Fat White Vampire Blues

by Andrew J. Fox

  “Shit-aoww-aoww-aoww-aoww!”

  Jules spent the next fifteen minutes soaking his throbbing hands in a bucket of ice water. Doodlebug was good enough to mop up the spilled coffee and sweep the broken china into a wastebasket.

  “Do you want to call it a night?” Doodlebug asked.

  Jules wiped his hands on his pants. “Naww. I’m sure Malice X ain’t restin‘ onhis laurels. Lemme try it a few more times.”

  Doodlebug poured fresh coffee into two unbroken cup-and-saucer sets and handed them to his friend. Jules lined up back at the starting point. The big vampire took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind of all distractions. His hands still throbbed. What if he spilled steaming coffee on them again-? No; that didn’t matter. What mattered was what Doodlebug had promised him. What mattered was the fact that if he worked hard enough, his enormous bulk, the target of endless insults and humiliations over the years, could become an asset instead of a liability. Then Jules Duchon wouldreally throw his weight around.

  Jules opened his eyes. “Are you ready?” Doodlebug asked.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  The train lurched into motion. But Jules didn’t lurch. He flowed along the path like a blob of mercury guided by electromagnets.No need to rush, he told himself.I know exactly how fast that train moves-I got plenty of time to make the intersection. Doodlebug’s words bathed his mind like a refreshing warm shower: Flow. Peacefulness. Connectedness. The cups and saucers he held in his hands weren’t heavy at all. There was no clatter, no nervous sloshing. They were part of his limbs, connected to him. Like the path was connected to him. And he knew the train like he knew the beating of his own heart.

  He successfully passed the first intersection five full seconds before he was cognizant of having done so. The trestle bridge didn’t trip him up in the slightest. He passed over it without causing even a stirring in the coffee cups.

  But then something changed. The train hit an invisible wall of rubber. Some evil outside force took control of his calm mastery and twisted it, slowing everything down.

  “You-you’re changing the train’s speed! You can’t do that!”

  “I most assuredlycan,” Doodlebug answered.

  “No, you can’t! Notnow!”

  “The bird that taps against the window, Jules. It always pops up at the worst possible time.”

  “Fuckthe fuckin‘ bird!” He was losing it. The cups and saucers were cups and saucers again, not part of his hands. Their clattering sounded like the approach of an onrushing streetcar. The train sped up again. Then it slowed to a crawl.

  Sweat fell into Jules’s eyes. “Take that bird and shove it up your-aoww-aoww-aoww-aoww!”

  The passing train was caught in a deluge of falling coffee. The tracks sparked. The electrical discharge traveled almost instantaneously around the track to the control box, which shorted out with a sharp pop-pop-pop!

  Doodlebug sat stunned for a moment. He stared at the smoking control box in his lap, then stared at Jules, who was fuming even more than the blackened, ruined wall socket.

  “Well…” the somewhat embarrassed taskmaster said. “I guess we’ll be breaking for the night. No wonder my teachers had me juggling live rats instead of racing electric trains.”

  “Wolfand bat. You can do it, Jules.”

  Jules had hardly slept at all the previous day. He’d tossed and turned in his piano box, his mind crammed full with thoughts of Maureen(what does she know that she hasn’t told me?), Elisha Raddeaux(has Malice X found her? does he want to kill me even morenow?), the mysterious Veronika(what’s the deal with that screwy dame, anyway?), and his upcoming training session(what if I can’t hack it?). But now he was back in Maureen’s basement, naked as a jaybird, warily putting himself in Doodlebug’s manicured hands again.

  “Shouldn’t we be trying this closer to where my coffin is?” Jules asked, rubbing the side of his nose. The more questions he asked, the longer he could put off having to make his first attempt. “I mean, we’re clear across town from where my slug-thingie’s gonna end up.”

  Doodlebug didn’t appear to be swayed. “Think about this logically. In all your years of changing to a bat or a wolf, has itever made a difference how far you were from your coffin? Stop stalling. Let’s just give it a try, shall we?”

  The little martinet was onto him. Jules sighed. Wolf and bat. Bat and wolf. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Full moon. Wings. Long nose, long fangs. Long, skinny fingers. Bushy tail. Tiny legs and itty-bitty talons. Powerful jaws. Hair. Ears like a rabbit’s, only not as fuzzy and cute…

  The basement began to fill with smoke. Jules sensed his body waver and shimmer, going in and out of focus like the picture on an old vacuum-tube TV. For the briefest of instants Jules’s form was replaced by a creature from a Hieronymus Bosch phantasmagoria-a wolf’s head with a tiny rodent body, black wings sprouting from the tip of its long nose frantically flapping in a vain attempt to keep from falling over. It half yelped and half hissed before it lost its shape. Then it melted into an amorphous gray mass that splattered against the concrete floor with a resoundingshhglorp!

  The floor was hidden by fleshy smoke again. When it cleared, Jules was lying on his back, gasping for breath and bathed in sweat.

  “Jules!” Doodlebug rushed to his friend’s side and helped him sit up. “Are you all right?”

  Jules coughed heavily, then shook his head to clear away the cobwebs. “I been-ahchem! — better. I been a wholehelluva lot better.”

  “What happened? Why did you try transforming into both animals at once?”

  “Ain’t that what you’ve been yammering at me to do these past two nights?”

  “I’m afraid you misunderstood. You should only attempt one transformation at a time-when you have one form fully under control,then you create the other.”

  Jules grabbed his shirt and mopped off his forehead. “You sayin‘ you want me to change into a wolf or a bat first, andthen pull a second animal outta that gray glop five miles away?”

  Doodlebug appeared mystified. “Well…sure. I thought I was very clear on that.”

  Jules dabbed off his glistening chest, then tossed the soaked shirt into a corner. “Lemme tell you somethin‘. There’s no way inhell I’m gonna be able to muster the concentration to pull a second animal outta my hat once I’m a bat or a wolf. With all those super senses rushing in on me, I got too much jumpin’ around my wolf-mind or bat-mind to pull together a second body. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

  Doodlebug crouched in front of his friend, put his hand on his shoulder, and looked him directly in the eye. “I beg to disagree. Last night you achieved a special state of mind. Until I was able to distract you and shatter your concentration, you had succeeded in dividing your consciousness. You were paying equal attention to three factors at once.”

  Jules’s stonewalling thawed into a wary hopefulness. “Huh. You really think so? I was doin‘ that good?”

  Doodlebug smiled and patted his friend’s well-padded shoulder. “You were doingmuch better than ‘good.’ You’ll be able to reach that level again; I have no doubt. All it takes is work. Practice, practice, practice. Plus a little faith in yourself. Shall we try it again?”

  Which animal was the easiest? It made sense to do the harder one first and then, when his concentration and mental faculties weren’t at their sharpest, attempt the simpler one. The wolf was a heck of a lot more similar to his normal form than the bat was. Transforming into a bat was downright alien, and more than a little creepy. Growing those long, long fingers, and then stretching his skin paper-thin between them… yuck. The bat was definitely the more difficult of the two.

  Jules thought bat-thoughts. His old familiar body, with which he’d shared a decades-long love-hate relationship, melted away. Jules looked around the room, emitting his ultrasonic shriek more by instinct than by rational choice. He could sense Doodlebug’s lithe, graceful presence by the shape of the echoes that bounced off him. He te
sted his wings, beating them tentatively against the stubborn pull of gravity. No dice. Even with the extra vitality granted him by Doc Landrieu’s wonder pills, his bat-form was still too obese to become airborne under its own power. Why? Why couldn’t he become athin bat?

  Too many questions-his rodent brain ached from them all. Right now, he had other irons in the fire. Like pulling a wolf out of his trick bag. He shut down his echolocation, clenched his weak eyes shut, and thought the most cogent wolf-thoughts he could manage. Something started to happen “No, Jules! Notthat way!”

  What was the matter? He was doing it, wasn’t he?

  He could sense the long wolf snout emerging, complete with its wet nose and fearsome incisors. Unfortunately, he also sensed something else going on-his left wing was disintegrating even as his wolf snout took shape!

  “Use the mass in your coffin, Jules! Theextra mass! Don’t reshape what you’ve already got with you! Pullmore in-”

  But it was too late. Jules’s grotesque little homunculus was missing its left wing and much of its ears, but a wolf’s levitating jaws were attached to its chest by tenuous floating strands of protoplasm; he splattered into a grayish puddle with a sickeningshhglorp!

  Jules needed nearly forty minutes of recuperation before he had the strength, not to mention the intestinal fortitude, to try again. This time he managed to hold his bat-form steady while pulling about a quarter of a wolf from the proto-matter stored in his distant coffin. However, he would’ve done better to build the canine’s hindquarters first. Starting with the head meant that the wolf’s potent senses shattered his concentration before he even reached the neck. Both his bodies imploded, ending up as sluglike puddles on the floor, then a very disoriented and disgruntled Jules.

  Threeshhglorps! later, the door at the top of the basement steps opened. Maureen, dressed in one of her Velcro-laden dancing costumes, inserted herself through the doorway.

  “How’s the training coming? I’m on my one o’clock break at the club, so I thought I’d walk over and see how you guys were making out.”

  Jules said nothing as Maureen descended the steps. Whether this was because of exhaustion or a reluctance to have anything to do with her, he wasn’t quite sure. Doodlebug rushed to fill the dead silence. “Jules has made some pretty impressive progress. The last couple of hours, though, he’s hit a wall. Not unexpected, really. We all do. So we’ll be taking a break.”

  “You have him punching sides of beef yet?” She hummed a few bars from theRocky theme and performed some girlish shadowboxing. She stopped when she saw she wasn’t getting even the faintest shadow of a smile from Jules, who was still lying on the floor. “Jeezus… helooks like a side of beef.” She walked over to where he lay flat on his back, breathing in labored, phlegmy gasps. “Hey, you been rummaging through my costume jewelry lately?”

  This out-of-left-field question yanked a response from him. “What the… hell… kinda reason… would I have… to dig through yourjewelry?”

  “I have no idea. But tonight I was looking for some pieces I haven’t worn in a while, and I noticed that your vampire baby teeth were missing.”

  Jules dragged himself to a sitting position and set his shirt over his lap. “My baby teeth? What’re you talkin‘ about?”

  “Yourvampire baby teeth. Don’t you remember? I saved them and kept them in a pill bottle. They were soadorable. I still remember the night you lost them. Twelve months to the day after you first became a vampire. Remember? You were soscared. I meanterrified. You thought you’d never have fangs again. You were running around this house hollering like your pecker had just fallen off. It was funnier than the Keystone Kops and Fatty Arbuckle put together.”

  “Yeah, I remember. You were a regular Saint Theresa that night. Real supportive. So what’s all this about my vampire baby teeth?”

  “They’regone. Like I said, I kept them in this pill bottle, and I kept the pill bottle at the bottom of this box of old costume jewelry. Nobody ever dug through that box except me.”

  “Well,I didn’t take them.”

  “But you were the only one who would’ve known they were there.”

  “What do I need my fuckin‘baby teeth for? I need another pair of fangs like I need a pack ofHispanic vampires on my case. You lost ’em, that’s all.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right. What does it matter, anyway?” She picked up a folding chair that was leaning against the wall, opened it, and sat down. It groaned like a packhorse on its last legs. “So let’s see your stuff, hotshot. Let’s see what Doodlebug’s taught you so far. Put on a show for ol‘ Mo.”

  Jules mopped his forehead with his shirt. “Forget it. I’m whipped.”

  “Oh, come on, Jules. I walked all the way back here from Jezebel’s-”

  Jules’s voice had more steel in it this time. “I said forget it. I been beatin‘ my head against the concrete floor all night. The only thing I’m good for right now is watchin’ an old John Carradine flick on video.”

  Maureen crossed her arms stiffly. “Well, that’s afine attitude to have. I suppose John Carradine will show you in ten easy steps how to get out of the mess you’re in?”

  Doodlebug, sensing trouble brewing, stepped between the two of them. “Uh, Maureen, Jules reallyhas been working awfully hard tonight. This isn’t the best time-”

  Jules lit into Maureen as if Doodlebug weren’t even there. “Y’know, you got ahelluva lotta nerve, waltzing in here now and givin‘ me shit when you ain’t even been here to see how I’ve been knockin’ myself out. You got noidea what you’re talkin‘ about.”

  Maureen didn’t back down a millimeter. “Oh, don’t I? I think I know enough to recognize aquitter when I hear one. Winners don’t crawl away to lie on a couch and watch old horror movies when they’re beat. Winners keep plugging away until they’ve got thegame beat.”

  “Well,thank you, Knute Rockne. I’m all inspired now. ‘Scuse me-I gotta go jam a stake up your old boyfriend’s ass for the Gipper, okay?”

  Maureen flinched, but her voice remained steady. “I see you’ve gotplenty of vim and vigor left when it comes to blaming me. How about applying some of that energy where it’ll make a difference, like learning how to be a better andsmarter vampire?”

  “Aww, hell, why don’tyou try it, Maureen? You think it’s so goddamn easy? Go ahead. Change to a bat and a wolf at the same time. Or change into three ballerinas. No-fourballerinas! I ain’t the only one around here ‘blessed’ with excess mass.”

  “That’s right. You just happen to be the one with a bright red bull’s-eye painted on your mass.”

  “Painted there courtesy ofyour out-of-control sex drive-!”

  The upstairs phone rang, the bell that ended this round of the superheavyweight championship bout.

  Maureen rose from her seat, her cheeks flushed. “Excuse me, Jules. Maybe we’ll continue this-discussion-once you’re decent.” She tossed his trousers at him before heading back up the stairs. Two minutes later she stuck her head through the door again. “It’s foryou, buster,” she said. Her voice was a barely contained froth of scorn, anger, and hurt. Jules, flabbergasted, stared at Doodlebug. “But-but nobody knows I’m here. Right?” Doodlebug shrugged his shoulders. Jules turned back to Maureen. “Who is it?”

  “I didn’t care to ask.” Her nose twitched, as if she’d just caught the scent of something unmentionably vile. “It’s somewoman.”

  Jules finished wiggling into his trousers. Then he hurriedly climbed the steps, wincing as his bare foot snagged a splinter, his mind seething with equal parts curiosity and trepidation. Maureen had left the receiver lying on her kitchen table. Jules picked it up, his heart beating both with excitement and the exertion of hustling up the stairs.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Jules?” He recognized the voice before she said another word. “It’s Veronika.”

  Her husky, Memphis-tinged but New York-inflected voice set off a grenade in his brain. A hundred questions whizzed past each other
like shrapnel. Unfortunately, his mouth could process only one question at a time, and the resulting traffic pileup resembled the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway during a hurricane evacuation.

  “What-how-you tried to-you,you- ”

  “It’s extremely important that I see you again.”

  One question finally tore loose of the pack. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “I know all sorts of things about you.”

  “What the hell’s this all about? Whoare you?”

  “I know I owe you an explanation-much more than an explanation. I want to come clean, Jules. But I can’t do it over the phone.“ Jules saw Maureen staring through the doorway with the intensity of a hawk eyeing a plump field mouse. Doodlebug was standing next to her. Jules tried to keep his voice low. It wasn’t easy. ”What the hell do you want?“

  “I need to see you again.”

  All thoughts of stealthiness were blown out the window by the fury of a male ego scorned. “You must be outta yer fuckin‘mind! Do I look retarded? Am I some droolingidiot? You tried tokill me! You invited me up to your room with, y’know, with false pretensions-I thought you wereinto me!”

  “Honey, I can explain-”

  “Explain?Explainwhat? That you’re some kinda vampire-huntin‘ wacko-oh yeah, Isaw your little arsenal in the bathroom under the sink. But idiot me, I clambered into that hot tub with you anyway. And boy, did I pay-you tried toboil me like some fuckin’ four-hundred-and-fifty-poundcrawfish!”

  Even with the bad connection (she was on either a cheap cell phone or one of the battered-and-abused pay phones in the Quarter), he could hear the anguish in her voice. “Jules, please believe me-Ihad to do it! I had no choice! They’re watching me all the time. My loyalty wasalready in question. So I had to do something to you-but I picked theleast lethal weapon they gave me. Don’t you think Ihated doing it? I’ve been crying my eyes out ever since you ran out of my hotel room. I hate myself for letting them force me to hurt you.”