"The Vampire of Washington Park" by Charles Haddox

The Vampire of Washington Park 

It’s one of those magical midsummer days in Washington Park. A woman is selling cups of corn out of a plastic cooler on the sidewalk. White corn, with butter and chili and lime, elote en vaso. A sky-blue, ’57 Chevy drives down the street, as shiny and polished as a bald guy on a date. Don Arcadio sits in front of his day-old bread stand, reading a newspaper and drinking a Coke. He has a long grey mustache and dresses in black polyester, which makes him look like a seal or a walrus. His loaves of day-old bread are perspiring in their plastic wrappers. They’re a bit dented and have been “day-old” for a couple of weeks. But, as always, Don Arcadio shakes my hand and gives me a stick of cinnamon gum. Two men in white overalls are painting the front of a red-brick bungalow. I have no idea why people think it’s a good idea to paint brick. But there they are. The air smells like rotting fruit and gasoline, that oil paint smell. One of the painters is probably around thirty. The other looks like he’s pushing sixty, a handsome, sun-bronzed, white-haired vato, who says to the younger guy in Spanish, “Just wait ’til you get to be my age. No one wants to mess with you. They can never tell how strong or how crazy you really are.”
When I hear this, it makes me think that he might be the guy who recently “convinced” some of the neighborhood taggers to find a new hobby — and they all readily agreed. He’s the guy I’d like to be when I’m sixty, the kind that always gets respect, even if he’s just a lowly painter.
I’m walking home after swimming at Washington Park Pool with a little water in one ear and chlorine burning my eyes, but the day is fine. It seems like all my good memories are somehow associated with swimming.
At the corner of Tobin and Boone, I run into a couple of kids from school. One of them is tall and dark and wears a baseball cap. His name is Norbert, even though he’s puro Mexicano. Norbert Martinez, Jr. He’s a fantastic soccer player, unstoppable as hell when we play at recess. One time, he chased a ball right into a spiny, pyracantha hedge running along the edge of our school playground, and it took three of us to pull him out. The guy with him is Eddie Lozano, a wiry, little twelve-year-old who likes to put it around that he’s Italian, even though he’s actually Mexican, too. We’ve started calling him Eddie Spaghetti the Meatballs Are Ready, which is neither original or clever, but hey, if you don’t like it, you can call the nickname police.
“What are you up to?” I ask them.
“We’re going to feed the vampire bat,” Norbert says.
“You have a vampire bat?”
“There’s one that lives in a hole in that shitty old tenement behind Eric Ochoa’s house.”
“The place they call El Buque?”
Eddie nods and adds, “We feed it. We’re the Vampire Club. Check it out.”
I go with them to the abandoned, orange-brick apartment building that we used to pretend was a pirate ship when we were younger. They lead me to a small hole in one of the crumbling walls, under a sagging concrete-and-steel staircase facing an alley. It smells like urine under the staircase. And the hole is dark and seems to go back a great distance into a hollow partition or utility crawlway, something like that. The whole place used to have a chain-link fence around it that we loved to climb.
“This is where he lives,” Norbert says.
“The vampire bat?”
“Simón.”
I don’t say anything to them, but the hole has always been one of my favorite pee-spots when I’m out and about and happen to get caught short.
Eddie asks me if I want a cigarette.
“Sure.”
“You gonna help us feed the vampire bat?”
“Okay.”
We light up, and Norbert produces a little shard of clear, broken glass. He and Eddie cut their index fingers. They take turns squeezing drops of blood into the hole. I don’t believe there is a vampire bat — and I’m not so sure that vampire bats exist at all — but I’m enjoying the cigarette and the company, so I take the fragment of glass and make a quick, shallow cut on one of my fingers.
“How long you been doing this?” I ask Eddie.
“About a week,” he answers.
“Now you’re part of the Vampire Club,” Norbert says.
Don’t think I’ll be attending all the meetings, I think to myself.

In the evening lit by golden streetlights, Don Arcadio is boarding up his stand. The two house painters have knocked off work and are killing a couple of quarts of Busch. Bats are dancing over Tobin Street, as they do all summer, making spirals and arcs, having spectacular near-collisions with buildings, trees, telephone wires, and each other. They look suitably hungry, chasing around like that, but for insects, not for blood, and I’m thinking as I watch them that I’d never be able to tell a vampire bat from an ordinary brown bat, or a Mexican long-nosed, or even just a plain old Mexican free-tailed bat.

Charles Haddox

Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, Folio, and Stonecoast Review.

Headshot: Lizabeth Berkeley

Photo Credit: Staff