Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  The sound of one hand clapping itself to a forehead in exasperation was repeated many times throughout the livingroom. It remained for Bubbeh Gratz to step in as the voice of clarification:

  "I said Benny's a faigeleh, him and his friend. This little pisher said he's a vampire."

  "I did not!" Oscar's protest flew free in the face of his father's ineffective attempts to shush the lad. "I said Benny's friend was the vampire. I mean, look at him! Look how pale he is, how he's all dressed in black, how he couldn't come here unless it was at night. You gotta watch him drink Benny's blood to prove I'm right or what?"

  "I would not suggest waiting for that opportunity." Kazimir stood in the hallway leading from the bedrooms, Benny glued to his side as always. The foreigner's face contorted with distaste. "We heard what was said. I bid you . . . good evening."

  He was gone so quickly it seemed as if he'd sprouted wings. Benny uttered a low moan, but when he tried to rush after his friend, Tanteh Rifka suddenly materialized from the kitchen and laid hold of her son with an unyielding grasp.

  "Benny, zieskeit, let him go!" she cried. "Such a friend you don't need, believe me!"

  "Ma, please," Benny protested. "You've gotta let me go; it'll kill me if you don't."

  "Fine, go!" Benny's mother dropped her hold on his arm and clutched her chest. "Better you should tear my heart out and grind it into the dirt than you should listen to me. Who am I to ask you for anything? Only the woman who suffered the tortures of the damned to give birth to you. But go, go! I'm only thankful that with my health I won't be around to suffer your ingratitude much longer." She staggered towards the nearest sofa, alternating sobs with coughing fits and groans.

  "Oh my God, I can't take this." Evie rolled her eyes. "I have just sat through that snotty Joanie Dreyfus unwrapping thirty-four identical sets of monogrammed guest towels with nothing to eat but dried-out cucumber sandwiches because Mrs. Dreyfus thinks that's refined, for Lord's sake, and I am not going to have my first chance at a decent meal ruined because Cousin Benny's queer friend had a hissy fit and stomped out. You wait right there with your Ma, Benny; I'll bring back your boyfriend." So saying, Evie was out the door.

  Oscar took one look at the remaining family faces surrounding him. If life were a comic book, their eyes would be emitting tiny red lightning bolts, symbolizing the emanation of killer Guilt rays. "I'll help you, Evie!" he yelped, and bolted before anyone could stop him.

  He hoped to catch up to his sister on the stairs or at least in the lobby of Tanteh Rifka's building, but it was not meant to be. Evie had a head start and hunger had given her speed. Oscar hit the sidewalk and cast around for some sight of her, to no avail. The Flatbush streets were well lighted with the yellow radiance of streetlamps, none of which revealed his sister's retreating form. On such a warm evening, kids were still out playing potsy, fathers settled world affairs over a pack of Lucky Strikes and a bottle of Coca-Cola, mothers swapped news, recipes, and beaming brags about their perfect children, while grandmothers enthroned on a row of folding chairs sat in awful judgment-without-appeal over the whole neighborhood, but that was all. There was no sign of Evie; there was no sign of Kazimir.

  Oscar pondered his options: Go back upstairs and face the collective Wrath of Gratz—with the added likelihood that Bubbeh would seize this opportunity to blame the recent blowup on "that sci-fi drek the boychik reads"—or wander aimlessly around the streets until his absence became so terrifying that when he finally did return to the Strauss apartment, all would be forgiven out of sheer relief to have him back again.

  It wasn't a hard choice to make. Oscar jammed his hands into the pockets of his good pants and sauntered off in a random direction, whistling the Davy Crockett theme song. If he knew his kinfolk—and he did, thanks to all those Cousins' Club meetings—being a Lost Child would trump his Troublemaker status into oblivion.

  He was halfway to the corner when he heard a sound that set the short hairs on the nape of his neck on end, a plaintive, high-pitched moan that came from the back of a strange passageway between two large apartment buildings. Five concrete steps led down into a tunnel that served the function of an alley. The lone working light bulb cast a weak glow over a clutter of trashcans near the stairs, but left the far end shrouded in shadow.

  The moan came again, louder, shuddering through the air. For Oscar, there was no mistaking the voice that had uttered it. He'd swear to its identity on a stack of Detective comics: "Evie? Evie, is that you? What are you doing down there?" No answer came out of the shades. For a moment he paused on the lip of the passageway, unsure of whether to descend into the gloom or run to Tanteh Rifka's apartment for help.

  With alacrity worthy of UNIVAC, his young mind blitzed through all the possibilities that might be lurking just beyond the pathetic pool of light, all the consequences that might befall if he didn't do something and do it now. Swiftly he weighed his hopes of getting immediate backup from any of the strangers on the sidewalk. He knew how that would go:

  "Who are you . . .? Rifka's nephew? Rifka Strauss, from 3-C?"

  "No, Simon, the Strausses live by 5-C."

  "I'm telling you, Shayna, it's 3-C, and may God strike me dead if I'm wrong."

  "Fine, so I'll be a widow."

  "Little boy, does your tanteh Rifka know you're out here like a wild thing, talking nonsense about someone making a big tumult down by where the super keeps the garbage?"

  And over this imagined interchange there loomed another image, a gaunt specter of the night—white skin, red lips, arms spread wide like a bat's leathery wings. When those arms closed, they clasped to the monster's bosom that helpless victim of his hideous thirst, Evie. The fantasized Kazimir raised a bloody mouth from his unnatural feast and filled Oscar's head with dreadful, gloating laughter.

  That did it. He took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and asked himself What would the Batman do? He knew the answer: Oscar Rosenfeld dove into the darkness.

  "Evie! Evie, I'm coming!" As he sped past the row of garbage cans, he caught sight of a godsend: Huddled in the space between two of the cans was a busted-up old orange crate. Oscar paused just long enough to wrench free one of the broken wooden slats, then ran on, couching his improvised stake like a lance, ready to send the vampire to his doom.

  "Oh my God, Oscar, what are you doing, running with that sharp thing? You want you should poke your eye out, God forbid?" Like a deus ex Future Jewish Mothers of America, Evie materialized out of the darkness and intercepted her little brother, yanking the slat from his hands and throwing it far away. Behind her, Kazimir observed the whole business with burning crimson eyes.

  "Evie, no!" Oscar hollered, lunging for his do-it-yourself vampire-slayer. Again she thwarted him, pulling him back by the shoulders. He stared at her in horror. He'd read the stories: He understood why his own sister had betrayed him. A faint spill of light came from the rear end of the passageway, where lamp-lit single family homes shared backyard space with the big apartment buildings. The soft glow illuminated the young woman's face, her hair—

  —her neck.

  "He got you!" Oscar stared spellbound at the dark mark on his sister's dainty throat. "You're his slave for all eternity! Ma's gonna plotz!" He began to sniffle, then to sob for his lost sister, the vampire's newest plaything.

  "Oscar, why're you crying, a big boy like you?" Evie asked.

  "'Cause I'm too late, and he bit you, and now you're gonna become a vampire, and sleep in a coffin by day, and drink the blood of the living by night, and— and—" Abruptly, Oscar's sobs stopped. He took a long, shaky breath, then a closer look at his sister's neck.

  "That's no vampire bite," he declared. With dynamism worthy of a young Perry Mason, he leveled an accusatory finger at her. "There's no puncture marks. That's— that's—" He cudgeled his brain for a word he'd learned from some older boys at school—accompanied by salacious winks and snickers—when they spoke of the mysterium tremendum that was Brooklyn Woman.

  "—a hickey." Th
e glaring beam from the flashlight in Cousin Benny's fist illuminated Evie's throat, then swept over to engulf Kazimir. "I can't leave you alone for a minute, can I?" he said coldly.

  "No matter how much I wish you would, no." The vampire drew back his lips in a grimace that began life as a feral snarl but resolved itself into a sheepish grin. "I keep telling you, Benny: I like girls."

  "So do I. We should talk," said a gravelly voice. Bubbeh Gratz shoved Benny aside and lumbered down the concrete steps into the passageway, bearing down upon Oscar, Evie and Kazimir like an othopedically-shod juggernaut. She did not stop until she stood nose-to-shirt-front with the vampire.

  "It's a good thing I followed Benny when he handed his poor mama that tumel about going out for a pack cigarettes. For this you need to take a flashlight? Bah. Children. And you." She stabbed her pocketbook sharply into Kazimir's belly. "So the little pisher was right, after all?" She jerked her head at Oscar. "You're a vampire, like out of that sci-fi drek? With the blood-drinking and the coffin-sleeping and the whole undead mishegass?"

  Kazimir nodded nervously. In all his years on either side of the grave, he had never encountered anything quite so daunting as Bubbeh Gratz.

  That formidable woman now rounded on Evie. "And you," she declared, waving her purse at the trembling maiden. "You aren't gone maybe five minutes from the apartment and already you're making moofkie-foofkie in an alley with this piece of work? What are you, a cat? A bummerke? A Little Miss Round Heels?"

  Evie grabbed Bubbeh Gratz's meaty hands. "Please don't tell Ma," she begged. "All I wanted was to talk to Kazimir somewhere away from all the neighborhood yentas, so they shouldn't know about him and Benny being . . . you know."

  "Except as I told this lovely girl, Benny and I are not 'you know,'" Kazimir put in.

  "Say it again, louder, I don't think they heard you in Far Rockaway," Benny said bitterly. "For this I got away from Ma, Kaz? For you to give me a slap in the face? Again? With my own cousin?"

  Evie shushed them both. "I wanted he should come back upstairs, that's all. But then— I don't know what happened, or how it happened so fast or—" She paused, left flummoxed by her own emotions. "There's something about him that's so— so—"

  "Sexy?" Bubbeh Gratz gave a lecherous chuckle and nudged the girl with one plump elbow. "Like I can't know that word? I'm through playing the game, but I can still keep score."

  Benny descended the concrete steps to join the miniature family reunion in the alleyway. He placed one hand on Evie's shoulder and said, "I know what you mean about Kaz. Why do you think I spent ten years of my life trying to get him to change his mind about me? I hope you never have to know what it's like, Evie, when the love of your life won't even give you a chance to— OW!"

  The zetz that Bubbeh Gratz landed on Benny's arm might not have shaken the pillars of heaven, but it probably shook the pillars of Teaneck, New Jersey. "What love? What life? You haven't been paying attention? He says he likes girls,

  "So do you," Oscar spoke up. Bubbeh Gratz and the others looked at him as though he'd just proclaimed his vocation for the Catholic priesthood. Oscar responded with a defiant: "Well, that's what you said."

  "Like you didn't know, already?" Bubbeh Gratz inquired. The silence that followed was eloquent. "You didn't?" Bubbeh's grizzled eyebrows rose. She looked from Oscar to Evie. "The boychik, okay, him I can see not knowing, but you?" Evie shook her head. "And you, the faigeleh, nothing?"

  Benny shrugged helplessly. "No one in the family ever said anything about you liking— about how you never got married because— about you being a—" His voice trailed off.

  "Oy." Bubbeh Gratz sighed. "This generation, kasha varnishkes for brains. You don't need to be told things about your family, you big yutz: You just know! Why do you think we have these Cousins' Club meetings? For our health? It's where we come so we can find out all the family things we need to know but no one wants to talk about."

  "You mean like about how you're a girl faigeleh?" Oscar asked Bubbeh brightly.

  Bubbeh Gratz smiled. "You're a smart boy. Here, have a sourball." She flicked open her purse and gave Oscar a piece of unwrapped hard candy so covered in pocket lint that it looked like a dandelion puff. It was either a reward or revenge.

  The furry candy came out of the same purse into which Bubbeh Gratz had been stuffing salami and its pungent kindred all evening. The gust of garlic-laden air released from the purse's depths hit poor Kazimir like a mallet. He groaned, demonstrated that there was a stage of pallor that went beyond the dead-and-bloodless variety, and fainted.

  "Oh my God, what do we do now?" Evie cried, kneeling beside the fallen vampire and cradling his head to her bosom.

  "First, mamaleh, you stop holding him to your tsatskehs like you want he should take a drink," Bubbeh Gratz said. "Then, we should all go get one."

  ****

  Oscar sat in a booth at the back of McNulty's bar making an outline of the Bat Signal out of maraschino cherry stems. The remains of four Shirley Temples stood ranged on the tabletop in front of him. They had all come with extra cherries as a bribe to Oscar's goodwill. It hadn't worked.

  "They've got their nerve," he muttered, fiddling with the pattern of scarlet stems. "Turning me into a stupid baby-sitter." He spared a cold glance for his charge, the still-unconscious vampire. "Boy, I wish you could've seen some of the looks we got from the little old ladies in front of Tanteh Rifka's building when Benny walked by with you slung over his shoulder. I thought they were all gonna have a heart attack or something. Wait until they tell his Ma!" Oscar grinned in spite of his displeasure with having been shunted aside to play vampire-tender.

  Kazimir was propped up in one corner of the booth, eyes closed, mouth open. He looked like just another drunk, which was exactly how Bubbeh Gratz had introduced him to her old friend, Mr. Cullen McNulty, the establishment's owner/barkeep.

  "But a drunk with money," she clarified when that worthy man seemed reluctant to let their group enter his place of business. "You wait until he gets his second wind, and then such drinking you'll see—!"

  "It's Sunday," McNulty said. "He's not supposed to be drinking on a Sunday."

  "And you're not supposed to be serving on a Sunday, you old gonif," she countered. "But if someone knows you're here today, you pour. It's a public service for the local shikkers, those drunks should have somewhere safe to get a snootful. Now draw us three beers, give the boychik a nice glass of soda pop, and don't make every little thing into a big megillah!"

  Before McNulty could voice any further doubts or demurrals, Benny flashed him a twenty and he saw reason. Now, lined up like birds on a telephone wire, Benny, Bubbeh, and Evie sat nursing a trio of beers at the bar while Oscar minded Kazimir in the booth. They were the only people in the place, it being too late for the after-church-drymouth crowd and too early for the real nightowls.

  From time to time Oscar caught tantalizing scraps of the bar-side conversation concerning how Benny had first encountered and fallen hard for Kazimir. The amorous thunderbolt struck him in a café in Germany, in the war's aftermath, when the world was still just a little topsy-turvy and strange things had more of a chance to happen.

  Oscar strained his ears, hoping to pick up some clue as to why the vampire had not turned Cousin Benny into a meal from the get-go. What was that Benny was saying, over at the bar? He'd taken Kaz up to his hotel room? Why would anyone need to go up to a hotel room just to keep talking? That was weird.

  Weirder was yet to come: "—really did just want to talk . . . to listen, I mean . . . about the family. Funny, right?" Benny raised his Pilsner glass in a mock toast. "He was fascinated. All he wanted to do was listen to me tell him all about—"

  —the family? Our family? Oscar shook his head. Some things were even more unbelievable than vampires.

  And yet, there it was: The few sentence fragments Oscar overheard told how, in his infatuated state, Benny was willing to do anything to keep Kazimir in his company that night. And apparently Kaz
imir was willing to hold off on drinking Benny's blood if that meant he'd get to hear more about that herring-bearing freak show that was Clan Gratz.

  Alas, the dawn was not willing to hold off, and so the vampire found himself thrown into peril of his afterlife, marooned in a cheap hotel room, far from the shelter of his coffin. Having no other recourse, he confessed his true nature to his smitten suitor and threw himself on Benny's mercy.

  "—word of honor never to harm me," Benny was saying. "To stay by me and protect me forever, as I protected him that day. Forever . . . or until I told him he was free to go."

  "Oh, Benny, how noble!" Evie sighed, casting a fond look back to the booth where Kaz still sat in a garlic coma.

  "Oy, Benny, how narrish!" Bubbeh Gratz's sigh was anything but fond. "Other boys, they save coins, stamps, box tops. You save monsters?"

  "He's not a monster!" Benny protested.

  "By you he's not a monster, but trust me: Someone who doesn't want to shtup him thinks different."

  "But I love him! Doesn't that count for something?"

  "Unless he loves you back, it counts for bubkes," Bubbeh Gratz replied. "Listen, boychik, maybe by some men, hanging on like a leech finally gets them, but that's not love: That's them shtupping you so you'll stop with the nagging, already. You've got no class, they've got no backbone, a nice bargain! Ten years this one owes you his life and he hasn't let you touch him? Learn, already! You can't make gefilte fish from goulash. Get someone who loves you! But first, take my advice: Get married. Find a nice girl who wants to get a husband, have a kid or two, and then to be left in peace. Give your poor mother grandchildren instead of aggravation. Trust me, once you make with the grandchildren, you can get away with anything in this family."

  "Why didn't you take your own advice, then?" Benny demanded.

  Bubbeh Gratz grinned. "Because when the egg pops out, it's not the rooster who screams, fershtais?"

  "So you want me to get married, have kids, and then find a man who—?" Benny began.

  "Hey, get a load of that, guys! Gramma Hettie saw right: Jew-boy's back." A strident voice cut Benny off in mid-sentence and drew all eyes to the doorway of McNulty's. The speaker was a short, boxy man about Benny's age, wearing a cheap suit with the green-on-brown sheen of rancid roast beef. He was attended by a pair of swarthy, lumbering brutes whose forearm hair could have founded a wig-making dynasty. Rumpled trousers and sweat-stained white singlets were their livery and ape-like hooting was their best stab at laughter. Bubbeh Gratz took the trio's measure calmly, but Evie's cheeks went pale.