Vampire Society

VAMPIRE SOCIETY

Ken La Salle

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Ken La Salle

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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To Debbie Hill and Margot Von Strohuber

Who saw all of this

And to Vicky Pearson

Without whom…

OH, THE LOVE OF DARKNESS

OH, THE VAMPIRE’S KISS

HAVE MERCY ON A PEOPLE

WHO WOULD DREAM LIKE THIS...

Al Stewart

Chapter 1

Vampires. That’s what they are. The whole society. Vampires.

It was a time of greed. A time of selfishness. A time when what you were meant nothing in the face of what you had. With possessions defining virtue in the way that a stirred sludge-pond defines an image, thought, word, and deed were moot before an intransigent bottom line.

And why should this come as a shock to anyone? After the 1970's ME Decade and the 1980's Trickle-Down society, the baby-boomer’s scrambling, utilitarian, hunger was a plague that reached out and spread, perhaps unknowingly, to everyone.

We were in high school then, living years that were taken from us just as quickly as we began to appreciate them. We didn’t understand things like politics, consumerism, or free-market economics and in our ignorance we found bliss. Let the adults scald their souls in the inhospitable world of the late twentieth century! For we were alive; let us live!

Sadly, such exuberant longings were not to be. Our eyes would be opened, even if we clenched them shut tight. Opened with hot tongs and cast iron pliers.

I still remember the day.

There were three of us then. I like to think that it wasn’t a consequence of our being friendless that we became friends. None of us fit in where the rest of society dictated that high school students should be stacked: sports, band, clubs, etc.. We three were individuals. We were a separate race among the mongrels of a cracked melting pot. Or, perhaps, thanks to this fact, we really were friendless.

Arthur Silvada led us. It was the time when he always did. By virtue of his striding, long legs, strong from his ritualistic morning runs, which elevated him above the two of us at just over six feet in height, those legs demanded of the world that he lead. It was remarkable that he was in our little group. He could easily have led the track team. Often, he ran through their lengths in the morning just to tease them, setting out after his shower from his house near the school as the gasping athletes limply limped back to their coach. He worked weights in his garage, wore the right clothes. Honestly? He was incredibly handsome. His blue eyes inspired trust and his costly, white teeth always shone through his smile, even in the darkest rooms. His tanned skin betrayed a healthy glow that only later would we learn hid the carcinomas that would someday lead him to costly surgery and a night-world existence terrified of the sun he had once adulated.

Down the hallway, he led. It was Tuesday, May sixth and, beneath his smile, lay the tension of the orphan being sent away to his adopted home. For our schools were the orphanages of the late twentieth century, not only for us but for all children. A part-time orphanage, to be sure. It held us for just about eight hours every day, while our parents - Arthur often relished in the riches of living with both parents - left us for destinies untold. What destinies? Our own. For one day, we would take our parents’ places in the sweat shops and salt mines and textile mills of the information age: customer service, telemarketing, retail sales. Until that day, though, it was in our orphanage that we remained, progressing through our graded years. From the beginning, it seemed like torture, taken from our familiar homes, sardine-canned into those overcrowded classrooms. It wasn’t until those last months of high school that the understanding of our privileged position was gleaned like stray nuggets of abandoned gold. So much time wasted! We were the sheep, soon to be led to the slaughter, trying to tell the kids in the field to enjoy the grass while they still could only to see them spit it out with contempt.

June was coming; soon, we were to graduate.

The hallways there were all built in exactly the same way, with the exact same height, width, and length in every building. It was said that our school was built by a firm that had designed prisons as well, all the better for us inner-city students who’d be better off getting used to such an environment, or so it seemed to say. No attempt had been made to make this place look any less like a prison, with paint or furniture right on up to the instructor’s guarded frowns, lest we be unable to appreciate it.

Still, Arthur walked as though heaven awaited at the end of those halls.

And why shouldn’t I, he asked, his arms spread, uplifting the two of us from our typical malaise.

For the simple reason that all is not as good as you might think it is from up there, Arthur, Abby snapped one of her trademark replies.

Be you an over-achieving demigod like Arthur or someone more like myself, you had to love Abby. There was more in her words than mere letters. Sadly, there is no earthly way that ink on paper can capture the music of her voice. If this page could rise above its font-enshackled bonds, however, her words would dance. Her words would smile. Her words would truly live!

Just thinking that nearly brings my heart to break because I know, just as surely as you will, what became of her words, how the poetry was stripped from them by the world in which she lived.

Though we called her Abby, the name her father gave her was Abigail Sorina Ayrnes.

Ayrnes, the name of her father’s family, the name of those proud brothers who had started a school in Chihuahua long before there were even paved roads running through the region. Martin and Jose were both well-educated men from the south who were sure they could bring prosperity to this region with their school. They’d prepare the many children for the colleges in Mexico City and, yes, even in el Norte. Shortly after the school was built, they both took wives from among the local families and built homes for themselves on the school’s property. There, they flourished. An entire town sprang up around them. A little hacienda, a couple of chickens, and a church down the road; who could ask for more?

Soon, the first offspring was born. His name was Ricardo Ayrnes, Abby’s great-grandfather, born to Martin and his wife, Maria. The compulsion that drove his father and uncle drove him just as hard. North. Always north. Abby’s father, Ydalgo, had felt it running hot through his blood, too. He would never admit to it, though. He would put the blame on a discarded magazine and indoor plumbing.

In 1966, while Ydalgo was picking in a neighbor’s field, he first laid eyes upon Sorina.

Sorina Medina had come from a long line of Medinas, which stretched back to her grand-sires who had bought the family farm in Columbia in the 1850's. That gilded memory was of a farm that had grown enough coffee and cotton to make the family rich until the Depression of the 1930's had driven them from the land, paupers. Northward, they had come. Bourgeois turned beggar, the Medina clan migrated like summer birds, north, always north. At every town in which they stopped, they’d beg - not for bread but for work. The old and the young, together they worked the land graced by pacific breezes. Along the way, some of them caught the germ of communist propaganda so popular at the time. Should that be at all surprising, given Abby’s later leanings? Eventually, they stopped in the northern Baja. Few of them remained. Proud Catholics, their rugged lives left many dead babies, like Darwinian road marks, by the side of the road.

Sorina would become Abby’s mother. Sainted, according to Ydalgo, she died in the throes of childbirth. But she was happy in the end, Ydalgo always said. Smiling that smile that he had first seen across the fence.

It was because they had gone to el Norte, America. That’s what Ydalgo’s mother claimed was the reason for Sorina’s demise. Abigail Ayrnes, Abby’s grandmother had once lived in el Norte. It had been Ricardo Ayrnes who had driven them to live on a bracero outside of Los Angeles where her father and her mother, her mother’s grandparents, and her four sisters had all lived in the tiny, one room shack. There, they picked, from farm to farm, strawberries, lettuce, broccoli, chard, oranges, peppers, tomatoes - the bounty of the rich, Californian land. They’d leave in the morning before dawn and work until their fingers were cramped or bled and wait until nightfall when her father would be through. Her father’s idea to go there, to leave the home and history of Chihuahua, to drag the family to this new place with its concrete and prosperity had ended in the only way it could end, tragically. He had told them they would have a better life, a life with schools and plumbing and appliances and cars and dignity. But what did they get there? A shack fit for a dog, little furniture, an outhouse rarely cleaned, and a life of fighting and scraping for the barest essentials. Then, the grandparents died, one on the fields, the other days later. They’d worked until their last days never to know the comforts of this opportunity el Norte promised.

Ydalgo’s mother couldn’t take it. She saw her sister’s bellies round with babies who would be born in the mud of the field. But not her. No. She swore it! She’d run away! Run to Chihuahua if she must but she would get away!

No, her mother told her. If you must go, don’t risk the long journey alone; so she was told to go, instead, to Rosarito where friends of the family could watch over her. There, she was allowed to blossom. Her rich red hair, always short to keep it from her face as she worked in the fields, grew long and her fingers grew soft. There, she’d met Ydalgo’s father, Raphael.

Then, the war came. Married only two years, her own belly swollen large with Raphael’s seed, she could not sit idly by when Raphael began boasting that he would go north and enlist in the army el Norte was sending against Japan. He couldn’t leave, she told him. He couldn’t! Soon, she promised, his child would be born and they would be without him. She couldn’t bear it! But he promised her he would send his checks and he would send his letters. Raphael was never a liar and he told his wife, his eyes pinched with sincerity, what he knew to be true. Late one night, there was no more talk. She awoke with labor pains to find that he was gone. Ydalgo was born in November of 1943. His mother swore to him with hushed breaths, warm breaths, blowing through his downy, newborn hair that she would never leave him. He would never experience abandonment as she had so many times in her life.

Raphael kept his word. He sent her checks. He sent her letters. One day in May, only months after he’d left, a letter came that wasn’t from him. It told her that no more letters would arrive. Raphael had abandoned her for a bullet and a cause on an island in the Pacific. The island didn’t even have a name, just a number. When his body arrived, his family mourned. Ydalgo’s mother held her baby in her arms, silent.

She never remarried. Ydalgo was now her life. She told him that he’d never make the mistakes her family and her husband had made and gave him her name, Ayrnes, to be sure he never felt drawn to emulate Raphael. Her in-laws felt betrayed when she denied the boy his heritage but gave her a room in their hacienda and a small place in their lives. She worked on their farm and Ydalgo joined her, first as a fumbling child, then as a lanky boy. He was still working with her on the family farm when he was a man of twenty.

What is wrong with you, she’d ask him. Don’t you know you have a responsibility? Where is your wife? Where are my grandchildren? Look at my hair! It has gone grey. Must I be dead before you marry?!

Ydalgo, his hair cropped short, removed his Dodger’s baseball cap. Mama, it’s not that easy. Besides, I help take care of you, don’t I? You’re also my responsibility.

Fah, she spat. Just as her grand-daughter would one day, she grew grouchier as she grew older. I have taken care of myself all of my life! Get out of my sight!

He would go but never so far that he couldn’t keep his eye on her.

In time, though, his eyes strayed. He was twenty-one. It was spring. And Sorina was walking on the other side of the fence. It was just as Ydalgo had always imagined. He looked into her eyes and she looked into his and by summer, they were married. Ydalgo wore one of his uncle’s suits. His uncles had always been important to him. They were like his fathers. Sorina wore her mother’s dress. They were married by the ocean on a morning when the sea was all mist and people were worrying about the dress and the suit and the flowers. I don’t need those things, Ydalgo told the families, sounding much like Abby would many years later. They are only things. They aren’t love or hope or life. They will be gone to rot and to ruin but the love that brought me here will always remain. And, with those words, they were married.

Soon, it was 1967, and Ydalgo’s mother was impatient. Where are my grandchildren, she’d ask. What is wrong with you? Are you not a man!?

Mama, Ydalgo would scold as he found he often must. There came a time when he scolded her and hesitated to continue because he knew how she’d react. Sorina had found a Better Homes and Gardens magazine that one of her sisters had discarded after reading. Both were living with her parents, where there was more room, and Sorina had relished in the pictures of the beautiful homes in America, encouraged by Ydalgo who had his own dreams of the forbidden el Norte. The beautiful things he showed her in that magazine. The bathrooms, in particular, held her in its chrome and ceramic embrace. To think! Indoor plumbing! Showers! Sinks with cabinets covered in tile! Virginally white toilets, with nary a stain, that really flushed! With their heavenly gleam, the pictures showed Sorina an impossible land of impossible promises.

Mama, Ydalgo said on that occasion, his voice lowered, Sorina and I have been saving. We have nearly five hundred American dollars.

She eyed him suspiciously. What need have you of that kind of money? Babies are expensive but -

It’s not for a baby, Ydalgo interrupted. He took his mother’s hand as she sat there at the dinner table. It’s to bring with us. Sorina wants to move to America.

He thought she’d scream. He thought she’d stamp around in a tantrum, throw things at him, invoke his father’s name as she so often did when he disappointed her but she didn’t get up. One hand clutched her knee. The other was in his but quickly slipped out as she drew it back. A soft hiss betrayed the air fleeing her lungs as an icy grip clutched at her heart. I - I see.

It won’t be long and then you can come with us, he promised, hoping it would be enough for her. She’d always ranted about el Norte. El Norte gives us sand for our food and waste for our oil, she’d say. El Norte breaks the back of our people and leaves us crippled, she’d say. But, surely, Ydalgo thought, she’d feel differently if she could actually live there. You’d like that. Wouldn’t you?

When? Her voice was hoarse as she asked, as if she hadn’t the energy to speak let alone scream.

In a month.

Where?

To Los Angeles, mama. He stopped, frightened by how she spasmed at its mention. She’d never told him about her family because she had never heard from them. As far as she was concerned, they had all died in Los Angeles. Sorina knows of a dress shop that will hire her. She’d good with her mother’s sewing machine. There’s bound to be a job for a hired hand.

I see, she muttered, standing. Her body shook as she struggled to her feet and a moan escaped her lungs.

Mama!

She put a hand to him to keep him off. Then, she turned and walked back to her room. Goodbye, Ydalgo, she muttered.

As the weeks passed, Ydalgo tried to see his mother again but she would not come out of her small room. His uncles tried to ease his mind. She would come around in time, they told him, and then she would write to him. But that wasn’t good enough for Ydalgo. Sorina was pregnant and his mother would want to know that. He couldn’t leave and let someone else tell her that. Aunt Maria kept him from her door. No, she said, her large, doughy body blocking his way. You must respect her wishes, Ydalgo.

No, he shouted. I will not leave until I see her! You go in there and tell her that I am going to enter right now whether she says to or not.

But she didn’t need to go. The door opened behind her and his mother, Abigail, stood there. Disrespectful boy. Go, Maria. You won’t want to be here. I will tell you what he says.

Maria said nothing, giving them both a worried look. She had always conceded to Abigail’s will, it seemed, until now. Maria didn’t think it wise that the two be left alone.

She had little choice in the matter. Abigail opened her door and Ydalgo entered, the door shutting behind him. You need to talk, she yelled at her son. You will disrespect me in front of our family? Talk, then! Make it quick!

From the youngest age, Ydalgo had been taught to respect women. He had been taught that family comes before all else. His mother didn’t realize how her words pierced him like hooks and tore at his flesh. Very well, mama. We leave for California tomorrow. We will do this with or without your blessing but I’d rather we had your blessing.

My blessing? You’ve thrown away everything I’ve taught you to cherish! How can you do that and still believe you would have my blessing!? She wouldn’t sit down. Her hands were balled into fists and her breath hissed through clenched teeth.

You taught me to honor family, he shouted. Well, Sorina is part of my family, now! I have just as much a responsibility to her as I do to you! We will send for you once we find a home there! What is wrong with that?!

When she replied, her voice was deceivingly quiet. I know why you want to go there. She sat down on her bed, set deep with thick blankets. You’re not going because of family or love or respect or duty or Sorina! She spat the last word. Her daughter-in-law’s name was a pariah to her lips. You go there because of the things they have there, the things in their houses and the things they drive and the things they buy. You want to have those things! You greedy, little bastard! You leave me because of all the things you want to have! Well, you won’t have them, I can tell you! What do you think you are?! Look at your skin! Don’t you realize that, to them, that color makes you no better than the dirt?! You think you can strangle your tongue and speak their language, too?! Well, you can’t! You are Mexican!

Ydalgo shook his head. There’s no talking to you, mama. Your heart is withered up and I cannot reach it. He turned, his hand resting on her doorknob for just a moment, and he remembered why else he’d come. By the way, you will have a grandchild in el Norte, mama. Sorina is with child. He heard his mother get up. She was coming to him. To ask his forgiveness, he thought. He’d finally gotten through to her. He took his hand off the doorknob and turned to forgive her.

Her right hand was raised in the air and it came down hard upon Ydalgo’s face, leaving his left cheek dark red and his body leaning over.

How dare you, she shouted. That you would do this to your own mother and your own wife is one thing but to your own child?!

Ydalgo felt hot tears flow from his eyes. What is so wrong with what I’m doing?!

Wrong?! You do not see?! Just look at the life you’ve had, my son. Think of the family that won’t be there for your child. Think of the history he won’t know. He won’t know who he is! He won’t know where he belongs! He’ll be treated like dirt by all the little, white children. He won’t have any dignity, Ydalgo! He won’t have any hope! He’ll be nothing in el Norte! Nothing but a dirty, rotten Mexican! She said the final word like a curse, hoping it would sink in.

Ydalgo looked at her, appalled, rubbing his face. How could she know this, he wondered. No words came to him. His own mother had stooped down to lies just to stop him from leaving. So, he walked out without saying another word. She’ll change her tune when I send for her, he hoped.

Five hundred dollars didn’t last long in el Norte. Their train stopped at Union station, where Ydalgo and a rounder Sorina were met by the friends who had found her a job. But dress factories, the titular precursor to the sweat shop, didn’t like hiring pregnant women. She could tell them she was just fat for only so long. By her eighth month, they were out of work, out of money and, sadly, out of friends who had the wherewithal to help anyone but themselves. Ydalgo heard about the orange crop being harvested in groves around the county. Sorina couldn’t bend over but she could reach up and she worked at his side for several agonizing weeks.

Then, the labor pains came very quickly one day as they were working the fields. She knelt down as her water broke and Ydalgo didn’t think she’d get back up again. He started to panic. Get me a midwife, he asked the foreman. We need help!

The foreman was just as dark as he but considered himself white. We ain’t got none of your voodoo medicine here, Ayrnes. Get her to a hospital and get her quick.

Where?! How?! Ydalgo’s attention was split between the unaffected foreman and his love clutching at her gut, her body racked in pain.

Don’t none of you boys got no trucks?

Ydalgo ran through the groves, his legs pumping like hammers over the soft, valencia leaves, shouting through his burning lungs for a truck. Foreman says that I am to get her to a hospital, he cried. Please! But no one would leave the fields until the day’s work was finished. Their lives, too, depended on what they could produce. Ydalgo ran back to Sorina to find her on the ground, dirty and sweating. She no longer cried, though; she had passed out. He took her in his arms, crying in terror, running out of the fields to the street. Ydalgo was never a strong man but, if Sorina was suffering, he could carry her as long as she needed. He sprinted out into the street, stopping cars around him with the scream of slamming brakes.

Hospital! Aqui!

It was Caroline Ell who took him, the only one to stop who didn’t drive away with eyes averted as one looking into the white hot intensity of their own guilt. As they were close to Chapman Avenue, she brought them to Orange County Hospital where Ydalgo ran out without saying goodbye. Into the first open door, he carried his wife, screaming for help in both spanish and english, making little sense in either. When he found a doctor, and his beautiful Sorina was taken away, ashen and still, Ydalgo stood silently. Afraid to sit, he clutched at his hands, holding them against his stomach. Hour after hour in the white hall passed until the tears leaking from Ydalgo’s eyes ran dry.

Then, the doctor came out. He spoke no spanish but Ydalgo knew what had happened by the look on his face. No words were needed. Ydalgo’s beautiful Sorina had died. On that sunny day in June, Ydalgo felt the curse his mother had placed upon him when he left her deep in his gut but knew he was blessed when he learned that the baby was alive.

She was going to be all right. Ydalgo counted fingers and toes. She was perfect. More so, she already had a full head of hair, fiery and wavy like an ocean of obstinance burning bright. She had her grandmother’s hair.

That day in the high school hallway, Abby’s fiery, red hair was cropped short as it had been throughout her senior year in high school, defying gravity for a fraction of an inch before its short curls reached out and swirled around, refusing to be ignored. She stood at only five and a half feet but the hair made her stand out even from Arthur. She hadn’t the body of a goddess, lips that were too thin and tended to frown and hips that were too wide and held record of a tendency towards dairy products but I don’t think Arthur noticed and it didn’t matter to me, either. She could have been in student council; she was smart enough. Or, like myself, journalism, she was more than able. Sports escaped her interest and cheerleading was beneath her.

Abby wrote.

Her words were poetry, rhyming or not. Through word of mouth, students knew her and asked her to bless them with her words.

Nathan? Has your tongue been cat-nipped?

Huh? Startled from