Writer’s Playground

THE UNDEADBEAT

Life’s a bitch, and then you don’t die

Credence Clearwater was a vampire, just not a very good one.

She was Born during the Great Depression in the alley of a Speakeasy after agreeing to meet a bootlegger named Blaise Diesbourg around back. 

She'd thought she could sweet-talk him into a case of whiskey in exchange for a little somethin' somethin', but it turned out Blaise had been much more interested in her jugular. She woke up on his couch three nights later with a wicked toothache and the bitter disappointment that she hadn't gotten her hands on his hooch.

Blaise thought he was the bee's knees because he ran rum across the border for Al Capone. He insisted she call him "King Canada" in bed; she told him she'd call him whatever he wanted, as long as they could start eating people from outside the Detroit area. They all tasted like burnt tires. 

When he eventually realized that - no matter how hard he tried - she wasn't the type of undead girl to willingly vacate a man's abode, he offered her a job.

Credence was well suited to bootlegging. She'd been in a long-term relationship with giggle-water since 1919, a lifelong dewdropper and professional cellar-smeller who was well acquainted with all of the blind pigs on both sides of the border. She'd racked up an insurmountable tab at most of them, but she ate the owners who gave her a hard time. The rest of them put up with her in exchange for the goods.

When prohibition ended, Blaise went out one day for a bag of blood and never came back, leaving Credence with nothing but a dozen crates of watered-down whiskey and an eviction notice. She ate the landlord, got rip-roaring drunk for ten days, and then decided to get her act together.

She took a job at a rundown bowling alley that paid cash, renting one of the dank apartment units on the second story. The alley opened at five pm and didn't have any exterior windows, so as long as she avoided taking out the trash in the summer when the days were long, she got by just fine. 

Javi, a young fry-cook with chicken legs and a poor excuse for a moustache, developed a crush on her. She was pretty, in a lazy doesn't shower enough kind of way, but it didn't bother Javi. One of her greatest disappointments with immortality was finding out that she still had to wash her hair and shave her legs. Most days, she didn't bother with either.

"You used to be a rum runner for Capone?" Javi whistled, beads of sweat catching in the fine hairs of his upper lip after his clumsy (albeit exuberant) lovemaking. "You were like... a gangster."

Credence let Javi stay over, that night.

All the other vamps she'd met seemed to be extremely well-off, most having bequeathed their own assets to themselves over the centuries, falsely inflating their generational wealth. But Credence never seemed to be able to get ahead, always living paycheck-to-three-days-before-paycheck, stealing liquor from the bowling alley bar and slipping joints from the kitchen boys to the butcher down the road in exchange for jars of pig's blood.

"Why do you have jars of blood in your fridge?" Javi had asked her once. 

"The vodka is in the ice box," she'd replied.

He hadn't asked again.

It was late on a Friday evening when a particularly obnoxious group of men who had showed up for members only night began hassling her.

"You'd be real pretty if you weren't such a bluenose," one of the men slurred, firmly squeezing her ass. "Lighten up, doll."

She found him in the alley when she took out the trash, his little tommy gun swaying in the breeze as he tried to write his name in yellow cursive on the brick wall. 

He tasted like the clap. 

"You're a vampire, aren't you," Javi asked. He had appeared in the doorway to the alley while her back was turned.  She wiped a dribble of blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand and shrugged, extending her canines and plucking the pube-like hair from his neck-beard out of her teeth.

The man was laying facedown between two dumpsters, his custom bowling shoes shining under the streetlamp, a puddle of his own piss slowly making its way towards his outstretched hand.

Javi lightly kicked his shin.

He didn't move.

"He's dead," Javi said.

"You're all-wet, ace," she laughed. "He'll live to bowl another day."

"Won't he tell someone?"

"Tell them what? The dame at the bowling alley is undead?"

Javi pursed his lips. "Won't he have a big wound?"

"He's half-seas over. He'll think he fell."

Javi was skeptical, but an hour later the man toddled back into the alley, avoiding eye contact and blathering on about a mugging.

"They believed him!" Javi was dumbfounded. 

"They're all on a toot, none of 'em will remember tomorrow."

Javi moved in with her that summer. They spent their afternoons drinking and lazily making love in the shadows at dusk before they'd head downstairs to the endless symphony of crashing pins, sneaking shots of tequila and - sometimes - a nip from an obnoxious customer. Javi would cover for her while she snuck into the men's room after the ones who called her toots. 

In the pre-dawn hours they'd walk the city streets hand-in-hand, stealing papers from newsies even though they never read them.

When the building was condemned, they moved to a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Javi got a job working for a demolition crew, and Credence picked up the night shift stocking shelves at the grocery store. Sometimes they missed rent, but their neighbour Butch (who was responsible for payment collection) had walked in on Credence and Javi mid-whoopie, her teeth sunk into his neck and a trickle of blood running down his collarbone. Butch’s skin turned a funny greyish colour like moldy oatmeal, and he never bothered them again.

Every five years or so they'd buy a map from a gas station, lay it on the bed, and with her eyes closed Credence would stick a fang into the paper. That's where they'd move, without notice or preamble, just walk away from their dirty laundry and the fridge full of food for Javi, load up into whatever jalopy they were driving that week, and find the next trailer park.

By the seventies, people assumed that Credence was Javi's daughter.

"Maybe we shouldda figured out how to make me one of you," Javi said, wincing as he rubbed his bum knee.

"I have no one to ask. I think I'm the only vampire left north of Pennsylvania."

"Wouldn't have taken your lot for snowbirds."

By the late eighties, Credence took to calling Javi Papi. 

"I think I need dentures," he said. The orthodontist kept watching Credence nervously out of the corner of his eye, his hands shaking as he glanced repeatedly at her mouth. 

Credence ate his secretary before she had a chance to do up the bill.

"What do you want to do today?" Credence asked Javi one afternoon as he was finishing up his Jell-O. 

"I want to go bowling," he said.

He struggled with it, his legs shaky and his arthritis rearing its ugly head, but he smiled with such warm affection as the ball rumbled down the laneway that Credence didn't even make fun of him when his glasses slipped off his face and onto the shiny wooden floor with a muted clatter.

He groaned as he bent over to pick them up, his old bones creaking in protest, and frowned as he ran his thumb over a crack in the glass.

"They're broken," Credence said.

"Doesn't matter. They don't really help anyway, damn cataracts..."

She raised his hand and sucked the drop of blood from his thumb, the taste of Death thick on her tongue, burning her throat like the watery booze she used to run for Blaise.

When he died, she sold his body to the science department of a second-rate university with a questionable reputation. She used the money to purchase a run-down bowling alley in Windsor, where she hired a young line cook named Jorge.  

“You’re a vampire, aren’t you,” he asked.

She called him Papi in bed.