LITTLE PEOPLE!

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  This is a fairy story. Not that kind, shtumie. Fairies, as in goblins and glashtins and shellycoats; or, for the rest of you non-Jews, as in leprechaun.

  I’ve seen them all and almost died in the doing. That’s what this story is all about. Moishe Dayan was not the only Jewish hero, you might note.

  My name is Moishe Mencken (not related to the H.L. of the same surname) and I’m a comedian by trade. I’m kind of a permanent fixture at the Rachmones Resort. That’s in the heart of the Borscht Belt, near Liberty, and right off old Route Seventeen.

  Noo-oo? Do I detect some little condescension back there?

  Well, let me tell you, this isn’t such a bad place, as resorts go. It’s not like it was in the old days, of course, when we had the Concord and Grossingers. But this is the best you get now. I make a living wage here, which is better than most of my peers can muster.

  In the old days we could use good material. We could be funny then. (I mean really funny. Not what you call funny.) Now everything’s so uptight that even the Jews can’t take a joke. Everyone’s afraid. God forbid they should laugh at themselves.

  So we give the shleppers what they want. Like Polish and frog jokes. (Yes, the Poles are the true heroes of America. They can take a joke and prosper.) But you always want one more Polish joke, right?

  Okay, shtumie. Everybody knows that European and South American banks have taken over the country. You see them everywhere, right? But have you ever been to a Polish bank? They have a new policy: You give them a toaster and they refund you three hundred dollars. Ha-ha.

  That’s what you pay for. You deserve it. The frog joke. The oldest one still gets a laugh. Can you believe that? Oy, someone doesn’t know the frog joke. What’s green and red and goes sixty miles an hour? Go figure it out.

  Okay, now I’ll tell you about Shearjashub Mills. He’s the one who got me into all the fairy trouble in the first place.

  Nobody knows what Shearjashub means, or how he got the name because he’s not telling. He likes to be called Hub, and he’s as Jewish as bacon—pure Wasp, yet he smells from herring and speaks a passable Yiddish, which is mostly a shtik. He was born on a shtetl in Galicia; that’s how come the Yiddish.* Hub is not quite six feet tall (but he lies about his height and his age), has gray frizzy hair, a pot belly, and a beautiful girl always on his arm. How he does that is beyond me. He says it’s the meat and the motion. It certainly couldn’t be the money.

  For your information, I’m five-feet-two and three-quarters. Let’s get that out of the way. And I do not have frizzy hair and a pot belly. I’m tough, scrappy, and told that I’m quite handsome in a goyish way: big blue eyes, squarish, strong face, cleft in my chin, you get the picture.

  [*It occurs to me that some of you were not brought up in a shtetl in Galacia and cannot understand Yiddish, which is to miss most of the important dirty words in the English language. For you there is a Yinglish glossary at the end of the story.]

  Hub still works and lives at the Graubs Resort, a third-rate club with some decent skiing, which has kept it alive. At one time, the Graubs did quite well, as attested by its many bungalows and central houses, all stone—the old wooden barn, where stores used to be kept, caved in years ago, and still sits there in a field like an old gray hat.

  Every few months I get the urge to see Hub. He’s like lumpfish caviar: good once in a while, but every day—feh. So last month I got the urge and called and this is what I got:

  “Hello, Diana, this is Moishe Mencken, connect me with Hub Mills’ room, I love you.”

  Silence on the line. Perhaps she was overwhelmed.

  “Hello? Diana?”

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closed”—that said in a voice that was unmistakably Diana’s, but so cold I felt a chill. “If you would like to leave your address, we will—”

  “What are you, a recording?” I asked. “Cut the crap. Diana, this is Moishe, your little Moishe, now let me speak to Hub.”

  Click.

  That’s all, just like that, and I stood there with the phone still to my ear as the chills went up and down. That wasn’t Diana, I knew that. The Graubs couldn’t be closed. When a resort closes, everybody knows. It’s like a telepathic hotline. And certainly Hub would have told me, if such a thing had happened.

  It wouldn’t take me but five minutes to reach the Graubs and find out what was what. I had a few hours before I had to perform at eight.

  “Nobody screws around with Moishe Mencken,” I said into the dead phone. “Just wait!”

  So put the phone down, already, I told myself. But I couldn’t move, not a muscle. I was in some kind of trance, like a dream. Until seven-thirty I stood there.

  Later I couldn’t remember a thing. But, oy, did my right arm ache!

  ###

  I had just enough time to dress and get downstairs and do the show, tuxedo and studs and all; but I had a splitting headache like I sometimes get from drinking Wild Turkey (good stuff, mind you, but always gives me a migraine on the left side). I wondered why my right arm was numb; maybe it had fallen asleep.

  Because the crowd was small (what else is new’?), I had to perform in the Bronze Room. Can you imagine a room with tin walls and red velvet chairs? It was enough to embarrass even the nouveau riche. Then I shot an hour at the bar with Finney the barkeep (who looks like everyone’s bald uncle who plays the stock market) and a bellboy, talking about the old days. The bellboy wasn’t old enough to remember the Manhattan Riots, much less the good times, but we always made a show of impressing him with how good it was. (Ah, it wasn’t that good then, either; just better than now.)

  No, I still didn’t remember the phone call business. Wasn’t it enough that the crowd was a bunch of pishers and all the demons of Gehenna were banging on my skull?

  After a while, Finney asked about Hub—he was the only person I ever met who called him Shearjashub.

  Gottenyu, it was like waking from a dream. Suddenly I could remember! But everything wasn’t all right. I was still farchadat, a little meshugge, ready for the funny farm.

  I could not speak Hub’s name. God, did I try, over and over! But every time I tried, I had a terrible compulsion to say all the Yiddish words that start with S, which is akin to listing the nine billion names of God:

  Shabbes

  Schmuck

  Sachel

  Schneider

  Schatchen

  Schnook

  Shlack

  Shaygets

  Schlemiehl

  Shaytl

  Schlep

  Shekel

  Schlok

  Shlemozzl

  Schloomp

  Schmo

  Shikk—

  “Hey Moishe,” Finney said, reaching across the bar and shaking my shoulder.

  —er

  Shikseh

  Shmachel

  Shmatehs

  “Moishe, hey, enough, already. Are you all right? Come on.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m all right.” But I wasn’t, as you can see. I was under some kind of spell. But how could this be? This was New York, not Moravia! I took the hint: if I started trying to talk about Hub, I would only start with the list again. So with great presence of mind, I excused myself (after liberating Finney of some more of his Wild Turkey—screw the headache) and went out to my car.

  Of course, my lousy luck, it wouldn’t start.

  Back inside. It took a good half-hour to convince Finney that, indeed, I was all right, had not been drinking that much, and, yes, I would gas up his farshtinkener car and take good care of it. I’ll be back in less than an hour, if you please.

  ###

  I took old Seventeen, the Winding Way, as it was nicknamed. There was no one else on the road, which was unusual, but not that unusual. Finney had a convertible, a real antique, and the top was down. It was the kind of night to look up at the stars while a beautiful girl did unmentionable things to you in the front seat.

  The main house of
the Graubs, which I could see when I was off the highway, was lit up like a bingo parlour.

  Something fishy on Mott Street.

  Everywhere else it was dark. Except for a flickering light near the old wooden barn. I stopped the car and watched. It was most certainly the phenomenon known as Ignis Fatuus (you see, I’m no dummy), otherwise known as will-o’-the-wisp. But who knows from will-o’-the-wisp in Kerhonkson, New York?

  Something about all this bothered me. The directions didn’t seem right. Everything seemed, somehow, placed wrong. It was what my mother, may she live many more good years, would call a goslin night.

  But I was wasting time here. If Hub was around, he’d be at the bar in the Main House.

  Then a voice called my name.

  “Hub?” I answered. It sure as hell sounded like him, but I was wary after that Diana business. Maybe I was talking to spooks again. Ah! I couldn’t believe that, either. I’d been under a lot of strain lately. Maybe the whole damn thing was a loose cog in my head.

  Again the voice called my name. It was Hub’s voice. I wasn’t so delirious that I couldn’t recognize the voice of my best friend. The dumb sonovabitch had probably bought himself a bottle of cheap wine and was getting bent up in the woods. It didn’t take much to get Hub drunk. He had emphysema and still smoked like hell and took pills, which dried out his lungs. Mix the booze with the pills and you have a cheap drunk.

  Maybe he was out here getting laid. Out of the question: he always said that he was born in a bed and not in a bush. He didn’t want any of that country-bumpkin prickers-in-your-ass stuff.

  But how could he tell it was me? I was driving Finney’s car. It was dark.

  So what would you have done? Sit like a schlemiehl? Tell yourself you were hearing things again?

  So you have no chutzpa.

  I went to investigate.

  And found a very drunk Shearjashub sitting like a toad on a rock in front of a dying fire. (So I was wrong about the will-o’-the-wisp. Sue me.) Behind him were two huge oak trees, their branches grotesquely twisted together. There was a log for the fire beside him. Nearby was another log and some kindle. Remember that, it’s important.

  “Hello, diminutive person,” Hub said, slurring his words. He leered at me as if I were jailbait. “What brings you here?”

  “I wanted to see you, dummy. How did you know it was me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, you called my name. You must have known something.”

  “Nope.”

  “You didn’t call my name?”

  “Uh-uh. But I’m glad you’re here.” Then he offered me his bottle, which I politely refused. “Come on. They’ll be none left soon.”

  That wasn’t like Hub. The Hub I knew and loved wouldn’t drink out of a glass that had been used by his mother, much less share a bottle with me.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “I’m taking you home.”

  “Don’t come near me,” Hub said, rocking back and forth on his rock—shuckling, my mother calls that: it’s what the old men do when they pray next to you in shul. It’s Jewish machismo: who can rock back and forth the fastest. Maybe it helps shoot the prayers up to Heaven.

  Anyway, I stopped where I was. He had said it like he meant it. Then he stopped shuckling, picked up the log that he had kept beside him, and then broke it in half over his knees.

  I didn’t believe it either, but seeing is believing.

  “What are you, training to be a masher?” I asked.

  He placed the log on the fire, which soon came alive. It was getting a little cool and the warmth and light and crackling of the fire felt good—almost reassuring.

  “Not bad, huh?” Hub asked, taking another sip. “It’s a trick, like tearing telephone books. The log was rotten.”

  “Very good,” I said, impatient to get out of there. “Now let’s—”

  “Sit down and be humble and I’ll tell you a story.”

  “I’ve heard enough stories for one day. When I called the hotel, Diana of the big boobs didn’t know who I was and told me the place had closed and wouldn’t let me speak to—”

  “It’s all true, the place is done, but we did have some good old times here, didn’t we?”

  I was about to remonstrate and tell him why the Graubs could not possibly be closed when, feh, he drooled all over his chin. Like my uncle used to do, may he rest in peace.

  “Come on, sit down beside me like a good little person, and I’ll tell you about the fairies.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Remember when you talked to Diana?”

  “Well?”

  “It wasn’t Diana.”

  “Then who was it?” I asked. I knew what Diana’s voice sounded like. Hub always referred to her as a sexy frog—as good a description as any. I wanted to get out of there. Even though the fire was warm (too warm), I didn’t like being out here in the middle of nowhere.

  “A bogle,” Hub said. “You talked to a bogle.”

  “A what?”

  “If you want to find out more, sit here by me and I will tell you.” He patted the rock and said, “There’s enough room.”

  So I sat down beside him.

  “A bogle, my son, is a goblin. And very evil tempered.”

  Not only was he drunk, but completely meshugge—blotto, crazy, off the wall—exactly what you thought about me when I told you what kind of story this was going to be.

  “And you’re shikker, let’s get coffee,” I said.

  “No, sit a minute. Believe me, bogles are notorious for playing with telephones and disguising their voices.”

  Maybe this bogle cast a spell over me on the telephone, I thought, but I told myself to think straight like a person; otherwise, I would become a draykop like Hub, if I wasn’t one already.

  “The fairies are taking everything over,” Hub said, looking around at the trees as if he was talking to them. Nu? Maybe he was. “And a good thing, too,” he continued. “The Catskills are as dead as Dublin. Maybe we should go back to Miami Beach.”

  Heaven forbid!

  “Okay, Hub,” I said, standing up now. “I’m going down to the Main House where I will ask the bogle if I can use his phone for a minute and call the zipzip boys in the white coats.”

  “Fine. Go ahead. But first, maybe, you could get me that log on the pile of kindle over there.”

  “You just put a log on the fire,” I said. But lo and gevalt, it was true. Burned through and through. Only glowing embers remained. “It couldn’t burn that fast!”

  “Get me the log and I’ll show you the trick to break it,” Hub said.

  “Get the log yourself, putz. You want a fire, get your own log.”

  “I’m drunk, you want I should fall? Anyway, you’re already standing.”

  But I refused to budge. Then, without warning, he lunged at me. The Hub I knew couldn’t move that fast if his life depended on it. He hit me hard, and we grappled. This was no drunkard; this boy was all muscle. Maybe a dybbuk, God forbid, was inhabiting my friend.

  He locked his arms around my chest and started dragging me toward the log and pile of kindle. All the while, he was laughing like hell.

  Suddenly everything changed. Again it was like waking up from a dream. Nothing was as it should be. The trees had disappeared, as had the fire and log and kindle. I had thought I was in the backwoods of the Graubs; instead, I found myself on Fishkill Craig. About a foot away from us, where the log and kindle had been, was a four-hundred-foot drop—straight down.

  And I saw now that it wasn’t Hub who was squeezing the life out of me, but a dwarfish person with a scraggly beard, sloped forehead, and hooked nose.

  I’d been tricked, duped, the same old thing all over again. I’d fallen under another spell.

  But, gottenyu, what fear can do to a man!

  I started kicking and screaming and making such a tummel that this dybbuk, or whatever it was, twisted around and slipped on a smooth rock. Even as he fell over the cliff, h
e was grabbing at me to pull me over with him.

  ###

  No, shtumie, it doesn’t end there. What comes next is the heroic part, but first let me tell you what it was that tried to seal my doom. It was a duergar using glamour, which is a fairy spell, to make me think I was talking to my friend. Nu? So what’s a duergar, you may rightly ask. A duergar is a dwarf, very nasty, not well disposed to humankind, and originally from the North of England.

  Remember when I talked to Diana and fell under a spell? Well, I really had been talking to a bogle, which is a goblin. Bogles and duergars always work together. The bogle casts a spell to lure a human to the duergar, and the duergar kills him. Very neat. It seems they’ve been doing this sort of thing for years.

  How do I know that? My wife explained it to me later. She’s had trouble with duergars and bogles, too.

  For your information, my wife is a water fairy. Don’t worry, it all fits in. Believe me.

  ###

  Whenever I was about to do something crazy, my mother would say: “Moishe, if you had another brain, you’d be a half-wit.”

  If she had known what I was about to do, she would say it again. “Leave well enough alone, Moishe.” Moma was smart. She understood that bravery was the other side of stupidity, and didn’t approve of either. (Neither would she approve if she knew that my wife turns into a serpent at the touch of a drop of water.)

  But she also used to say that God works in mysterious ways. God made me a comedian; now maybe he was working in a mysterious way to find me a wife. I’m a deeply religious man about these things.

  Anyway, I drove down to the Main House to find out what had become of my friend.

  Well, there might as well have been a Bar Mitzvah going on. If that’s what happens when a place goes out of business, it should only happen at my resort! The place was crowded as an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day. Outside, Cadillacs as thick as cockroaches; inside . . .

  It was like walking into a Las Vegas club. Like the Concord in the old days. Like Heaven. It was opulent. It was filled with beautiful people, with blond Galitzianers and dark Litvaks, all sitting together at long, lavishly laid-out tables, as if they didn’t know about the Jewish pecking order. (Nudnik! You must be a Litvak, you with the blank face. A Galitz is a Jew whose ancestors came from Poland, but he likes to think they came from Austria. A Lit knows his ancestors came from Lithuania, but he’s skeptical, nevertheless. Me? I’m a Galitzvak: blue eyes and swarthy skin, you should note.)