Panting heavily, he reached her home on Bienville Street. Home base! He was safe! He’d duck behind that thick door, crawl up into the attic, and they wouldn’t find him in a thousand lifetimes.
Then he realized he had one small problem. His key was in the pocket of his trench coat. And Maureen wouldn’t be home for at least another three hours.
Shivering from exertion, he squirmed through broken masonry and bent chicken wire into the wet, muddy crawl space beneath her house. He had no choice but to hide in the damp darkness until Maureen came home from her shift at Jezebel’s Joy Room.
He crawled behind an ancient, rotting Jax Beer shipping crate and dug a shallow hole in the dirt for his belly so he could rest more comfortably. Those bastards! They’d cost him the last copy ofBig Cheeks Pictorial! Maybe tomorrow night it’d still be lying in the alleyway where he’d dropped it?… Naw, that was too much to hope for; some bum would stumble on it and praise the Lord for his good fortune.
Voices-maybe two blocks away. His pursuers? Jules perked up his amazingly sensitive ears and listened.
“-think he came back this way.”
“You sure?”
“Man, this place got more nooks an‘ crannies than my ol’ lady’s ass. He could be hidin‘ anywheres.”
“I tell you what then. It take a wolf to catch a wolf. Take yo‘ clothes off an’ change.”
“Whyme? I hate doin‘ that shit.”
“Why you? ‘Cause I’stellin’ you, that’s why. Now strip, suckah.”
“Can’t Leroy do it?”
“Did I tellLeroy to do it? Whatchu complainin‘ ’bout, anyhows? Yo‘ suit’s drippin’ with wolf piss. You oughtta behappy to get outta them rags, man.”
“Aww, fuck, all right then…”
Uh-oh.This meant big trouble. A fellow wolf would sniff him out in no time. What now? He was too tired to give them much of a chase again. And where could he run to, anyhow? To the Trolley Stop? No. They’d catch him before he got even three blocks uptown.
The only solution was to become something without a scent. Jules knew whatthat meant. And the thought gave him cold shivers. The last time he’d transformed into mist, he’d almost died. In mist form, he had virtually no control over his body at all. The wind could take him anywhere. In the very worst scenario, he could become so dispersed that he’d be unable to transmute back to human form before deadly sunrise.
Not far away, a human moan of pain slowly transmogrified into a wolf’s guttural snarl. It was now or never. Possible death by dispersal versus certain death by a stake through his heart. No choice at all, really.
Jules concentrated on memories from ninety years ago, from before he’d become a vampire, when he could still go outside early on a Sunday morning and greet the sun. Memories of climbing the levee outside his house and watching the thick blanket of river mist swirl and coalesce over the Mississippi like a jealous and loving thing.
“Hey, Leroy, I think yo‘ bud’s caught a scent already!”
“Yeah, lookit him go!”
Gray hairs melted into tiny floating water droplets. Bone and flesh liquefied, then recoalesced as cloud. Of all his possible transformations, this was the one most amazing to Jules, the most alien and the most terrifying. Was he even still alive in this form? He didn’t breathe. He didn’t have a pulse-nowhere in his expanding form was there a heart to pump, blood to be pumped, or veins to pump it through. But he could still think, even if his thoughts were scattered, diffused, difficult to focus. And even without ears, he could still “hear.” Sound vibrations traveled across the water droplets of his “body” in an unceasing flow, an incredibly rich matrix that became easier for Jules to decipher with each passing second.
The first sounds Jules was able to recognize were canine whines of frustration.
“Damn! What happened?”
“He was headin‘ straight for that house-”
“Now he’s lookin‘ around like some ghost slapped him upside the head-?”
“He lost the scent! Damn! We fucked, man! Fuck!”
A warm glow of satisfaction spread through Jules’s vapory form. Age and guile would trump youthful strength and energy every time… so long as the punks gave the old guy even half a chance.
He “listened” to the three of them stomp away in angry frustration.Heh. If he had a mouth, he’d laugh. Maybe those punks would think twice before screwing with Jules Duchon again. There was more to being a good vampire than flashy clothes, a bad attitude, and an army of flunkies to back you up. Hell, he was more vampire than any of these wet-behind-the-ears pissants wouldever be Huh?He was moving. He hadn’t willed himself to move. He wanted to stay right where he was, under the house, until Maureen showed.
It was the wind. A strong wind was pushing him out from beneath the house. He struggled to stay in place, trying desperately to “grab” the Jax Beer crate and the house’s pilings, but his misty form flowed right around these potential anchors.
Before he could begin thinking of a Plan B, he was spread across Bienville Street, portions of him drifting under derelict cars or condensing on rusty fire hydrants. It was all he could do to keep himself together. His scattered thoughts ricocheted back to terrible memories, memories of him slowly dispersing across a tremendous field, being pulled into the obscene embrace of the tall grass, helpless, so terrifyingly helpless -
The wind shifted. He found himself blowing back the way he’d come. He collected himself off the various metal surfaces where he’d condensed, relying on the almost magical attraction of water molecules to other water molecules. He wasn’t heading back to Maureen’s house, however. He was being pushed into the cavernous old building next to her home, a coffee warehouse that had been converted to a parking garage.
He mentally breathed a sigh of relief. This was one of the safest places the wind could’ve deposited him. There was no vegetation to absorb him, and the walls of the garage would keep him compact enough that he could condense on the relatively cool concrete floor and gradually pull himself back together.
What a night! After this, he’d definitely take Maureen’s advice and cool his heels in the safety of her house for a while. Give Doc Landrieu’s pills a chance to work their magic to the fullest before he’d confront the cruel world again A wall of sound shattered the garage’s early-morning quiet. The high-pitched mechanical whine reverberated off the brick walls, quaking Jules’s entire form with brutal vibrations. What could it possibly be this time? Why couldn’t he have even five minutes of peace? And then he was moving again.
Only now he wasn’t being pushed. He was being pulled. Suctioned. He realized with a jolt of horror what was vibrating him so violently.
It was a vacuum cleaner. And not just your run-of-the-mill Hoovermatic. The mechanical beast sucking him toward its maw was a sidewalk sweeper, part of the fleet that cleaned the walkways of the Quarter in the hours just before dawn.
The whine was the whine of stainless-steel death. Obliteration dealt by an array of sharp fans rotating hundreds of times a second.
There was no escaping those blades. Jules desperately tried to change, but the ceaseless vibrations shattered his concentration and made any transformation hopeless. He was caught. Like a rat in a trap. No,worse than a rat in a trap.
Slowly, inexorably, the cruel steel blades sucked him in.
NINE
If Jules’d had a mouth, this is what he would’ve screamed:
“Whoawhoa WHOAWHOA-HAAAAA!”
Thankfully, he didn’t have a mouth, or any other organs or limbs, because the whirling vacuum blades scrambled him up worse than a ride on the old Pontchartrain Beach Zephyr roller coaster. The suction pulled his gaseous form apart. The blades minced the separate clouds into stray atoms. Tiny fragments of Jules shot the rapids through the suction tube. Sudden compression knocked him into blissful unconsciousness; blissful because he didn’t have to experience the forced mingling of his substance with the street filth already in the sweeper’s canvas waste bag, a m
ingling that would later play havoc with his delicate complexion.
Half an hour later Jules regained a semblance of consciousness. The machine was silent. His atoms had coalesced in the bottom of the waste bag. He groggily wondered whether it was safe to attempt a transformation back to his habitual shape; after the scrambling he’d undergone, the change could leave him with fingers sticking out of his head and his nose where his asshole normally was.
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 po
or 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.
The strangeness of this setup compared to the traditional coffins he’d occupied barely even registered on Jules’s troubled mind. Still boiling with anger and humiliation, he grabbed the remote control from atop the flat-panel display and flopped onto the water bed, purposefully mashing a few blossoms on the way.
The slow-motion sloshing did nothing to better his mood. He braced himself against the bed frame and turned on the TV. For the next five minutes he clicked ceaselessly through dozens of satellite stations, searching for a glimpse of naked female bodies (or anything less repulsive than a miracle-diet show or an infomercial promoting adult incontinence products). He finally settled on a low-budget erotic retelling of the Snow White story, dubbed into Spanish. Everyone was a lesbian-Snow White, the wicked queen, all seven dwarfs, and even the prince(ss). Jules made a few feeble attempts to whack off, most energetically during the “Whistle While You Work” musical orgy scene. But his heart wasn’t in it. By the time Maureen climbed the stairs half an hour later, he’d switched over to an episode ofThe Rockford Files.
“Are you done sulking yet?” Maureen asked, standing in the doorway. She’d removed her makeup and changed into a surprisingly modest and tasteful white nightgown.
“Men don’t sulk,” Jules answered, returning his attention to James Garner.
“Yeah. Right. And pigeons don’t shit in Jackson Square, neither.”
Fat White Vampire Blues Page 16