“The assistants you see are all members of our household. With the exception of a few founding fathers, all who live here take their turns tending to the livestock.”
“Livestock? What? You mean the retards?”
Besthoff smiled. “The ‘retards,’ as you so charmingly put it, are the descendants of the inmates of an imbeciles’ hospital run by an obscure, impoverished order of French nuns. In 1873 the order was disbanded by Rome, and the sisters were faced with the morally devastating situation of having to turn their helpless charges out into the streets. Fortunately, Mr. Krauss, Mr. Katz, and I took heed of their plight. Never ones to turn our backs on opportunity, we offered to take over the care and housing of the imbeciles, at no charge to the Church or state. The imbeciles have been marvelously docile and tractable creatures. We’ve bred six generations of them since we took over their care.”
It took a few seconds for the full implications to sink in for Jules. As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, he recognized the blood extraction equipment standing by several of the beds on the far side of the room. “You mean to tell me… you breed them for theirblood?”
“Of course. Why else would we house and feed more than two hundred imbeciles? We carefully control their diets, feeding them the proper nutrients to ensure that their blood is well balanced and healthful. Thus, the blood that we consume is considerably superior to that obtained from random victims. Especially those from the New Orleans area.” He glanced condescendingly at Jules’s more-than-ample gut and wryly smiled.
Jules was too occupied with conflicting emotions of revulsion, jealousy, and grudging admiration to realize that he’d just been slighted. Two hundred imbeciles-how many gallons of blood did that equate to in a year? He tried to do the math in his head, but the numbers overwhelmed him. “Sweet Lord almighty-what a setup you’ve got here!”
Besthoff smiled again. “I thought you might think so. Perhaps now you understand why we need not bother ourselves with the affairs of free-range vampires such as yourself. We of the High Krewe of Vlad Tepes evolved beyond the hunting-and-gathering stage well over a century ago.”
Straussman appeared at Jules’s elbow to retrieve the cup and saucer, and the rotund vampire was quickly and efficiently shown to the front gate.
FOUR
The bum’s rush. They gave me the bum’s rush, just like Maureen said they would.
Jules forced himself to open his eyes. He’d stewed and fumed in his coffin long enough. Long enough to develop a painful crick in his neck. Much as he hated to admit it, his coffin was getting too small for him again. He’d been putting off that inevitable trip to the lumberyard as long as he possibly could, but it was as plain as the belly overhanging his belt that he couldn’t procrastinate any longer. Hell. One more reason to go on a damn diet.
Jules pushed open the hinged lid on his coffin and sat up. He grabbed hold of the wrought-iron clasps he’d bolted onto the adjacent wall and pulled himself out of the box, which was almost as wide as it was long. He brushed the clumpy earth off his flannel pajamas, trying to make sure most of it landed back in the coffin. Sweeping dirt up off his basement floor was a task he disliked almost as much as building new coffins.
He glanced at his watch. Nine thirty-nineP.M. He’d wasted almost an hour of darkness with his stewing. But he just couldn’t get over it. Those stuck-upbastards! In their own way, they were just as bad as Malice X was. Looking out for nobody but themselves, not giving a shit what happened to the rest of the bloodsucking fraternity. They’d landed their fancy house and their hundreds of retarded blood-cows, so they felt perfectly at ease letting their less well-off inner-city cousin twist in the wind.
So he was on his own. If he couldn’t get the High Krewe to lower the hammer on Malice X, then he’d just have to do his best to round up some white victims, inconvenient as that might be. Maybe it was for the best. The upside of this regrettable turn of events was that the average white kill in New Orleans was way lower in fat than the average black kill. And if Jules played his cards right, maybe he could accelerate his weight loss by harvesting someextremely low-fat white victims.
It’d be a few hours yet before his friend Erato would make his nightly appearance at the Trolley Stop Cafй; Jules planned to hit him up for information on health-related conventions coming to town. That left Jules time to do some work on the Caddy, maybe even listen to a little music, before heading out.
He walked past his woodworking machinery to the back of his basement, which was actually the windowless ground floor of his house, then laboriously climbed the stairs to the main story. He walked across his checkerboard-tile kitchen and descended a separate set of stairs to his garage. He’d had the garage added on to the house in the early 1960s, after his mother had passed on to her heavenly reward. He yanked the frayed bit of rope that clicked on the ceiling bulb. A quarter of the garage was filled to overflowing with five decades’ worth of tools, auto supplies, and broken hi-fi sets that he’d never gotten around to fixing, plus bits and pieces of old coffins. The rest of the garage was filled with the Cadillac.
He hadn’t messed around with his jury-rigged gas injection system in four years, not since he’d yanked the components out of the Caddy following his initial debacle.Well, if George Washington had stopped tryin‘ after Valley Forge, we’d all be livin’ in the United States of Canada.
He opened the Caddy’s passenger-side rear door as far as it would go. Then he slid down from its place on a shelf a long, thick piece of Plexiglas, specially fitted to divide the cab’s interior into separate passenger and driver compartments. Jules had purchased the divider five years ago, after a spate of cabdriver murders had prompted the city’s Taxi Bureau to offer the protective shields to drivers at an enticing discount.
His original conception had been good, Jules reminded himself as he crawled into the Caddy’s backseat and pulled the Plexiglas divider in behind him. What had ruined his plan had been his failure to pay attention to the little details. He reached through the open window and grabbed a socket wrench and a Ziploc bag full of bolts. Then, grunting with exertion, he lifted the shield into place and partially screwed in the first two retaining bolts. Five minutes later, the shield was secure. But not snug. Not quite.
Jules inserted the tip of his index finger between the top edge of the Plexiglas and his cab’s head liner. That quarter-inch gap had been enough to royally screw his plans the last time. Enough to almost make him total the Caddy. The memory made him shiver. He wouldn’t make the same fuckup again; he’d be sure to putty the gap this time.
Jules clambered out and opened his trunk. He leaned inside with a flashlight and carefully examined the rubber gas-feed lines that snaked from the rear right corner of the trunk through holes drilled into the passenger compartment, connecting with spray nozzles hidden inside the rear speaker housings. The hoses looked to be in good shape, with no visible cracks or kinks. But Jules would be certain to test them before he took his knockout system back out into the field. He glanced over at the dusty red canisters of laughing gas, purchased from Tiny Idaho, a local hippy anarchist, that were lying in a corner of the garage. Maybe he could get another use out of them? How long did laughing gas stay good? Jules had no idea. He’d just have to test the stuff before heading out on the hunt.
Jules glanced at his watch again. Ten twenty-three. He had another hour to kill before heading over to the Trolley Stop. Good. His visit to Bamboo Road the night before had left him off-kilter, so a little cultural relaxation would do him a world of good.
First, he’d treat himself to a little snack. All that exertion with the car had perked his appetite. He climbed up the stairs to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator (one of his mother’s last purchases before she’d been loosened from her earthly shackles), and took out one of the jars of blood from two nights ago. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents.Hrmmm. Already, the blood had lost much of its freshness. He’d have three days, maybe four, before it’d be undrinkable and he’
d have to pitch whatever was left. Erato’d better have a juicy tip to give him tonight. He took a swig of blood, then rescrewed the top and put the jar back in the fridge. Jules swished it around the back of his mouth before swallowing it; actually, it wasn’t all that bad. His biggest problem was that he’d let his standards get too high.
In the living room, Jules perused his collection of classic, original jazz pressings, most purchased during his first two decades as a vampire. Following a few minutes of delicious indecision, he selected a thick, heavy, seventy-eight-rpm record and arranged it carefully on his Victrola. As soon as the worn stylus touched the venerable platter, the warm, rich tones of Bix Beiderbecke’s Jazz Wolverines emerged from the gramophone’s lacquered horn. Jules didn’t play his original records much anymore; he usually listened to reel-to-reel or cassette tapes he’d made, rather than subjecting his irreplaceable collector’s items to more wear. But sometimes only the first-generation recording, playing on the equipment it’d been made for, would do.
Now for some appropriate reading material. In his mother’s old sewing room, long ago converted into his library, Jules breathed in the rich, glorious odor of decaying pulp, a bouquet he’d always associated with immeasurable pleasure. Three walls were lined entirely with hundreds of adventure, mystery, and horror pulp magazines dating back to the Great Depression, and thick stacks of comic books from the war years. As a young vampire, Jules had thrilled to the nocturnal adventures of the Shadow, Chandu the Magician, and the Spider. Once comic books began displacing the pulps, Jules quickly discovered a strong affinity for Bob Kane’s Batman. Better still were Captain America Comics, which usually featured great gobs of vampires, even if they were invariably portrayed as evil Japs or Nazis. Jules had actually written a long letter to the editors at Timely Publications concerning that subject. He suggested that, since the Axis seemed to have an unlimited supply of vampires to fight on their side, surely the United States should have its own vampires, too. Wasn’t it unrealistically one-sided to portray all the vampires in the world as evil Fascists? Shouldn’t Captain America occasionally team with a heroic American, Canadian, or British vampire, one eager to sink his fangs deep into Hitler’s repulsive neck? Jules never received a reply to his letter, and he’d been bitterly disappointed when the editors neglected to print it on the “Captain America’s Fan Mail” page.
The whole notion of a boy sidekick had come to him from the comics. Captain America and Bucky. Batman and Robin. The Sandman and Sandy. The Hooded Terror and… Doodlebug.
Doodlebug.Rory “Doodlebug” Richelieu. Hard as Jules tried to forget him, the memory of his ex-sidekick wouldn’t fade.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed and Jules heard President Roosevelt’s stirring declaration of war on the radio, the young vampire had felt a powerful urge to serve his country. Only the thought of having to submit to an army physical had kept him away from the local recruiting office; what the army physicians would have made of his room-temperature thermometer reading and his fatal vulnerability to sunlight could only be conjectured.
He nursed his frustration at his inability to serve with a renewed plunge into the escapism of comic books. Happily, he discovered that most of the costumed adventure heroes had also stayed off the troopships, opting to remain behind and fight fifth-column saboteurs on the home front. Striking terror in the hearts of Ratzi spies seeking to blow up the landing craft factory on Bayou St. John-nowthere was a job Jules could sink his teeth into. And of course, every masked mystery man worth his salt needed a teen sidekick. So Jules Duchon, the Hooded Terror, hadn’t been without one for long.
How many weeks had he haunted Bywater’s movie houses, ball fields, and drugstore soda counters, searching for exactly the right kid? And out of hundreds of possible candidates, what had made him pick Rory “Doodlebug” Richelieu?
Maybe it’d been because the kid had always been by himself, hanging out at the soda counter next to the neighborhood newsstand. A kid without any friends would have fewer people missing him and looking for him. Maybe it was because Rory had seemed to like the same things Jules liked. The kid’d always had his nose in a mystery pulp or comic book; either that or he was sketching outlandishly costumed adventure characters in the margins of his Holy Cross School writing pad. Heck, maybe Jules picked him because Rory hadn’t instinctively shied away from the vampire the way so many of the other kids did.
So Jules had followed Rory outside one November night in 1942, when the evening air was still unseasonably warm and smelled of the river, and Press Street echoed with the Klaxons of freighters entering the Industrial Canal. And there, in front of the darkened newsstand, he’d asked the boy:
“Hey kid, do you wanna be stronger than ten grown men put together?
“You wanna be able to change into a bat whenever you damn well feel like it?
“You wanna send all the Ratzis you can get your hands on to hell?”
He’d saved the best for last “You wanna be around forever?”
And the kid had said yes. Yes to all of it, without a second’s hesitation.
Doodlebug had made a good little vampire. He’d hardly missed sunlight at all, or his foster parents, or the nuns at Holy Cross School. He’d been a damn good sidekick, too-at least for a while. Always good company, quick with a funny quip, a helpful suggestion, or a belly-warming cup of coffee. Having him around had made the long nights of patrolling the waterfront factories fun.
The costume and secret identity thing had been icing on the cake. Doodlebug had loved dressing up. Loved it way,way too much, as it turned out. And that had been, ultimately, what blew their partnership apart. Blew it apart far more decisively than any Nazi grenade ever could.
The sound of the gramophone’s needle scraping against the record’s hub interrupted Jules’s remembrances. The grandfather clock by the Victrola indicated it was a quarter past eleven. Time to get a move on.
Before getting into his car, he paused a few seconds, as he usually did, to admire his house, his street, and the levee, all glowing peacefully in the moonlight. Despite all its changes over the years, the neighborhood couldn’t be better suited for him if he’d designed it himself. Jules smiled. He couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else.
The tiny front and back parking lots of the Trolley Stop Cafй were packed with taxis and police cruisers-mammoth Crown Victorias, Caprices, and Roadmasters that sprawled across the universally ignored yellow divider lines onto the sidewalks. Jules circled the block, then found an open spot on St. Charles Avenue and pulled in. The all-night breakfast joint was on a stretch of the avenue that had seen its ups and downs. Swank when first developed, the neighborhood had managed to stay upscale through the Depression and two World Wars, but then had gone precipitously downhill in the 1970s. Now, however, it looked to be coming back up.Stick around long enough, Jules thought to himself,and you see everything come back round again.
The Trolley Stop itself was a converted gas station, made to vaguely resemble a St. Charles streetcar by an application of kelly-green paint and the addition of wooden cutouts of a Victorian streetcar conductor and riders, dressed in their Sunday going-to-church finery. Jules preferred the less touristy atmosphere at the St. Charles Tavern, another twenty-four-hour dive down the street. But when the overwhelming majority of cops and taxi drivers had transferred their allegiance to the Trolley Stop right after the new place had opened, Jules, grumbling, had felt he’d no other choice but to go along with his pals. Besides, he had to admit that the coffeewas fresher at the Trolley Stop.
Before stepping inside, Jules checked the parking lot for Erato’s cab. Sure enough, there it was-a Lincoln Town Car painted the unmistakable green, gold, and purple livery of the Napoleon Taxi Co. Erato hadn’t been his best pal for that long-only the past fifteen years or so-but Jules felt closer to him than any human friend he’d ever had. It was kind of weird, given Jules’s recent circumstances, that his best human pal ever, and the man he was now seeking out for advice, happened to be a
black man. The more he thought about it, the more the injustice of Malice X’s threats rankled. Of all the white vampires out there, why pick onhim, Jules Duchon? Jules had always been decent to black folks, even back during the old Jim Crow days. Heck, nearly all the musicians on his most-admired list were black guys from New Orleans.
He pushed his musings aside and entered the restaurant. The cabdrivers had staked out their usual territory: they were lined up on the closely spaced stools fronting a long wooden bar adjacent to the cash register and the men’s room, sipping from cups of dark, aromatic coffee. Some of them scraped the last few sticky granules of grits off the bottoms of greasy plates, while others snatched quick glances at the counter lady’s heart-shaped ass in the full-length mirror behind the liquor bottles. That was one thing Julesreally disliked about the Trolley Stop-having to deal with that damn mirror. Luckily for him, at each end of the bar was a stool that faced oak paneling instead of silvered glass. Unluckily for him, both stools were currently occupied. However, one of the corner occupants was Erato himself.
John Xavier Erato was a head shorter than Jules, but just as wide across the shoulders. Thirty years ago he’d been a star varsity wrestler at Alcee Fortier High School. He’d won a record number of matches, despite a lazy eye that would concentrate more on the girls in the bleachers than the task at hand. But twenty-five years of sitting in a cab ten hours a night had grafted a generous middle-aged spread onto his once taut abdomen. The one-eighth Natchez Indian ancestry he always boasted of was evident in his skin’s reddish brown tint and the slightly Asiatic cast of his eyes. His shiny scalp was crowned by a still-credible thicket of dyed and processed curls.
Fat White Vampire Blues Page 6
