Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

The cabby weaved around a pair of dogs chasing each other across St. Claude Avenue. Jules watched them sniff each other. Dogs. The neighborhood was full of stray dogs. They would’ve found the body by now. And if dogs had discovered the body, then people wouldn’t be far behind. People who might call cops. Cops meant crime reporters. Crime reporters meant newspaper stories, which meant the whole damn city would know. Including Malice X.

They were next to the alleyway now. Maybe he still had a chance to fix his boneheaded mistake. “Hey. Let me off here.”

The cabby’s dark eyes questioned him from the rearview mirror. “This not Montegut Street.”

“I changed my fuckin‘ mind, okay?”

The cabby jammed on his brakes, screeching the cab to a ragged halt. “This a bad neighborhood, mister. But it your ass, huh?”

Jules threw the man a five-dollar bill from his newly retrieved wallet and stumbled out onto the curb. The cab roared away in a shower of gravel and flattened malt liquor cans. Another fire truck raced past, sirens echoing off clapboard buildings. The sound made Jules’s spine quiver.

Heart pounding, Jules entered the alleyway. He didn’t have to walk far to confirm his dreaded suspicions.

Shit.

The far end of the alley was roped off with yellow plastic police barriers. The body was gone. Its place on the filthy asphalt was marked with a chalk outline that looked ludicrously like a plump kindergarten child’s self-portrait.

Shit, shit, shit!

He had to get home. He had to figure this thing out, figure all the angles. His shirt clung to his fleshy sides like damp toilet paper. Looking down, he saw that his jacket had two huge crescent-shaped maroon stains under its sleeves. He had to have time to think. Was that so much to ask, time to think?

He walked quickly out of the alleyway. Off to the south, in the direction of the river, low clouds reflected a dull orange glow.(The fire?) He had to get home.(Please don’t let it be my house.) Mother would tell him what to do. He’d stand in his living room and stare at her portrait and after a couple of minutes the answers to everything would pop into his head. Mother knew all the angles. She was smart, even smarter than Maureen.

Oh please oh please don’t let it be my house.

Sirens pierced the air, growing louder the closer Jules came to the levee. He found himself running. His great belly sloshed up and down like a water bed in an earthquake. The gray sky ahead of him flashed with drifting sparks. Faster. He’d fix it. He’d fix everything. His heart beat like a crazed metronome. Like Gene Krupa’s right hand. Like a jackhammer made of scared meat.

He turned the corner onto Montegut Street, wheezing, praying to Varney and Jesus and Moses and Mary and any other deity he could think of that some crackhead had torched the abandoned Wilson place. Or the old Giusseppe house. Or that little shithole of a bar that the cops had closed down four times since last Christmas.

He should’ve saved the energy. His house and everything in it, including Jules’s graffiti- and urine-stained coffin, were engulfed in lurid orange flames.

“My record collection! My pulps! Aaahhhhhhh!!!”

“Sir, you can’t cross the line- Sir!Hey! Somebody stop that big lunatic!”

Jules bludgeoned aside a cop and a pair of sooty-faced firemen on his mad charge across the lawn to his front steps. Like a maddened rhino, he was almost impossible to stop once he got up to speed. Belying his bulk, Jules sprang up his front steps in two bounds. He struggled through the wreckage of his front door, smashed in by firemen’s axes. He was suddenly caught in the streams of two high-pressure hoses, but the force of the twin torrents only added to his momentum, shoving him through the smoke-blackened doorway like an immense plaid beach ball pummeled by a giant wave.

His sport coat and pants reduced to dripping rags, Jules didn’t feel the heat surging through his living room at first. The flames, the smoke, his tearing eyes-none of it seemed real. His sagging couch ignited, and a gust of superheated air slammed the reality of the conflagration in his face. The greedy flames leapt across mildew-stained cushions to the pile of musty afghans his mother had knit over a span of ten thousand radio-filled nights. The old blankets lit up like drought-parched saw grass.

“Jesusfuckin‘ Christ!” Sparks landed on Jules’s eyebrows. His nostrils were filled with the stench of his own burning hair. He slapped his forehead wildly, looking like a clumsy comedian trying out for the role of a fourth Stooge. What to save? Whatcould he save? The library was a lost cause. He stumbled across the burning sofa and reached for his gramophone, a priceless antique. But as soon as he managed to get a firm grip on its walnut base, the gramophone’s horn, made of highly flammable lacquer, lit up like a Roman candle.

“Fuck!”He dropped the gramophone and shoved his burned fingers into his mouth. His records! Maybe he still had a chance to save some of them. Maybe just the most valuable ones-?Maybe whatever the hell you can get your singed paws on, you stupid fucker. Go! He dropped to his knees and crawled furiously in the direction of the oak cabinet where he stored his most valuable and rare platters. Armstrong. Teagarden. King Oliver. The black smoke above his head had gotten as thick as blood left out of the refrigerator overnight, and it dropped lower with each passing second. Could vampires asphyxiate? Jules didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out the hard way.

He was crawling blind, navigating his cluttered living room by a hundred-plus years of memory. His head smashed into something hard but hollow. The cabinet. He pulled the oak doors open and reached inside.

His throbbing fingers flipped sightlessly through endless dozens of LPs.Not the vinyl! The old stuff! The old stuff! Which shelf were his oldest platters on? Which side of the cabinet?

His feet and calves felt as if they were in an oven. But at last his fingers brushed against the stiff cloth and cardboard casings of his oldest records. As fast as he could manage, he pulled out as many of the thick platters as he could grasp, piling them on the floor near his knees.

“There he is! I see him!”

“Where?”

“Over there, in the corner!”

Firemen! They’d come in after him! Jules began scooping platters into his bearlike paws, but in his mad hurry sent many sliding across the hot floor.

Rubber boots and padded knees shattered eighty-year-old shellac discs as the firemen crawled toward Jules. “What the hell are you up to, buddy?” the lead fireman shouted. “You’ve got to get the hell outta here!”

“Hey! Look out! Don’t step on those platters!” Jules furiously tried gathering up his records. Some were ominously hot to the touch. “Give me a minute, will ya? Can you guys help me grab these things, maybe?”

“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.