Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“Holy Christmas, Mo… if I were Eldo Rado,I’d hate me, too.”

“What? What are you saying? That this is somehow allmy fault? Is that it? Well, a girl’s gotta talk about something, doesn’t she? It can’t just bewham-bam-thank-you-ma’am every night-he didn’ttalk, Jules! Do you understand? I had to do the talking forboth of us!”

“Yeah, I understand, baby. Perfectly.” He turned to Doodlebug. “Let’s get outta here. She ain’t gonna tell us anything more useful. Maybe I should just hang out at my usual spots and let him come to us.”

Maureen grabbed his hand as he tried extricating himself from the couch. “Jules! Don’t go yet. I want to be helpful, Jules. I’m trying so hard. I have papers for you to sign! Insurance papers so you can get some money for your house! I went to the safe deposit box at the Whitney Bank. I still had the key from years and years ago. From when we were like a married couple, and you trusted me with everything. Ever since your mother was still alive, the bank’s been sending a check from your account every month to the insurance company-”

Jules headed for the door, or tried to. “What good’s money gonna do me if I end up with a stake jabbed through my ticker?”

Maureen dragged him over to the dining room table, where she had the insurance papers laid out. “Just sign them!” She forced a pen into his paw. “What can it hurt? Maybe you can get yourself another Cadillac. Maybe you can replace some of those old jazz records you lost. As coexecutor, I’ve already filled out everything I could. I made X’s everyplace you need to sign. See? Right there-”

Jules reluctantly signed everywhere Maureen had made a big purple X. Doodlebug joined them at the table. “Maureen, anything else you remember could be of vital importance to us. Do you recall any distinctive clothing he wore? Maybe a shirt with the logo of a favorite bar? A jacket with a school mascot on it?”

Maureen sat despondently at the table and leaned her head on her fists. “I’ve tried, I’ve tried sohard, but I just can’t remember… Wait. Wait just a minute! Therewas a jacket. A jacket he used to wear lots of times. It was from some school. It had a bird on it!”

Jules scowled as he continued to sign. “Oh, that’s real helpful, Mo. A bird. There are only-what? Ten thousand different kinds a birds? Was it a parrot? A chicken hawk? A hummingbird, maybe?”

“I’m not an expert onbirds!”

“Do you remember what color the bird was?” Doodlebug gently asked.

“Umm… blue, I think. No, I’msure. It was blue and white.”

“A bluebird? A blue jay?”

“A blue jay, I guess. That sounds right.”

“Jesuit,” Jules mumbled. “What was that fucker doin‘ with a jacket from Jesuit High School?”

“That’sit!” Maureen cried. “I remember now! He told me he went to Jesuit! The priests gave him a special scholarship! He played on one of the sports teams… not football or basketball. Maybe the bowling team?“

Doodlebug’s face brightened. “If we could get our hands on the right yearbook-”

Jules completed the thought. “We could learn his real name.”

“Just one problem. It’s summer. All the schools are out of session.”

“But they open up on Monday nights,” Maureen interjected. “All the Catholic schools. During the summer they do open houses on Monday nights, so parents who are looking for a school for their kids can check them out.”

“How do you know?” Jules asked suspiciously. “When was the last timeyou sent a kid to Catholic school?“

“It just so happens that one of my regulars at Jezebel’s has a thing for Catholic schoolgirls. Summer is his favorite time of year. He pretends to have a daughter and he goes to all the girls’ schools’ open houses on Mondays and ogles the students. I can’t tell you how many times he’s begged me to use a school uniform in my act. It’s simply impossible to find those plaid skirts in my size.”

“Monday nights, huh? That’s tomorrow.” A broad grin spread slowly across Jules’s face. “Doodlebug, ol‘ pal, I think it’s high time we look into gettin’ you that high school education I made ya miss fifty years ago.”

“But Jesuit’s a boys’ school, isn’t it?”

“Heh. That’s right, slugger.”

“I feel perfectlyhideous,” Doodlebug muttered.

Jules pulled alongside the curb in front of the Banks Street Bar and Grill, two blocks west of Jesuit High School. The tremendous crush of parents and potential enrollees who’d come out for the school’s open house prevented him from parking any closer. “Shaddup already. You got no reason to be whinin‘. I let you pick out your own outfit at Wal-Mart, didn’t I?”

“And a fat lot of good that freedom of choice did me. Ye gods… even their Women’s Department was filled with the most awful grotesqueries imaginable. But the Boys’ Department-that shapeless denim, those threadbare sports logo T-shirts-all I can say is, I pray it’ll beanother forty-eight years before I shop for boys’ clothing again. And must I wear this ridiculous baseball cap?”

Jules climbed out of the car onto pavement so broken and tilted it looked like the floor of a fun house. “It’s either that or chop off your hair, pal.”

“But plenty of boys wear their hair long nowadays.”

“Not at Jesuit they don’t.”

They walked toward the imposing three-story brick edifices that overwhelmed Banks Street. In contrast to the Catholic grandeur of the school buildings, the surrounding houses were tired and dingy, leaning wearily shoulder to shoulder like a police roundup of overworked hookers crowded into a freight elevator.

They walked into the main academic building and were immediately immersed in a sea of anxious parents, overfriendly faculty, and too-bored-for-words pubescents. Doodlebug stared coldly at the current Jesuit students, standing around nonchalantly in their light brown, paramilitary-looking uniforms.

“What a perfect bunch of Fascists-in-training,” he whispered harshly to Jules. “Cannon fodder for the next Nathan Knight campaign. And the Jesuits are supposedly theintellectuals of the Catholic Church? This descent into the inferno makes me evenmore grateful to you for making me miss high school.”

Jules spotted a nun in the crowd. He grabbed Doodlebug’s sleeve and pulled him over to her. “ ‘Scuse me, Sister. My boy and me wanna take a look at your library. Can you maybe point us in the right direction?”

“Oh, you must mean our Resource Center!”

“Yeah, I guess so. That where you got yer books and stuff?”

“Oh, sir, our Resource Center has much more than justbooks! It’s also our computer hub, audiovisual lab, and creative graphics shop. It’s one of the finest knowledge facilities of any high school in the South. We’re very,very proud of our Resource Center.”

“Yeah, I can see that. So where is it?”

“Just take those stairs at the end of the hall to the second floor, then turn right. Or we have an elevator just around that corner there.”

“We’ll take the stairs. Thanks, Sister. Have a swell summer.”

The short nun sniffed the air like a groundhog emerging from its hole on the first day of spring. “Say, do you smell somethingburning?”

Jules was already pulling his companion down the crowded hall. He grimaced, then cuffed the side of Doodlebug’s head. “D.B.! Put out that damn cigarette!”

They ducked into the stairwell. Both vampires sighed with relief. Jules headed straight for a water fountain tucked in the corner and splashed cold liquid down the neck of his shirt, dousing his smoldering skin.

“You justhad to chat up a nun, didn’t you?” Doodlebug said, fanning his burning arms. “I didn’t appreciate that whack to the head, by the way.”