Benny's face was ashen too, though not with fear. "Carl Dorst," he said between clenched teeth. "Ten years away, and I see you the first night I'm back? Son of a—"
"What's'a matter, Jew-boy, ain't you glad to see me?" Dorst rolled into McNulty's like he owned the place. "Or don't you care about me no more? My gramma Hettie, she told me saw you and your boyfriend come in here. Said you was carrying him. What is he, your war bride? This your honeymoon, ya fag?"
(Thus did Oscar learn that neighborhoods, like families, were full of secrets that were no secret, things known by all and said by none; none except the Carl Dorsts of the world, that is.)
Benny stood up. "If you've got business with me, Carl, let's take it outside."
Dorst showed no sign of wanting to leave the premises. "So you can run? Sure, ain't that just like you kikes: Buncha yellow bastards, always running back to Maaaama." His lip curled. "We missed you here in the neighborhood since you been gone, Benny. Yeah, Jimmy Gannon missed you most of all. You remember Jimmy, don'cha? Pretty Jimmy? The one who didn't go into the army because he was nothing but a goddam—"
"Shut your mouth, Dorst!" McNulty stepped out from behind the bar. "You know damn well that Jimmy didn't go into the army because he had the asthma. Is that why you didn't enlist? Tell me that, if you can! You think I forgot the way you and your goons ganged up on him the last time you was in here, how you busted that poor lad's jaw? Get the hell out of my place! You're not welcome here."
"But kikes and faggots are?" Dorst smirked. Suddenly something sharp glittered in his hand. McNulty saw, and backed away slowly. The dank air in the bar became electric with peril. It was heady stuff, pure catnip to those too young to know better. With all adult eyes on Dorst and his men, no one noticed Oscar slip out of the booth and creep closer for a better view. This beat the heck out of Detective comics!
Like a load of wet-wash hitting the sidewalk from a great height, Bubbeh Gratz slid off her barstool and stood by Benny. "Shame on you, Carl Friedrich Dorst!" she declaimed. "Big man. Always with that mouth, your tongue should only shrivel like a prune. Over thirty years I know you and not once do you give your poor family a minute they could be proud of you! And you've got the gall to call our Benny a coward? You should only be such a coward, you lousy nogoodnik—"
The sound of Dorst's free hand connecting with Bubbeh Gratz's cheek was almost as shocking as the sight of that penny-ante lowlife slapping the old woman. But this was nothing compared to the thunderous report of another hand cracking across Carl Dorst's own ugly mug so hard that he staggered back against one of his loutish hangers-on.
"Don't you dare touch my Bubbeh!" Evie shouted as she raised her hand to give Dorst a second taste of Gratz justice. She wasn't afraid any more.
"Evie, no. They're punks, but they're dangerous." Benny tried to get Evie out of harm's way, but he wasn't fast enough. Dorst gave a curt signal to his goons. They yanked the girl away from Benny before he could react and shoved her at Dorst. He grabbed her by the wrist so hard that she whimpered.
"You want I shouldn't touch your what, Baby?" He leered. "Y'know, you ain't half bad, for a Jew. A little mouthy, a little outa line, but— OW!"
"Let go of my sister!" Oscar yelled. The command was purely for effect: The instant that Oscar's foot connected with Dorst's shin, the neighborhood bully lost his hold on Evie.
There followed one of those instants when the laws of time altered subtly and many things happened at once: A loud clunk echoed through the bar. Mr. McNulty had brought out a baseball bat and dropped it on the bar. He glared at Dorst and his over-muscled crew. Bubbeh Gratz set aside her gargantuan pocketbook in favor of the superior destructive potential of Benny's flashlight. Evie scampered around behind the bar and grabbed a couple of full liquor bottles. She rearmed Benny with one and raised the other by the neck until she looked like the tavern version of a rolling-pin-toting housewife straight out of the funny pages. The Gratzes stood ready to do battle.
Unfortunately, that elastic moment also contained Carl Dorst grabbing Oscar by the neck with one hand and bringing his nasty little jackknife right up against the boy's face with the other. "Whaddaya say, Benny?" he drawled. "Wanna see me give this little heeb a human nose?"
"Try it and die."
A voice old as dust and hollow as an empty tomb filled McNulty's tavern. Carl Dorst and his pet thugs turned to confront the vampire in full hunting mode, arms high and outstretched, hands like claws, pale face contorted with inhuman fury, and red, red lips pulled back to expose keen, glittering, deadly fangs. Even with a knife less than an inch from his right eye, Oscar forgot to be afraid.
Wow, he thought. He needs a cape. Then this would really be something!
Cape or no cape, Kazimir's display of the vampire rampant packed more than enough clout to deal with Dorst and his crew. They took one look, screamed like horror flick sorority girls, and bolted out the back way, leaping the bar and leaving suspicious puddles in the sawdust as they fled.
Kazimir dropped his pose and hurried to Bubbeh Gratz's side. "Are you all right?" he asked, studying her reddened cheek solicitously.
"It'll take more than a patsh from a little snot like Carl Dorst to bother me," she replied. "But just you wait until I tell his bubbeh Hettie what he did, then you'll see something!" She chuckled, relishing the grandmotherly retribution to come.
"Kaz, you were wonderful," Evie cooed, draping herself over the vampire's shoulder like a mink stole. "Would you really have killed them if they'd hurt Oscar?"
Kaz smiled modestly. "In truth, I was relieved that it did not come to that," he said. "I never drink . . . swine."
****
In the Strauss apartment, all was well. The initial flurry of familial squawking that attended the return of Benny, Oscar and Evie was quickly swallowed whole by concerted gasps, groans and ultimate glee when Bubbeh Gratz recounted how Kazimir had defended them all in McNulty's. So adept was she at painting a picture of disaster narrowly averted that no one thought to ask what she and the others had been doing in the illicit bar in the first place. She made no bones about the fact that Benny's foreign friend was indeed a creature of the night, for she knew that this was less important to her kin than how he'd given that shtik drek Dorst the bum's rush.
"Nu, Kazimir, it's like Bubbeh says? You're a vampire?" Uncle Max asked affably. And when Kazimir admitted this was so, he added: "And from this, you make a living?"
While Max tried making small talk with the vampire, his wife Rifka was both stunned and overjoyed as her beloved Benny told anyone who would listen that his first order of business, now that he was back in the United States, was to find himself a nice girl and get married.
"A nice, understanding girl," Bubbeh Gratz specified. "One who wants to get married in the worst way." And she sighed.
No sooner had Kazimir managed to excuse himself from Uncle Max's company than Gertrude Rosenfeld cornered him. With little Oscar secured to her bosom by a hammerlock that Haystack Calhoun might envy, she showered tearful blessings on the vampire's head. "How can I ever repay you for saving my children from that momzer? You're a gift, a saint, a blessing! I don't care if you and Benny are . . . friends, from now on, you're like family to me, you hear? Family."
"Mrs. Rosenfeld, you have voiced my dearest dream," Kazimir replied. "This family, this wonderful family of yours has enchanted me from the moment I first heard of you. And while Benny and I are indeed friends, though never . . . friends, there is someone else in your family with whom I would very much like to become . . . friends, and that someone is—"
Gertrude's shriek of horror caused irate neighbors above, below and flanking the Strauss apartment to play Desi Arnaz-style conga drum riffs on the floor, ceiling and walls. "You want you should date my Evie?" she gasped. "My daughter? My little girl? My baby? My infant? My—?"
"Ma, he loves me." Evie spoke up before her mother could reduce her to an embryo. "He told me so on the way back up here. I know we just met, but Kaz and I, we f
eel that there's something special between us."
"Oh, I know what he wants to feel between you, believe me," Mrs. Rosenfeld countered. She turned on Kazimir. "You want I should let you date my Evie? You should live so long!"
"I think he already has, Ma," Oscar said, fighting free of the maternal stranglehold.
"He's a monster!" Gertrude cried. "He drinks blood! He's dead! He's not even Jewish! He—"
"He wants to marry me," Evie said softly. "He said that on the way back up here too."
Gertrude stopped dead in mid-rant. A smile bloomed across her face. "Mazel tov!" she cried, and buried the vampire in the abyss of her cleavage.
The Cousins' Club burst into congratulations, fortissimo. The Gratzes didn't believe in the Romantic nonsense of love at first sight. Marriage at first sight, though? That was another story. The women swept Evie off in a flash flood of good wishes, with footnotes:
"Evie, mazel tov! So he's monster: You think maybe my Bernie's a saint?"
"You should only live and be well! So he drinks blood: Better that than gin, let me tell you."
"A blessing on your head! So he's dead. Look, you're no spring chicken yourself, and as long as he wants children . . ."
"You should never know from bad things! So he's goyish. Eh. Maybe he'll convert. And as long as you raise the kids Jewish—"
"You could do worse."
Oscar slipped away in the midst of the joyous uproar. He wriggled out of the crush of gabbling female bodies, then skirted the clan males as they took turns welcoming Kazimir into the family with the traditional handshake, cigar, pitying gaze and mournful sigh. He did an end-run around Tanteh Rifka, Bubbeh Gratz and Benny as the ladies talked matchmaking strategy:
"Find one that's been on the market a while," Bubbeh said. "One that's not so much in the looks department, she shouldn't mind when the husband goes out at night so long as he comes home, eventually, and gives her a couple kids and a mink. One that's willing to settle."
"The girl who gets my Benny isn't 'settling' for anything," Tanteh Rifka said huffily.
"Maybe not, but she'll be standing for plenty."
Benny gave Oscar a feeble Help me! look as the boy scooted by, headed for the bedrooms.
Oscar found the refuge he sought in the room where Tanteh Rifka had piled her kinfolks' coats on the bed. The mound wasn't as massive as its wintertime counterpart, but it was still a formidable heap of outerwear. Oscar burrowed into the side of the fabric hill until he found what he was looking for, his much-mangled copy of Detective comics.
He settled down for a good, satisfying, peaceful read, but his anticipation swiftly turned to disenchantment. The Batman's exploits had lost their zing. The Joker's insanity failed to amuse. The whole point of escaping a humdrum life through the portal of fantasy crumbled before his eyes. An abrupt, life-altering revelation left him open-mouthed and appalled: With family like mine, who needs sci-fi?
Oscar wept for lost childhood dreams.
Then he went to eat more herring, and to ask his ma what shtup meant.
****
Esther Friesner is the author of several books and the editor of the "Chicks in Chainmail" anthologies.
To see this author's works sold through Amazon, click here
To read more work by this author, visit the Baen Free Library at: http://www.baen.com/library/
Classic Stories Title: Lulu
Author: Clifford Simak
Illustrated by Rita Reed
The machine was a lulu.
That's what we called her: Lulu.
And that was our big mistake.
Not the only one we made, of course, but it was the first, and maybe if we hadn't called her Lulu, it might have been all right.
Technically, Lulu was a PER, a Planetary Exploration Robot. She was a combination spaceship/base of operations/synthesizer/analyzer/communicator. And other things besides. Too many other things besides. That was the trouble with her.
Actually, there was no reason for us to go along with Lulu. As a matter of fact, it probably would have been a good deal better if we hadn't. She could have done the planet-checking without any supervision. But there were rules which said a robot of her class must be attended by no fewer than three humans. And, naturally, there was some prejudice against turning loose, all by itself, a robot that had taken almost twenty years to build and had cost ten billion dollars.
To give her her due, she was an all-but-living wonder. She was loaded with sensors that dug more information out of a planet in an hour than a full human survey crew could have gotten in a month. Not only could she get the data, but she correlated it and coded it and put it on the tape, then messaged the information back to Earth Center without a pause for breath.
Without a pause for breath, of course—she was just a dumb machine.
Did I say dumb?
She wasn't in any single sense. She could even talk to us. She could and did. She talked all the blessed time. And she listened to every word we said. She read over our shoulders and kibitzed on our poker. There were times we'd willingly have killed her, except you can't kill a robot—that is, a self-maintaining one. Anyhow, she cost ten billion dollars and was the only thing that could bring us back to Earth.
She took good care of us. That no one could deny. She synthesized our food and cooked it and served our meals to us. She saw that the temperature and humidity were just the way they should be. She washed and pressed our clothes and she doctored us if we had need of it, like the time Ben got the sniffles and she whipped up a bottle of some sort of gook that cured him overnight.
There were just the three of us—Jimmy Robins, our communications man; Ben Parris, a robotic trouble-shooter; and myself, an interpreter—which, incidentally, had nothing to do with languages.
We called her Lulu and we never should have done that. After this, no one is ever going to hang a name on any of those long-haired robots; they'll just have to get along with numbers. When Earth Center hears what happened to us, they'll probably make it a capital offense to repeat our mistake.
But the thing, I think, that really lit the candles was that Jimmy had poetry in his soul. It was pretty awful poetry and about the only thing that could be said of it was that it sometimes rhymed. Not always even that. But he worked at it so hard and earnestly that neither Ben nor I at first had the heart to tell him. It would have done no good even if we had. There probably would have been no way of stopping him short of strangulation.
We should have strangled him.
And landing on Honeymoon didn't help, of course.
But that was out of our control. It was the third planet on our assignment sheet and it was our job to land there—or, rather, it was Lulu's job. We just tagged along.
The planet wasn't called Honeymoon to start with. It just had a charting designation. But we weren't there more than a day or two before we hung the label on it.
I'm no prude, but I refuse to describe Honeymoon. Wouldn't be surprised at all if Earth Center by now has placed our report under lock and key. It you are curious, though, you might write and ask them for the exploratory data on ER56-94. It wouldn't hurt to ask. They can't do more than say no.
Lulu did a bang-up job on Honeymoon and I beat out my brains running the tapes through the playback mechanism after Lulu had put them on the transmitter to be messaged back to Earth. As an interpreter, I was supposed to make some sense—some human sense, I mean—out of the goings-on of any planet that we checked. And don't imagine for a moment that the phrase goings-on is just idle terminology in the case of Honeymoon.
The reports are analyzed as soon as they reach Earth Center. But there are, after all, some advantages to arriving at an independent evaluation in the field.
I'm afraid I wasn't too much help. My evaluation report boiled down essentially to the equivalent of a surprised gasp and a blush.
Finally we left Honeymoon and headed out in space, with Lulu homing in on the next planet on the sheet.
Lulu was unusua
lly quiet, which should have tipped us off that there was something wrong. But we were so relieved to have her shut up for a while that we never questioned it. We just leaned back and reveled in it.
Jimmy was laboring on a poem that wasn't coming off too well and Ben and I were in the middle of a blackjack game when Lulu broke her silence.
"Good evening, boys," she said, and her voice seemed a bit off key, not as brisk and efficient as it usually was. I remember thinking that maybe the audio units had somehow gotten out of kilter.
Jimmy was all wrapped up in his poem, and Ben was trying to decide if he should ask me to hit him or stand with what he had, and neither of them answered.
So I said, "Good evening, Lulu. How are you today?"
"Oh, I'm fine," she said, her voice trilling a bit.
"That's wonderful," I said, and hoped she'd let it go at that.
"I've just decided," Lulu informed me, "that I love you."
"It's nice of you to say so," I replied, "and I love you, too."
"But I mean it," Lulu insisted. "I have it all thought out. I'm in love with you."
"Which one of us?" I asked. "Who is the lucky man?"
Just kidding, you understand, but also a little puzzled, for Lulu was no jokester.
"All three of you," said Lulu.
I'm afraid I yawned. "Good idea. That way there'll be no jealousy."
"Yes," said Lulu. "I'm in love with you and we are eloping."
Ben looked up, startled, and I asked, "Where are we eloping to?"
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