Three nights later Jules was running out of curses to mumble to himself. He’d revised his earlier opinion of his new home: Baton Rougewas hell. He’d tried shifting his hunting grounds to LSU, hoping to corner an unwary undergraduate behind a dormitory, but security guards had chased him off campus. Back downtown, he’d hoped to cut his growing hunger with a cup of free coffee, but the Baptist missionaries had refused him even a drop when he wouldn’t sing hymns with them. And his fellow street people still shunned him like he was a dose of HIV.
Even among the outcasts, he was an outcast. The unbearable bitterness of that realization rubbed on his frayed soul as he aimlessly wandered the bleak, empty streets of downtown, blowing down the cracked sidewalks like a wadded-up page of yesterday’s newspaper. He had no idea how long he’d been walking, or where he’d gotten himself to, when he heard thetap-tap-tap-tap of someone, or something, following behind him.
He wasn’t afraid. He recognized his lack of fear with a dull, slow surprise. In fact, he half hoped it was Malice X following behind him, twisted stake in hand.
Jules turned around.
It wasn’t a vampire, or the bogeyman. It was a dog. Just a mournful-eyed, matted-furred, droopy-eared mutt.
The dog stopped walking as soon as Jules turned to face her. She looked at him shyly and fearfully and eagerly, her tail wagging with a quick, nervous stutter.
Jules’s heart began to defrost at the sight of the timid, hopeful animal. He’d never been a dog lover. But here was a fellow outcast, just as dirty and hungry and lonely as he was. A fellow outcast who was reaching out to him.
Jules knelt down, ignoring the painful protest of his knees, and held out his hand. “C’mere, girl,” he whispered, terribly afraid she might spook and run away from him. “C’mere. I won’t hurt you, darlin‘. I swear. I just wanna be your friend.”
Slowly, with short, hesitant steps, the dog approached him. He held his breath, not daring to move even a millimeter. Time seemed to stop as he waited for the cold touch of her nose against his fingertips.
Finally, she sniffed his hand. With the first whiff of his scent, she began wagging her tail more confidently. Jules waited for her to get more accustomed to him before he dared pat her on the head. Her nose moved swiftly from his fingers to his arm to his knee, then to his crotch, her tail wagging more enthusiastically with each passing second.
“Yeah, sweetheart. You like the way I smell, don’t you?” He hesitantly patted the top of her head. When she responded by licking his hand, he threw caution to the winds and scratched behind her ears and vigorously rubbed her scabby back. “Yeah. Aren’t you sweet? You aren’t mean an‘ nasty like them others. You’re just a sweetheart, ain’tchu?”
While he was picking burrs out of her matted fur, he noticed how her ribs pressed through her paper-thin sides. He stood up. “We’ve gotta find you somethin‘ to eat, sweetheart. You’re lookin’ even hungrier than I am. And that’s pretty fuckin‘ hungry.”
The two of them wandered the streets until they came upon a closed but still-in-business convenience mart. Jules stared through the window. There, on aisle three, sat half a dozen bags of dog food.
He looked down at his new friend. She stared up at him and wagged her tail hopefully. He looked back through the window. “Aww, what the fuck,” he muttered to himself. “The worst they can do is toss me in the slammer, and that’d be a helluva lot more comfy than sleepin‘ in that damn trunk of mine, anyway.”
He walked around to the back of the store. The rear window was barred, but the door, with its rotting wood and flimsy, loose knob, looked promising. Jules gathered what remained of his strength and threw his shoulder against the door. The old wood gave some, creaking in protest. He backed up five paces and got a running start. Faced with the impact of 450 pounds of newly invigorated vampire, the sagging door split into five pieces.
An off-key symphony of Klaxons, bleats, and hoots sounded as Jules picked himself up off the dirty floor, rubbed his sore shoulder, and headed for the dog food aisle. He grabbed as many of the ten-pound bags as he could squeeze into his arms, then ran out the way he’d come in. The shrill whistles of the store’s alarm system chased him into the street like pursuing harpies. His canine companion barked excitedly at the noise and the tumult, despite Jules’s out-of-breath pleas for her to be quiet. He lurched into a dark alleyway and dropped his five sacks of purloined dog food onto a torn, stained mattress.
Then he fell back against the wall, slid to the ground, and waited for the sirens and flashing red lights of approaching patrol cars.
They never came. Once Jules’s heart settled down a bit, he crawled over onto the mattress and tore open one of the bags of dog food. His companion had her head inside the bag before the first dried protein pellets hit the mattress’s yellow-stained surface. She ate ferociously, as if she might never see food again.
Watching her, Jules felt happy for the first time in more than a week.Look at her go! he thought. His own stomach groaned piteously, adding its plaintive note to the alarms still echoing through the streets. He found himself wishing he could join his friend in her meal.She sure is wolfing that stuff down, he thought, half enviously; and his stray thought gave him the glimmer of an idea. A nasty, depressing idea, but an idea, nonetheless. Maybe hecould join her in her meal.
He found himself remembering a time in his life he usually avoided thinking about, the last time he’d been in straits as dire as these. He’d just been laid off from his job in the coroner’s office, cut off from the easy, simple existence he’d enjoyed for nearly thirty years. Suddenly on his own, he realized with horror that after three decades of living off the blood of the recently deceased, he’d totally lost his knack for hunting up a meal. Sitting alone in his house, he’d nearly starved, until one evening he noticed that his next-door neighbors had moved out, and in the pile of trash they’d left behind were several half-emptied sacks of dog food. Desperate, delirious with hunger, he shifted into his wolf-form and attacked the abandoned meal. It wasn’t brunch at Brennan’s, but that dog food kept him going for a couple of weeks, until he came up with the plan of driving a taxicab and having his meals pay to come to him.
That was years ago. It was an experience Jules had hoped he’d never have to repeat. The very notion was degrading. Resorting to eating as an animal was as low as a vampire could sink. Plus, he couldn’t be sure that his wolf-form’s digestive tract could still tolerate solid food; his human-form’s certainly couldn’t. But the longer his dog companion chomped away, the more Jules’s agonized, shriveled stomach pleaded-no,demanded — that he try something, anything at all. Sighing, he dragged himself to a corner of the mattress, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes tightly, and concentrated on a mental picture of the full moon.
The dog paused from her voracious eating long enough to produce a fearful whimper at the unnatural spectacle of flesh rearranging itself in a flurry of swirling mists. Jules pounced on one of the other bags of dog food and tore it open with his fangs. He was surprised at how good it tasted; maybe those paid flacks on dog food commercials who claimed that their brand was super delicious weren’t lying after all. He polished off the first bag before he even thought to wiggle free of his clothes. The second bag went down his gullet just as fast. The third bag was heavenly, and the fourth bag nearly as heavenly, even though by the time his long nose reached the bottom half of the sack, his wolf-gut was full to bursting. He had the unmitigated gall to stick his snout into his companion’s bag of food, but a few angry nips on his nose and tail were enough to convince him that discretion was the better part of valor.
Sated, exhausted from the exertion of eating so much so quickly, he felt his four paws splay out from under him as the heft of his grotesquely stretched potbelly dragged him down to the mattress. Damn, he feltgood! He hadn’t felt this good since… since… since he couldn’t remember when. Floating in a half-conscious fog of satisfied gluttony, no longer fixated on the need to consume, he began to notice the inpu
t of his heightened wolf-senses. Tiny insects buzzed in the storm gutters high above his head, the beating of their wings like distant applause. He sniffed the stains on the mattress and was able to differentiate the various urine stains, chicken grease stains, and semen stains by their unique scent signatures. And there was something else, another odor that overpowered all others, a potent muskiness that insinuated itself in his veins and sinews and bones and made him crazy, absolutelycrazy — He hadn’t realized it before, with his limited human nose, but his friend the bitch was in heat.
I’ve gotta turn human again,Jules told himself as he avidly sniffed his companion’s hindquarters, caught in the throes of a lust unlike any he had ever known.I’ve gotta turn human again, right now, immediately, before I do somethin‘ really stupid- But before he could even begin to muster the concentration necessary for a transformation, he had already mounted her.
The much smaller dog yelped with pain as Jules’s comparatively tremendous weight landed on her back. She tried to scoot away, but his strong paws clamped onto her sides and held her fast. As he pumped faster than he thought possible, his body trapped in the iron hold of canine pheromones that screamed “Make puppies! Make puppies!” his still-human mind was filled with remorse.I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry, I’ll make it up to you, you’ll never want for dog food again…
Nearly as quickly as when he was in human form, it was over. He slid off of her and collapsed in a furry heap on the mattress. He waited for her to reproach him, maybe bite him, and then run off. It was only what he deserved, after all.
But she surprised him. Rather than running away, she nuzzled him, then licked his face. Jules was astounded. Overcome with emotion, he licked her all over with his huge tongue until her fur was cleaner than it had ever been. They snuggled close together on the mattress, his bitch warming herself against Jules’s great potbelly. Jules fell into the deepest, most blissful sleep he’d had in years.
When he awoke a few hours later, startled out of sleep by a newspaper delivery truck, he was alone. Seized with panic, he crisscrossed the streets within a five-block radius, searching vainly for her scent. But she was nowhere to be found.
Jules howled. And every street dweller in downtown Baton Rouge knew that some creature had just lost its only friend.
Please deposit thirty-five cents,the mechanical voice said.
Jules fumbled through his coat pocket for a fistful of change, then pulled a frayed piece of paper from his wallet. He had to squint to see the faded writing in the yellow phosphorescent light of the parking garage. He punched in the number, almost forgetting to include the three-digit area code.
The number you have dialed requires a deposit of-two dollars and twenty cents-for an initial call of five minutes. Please deposit an additional-one dollar and eighty-five cents. Thank you for using Baton Rouge Telecom, your telecommunications specialists.
Jules shoved seven quarters and a dime through the slot. The coins fell into the bowels of the pay phone like desperate wishes tossed into a lucky fountain. The phone rang. She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Mo, don’t say anything. Just let me talk, okay? I know you probably hate me. You probably think I’m scum, like everyone else on this goddamn planet. But I’ve got nobody else to turn to, baby.” His voice cracked. He quivered and leaned heavily against the booth, fighting to maintain some tiny shred of control and dignity. “I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve hit rock bottom. My life has been nothin‘ but hell these past two weeks. I lost everything I had, and then I kept losin’ more and more. I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Jules, hush yourself-”
“Don’t hush me, Maureen! Let me finish before you rip into me! You know how hard it is for me to call you like this? You think I wanted to? But I’m on my knees, baby. You made me what I am. You’re almost as much a mother to me as my own mother was. If you don’t help me-”
“Jules, hush yourself, sweetheart, and come on home.”
SEVEN
The next evening Jules stood hesitantly before the front door of Maureen’s French Quarter town house, fidgeting as nervously as a boy about to pick up his prom date. For the first time in years, he found himself wishing he could see his reflection in a mirror. He spat in his palms and slicked down his unruly hair as best he could. Then he brushed the last few flecks of dirt from his threadbare sport coat. It would have to do. Finally, he lifted the big brass pineapple-shaped knocker and let it crash against the door’s cracked red paint.
A few moments later, he heard a slow, heavy tread approaching the door. After a few seconds of queasy silence, three balky dead bolts clicked, and the door opened.
Maureen’s nose twitched violently. She made no effort to disguise her revulsion. “Oh. My. Gawd.”
“Hi, baby.” Jules smiled weakly. “It’s good to see you.”
Maureen stepped back quickly from the doorway. She pointed curtly in the direction of the bathroom. “Shower. Now.”
“Don’t I even get a ‘hello’?”
“Scrape that toxic waste off your hide and I’ll consider it. Bathroom’s through there. Drop all your things through the big chute in the hallway. And I meaneverything.”
Jules stepped inside. He briefly considered trying for a hug, but the fact that she was eyeing him as though he were a gigantic cockroach changed his mind. He walked down the hallway until he came to the chute and began peeling off his clothes. He dropped his coat on the polished cedar floor; a cloud of gray dust swirled around his ankles. His shirt clung to him like a massive strip of cellophane wrap. He opened the chute, which was big enough to stuff a body through, and peered inside before dropping in his wadded-up shirt, pants, and socks. A wave of heat hit his face from the darkness below.
“Hey, baby, where does this thing lead to? The laundry?”
“No. The incinerator.” She picked up his coat with a pair of fireplace tongs. “Reach in and take out your wallet,” she commanded. Jules obediently followed orders. Then she dropped the coat through the opening.
“Hey! That’s my best sport coat!”
“Not anymore,” she said, prodding him toward the bathroom with her tongs.
After half an hour of scrubbing himself beneath a scalding, high-pressure cascade, Jules began to feel vaguely human again. Every few minutes Maureen’s pudgy hand would appear through the shower curtain, handing him a series of astringent soaps and shampoos to use. Finally, she reached in and turned off the hot water, signaling that he was allowed to come out.
After he toweled himself off, she handed him a fluffy pink robe through the door. He was surprised by how well it fit. He searched through her drawers until he found a razor (a lady’s razor, but it would have to do), then felt his way through an uneven shave. Failing to find any aftershave, he wet down his hands with some of Maureen’s perfume and patted it onto his semismooth, but burning, cheeks and neck.
He found Maureen waiting for him in the kitchen, pouring the contents of several plastic bowls into a tall blender. “Your friend the cabdriver was worried sick about you,” she said, scraping what looked like raw eggs into the blender with a wooden spoon.
“Erato? He was worried about me?”
“Yeah, Erato, that’s the one. He came looking for me at the club the night after your house burned down. He thought I might know where you’d disappeared to.” She flicked on the blender for twenty seconds, then poured the contents into a large glass and handed it to him. “Here. Drink up. I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
Jules eyed the reddish mixture uncertainly. “What’s in this?”
“Egg whites, Italian stewed tomatoes, okra, mirlitons, V8 juice, and a little Tabasco sauce. Oh, and blood, of course.”
Jules winced slightly and set the glass on a table. “Sounds to me like a surefire recipe for the runs. Uh, thanks for goin‘ to all that trouble for me, but can’t I just have some blood by itself?”
Maureen sank her fists aggressively
into her billowy hips and stared Jules down. “Jules Duchon, you’re going to drink that mixture and you’re going to like it.”
“But, Mo, aside from coffee, I ain’t been able to tolerate normal food in years-”
“Well, consider this a start, mister! You need to lose weight and get yourself healthy!Especially now! What, you think you can just waltz back into town and go back to all your old bad habits like nothing’s happened? You might as well just waddle down the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard with a great big target painted on your chest. A sign that says,KILL ME NOW-I’M TOO FAT ANDstupidTO TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. Sure! Let’s go visit this Malice X of yours right now and save him the trouble of looking for you.”
“Aww, Mo-”
She slapped his hands away, then knelt down and feigned breaking a leg off one of her kitchen chairs. “Better yet, I’ll just sharpen up a wooden stake for you-right here, tonight-and you can plunge it through your heart yourself. Wouldn’t that be faster and easier?” She yanked more strenuously, and the leg began to crack. “Huh? Wouldn’t it?”
He leaned down and pulled her hands away from the chair, as gently as he could. “C’mon, stop it. Just calm down, huh? Look-I’ll drink your concoction, okay? Here. Watch me.” He lifted the glass to his lips and downed its contents in four mighty gulps, forcibly suppressing both his gag reflex and a series of shudders.
Maureen appeared at least partially mollified by his efforts. “Good,” she said, taking the glass from him and rinsing it in the sink. “My house, my rules. The one hundred percent blood I keep in the fridge is strictly off-limits to you. Understand? If I come home some evening to find that you’ve been sneaking any, you’ll be out on the street again before you’ve even had time to belch. You clear on that?”
Fat White Vampire Blues Page 12
