Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

But Clayton, he got the full treatment.

Those Hudson River frogmen weren’t going to find a damned thing; when sunlight torches one of the family, it even torches the bones.

Clayton was the second-oldest vampire I knew about in New York.

The oldest was a Hessian. Like, played for the other team in the Revolutionary War. Big bastard, pale as death, never fully lost his German accent. Had a house in Greenwich Village, beautiful place with bars on the windows and a servant; the Hessian is stinking rich and nobody fucks with him. Or at least they didn’t for a long time. More about him later, much later.

But enough about night fever and Hessians.

You probably want to hear about the next time I saw those kids.

Okay.

But the story jumps ahead now.

You know how when you’re a kid a rainy day seems like the end of the world? You press your forehead to the window and sigh, fogging the glass, drawing squiggles in the fog with your pudgy little finger or maybe writing the word BORED but not backward so a woman walking by on her way to the bank or somewhere errandy glances at it but doesn’t take the time to work it out, just clip-clops along hunched under her umbrella, those perfect, temporary circles pinging in the puddles at her feet. And the sun, fickle in this gray city, always a flight risk, seems gone for good. No note, just went out for cigarettes and never came back. Your dad and mom are seething with some just-under-the-skin fight and they wish you could go play even more than you do, if that’s possible, cause they’ve got awful things to say to each other, things you can plaster over maybe but they’re part of the architecture now. And you? You’re tired of your toys and nobody will play a game, and you’ve read everything twice and the dog barely wags at you, barely cocks his eye at you, knows you’re dangerous somehow.

That’s a rainy day for a kid, a rainy Saturday anyway.

When you’re a vampire, a rainy day is a hall pass.

This particular day, a freaky warm Saturday in March, I was sitting just inside the entrance to the subway with my soccer gear on and a transistor radio on my lap, not caring that I was in the way, making the wet, grumpy lava flow of mass transit users even grumpier for having to step around me. One lady actually shook her umbrella out practically on me, said, “Oh, pardon me, I didn’t see you.” I thought about following her down but didn’t want to taste her, thought her blood might be rank with all that sourpuss she was pumping out of her sourpuss gland.

The radio was fuzzy; I twiddled with the antenna.

“Warmer than normal ( pffft ) time of year in the greater New York metropolitan area. Expect light rain ( pffft ) cloud cover for the rest of the day and over… ( pffft ) clearing tomorrow morning. The temperature at Central Park is ( pffft ).”

Music to my ears, static and all.

I slipped out of the Columbus Circle entrance and crossed the street to the park’s southwestern corner. I stayed away from the carriage horses—one tried to bite me once, made quite a scene—and instead steered toward the guy at the kosher hot dog cart, asked him what time he closed. Six? Perfect. Would he mind holding on to my radio till I got back? Drool and nod, surprisingly feminine way of patting his mouth with the corner of the napkin, I think this guy wore lipstick in his free time. It was already after four; I’d probably forget the radio, but I had six or seven more of them in my room—if shoplifting were an Olympic event, I’d be Mark Spitz.

I tooled around for a while, past the big, useless Maine memorial, I mean, the Alamo’s a good story, I get that, but the Maine ? Smelled like an inside job to me. Fuck the Maine ! I went to Umpire Rock to look at the skyscrapers jutting up past the trees, Essex House blazoning its name in hooker red, much less elegant than the Hampshire House next to it; then past the Carousel, the dilapidated Dairy, up and patted Balto’s head. When I was still a real kid, me and a bunch of other small fry hitched our sled behind the big bronze doggie and Dad’s friend Walther took a picture. Must have been 1929, 1930, after the crash because I remember looking at the skyscrapers on Park Avenue, watching for guys jumping. Uncle Walt told me about the jumpers; he was always telling me creepy shit in that matter-of-fact way that made you love him, made you sure everything was all right because all the bad stuff he told you about had to get through him to get to you. I don’t know what happened to that Balto picture. I don’t know what happened to anything.

I doubled back to the Sheep Meadow; I knew that on this first almost warm day of 1978 I’d see kids playing soccer there, rain or no, and I did, a bunch of them all muddy and swearing and laughing, a few spectators sharing cigarettes on the sidelines. I asked if I could play, and they didn’t let me at first, and then a few of the older ones left when some girls came by and I was in.

At first nobody wanted to pass to me, younger as I was and dressed in my really square parochial soccer jersey and all, but a ginger kid got in trouble and booted it sideways to me, so I yo-yoed that ball around like Pelé and scored bigger than hell. I dialed it back after that, let kids take the ball off me half the time, but scored twice more. One of the fullbacks on the other team called me “shrimp,” a tall, skinny, bucktoothed kid you just knew would end up in jail. One of my teammates stood up for me, said, “That’s Supershrimp to you! He fucked you up twice now!” and bucktooth didn’t like that. Made a point of tripping me the next time I got near him. I gave him a cleat in the nuts during a big tangle-up later and I could tell he wanted to fight but didn’t want to look like the bully he actually was. The rain got heavier then, and most of the kids left. But bucktooth wasn’t done with me, nor I with him, so we stayed on to keep playing three on three. A Puerto Rican kid split for dinner, so we were left with five. Soccer was out. Bucktooth suggested Smear the Queer, looking right at me, and I said, “Hell yeah!” in my ten-year-old’s falsetto, making the others laugh. One threw me the ball, and off I went, weaving around the dirty, mostly pale legs and twisting out of feeble claw-hands until it began to strain credibility and I let myself get smeared. But something had shifted in the group dynamic; they liked me. I had outmaneuvered seemingly older kids well enough to make them go “Whoa!” and “Damn, Supershrimp!” and then taken my lumps while laughing. They piled on me, sure, but the late knee or elbow from bucktooth never came. Instead, he awkwardly patted my back as I got up. At that moment I decided I wouldn’t follow him home after all.

But I had to follow somebody. The hunger was on me. And the place was emptying fast; Central Park wasn’t a place where good citizens wanted to get caught after dark.

I left the meadow, looking back over my shoulder as I went. I remembered when that other big, open space, the Great Lawn, was a Hooverville, full of improvised shacks and tents put up by the poorest of the poor during the Depression. Not long after I got turned, I saw a guy cut another guy’s ears off with a razor up there, just cut ’em right the fuck off, said what did he need ears for if he wasn’t going to listen. Kids then played stickball, kids always play, but when they weren’t doing that, they were hunting pigeons and squirrels with slingshots. You know, for dinner. People now bitching about gas rationing and recession have no idea. No fucking idea whatever.

I steered toward the Delacorte, deserted now, but the theater crowd would come in a few months with their rich, winey blood corralling themselves within the limits of the lights, laughing their pretty laughs, the women in their pantsuits, the men in their longish hair and wide ties. But before I could get there, I entered the dripping green little forest of the Ramble, an especially bad place to hang out when the light was failing. On a lucky night, you’d trip over gays gaying it up. On a less lucky night, well, let’s just say the weather’s a little muggy. As if to illustrate this, a pair of nearly skeletal black dudes noticed me; one got up from where he had been squatting beneath the shelter of a branch-hung garbage bag, burning the edges of a plastic orange Frisbee with a lighter, I can’t say why, sometimes there is no why. Sometimes it’s just Frisbee-burning time. “Li’l man, li’l man,” he chanted in a kind of singsong, motioning me to him for what purpose I did not know, flipping the smoking Frisbee in his hand, grinning a big alligatory grin. But then the older fellow that he had been squatting near said, “Butterbean, let him be! He one a’ them.” Butterbean stopped cold and turned around, moved back into the darkness under the bag, saying quietly, I think to me, “I didn’t mean nothin’. I wa’n’t gonna do nothin’.”