Annie of the Undead (22 page)

When I got over the initial shock and orgasmia,
I groaned in rapture, “Sweet black Jesus.”

After five more bites, I got up, went over to
the counter, took custody of the tip jar, and stuffed a twenty down
its throat. The big cook grinned at me knowingly. Then I went back
and sat down to get the rest of my food before the gluttonous Jesus
Christ could.

As I downed my eggs I thought how, when I was
dead, I really was going to miss my food.

“So he’s a high-rolling poker player,” said Yoki
between bites, back on her previous line of inquiry.

I chewed my toast.

“A tyrannical CEO.”

I drank my water.

“A cutthroat hedge fund investor.”

I started on my salad.

“A secret government contractor.”

It was a good salad.

“Ooh, he works for Halliburton –or
Blackwater.”

Munch. Munch.

“Why aren’t you answering?”

“Because I’m not having this conversation.”

People were staring at us. A man who had come in
after I did seemed especially intrigued. How could he not be,
especially with things being said like what Yoki was just about to
say.

“But I’ll tell you everything about every man,
boy, or geriatric I’ve ever boffed. I tell you how much money they
made, how good they were in bed, what piercings they had, how big
their lads were and what they named them… I don’t have any
secrets.”

No, apparently, you don’t.

“What are you hiding? I know it’s something
mysterious. Something very…
dangerous
. Something…a secret
agent? An assassin? A sponsor of terrorists?”

“Would a sponsor of terrorists waste money on a
McLaren?”

“Of course. Do you have any idea how much money
those rich ringleaders spend on themselves? Ooh! A mafia don!”

Even she didn’t seem satisfied with that
answer.

“Something very unique…a cult leader…a voodoo
king…Oh, I know,” she chirped summarily through her last bite of Po
Boy. I couldn’t imagine how it had all fit into that teeny body.
She picked up her napkin for the first time.

“He’s a
vampire
.”

The old lady with the newspaper laughed out
loud, and somehow I doubted it was from the funnies.

I put down my fork. Coming from Yoki, I
shouldn’t have been surprised. She was bound to come to the vampire
thing eventually, but somehow I had still lost my appetite.

The man who’d been so rapt to Yoki’s every word
looked away nervously when I snarled at him.

“You’re worse than nuts,” I said, “You’re
cracked nuts.”

She looked brightly at me, “So you’re the one
that gets the vampire, eh? After all my pining and you not even
caring, thank you very much.”

“I should really be going…”

“Is he handsome? Oh, of course he is.” She
countered herself. “All vampires are handsome, the Queen Anne
taught us that much…Well, is he?”

“Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed in exasperation.

He started yapping.

“Yes. Okay? Yes. The man who owns the McLaren
–who I would not call my boyfriend, by the way, is, as far as I’m
concerned, very handsome.”

“Ooh! I knew it! What does he look like?”

“Sort of like Al Pacino around forty, but
taller.”

“Hhhm. Not my type. Too forty, too Pacino. Does
he have long hair?” She asked with renewed hope after the initial
disappointment.

“Hardly, but he has a beard.”

“
Oh,
but vampires aren’t supposed to have
facial hair,” she objected.

“Why?”

“Because they’re not supposed to be oversexed
but elegant and effeminate.”

“You should meet more vampires.”

“I have long thought so myself.”

“Here’s your bill,” said the waitress, setting
it down.

“Mind getting this one?”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t carry money.”

“You don’t carry money.”

“No. Usually the boys pay for things. I just
forgot to bring one of them today, I suppose.”

I looked around. The food was gone. The
conversation had gone too far, and everyone in the little place had
been entertained at my expense. I’d tipped the house thirty-five
bucks of Miguel’s money, and I hadn’t even paid the bill yet –for
both of us. I wadded up my napkin and placed it on my empty
plate.

“Yoki,” I said very calmly, “I am going to have
to kill you now.”

“That sounds jolly fun, but could you drive me
home first?”

“But you have a car outside.”

“Yes, but it sputtered to a stop just as I
pulled up. It won’t start again. I tried. Jeanne has a truck. I
called her, and she said she’d tow it to the shop this evening
after school.”

“Wait for her,” I grated.

I laid down a twenty and stood up.

“The food was excellent,” I said to the cook as
I headed for the door.

“Ya’ll come back now,” he replied.

Yoki followed me out the door.

I turned on her before I got to the car.

“Don’t even try.”

“But I never got to address our reason for
convening today.”

“You’d better do it here, because you are not
getting in my car.”

“All right then,” she said, looking hurt, which
surprised me –I hadn’t known she could
be
hurt. She had
seemed to be made of rubber. “I just wanted to tell you how much we
all admired your decorum last night. We were all wrecks, but you
stayed so calm, and you got us out of there so efficiently, and
tucked us all in a cab when there wasn’t room enough for you. We
all thought it quite noble. And I would personally like to thank
you again for fighting that fool for me and Jesus at the gym. You
didn’t have to do that, just like you didn’t have to help us last
night. You’re a warrior and a leader –not to mention a brilliant
Grand Prix runner. You’re quite an Amazon, Annie. If you ever
decide to come over to humankind’s side, we’ll surely be the better
for having you.”

With that, she dropped Jesus to the ground and
lead him off by his pink leash into the silent, sun-baked streets
of what I would later come to know was the Ninth Ward, one of the
places Lucas, in his grief, had tried to tell me about. Hands in
pockets, chin held high, and chains jingling, Yoki Hayashi went her
way.

I got inside the cockpit and drove back to the
Quarter, thinking about pushups and side-bends and the dream of
reaching a thousand crunches.

I stepped out of the car before the Banana Grove
to find a fresh scattering of debris on the street that said
Stanley, Hector, and Esmeralda had been up to their shenanigans
again. Old Man was sweeping the sidewalk, and once again didn’t
acknowledge my existence. The cars parked up and down the street
and the rowdy music coming from inside the Grove said that an
evening get-together was just getting underway. I just didn’t feel
like going inside. Instead, I started walking, back into the
Quarter. The late afternoon sun slanted down streets casting the
kind of shadows that meant cold this time of year in Michigan. But
here, it was eighty-five in the shade, and all kinds of humid.

I passed the old man who handed out Good Mister
Goodwin buttons and little disposable American flags every day. He
didn’t try to give me one this time. I passed the house where the
drug dealer lived and did what he called work. I passed the place
where Jesus Christ had almost killed me that first night I’d
started running again. I was a lot fitter now. Now he wouldn’t
catch me. I passed happy teenagers and a little girl in a yellow
dress, one hand attached to her mother and the other to a
fast-melting strawberry-pink ice cream cone.

On a corner was an undersized, overstocked
everything store, the way New Orleans is an everything city. They
sold mostly curios and souvenirs, but they had also some candy,
bottled juice, necessities like toothpaste and deodorant (the
latter for some reason under lock and key), and a few utility items
dressed up with a little New Orleans flare, for instance, a floor
lamp with a shade dripping with strings of glass beads, and a
cinnamon-scented, artsy-looking broom.

I bought the broom.

On my way out the door, I ran into a man. He was
younger than me, taller, and very thin, with brown skin, an angular
face, and blue eyes. He wore a gray T-shirt and frayed jeans
covered with dust, bits of dried plaster, and paint. His hair was
long and black and unkempt. He had been looking down and hadn’t
seen me as we’d both been going through the narrow doorway in
opposite directions, and he consequently knocked the
newly-purchased broom right out of my hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He picked up the broom before I could and handed
it to me, but when I took it from his hands, for a moment he didn’t
move out of my way. He stood there, staring at me glassily, and I
thought I saw his nostrils flare. Then, he remembered himself, and
he stepped out of my way, his head down again as he moved off, as
though the world around him was no more than shadows on the
wall.

I stepped outside and continued down the street,
utterly unaware that I had just had what would turn out to be the
single most fateful encounter of my entire life. Yes, maybe even
more than my crossing paths with Vampire Miguel. But all that comes
later. For now, I simply thought,
clumsy ass
, and rode my
broom down the street.

When I got back to the inn, the laughter inside
was louder, and the door and windows had been propped open to let
in the evening air. Apparently the natives could feel the
temperature difference somewhere between incredibly hot and almost
as hot. I couldn’t.

Old Man was still at his labors. Swish, swish,
swish… He did not look at me as I approached. Urn in arm and nubby
broom in hand, he remained in his own little world.

“Old Man,” I said, “I got you a new broom, if
you want it.”

Swish, swish, swish…

“Right.”

I leaned it against one of the pillars and
headed back across the street to the car to get what was left of my
gear from the gym.

“That was a kind thing to do.”

I startled, big time. Those words were so
familiar. They were the words that had begun this whole strange
change of circumstances in my life. They were the words that had
been said by my vampire on the cold, dark night that he had invited
me to join his life, if not yet his unlife.

But this time, they were not being said by my
vampire.

I turned around to face this ambiguous new
threat, and then it wasn’t so ambiguous.

It was Vampire Andy.

“Oh, did I scare you, little boxer, little
paramilitary brat? Little GI Jane?”

He looked at the McLaren, whistled. He ran his
hand over the sleek black surface of the hood.

“Wow, new model. Sexy new lines. I like it. I’ll
have to buy a couple. Where did you get yours? I didn’t realize
there was a dealer in Hazard County…Unless, of course, it isn’t
yours at all.”

How was he here? It was still daylight. Fading,
indirect, but still daylight. He was wearing shades and a jacket,
but… I glanced up and own the street with just my eyes. Old Man was
gone. There wasn’t a person in sight.

“Are you expecting someone? A mutual
acquaintance, perhaps? Don’t. He won’t be getting up for about…” He
looked at his flashy several-thousand-dollar watch, “thirty-two
more minutes. So what am I doing here this time of
day
?
You’d know the answer to that if he’d told you anything about us,
if he really intended to make you one of us.”

He took off his shades. I watched him squint
against the light, watched him scowl from some weird mixture of
pleasure and pain.

“You were up all day. Up and out, with the
mortals. So many friends. That’s not very immortal behavior, you
know.”

“What the hell is this, Andy? You trying to
intimidate me? Threaten those kids? ‘Cause you know he’s gonna hear
about it. And if anything happens to me you know he’s gonna know
about it. He’s not as stupid as you.”

He took a step closer –a lion on two legs,
closing in on me.

“But what can he do about it?” Andy smiled
darkly, “I’ve known him for over two hundred years, and how long
have you known him? Two months? Two weeks? You don’t really know
him at all. He would never, ever touch me, not over something like
you, especially not after what I did for him last night.”

“And how much consolation would that be? Knowing
you’d gotten me, when for the rest of eternity the object of your
desire would never so much as look at your pale ass again? I’m not
afraid of you, and I’ll tell you why. Because your age hasn’t made
you a good enough actor to hide from me what’s really important to
you. You’d have fun killing me, for sure, but it wouldn’t last.
What you really want is Miguel. You want him so bad he dumped your
ass and you still crossed oceans to bail him out of hot water, and
if you kill me, if you ride that power trip, you can kiss your wet
dreams goodbye, because they won’t be undead. They’ll just be plain
dead.”

“He planned to kill you, you know, if you hadn’t
killed those witches.”

That was meant to be some kind of revelation for
me. I answered the statement with as much surprise as I felt.

“Maybe I should thank their widows.”

I opened the trunk and pulled out my gym bag,
giving Vampire Andy full view of my back.

“You’re full of spunk. He always liked that, but
if he changes you, don’t expect the honeymoon to last forever. One
night, he will leave you, just as he did me. You’ll be alone.
Forever.”

I turned back around. It was my turn to
smile.

“That’s okay. No man is my whole world. This
little GI Jane, she’ll just keep troopin’. Maybe you could learn a
thing or two from her.”

I turned away.

“This isn’t over, you tragic little
half-trash.”

Apparently he was one of those
always-gets-the-last-word types. I just kept walking.