The Avram Davidson Treasury (66 page)

“It’s no use, Mr. Smatz,” said the script girl.

“Wouldn’t help, Alfy,” called down the cameraman.

“We couldn’t get him sober yesterday and we couldn’t keep him sober the day before,” declared a blond, youngish-looking fellow in short khaki pants and shirt, and a pith helmet.

And in a high, petulant voice, a bosomy blonde youngish-looking woman dressed similarly announced that she was “fed up with alla this stuff”—actually, she didn’t say
stuff
—and in another minute would go sit in her dressing room.

“Get somebody else,” advised somebody else, “for the ape part.”

The man with the turned-around cap gave, through his megaphone, an anguished howl. “Even in a low-budget film no one could afford to maintain a shikker gorilla on the payroll!—Also,” he said, giving the youngish-looking woman a baleful stare, “histrionics in high places I’m not appreciative of; also, furthermore, in low-budget films high places ain’t so damn high.—
What,
‘Get somebody else?’
Who
, ‘Get somebody else?’
Where
, ‘Get somebody else for the ape part?’ Ape-part-playing is a dying art, gorilla suits cost a fortune—and if I had a fortune would I be making D-films? No,” he answered.

Then an odd expression came over his face. One hand he cupped around his ear; the other hand he used to shade his eyes. “Wait. Listen. Look. Just before shikker here, he plotzed, didn’t I hear like a high-pitched squeal which clearly indicated astonishment and alarm? Sure I did. So. Okay. Who
squealed
?”

Voices were heard denying that he or she or they had squealed. Ears were cupped and eyes were shaded… It was very soon indeed that fingers were pointed. Dorothy, realizing that concealment was useless, shyly stepped forward.

Alfred Emmanuel Smith-Smatz—“Alfy” (for it was he) clapped both hands together. “
Dotty!
” he exclaimed. “Not only did you chase away Sandra, that yenta; early this morning I get a phone call from my thirty-year-old stepson Sammy, the schmuck: ‘Mommy is so terrified she swears she’ll never leave Desert Hot Springs again’—but you are
still
giving out the intelligent squeals, with
expression!
Bartlett Bosworth never got no expression in his squeals; that’s the way it is with them silent screen stars: squeak, yes; squeal, no. Are you a quick study, Dotty? Yeah? Good! So take a quick sixty seconds to study the next scene… You got it? Yeahh! Yeay! Lights! Camera! Dolly in on Dotty, this great little gorilla lady!
ACTION
! Let’m roll!”

The rest is Film History, even if much of it must be concealed from the fans and the gossip columns and the world at large. To be sure, Alfy Smatz (“King of the D-films”) was a bit put out at first when he learned that Dorothy couldn’t play gorilla roles week after week; but only during those weeks when the moon is full in central Sumatra.

But the month has, after all, more than one week. The first week Dorothy, in her own natural form (with artfully padded hips and bosom) plays the heroine in a science fiction film as the daughter of (despite feeble social protest) the mad scientist. The second week Dorothy is kidnapped from various wagon trains and restored to various wagon trains by, alternatively, Marco Thunderhorse and Amos Littlebird. The third week Dorothy is, first, threatened by love-starved Arabs, and second, saved from same by the noble efforts of either Marco or Amos in djellabas.—But the
fourth
week in the AESSP shooting schedule:
Ahah!

In the fourth week of every month Dorothy stars in one STARRING JEANNIE OF THE JUNGLE, THE WORLD’S MOST LOVABLE LITTLE GORILLA film after another after another after another. These movies have wowed the fans in every drive-in in North America, and break records in every box office from Tampa to Tahiti; and, boy! How the money rolls in!

Dorothy has paid off her father’s debts and retired him on a personal pension, with modest privileges at the gaming tables in the poker palaces of Gardena.

Every now and then she and her blond, youngish-looking leading man of the moment get into her lemon-yellow Pighafetti-Zoom convertible to visit Luanne and Angela. They are green with envy. Again and again, separately and together, Luanne and Angela wonder. What is the secret of Dorothy’s success? It isn’t looks. It isn’t figure. What? What? What?

It’s showbiz, is what.

Dr. Songhabhongbhong Van Leeuwenhoek has never been heard from again.

Serves him right.

I
NTRODUCTION BY
M
ICHAEL
S
WANWICK

“The Slovo Stove” is probably the definitive statement on a process central to the American immigrant experience—the loss of ethnicity. I once wrote Avram to praise this story and mentioned that my wife, Marianne Porter, who is of Ruthenian extraction, had been able to learn almost nothing about her heritage. He wrote back:

As for the already dead and gone Czechoslovakian Republic of my youth. Local attitudes in Yonkers went like this: “What about the Czechs?” “The Czechs… The Czechs are all right. They have funny names but basically they are all right.” “And the Slovacks?” “Well…the Slovacks…they work hard…but on Saturday night they get drunk and beat up their wives and kids, the Slovacks…they don’t wear hats…they wear caps!” “And the Carpatho-Ruthenians?” Answer: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” I never heard anybody mention them without laughing. To this day I don’t know what is or is supposed to be so damned funny about the Carpath-Russian-Ruthenians. NO idea.

Which was how Avram wrote
casually
—with erudition, street smarts, and enormous humor. If, by the way, you have a loved one who “doesn’t read science fiction,” but appreciates the fine literary craftsmanship of (say) Updike, Cheever, or Raymond Carver, here is a story you can urge upon him or her with confidence. Because Avram was—is—their peer. In craft, in heart, in experience, his best are the equal of theirs. He was, like them, a great American short story writer.

As to why this fact was never acknowledged in his lifetime, I simply cannot say. NO idea
.

THE SLOVO STOVE

I
T WOULD HAVE BEEN
a little bit hard for Fred Silberman to have said a completely good word for his hometown; “a bunch of boors and bigots,” he once described it; and life had carried him many leagues away. However. In Parlour’s Ferry lived Silberman’s sole surviving aunt, Tanta Pesha; and of Tanta Pesha (actually a great-aunt by marriage) Silberman had only good memories. Thinking very well of himself for doing so, he paid her a visit; as reward—or punishment—he was recognized on the street and almost immediately offered a very good job. Rather ruefully, he accepted, and before he quite knew what was happening, found himself almost a member of the establishment in the town where he had once felt himself almost an outcast.

Okay, he had a new job in a new business; what was next? A new place to live, that was what next. He knew that if he said to his old aunt, “Tanta, I’m going to live at the Hotel”—Parlour’s Ferry had one, count them,
one
—she would say, “That’s nice.”
Or
, if he were to say, “Tanta, I’m going to live with you,” she would say, “That’s nice.” However. He rather thought that a roomy apartment with a view of the River was what he wanted. Fred developed a picture of it in his mind and, walking along a once long-familiar street, was scarcely surprised to see it there on the other side: the apartment
house
, that is. He hadn’t been imagining, he had been remembering, and there was the landlady, sweeping the steps, just as he had last seen her, fifteen years ago, in 1935. He crossed over. She looked up.

“Mrs. Keeley, do you have an apartment to rent? My name is Fred Silberman.”

“Oh,” she said. “
Oh
. You must be old Jake Silberman’s grandson. I reckernize the face.”

“Great-nephew.”

“I reckernize the face.”

The rent was seventy-five dollars a month, the painters would come right in, and Mrs. Keeley was very glad to have Nice People living there. Which was very interesting, because the last time Silberman had entered the house (Peter Touey, who used to live upstairs, had said, “Come on over after school; I got a book with war pictures in it”) Mrs. Keeley had barred the way: “
You
don’t live here,” said she. Well. Times had changed. Had times changed?
Some
thing had certainly changed.

The building where the new job would be lay behind where the old livery stable had been; Silberman had of course already seen it, but he thought he would go and see it again. The wonderful dignified old blue-gray thick flagstones still paved most of the sidewalks on these unfashionable streets, where modernity in the form of dirty cracked concrete had yet to intrude; admiring them, he heard someone call, “Freddy! Freddy?” and, turning in surprise, almost at once recognized an old schoolmate.

“Aren’t you Freddy Silberman? I’m Wesley Brakk. We still live here.” They rambled on a while, mentioned where each had been in the War, catalogued some common friends, then Wesley said, “Well, come on into the house, we’re holding my father’s
gromzil,
” or so it sounded; “you don’t know what that means, do you? See, my father passed away it’s been three years and three months, so for three days we have like open house, it’s a Slovo and Huzzuk custom, and everybody has to come in and eat and drink.” So they went in.

There were a lot of people in the big old-fashioned kitchen at the end of the hall; the air was filled with savory smells, the stove was covered with pots—
big
pots, too. One of the older women asked something in a foreign language; im
me
diately a younger man snapped, “Oh for Crise sake! Speak United States!” He had a dark and glowering face. His name, Fred learned, was
Nick
. And he was a relative.

“This is beef stomach stuffed with salami and hard-boiled eggs,” said a woman. “Watch out, I’ll pick away the string.”

“You gonna eat that stuff?” asked Nick. “
You
don’t hafta eat that stuff; I’ll getcha a hamburger from Ma’s Lunch.”

Ma’s Lunch!
And its french-fried grease! And
Ma,
with frowsy pores that tainted the ambient air. “Thanks, Nick, this is fine,” said Fred.

Nick shrugged. And the talk flowed on.

By and by a sudden silence fell and there was a tiny sound from forward in the house. “Aintcha gonna feed the
baby
, f’Crise sake?” cried Nick. His wife struggled to rise from a chair crowded behind the table, but “old Mrs. Brakk,” who was either Wes’s mother or Wes’s aunt, gestured her not to; “
I
will do,” said she. And produced a baby bottle and a saucepan and filled the pan at the sink. There was a movement as though to take one of the heavy cook pots off the stove to make room to warm the bottle, but the dowager Mrs. Brakk said a word or two, and this was not done. Perhaps only Fred noticed that she moved toward a small pile of baby clothes and diapers in a niche, as though she wanted to bring them with her, but Fred noticed also that her hands were full. So he picked them up and indicated that he would follow.

“Thank you, gentleman,” she said. She gave him, next, an odd glance, almost as though she had a secret, of which she was very well aware and he was utterly ignorant. Odd, yes; what was it? Oh well.

In her room, “You never see a Slovo stove,” Mrs. Brakk said. It was not a question. It was a fact. Until that moment he had never
heard
of a Slovo stove. Now he gave it a glance, but it was not interesting, so he looked away; then he looked back down at it. Resting on a piece of wood, just an ordinary piece of wood, was a sort of rack cut from a large tin can, evidently not itself brought from Europe by whichever Slovo brought the stove. On top of the rack was something black, about the length and width of a book, but thinner. Stone? Tentatively he touched a finger to it. Stone…or some stonelike composition. It felt faintly greasy.

“You got to put the black one on first,” Mrs. Brakk said. However glossy black the old woman’s hair, wrinkled was her dark face. She put on the saucepan of water and put the baby’s nursing bottle in the pan. “Then the pot and water.
Then
you slide, underneath, the blue one.” This, “the blue one,” was about the size and thickness of a magazine, and a faint pale blue. Both blue and black pieces showed fracture marks. As she slid “the blue one” into the rack, Mrs. Brakk said, “Used to be
bigger
. Both.
Oh
yeah. Used to could cook a whole meal. Now, only room for a liddle sorcepan; sometimes I make a tea when too tired to go in kitchen.”

Fred had the impression that the black piece was faintly warm; moving his finger to the lower piece (a few empty inches were between the two), he found that definitely this was cool. And the old woman took up the awakening child and, beaming down, began a series of exotic endearments: “
Yes
, my package;
yes
, my ruby stone;
yes
, my little honey bowl—” A slight vapor seemed to arise from the pan, and old Mrs. Brakk passed into her native language as she crooned on; absolutely,
steam
was coming from the pan. Suddenly Silberman was on his knees, peering at and into the “stove.” Moistening a fingertip as he had seen his mother and aunts do with hot irons a million times, he applied it to “the blue piece,” below. Mrs. Brakk gave a snort of laughter. The blue piece was still cool. Then he wet the fingertip again and,
very
gingerly, tested the upper “black piece.” It was merely warm.
Barely
warm. The
pan?
Very
warm. But the steam continued to rise, and the air above pan and bottle was…well…
hot
. Why not?

She said, “You could put, between, some fingers,” and, coming over, baby pressed between one arm and bosom, placed the fingers of her free hand in between the upper and lower pieces. He followed her example. It was not hot at all in between; it was not even particularly warm.

Silberman peered here and there, saw nothing more, nothing (certainly) to account for…well…
any
thing… She, looking at his face, burst out laughing, removed the lower slab of stone (if it was stone), and set it down, seemingly, just anywhere. Then she took the bottle, shook a few drops onto her wrist and a few drops onto Fred
Sil
berman’s wrist—oh, it was
warm
all right. And as she fed the baby, calling the grandchild her necklace, her jewel ring, her lovely little sugar bump, he was suddenly aware of two things: one, the bedroom smelled rather like Tanta Pesha’s: airless, and echoing faintly with a cuisine owing nothing to either franchised foods or Fanny Farmer’s cookbook (even less to
Ma’s Lunch!);
two, that his heart was beating very, very fast. He began to speak, heard himself stutter.