Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

He had no idea where the sweeper had stopped. He didn’t even know whether the sun was up or down. But a quick reflection upon whatelse might come hurtling down the sweeper’s tube to mingle with his atoms convinced him to make the effort. Any fate was better than intermixing with the disgusting slurry that collected in the gutters of Bourbon Street.

The horror of that thought popped him quickly back to human form. His head and one leg protruded through the sweeper’s canvas bag. He quickly realized that the sweeper was still inside the parking garage; Jules figured the operator had left for a coffee break. A minor application of his strength allowed him to push his other leg and both arms through the bag, which-when torn away from the sweeping apparatus-became a rustic, but serviceable, coverall.

Jules crawled to the front entrance of the parking garage, doing his best to stay out of sight. The sun hadn’t come up yet, thank goodness. The absence of light across the street at Maureen’s house meant she hadn’t come home from her shift yet. So it couldn’t be any later than fourA.M.

He cautiously peered up and down the street, looking for any sign of his pursuers. The street seemed deserted. He considered his options. The parking garage was too open to serve as an effective hiding place while he waited for Maureen to come home. The best thing for him to do, he decided, was to squeeze himself into the crawl space beneath Maureen’s house and hide behind her front stoop.

He’d managed to shove about two-thirds of his body beneath her front steps when he heard a very familiar, very agitated voice behind him.

“Well, Jules, I hate to say I told you so.But I told you so! ”

His already cool blood ran even colder. Facing Maureen’s scornful fury was more ball-shriveling than being hunted by dozens of Malice X’s thugs.

“You justhad to go out, didn’t you?” she continued. “You couldn’t even stay inside for, what-six lousy hours? Why do I even bother trying with you?”

He tried turning around to face her, but the space beneath her steps was a tight fit. “Mo, honey, I can explain everything-”

“Oh, I’msure you can! How about we start with the reason you’re wearing a ripped-up sack instead of your clothes? Let’s see… you donated your ensemble to some sweet old five-hundred-pound homeless man, right? Or you just landed a role as an extra in a caveman picture, and the producers were too cheap to provide you with a bearskin-”

“Can I maybe get a word in edgewise here?”

“No!”

“I’m glad you’re being so reasonable, baby. You think maybe we could continue this inside?”

“Why? Am I embarrassing you? Is itpossible for me to embarrass you worse than you’ve already embarrassed yourself?”

“Probably-eh! — not.” Jules managed to back his way out of the crawl space. He dusted the mud off his hands and knees, then glanced nervously up and down the block. “Look, honey, I enjoy an open-air humiliation as much as the next guy, but it’s just not safe for us to be out here right now. Can weplease go inside?”

Maureen blocked the door with the formidable barricade of her body. “Not until you promise to tell me exactly what you’ve been up to tonight. And don’t even try to bullshit me-when it comes to you, my bullshit detector’s as sensitive as a just-circumcised pecker.”

Jules peered fearfully up the deserted street. “All right! I promise! I promise!”

Maureen unlocked the door and stalked into her kitchen. She flung open her refrigerator door, grabbed a glass milk container filled with blood, and took a long, deep slug straight from the bottle. Pointedly, she didn’t offer Jules a drink before slamming the refrigerator door shut again.

“Tell me,” she said.

Jules cautiously sat himself opposite her, careful to keep the table between them. “Well, since you hafta know, I was out doin‘ some research.“

“What kind of research?”

“Research on recruitin‘ an army.”

“What?”

Jules told her about his brainstorm. Maureen’s face remained strangely expressionless, almost dazed. Hoping to curry favor by reassuring her that he was taking good and prudent care of his health, he also mentioned his acquisition of the miracle antidiabetes pills.

Maureen sank heavily onto a kitchen chair. “The rest. Out with it. Considering how I found you dressed and where you were, that can’t beall you were up to tonight.”

“Uh, well, yeah…” Jules paused before mustering enough courage to continue. “I got jumped by a few of Malice X’s thugs. But don’t worry-I managed to give ‘em the slip.”

Maureen sighed and slowly shook her head. “From bad to worse.” She leaned her forehead against her hand, leaving her palmprints’s impression in her thick makeup. “So now he knows you’re back in town. It’s amazing what you’ve been able to accomplish in a single unchaperoned evening.”

She rose from the table and walked crisply from the room.

Jules had steeled himself for a screaming fit. But seeing her leave was even more alarming. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to do something I should’ve done the instant you arrived on my doorstep,” she shouted from the next room.

Jules overheard the distinct tones of a long-distance number being dialed on a push-button phone. He quickly followed her into her living room. “Who are you callin‘?”

Maureen finished punching in the number from her red leather-covered phone directory. “It’s obvious that you are too headstrong, unpredictable, and stupid to be left unsupervised. Unfortunately, my work makes it impossible for me to be your full-time nanny. So I’m calling someone who can hopefully keep you from getting yourself permanently extinguished.”

“Who?”

“Do the initialsD.B. mean anything to you?”

It took a few seconds to register, but when it did, Jules’s face turned purple in a hurry. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare call him!”

Maureen smiled tightly. “Oh, but I just did. And it sounds like he’s picking up. Yes, here he is now-”

“Put that phone down!”

Maureen tensed her free hand into a menacing claw and waved Jules away. “Hello, Doodlebug? You’ll never guess who this is-yes, that’sright! I’m amazed you still recognize my voice, honey. Iknow it’s been ages! How the hell are you?”

Jules squared his shoulders and took two hulking steps forward. “Maureen, this is the last straw! Either you hang up that phone right now, or I’m outta here. Hear me? Keep talkin‘ to that little nutcase, and you’ll force me to walk right out the door.”

Maureen’s smile remained stiffly frozen on her face. “Oh, that’swonderful, Doodlebug! Look, could you hold on just a minute? I’ve got a visitor here, another person from your past, and he’sunpardonably impatient to speak with me.”

She put her hand over the phone’s speaking end. All traces of a smile immediately melted from her countenance. “You want to walk out the door, Jules? Be my guest. Better yet-don’tbe my guest! Just go. My watch says you’ve got about fifty minutes to sunrise. If you intend to sleep anywhere outside this house, I suggest you get busy. Oh, and while you’re tending to your sleeping arrangements, please don’t forget to give my best to your playmates from the projects.”

Jules knew when he’d been nailed. And she’d just nailed his feet to the hardwood floor. His bluff twitched briefly, then stiffened into rigor mortis. Unable to think of a single word in reply, he stalked out of the room. Behind him, Maureen resumed her conversation. “Oh, I’m so sorry, thank you for being patient. Yes. He was suffering from a bit of stomach upset, the poor dear…”

Scowling under his breath, Jules climbed the stairs to Maureen’s bedroom, a windowless room set in the middle of the second floor. Apart from an impressively large flat-panel television, the only piece of furniture in the high-ceilinged room was a custom-built double-king-sized water bed. This monumental contrivance sat low to the ground in the midst of a neatly combed plot of earth, which was planted with a variety of night-blooming flowers. The orderliness of the indoor garden was marred somewhat by the uneven mounds of dirt Jules had taken earlier from his car’s trunk and dumped around the bed.