated highway as he tried to figure himself out. Was he feeling guilty about what he’d done? He rolled down his window and hocked a gob of phlegm into the street. That wasridiculous, too ridiculous a notion for him even to consider. “Everybody has to eat, don’t they?” he told himself. “Do steak lovers feel guilty about the cows? Do vegetarians get all weepy when they’re dicing carrots?Hell no! So why shouldI be different?”

  Jules shifted the Caddy’s Hydramatic transmission back into drive. It had been a tiresome night; it was time to head home. He passed by Charity Hospital and the tall, modern hotels that lined both sides of Canal Street, choosing a route that would take him back through the Quarter. Almost as soon as he turned onto shadowy Decatur Street, however, he had reason to regret his choice. This hour of the night, the street was teeming with vampires. Notreal vampires, mind you. Just skinny kids with an attitude.