Fat White Vampire Blues

by Andrew J. Fox

  “We’ve got a fuckin‘ nutcase here!” the closest fireman yelled back to his partners. “Grab his arms! We’re gonna have to pull him out!”

  “No! Wait! I’ll go! I’ll go!” But already three pairs of strong hands had grabbed him by his arms and were pulling him toward the door, forcing him to spill much of the precious cargo. He stopped fighting the firemen, desperate to save what he still had in his hands. Risking smoke inhalation, he got to his feet and crouched down as low as he could while still moving forward, hugging the remaining platters to his still-damp breast. Tongues of flame licked at his elbows as he pushed his way through the burning velvet shreds of the curtains that had once separated his living room from the entrance foyer.

  As his singed shoulders brushed the jagged front door frame, Jules succumbed to the same foolish impulse as Lot’s wife and looked back. Illuminated by the garish flames was the portrait of Jules’s mother, her stern gaze still fully intact and transfixing him from above the burning mantelpiece.

  “Mother!”Despite the ruddiness caused by the fire, Jules’s complexion instantly turned three shades whiter than normal. He lunged back into the house, toward the portrait surrounded by flames, but half a dozen powerful hands grabbed him and pulled him outside.

  “Noooo! Muhh-thuurrrr!”

  But it was too late. Flames blocked the entrance foyer. Part of the ceiling over the living room collapsed, blowing a cloud of plaster dust out the door and into Jules’s tearstained face. He’d failed her again. The hot platters slipped from his hands onto the brown grass, but he didn’t notice. Some son he was. All he’d been thinking about were his pulp magazines and his old records. He’d forgotten all about his most precious keepsake-of his mother-until it was too late. Too damn late.

  A small hand tugged on Jules’s damp sleeve. “Hey, mistah?” Jules looked down. A tyke from the neighborhood, maybe five years old, had removed one of Jules’s records from its cardboard sleeve.

  Clasped in the boy’s hand, the shellac disc drooped like a charbroiled flapjack. “Hey, mistah? What dis ‘posed to be?”

  Jules clenched his eyes tightly shut. Maybe a vampire’s powers included traveling back in time? He concentrated as hard as he could, imagining his street as a row of newly built, white-painted, gingerbread-trimmed cottages. But as hard as he tried, the stench of burned velvet lingered in his nostrils; a stench as nasty as a vampire left out in the sun.

  Sunrise!Jules checked his watch. It was a quarter past eleven. His coffin was a pile of ashes and charred plywood. In barely seven hours, the first rays of daylight would boil the thickly padded flesh from his bones.

  Who could help him? A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Small cliques of men drank malt liquor from tall, skinny cans and watched the firemen battle the remaining flames, some boisterously pointing out when fresh shoots of flame crackled forth from previously pacified corners of Jules’s house. Women hugged babies to their ample breasts and watched their children play with warped records on the dead grass. Some of the faces Jules recognized from the neighborhood. Many were strange to him. Every few seconds another face would turn in his direction. Some eyes regarded him with sympathy. Most were unreadable, contemptuous, or even hostile.

  A chill quivered Jules’s spine. How many of those onlooking faces belonged to Malice X’s spies? Who’s to say the black vampire would stop with burning down Jules’s house? How many of these “neighborhood folks” were actually enemy vampires, eagerly waiting for the firemen and police to disperse before plunging sharpened stakes into Jules’s chest, or severing his head and stuffing his screaming mouth with garlic?

  He had to get out. Out of the neighborhood. Out of New Orleans. His whole world had been turned on its head, transformed into an evil, brutal, twisted mirror image of itself. Just days ago, he’d had everything he’d ever wanted. Now he had nothing. Once the proud, skillful hunter, now he found himself the hunted.

  Jules pushed his way through the crowd. If he didn’t make a break for it now, he’d end up a three-dollar pile of powdered chemicals at dawn for sure. He turned a corner, leaned heavily against a graffitied wall, and checked his wallet. Thirty-seven dollars. That wouldn’t take him far. His Hibernia Bank ATM debit card would take him maybe twelve hundred dollars farther. He rifled through the dog-eared business cards stuffed into the pouch behind his dollar bills until he found the one he was looking for: BILLY MAC’S GARAGE AND PRE — OWNED AUTOMOTIVE EMPORIUM-WE STAY OPEN LATE! Billy Mac had been his mechanic for more than twenty years. For almost as long, he’d been haranguing Jules to buy one of his used cars, but Jules had always purchased his chariots from other, more upmarket lots. Tonight, however, Billy Mac was Jules’s only possible ticket out of town.

  Eleven. I think he stays open ‘til eleven. Which means maybe I can catch him before he goes home.The St. Claude Avenue garage was only a few blocks away. Jules picked up his pace. At the corner of Montegut and North Rampart, a lively crowd loitered on the buckled sidewalk in front of the Beer ’N‘ Cigs Grocery. Jules picked up snatches of conversation, mostly concerning the big fire. A young woman wearing a pink shower cap talked excitedly into a dilapidated pay phone. “I saw the whole thing, yeah! This long-ass limo pulled up on Montegut Street, and then fourfine — lookin’ brothers got out, all with big cans in dey hands. Five minutes later, the limo pulls off, see, burnin‘ rubber, and this fat ofay’s house goes up like a bonfire. Yeah! That creepy-lookin’ fat-ass white guy livin‘ on Montegut-”

  Jules scowled at the woman on the phone, stopping her conversation dead. Then he hurried past, ignoring the stares of the crowd. Billy Mac’s was just another block away. As he rounded the corner, Jules was enormously relieved to see a light on in the tiny office next to the cinder block garage with its sagging aluminum roof. Billy Mac must still be going over the day’s receipts.

  Jules knocked loudly, maybe too loudly, on the office door. He heard something break inside the room, followed by a stream of muttered curses.

  “We’reclosed!” a deep voice shouted from the office. “Closed for the night! Come back in the morning!”

  Jules knocked again, more urgently. “Billy Mac! It’s Jules Duchon! I’ve gotta talk to you!”

  “Juleswho?”

  “Jules Duchon. Cadillac Jules. Nineteen seventy-five Fleetwood. All white. Cream leather interior.”

  “CadillacJules? The big, big guy?”

  “Yeah!”

  “I’m sorry. The garage isclosed, man. If that damn serpentine belt a yours done busted again-”

  Jules cut him off. “Billy Mac, this isn’t about my Fleetwood. The Fleetwood is gone. I need to buy another car from you. Tonight.”

  “Tonight?Hey, I’d love to oblige you, but I’m bone-ass tired, y’know? Just got done workin‘ a fourteen-hour day. I ’preciate the patronage, believe me, but it’s gonna hafta wait ‘til tomorrow.”

  Heart pounding, eyes wide, Jules lost the last shreds of his composure. “Itcan’t wait ‘til tomorrow! If it waits ’til tomorrow, I’m a dead man!” Forced to the brink, he uttered the words he knew he’d regret later. “I’ll pay you top dollar!”

  In the ensuing silence Jules could almost hear the mental tinkling of the cash register in Billy Mac’s head. “You just said the magic words, Cadillac Jules.”

  The door opened and the diminutive proprietor emerged, all smiles. He shook Jules’s hand vigorously. “The sales manager of Billy Mac’s Pre-Owned Automotive Emporium is on duty and at your service. Follow me out to the display floor. If you don’t mind my saying, you look like shit.”

  “You just worry about getting me a car,” said Jules.

  The “display floor” was an L-shaped dirt lot that fronted on St. Claude Avenue and wound behind the garage. Jules’s heart sank as he gave the sparse selection of dusty vehicles a quick once-over. Most cheapo lots could at least be counted on to have a decent selection of older American full-sized gas guzzlers, but Billy Mac seemed to specialize in the worst aberrations ever produced in the field
of compact cars. Side by side sat a virtual freak show of small cars-an egg-shaped Renault Fuego, a Chevy Vega with two flat tires, and a lavender AMC Gremlin, a misshapen, hunchbacked monstrosity that truly resembled its namesake. The least objectionable choice on the lot was an early-1980s Subaru GL, but its body appeared to be made up more of Bondo than sheet metal. And besides, there was no way Jules could ever fit behind its steering wheel.

  Billy Mac turned toward his customer to gauge his reaction. The mechanic’s smile emanated a surprisingly childlike innocence, a quality it’d had ever since a dissatisfied customer had knocked out Billy Mac’s four front teeth fifteen years earlier. Often mistaken by his customers for an American Indian, Billy Mac was actually from Java; he had come to New Orleans as a small boy from Dutch Indonesia just after World War II, and he had quickly “gone native” in the Crescent City. He had become an exceptionally skilled mechanic, even though, at four feet nine inches tall, he had to stand atop a specially built stepladder to see into the innards of the bigger cars.

  The plain look of dismay on Jules’s face did not diminish Billy Mac’s smile one iota. “See anything you like?” he asked, beaming.

  “Jesus Christ, Billy Mac! Is this all you’ve got?”

  Billy Mac grinned even wider as he caressed the lumpy hood of the Gremlin. “Whas the matter with the selection, Jules? People gotta protect the environment, man. Small cars arein. Damn Arabs gonna jack up the price of gas to five dollars a gallon any day now, you’ll see.”

  Jules scowled. “That’s a crock! Gas has been under a buck fifty a gallon for the last ten years.”

  “So? It’ll go up again. Besides, I thought this was a life-or-death situation, right?”

  Jules found himself backing down slightly. “Sure it is. But you can’t expect me to fit inside any of these kiddie carts. Don’t you have anything bigger on the lot? Some old Fleetwood or Sedan DeVille? I need the biggest trunk you got.”

  Billy Mac crossed his arms belligerently, looking a bit like Chief Crazy Horse just before Little Big Horn. “Sure! Sure I’ve got other cars on the lot! But you didn’t gimme a chance to show them to you, did you? No-you wasted three minutes of my precious sleepin‘ time bitchin’ about the stock I got out front here!”

  “Okay, look, I’m sorry. So where’re you hidin‘ these other cars?”

  The mechanic’s angry frown turned back to a smile. “Behind the garage. Follow me!” Despite Billy Mac’s short legs, Jules found it hard to keep up with the little man. “I’m gonna show you the peach of the lot, Jules! You always been a Cadillac man, right? Well, this beauty I got back here, you take a drive in it and you’ll see why Cadillac’s called ‘The Standard of the World’! Just to sit in it, man-leather seats like butter, I mean, you sit down and you never want to get up again. It’s like pussy on wheels! Electric windows! Electric door locks! Electronic speed control! This baby’s got itall!”

  The longer Billy Mac’s monologue rambled on, the higher Jules’s spirits rose. Sure, his house had burned down. Yeah, he was being chased out of his beloved hometown by a gang of homicidal vampires. And Billy Mac was certain to drive a hard bargain. But at least Jules was going to get his hands on a sweet chariot again.

  Billy Mac abruptly stopped walking and spread his short arms as wide as they would go.“Taa-daah!”

  Jules looked around confusedly. “Yeah? So where is it?”

  “You’re standing right in front of it.”

  Jules stared, dumbfounded, at the small gold-metallic sedan in front of him, barely wider than he was. “What’re you talkin‘ about? That’s a Chevy Cavalier.”

  “Nope. That’s a Cadillac. A Cimmaron! Gets the best gas mileage of any Caddy ever made. A collector’s-item classic! They only made these for two or three years, y’know.”

  Jules’s recently inflated spirit withered like a slug buried in salt. He wanted to scream. The only Cadillac on the lot, and it had to be the dinkiest, crummiest rip-off-mobile to ever wear the wreath and crest, a Chevy economy car with a Cadillac grille bolted on front. “No, no,no! Full sized! I need a full-sized car, with a big trunk! I’ll take a Buick, an Oldsmobile. I’ll even take a Pontiac. But it’s got to befull sized.”

  Billy Mac looked thoughtful. “Oh. You mean you want abig car.”

  “Yes. Big. That’s right.”

  “But that Cimmaron’s awful nice.”

  “Fuckthe Cimmaron! I couldn’t fit mydick in the goddamn Cimmaron!”

  “Hey! No need to go postal on me, man. I think I got just the right car for you. I picked it up at auction late last week, so I haven’t had time to clean it up yet. But it’s cherry, man. Vintage cherry. Honestly, I didn’t show you this one yet ‘cause I was thinkin’ about makin‘ it my own personal car. But since you ain’t findin’ anything else to your likin‘, I’m willing to make a sacrifice. ’Cause that’s just the kinda guy I am.”

  Jules sucked in a big breath. “Okay. Okay. Just show it to me.”

  Jules followed Billy Mac to the corner of the mechanic’s property farthest away from the street. “There she is,” Billy Mac said, his eyes brimming with emotion. “A real beaut, ain’t she? It’s gonna smash my heart in little pieces to see you drive her off the lot.”

  “A Lincoln,” Jules whispered, his voice etched with despair. “Ithadda be aLincoln…”

  Three hours and eighteen hundred cash dollars later (Jules started negotiations at four hundred, but his bargaining position was weak), Jules climbed into his newly purchased 1974 Continental Mark IV. The car had once been silver. But a quarter century beneath the Louisiana sun had oxidized the paint nearly to the metal underneath, leaving the car a multitoned dull gray, mottled with dimples of brown rust. Its black vinyl roof had cracked and flaked so badly it appeared the car was suffering from terminal psoriasis. Jules walked slowly around the car’s massive hood. Its driver-side disappearing headlight assembly was permanently stuck in a half-open position. The battered coupe seemed to be winking at Jules, like the pathetic come-on of an elderly whore. The odometer read 37,256 miles. That could mean 137,256 miles, 237,256 miles, or maybe even 337,256 miles. Jules winced at the sight of the torn zebra-print upholstery, perfectly complemented by the sun-faded pair of red fuzzy dice that hung limply from the rearview mirror.

  Billy Mac enthusiastically patted the car’s dull gray hood. “That inside trunk-release latch you had me install carries a seven-day warranty, so keep your receipts. You’ll love her, man! This li’l honey runs like a fuckin‘ Swiss watch!”

  Reminded of the late hour, Jules checked his own watch. It was already three-thirty. Barely three hours to sunrise. He grabbed the keys from Billy Mac’s hand, mumbled his thanks, and shoved the Lincoln’s bench seat as far back as it would go.

  Jules had read Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road when it first came out. The book hadn’t tempted him to leave New Orleans one tiny bit. Now, after thirty minutes of westerly highway travel, Jules had formulated an unshakable opinion of life on the road. It sucked. The Lincoln’s tranny was missing its third gear. Jules couldn’t go any faster than forty-five miles per hour without pitching his pistons through the hood. Other cars raced around him in a nonstop blur of red taillights, their angry horn blasts distorted into twisted bleats by a severe Doppler effect. Jules tried hard not to think about the royal screwing he’d just been subjected to, but he couldn’t help it. For a guy with no front teeth, that Billy Mac was the worst bloodsucker he’d ever crossed paths with. Jules had cleaned out his savings account to put money down on the car, and then financed the remaining six-hundred-dollar balance, three hundred dollars for the trunk release, and fifty dollars for a crummy, broken-down shovel, all at a usurious rate of twenty-four percent. As soon as Billy Mac had finished installing the trunk release, Jules had debated whether or not to fang him and save twenty-eight hundred dollars. He’d almost done it, too. But a good mechanic was just too hard to come by.

  He’d used the fifty-dollar shovel to scoop soggy earth from the front yard of his destroy
ed house into the bottom of the Lincoln’s trunk, coating it with about six inches of mud. Jules wondered how accurate that old legend was about vampires needing to rest in soil from their birthplace. Would any dirt from anywhere work just as well? He’d never had to wonder about it before. If the legend was, in fact, factual, how strictly or loosely was the termbirthplace defined? Would dirt from Uptown New Orleans, City Park, or Baton Rouge (to go even farther afield) work just as well as earth from his own yard? Maybe he hadn’t needed to take the risk of returning to his neighborhood so soon after the fire? Well, that was a moot point now. Considering the way his luck had been running, he’d been smart sticking with the tried and true.

  As soon as the wordluck entered his head, it started raining. The falling moisture was an angry, living thing, an avenging fury that beat on the oxidized metal of his hood and roof like a gigantic millipede with a thousand claw hammers. Jules wondered whether the storm might be a manifestation of his mother’s earthbound spirit, furious at her only son for losing their home. The Lincoln’s bald tires quickly began hydroplaning on the rutted, waterlogged asphalt. The big car weaved from lane to lane as Jules struggled with the unfamiliar steering wheel and jerky brake pedal. He didn’t dare slow down, however. Not with sunrise barely an hour away. He had to at least make Baton Rouge before first light. No closer place outside New Orleans had the enclosed parking garages that might give him shelter.

  The sun-rotted wiper blades only served to spread the rain evenly over his field of vision. The metal tips bit into the windshield glass, etching the car a pair of eyebrows. Jules turned the wipers off. He rolled down his window and tried clearing the glass with his hand. No good; the outside world remained a watery blur.

  Faded outlet-mall billboards and the gnarled trunks of dead cypress trees drifted past at forty-five miles per hour, signposts of his grim exile. Jules felt a mysterious lump in his coat pocket. Aside from the shabby clothes on his back, that lump could well be the last connection he had to his beloved former life.