THE TIME OF THE BLEEDING PUMPKINS

When I saw my wife standing out on our front porch, shivering in just a sweater draped over her shoulders despite the relative warmth of that mid-October morning—something of a heat wave for southern North Dakota, with the temperature well above freezing even at a quarter to seven in the morning—I suspected something was wrong. And as my car moved forward a few more feet, past the now mottle-leafed shrubbery that surrounded the porch, and I could see all of her standing in front of the door, I knew something was wrong.

She was holding one of the pumpkins she’d bought for Halloween in her arms—not the biggest one, but one of the mid-sized ones destined to be hollowed out and placed luminaria-style along the concrete walkway leading to the porch come Halloween night. Not taking my eyes from her pale, worry-twisted face, I parked the car in front of the house, yanked the key out of the ignition while struggling to release the catch on my seat belt, then slid across the passenger seat so I could emerge from the car directly before her. As I ran down the walkway, I finally let my gaze drift down from her haunted eyes and quivering lips to her midsection, where she cradled the still-intact pumpkin with shaking hands.

The pumpkin was bleeding.

Convex droplets of deep, dark crimson welled close to the dried-out stem, jiggling slightly with the trembling motion of the orange sphere. Their shining surfaces caught the first pale gold of dawn in winking dots of brightness that blinked like tiny eyes against the flat ochre of the pumpkin. And having worked for the majority of my adult life in various meat-packing plants (as well as a couple of slaughterhouses), I knew real blood by sight.

And by smell; as I stepped up onto the slab-poured concrete porch, that mineral-rich, slightly fulsome odor tweaked my nostrils. Wordlessly I took the pumpkin from Anya’s hands (she reflexively began wiping hers against the thighs of her jeans) and brought the thing up close to my face to better examine it.… After I’d held it for a couple of seconds, I realized that Anya hadn’t been shaking the thing—it had been shaking her. Down from her haunted eyes and quivering lips to her midsection, where she cradled the still-intact pumpkin with shaking hands.

It shook from within, as if an ogre’s hand stirred the seeds and yanked the attached stringy filaments; as it vibrated, beads of blood began to slide down the latitudinal indentations, leaving a viscid, semitransparent trail of pale carmine in their wake. Instinctively I held the pumpkin up to my ear; the noises coming from within were faint but unmistakable to the ear of a fourth-generation dhampire: This pumpkin had been tainted by a vampire. And having been tainted, was in the process of vampirification…which in turn meant that its mere presence in the house would not only cause trouble for my family, but for all that entered the house.

And as I held that quaking, bloody thing in my hands (the same hands that for the last eight hours had handled long still, but equally bloody, hunks of cow flesh), all of the stories my father and grandfather had told me about the duties of a dhampire—he who was born with the ability to hunt down other vampires—came back to me in a whisper of low voices. Male voices that mixed our adopted English with our far older native languages: the Romany of our original Gypsy tongue and the subsequent flavoring of Russian dialect my family’s clan picked up during their time there:

The uppyr drains the blood of those it envies.… The dead cannot hope to live as the truly living do, so they seek to ruin anything associated with life.… Remember the tale of the soldier who brought an uppyr to a wedding, how the uppyr began feasting on the happy couple.… To kill an uppyr, one must disinter it, dismember it, drive an aspen stake through its heart.…

To be vampire is a most unnatural state. The vampire, the mulo, is the most unnatural being of all. It is an affront to the living…Mulé arise from the bodies of those who die suddenly or those who choose to die before their time.… But to kill them, aspen stakes might not be necessary; catch the mulo outside its grave, and a simple pistol shot will do.…

There are those of our people who believe the mulo lives but forty days…just as there are fools within any family.…

Teach you the ways of vampire hunting? No such lessons were ever given to me, nor to your grandfather or his before him.… Did your mother need to teach you to eat? Just as all humans hunger for food right from the womb, so does a dhampir hunger for the rightness of humanity and thus knows by instinct the means of achieving that balance. Your senses are attuned from birth toward this goal, just as the baby seeks out the tit. You will know, Greg, when a mulo is about to strike. What you decide to do with that knowledge is then up to you.…

My wife’s low voice brought me back to the present, to the unending expanse of tract houses surrounding me and that bleeding pumpkin.

“Greg, does this mean what…I think it does? I remember your family talking about—” Here her voice became a near-soundless whisper, virtually a mere mouthing of the word, “—vampire animals, and even vampire plants. So when I saw that thing shaking on the floor while all the kids were watching TV and quiet for a change, I got it out of the house.”

Holding the quivering mass of smooth orange slightly away from my body, I nodded, then whispered, “Did any of the children see it? Not so much ours, but any of the others?”

By “others” I was referring to that latest group of immigrant children my wife, her younger sister, and a couple of teenagers from the local Lutheran-Episcopal resettlement agency here in Jamestown took care of each weekday morning from six to noon. While neither of us was Lutheran or Episcopalian, the manager of the meat-packing plant where I worked was in on the community effort to integrate immigrants into the fabric of Jamestown’s social and cultural life—an effort that included providing daycare for the children of the most recent arrivals (all of whom were expected to get jobs and just plain assimilate into the North Dakota way of life here).

Just as my family’s and Anya’s people had done, practically everyone we knew or lived near or worked with had immigrated to this state within the last century. But the more recent arrivals were from exotic locales like Somalia, Bosnia, the Sudan, and wherever it was that Kurdish people came from. Not to mention the previous influx of Vietnamese in the ’70s and ’80s. But the majority of the children still inside my house were refugees from the aftermath of Desert Storm or the civil war in Bosnia and the rest of what used to be Yugoslavia. Which is what really worried me.

“I don’t know. I mean, the children have been trying to play with the pumpkins, wanting to paint them and all, but Marina explained to them about how you wanted to have a line of jack o’lanterns along the walkway. And they’re pretty good about listening to her, so lately they’ve sort of lost interest in the damned things. Those church girls found some really good kid shows on cable, and—”

“So you don’t think they noticed?” The unseen ghoul that stirred the inside of the pumpkin was using both fists now, churning the orb from within as the blood began to plop down on the concrete at my feet.

Anya shook her head, setting her chin-length blonde hair to rippling like wheat-fields in summer when the winds blow hard and fast over their endless, flat stretches. Her pale blue eyes watered as she said, “It’s just that I wasn’t expecting anything like this. Not that I disbelieved your family’s stories, Greg, but…it just seemed such an Old World thing. Like things that might happen in another place—not here in North Dakota. Not in such a…wide, open place where everyone does for everyone else. I mean, this place is like the proverbial melting—” I thought she was going to go the cliché route and say “pot,” but she surprised me “—griddle, with everyone tossed on the pan to fry together. What place does a…vampire have here?”

“Are mulé ever wanted anywhere? Just as most of those kids’ parents weren’t wanted where they came from—or just as they wanted to get the hell out, period—so might the mulé seek refuge here. It was simply a matter of time, I suppose—” The pumpkin was beginning to quiet in my hands, less blood welled up from the spot where the stem met the main body of the thing, and even the unseen sorcerer had stopped the endless mixing of its guts. “—before some mulo was scooped up by Immigration and Refugee Services in New York and dumped here. Family and all. Hell, who knows? One of them in there might be—”

Anya crossed here arms over the “She Who Must Be Obeyed” T-shirt the kids and I had bought her last Christmas and began shaking her head of wheat-fine hair again.

“I don’t care who or what your great-great-whatever-grandmother slept with and got impregnated by, even if that offspring was a dhampire; you’re not going into that house and killing any of those little darlings. Most of them barely speak English, for Chrissake—”

“It doesn’t matter what a mulo speaks—”

“They’re babies!”

“Who said I was going to do anything to them?”

Anya’s mouth puckered into a stubborn moué before she said, “But you had to have been thinking it. That’s what your kind does. Find and…kill vampires. But those kids are my responsibility. And that includes making sure my fourth-fifth-whatever-generation dhampire husband doesn’t drive an aspen stake through their little backs! Or pop them with a Saturday Night Spec—”

“It is in my nature to find mulé, not necessarily kill them,” I cut in as the pumpkin finally stilled in my arms and stopped seeping blood. Just as I figured, being in the house had been what started the thing off. After directing a fast prayer of thanks for being born allergic to small animals (because vampirism could strike house pets as well) heavenward I added, “We have to get the rest of the pumpkins outside, at least into the garage. Just away from the house itself.”

“But won’t they freeze?”

Sometimes I couldn’t believe Anya’s Norwegian practicality.

“We’ll buy new ones, damn it! It won’t stop with them bleeding and moving; they’ll begin to cause trouble for us. And that trouble can extend to cattle—who knows what sort of havoc it could wreak at my work? Or at the slaughterhouses where most of those kids’ fathers work? As it is, I’ll have to break this one up and scatter the pieces far from where any damage might be done. Have Marina start moving the other pumpkins by the door. Maybe those church girls could help.”

Without waiting for her reply I hurried off to the backyard, which was walled in on three sides by a weathered wood-slat fence. Once in that relative enclosure, I hurled the pumpkin to the ground, where it split open on the limp, dead grass…and began to steam—a musty plume that flickered above the tangle of seeds and filaments the way steam hovers over fresh cow entrails in the coolness of a slaughterhouse.

That invisible ogre may have removed its hand, but its heat signature remained. The mulo within my house was a powerful one.

Behind me, I heard the moist sound of someone walking across the lawn, followed by my sister-in-law Marina’s exasperated, “Gregory, do you realize how much these things cost?”

Turning around to take the medium-sized orange globe from her hands, I said, “Do you realize how much damage a mulo can do? How much his or her rampage can wind up costing just in property alone?”

Pursing her lips (which were thinner than Anya’s, just as the rest of her was inversely fatter), Marina blew a silent raspberry of contempt before muttering, “It’s probably just something the kids did when none of us were looking. You know how little ones are. And you and Anya are constantly filling their heads with all that Gypsy lore.

The pumpkin she’d just handed to me was beginning to quiver. Not overtly, but just enough of a vibration that I could feel it through my open palms. And in the ever-brighter light, I could see the faint shine of blood droplets oozing up along the edges of the stem. So I held it before her, tilting the thing so she could see the first pearl-sized bead dribble down the groove under it, and said, “This isn’t mere ‘Gypsy lore’—unless you took a side trip to the old meat shed out back and scooped a few drops of blood off a dressed steer. Although I’m sure you’d have lost an ounce or two of your own blood if you’d actually found a meat shed, let alone visited one.”

Soon the brightest parts of her flat, usually placid, face were her blue-painted eyelids and those thin, quivering lips of hers; the rest looked as if she’d been bled as slowly as a kosher steer.

“You—” she began. But mindful there was a houseful of small children seven yards away from her, she settled for sticking her tongue out at me before waddling back to the sliding back door, her hips and buttocks rolling under the tight confines of her jeans.

I’d dressed out sides of pork with less fat.

Once dashed to the ground, the second pumpkin steamed only slightly. Perhaps I could salvage the rest if I stored them in the garage, I told myself as the sliding door screeched open behind me and I heard the muffled thud of one-two-four-six more pumpkins being deposited on the pine decking. As I heard the door slide shut, I turned to see what sort of faces my sister-in-law was making at me now, but instead caught a brief moving glimpse of another young woman—this one dark-haired, much thinner than Marina, and somewhat taller. But as the insulated curtain slid back into place inside the kitchen, she was merely a blur of long, brownish black topping a body clad in the ubiquitous dark blue of an FFA corduroy jacket and jeans.

Thanks to my current late shift at the packing plant, I seldom took more than a brief glance into the TV room where Anya and her sister tried to keep the morning-care kids before heading to the bedroom, but I was sure the two girls working with my women were both shorter and lighter-haired (one reddish, the other dishwater-light-brown). And neither of them were in the Future Farmers of America. True, the helpers had come and gone during the two-and-a-half years Anya had been utilizing her B.S. in Early Childhood Education from the University in Fargo—using high school or college girls meant a fairly regular turnover—but for a new one to come in the middle of a semester was odd.

By the time I’d walked over to the back deck to pick up the first of the pumpkins, they’d already begun to feel coolish to the touch. Save for the one closest to the door—the one the FFA girl had most recently touched.

That one still rocked in place as just the tiniest bead of welling blood dribbled down one furrow.…

Once I finished putting the pumpkins in the garage, I took my time before going back into the house—partly because it was close to morning snack time, when the little ones would be swarming around the kitchen, and partly because I didn’t want to talk to Anya or that pain-in-the-behind she called a sister. There was still the car to restart and park in the garage and the bits of pumpkin from the back lawn to gather up and place in the burn-barrel out near the north fence. And as I tossed some dried grass clippings over the chunks of eviscerated, dying fruit, I realize that burning these pumpkins and housing the rest in the garage was not going to make the problem of the mulo in my house go away.

Oh, perhaps this particular bloodsucker wasn’t a true Gypsy mulo (maybe my wife’s most energetic use of the Americanized vampire was a better fit), but my Great-Great-Grandfather Stanislav, upon his unfortunate demise as the result of a particularly bloody and violent farming accident, had become what my people dubbed a mulo—literally “one who is dead.” Which is to say not entirely dead, as my Great-Great-Grandmother found when she made the foolish, if sentimental, mistake of hanging onto his clothing and personal goods after his death in that field of rippling, indifferent wheat so many decades ago.

Destroying the belongings of the dead was Gypsy custom, even here in the relatively tame, almost mundane, social order of North Dakota. But life had been so terribly hard, so indescribably bare-bones, out in their soddie that I suppose Great-Great-Grandmother’s temptation to hang onto an extra set of winter clothing, a warm coat and wool-lined mittens, was irresistible. And I’m sure that in the total whiteness of a Dakota winter, that utter blankness of snow spread like cake frosting over an unendingly flat landscape, my Great-Great-Grandmother took comfort in gazing at the family icons her husband had smuggled out of the Old Country.

As I held my lighter to a few twisted strands of grass prior to tossing them into the burn-barrel, I could empathize with her about hanging onto the belongings of a dead man (especially a dead man who’d died an accidental death), but only to a point. I had had fun with the kids going to the farmer’s market late last month to pick out a suitable group of pumpkins for the house; Gregory Junior and Marta were both young enough not to have to go to school and young enough to gain incredible pleasure from something as simple as inspecting row after row of fleshy orange globes. But that didn’t stop me from burning those pumpkins now, regardless of whether or not my kids had helped to pick them out.

And my Great-Great-Grandmother should’ve just plain known better. In her day the Dakotas weren’t much of anything when it came to meeting new people or learning anything to speak of concerning their ways. To this day we don’t even have 650,000 people living in the whole damned state. And back then, how many different cultures might one encounter? Not even counting the Native Americans who lived here? You could probably count them on one hand: Russian, Norwegian, German, French…and not much else. And Gypsies can be found in Germany, too—even France.

But I suppose the loneliness and the pain of losing her husband was just too much. Just as the terror she had to have felt when he came back to her—a few nonessential parts still missing, casting no shadow in the weak noon sun—just had to have been mixed with a bit of dark pleasure ate having company again…of any sort.

And company she did have with him; my Great-Grandfather, born a full sixteen months after the death of his father, was proof of that. As was the nearly demolished soddie my mulo relative left in his wake before my Great-Great-Grandmother finally came to her senses and dispatched him via an iron needle thrust into his stomach. That she did remember from the recitations of Gypsy lore heard back in Russia.

But only after she’d ignored one of the more common bits of family knowledge.

Soon the smoke coming from the burn-barrel was a stinging, choking billow that drove me to stand a few feet away, though still close enough to watch it carefully. Eyes watering, I knew instinctively I could not afford to make the same sort of selective mistake my long-ago relative had made. This mulo or upyr or whatever the North Dakota bloodsucker wanted to call itself (a Five-H-er, with the fifth H being Hemoglobin?)—I had no choice but to stop it.

And considering that an unchecked bloodsucker might very well work its way through a huge chunk of the state’s population—including immigrants who’d already gone through enough torment and persecution to last a normal lifetime—I couldn’t afford to take modern-day morality into account, even should the creature be a child. But as I listened to the flesh of the pumpkin sizzle and sputter in the flames as if protesting its final dissolution, I seriously doubted I’d have to wield my skills as a dhampir against a small fiend.

A youngish one, perhaps, but almost certainly not a child.

* * * *

Knowing I’d arouse too much suspicion if I didn’t eventually go into the house and to bed, I still waited until the last embers died out in the barrel, poured a layer of rainwater over them from the bucket I kept near the downspout then walked slowly across the dead grass, up onto the deck, and in the house. The relative quiet told me Anya had unrolled the sleeping bags we usually kept in the spare bedroom and hauled them into the TV room: post-snack naptime, when the entire carpet was covered with piles of dark-haired and swarthy-complexioned little children. The two girls the church people had sent knelt next to a couple of kids, rubbing their narrow backs and soothing them into sleep. I recognized the redhead as Tanya something or other, a relatively cute junior from the high school. But the other one, the blue-jacketed one, was a total stranger.

In one sense.

Back when I first was dating Anya, I told her everything about my past (better to find out before marriage and kids that a woman thinks you’re a basket case, rather than after), including the dhampire part. To which, after a few beats of silence there in the back of my father’s 4x4, she’d simply said, “I know I’ve lived my whole life in a state where nothing much seems to happen. But I also know things do happen, all over, and too many of those things can’t be explained. My people, back in Norway, believed in the mara—this beautiful woman who was actually an evil troll that did horrible things to people. Who’s to say she didn’t really exist? Who’s to say anything can’t…be?”

But the one thing I could never quite explain to Anya was how I knew when I was in the presence of a mulo. According to Gypsy lore, they could look and even act quite normal; they were known to exist in the daytime and cast shadows. I can’t even explain the exact mechanics of the detecting process to myself; it goes beyond gut feelings or vibrations or anything else that overt. I suppose it’s a…combination of a hunch and inherently well-honed powers of deduction, of intuition.

Or maybe just common sense; after all, this bleeding pumpkins episode had occurred at the same time a new girl entered my house. A young woman I couldn’t remember seeing before this day…and who wore a jacket commonly seen on high school students who dabbled in animal husbandry of some sort.

And vampire lore of virtually any culture often includes the drinking of animal blood when no suitable human victim is nearby.

Knowing this bloodsucker wouldn’t dare to try anything with the children in my wife’s care—at least not after the pumpkins had given her away so graphically—I slipped out of my shoes in the kitchen (which looked out onto the TV room) lest I make too much noise clomping across the tiled floor and wake the kids, then sock-footed my way to the bedroom at the back of my one-story, steep-roofed house. I sat down on the edge of our bed and set my alarm clock for just a bit past noon.

Anya may have longed to talk to me, but she knew better than to bother her day-sleeping breadwinner—especially after what she’d shown me on the front porch. I heard her padding about outside our bedroom door, but she didn’t open it; this may have been her first encounter with the mulo, but Anya was a good woman, and a smart one: She knew better than to question what both of us knew had to be done.

* * * *

The steady, humming drone of my alarm jarred me into wakefulness; vague wisps of my dream lingered long enough in my mind for a few images to register; a jack o’ lantern with bleeding fangs…a running figure in a death mask and dark blue corduroy jacket…the circular mass of flames within a huge, huge burn-barrel.…

But as I quit the bedroom, the actual images themselves faded from my consciousness, leaving only the knowledge within me that something had to be done. Without question; without hesitation.

The TV room was empty of small, limbs-askew bodies when I passed the doorway. The odors of peanut butter, saltines, and damp diapers hung in the air like a miasma, though, and the feeling of all those tiny people was still tangible.

Just as the subtle disturbance of the mulo’s presence was still a part of that room, like the warmth a body leaves in the squashed contours of a soft, yielding chair.

Yet this might not have been her first day here; for the last week or so I’d been working time-and-a-half to accommodate some new stores in one of the large grocery-market chains my processing plant routinely shipped meat to. I was always so tired upon coming home I could barely feel my way to my bedroom.… And with my senses dulled the mulo’s fiendish magic might have been able to work unchecked.

As I poured myself a cup of black coffee, I could hear my wife singing some Norwegian lullaby to our little ones down in their bedroom. I also heard the heavy displacement of plodding footfalls on the hallway carpet—Marina.

“What are you doing up, Greg?” My sister-in-law turned herself sideways to squeeze past the central work island and the jutting handle of our two-door refrigerator on her way to the stove at the opposite end of the kitchen. She still managed to graze both the handles and the edges of the countertop.

“Couldn’t sleep; I was too worried about the mulo.”

“Mulo-schmoolo,” she snorted while bending over to peer through the glass insert in the oven door. “I still think you should spend more time with the kids; you’d be amazed what the little squirts can and will do when you’re not looking. But it’s not for me to say how you throw your money around—”

“No, it isn’t,” I agreed flatly between sips.

Having verified the casserole bubbling in the amber-glass covered dish was in no immediate danger of leaking hot mushroom soup onto the oven floor, Marina turned around and said, “Well, I suppose the plant does give overtime pay.… But it’s still a shame. About the pumpkins. Especially when Basha was going to show the kids how to paint faces on them.”

“‘Basha’?” I echoed before nonchalantly pouring myself another cup of coffee I didn’t particularly want. “She a new one from the high school? Seems like they come and go so quickly.…”

“Not exactly new-new; been here about a week, week-and-a-half. One of the other girls moved, and Basha volunteered. That girl’s carrying a load, lemme tell you. FFA, 4-H—” I almost choked on my coffee when she said that. “—FTA, a whole bunch of organizations. And she’s a transfer herself; told me her family moves around a lot on ’count of her father being some sort of medical supply salesman—or was it farm equipment salesman? But she’s really good with the kids. Doesn’t mind if they sit on her lap even if, y’know, they’re a little soggy or anything like that. The kind of stuff that makes some of those other girls turn up their noses. She’s a real good kid,” Marina emphasized with a shake of her permed head of hair, “so I was really sorry to see how hurt she was after you and Anya pulled that little stunt. She was awfully disappointed.”

“Well, you know how it is: Better safe than sorry. Maybe I could make it up to her; does she happen to have art class today? Maybe I could call her teacher, put in a good word for her…for working with the kids and all?”

Behind Marina, the casserole finally began to leak; while she opened the door and tried to slide a cookie sheet under the dish (why she hadn’t done so in the first place was one of those imponderables—considering Anya’s casseroles always leaked anyhow) she said over her shoulder, “I don’t think she has any classes today. She’s already got all her credits to graduate, but you know how the school is about kids getting early graduation. And she says for transfers, it’s even worse. They have to stay until next June.”

“Too bad…Do you know where she hangs out? After working here? I just wanted to let her know it wasn’t personal—”

“That’s sweet of you, Greg. While you’re at it, you should tell her you were just joking about all that mulo crap. Basha said you talking about that would just scare the kids.”

While Marina fiddled with the sputtering stove and the heavy casserole, I took another sip of coffee and smiled inwardly; I knew my Anya wouldn’t mention vampires in front of her small charges, and I hadn’t said anything about mulé, so only Marina (maybe) had mentioned it. But it was quite interesting that this Basha girl would know what a mulo was—and realize the fearsome potential of such a being.

Still, I had to be totally certain.

“I suppose Basha asked you why I was doing what I was doing?”

“No. Anya’s rule about scary-talk around here is quite strict. You know I wouldn’t have mentioned it. No, Basha brought it up. She seemed to have heard of this bleeding pumpkin nonsense in her family or something. The girl is dark-haired, like you, and considering what a melting pot North Dakota is, why shouldn’t there be more Gypsies landing here? Everything else manages to find this place—”

“What’s her last name?” Having drained the cup, I held it in both hands, my fingers suddenly cold enough to need that residual warmth.

“Oh gawd, something Polish…Dolisovna, or something like that. Lots of letters that don’t sound too good together.”

The phone book was only a few feet away from the coffee machine, but I didn’t bother looking up the name or the number—the book was too old. And Marina had already said more than enough for me to begin my hunt. Placing the ceramic mug on the counter with a decisive chunk, I said, “I think I’ll take a spin around the neighborhood. I’m still too jumpy to go back to sleep.”

Marina glanced at the nearly empty coffee pot on the base of the machine as I let myself out the sliding door and snapped, “Lay off the coffee and you won’t be so jumpy. The casserole’ll be done in about half an hour; you think you’ll be back by then?”

Sliding the door shut behind me, I said through the glass, “Nah, you can have my share, okay? Tell Anya I’ll be back,” before hurrying to the garage to collect my supplies.

* * * *

As I slowly cruised the relatively unfamiliar post-noon hours along the streets of my neighborhood, glancing out the windows for my prey, my burlap-bag-covered mulé-hunting supplies close by my side, I found myself thinking of the various waves of immigrants that had subtly changed this place, this town, but not this landscape. The influx of Asians in the ’70s created a subculture of Vietnamese mom-and-pop groceries, bookstores, and video-rental places, all catering to various Asian groups, while the newest new-people, the Gulf War refugees, had filled up many of the otherwise empty apartments above storefronts, changing the street scene below from mostly pale, European faces to swarthy, black-eyed ones.

But no matter who came to this always-verging-on-barren land, the surrounding countryside remained the same; endless vistas of highway, of fields either rippling and golden with wheat or mowed and stubbled, the occasional farm barns or silos protruding from the flat landscape like fingers of the dead working their way out of the soil. And always, no matter how many people those church folks flew here from Minneapolis, there was this sense of openness—of sheer space—around each building, each person.

I doubted even a cockroach would be able to find enough tight, enclosed spaces to hide in here. But as for a mulo—vampires had a need for others, something beyond mere hunger. Call it a necessity. To a mulo, humans were the very air (although if humans weren’t available, animals might serve as prey). And Marina had said this Basha girl was in FFA and 4-H. Her father might even sell farm equipment…although I had a feeling her parents might not even be alive—at least in the traditional sense—with a mulo under their roof.

One of the things I happen to like about this state is the easy way the city segues into the country. Go along either of the highways, 94 or 281, and pretty soon you’re in wheat and cow country, where the houses sit back a ways from the road and are marked by the name-embellished mailboxes along the highway. Usually Old World names—lots of Russian, German, some Norwegian…but also some Polish, too.

Like Dolishowna, which had been written on a strip of colored tape and slapped onto the silvery-new mail receptacle in front of me. Marina had been close on the name; the h was silent.

As was the house at the end of the uneven gravel road bridging the twenty yards between the road and the building itself; the place was small, two-storied, and covered with that awful-looking asbestos siding people back in the ’50s slapped on just about every frame house to avoid having to repaint the damned things. This siding was splintering along the bottom of the house, revealing the original thin, once light-gray clapboards underneath. I couldn’t tell if the place had any curtains; all the shades were pulled down to the inner sills.

The converted barn-garage next to the house was open-doored and empty. The old silo out back was buckled in the middle and sagging to the left. But there was a chicken coop out beyond the crooked finger of a silo, and I heard the faint sound of a chicken struggling, then the whistling whoosh of a descending ax and the whispery flutter of wings beating reflexively into dead silence. Leaving the door hanging open, I left the comfort of the car and walked softly toward the distant coop—an unexpectedly easy task given the fact that I’d forgotten to put my shoes on back in the kitchen. The scruffy grass was cold and clammy underfoot, and the gelid ground gave slightly, like soggy padding under a carpet that someone’s spilled soda on. Soon my socks were adhering to my feet like a second skin.

Basha was still wearing her deep blue FFA jacket. Only now its pinwale corduroy was dotted with shimmering droplets of blood from the chicken body she held above her face to let the blood drain into her open mouth. Out of some innate, if somewhat inane, sense of politeness, I let her finish her meal; this place was, after all, her current stomping grounds. And despite the rightness of my mission, I was still the intruder here.

Flinging aside the limp, feathered body with her right hand while wiping her mouth with the wrist of her left hand, Basha let out a short barking belch and was beginning to turn back toward her house when she saw me.

“Hi, Basha. I’m really sorry about making you get rid of those pumpkins,” I began as I took a step forward with an easy casualness that belied my thudding heart and pounding temples.

Taken aback by my nonchalant tone (and my seeming to not notice her noontime snack of fresh chicken blood), she finished wiping off her face, then wiped the rest of the blood against the bottom of her jacket before smiling warily in return and saying, “It’s no biggie. I mean, they were yours. I was…just thinking of the kids, y’know?”

I wondered if she thought perhaps I hadn’t clearly seen what she’d been doing; the fall light was quite bright in its intensity at this time of day. And she was half in the shadows.

“Yeah, they get real scared of stuff that bleeds. But that tends to happen when a mulo is around,” I said with that same casual tone as I walked slowly toward her, hands swinging by my side in a friendly, no-weapons-here motion.

“You know what a mulo is, too? Are you a Gypsy, too?” It was clear from her tone that Basha thought—or hoped—she could talk herself out of this.

“Yeah. My people came over in the early part of the century. When there was all that trouble in Russia. My Great-Great-Grandfather, he got himself into a jam over there, more or less got himself kicked out of the country. Lucky devil.”

“My people were from a ways over, near Poland. We—they came over during World War II. But I suppose Gypsy ways transcend national boundaries, no?” In a surprisingly short time Basha had made her way to a position only a foot or so away from me; I was close enough to smell the cloying, iron-copper reek of the blood coloring the tiny cracks in her lips and to see just how incredibly wise her pale blue eyes were—not the sluttish wisdom of a promiscuous teenager but the genuine, almost sad, sexual perception of a female mulo.

“All Gypsies came from one people,” I began while tensing myself for the inevitable (while a part of me began to realize just who Basha might have intended all along to be her victim). Sure enough, the girl had manage to sate only a small part of her hunger while feasting on that chicken; with an almost serpentine swiftness she hooked one arm around my neck and the other around my waist and, lips slightly parted, breath bloodily fulsome yet subtly spicy, began to incline her face toward mine. But long years of working in the slaughterhouses had taught me, too, something about moving swiftly lest I be kicked or gouged by a flailing hoof or claw or beak. And years of lifting heavy sides of beef had given me almost superhuman strength.

The sound of her neck snapping under my encircling hands echoed clear and sharp in the crisp autumn air.

* * * *

Old farmhouses tend to have something else in common besides sagging barn-garages, leaning silos, and rust-skirted chicken coops. Something akin to a burn-barrel, but much better for the job at hand; garbage pits, usually out back and often lined with gravel.

The one at Basha’s new “home” was out behind the chicken coop; there was little else around it save for a lot of trampled dirt on its edges and the charred remains of something someone had burned there who knew how long ago—whatever it was had mold on it, so it had to have been quite a while ago. I could also see the rusted remains of broken farm equipment, some pottery, other less easily identifiable stuff. No stakes, though. Not that I really needed them; I’d brought some things from the garage that would work just as well—better, even, considering how extreme Basha’s infestation had been.

I’d found out by accident (a freak fire had ignited some janitorial supplies in a slaughterhouse I’d worked in) how nicely bleach made a fire burn. Ever since then I’d kept a bottle out in my garage…Near the gas can…just in case. So I was able to saturate the old rags I’d brought to cover the body with bleach and gasoline before flinging them down on top of her. I added the parts of the chicken she’d killed, and since I couldn’t be sure what might happen to the live ones once I left, I dispatched them quickly and dispassionately and added them to the pile.

While I had matches, I’d forgotten a bottle for making the Molotov cocktail I planned to ignite the pit with; the back door of the farmhouse was open, and with only a quiver of trepidation I stepped inside. The place was as I imagined it: rain-runneled wallpaper peeling away from the grayish plaster beneath, window sills flaking, mold and dirt encrusting the linoleum flooring, and no real food anywhere. Just an open, lightless refrigerator, a grease-spattered stove, and a five-legged, old-fashioned wood table. The cupboards under the antiquated ceramic sink were askew. And one held an empty soft drink bottle (for a soda currently advertised by punks on skateboards and snowboards) embellished with hillbillies and comically askew country-style lettering. I knew it had to be a collector’s item, but it was the only bottle in the kitchen. And I had no intention of looking through the rest of Basha’s place.

But before I quit the room, thirty-plus-year-old bottle in hand, I noticed a pile of things on one of the kitchen counters. A flyer from a local high school football game. And under it old photos—of Basha. Judging from the scalloped edges around the white part of the photos, they’d been taken in the late ’30s, early ’40s. When she’d arrived here during the WWII wave of immigrants. The ’40s-style dress looked a lot better on her than the FFA jacket had.…

Not knowing for sure if the fire might eventually whip out of the pit and move to the house, I took the pictures outside with me. They fluttered into the pit like large pieces of confetti and landed close to her rag-covered body. Even if the house didn’t burn, I thought she might appreciate the gesture, from one Gypsy to another—burning her belongings like that. I suppose I should’ve gone for her clothes…whatever else of hers was in that house. But the wind was shifting to the northeast, toward the house proper, and there were no other houses within eyesight on either side of the place. Just fields of chopped wheat beyond the sagging barbed-wire fence where the property line ended fifty feet away.

Even though this was my first mulo kill as a dhampir, I knew my father and my father’s father would be proud of me. I didn’t think she’d suffered, and my hands were clean of her blood. Just as the land would be scoured of her influence, the very earth under her burned clean and pure again. And I’d done what was right: I’d given her back her pictures, to burn with her in the proper, ancient, Gypsy way.

Being Gypsy was important to her—sadly, fatally so. If she hadn’t wasted time talking to me, sharing common lore, she just might have escaped. The penalty of not assimilating enough, I supposed as I finished filling the old soda bottle with a clear liquid similar to the bright yellow treat it had once contained, stuffed a rag into its neck, and stepped back to toss it into the pit. As I ran away, I mouthed a fitting goodbye to my first kill as a dhampir:

“Welcome to the melting pot, my dear Basha.…”

Then I drove back home to the city, to my family, to my own world of work, to Anya and the children. All of them part of the state I’d been born in—the state of being that was, I now realized, more wholly American than I’d ever suspected.

True, I realized as I watched the glowing pit of flame recede in my rearview mirror, I was still a dhampir in my blood—my heritage—but I’d been born a native of North Dakota, home of all peoples. And Basha had been a threat to all those people—not just the Gypsies and not just the old-time natives. She’d been out to get the whole melting pot of them.

But while she still thought of herself as a Gypsy, I was one step ahead of her:

I was an American.