Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

The chair that Maureen had been taped to was still in the center of the kitchen. The crumpled duct tape and empty dress and stockings offered mute testimony to Maureen’s final, agonized seconds. But Jules wouldn’t let himself think about that.

Almost two hours later, he was nearly done. He had scoured the entrance foyer, the front parlor, the music room, the dining room, and the kitchen. He had moved sofas, tilted an upright piano, and whisked out the corners of long-disused closets. He had beaten the dust out of cushions and rugs, gently blown it from between the ruffled pages of beauty magazines, and even whisked it from the narrow grooves in the soles of his boots.

The vase was filled nearly to its top. He had probably mixed Maureen’s remains with a goodly proportion of ordinary household dust; it simply couldn’t be helped. Now the final part of his chore was before him. The most difficult part-the part that would force him to think about Maureen, the woman, instead of Maureen, the sugar trail. The last thing he had to do was to dislodge those particles of his lover that had remained stuck to the duct tape, and collect whatever dust was still hidden within the folds of Maureen’s undergarments.

Brushing the tape with the whisk broom accomplished nothing. The bent straw only got stuck to the glue itself. Jules had better luck using one of Maureen’s nail files to scrape the dust off, but it was still hard going. Fitting, in a way. Maureen had always been a stubborn woman.

He was almost afraid to touch her panties. Afraid her avenging spirit might incinerate the first male to touch her underwear-too many men; that’s what had led her to this. He lifted them gingerly, like he was handling the Shroud of Turin. A thimbleful of dust was cupped in the cotton panel in the crotch. Jules carefully raised the panties over the vase, then tipped the dust in. He felt self-conscious about what he did next, but he did it anyway. He held the red silk against his nostrils and breathed in deeply. Nothing. Even that was gone. Even her scent had crumpled into dust.

Jules opened several of the drawers beneath her kitchen counter, looking for some aluminum foil to seal up the vase. A small pile of bills and letters was sitting on the countertop. The letter on top of the pile was addressed to him, care of Ms. Maureen Remoulade, cobeneficiary. The letter was from the Claims Department of the First Union Firemen’s Casualty and Insurance Company.

Inside was a check for twenty-one thousand dollars.

The phone rang. Jules yanked the receiver off the wall. “You fuckin‘ sonofabitch,” he said before the caller could utter a sound. “Got impatient, huh? Thought I wasn’t gonna call your fuckin’ chat line? Well, you jumped the gun, asshole-”

“Hello? Jules, is thatyou?”

The voice wasn’t the sneering, somewhat high-pitched voice Jules had been expecting to hear. “Uh… yeah, this is Jules,” he answered, a little embarrassed. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Dr. Marvin Oday. You know, your old morgue buddy? Well, I’ve gotta hand it to you, Jules. You and Dr. Landrieu are quite the kidders. If nothing else, you livened up a slow night by giving me a good laugh.”

Jules tried to decipher this comment, but drew a complete blank. “What are you talkin‘ about?” His mind felt like curdled pudding. “This about those pills I asked you to look at?”

“Those little whiteA pills you gave me? Oh, I’ve looked at ‘em, all right. You really got my curiosity going with all that talk about secret, non-FDA-approved research. I thought maybe my analysis would take a couple of nights, at least. Only took me about ten minutes, though.”

Events were shifting back and forth too fast for Jules to follow. He knew he should feel grateful, but he’d forgotten how. “You know what’s in them pills? That’s great, Marvin; that’s really, yeah, that’s really great. You’ve done me a big favor. So you’ll be able to make more of them for me?”

“The first rule of comedy is never try to squeeze more humor out of a used-up joke. You want more pills? Cough up two bucks and get your butt over to a drugstore. ‘Til next time, Jules-”

“Wait! Marvin, don’t hang up yet! You’ve gotta tell me what’s in those pills!”

The receiver was silent for a couple of seconds. “Hold on-you mean Dr. Landrieu didn’t let you in on the joke?”

“Whatjoke?” Jules cried, totally exasperated. “What the hell is in the damn pills?”

“Aspirin, man. Ordinary, generic table aspirin.”

Jules mumbled good-bye to his old coworker and hung up the phone. He went into the dining room and sat down, resting his elbows on the table and leaning his forehead against his hands.Aspirin. Ordinary table aspirin. That’s what had stripped the years off his weary, weight-burdened body?That’s what had canceled the shooting pains in his knees, restored wind to his lungs and strength to his biceps?

It didn’t seem possible. Ordinary, common aspirin. But it had worked. It had worked just like Doc Landrieu had told him it would. Jules had no doubt about that. Maybe there was more to aspirin than just headache and hangover relief. Studies had recently shown it could prevent heart attack victims from suffering a second attack. Maybe his ex-boss had discovered more about aspirin than was commonly known?

Another notion occurred to Jules. Maybe Doc Landrieu had discovered more aboutJules than Jules had known. Maybe the pills hadn’t done the work at all. Maybe what had really done the work had been his own trust, his ownbelief that the pills would help him.

A placebo. Doc Landrieu had slipped him a placebo. That rotten bastard. Here Jules had trusted him, believed in him, and his old boss had abused that trust, twisted him around his pinkie finger just so he could get Jules to reconsider moving with him down to Argentina Jules barely had time to work a good mad up before the delayed-action epiphany kicked him in the head like the business end of a French Quarter mule:

It wasn’t the pills at all. It wasme. It’salwaysbeen me.

Everything Doodlebug had tried to convince him of was true. Jules had been transforming into a wolf with a barrel-belly because that was the only kind of wolf he’d believed he could become. He hadn’t flown in years because he’d lost faith in his ability to leave the ground. He’d suffered from aches and pains and shortness of breath for decades, all because an unending stream of newspaper articles and TV shows had told him a person of his sizehad to suffer these things.

None of it had been necessary. Maybe it had been safe and comforting… he’d always had a ready excuse at hand whenever he screwed up. But those excuses were a part of his old, familiar self that should’ve burned up when his house did.

His form and his fate were in his own hands.

He was 450 pounds of Grade-A, USDA-choice vampire. It was time he started acting it.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number from the tape. An unfamiliar voice answered.

“Get me your boss,” Jules said. “Tell him it’s the fat man.”

Two minutes later, Malice X came on the line. “I guess you figured out which end of the tape to stick in the machine, huh?“

Jules briefly considered five or six snappy comebacks. But he was in no mood for banter, clever or otherwise. “You and me, Malice. Let’s do it. Let’s get this shit over with.”

“Whoa-ho-ho!You soundserious, man. But I guess losin‘ a friend and a lover in one night can do that to a guy. Just name your time and place, Julio.“

“Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. Your place.”

“You mean where I live?”

“Whatever hole in the ground you crawl into at the end of the night.”

Malice X laughed. “You hit closer to the truth than you know, man. How come my house? Not that I mind, but you’ve got me curious.“