Jules sidled up behind him. Then, in his best George Raft whisper, he hissed into Erato’s ear, “Hey, pal, I hope the only reason your ass is on that seat is to warm it up forme.”
Erato half choked on a mouthful of red beans, then recovered enough to glance over his right shoulder, wiping bean flecks from his chin with his napkin. The anger in his eyes faded when he saw who it was.
“Hey, hey, look what just crawled in! Jules Duch-bag, king of the gypsy cabdrivers hisself!” Erato tossed his napkin onto his plate and turned to the man sitting next to him, a wispy-haired, jowly driver dressed in a shapeless plaid jacket. “Hey, Conrad, push on over, will you? My man Duch-bag needs an end seat, or else he stands around and makes your skin crawl ‘til you get your ass off his fuckin’ stool.”
The other driver’s face puckered into a scowl, but he pushed his plate and coffee cup to his left and moved over. Erato then slid gracefully from the end stool onto the stool Conrad had vacated. He glanced to his right as Jules maneuvered into the space between the end stool and the bar and awkwardly settled his rump onto the round, red vinyl cushion.
“Man, you hurtin‘ my eyes again!” Erato pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket with a flourish. “You get any whiter, you gonna make me go blind, man!”
Jules smoothed the edges of his place mat and straightened the utensils the counter lady set down in front of him. “Yeah, and if you get any blacker, Community Coffee’s gonna grind your ass up and stick it in one a their cans.”
“Ouch! So where you been hiding yourself these past few weeks? I was beginning to think you’d up and left town.”
Jules signaled the counter lady for a cup of java. “Been busy. Trying to get my life in order, y’know?”
“Oh, I hear what you sayin‘. You live and work around these parts, things isbound to get messy now and then.”
“Buddy,messy is too piddly a word for the fix I’m findin‘ myself in. To cut to the chase, I’m hopin’ you can maybe drop me a good lead. You’re always connected to what’s goin‘ on around town.”
Erato nodded sagely. “Pal, you can count on it. Whatever you need. In our line a work, you gottagive good tips toget good tips. What kinda info you need?”
Jules took a sip of coffee. “Business has been shit lately. All I’m getting is these little bumfuck fares that barely pay my gas money. I need an angle.”
“How ‘bout airport fares? That’s a dime clear each way, at least.”
Jules frowned. “You know how hard it is for an independent to land any airport gigs. To grease all the palms I’d have to grease, I’d have to mortgage my goddamn house.”
“Man, haven’t I been tellin‘ you foryears to leave that gypsy shit behind? Join Napoleon Cab already! Management’s decent. They been treatin’ me all right goin‘ on ten years now.”
Jules pushed his empty coffee cup in the counter lady’s general direction. “We been through this already. A hundred times now. I can’t be workin‘ for no boss but myself. I got special needs.”
“Yeah-like keepin‘ that lazy ass a yours in bed all day. So, Mr. Special Needs, what kinda angle you lookin’ for?”
Jules tried to catch the counter lady’s eye, but his curt little wave overshot the mark. A woman sitting by herself at a table across the dining room caught Jules’s wave and met his eyes with her own. A spectacular woman. How could he have failed to notice her when he’d first walked in? She was like a pre-Marilyn Norma Jean, only fifteen dress sizes bigger. Even from the far end of the dining room Jules could see she was perfectly proportioned, every supervoluptuous curve precisely sculpted to awaken the long-dormant beast that slumbered within his loins.
“Hey, Jules? Mission Control to Spaceman Jules. I was askin‘, what kinda angle you lookin’ for, anyway?”
Jules forced himself to refocus on the conversation. “Uh. Yeah. Here’s what I’m lookin‘ for, see. Health nuts. You know the kind. Joggers. Bike riders. Those wackos that swim the Gulf of Mexico and then box fifteen rounds dripping wet. I wanna be the official driver for all the health nuts that come to New Orleans.”
Erato waited for Jules to continue, hanging expectantly for a punch line of some kind. But his large companion looked perfectly serious. “Uh, I don’t get it.”
“Think, Erato! Think! You’re some runner in for a marathon runners’ convention in the Big Easy. You’re booked in one of those swanky hotels downtown. You got a big race comin‘ up next week, after your convention, so you want to stay in shape. You can’t be scarfin’ down all that greasy andouille shit they serve up in the Quarter. You gotta find some healthy chow. But the few healthy restaurants this town’s got are miles from your hotel, in neighborhoods you never heard of. What are you gonna do? Save a few bucks by eatin‘ local and pack on ten pounds? You’re screwed. You got no choice but to open up the wallet and let your friendly, know-it-all cabdriver take you to wherever the alfalfa sprout joints are tucked away.”
Erato stared at Jules with new respect. “Y’know, you ain’t half as dumb as you walk in here lookin‘.”
Jules grinned. “Good thing, huh? So, you heard of any health-nut-type conventions around town?”
Erato rested his stubbly chin on a large, callused fist. His eyes narrowed to dark slits as he accessed his formidable data bank of hearsay, newspaper stories, and talk-radio rumors. Then, just as Jules was wondering if he’d fallen asleep, Erato’s orbits popped open to their full size. “Yeah. I think I got one for you. There’s a convention of river kayakers staying at the Hotel La Boheme, one of them new places on Convention Center Boulevard. If it’s nuts you lookin‘ for, these fellas fit the bill. They’s planning to paddle up the Mississippi all the ways to Natchez or thereabouts.”
Jules leaned against the bar for support as he backed his rump off the stool. The waitress refused to meet his eye; a second cup of coffee was clearly a lost cause tonight. “Yeah, that’s good, that fits the bill. Thanks, Erato. I owe you one. Next bowl of red beans is on me.”
Erato leaned closer and grabbed Jules’s thick arm. “You in the mood to do me a favor, huh? How about gettin‘ into areal car? When you gonna dump that Caddy a yours for aLincoln? My brother-in-law’s in sales at Lamarque Lincoln-Mercury over across the river, in Harvey. He’ll set you up in a Town Car-cherry, nice an’ pretty-and he’ll give you good trade for that hunk a junk a yours, too.”
Jules pulled a dollar from his billfold and tossed it onto the bar, figuring that’d leave the waitress a seven-cent tip. “You know when I’ll drive a Lincoln? When the Streets Department shells out for a fleet of snowplows, that’s when. Thanks for the tip, Erato. Your taste in transportation stinks, as always. Don’t go playing any three-card monte on Bourbon Street, okay?”
“You neither, okay?” Erato’s yellow-toothed grin was quickly obscured by theTimes — Picayunecomics section. “Take care, man. And good luck with your angle.”
“Thanks, pal.”
Jules smiled. His step had a bit of extra spring to it as he turned to leave the diner. Now he had a plan. Plan your work and work your plan, that’s what Mother always said. Without even thinking about it, he chose a path that led him within a French bread’s span of the table occupied by the spectacular woman he’d locked gazes with earlier. He couldn’t help but notice what she was eating. She stabbed a stack of chocolate-chip pancakes as tall as her fork, dipping her fire-engine-red fingernails into fluffy protrusions of whipped cream and blueberry syrup each time she buried her utensil in the mountain of fried batter.
Jules had never seen anyone like her. Not in the flesh, anyhow. She conjured up memories of the Turkish harem girls in the old French paintings at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where Jules’s mother had taken her young son for cultural outings. Her blond hair was like a movie star’s, seductively framing her round, beautiful face. As she carefully raised a wedge of pancake, syrup, and cream to her full lips, touching the white cream with the tip of her tongue before plunging the sweet mass into her mouth, the ceiling li
ghts glinted off the yellow down on her expansive arm; it looked as if she were wearing a sheer golden negligee.
Midchew, she raised her eyes slowly to Jules’s. And winked.
Jules blushed as vividly as Maureen had the night before. During the ride home and for hours afterward, his pants felt even more uncomfortably tight than normal.
The next evening, Jules pulled his Caddy into the taxi line in front of the Hotel La Boheme barely half an hour after the sun had set. He hadn’t wanted to miss the dinner hour-either the conventioneers’ or his own. His hunger had returned with a vengeance. The last few bottles of his reserve blood had gone stale, two days earlier than their estimated expiration date.Damn refrigerator’s on the rag again. One more goddamn thing I got to spend money on. He was hungry and nauseated and a little weak, and he was in a testy mood.
Jules’s disposition improved greatly when he saw who exited the lobby and walked over to his cab. The man sliding into the Caddy’s rear compartment was a little gray at the temples, but his thin T-shirt revealed a rippling set of upper-body muscles. This guy was definitely an athlete. Jules salivated gratefully, anticipating his most healthful meal in years.
He slid open the small window in the plastic shield between the front and rear seats. “You lookin‘ for dinner, pal? I know where all the healthy spots are. A guy like you wants to eat right, right?”
The fare jutted his sharp-nosed face close to the little window. “You know a good place for grilled fish?
Someplace the locals go. I’m sick and tired of tourist traps. Get me the hell away from the French Quarter.“
Jules steered onto the Uptown-bound lanes. “Sure! Bucktown’s where all the locals go. It’s a bit of a haul from here, but the food’s worth it.”
“Yeah. Whatever; as long as it won’t cost me more than fifteen bucks. But don’t take the ‘scenic route,’ okay? Let’s just get there. I get any hungrier, the acid’s gonna eat a hole through the bottom of my stomach.”
Jules stepped on the gas. “I know what you mean, pal. Believe you me, Iknow what you mean.”
Jules was accelerating up the Calliope Street I-10 on-ramp when his passenger rapped angrily on the plastic screen. “Hey! It’s hotter than hell back here! Doesn’t this hack have a/c?”
Uh-oh.Jules hadn’t thought of that. The Caddy’s only a/c vents were in the dashboard. Closed off behind the plastic shield, the backseat must’ve felt like a windowless attic. Jules slid the little sliding window open again. “Sorry about that, buddy. Last few years it’s been open season on cabbies, so the Taxi Cab Bureau made us install these damn plastic gizmos. Let me crack those back windows for you. The air outside’s nice an‘ natural and all.”
Where should he do it? Maybe the levee alongside Bayou St. John? The levee was dark, heavily shadowed by long-limbed oak trees, and the fact that it was a popular lovers’ lane meant that cops normally didn’t molest people who parked by the murky, slow-flowing waterway. On the other hand, choosing a lovers’ lane meant that there would be lovers about. The boat launch at West End?Nix that; too many fishermen snooping around. Jules finally decided upon a small playground he knew of behind a boarded-up refreshments stand along a closed-off section of Lakeshore Drive. It was a more open area than he would’ve preferred, but it should be deserted enough for his purposes.
Jules exited the interstate and headed north toward Lake Pontchartrain. As he turned onto Robert E. Lee Boulevard, he pressed the buttons to close the rear windows. His passenger angrily tapped the plastic shield, but this time Jules kept the window tightly shut.
“Hey! What’d you shut the windows for? You want me to broil back here?”
Jules’s only answer was to press a small jury-rigged stud near the Caddy’s left wheel well with the toe of his shoe. His sharper-than-human hearing detected the low hiss of gas being released into the rear compartment. Stomping the accelerator to race through a yellow light, Jules glanced in his rearview mirror to see how his fare was reacting.
“Jesus! Somethingstinks back here!” The rapping on the plastic divider escalated to a frenzied pounding. “What the fuck’s going on? I’ll report you to the city-aha, aha,a-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The crazed laughter was music to Jules’s ears. So the laughing gas hadn’t been too old after all. Seconds later his passenger slumped unconscious on the backseat, an angelic grin on his previously furious face. Jules depressed the stud on the floor a second time, shutting off the flow. Then he opened the rear windows wide, letting the accumulated gas escape into the humid night. He’d done a very thorough job plugging the open spaces around the shield’s edges, but there was no sense in taking chances. There’d be no fucking up tonight, not like the last time.
Jules turned right and headed through an upscale neighborhood adjacent to Lake Pontchartrain and Lakefront Park. He slowed down to five miles per hour below the speed limit, eager not to attract attention. The portion of Lakeshore Drive at the end of Canal Boulevard was a jumble of broken concrete and dried mud, the result of a project meant to repair the roadway from the ravages of erosion but that seemed to only be making matters worse. Jules cut his headlights, relying on the illumination of a half-melted moon and its shimmering reflections off the lake to slowly maneuver around parked backhoes and haphazardly placed barricades.
The short trip along Lakeshore Drive did the Caddy’s suspension no good. Jules figured at least one strut had given up the ghost by the time he reached his destination. At least his passenger wasn’t awake to complain. He pulled onto the grass and parked between a shuttered refreshment stand and the kiddie play lot behind it, out of sight of the road. His thick fingers fumbled with the key as he shut the ignition. Tonight’s meal couldn’t come too soon. Jules climbed out of the car. The balmy breeze that caressed the fleshy gap between his shirt and distended trousers did little to calm his nerves. He stared at the Lake Pontchartrain wavelets that stretched to the black horizon. Lately he’d been having all his meals near water. Did that mean anything?
The turmoil at the base of his stomach nearly knocked him off his feet, so he wasted no more time in opening the rear door and crawling inside. Too late, he realized that he’d forgotten to move the front seat forward. His shoulders and arms had fit inside the rear compartment without a problem, but now his belly was wedged tightly between the rear seat back and the plastic shield. Only carnivorous desperation gave him the strength to wiggle forward the last few inches to his sleeping fare’s waiting neck. He swore fiercely to himself that this was the last humiliating jam he’d let himself get stuck in. Very soon, he’d parade his body beautiful in front of an appreciative Maureen. Tonight was the first night of the rest of his unlife.
He bit deep, and his mouth quickly filled with warm gore. But the blood didn’t taste right, somehow. It wasn’t just that it was thin and watery, reminding him of tomato soup from a cheap buffet. The flavor was definitely off, like overchlorinated tap water. Drinking it made his nose tickle. His rear molars felt like they were sprouting flowers. Jules paused in wonder as he sensed soft petals wriggling against his tongue. Delicate roots pushed their way through the roof of his mouth and into his sinuses, like spiders made of water vapor. Strange laughter filled his ears, manic and loopy and off-kilter. Jules didn’t like the sound of it. Whoever was laughing seemed to be right in the car with him.I don’t get it, he wondered.What the hell is so damn funny…
Jules awoke to the sound of voices.
“You think it’s a couple of faggots, maybe?”
“I dunno. Hard to tell. I can’t see if the one on the bottom’s a man or a woman. Can you?”
“Jesus Christ! Look at that ass! You ever see anything so fat in all your life?”
Jules forced his eyes open. Flashlight beams probed the Caddy’s interior. He removed his mouth from his passenger’s neck. The man was still breathing, which was a minor miracle, considering the dead weight that had been resting on his chest. Jules tried to back out of the car. He was stuck tight.
Something
blunt and hard prodded his posterior. “Okay, buddy, fun time’s over. Come on out of there.”
The poke of the nightstick really woke Jules up.Shit! It was either cops or Levee Board police. In any case, they’d be sure to ask him why he was drinking a drugged tourist’s blood in a playground in the middle of a no-trespassing zone. He had to get away. But he was trapped! Like a rat!
This last thought gave Jules an idea. He had to make himself smaller. He hadn’t transformed himself in a very, very long time. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Which form would be best? His wolf-shape would scare the bejesus out of the dicks, but there was an equally good possibility that his canine form would find itself no less wedged in than he was now.
Another poke on his helpless rear region. “Come on, pal. We haven’t got all night. Get moving, or we’ll pull you out of there.”
Maybe mist? He’d ooze out of the Caddy in seconds and quickly lose himself in the grass. But his mind flooded with stark terror as he recalled the last time he’d tried turning himself to mist. He’d become such a dense, heavy fog that he’d instantly settled over a field like dew, and he’d barely been able to reincorporate himself and escape back to his coffin before being evaporated by the rising sun.
“Okay, pal. Time’s up.” Hands roughly grasped his foot. “Grab the right leg, Chuck. Fatso’s decided to be cute.”
Just one more choice remained. It was now or never. Jules took a deep breath. He clenched his eyes tightly. He tried to blot out the outside world and concentrate on black, leathery wings, flight, long furry ears “What thehell — ?”
“Some kinda cloud-”
“Hey! Where’d his foot go?”
Jules sensed his body twist and melt. It felt like a cross between a whole-body orgasm and a wisdom tooth extraction-with emphasis on the wisdom tooth extraction. He couldn’t let himself get distracted now, or there was no tellingwhat he’d end up as.Wings! Wings! Wings! Wings!
Fat White Vampire Blues Page 7