Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Dr. Landrieu picked up Jules’s empty cup and saucer and deposited them in the sink. “Well. I’m glad we’ve had this little reunion, Jules. I’ll see you again in fifteen days?”

“Sure thing. I hope these pills’re as good as you say they are.”

Dr. Landrieu led him through the living room to the entrance foyer. “Oh, I suspect you’ll be very pleasantly surprised.”

Jules drove along the edge of the Jewish cemetery until he reached Canal Street. Then he made a right turn toward the French Quarter. No doubt about it, his luck was beginning to turn. By the time he reached the garage across from Maureen’s house, he was already feeling the tinglings of a fresh surge of energy. Shuttling his packages from the Lincoln’s trunk, down the garage’s stairs, up Maureen’s front steps, down her hallway, and up more stairs to the closet she’d assigned him, he could swear that his knees already hurt less than before. His stride had more zing in it. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he felt twenty years younger and two hundred pounds lighter.

He sat for a moment on Maureen’s front stoop, pondering how he should spend the rest of his night. A Lucky Dog vendor wheeled his wiener cart along Bienville Street, and Jules waved and wished him a good evening.

“You want I should fix you a dog, pal?” the vendor asked. He looked to be in his late sixties, with a well-tanned, deeply furrowed but personable face.

“Wish I could, buddy,” Jules answered mournfully, eyeing the bin of wieners and tray of condiments with an expression just short of lust.

“I understand,” the vendor said in a consoling voice. He cocked an ear toward the tiny portable radio he carried on his cart and turned up the volume. His gentle smile faded into a grimace. “You been listening to this crap on the news? Those dopes on the North Shore want that asshole Nathan Knight to get back into politics again.”

“What’s this?”

“You’ve gotta remember Nathan Knight, right?”

“He ran for governor or somethin‘, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, and the bum got his racist ass kicked. But now this committee of ‘concerned citizens’ over there across the lake are trying to convince him to make another run for office. They’re holdin’ a big rally a couple of nights from now.” He shook his head sadly. “People like that give me the willies. I don’t know what your politics are, pal. But me, my folks brought me over from Germany when I was five years old. Just before WW Two. So people like that… well, they give me the willies, is all.”

Jules had never given Nathan Knight and his followers much thought. Or any politics, for that matter. He’d always been too concerned about where his next meal was coming from to pay any attention.

The Lucky Dog vendor switched off his radio. “Sorry I disturbed you. Have a good night.” He hefted the handles of his cart and began moving off down the street. Too late, Jules realized that the man had probably interpreted his lost-in-thought silence as disagreement. He hated the notion that the vendor had pegged him as a Knight supporter. But the man was already halfway down the block.

The scent of boiled wieners lingered in the air. Jules thought some more about what he’d just heard. A huge rally of black-hating white people on the North Shore?Hrrmmm… nowthat smelled like an opportunity. A foul-smelling opportunity, for sure; Jules didn’t relish the thought of associating with people who wouldn’t be caught dead sharing a cup of joe with Erato. But Jules had watched enough trash haulers make a good profit from stuff that stank to know it could be done. He could wash his hands of the whole lot of them after it was all over and his life had returned to normal.

Jules smiled at the ingenuity and sheer audacity of his idea. Maureen had wanted him to come up with a plan of action. Well, he just did.

If Malice X could form his own vampire army, then by golly, so could Jules Duchon.

Action Plan Step One: He needed to find out more about this Nathan Knight rally-when and where it would be held, how many supporters were expected to show.

Action Plan Step Two: As a reward for formulating and accomplishing Action Plan Step One, he needed to do something really nice for himself. Maureen had given Jules some walking-around money. Although he couldn’t even begin to replace his one-of-a-kind record collection, there was another vital personal collection he could begin replenishing. Nudie books. And the best thing about Jules buying new nudie books was that he could accomplish Action Plan Steps One and Two at the same time and in the same place, a valuable saving of effort.

With renewed determination fueled in part by Doc Landrieu’s miracle tablets, Jules walked purposefully in the direction of Royal Tobacco and News, downtown’s most discreet late-night source of newspapers, cigars, and pornography. The walk from Maureen’s stoop to the newsstand was only four and a half blocks, but the streets were shadowed and desolate, mostly comprising warehouses and parking garages unused at night. Ordinarily, Jules wouldn’t have given such surroundings a second thought; or, if he did, he’d be feeling happy twinges of anticipation as he searched for an isolated derelict to drain dry. But tonight, these abandoned blocks felt vaguely menacing. He couldn’t walk more than three steps without glancing back over his shoulder.

Jules sighed with relief when he reached the one hundred block of Royal Street. This stretch of Royal, just off Canal Street, bustled with people. Sure, the people who hung out there tended to have lengthy police records and suffer from unusual venereal diseases, but Jules wasn’t in any mood to be picky about company.

As he walked past the Funland Amusements Arcade, whose window was plastered with anti-loitering signs in seven different languages, a mustachioed black man wearing a fringed buckskin jacket stepped out of the entranceway and blocked the sidewalk.

“Hey, man, you need a prepaid calling card?”

“No,” Jules answered.

“Turkish cigarettes?”

“No.”

“Diet pills? I bought up a good stash of Flabovate just before the FDA banned it, man.”

Jules frowned. “You need a fat lip to go with that big fat hat of yours?”

“Uh, no.” The man faded back into the shadows. Just beyond the arcade’s blinking lights, Jules paused to glance back, wanting to see what rap the huckster would lay on the next sucker to walk by. But the huckster was gone.

Royal Tobacco and News was a narrow, cluttered storefront with a pull-down corrugated metal shutter for a front wall, hardly bigger than a kiosk. It sat next to a bedraggled aid station for foreign sailors; the plastic-wrapped magazines in the back of the newsstand had supplied far more assistance to sailors than any employee of the aid station ever could. Apart from an ever-varying parade of newspapers and magazines, the newsstand had hardly changed in the last fifty years, which was one reason why Jules loved it. Even with its open front, the place smelled like an all-night poker game. It was a home away from home.

The newsstand’s owner and only employee sat in a battered office chair behind a wood-paneled counter, smoking a cigar and reading an issue ofAlfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The small man’s outstanding feature was his nose, which, scarred by a profusion of ulcers and melanomas, bore a startling resemblance to a topographic map of Peru.

“Hey, Philip, how’s it goin‘?” The white-haired owner looked up from his magazine. “Oh, hey, Jules! I was just thinkin’ about you earlier this week.” His badly chapped lips formed a puzzled frown. “Although I’ll be damned to hell if I can remember why.“

“Don’t rack your brain too hard. Say, you got anyTimes-Picayune‘s left?” The salesman cocked a wry eyebrow. “You upgradin’ your class of readin‘ material? Yeah, I got a few left. They’re out in front.“