Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Maureen redirected her withering glare on him. “I don’t give a flyingshit about your caffeine addiction-” Her tirade stopped in midsentence, like a wildfire suddenly deprived of oxygen. She sank back into her chair and wearily rested her forehead on her palms. “You said there was something else, didn’t you? Something you had to ask me. A favor.”

“Uh, yeah. Alittle favor.”

She sighed. “You’re like a crotch itch, you know? You show up at the worst times, and you won’t go away until you’re thoroughly scratched. Spill it. You’ve got two minutes, max.”

“I need some information, okay? That’s all. I need to get in touch with those vampires you used to live with before you went solo. The ones with the big compound somewhere near the parish line.”

Maureen’s thick makeup crinkled with surprise. “The High Krewe of Vlad Tepes? What the hell do you need to see those highfalutin assholes for?”

Now it was Jules’s turn to sigh. “To get a rogue off my back.”

“A rogue?”

The story began spilling out of him like a flash flood. “He was waitin‘ for me at my house last night. Busted up my door somethin’ awful. He threatened me. Threatenedme, in my own house! Wants to push me outta town. He pissed all over my coffin, and now I can’t get the damn stink out-”

“Slow down. Who is this you’re talking about? You’re not making much sense.”

Jules took a few seconds to gather his thoughts. “There’s a rogue vampire in town. A colored guy. Young. A real badass. He says he’s got a whole army of other vampires backing him up, and they’ve been watching everything I been up to. He told me I better stop fangin‘ black folks, or else he’s gonna have his goons lean on me. Can you believe this shit?”

Maureen was silent for several seconds. Her cheek twitched. “What’s-what’s his name? This rogue?”

“What the hell does that matter? His name? It sounded like that crazy preacher guy from the sixties. Like a girl’s name… Alice. Malice X.”

Maureen turned her head away suddenly and glanced at the empty stage. “Acolored vampire, you say?” Her fingers tightened on the edge of the table. “Where do you think he’s in from?”

“He says he’s from here. New Orleans born and bred.”

“That’s impossible. No one here would’ve made him.”

“Youargue with him. I’ll send him over to your place the next time he drops by for a chat.”

Maureen looked back at her companion. Jules noticed anxiousness in her eyes. Maybe even fear. “Do you think he’s on the level? About having an army of vampires, I mean?”

Jules considered this. “An army? Well, I dunno. But it makes sense that he’s got others with him. He knew too much about me and where I been to be working on his own.”

Maureen’s face brightened, as though she’d experienced a sudden revelation. Her voice returned to the motherly, half-cajoling, half-commanding tone he knew so well. “Have you thought about maybe doing what he said? Laying off the colored victims?”

“What?Whose side are you on?”

“Yours, you big dummy. Weren’t you just bragging to me five minutes ago about how you plan on going on a diet?”

“Well, yeah, sure, but-”

“Well, how do you think you got so damn fat in the first place? Me, I’ve been a vampire twice as long as you have, so I’ve had a lot more time to earn my blubber. But you, you’ve always preferred the colored victims. Always said they were tastier. Do you know what those peopleeat? Fatback. Pigs’ knuckles. They fry theirvegetables, for Varney’s sake! You want to slim down? If you do-if you really,honestly do-then this is the best thing that could’ve happened to you.”

Jules mulled this over. Could Maureen be right? Maybe this whole awful experience was really a blessing in disguise? “Well… well, maybe…”

But then he thought about his coffin again. His coffin, streaked with drying urine. All the helpless indignation he’d experienced in the past fifteen hours came boiling to the surface. “No.No way! I can’t let that little asshole get away with that shit. You weren’tthere, Mo. It wasn’tyour coffin he pissed on. My own house! This whippersnapper has the nerve to bust into my own house and try and muscle me around! Well, Jules Duchon don’t knuckle under to nobody. The High Krewe’ll tell that little snot-nose where to get off. You gonna give me that address or not?”

Maureen’s voice dropped fifty degrees. Celsius. “If you’re so bound and determined to make an ass of yourself, heaven forbid I should stand in the way. Just don’t come crying to me after those buzzards give you the bum’s rush.”

She gave Jules the address he was looking for. He wrote it down on a ragged little pad of paper. She volunteered some additional information, the lines of a poem that would act as a code to get him through the gate.

She grabbed the pad away from him once he was done writing and checked it for accuracy. “All right.” She flung it back at him. “Now get the hell out.”

Jules felt a great, big lump grow in his throat. He didn’t want it to end like this. Until he’d actually been sitting across from her, he’d barely realized just how much he’d been looking forward to seeing her again. “Look, Mo, about what you said before-y’know, layin‘ off the colored victims… I’ll think about it, okay? One way or another, I’m gonna slim down. For you and me both. Have a little faith in me. Just alittle. Huh?”

Her voice was flat as a bottle of Big Shot soda left open for a week. “Sure, Jules. You’ll come back in a year. Or five years, or ten. And you’ll be bigger than a house. We’ll both be. The people around here eat the most fattening crap in the world. And we eatthem. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’ll stay. Good night.”

He could tell from her voice that there was nothing more he could say. He scooted back from the table, which was poking painfully into his liver. He pantomimed a tip of his hat to Maureen, but she had already turned away and started walking back to the stage door.

Jules tried shrugging his shoulders. The gesture felt false, somehow. He started shuffling toward the exit. At least those damn stairs would be easier to get down than they’d been to get up.

He was halfway to the door when he heard her voice behind him. “Jules. It’s a different world out there than it used to be. Watch your ass, honey. Okay?”

Leaning on his cane, he swiveled back around and smiled a winning smile. “As big as my ass is, baby, it’s impossiblenot to watch it!”

He was pleased with himself. That had been a good line to exit by. But as he made his way cautiously down the steep steps, her parting words of warning made him uneasy. And unlike a crotch itch, the uneasiness wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he scratched it.

Next stop, Bamboo Road,Jules thought to himself.

In all his years as a cabdriver, he’d never had the opportunity to drop a fare off on Bamboo Road. Not too surprising-the folks who could afford to live there either drove their own imported luxury cars or hired chauffeurs to drive them.

As he neared the address, he drove past acres and acres of aboveground marble crypts. Metairie Cemetery was the largest, most elaborate “city of the dead” in all New Orleans. Its crypts and miniature cathedrals housed the earthly remains of Confederate heroes, several mayors and governors, and much of the royalty of the Krewes of Rex, Comus, and Proteus. Jules estimated that even the smallest crypt in Metairie Cemetery was worth more than all the houses on his block of Montegut Street added together. Here and on neighboring Bamboo Road, the dead did well for themselves.

Jules turned off Metairie Road onto the loose gravel path, shadowed by ancient oak trees, that led to his destination. He parked his Caddy a dozen yards from where the path ended at an iron gate. Perhaps it was due to the abundance of trees and shrubs that lined the drive, but the air became tangibly cooler as Jules approached the lordly stone wall that surrounded the mansion and its outlying buildings and gardens.