Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“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.