Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“Oh yeah.” She turned around toward him. “What’s it like, drivin‘ a cab for a livin’? You like it?”

Jules turned the music down a smidgin. He regretted having started a conversation. It never seemed right, somehow, getting too friendly with his meals. “It’s all right, I guess. It’s a living.”

“You always done this?”

“Naw. I used to work in the coroner’s office. Did it for years. Now there was a sweet job.Lots of on-the-job bennies. But then my boss couldn’t get himself elected no more, and the new guy wanted to bring in his own people. So after twenty-seven years, I was out on my ass.”

Jules went quiet. The bitterness of that memory seeped out of his head and into the car, turning the air-conditioned atmosphere somber. His boss at the city coroner’s office had been maybe the best friend he’d ever had. Doc Landrieu had known almost from the start exactly what Jules was, and for decades he’d looked the other way while Jules discreetly satisfied his appetites with the blood of the recently deceased. Life was so sweet then. He’d had his meal ticket, in every sense of the word. But the city was constantly changing; longtime residents moved out to the ‘burbs, and the new people didn’t vote the same. Nothing ever stayed the same, he’d found. At least nothing good.

B.B. King came on the radio, singing “The Blues Is All Right.” It was a song about being sad, but the way B.B. sang it, so enthusiastic and joyful and glad about being alive, Jules felt his sour mood evaporate. He began drumming his fingers on the steering wheel again. The Caddy passed beneath the sign for Interstate 55, and Jules took the turnoff that would lead him north to Lake Maurepas.

At that late hour, the elevated highway was deserted. The Caddy was an isolated blob of light gliding swiftly above a slumbering landscape of cypress tree stumps and wooden fishing shacks. Alligators silently stalked nutria, plump water rats, through a maze of swamp grass. Jules carefully watched for his favorite exit, a fishermen’s route to a narrow dirt road by the water, half a mile from the closest camp. He spotted it, then gingerly braked the Caddy to a near crawl and aimed its big white hood down the off-ramp.

Jules felt Bessie’s hand squeeze his thigh. “We near your place, huh?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “But you’re gonna kill me. I just remembered that I left the keys to my camp back at my house in town.”

Her hand immediately left his thigh. “You did what? What’n hell we gonna do now?”

Damp gravel crunched beneath the Caddy’s whitewall tires as Jules parked close to the turbid water’s edge. “Don’t sweat it, baby. Cab’s got a backseat as big as Alaska. Nobody’s gonna bother us out here. It’ll be just like we’re inside the cabin. I promise.”

“Shee-yit. I does all my lovin‘ in the backseat of a damn car.”

Jules cut the ignition. “Hey, at least dinner was A-One, huh?”

“Yeah, you right,” she reluctantly admitted. “Dinner was plenty good.”

Jules turned the key just enough to keep the radio and power accessories running, then opened his door and lowered himself slowly to the gravel. The air was surprisingly cool; Jules figured it must be their proximity to all the water. “You’re gonna have to get out for a bit. Takes me a minute to move the seat all the way forward.”

Bessie didn’t budge. “Ain’t no snakes around here, is there?”

Jules sighed heavily. By now, he was shaking with hunger, and all the coffee he’d drunk felt like acid at the bottom of his stomach. “No, baby. And if therewere any around, the car would’ve scared ‘em all off. C’mon now.”

Bessie slowly swung her door open and tiptoed down to the ground. Jules pressed a switch on the door sill, and the electric seat groaned into life, moving forward at the pace of continental drift. Two minutes later it had gone as far as it could, the seat cushion mashing into the dashboard.

“Can I get back in now?”

Jules walked around to the back of the car. “Just another minute, okay?” He opened the trunk and removed a folded plastic tarp and a sheet-cake-sized foil baking pan. Then he opened the driver-side rear door and awkwardly spread the plastic tarp over the seat. The baking pan he placed on the floor.

Jules walked around to the other side and opened the back door for Bessie. “What’s that plastic wrap doin‘ there?” she asked, her voice more than a little petulant.

“Them’s genuine cowhide leather seating surfaces. Gotta take good care of them, or they won’t look worth a shit. Didn’t your mama used to put slipcovers on her good couch? Same principle here. Big folks like you and me, we’re liable to make quite a mess when we’re doin‘ our business. Gotta take care of the seats.”

Bessie turned up her nose, but she obligingly crawled onto the tarp-covered seat, dumping her Mardi Gras beads on the floor. Even with the front bench kissing the steering wheel, it was still a snug fit. While she was squirming to make herself more comfortable, her hand brushed against the baking pan. “And what’sthis here thing doin‘ here for?”

Jules peered into the dark space. “What’s that? Well, I’ll be damned. Some dumb-ass customer must’ve left that there earlier this evening. Well, guess it won’t do us no harm.”

Jules waited until Bessie stopped squirming, then he commenced the arduous task of climbing in on top of her. Trying to slide forward, grasping for handholds, was like struggling to scale a woman-shaped mountain of Jell-O.

“Hey! Watch with the knee, buster!”

“Sorry, baby.”

Finally, his overtaxed heart pounding from exertion, Jules reached what he figured was his optimal position. His cold nose nuzzled Bessie’s warm, fragrant neck. Jules tried to sort out the different elements that made up her scent. Cinnamon, for sure. A hint of chocolate, or maybe cocoa butter. And unmistakably, the smoked tang of the sausage she’d eaten an hour before. He kissed her neck, his salivary glands working double time.Ah, bless you, New Orleans… greatest food in the whole goddamn world…

“Oohh baby,” Bessie cooed, “you be shakin‘ all over-”

“Yeah, baby, it’s been too long, it’s beenway too long-”

Aretha Franklin’s voice boomed from six speakers, declaring to all Manchac swamp,“What you want, baby I got it!” Jules surrendered to his appetite, a desperate, living hunger that knew it would soon be sated. He nibbled her now moist neck, searching out her jugular vein. He couldn’t find it. He nibbled harder, frantic, but all he could sense was flesh and more flesh, a nigh-impregnable collar of blubber.

“Oohh baby, the way you bitin‘, you mylover — man, baby.”

“Yeah, baby, sure,” Jules stuttered, his voice laced with real terror.

Bessie shifted beneath him. “But how we gonna get all these clothes off now? The way you got us jammed in here, we’s like pig’s feet in a full-up jar. I can’t move hardly nothin‘-”

“Uh, you letme worry about that, huh?”Shit! He had to think of something. He honestly didn’t think he had the strength left to make it back to the city and start all over again. His armpits were soaked with sweat, despite the cool breeze that blew up the back of his shirt through the open door. He kissed her neck mechanically, his mind racing. She moaned again, louder this time, and the flesh of her neck shimmied beneath his parched lips. Then he had an idea. A desperate ploy, but it might just work. He reached his hand under her dress, praying that he remembered where everything was. Her legs parted slightly, but there was still a formidable obstacle course for his thick fingers to overcome. It was like playing blindman’s bluff in quicksand. Okay, there were her panties; he was moving in the right direction. Please,please let him remember Bingo! He must’ve hit the magic spot, because her moaning took on a new, deeper timbre, and her back and neck arched with pleasure. Suddenly, her neck had contours-her thick jugular appeared through the flab like Atlantis rising from the deep. Instantly, before it could submerge again, Jules bit deep.