“My record collection! My pulps! Aaahhhhhhh!!!”
“Sir, you can’t cross the line- Sir!Hey! Somebody stop that big lunatic!”
Jules bludgeoned aside a cop and a pair of sooty-faced firemen on his mad charge across the lawn to his front steps. Like a maddened rhino, he was almost impossible to stop once he got up to speed. Belying his bulk, Jules sprang up his front steps in two bounds. He struggled through the wreckage of his front door, smashed in by firemen’s axes. He was suddenly caught in the streams of two high-pressure hoses, but the force of the twin torrents only added to his momentum, shoving him through the smoke-blackened doorway like an immense plaid beach ball pummeled by a giant wave.
His sport coat and pants reduced to dripping rags, Jules didn’t feel the heat surging through his living room at first. The flames, the smoke, his tearing eyes-none of it seemed real. His sagging couch ignited, and a gust of superheated air slammed the reality of the conflagration in his face. The greedy flames leapt across mildew-stained cushions to the pile of musty afghans his mother had knit over a span of ten thousand radio-filled nights. The old blankets lit up like drought-parched saw grass.
“Jesusfuckin‘ Christ!” Sparks landed on Jules’s eyebrows. His nostrils were filled with the stench of his own burning hair. He slapped his forehead wildly, looking like a clumsy comedian trying out for the role of a fourth Stooge. What to save? Whatcould he save? The library was a lost cause. He stumbled across the burning sofa and reached for his gramophone, a priceless antique. But as soon as he managed to get a firm grip on its walnut base, the gramophone’s horn, made of highly flammable lacquer, lit up like a Roman candle.
“Fuck!”He dropped the gramophone and shoved his burned fingers into his mouth. His records! Maybe he still had a chance to save some of them. Maybe just the most valuable ones-?Maybe whatever the hell you can get your singed paws on, you stupid fucker. Go! He dropped to his knees and crawled furiously in the direction of the oak cabinet where he stored his most valuable and rare platters. Armstrong. Teagarden. King Oliver. The black smoke above his head had gotten as thick as blood left out of the refrigerator overnight, and it dropped lower with each passing second. Could vampires asphyxiate? Jules didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out the hard way.
He was crawling blind, navigating his cluttered living room by a hundred-plus years of memory. His head smashed into something hard but hollow. The cabinet. He pulled the oak doors open and reached inside.
His throbbing fingers flipped sightlessly through endless dozens of LPs.Not the vinyl! The old stuff! The old stuff! Which shelf were his oldest platters on? Which side of the cabinet?
His feet and calves felt as if they were in an oven. But at last his fingers brushed against the stiff cloth and cardboard casings of his oldest records. As fast as he could manage, he pulled out as many of the thick platters as he could grasp, piling them on the floor near his knees.
“There he is! I see him!”
“Where?”
“Over there, in the corner!”
Firemen! They’d come in after him! Jules began scooping platters into his bearlike paws, but in his mad hurry sent many sliding across the hot floor.
Rubber boots and padded knees shattered eighty-year-old shellac discs as the firemen crawled toward Jules. “What the hell are you up to, buddy?” the lead fireman shouted. “You’ve got to get the hell outta here!”
“Hey! Look out! Don’t step on those platters!” Jules furiously tried gathering up his records. Some were ominously hot to the touch. “Give me a minute, will ya? Can you guys help me grab these things, maybe?”
“We’ve got a fuckin‘ nutcase here!” the closest fireman yelled back to his partners. “Grab his arms! We’re gonna have to pull him out!”
“No! Wait! I’ll go! I’ll go!” But already three pairs of strong hands had grabbed him by his arms and were pulling him toward the door, forcing him to spill much of the precious cargo. He stopped fighting the firemen, desperate to save what he still had in his hands. Risking smoke inhalation, he got to his feet and crouched down as low as he could while still moving forward, hugging the remaining platters to his still-damp breast. Tongues of flame licked at his elbows as he pushed his way through the burning velvet shreds of the curtains that had once separated his living room from the entrance foyer.
As his singed shoulders brushed the jagged front door frame, Jules succumbed to the same foolish impulse as Lot’s wife and looked back. Illuminated by the garish flames was the portrait of Jules’s mother, her stern gaze still fully intact and transfixing him from above the burning mantelpiece.
“Mother!”Despite the ruddiness caused by the fire, Jules’s complexion instantly turned three shades whiter than normal. He lunged back into the house, toward the portrait surrounded by flames, but half a dozen powerful hands grabbed him and pulled him outside.
“Noooo! Muhh-thuurrrr!”
But it was too late. Flames blocked the entrance foyer. Part of the ceiling over the living room collapsed, blowing a cloud of plaster dust out the door and into Jules’s tearstained face. He’d failed her again. The hot platters slipped from his hands onto the brown grass, but he didn’t notice. Some son he was. All he’d been thinking about were his pulp magazines and his old records. He’d forgotten all about his most precious keepsake-of his mother-until it was too late. Too damn late.
A small hand tugged on Jules’s damp sleeve. “Hey, mistah?” Jules looked down. A tyke from the neighborhood, maybe five years old, had removed one of Jules’s records from its cardboard sleeve.
Clasped in the boy’s hand, the shellac disc drooped like a charbroiled flapjack. “Hey, mistah? What dis ‘posed to be?”
Jules clenched his eyes tightly shut. Maybe a vampire’s powers included traveling back in time? He concentrated as hard as he could, imagining his street as a row of newly built, white-painted, gingerbread-trimmed cottages. But as hard as he tried, the stench of burned velvet lingered in his nostrils; a stench as nasty as a vampire left out in the sun.
Sunrise!Jules checked his watch. It was a quarter past eleven. His coffin was a pile of ashes and charred plywood. In barely seven hours, the first rays of daylight would boil the thickly padded flesh from his bones.
Who could help him? A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Small cliques of men drank malt liquor from tall, skinny cans and watched the firemen battle the remaining flames, some boisterously pointing out when fresh shoots of flame crackled forth from previously pacified corners of Jules’s house. Women hugged babies to their ample breasts and watched their children play with warped records on the dead grass. Some of the faces Jules recognized from the neighborhood. Many were strange to him. Every few seconds another face would turn in his direction. Some eyes regarded him with sympathy. Most were unreadable, contemptuous, or even hostile.
A chill quivered Jules’s spine. How many of those onlooking faces belonged to Malice X’s spies? Who’s to say the black vampire would stop with burning down Jules’s house? How many of these “neighborhood folks” were actually enemy vampires, eagerly waiting for the firemen and police to disperse before plunging sharpened stakes into Jules’s chest, or severing his head and stuffing his screaming mouth with garlic?
He had to get out. Out of the neighborhood. Out of New Orleans. His whole world had been turned on its head, transformed into an evil, brutal, twisted mirror image of itself. Just days ago, he’d had everything he’d ever wanted. Now he had nothing. Once the proud, skillful hunter, now he found himself the hunted.
Jules pushed his way through the crowd. If he didn’t make a break for it now, he’d end up a three-dollar pile of powdered chemicals at dawn for sure. He turned a corner, leaned heavily against a graffitied wall, and checked his wallet. Thirty-seven dollars. That wouldn’t take him far. His Hibernia Bank ATM debit card would take him maybe twelve hundred dollars farther. He rifled through the dog-eared business cards stuffed into the pouch behind his dollar bills until he found the one he was looking for: BILLY MAC’S GARAGE AND PRE — OWNED AUTOMOTIVE EMPORIUM-WE STAY OPEN LATE! Billy Mac had been his mechanic for more than twenty years. For almost as long, he’d been haranguing Jules to buy one of his used cars, but Jules had always purchased his chariots from other, more upmarket lots. Tonight, however, Billy Mac was Jules’s only possible ticket out of town.
Eleven. I think he stays open ‘til eleven. Which means maybe I can catch him before he goes home.The St. Claude Avenue garage was only a few blocks away. Jules picked up his pace. At the corner of Montegut and North Rampart, a lively crowd loitered on the buckled sidewalk in front of the Beer ’N‘ Cigs Grocery. Jules picked up snatches of conversation, mostly concerning the big fire. A young woman wearing a pink shower cap talked excitedly into a dilapidated pay phone. “I saw the whole thing, yeah! This long-ass limo pulled up on Montegut Street, and then fourfine — lookin’ brothers got out, all with big cans in dey hands. Five minutes later, the limo pulls off, see, burnin‘ rubber, and this fat ofay’s house goes up like a bonfire. Yeah! That creepy-lookin’ fat-ass white guy livin‘ on Montegut-”
Jules scowled at the woman on the phone, stopping her conversation dead. Then he hurried past, ignoring the stares of the crowd. Billy Mac’s was just another block away. As he rounded the corner, Jules was enormously relieved to see a light on in the tiny office next to the cinder block garage with its sagging aluminum roof. Billy Mac must still be going over the day’s receipts.
Jules knocked loudly, maybe too loudly, on the office door. He heard something break inside the room, followed by a stream of muttered curses.
“We’reclosed!” a deep voice shouted from the office. “Closed for the night! Come back in the morning!”
Jules knocked again, more urgently. “Billy Mac! It’s Jules Duchon! I’ve gotta talk to you!”
“Juleswho?”
“Jules Duchon. Cadillac Jules. Nineteen seventy-five Fleetwood. All white. Cream leather interior.”
“CadillacJules? The big, big guy?”
“Yeah!”
“I’m sorry. The garage isclosed, man. If that damn serpentine belt a yours done busted again-”
Jules cut him off. “Billy Mac, this isn’t about my Fleetwood. The Fleetwood is gone. I need to buy another car from you. Tonight.”
“Tonight?Hey, I’d love to oblige you, but I’m bone-ass tired, y’know? Just got done workin‘ a fourteen-hour day. I ’preciate the patronage, believe me, but it’s gonna hafta wait ‘til tomorrow.”
Heart pounding, eyes wide, Jules lost the last shreds of his composure. “Itcan’t wait ‘til tomorrow! If it waits ’til tomorrow, I’m a dead man!” Forced to the brink, he uttered the words he knew he’d regret later. “I’ll pay you top dollar!”
In the ensuing silence Jules could almost hear the mental tinkling of the cash register in Billy Mac’s head. “You just said the magic words, Cadillac Jules.”
The door opened and the diminutive proprietor emerged, all smiles. He shook Jules’s hand vigorously. “The sales manager of Billy Mac’s Pre-Owned Automotive Emporium is on duty and at your service. Follow me out to the display floor. If you don’t mind my saying, you look like shit.”
“You just worry about getting me a car,” said Jules.
The “display floor” was an L-shaped dirt lot that fronted on St. Claude Avenue and wound behind the garage. Jules’s heart sank as he gave the sparse selection of dusty vehicles a quick once-over. Most cheapo lots could at least be counted on to have a decent selection of older American full-sized gas guzzlers, but Billy Mac seemed to specialize in the worst aberrations ever produced in the field of compact cars. Side by side sat a virtual freak show of small cars-an egg-shaped Renault Fuego, a Chevy Vega with two flat tires, and a lavender AMC Gremlin, a misshapen, hunchbacked monstrosity that truly resembled its namesake. The least objectionable choice on the lot was an early-1980s Subaru GL, but its body appeared to be made up more of Bondo than sheet metal. And besides, there was no way Jules could ever fit behind its steering wheel.
Billy Mac turned toward his customer to gauge his reaction. The mechanic’s smile emanated a surprisingly childlike innocence, a quality it’d had ever since a dissatisfied customer had knocked out Billy Mac’s four front teeth fifteen years earlier. Often mistaken by his customers for an American Indian, Billy Mac was actually from Java; he had come to New Orleans as a small boy from Dutch Indonesia just after World War II, and he had quickly “gone native” in the Crescent City. He had become an exceptionally skilled mechanic, even though, at four feet nine inches tall, he had to stand atop a specially built stepladder to see into the innards of the bigger cars.
The plain look of dismay on Jules’s face did not diminish Billy Mac’s smile one iota. “See anything you like?” he asked, beaming.
“Jesus Christ, Billy Mac! Is this all you’ve got?”
Billy Mac grinned even wider as he caressed the lumpy hood of the Gremlin. “Whas the matter with the selection, Jules? People gotta protect the environment, man. Small cars arein. Damn Arabs gonna jack up the price of gas to five dollars a gallon any day now, you’ll see.”
Jules scowled. “That’s a crock! Gas has been under a buck fifty a gallon for the last ten years.”
“So? It’ll go up again. Besides, I thought this was a life-or-death situation, right?”
Jules found himself backing down slightly. “Sure it is. But you can’t expect me to fit inside any of these kiddie carts. Don’t you have anything bigger on the lot? Some old Fleetwood or Sedan DeVille? I need the biggest trunk you got.”
Billy Mac crossed his arms belligerently, looking a bit like Chief Crazy Horse just before Little Big Horn. “Sure! Sure I’ve got other cars on the lot! But you didn’t gimme a chance to show them to you, did you? No-you wasted three minutes of my precious sleepin‘ time bitchin’ about the stock I got out front here!”
“Okay, look, I’m sorry. So where’re you hidin‘ these other cars?”
The mechanic’s angry frown turned back to a smile. “Behind the garage. Follow me!” Despite Billy Mac’s short legs, Jules found it hard to keep up with the little man. “I’m gonna show you the peach of the lot, Jules! You always been a Cadillac man, right? Well, this beauty I got back here, you take a drive in it and you’ll see why Cadillac’s called ‘The Standard of the World’! Just to sit in it, man-leather seats like butter, I mean, you sit down and you never want to get up again. It’s like pussy on wheels! Electric windows! Electric door locks! Electronic speed control! This baby’s got itall!”
The longer Billy Mac’s monologue rambled on, the higher Jules’s spirits rose. Sure, his house had burned down. Yeah, he was being chased out of his beloved hometown by a gang of homicidal vampires. And Billy Mac was certain to drive a hard bargain. But at least Jules was going to get his hands on a sweet chariot again.
Billy Mac abruptly stopped walking and spread his short arms as wide as they would go.“Taa-daah!”
Jules looked around confusedly. “Yeah? So where is it?”
“You’re standing right in front of it.”
Jules stared, dumbfounded, at the small gold-metallic sedan in front of him, barely wider than he was. “What’re you talkin‘ about? That’s a Chevy Cavalier.”
“Nope. That’s a Cadillac. A Cimmaron! Gets the best gas mileage of any Caddy ever made. A collector’s-item classic! They only made these for two or three years, y’know.”
Jules’s recently inflated spirit withered like a slug buried in salt. He wanted to scream. The only Cadillac on the lot, and it had to be the dinkiest, crummiest rip-off-mobile to ever wear the wreath and crest, a Chevy economy car with a Cadillac grille bolted on front. “No, no,no! Full sized! I need a full-sized car, with a big trunk! I’ll take a Buick, an Oldsmobile. I’ll even take a Pontiac. But it’s got to befull sized.”
Billy Mac looked thoughtful. “Oh. You mean you want abig car.”
“Yes. Big. That’s right.”
“But that Cimmaron’s awful nice.”
“Fuckthe Cimmaron! I couldn’t fit mydick in the goddamn Cimmaron!”
“Hey! No need to go postal on me, man. I think I got just the right car for you. I picked it up at auction late last week, so I haven’t had time to clean it up yet. But it’s cherry, man. Vintage cherry. Honestly, I didn’t show you this one yet ‘cause I was thinkin’ about makin‘ it my own personal car. But since you ain’t findin’ anything else to your likin‘, I’m willing to make a sacrifice. ’Cause that’s just the kinda guy I am.”
Jules sucked in a big breath. “Okay. Okay. Just show it to me.”
Jules followed Billy Mac to the corner of the mechanic’s property farthest away from the street. “There she is,” Billy Mac said, his eyes brimming with emotion. “A real beaut, ain’t she? It’s gonna smash my heart in little pieces to see you drive her off the lot.”
“A Lincoln,” Jules whispered, his voice etched with despair. “Ithadda be aLincoln…”
Three hours and eighteen hundred cash dollars later (Jules started negotiations at four hundred, but his bargaining position was weak), Jules climbed into his newly purchased 1974 Continental Mark IV. The car had once been silver. But a quarter century beneath the Louisiana sun had oxidized the paint nearly to the metal underneath, leaving the car a multitoned dull gray, mottled with dimples of brown rust. Its black vinyl roof had cracked and flaked so badly it appeared the car was suffering from terminal psoriasis. Jules walked slowly around the car’s massive hood. Its driver-side disappearing headlight assembly was permanently stuck in a half-open position. The battered coupe seemed to be winking at Jules, like the pathetic come-on of an elderly whore. The odometer read 37,256 miles. That could mean 137,256 miles, 237,256 miles, or maybe even 337,256 miles. Jules winced at the sight of the torn zebra-print upholstery, perfectly complemented by the sun-faded pair of red fuzzy dice that hung limply from the rearview mirror.
Billy Mac enthusiastically patted the car’s dull gray hood. “That inside trunk-release latch you had me install carries a seven-day warranty, so keep your receipts. You’ll love her, man! This li’l honey runs like a fuckin‘ Swiss watch!”
Reminded of the late hour, Jules checked his own watch. It was already three-thirty. Barely three hours to sunrise. He grabbed the keys from Billy Mac’s hand, mumbled his thanks, and shoved the Lincoln’s bench seat as far back as it would go.
Jules had read Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road when it first came out. The book hadn’t tempted him to leave New Orleans one tiny bit. Now, after thirty minutes of westerly highway travel, Jules had formulated an unshakable opinion of life on the road. It sucked. The Lincoln’s tranny was missing its third gear. Jules couldn’t go any faster than forty-five miles per hour without pitching his pistons through the hood. Other cars raced around him in a nonstop blur of red taillights, their angry horn blasts distorted into twisted bleats by a severe Doppler effect. Jules tried hard not to think about the royal screwing he’d just been subjected to, but he couldn’t help it. For a guy with no front teeth, that Billy Mac was the worst bloodsucker he’d ever crossed paths with. Jules had cleaned out his savings account to put money down on the car, and then financed the remaining six-hundred-dollar balance, three hundred dollars for the trunk release, and fifty dollars for a crummy, broken-down shovel, all at a usurious rate of twenty-four percent. As soon as Billy Mac had finished installing the trunk release, Jules had debated whether or not to fang him and save twenty-eight hundred dollars. He’d almost done it, too. But a good mechanic was just too hard to come by.
He’d used the fifty-dollar shovel to scoop soggy earth from the front yard of his destroyed house into the bottom of the Lincoln’s trunk, coating it with about six inches of mud. Jules wondered how accurate that old legend was about vampires needing to rest in soil from their birthplace. Would any dirt from anywhere work just as well? He’d never had to wonder about it before. If the legend was, in fact, factual, how strictly or loosely was the termbirthplace defined? Would dirt from Uptown New Orleans, City Park, or Baton Rouge (to go even farther afield) work just as well as earth from his own yard? Maybe he hadn’t needed to take the risk of returning to his neighborhood so soon after the fire? Well, that was a moot point now. Considering the way his luck had been running, he’d been smart sticking with the tried and true.
As soon as the wordluck entered his head, it started raining. The falling moisture was an angry, living thing, an avenging fury that beat on the oxidized metal of his hood and roof like a gigantic millipede with a thousand claw hammers. Jules wondered whether the storm might be a manifestation of his mother’s earthbound spirit, furious at her only son for losing their home. The Lincoln’s bald tires quickly began hydroplaning on the rutted, waterlogged asphalt. The big car weaved from lane to lane as Jules struggled with the unfamiliar steering wheel and jerky brake pedal. He didn’t dare slow down, however. Not with sunrise barely an hour away. He had to at least make Baton Rouge before first light. No closer place outside New Orleans had the enclosed parking garages that might give him shelter.
The sun-rotted wiper blades only served to spread the rain evenly over his field of vision. The metal tips bit into the windshield glass, etching the car a pair of eyebrows. Jules turned the wipers off. He rolled down his window and tried clearing the glass with his hand. No good; the outside world remained a watery blur.
Faded outlet-mall billboards and the gnarled trunks of dead cypress trees drifted past at forty-five miles per hour, signposts of his grim exile. Jules felt a mysterious lump in his coat pocket. Aside from the shabby clothes on his back, that lump could well be the last connection he had to his beloved former life.
He reached into his right pocket. The lump was the plastic case of a cassette tape. Jules lifted it quickly in front of his eyes. He could catch only a flash of yellow and the outline of a man standing by a car, but it was enough to spur his memory. Of course! It was Erato’s tape! The gift Erato had given him! He’d taken it along with him at the beginning of the evening, which seemed like a century ago, hoping he’d have a chance to listen to it once he’d retrieved his Cadillac. Then he’d forgotten all about it.
This little cassette was the last survivor of what had been a mighty, incomparable music collection.A Cab Driver’s Blues. How fitting. Jules glanced quickly at the Lincoln’s dim dashboard. Yes, the car had a tape player of some kind. Maybe fate was beginning to smile on him once more. His best, most loyal friend had provided him with a gift that would now serve to buoy his spirits when they were at their lowest ebb. Jules thought about his friend Erato, safe in his bed in New Orleans with his family, and his eyes misted over.
He carefully removed the cassette from its case and inserted it into the tape player’s mouth. He glanced at the dash. ThePLAY button was illuminated. Maybe Lincolns weren’t so crummy, after all. He pressed the button, anticipating the sweet blues music that would help soothe his ravaged and insulted soul.
Nothing happened. Jules glanced at the dash again.
“Of all the… Hell. It just damn well figures.”
Aside from a desultory whirring of gears, the Lincoln’s eight-track tape player remained stubbornly silent.
The deluge subsided to a thick drizzle by the time Jules reached the outskirts of Baton Rouge. The interstate was surrounded by an endless, monotonous vista of strip malls, fast-food emporiums, beige motels, and gambling casino billboards.So this is what the whole damn country turned into when I wasn’t payin‘ attention, Jules thought. He’d heard it from people who’d seen it firsthand, but he hadn’t dared believe it until now.
The eastern sky was beginning to turn a grayish pink in his rearview mirror. He had maybe ten minutes-fifteen, tops-to find himself a covered garage and check himself in for the day. He scanned the myriad featureless buildings lined up alongside the highway. Land must’ve been cheap in Baton Rouge, because all the businesses, even the office complexes, made do with exposed surface parking lots. Jules frowned. He couldn’t be positive the Lincoln’s trunk was completely daylight-proof, and besides, he didn’t relish the thought of broiling in a steel box twelve hours beneath the South Louisiana sun. He imagined himself slowly roasting in his own fat, not an appealing picture at all.
Sweating profusely from a surefire combination of stress and one hundred percent humidity, Jules figured his best shot at locating a public garage would be to head downtown, where the old state government buildings were. An overhead sign announced a Government Street exit two miles away. That sounded right. Behind him, the pinkish sky was beginning to turn ominously orange.
The Government Street exit appeared just after the interstate forked and Jules turned north. From the top of the exit ramp, Jules saw what he first took to be a heart-stopping premonition of his own eternal damnation. The western horizon was shackled in a steel corset of glowing pipes and effluent tubing. Sulfur-yellow smokestacks belched clouds of smoke and steam in unearthly oil-slick colors. It wasn’t hell, Jules reminded himself. It was merely the terminus of the chemical and oil refinery complex lining the Mississippi River’s banks along the seventy miles between Baton Rouge and his lost home; the origin of the toxic soup that gave New Orleans’s tap water its distinctive flavor and aroma.
St. Louis Street looked promising. Signs pointed the way to a Centroplex Convention Center, and besides, there was a St. Louis Street in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Jules’s eyes grew watery with the memory. But before he could become totally rheumy, he spotted a parking garage. And just in the nick of time, too-something was beginning to smell like cinnamon toast left in the toaster one cycle too long, and Jules was pretty sure it was none other than his own vagabond self.
The wide-bodied Lincoln scraped both sides as Jules piloted the car through the garage’s entranceway. He grabbed his ticket from the dispenser. At least the daily rates were relatively cheap; less than half the typical garage rate in downtown New Orleans. Good. He might end up staying here a long time, and the more days his remaining twenty-nine dollars would stretch, the better.
He pulled into the most shadowy, isolated spot he could find. The garage wasn’t underground. Louvered metal walls let in stray photons of the first rays of the morning. Jules cut his engine and got out of the car. The scattered bits of sunlight hit him like tiny incendiary missiles. Yet he found himself hardly caring. He was so sore all over that he could barely tell new pains from old. The floor where he had parked was filled with noxious blue smoke. Jules couldn’t tell whether the smoke had come from the Lincoln’s tailpipe or his own skin.
He popped open his trunk. The earth from his front yard had remained mud; it shimmered in the early-morning light like black molasses syrup. Jules didn’t bother taking off his jacket. What was the use? He flopped into the soupy trunk like a plaid sack of cement. The cool mud soothed his burning skin a little. He reached for the lid and pulled it closed, then squirmed a bit in a futile effort to get more comfortable.
The exiled, homeless vampire couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever welcomed the darkness more.
“-nuh-no!No! You won’t get me! Keepaway — ”
Soft hands grasped his shoulders and shook him awake. “Jules! Jules, wake up! You’re havin‘ yourself a nightmare!”
Jules opened his eyes. He blinked once. He blinked twice. But the pink walls and white lace curtains refused to fade away. He was lying in a downy-soft four-poster bed. The air was perfumed with essence of citrus. He turned his head to the side. Sitting next to him, resplendent in a gauzy white negligee, was Maureen.
She smoothed the wrinkles from his forehead with her soft fingertips. “Poor baby,” she said, her eyes brimming with concern. “You were howlin‘ like the wolfman got hold of your throat. Real bad dream, huh?”
“I–I was stuck in Baton Rouge, baby. It was… it washell. Everything I ever owned got taken away from me. Everybody hated me. The whole world was out to get me-”
“Hush. You just hush yourself now, baby.” She smiled and stroked his hair, letting her fingers glide down his cheek and neck to play with the tufts of hair on his bare chest. “You just let little ol‘ Maureen make it all better now.”
She slowly slid her big body over his. “Mmmm, I’ll bet I know a way to get you to fall back asleep…” Her creamy skin felt like satin against his legs and belly and chest. She let her full weight settle on him, and every cell in his body was engulfed with pleasure.
Her breath smelled of peppermint and fresh blood. “Mmmm, give Mama a big fat kiss…” Her lips were a feast, an endless repast that both perfectly satisfied his hunger and made him ravenous for more. She plunged her tongue into his mouth, sucking his teeth in a deliciously erotic fashion. He felt himself stirring, stiffening, growing proudly immense beneath her skillful ministrations.
And then she unzipped the back of her head.
“Hiya, Jules! Didn’t think I’d forgotten about ya, had ya?”
“Aaahhhhhhh!”
Malice X’s hot, garlicky breath filled Jules’s nostrils as he licked Jules’s face. “Mm, mm,good! Me, I always did prefer white meat.”
“Nn-nooo!” Jules tried to hurl the other vampire off him, but powerful black hands shackled his wrists and ankles. Jules’s heart beat like a trip-hammer. “Wha-what do you want with me?” he spluttered. “Haven’t you done enough to me already?”
Malice X smiled maliciously, letting his long fangs hang over his lower lip. “Why, Mistuh Jules, you an‘ me, we’ve barelybegun.” He shifted his right hand from behind his back, revealing a wooden stake shaped like a twisted ram’s horn. Clutching it in both fists, he raised it high above his head. Then, snickering softly, he plunged it into Jules’s spasming heart.
“Nooooo!”
Jules’s eyes snapped open. He was engulfed in darkness. His hands flew to his chest, above where his heart beat painfully fast. There was no stake there, twisted or otherwise. All his fingers felt were the soggy lapels of his sport coat, his heaving chest, and granules of dirt. He smelled drying mud and his own sour, frightened sweat. He stretched his arms out, exploring his lightless environment. Before he could reach very far, his hands bumped against the familiar, faintly comforting contours of the inside of the Lincoln’s trunk.
Shifting position so that he was leaning against the left rear tire hump, he pressed the glow button on the side of his watch. The blue digital numerals read 7:52P.M. The sun had been down for a good twenty minutes. He was free to leave the cramped chamber of horrors that was the Lincoln’s trunk.
He pulled on the wire that Billy Mac had rigged up. The trunk creaked slowly open, letting in the humid, petroleum-scented evening air. He glanced around the nearly empty garage. He had to make a plan. For the past nineteen hours, the only thing on his mind had been getting out of New Orleans. Now that he had escaped, he had to figure out what the heck to do with the rest of his undead existence.
Hrmmm…After his uncomfortable day’s sleep in the trunk, the effort of so much thinking made his head pound. Using the Lincoln as a taxi was out of the question. It was a two-door, and besides, nobody in their right mind would pay a dime to be driven around in that heap. So he’d have to buy another car (preferably another Fleetwood… a late- 1960s model in good condition, one of those beauties with the stacked quad headlights, some little old grandmother’s car with ridiculously low mileage, would be ideal).
He’d have to find some entry-level night-shift job, at least until he’d stashed enough away to clean himself up. Somewhere downtown there had to be a twenty-four-hour diner or coffee shop. Those kinds of places were always looking for dishwashers. Washing dishes was beneath him, of course, but he’d only be stuck at the bottom for a little while, until he was able to afford some new clothes. Then, thanks to his first-rate talent for servicing the public, he’d be promoted to wait staff, or maybe night manager.
And hey, the kinds of folks who patronized all-night diners usually made the easiest, most convenient victims, too.
Now that he had a plan, Jules felt one hundred percent better about his prospects.Plan your work, then work your plan-that’s what Mother always said. I’m like a crafty ol‘ tomcat, he told himself, brushing some of the mud from the front of his pants.Throw me off the roof a hundred times, I’ll always land on my feet.
He marched assertively down the parking ramp, his stiff neck stuck at a thirty-degree tilt, eager to see what downtown Baton Rouge had to offer him. The answer, he discovered after walking a few blocks, was “Not much.” The boarded-up storefronts along Convention Street, North Boulevard, and Florida Street reminded Jules of old Dryades Street back in New Orleans; Dryades had withered to the point where the only commerce that took place there involved the trade of green paper for white rocks and black skin. If anything, these streets were even sadder and lonelier than Dryades was, because not even crack dealers and streetwalkers bothered pushing their wares here.
Finally, on Florida Street, Jules found the one business establishment that wasn’t a windowless phantom. Richoeux’s Cafй was closed, but at least it looked like it might be open sometime. The faded Coca-Cola sign over the restaurant’s entrance mocked Jules with its invitation toPAUSE…REFRESH. He thought about the Trolley Stop Cafй back on St. Charles Avenue, the rough-and-tumble cabby fellowship he could always find there, the decent, if not outstanding, coffee. He stared through the dark front window, trying to see if the cafй‘s hours were posted somewhere inside.
Jules heard a rumbly clanking behind him, on the street. “You lookin‘ for sumptin’ to eat?” a voice asked.
He turned around. The voice belonged to a tiny, white-haired black man who was pushing a rusty shopping cart half filled with crushed tin cans. “You lookin‘ for sumptin’ to eat? Dat place don’t open up ‘til seven-thirty in the mornin’. It ain’t cheap, neither.”
“Yeah, I’d like to find me somewheres to eat,” Jules said. “You know of any places around here that’re open late?”
“No, suh.” The old man shook his head sadly. “But dem holy rolluhs gonna be handin‘ out samwiches an’ joe any minute now, over in the park.”
“The park? Where’s that?”
“Jes’ up the street,” the old man said, nodding his head toward the river. “I’m goin‘ over dat way now. Youse welcome to follow me.”
Jules shrugged and silently followed the old man and his rickety shopping cart down Florida Street. Where there was one homeless person, there were likely to be others, he reasoned. They might not help him earn money for a new Caddy, but at least an enclave of street people would ensure that Jules wouldn’t starve.
Lafayette Street Park was an acre of oak-shaded green space tucked between the Mississippi River levee and the old State Capitol Building. Jules noted with satisfaction that the park was home to a sizable community of derelicts, at least two dozen. Most of them were clustered around a large station wagon parked at the edge of the trees. Several people were setting up a coffee urn on the wagon’s tailgate and beginning to pass out wrapped sandwiches to eager hands.
Jules’s companion aimed his cart at the gathering and sped up his pace. “Dey make you sing,” he said, smiling shyly. “But I don’t mind none. Me, I kin sing dat gospel real good.”
Jules let the old man hustle off toward the chow line and drifted into the park. From a distance he endured several ragged choruses of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” One of the women volunteers noticed Jules watching from beneath the oaks and waved at him to come over, but he ignored her. He’d never taken a handout in his life, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to start now, especially not from some Bible-hugging Baptists who probably considered Spam on white bread manna from heaven.
He waited for the station wagon to drive off and then watched the various park dwellers carry their meals to their favorite benches. Many of the derelicts clustered together in small, wary groups. Jules thought they behaved like something he’d seen on theWild Kingdom show, packs of hyenas nervously guarding a half-devoured carcass abandoned by a lion. One white woman looked promising, however. She appeared to be a bit better nourished than the others (iron-poor blood wasn’t good for a vampire, Jules reminded himself), and she kept to herself, walking with small, quick steps to a bench near the levee, away from the others.
Jules approached her as casually as possible and sat down on the edge of her bench. She looked to be in her late thirties, and her clothes weren’t nearly as disheveled as those worn by the other park dwellers. She glanced at Jules several times with startled, birdlike movements, looking quickly away whenever Jules attempted to make eye contact, but she kept eating her sandwich and made no effort to leave the bench.
Jules smiled his warmest, most homespun smile at her. “Hiya, gorgeous,” he said, racking his brain for an appropriate opening line. “What’s a fine-lookin‘ lady like you doin’ in a low-rent situation like this?”
She placed her sandwich carefully on her lap and made eye contact with Jules for the first time. “You’re from the guv’ner’s office, aren’t you?”
A little nonplussed, Jules responded, “Uh, no. Actually, I’m from New Orleans. Just got into town this morning.”
“The guv’ner’s got offices in New Orleans, doesn’t he?” the woman shot back. “The guv’ner drives around in a big black limousine. It’s got a TV in it. He watches the TV to see what’s inside my mind.”
“Uh… yeah. I see.” Jules fidgeted with his fingernails, trying to figure a way to turn the woman’s unfortunate mental state to his advantage. “Well, actually, I reallyam from the governor’s office. The governor, uh, he sent me to find you, so I could give you a nice tour of that big nice house over there.” Jules pointed toward the old State Capitol Building, which glowed in the evening mist like a white castle from a Cecil B. DeMille knights-and-damsels epic.
“Really?” she said, edging closer to Jules.
“Really,” Jules said warmly, taking advantage of the moment to slide closer to her. “We can go take that tour right now, if you’d like.”
“Iknew it! I was the guv’ner’s mistress. He used to let me live there in that castle until I said I wouldn’t vote for him no more.”
“Yeah, well, he’s changed his mind. You can go live there again, and you can vote for anybody you like.”
He held out his hand to her. She stiffened, staring at Jules’s hand like it was leprous. “You’re trying to bribe me to vote for him, aren’t you?”
“Huh?”
“Your hand-it’s full of filthy bribe money.”
Jules stared at his empty hand. He wished itwere full of filthy money. “No, baby, it’s nothin‘ like that. We’re just gonna go on a little tour, is all.”
Her eyes grew wide. “No!” She scooted away from Jules and wrapped her sandwich in the hem of her dress. “He’s full of tricks! He’ll do anything to get me to vote for him!”
“Now, baby, you just calm yourself down-”
“Don’t come near me!” She abruptly stood and backed away from the bench. “He’s trying to bribe me!” she shouted to the nearest group of park dwellers. “He’s trying to seduce me with his video poker money! Then the feds will come get me and put me on trial! Briber!Briber! ”
All eyes in the park focused on the two of them. Jules got up from the bench and stepped away from her, his hands spread in a futile gesture of conciliation. “All right, all right already! I’m leavin‘, see? I’m leavin’. We’ll forget the tour, okay? Just settle down.”
Every other park dweller now eyed him like he was a walking time bomb. His repast for the evening was spoiled. Unable to think of anything else, he climbed to the top of the levee and watched the colored smoke belch from the tops of the tall refinery stacks. He passed a few hours counting the eighteen-wheelers that occasionally crossed the Mississippi River bridge. As the echoes of their passing bounced off the levee’s grassy slope, Jules felt the first cold fingers of real despair touch his soul.
Three nights later Jules was running out of curses to mumble to himself. He’d revised his earlier opinion of his new home: Baton Rougewas hell. He’d tried shifting his hunting grounds to LSU, hoping to corner an unwary undergraduate behind a dormitory, but security guards had chased him off campus. Back downtown, he’d hoped to cut his growing hunger with a cup of free coffee, but the Baptist missionaries had refused him even a drop when he wouldn’t sing hymns with them. And his fellow street people still shunned him like he was a dose of HIV.
Even among the outcasts, he was an outcast. The unbearable bitterness of that realization rubbed on his frayed soul as he aimlessly wandered the bleak, empty streets of downtown, blowing down the cracked sidewalks like a wadded-up page of yesterday’s newspaper. He had no idea how long he’d been walking, or where he’d gotten himself to, when he heard thetap-tap-tap-tap of someone, or something, following behind him.
He wasn’t afraid. He recognized his lack of fear with a dull, slow surprise. In fact, he half hoped it was Malice X following behind him, twisted stake in hand.
Jules turned around.
It wasn’t a vampire, or the bogeyman. It was a dog. Just a mournful-eyed, matted-furred, droopy-eared mutt.
The dog stopped walking as soon as Jules turned to face her. She looked at him shyly and fearfully and eagerly, her tail wagging with a quick, nervous stutter.
Jules’s heart began to defrost at the sight of the timid, hopeful animal. He’d never been a dog lover. But here was a fellow outcast, just as dirty and hungry and lonely as he was. A fellow outcast who was reaching out to him.
Jules knelt down, ignoring the painful protest of his knees, and held out his hand. “C’mere, girl,” he whispered, terribly afraid she might spook and run away from him. “C’mere. I won’t hurt you, darlin‘. I swear. I just wanna be your friend.”
Slowly, with short, hesitant steps, the dog approached him. He held his breath, not daring to move even a millimeter. Time seemed to stop as he waited for the cold touch of her nose against his fingertips.
Finally, she sniffed his hand. With the first whiff of his scent, she began wagging her tail more confidently. Jules waited for her to get more accustomed to him before he dared pat her on the head. Her nose moved swiftly from his fingers to his arm to his knee, then to his crotch, her tail wagging more enthusiastically with each passing second.
“Yeah, sweetheart. You like the way I smell, don’t you?” He hesitantly patted the top of her head. When she responded by licking his hand, he threw caution to the winds and scratched behind her ears and vigorously rubbed her scabby back. “Yeah. Aren’t you sweet? You aren’t mean an‘ nasty like them others. You’re just a sweetheart, ain’tchu?”
While he was picking burrs out of her matted fur, he noticed how her ribs pressed through her paper-thin sides. He stood up. “We’ve gotta find you somethin‘ to eat, sweetheart. You’re lookin’ even hungrier than I am. And that’s pretty fuckin‘ hungry.”
The two of them wandered the streets until they came upon a closed but still-in-business convenience mart. Jules stared through the window. There, on aisle three, sat half a dozen bags of dog food.
He looked down at his new friend. She stared up at him and wagged her tail hopefully. He looked back through the window. “Aww, what the fuck,” he muttered to himself. “The worst they can do is toss me in the slammer, and that’d be a helluva lot more comfy than sleepin‘ in that damn trunk of mine, anyway.”
He walked around to the back of the store. The rear window was barred, but the door, with its rotting wood and flimsy, loose knob, looked promising. Jules gathered what remained of his strength and threw his shoulder against the door. The old wood gave some, creaking in protest. He backed up five paces and got a running start. Faced with the impact of 450 pounds of newly invigorated vampire, the sagging door split into five pieces.
An off-key symphony of Klaxons, bleats, and hoots sounded as Jules picked himself up off the dirty floor, rubbed his sore shoulder, and headed for the dog food aisle. He grabbed as many of the ten-pound bags as he could squeeze into his arms, then ran out the way he’d come in. The shrill whistles of the store’s alarm system chased him into the street like pursuing harpies. His canine companion barked excitedly at the noise and the tumult, despite Jules’s out-of-breath pleas for her to be quiet. He lurched into a dark alleyway and dropped his five sacks of purloined dog food onto a torn, stained mattress.
Then he fell back against the wall, slid to the ground, and waited for the sirens and flashing red lights of approaching patrol cars.
They never came. Once Jules’s heart settled down a bit, he crawled over onto the mattress and tore open one of the bags of dog food. His companion had her head inside the bag before the first dried protein pellets hit the mattress’s yellow-stained surface. She ate ferociously, as if she might never see food again.
Watching her, Jules felt happy for the first time in more than a week.Look at her go! he thought. His own stomach groaned piteously, adding its plaintive note to the alarms still echoing through the streets. He found himself wishing he could join his friend in her meal.She sure is wolfing that stuff down, he thought, half enviously; and his stray thought gave him the glimmer of an idea. A nasty, depressing idea, but an idea, nonetheless. Maybe hecould join her in her meal.
He found himself remembering a time in his life he usually avoided thinking about, the last time he’d been in straits as dire as these. He’d just been laid off from his job in the coroner’s office, cut off from the easy, simple existence he’d enjoyed for nearly thirty years. Suddenly on his own, he realized with horror that after three decades of living off the blood of the recently deceased, he’d totally lost his knack for hunting up a meal. Sitting alone in his house, he’d nearly starved, until one evening he noticed that his next-door neighbors had moved out, and in the pile of trash they’d left behind were several half-emptied sacks of dog food. Desperate, delirious with hunger, he shifted into his wolf-form and attacked the abandoned meal. It wasn’t brunch at Brennan’s, but that dog food kept him going for a couple of weeks, until he came up with the plan of driving a taxicab and having his meals pay to come to him.
That was years ago. It was an experience Jules had hoped he’d never have to repeat. The very notion was degrading. Resorting to eating as an animal was as low as a vampire could sink. Plus, he couldn’t be sure that his wolf-form’s digestive tract could still tolerate solid food; his human-form’s certainly couldn’t. But the longer his dog companion chomped away, the more Jules’s agonized, shriveled stomach pleaded-no,demanded — that he try something, anything at all. Sighing, he dragged himself to a corner of the mattress, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes tightly, and concentrated on a mental picture of the full moon.
The dog paused from her voracious eating long enough to produce a fearful whimper at the unnatural spectacle of flesh rearranging itself in a flurry of swirling mists. Jules pounced on one of the other bags of dog food and tore it open with his fangs. He was surprised at how good it tasted; maybe those paid flacks on dog food commercials who claimed that their brand was super delicious weren’t lying after all. He polished off the first bag before he even thought to wiggle free of his clothes. The second bag went down his gullet just as fast. The third bag was heavenly, and the fourth bag nearly as heavenly, even though by the time his long nose reached the bottom half of the sack, his wolf-gut was full to bursting. He had the unmitigated gall to stick his snout into his companion’s bag of food, but a few angry nips on his nose and tail were enough to convince him that discretion was the better part of valor.
Sated, exhausted from the exertion of eating so much so quickly, he felt his four paws splay out from under him as the heft of his grotesquely stretched potbelly dragged him down to the mattress. Damn, he feltgood! He hadn’t felt this good since… since… since he couldn’t remember when. Floating in a half-conscious fog of satisfied gluttony, no longer fixated on the need to consume, he began to notice the input of his heightened wolf-senses. Tiny insects buzzed in the storm gutters high above his head, the beating of their wings like distant applause. He sniffed the stains on the mattress and was able to differentiate the various urine stains, chicken grease stains, and semen stains by their unique scent signatures. And there was something else, another odor that overpowered all others, a potent muskiness that insinuated itself in his veins and sinews and bones and made him crazy, absolutelycrazy — He hadn’t realized it before, with his limited human nose, but his friend the bitch was in heat.
I’ve gotta turn human again,Jules told himself as he avidly sniffed his companion’s hindquarters, caught in the throes of a lust unlike any he had ever known.I’ve gotta turn human again, right now, immediately, before I do somethin‘ really stupid- But before he could even begin to muster the concentration necessary for a transformation, he had already mounted her.
The much smaller dog yelped with pain as Jules’s comparatively tremendous weight landed on her back. She tried to scoot away, but his strong paws clamped onto her sides and held her fast. As he pumped faster than he thought possible, his body trapped in the iron hold of canine pheromones that screamed “Make puppies! Make puppies!” his still-human mind was filled with remorse.I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry, I’ll make it up to you, you’ll never want for dog food again…
Nearly as quickly as when he was in human form, it was over. He slid off of her and collapsed in a furry heap on the mattress. He waited for her to reproach him, maybe bite him, and then run off. It was only what he deserved, after all.
But she surprised him. Rather than running away, she nuzzled him, then licked his face. Jules was astounded. Overcome with emotion, he licked her all over with his huge tongue until her fur was cleaner than it had ever been. They snuggled close together on the mattress, his bitch warming herself against Jules’s great potbelly. Jules fell into the deepest, most blissful sleep he’d had in years.
When he awoke a few hours later, startled out of sleep by a newspaper delivery truck, he was alone. Seized with panic, he crisscrossed the streets within a five-block radius, searching vainly for her scent. But she was nowhere to be found.
Jules howled. And every street dweller in downtown Baton Rouge knew that some creature had just lost its only friend.
Please deposit thirty-five cents,the mechanical voice said.
Jules fumbled through his coat pocket for a fistful of change, then pulled a frayed piece of paper from his wallet. He had to squint to see the faded writing in the yellow phosphorescent light of the parking garage. He punched in the number, almost forgetting to include the three-digit area code.
The number you have dialed requires a deposit of-two dollars and twenty cents-for an initial call of five minutes. Please deposit an additional-one dollar and eighty-five cents. Thank you for using Baton Rouge Telecom, your telecommunications specialists.
Jules shoved seven quarters and a dime through the slot. The coins fell into the bowels of the pay phone like desperate wishes tossed into a lucky fountain. The phone rang. She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Mo, don’t say anything. Just let me talk, okay? I know you probably hate me. You probably think I’m scum, like everyone else on this goddamn planet. But I’ve got nobody else to turn to, baby.” His voice cracked. He quivered and leaned heavily against the booth, fighting to maintain some tiny shred of control and dignity. “I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve hit rock bottom. My life has been nothin‘ but hell these past two weeks. I lost everything I had, and then I kept losin’ more and more. I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Jules, hush yourself-”
“Don’t hush me, Maureen! Let me finish before you rip into me! You know how hard it is for me to call you like this? You think I wanted to? But I’m on my knees, baby. You made me what I am. You’re almost as much a mother to me as my own mother was. If you don’t help me-”
“Jules, hush yourself, sweetheart, and come on home.”