The bum’s rush. They gave me the bum’s rush, just like Maureen said they would.
Jules forced himself to open his eyes. He’d stewed and fumed in his coffin long enough. Long enough to develop a painful crick in his neck. Much as he hated to admit it, his coffin was getting too small for him again. He’d been putting off that inevitable trip to the lumberyard as long as he possibly could, but it was as plain as the belly overhanging his belt that he couldn’t procrastinate any longer. Hell. One more reason to go on a damn diet.
Jules pushed open the hinged lid on his coffin and sat up. He grabbed hold of the wrought-iron clasps he’d bolted onto the adjacent wall and pulled himself out of the box, which was almost as wide as it was long. He brushed the clumpy earth off his flannel pajamas, trying to make sure most of it landed back in the coffin. Sweeping dirt up off his basement floor was a task he disliked almost as much as building new coffins.
He glanced at his watch. Nine thirty-nineP.M. He’d wasted almost an hour of darkness with his stewing. But he just couldn’t get over it. Those stuck-upbastards! In their own way, they were just as bad as Malice X was. Looking out for nobody but themselves, not giving a shit what happened to the rest of the bloodsucking fraternity. They’d landed their fancy house and their hundreds of retarded blood-cows, so they felt perfectly at ease letting their less well-off inner-city cousin twist in the wind.
So he was on his own. If he couldn’t get the High Krewe to lower the hammer on Malice X, then he’d just have to do his best to round up some white victims, inconvenient as that might be. Maybe it was for the best. The upside of this regrettable turn of events was that the average white kill in New Orleans was way lower in fat than the average black kill. And if Jules played his cards right, maybe he could accelerate his weight loss by harvesting someextremely low-fat white victims.
It’d be a few hours yet before his friend Erato would make his nightly appearance at the Trolley Stop Cafй; Jules planned to hit him up for information on health-related conventions coming to town. That left Jules time to do some work on the Caddy, maybe even listen to a little music, before heading out.
He walked past his woodworking machinery to the back of his basement, which was actually the windowless ground floor of his house, then laboriously climbed the stairs to the main story. He walked across his checkerboard-tile kitchen and descended a separate set of stairs to his garage. He’d had the garage added on to the house in the early 1960s, after his mother had passed on to her heavenly reward. He yanked the frayed bit of rope that clicked on the ceiling bulb. A quarter of the garage was filled to overflowing with five decades’ worth of tools, auto supplies, and broken hi-fi sets that he’d never gotten around to fixing, plus bits and pieces of old coffins. The rest of the garage was filled with the Cadillac.
He hadn’t messed around with his jury-rigged gas injection system in four years, not since he’d yanked the components out of the Caddy following his initial debacle.Well, if George Washington had stopped tryin‘ after Valley Forge, we’d all be livin’ in the United States of Canada.
He opened the Caddy’s passenger-side rear door as far as it would go. Then he slid down from its place on a shelf a long, thick piece of Plexiglas, specially fitted to divide the cab’s interior into separate passenger and driver compartments. Jules had purchased the divider five years ago, after a spate of cabdriver murders had prompted the city’s Taxi Bureau to offer the protective shields to drivers at an enticing discount.
His original conception had been good, Jules reminded himself as he crawled into the Caddy’s backseat and pulled the Plexiglas divider in behind him. What had ruined his plan had been his failure to pay attention to the little details. He reached through the open window and grabbed a socket wrench and a Ziploc bag full of bolts. Then, grunting with exertion, he lifted the shield into place and partially screwed in the first two retaining bolts. Five minutes later, the shield was secure. But not snug. Not quite.
Jules inserted the tip of his index finger between the top edge of the Plexiglas and his cab’s head liner. That quarter-inch gap had been enough to royally screw his plans the last time. Enough to almost make him total the Caddy. The memory made him shiver. He wouldn’t make the same fuckup again; he’d be sure to putty the gap this time.
Jules clambered out and opened his trunk. He leaned inside with a flashlight and carefully examined the rubber gas-feed lines that snaked from the rear right corner of the trunk through holes drilled into the passenger compartment, connecting with spray nozzles hidden inside the rear speaker housings. The hoses looked to be in good shape, with no visible cracks or kinks. But Jules would be certain to test them before he took his knockout system back out into the field. He glanced over at the dusty red canisters of laughing gas, purchased from Tiny Idaho, a local hippy anarchist, that were lying in a corner of the garage. Maybe he could get another use out of them? How long did laughing gas stay good? Jules had no idea. He’d just have to test the stuff before heading out on the hunt.
Jules glanced at his watch again. Ten twenty-three. He had another hour to kill before heading over to the Trolley Stop. Good. His visit to Bamboo Road the night before had left him off-kilter, so a little cultural relaxation would do him a world of good.
First, he’d treat himself to a little snack. All that exertion with the car had perked his appetite. He climbed up the stairs to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator (one of his mother’s last purchases before she’d been loosened from her earthly shackles), and took out one of the jars of blood from two nights ago. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents.Hrmmm. Already, the blood had lost much of its freshness. He’d have three days, maybe four, before it’d be undrinkable and he’d have to pitch whatever was left. Erato’d better have a juicy tip to give him tonight. He took a swig of blood, then rescrewed the top and put the jar back in the fridge. Jules swished it around the back of his mouth before swallowing it; actually, it wasn’t all that bad. His biggest problem was that he’d let his standards get too high.
In the living room, Jules perused his collection of classic, original jazz pressings, most purchased during his first two decades as a vampire. Following a few minutes of delicious indecision, he selected a thick, heavy, seventy-eight-rpm record and arranged it carefully on his Victrola. As soon as the worn stylus touched the venerable platter, the warm, rich tones of Bix Beiderbecke’s Jazz Wolverines emerged from the gramophone’s lacquered horn. Jules didn’t play his original records much anymore; he usually listened to reel-to-reel or cassette tapes he’d made, rather than subjecting his irreplaceable collector’s items to more wear. But sometimes only the first-generation recording, playing on the equipment it’d been made for, would do.
Now for some appropriate reading material. In his mother’s old sewing room, long ago converted into his library, Jules breathed in the rich, glorious odor of decaying pulp, a bouquet he’d always associated with immeasurable pleasure. Three walls were lined entirely with hundreds of adventure, mystery, and horror pulp magazines dating back to the Great Depression, and thick stacks of comic books from the war years. As a young vampire, Jules had thrilled to the nocturnal adventures of the Shadow, Chandu the Magician, and the Spider. Once comic books began displacing the pulps, Jules quickly discovered a strong affinity for Bob Kane’s Batman. Better still were Captain America Comics, which usually featured great gobs of vampires, even if they were invariably portrayed as evil Japs or Nazis. Jules had actually written a long letter to the editors at Timely Publications concerning that subject. He suggested that, since the Axis seemed to have an unlimited supply of vampires to fight on their side, surely the United States should have its own vampires, too. Wasn’t it unrealistically one-sided to portray all the vampires in the world as evil Fascists? Shouldn’t Captain America occasionally team with a heroic American, Canadian, or British vampire, one eager to sink his fangs deep into Hitler’s repulsive neck? Jules never received a reply to his letter, and he’d been bitterly disappointed when the editors neglected to print it on the “Captain America’s Fan Mail” page.
The whole notion of a boy sidekick had come to him from the comics. Captain America and Bucky. Batman and Robin. The Sandman and Sandy. The Hooded Terror and… Doodlebug.
Doodlebug.Rory “Doodlebug” Richelieu. Hard as Jules tried to forget him, the memory of his ex-sidekick wouldn’t fade.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed and Jules heard President Roosevelt’s stirring declaration of war on the radio, the young vampire had felt a powerful urge to serve his country. Only the thought of having to submit to an army physical had kept him away from the local recruiting office; what the army physicians would have made of his room-temperature thermometer reading and his fatal vulnerability to sunlight could only be conjectured.
He nursed his frustration at his inability to serve with a renewed plunge into the escapism of comic books. Happily, he discovered that most of the costumed adventure heroes had also stayed off the troopships, opting to remain behind and fight fifth-column saboteurs on the home front. Striking terror in the hearts of Ratzi spies seeking to blow up the landing craft factory on Bayou St. John-nowthere was a job Jules could sink his teeth into. And of course, every masked mystery man worth his salt needed a teen sidekick. So Jules Duchon, the Hooded Terror, hadn’t been without one for long.
How many weeks had he haunted Bywater’s movie houses, ball fields, and drugstore soda counters, searching for exactly the right kid? And out of hundreds of possible candidates, what had made him pick Rory “Doodlebug” Richelieu?
Maybe it’d been because the kid had always been by himself, hanging out at the soda counter next to the neighborhood newsstand. A kid without any friends would have fewer people missing him and looking for him. Maybe it was because Rory had seemed to like the same things Jules liked. The kid’d always had his nose in a mystery pulp or comic book; either that or he was sketching outlandishly costumed adventure characters in the margins of his Holy Cross School writing pad. Heck, maybe Jules picked him because Rory hadn’t instinctively shied away from the vampire the way so many of the other kids did.
So Jules had followed Rory outside one November night in 1942, when the evening air was still unseasonably warm and smelled of the river, and Press Street echoed with the Klaxons of freighters entering the Industrial Canal. And there, in front of the darkened newsstand, he’d asked the boy:
“Hey kid, do you wanna be stronger than ten grown men put together?
“You wanna be able to change into a bat whenever you damn well feel like it?
“You wanna send all the Ratzis you can get your hands on to hell?”
He’d saved the best for last “You wanna be around forever?”
And the kid had said yes. Yes to all of it, without a second’s hesitation.
Doodlebug had made a good little vampire. He’d hardly missed sunlight at all, or his foster parents, or the nuns at Holy Cross School. He’d been a damn good sidekick, too-at least for a while. Always good company, quick with a funny quip, a helpful suggestion, or a belly-warming cup of coffee. Having him around had made the long nights of patrolling the waterfront factories fun.
The costume and secret identity thing had been icing on the cake. Doodlebug had loved dressing up. Loved it way,way too much, as it turned out. And that had been, ultimately, what blew their partnership apart. Blew it apart far more decisively than any Nazi grenade ever could.
The sound of the gramophone’s needle scraping against the record’s hub interrupted Jules’s remembrances. The grandfather clock by the Victrola indicated it was a quarter past eleven. Time to get a move on.
Before getting into his car, he paused a few seconds, as he usually did, to admire his house, his street, and the levee, all glowing peacefully in the moonlight. Despite all its changes over the years, the neighborhood couldn’t be better suited for him if he’d designed it himself. Jules smiled. He couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else.
The tiny front and back parking lots of the Trolley Stop Cafй were packed with taxis and police cruisers-mammoth Crown Victorias, Caprices, and Roadmasters that sprawled across the universally ignored yellow divider lines onto the sidewalks. Jules circled the block, then found an open spot on St. Charles Avenue and pulled in. The all-night breakfast joint was on a stretch of the avenue that had seen its ups and downs. Swank when first developed, the neighborhood had managed to stay upscale through the Depression and two World Wars, but then had gone precipitously downhill in the 1970s. Now, however, it looked to be coming back up.Stick around long enough, Jules thought to himself,and you see everything come back round again.
The Trolley Stop itself was a converted gas station, made to vaguely resemble a St. Charles streetcar by an application of kelly-green paint and the addition of wooden cutouts of a Victorian streetcar conductor and riders, dressed in their Sunday going-to-church finery. Jules preferred the less touristy atmosphere at the St. Charles Tavern, another twenty-four-hour dive down the street. But when the overwhelming majority of cops and taxi drivers had transferred their allegiance to the Trolley Stop right after the new place had opened, Jules, grumbling, had felt he’d no other choice but to go along with his pals. Besides, he had to admit that the coffeewas fresher at the Trolley Stop.
Before stepping inside, Jules checked the parking lot for Erato’s cab. Sure enough, there it was-a Lincoln Town Car painted the unmistakable green, gold, and purple livery of the Napoleon Taxi Co. Erato hadn’t been his best pal for that long-only the past fifteen years or so-but Jules felt closer to him than any human friend he’d ever had. It was kind of weird, given Jules’s recent circumstances, that his best human pal ever, and the man he was now seeking out for advice, happened to be a black man. The more he thought about it, the more the injustice of Malice X’s threats rankled. Of all the white vampires out there, why pick onhim, Jules Duchon? Jules had always been decent to black folks, even back during the old Jim Crow days. Heck, nearly all the musicians on his most-admired list were black guys from New Orleans.
He pushed his musings aside and entered the restaurant. The cabdrivers had staked out their usual territory: they were lined up on the closely spaced stools fronting a long wooden bar adjacent to the cash register and the men’s room, sipping from cups of dark, aromatic coffee. Some of them scraped the last few sticky granules of grits off the bottoms of greasy plates, while others snatched quick glances at the counter lady’s heart-shaped ass in the full-length mirror behind the liquor bottles. That was one thing Julesreally disliked about the Trolley Stop-having to deal with that damn mirror. Luckily for him, at each end of the bar was a stool that faced oak paneling instead of silvered glass. Unluckily for him, both stools were currently occupied. However, one of the corner occupants was Erato himself.
John Xavier Erato was a head shorter than Jules, but just as wide across the shoulders. Thirty years ago he’d been a star varsity wrestler at Alcee Fortier High School. He’d won a record number of matches, despite a lazy eye that would concentrate more on the girls in the bleachers than the task at hand. But twenty-five years of sitting in a cab ten hours a night had grafted a generous middle-aged spread onto his once taut abdomen. The one-eighth Natchez Indian ancestry he always boasted of was evident in his skin’s reddish brown tint and the slightly Asiatic cast of his eyes. His shiny scalp was crowned by a still-credible thicket of dyed and processed curls.
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 lights 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!
He was trapped in his own clothing. It was like being smothered by a collapsed tent. He beat his wings furiously-yes! yes! I’ve got wings! — expressing a small mammal’s instinctive horror of confinement.
“These pants are empty, Chuck!”
“I can’t believe it! I simply can’t believe it!”
“Hey! There’s something crawling around inside the shirt-”
Flapping blindly, Jules managed to poke his snout through the waist of his shirt. His weak eyes were dazzled by the strobing glare of the flashlights. But he saw an avenue of escape-the Caddy’s door was wide open, and between the patrolmen’s shocked faces and the car’s ceiling were several feet of clear airspace. Jules spread his wings wide, tensed his tiny leg muscles, and sprang off the seat.
He fell in a flapping tangle onto the Caddy’s transmission hump, landing on his ears and rolling heavily across the floor and onto the damp grass outside. Dazed and bruised, he scrambled to avoid the patrolmen’s dancing feet, dragging his rotund body across the grass with clawed wings.
“Holy Jesus! It’s some kinda bat!”
“Bat, hell! It’s a nutria with wings!”
How had everything gone so wrong? He had to get away-one solid kick could put him in Charity Hospital for months. Frantically beating his wings against the ground, he scurried in a zigzag toward the trees that shaded the tot lot, barely avoiding a fusillade of blows from steel-toed boots and nightsticks. He reached the gnarled roots of one of the live oaks and dug his claws into the tough bark, pulling himself up the trunk as fast as his wings would take him. His tiny heart beat like a trip-hammer.What a time for a heart attack! It’d be just my shitty luck!
“It’s crawling up the tree! You want we should go after it?”
“Naw. Don’t bother. Just let the goddamn thing go. I’m beginning to think this was some kind of gag.”
Jules reached a thick branch about ten feet above the ground and was finally able to rest. He felt nauseated and dizzy. He flopped forward into a hollow in the branch, his flaccid wings drooping over the sides. But his keen ears continued eavesdropping on the conversation below.
“A gag?” the first patrolman said. He was dressed in a gray uniform and wore a gray cap that saidCAJUNCOP NEIGHBORHOOD SECURITY. “What do you mean, a gag?”
“You know-a prank. I’ll bet it’s those damn SAMMYs from Tulane. Those frat brats are always up to no good.”
“What, you mean the fat guy was some kind of balloon or something?”
“Could be. I’ve heard of crazier stuff.”
“So who’s that guy with the bloody neck who’s sleeping in the backseat? He don’t look like no frat boy.”
“Maybe he’s an alumnus. Who knows? I say we call the real cops and let them sort it out.”
The first patrolman grunted. “Okay, Chuck. You radio it in. I’ll keep an eye on things here. And if that damn bat-thing comes down out of the tree, I’ll kick the shit out of it. Maybe it’s the frat mascot, huh?”
Jules could do nothing but gather his feeble strength and wait for them to go away. The wait was interminable. His painfully sensitive ears were assaulted by the incessant buzzing of thousands of insects, which gave him a pounding headache. Chuck took the security car, a puke-green Chevy Cavalier, and returned half an hour later with two cups of coffee. The aroma of stale gas station java made Jules’s headache even worse. Then an NOPD squad car showed up. The cops managed to revive Jules’s passenger, who mumbled a few incoherent phrases about rude cabbies and nasty smells before being gently led away to the squad car. One officer gathered the empty clothes from the backseat and removed Jules’s wallet from a pant pocket. He also took the Taxi Bureau certificate from its holder on the dashboard.
The bitter coup de grвce came with the arrival of a city tow truck. Jules watched helplessly as his beloved Cadillac was dragged off to the NOPD impoundment lot.
An angry squeak grabbed Jules’s attention away from his captive Caddy. A rat, large but barely half Jules’s size, glared at him from where the branch met the trunk. Apparently Jules was occupying its nest. In no mood to take shit from anyone anymore, Jules hissed vociferously at the rodent, until it finally realized it was outmatched and ran away.
With a stolenDON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP! flag draped around his ample midsection (he’d pulled it down from a flagpost at the New Orleans Yacht Club), an exhausted, human-shaped Jules dragged himself through the front door of Russell’s Marina Grill. A well-coifed young man intercepted him before he could cross the foyer.
“Sir! I’m very sorry, sir. We can’t serve you inside unless you’re wearing shoes and a shirt. Would you like to place a take-out order and wait for it on our patio?”
Jules considered asking the greeter ifhe’d like to place an order for a knuckle sandwich, express delivery, but he stopped himself. Instead, he took a deep breath and rearranged the flag around his middle. “Look. I’m not here to eat. I’m a cabby, and I just been robbed. That’s why I’m wearing this flag instead of a fuckin‘ Brooks Brothers suit, okay? If you’ll be so kind as to spot me thirty-five cents so I can make a call, I’ll gladly herd my fares to your fine establishment here for the next year. Deal?”
The young man considered this for a second or two, then dug into his pocket and handed Jules a quarter and a dime. “The pay phone’s by the men’s room in the back.”
“Thanks.”
Jules avoided meeting the stares of the paying customers as he made his way to the phone. He clutched the two ends of the flag with his right hand as he lifted the receiver and hugged it awkwardly between his shoulder and chin. One phone call-he had to make it count. He dialed Erato’s cell phone number. He was tremendously relieved when his friend’s familiar baritone voice answered.
“Yeah? Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s Jules. I’m at Russell’s by the lakefront. I’ve gotta ask you to come pick me up.”
“Jules? Whassa matter? Your Caddy break down?”
“Caddy got stolen. Everything’s gone. Damn robber even took my clothes. I’m standing here talking to you wearing a goddamn flag, if you can picture it.”
“Aflag? I’ll be right over. This I gotta see.”
Once outside, Jules didn’t have to wait long before a familiar tricolor Town Car rounded the corner and pulled into an empty handicapped parking space. Erato put his window down and leaned out, his wandering lazy eye eagerly taking in the spectacle.
“Hey! Who’s your tailor, my man? I gotta getme a outfit like that!”
“Fuck you, Erato. Thanks for coming so quick.”
“You was lucky. I was droppin‘ a fare only five minutes from here when I got your call. Get your ass in the car, already.”
Jules clambered in. He reluctantly admitted to himself that the Lincoln had a nice, spacious rear seat. “Take me straight home,” he said in an exhausted, defeated voice. “You know the way.”
Erato backed out and headed for West End Boulevard. “What? Don’t you want me to take you by the police station first? You’ve gotta report what happened, man. Give them cops a chance to catch those motherfuckers.”
“No. Straight home. I seen enough of cops tonight to last me a lifetime.”
They took the interstate until they reached Esplanade Avenue. They drove along the grand, crumbling old Creole boulevard, following the edge of the French Quarter until they reached Elysian Fields. Jules’s depressed musings were interrupted by a sudden exclamation from Erato. “Hey!” His friend dug through a pile of cassettes in an open shoe box on his front seat. “I got somethin‘ here that’ll cheer you right up. This tape’s by a new blues guy named Mem Shannon. He’s a cabby, just like us. It’s calledA Cab Driver’s Blues. Is that perfect, or what? Take it. It’ll do your sufferin’ soul some good, believe me.”
Jules examined the cassette. Its cover pictured a handsome, somewhat heavyset young black man, dressed in a cabby’s uniform, leaning against a dark gold taxi. “Aww, Erato, I can’t take this offa your hands. It’s brand new. Musta cost you fifteen bucks or so.” He tried handing it back.
Erato wouldn’t take it. “No, you keep it, man. Right now, you need it lots more than I do. I’ll just pick myself up another copy.”
A few minutes later they turned onto Montegut Street. The street, with its weed-strewn lots and graffiti-covered, termite-eaten shotgun houses, looked even more desolate than usual. On a normal night Jules would feel happy and secure driving through his old, familiar neighborhood. But tonight he felt scared, vulnerable, and alone.
They pulled up the narrow concrete driveway in front of Jules’s garage. Erato put his transmission in park and leaned back over his seat. His face was creased with concern. “You gonna be okay? You want me to come in for a few minutes?”
Jules mustered a smile. “Naww. I’ll be fine. Thanks, Erato. Thanks for everything.” He patted his friend on the shoulder, then opened the door to get out.
“Well, you need anything, you just call me on my cell phone, okay? Day or night. Hey! How are you set for cash? The Caddy insured? I could, y’know, ask some of the guys down at the Trolley Stop to pitch in. We could get some kinda benefit going. Maybe Mem Shannon would play!”
Jules carefully, respectfully shut the Town Car’s rear door. “Don’t you worry about me none. I’m flush. Me, I always land on my feet. I’ll be in touch, pal.” He remembered Maureen’s final words from two nights earlier. “Hey, you watch your ass, okay? Don’t let no shitheads takeyour cab. ‘Cause I won’t be able to come rescue you, least not for a while.”
Erato smiled. “Sho ‘nuf! God bless, Jules. You be good, you hear? And let me know what you think of that tape.”
Jules stood and waved as Erato backed out of his driveway. He walked to the curb and watched the massive Lincoln disappear down Montegut Street. Only when the cab was out of sight did he open his front door, still not repaired from Malice X’s invasion, and go inside.
His living room was hot, musty, and silent. He turned on a lamp. Its weak bulb cast long, ominous shadows over the room. As if on cue, his stomach emitted a tremulous moan. He stumbled to the couch and collapsed.
What to do now? He stared at his alabaster belly, which rose from the couch like a mountain of refined flour. Its lower extremities pulsed and jiggled as his gut sent out distress signals. Maybe the solution to his weight problem was to crawl into his coffin and stay there until he either wasted away to nothing or his gut, in desperation, devoured the rest of him.
His eyes fell upon his mother’s portrait on the mantelpiece. He tried looking away, but her stern, Victorian gaze held him fast.Son, I didn’t carry you in my belly for nine months, nourish you from my breast for another thirty-six, and watch over you until the day I died so that you could be a quitter.
For the second time in as many nights, Jules felt himself blush from head to toe. He forced himself to sit up. Then he picked up the nautical flag from where he’d dropped it on the floor. He read the embroidered inscription again.DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP!
Jules climbed the stairs to his bedroom, pulled on a pair of briefs, and selected his best trousers, shirt, and jacket from his closet. Then he tied a bright yellow-and-green polka-dot necktie around his collar. He was many things, a lot of them no good. But he was no quitter.
Out on Montegut Street, he began singing French-Irish drinking songs in a slurred tenor. He affected an inebriated, stumbling gait; given his many infirmities, this wasn’t hard at all. After a few minutes of weaving along the middle of the empty street, he detected hurried footsteps coming toward him from a side alleyway. He stopped singing.
An unpleasant voice broke the stillness. “Hey, Slick! Shoney’s Big Boy! Wait up! I got to talk wit‘ you!”
Ah, music to his ears. He turned and zigzagged unsteadily toward the dark alley. The black man approaching him carried a switchblade in one hand, and what looked to be a bag of fried pork rinds in the other. He was shirtless, his ebony skin glistening with sweat. Multiple rolls of fat hung over his faded jeans. Jules’s saliva glands went into overdrive.
Come to Papa,Jules thought.Fuck the goddamn diet. And while I’m at it, fuck Malice X, too.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
Let the good times roll!
At last, the night was kind to him. But for Jules Duchon, the good times would not roll for long.