Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  Crouching near the giant was another man, short and plump with wide-set brown eyes and cropped red hair. He wore a long walrus-like mustache that dangled past the ledge of his chin in two rough points.

  “I assure you he’s quite harmless, despite his frightful appearance,” the walrus said. “I had great plans for him, but his limited faculties, alas, offered even more limited theatrical possibilities. But no matter. He has his uses. That plate he wears is really quite a blessing. French shell in the pits of Verdun peeled his skull like a boiled egg. I’ll never forget that whistle. He was quite fortunate we still had our field surgeon with us.”

  I was on the ground now, but the giant refused to slacken his grip.

  “It’s okay, Mutter. You can let her go.”

  Mutter blew like a horse, blinking hard, then mumbled a wet growl and retracted his large hands.

  “I should dispense with introductions,” the walrus began. “I am Heinrich Meir-Aichen, but that is beating a banality. Please, call me the Trout. I assure you the name is more indicative of my tenacity than any aquatic prowess. And this conspicuous fellow is Mutter. I never learned his real name. The boys always called him Mutter, for he acted so like a mother, always making sure we were dry and fed. Always doing for others. And what shall we call you, my little water baby?”

  I moved to speak but felt a great surge of water flood my throat. I pitched forward and vomited a few liters of the Danube. I tried to say something, but all that came out were tarnished leaves.

  “No matter,” the Trout said. “Perhaps we could—”

  “Maddy,” I said finally, rasping it out with the sound of a long idle grindstone.

  “Maddy, yes. Short for Madeline I assume.”

  “Mädchen,” I croaked.

  “Mädchen. Quaint. A tad literal, perhaps.”

  He stood, his greatcoat almost reaching the ground. Around his waist he wore his ammunition belt. But where cartridges and grenades had once hung were tubes of dry sausage and triangles of cheese.

  Mutter raised himself to his full height and began walking.

  “Our camp is not far,” the Trout said. “Perhaps you would care to join us in a modest feast?”

  I said nothing. I could feel the pull of deep, open spaces, quiet depths, and silent floors where a nullifying sap could be allowed to saturate me. It was my first time experiencing this sensation. I did not know the earth is always calling for the dead. But something kicked, some involuntary muscle that still quivered for the light, for the human.

  “Or we could picnic here,” the Trout continued, deaf to the monumental struggle inside me. “By the water could be quite pleasant.”

  He produced a knife and cut a disk of sausage and held it out to me. I took it and remembered where it fit, stuffing it dryly into my mouth. My jaws rose and fell, but the mass tasted of ashes. I kept chewing, but no saliva flowed to reduce it. Flecks of fat and dried meat dribbled from my lips as my jaws continued to work.

  “Or perhaps you’re not hungry. Perhaps you don’t eat at all.”

  His tone grew quiet as I felt him eye me. His hand slapped my face and I felt the breeze of it as my head snapped to the side. I heard Mutter whimper.

  “You can’t feel that, can you child?” the Trout said. “In fact you can’t feel anything. Isn’t that right?”

  I said nothing.

  “You were quite dead when we fished you out, my dear. So perhaps, as the Americans say, let’s stop beating around the bush.”

  He took my face in his hand, studying it, waiting for a welt that never appeared. A memory of fear, a feeling of awful exposure surged through me.

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t throw me back into the river.”

  The Trout smiled, parting the tails of his great mustache like a curtain.

  “Throw you back, girl?” He chuckled wetly. “I have far more use for you than the fishes. I’m too jaded for miracles and I can no longer believe in God, so I shan’t waste a moment in awe. Suffice it to say there are gift horses and they should not be regarded where they chew. Now I had quite a reputation before the war, was known as quite an impresario, a showman who had the good fortune of performing for several distinguished personages not unknown to the Hapsburgs. Therefore I feel I can offer you, with utter certainty, a thrilling theatrical opportunity, one for which you would have to wait centuries to entertain its equal. In short, my dear, I can make you a star.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Pathos, pathos,” the Trout was explaining over a scrap fire of textbooks and single shoes. Mutter was softening a cheese rind over the low flames with a pair of spectacles bent into a single-pronged fork.

  “The empire is lost,” the Trout said. “The kaiser is as crazy as his father if he thinks otherwise. The war will cease by summer, and what do you think the masses will crave as they sift through the ashes? That ridiculous flickering train of Lumière’s? Pathos! Hope! Three matinees a day of a two-act resurrection!”

  Mutter was chewing on the blackened rind, having resumed his sewing. It was a dress meant for me, frilly with great capped sleeves painfully redolent of the pink-and-cream dress I had but dyed a dutiful black with diluted motor oil. The scenario had been all worked out and we were late into rehearsals, but still the Trout felt we needed inspiration.

  “I don’t eschew the possible revolutionary aspects of the flickers,” he said, blowing on his fingers. “But movies are dynamite in the hands of infants, fondled with their fuses wet. For now only the theater can offer real edification, spiritual, emotional, or otherwise. Mutter, hurry up with that hem. We need to go over that last business with the box.”

  I suppose there was genius in our presentation. If not in the execution, at least in the audacity of the attempt. It wasn’t a play, really. Not in the purist sense. There were elements of theatricality but just as much sideshow flimflam. There was a moment right after my “death from the Spanish Menace,” as the Trout referred to it, when he would place a small cone constructed from a modified ear horn over my chest and invite an audience member to listen for any signs of life. Satisfied that I was truly departed, I was respectfully deposited into a black pine box and slowly nailed shut. The Trout would dramatically hold each nail over his head, pinched between his taut fingers before driving it with great purpose into the dark pulp. Mutter, now dressed in a frayed chasuble, would ring a small bell between each strike of the Trout’s hammer. I was then lowered into a pit, while Mutter shoveled dirt on top of me and then left the scene for his costume change. The Trout would launch into a desperate prayer for my redemption, ascension, and hopeful resurrection. This speech would end with his tearful collapse onto the fresh grave, where he would raise his head one last time, streaming eyes facing the sky, and say, “But death shall be vanquished on the wings of a father’s final love” or some such claptrap, and poor Mutter, visibly panting by this time, would reenter, now in crepe beard and wire crown, a monolithic Jesus, and lift the box out of the grave with a two-handed squat. With the box on terra firma once more, the Trout would select an audience member, usually a woman, to whom he would graciously offer the hammer and aid in removing the seated nails from their supposed final resting places. This took some time, during which the Trout would indulge in some vaguely humorous patter that I always felt undercut the moment. With a heft and an impassioned grunt, the lid would fly off and I’d pop up, wide-eyed and giddy, the grateful beneficiary of an end-curtain miracle. The Trout and I would embrace, father and daughter reunited past death, while Mutter would strike some cribbed ecclesiastical pose. We would hold this dreary tryptic until the trickle of applause began and the Trout sprang back to life to pass the hat.

  As the saying goes, we killed ’em in the sticks. To me, the allure was trivial. I was growing increasingly sensitive to the dualities of life. All those wet eyes that greeted our trite finale, the soldiers with their tin jaws brandishing their iron crosses, screaming the names of their fallen friends. The souring widows and sonless mothers. All that roiling
hope, all those fervent wishes, wasted, spinning like rogue stars into an empty pocket the gods never tended. So perhaps I was to blame for what happened next. If we were going to hawk discount redemption, when the real agency of our act would have had us burned as witches, didn’t we owe it to the rubes to give them a better show? If the whole prestige of the thing was my miraculous recovery, wouldn’t it be better to chuck that corny bit with the ear horn and let them feel my dead self for themselves? The Trout liked this idea but thought stopping the show to have the audience line up to prod me might disturb the organic flow.

  “Well then, don’t bother lining everyone up,” I said. “Just pass me around.”

  “Like a collection plate! My God, you have the instincts of Bernhardt!”

  The next day we tried it. It was the pathos the Trout had dreamed about that took me in its many arms, an army of exhausted and woe-brimmed eyes, hearts stuffed so full of loss they split. I was thrilled at this new direction and wanted to sit up and shout, but I stayed limp in the anonymous hands. I could feel the knots of calluses through the thin fabric of my dress, the rooty fingers that made the satin rasp as I spilled in to frailer holds. I could smell stale mucus and cheap kraut, the pure notes of sour mash and the thrum of tobacco, boiled onions and pork fat and stale prayers. All the phantoms of private grieving. Fingers skimmed my throat and cheeks, lingering like bald mice, feeling for life, lifting me to the wiry ears of the old. Voices squeezed out names of the dead. Greta and Recca, Gerhart and Maude. Soon there were no transitions, no faltering stoppages, just one ragged flow of woe upon which I was borne like some blasted raft.

  In the distance I heard Mutter growl. Or perhaps I felt it, for it was that low, wet, throaty rumble of his he let loose whenever someone snatched the last sausage without asking or the Trout raised his voice to me. I was willing my limbs off the alert when I was crushed into a chest of stiff priestly black. I felt the sinews of thin but stubborn arms that locked me into a smell of wool and frankincense. I felt the chest swell with air, a whistle down the pinched pipes.

  “Death to the unclean!” it screamed. “Vanquish this hell-spawn of Satan, this incubus of decay.”

  I dared not struggle and fuel his argument, so I lay there limp, crushed in his fervent grip, my limbs flailing behind me. “Destroy the undead! Kill this nosferatu!”

  I could hear the approach of Mutter. Then I heard the voice of the Trout.

  “Father, please. You’re disturbing the performance.”

  “This is no performance,” the voice above me hissed. “No human child could still its vital pumps to this degree and still be called living. There is but one explanation. Vampire! Undead!”

  And here he made a sudden gesture that brought cries from the crowd. Peeking through a tangle of my eyelashes, I could see he held a wooden stake high above his head, crudely whittled to a sharp point. I could feel Mutter’s frantic heat, hear his strained breathing as he stood near me.

  “A mere illusion, Father,” the Trout tried to soothe. “Humble stagecraft, I assure you.”

  “There is craft I’ll grant you,” the voice wheezed. “But of a far darker cast.” And he shook the stake above his head, his fist draining white.

  Mutter feinted forward.

  “Try it, you profane filth, and I’ll run her through,” the priest said.

  I felt Mutter recede.

  “Now, now.” I could hear the Trout wending his way through the crowd toward me. “You must repose yourself, Father. These illusions are designed to be effective, and perhaps I should be flattered at the depth of their deceit. But really, put the child down and let us finish the show.”

  “Child? Did you say child?” the priest said. “Could any natural mother’s child withstand this?”

  He set the stake between his teeth and gripped me with both hands before shaking me so violently my teeth rang like hooves clacking on cobbles. Mutter whimpered and lashed out, but the priest was quick. He dashed between the dregs of the crowd, away from Mutter’s grasp, letting me fall to the ground, one ankle only in his wiry grip as he ran with me bumping and flailing behind him. The crowd surged toward the running man, clogging Mutter’s path. He pushed and clawed and shoved through the swamp of thick bodies, screaming in his awful denuded tones that held no language, only pain.

  “Up there!” a voice in the crowd rang out.

  I felt myself ascend, my head slapping rhythmically upon the hard edges of steps. Up and ever up until we burst through a door and stopped.

  “On the roof! The church roof!”

  Mutter threw himself at the rough stone of the church wall, finding purchase in the irregular surfaces, grinding his fingers into the rotting mortar, leaving bloody flecks like ashes from stamped cigars as he worked his body to the belfry.

  “Stop! Stop!” my captor screamed. “Or by God I’ll do it!”

  I could feel the point of the stake at my heart and I could feel the bubbling up of voices from below, shouting, screaming, crying out in anguish and dare.

  “Kill the Serbian whore!” (How did I become Serbian?) “Kill the daughter of the Dracul!” “Aw, come on! Let ’em finish the show!”

  Mutter had reached the copper rainspout that crested the slate roof and he swiped at the priest’s ankles, but again the old man proved quick and he lifted his feet in time and sent them crashing upon Mutter’s already bleeding fingers. Mutter let out a bellow, but still he held on. The priest lifted his foot for a second blow but Mutter caught it, his enormous fist easily enveloping the old man’s narrow arch. The old man screamed as the stake fumbled out of his grip. His hands churned in the air, trying to catch it, and I felt myself freed from his grip. A communal intake of breath from below seemed to buoy me up for an instant. Then a huge concussion of dread from the rapt throats beneath me signaled my slip and steady descent. I heard Mutter howl as my body breezed past his huge shoulders. I fell in a blinding veil of whipping hair. Then I hit the ground and lay there in a tangle of bad geometry. A circle of spectators surrounded me. I heard the Trout push through the crowd and plant his feet by my silent form.

  “Stop!” the Trout shouted before the horror of what had just happened could congeal.

  Mutter cleared the roof and subdued the old man with a single slap.

  “Never before,” the Trout continued in his booming bravura, “has the theater been subject to a spectacle of this magnitude. Not from the soul-shattering pits of Oedipus’s orbital gore nor from Faust’s foul demonic temptation has the human coil been so profoundly and effectively unraveled. You came to see life triumph over death. You came to see a father’s love vanquish the hoary darkness of disease and demise. Where would you have seen this? Why, the stages from London to New York could never have served up so thrilling a diversion as you have been privy to this day. Only here could you be witness to this apogee of theatrical entertainment. Only here will your eyes and hearts swell with the miracle of our craft. Yes, I say ‘miracle,’ for what is great art if not the impossible made possible? Ladies and gentlemen, you have been chosen. You have been marked for ages to come. For only here could you witness what will linger in your brains forever! Only from here could you depart and be just in saying, ‘Yes, by God, yes, I was there that day. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw the disease-ravaged shell of a frail little tot plummet ten stories to the unflinching soil to lay broken in a heap, crushed, nay it shall be said, dead.’”

  “And yet you will also see a sight that will thumb its nose at what you deem possible,” the Trout continued in full glory. “I implore you, ladies and gentlemen, hold fast to the knowledge that all you will observe is stagecraft, the mere whimsy of the theatrically inclined. But enough! For now we have come to the pinnacle of our humble play. You will see me turn to this lifeless form you see before you and with the power of the redeemer coursing through my shaken and shattered soul, with the beating thrum of ten thousand angels surrounding this dire scene, I shall shout, ‘Rise! My child, rise! In the name of the Lord, rise!’” />
  I assumed that was my cue. I milked it for all it was worth. I fluttered an eyelid. The crowd gasped. With a frail moan, my lips parted. Then my head tilted to the side. My eyes fell open. I blinked hard and a smile bled across my face.

  The Trout rushed to his knees and wrapped me in his arms.

  “You see, ladies and gentlemen, with love all things are possible.”

  The applause drenched us like spring rain. The ground was pocked with falling coins, hard kroners, and fluttering Papiermarks. Mutter was back on the ground, scooping up our winnings as fast as they fell.

  “Not bad,” the Trout whispered as he lifted me to my feet. “We should get that crazy reverend on retainer.”

  CHAPTER 8

  It was in a small outdoor café near Kagraner Platz that I first learned of Dracula. The Versailles treaty had yet to descend with its full crushing bulk so a simple meal of pork schnitzel and weak beer could still be had for a few pieces of silver. I was diligently chewing my meal, lifting my napkin to my lips while I pretended to swallow, giving what I considered to be an excellent impression of any living girl out for a simple dinner with her two doting uncles. Fresh from our recent triumph, it was a relief to have the talk veer toward something other than bits of stage business and blocking, but my mind was caught on an earlier comment, the one made by the crowd as I felt them sour, the one about me being a Serbian whore, the daughter of Dracul.

  “Dracula, actually,” the Trout corrected. “Son of the dragon, in literal translation, and son of King Dracul of Romania. But the allusion really refers to Mr. Stoker’s old penny dreadful.”

  “Romania? But why call me Serbian?”

  “Blame, my dear. Serbia, to some, is responsible for our recent troubles. But we can hardly fault so ignorant a mass for its poor geography. You are guilty by proximity. Another of the German virtues.”

  “But why do you say that?” I asked. “Aren’t you German?”