The Pinch (46 page)

That Lawyer Poteet’s general vitriol had descended into ad hominem abuse (“This’n’s proof skunks fuck monkeys, pardon my French …”) implied that his speech was winding down, and a hush fell over the crowd. The bound Negro, who had seemed almost incidental to the proceedings, was now the focus of everyone’s rapt attention. In the twilight the torches flared more brightly, prompting Muni to remember a phrase:
auto-da-fé.
So maybe Asbestos would prove as good as his name. But a nod from the Grand Syklops to his henchman reminded Muni that fire was not the chosen method of execution; this was a lynching pure and simple, a time-honored tradition of these peculiar southern states. And the locus they’d selected for the event was a sure way of demonstrating that the ghetto had lost its inviolability. The blind musician cocked his frosty head this way and that, presumably from the discomfort of the rope. Or was he listening for unheard melodies?

“God bless y’all white folks,” he murmured, his scratchy voice, though just above a whisper, still carrying in the silent dusk. “You done climbed the ugly ladder and never miss a rung.”

It was then that the girl in her sequined leotard flashing the last rays of the setting sun began to slide headfirst down the thick rope.

She had thought of him often during the jumps from show town to show town, had always missed his spooky music; none of the windjammers had ever adjusted their rhythms to suit so well her aerial turns. Lately she’d missed the old-timer like she missed the river itself and wondered why his fiddle couldn’t be added to the brass jig band that played the sideshow. She imagined him taking his place alongside the ensemble of darky musicians, such as Calliope Clarence, who played his Apollonicon with a sickle grin. The blind fiddler could play in the band and double-stage as a bumbling auguste, like the whiteface Negro clowns who were as thoroughly assimilated into the circus community as the freaks.

She knew that back in Memphis his days were numbered: he’d been marked (and marked again) for blue ruin since the time of his maiming on the north Mississippi plantation where he was born into bondage. He’d told her the tale: how he had the misfortune to stumble upon the overseer involved in an unspeakable act in the corn crib. “I ain’t seen nothing!” he protested to the cap’n, who assured him that
nothing
was what he would see from then on, and straightaway proceeded to gouge out his eyes with a penknife. The master, enraged at this wanton destruction of his property, dismissed the overseer and thereafter made of the blind pickaninny a house pet, awarding him—when he’d observed him admiring it with grazing fingers—the gift of a spruce trade violin. Demonstrating an innate aptitude for the instrument, the boy expressed his gratitude by taking to the open road with his gift, only to be returned in chains soon after by patrollers. The overseer, rehired for his redoubtable efficiency, flogged the boy and salted his wounds in a bath of brine. Unable to relieve the pain that inflamed his back, the blind boy displaced it by stroking the wounds and welts of others, thereby touching nerves whose oscillating vibrations he translated to the strings of his fiddle.

The next time he ran away he was put in stocks, and the time after that branded with an iron, during which procedure his refusal to cry out earned him the honorific that stuck. After his fifth or sixth attempt at escape it was noticed, when the serial fugitive was stripped for punishment, that he’d begun to mature—an observation that inspired the cap’n, always handy with his blade, to geld him on the spot. A generation or two later, when the blind man came to guide other fugitives through the tunnels that the old bayous were converted into after the fever, it was said he stuffed nugget-sized stones into the hollows of his eyes; legend had it that the stones allowed him to see in the dark. But the cops who finally apprehended him at his illicit business, and the mob that wrested him from the hands of the cops, aware of the rumor, never recovered any such stones.

If Jenny were honest, she would have had to admit that her reasons for wanting to retrieve the fiddler from his station in the Pinch were mainly selfish; her motives had more to do with missing the company of his eerie music than securing his safety. Then, too, the dreams that had saddled her with an unwieldy ballast on the wire caused her to teeter precariously in the direction of her old hometown. None of which excluded the providence of her arrival at the eleventh hour, when she stole into the roots of the tree in the park and did what came naturally: peeling off her garments to the costume beneath and lowering herself headfirst down the rope, she began to spin.

She performed a series of one-arm planges, looping her hand in the rope and flinging her body up and over her shoulder as if throwing herself repeatedly into a sack of air. She executed cunning jackknifes and dislocations, rolled herself up into a ball, hung by her ankles and knees. As she caracoled above the crowd, the rope swayed and the noose twirled like a lasso about the Negro’s neck until it was lifted clear off over his head—though, riveted as they were by the acrobat, no one seemed to notice. Some of the assembled held their breath while Jenny gyrated in circles; others, such as Muni Pinsker, could not have drawn a breath if they tried. In fact, so staggered was the retired scribe by battling emotions that he was on the point of passing out; he had to pound his chest with the heel of his empty right hand, as in the prayer of repentence, to coax his lungs into filling again. Then the pain of his breathing brought hot tears to his eyes. What did the girl intend with her unscripted exhibition? he wondered. Did she mean to beguile the crowd until the condemned man could be spirited away? If that was the case, she had badly miscalculated, because the spectators were so spellbound by her performance that no one—even had they been so inclined—stepped forward to rescue Asbestos, who remained standing patiently atop his nail keg, his face upturned despite his sightless eyes.

The merest meniscus of a moon had appeared in the lapis sky, prompting the Hasids among them to begin mumbling the Rosh Chodesh blessing. The sequins on Jenny’s costume, catching moonlight, seemed to throw sparks, which a few of the fanatics tried to snatch out of the air. Between their antics and those of the girl on the rope, most of the spectators missed the rueful blue chord soughed by a breeze on the remaining strings of Asbestos’s fiddle. But the chord was apparently loud enough to snap the Grand Syklops’s attention back to the task at hand. He bade his fellows hoist him to a height from which he could replace the noose around the fiddler’s unresisting neck. Lowered again after tightening the knot, Lawyer Poteet gave the nod to his henchman—“Klaliff Peay!”—who yanked the rope taut and tied it off on a nearby hydrant. The minstrel’s stick legs appeared to execute a two-step in the air above the keg that the klansmen had kicked over; then, only inches from the ground, the legs grew still. Transfixed, Muni Pinsker was unaware that his clenched fist had opened and the dust of his aunt and uncle—at least that which hadn’t already been trodden underfoot—was dispersed by the mild evening breeze.

The day was bright and the blades of the ceiling fan stirred the cool spring air in the shop, raising the dust in miniature twisters about the floorboards. The radio announced that Senator Eugene McCarthy had defeated LBJ in the New Hampshire primary; Walter Cronkite was urging negotiations to end the war; and I had been gloriously seduced. So why did I feel like I was in helpless freefall? Because, if I wasn’t Rachel’s lover anymore, then what was I? “Gornisht!” I proclaimed aloud. I’m nothing—and heard my old boss remarking, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.” Where was his therapeutic abuse when I needed it?

Not that I couldn’t get along on my own. I had my resources, didn’t I? My memories, though they seemed these days to have dead-ended around the time I came across Muni’s book. Since then I’d done such a good job of covering my tracks that I’d almost managed to hide them from myself. This was of course only a temporary amnesia, the lingering effects of a period of wretched excess; it would pass. Then I remembered how the population of the Pinch—after the tree in Market Square Park had been hauled off for cordwood and the crater filled with tons of gravel from a convoy of dump trucks—how they seemed to have jointly misplaced the past. One morning they looked around and the world was no better than it should be: the neighborhood was a slum, its primary thoroughfare strewn with drenched unmentionables and broken furniture (and perhaps a drowned hippogriff). They shared a universal hangover that felt as if it might last the rest of their days. Like me, they’d become marooned in the present.

Muni’s book lay on the desk in front of me, looking as nondescript as ever, though the hard reading I’d subjected it to had given the binding some character. I recalled the first time I’d opened it to that random passage—somewhere toward the middle or was it the end of the book?—when Lenny Sklarew makes his shambling entrance into the chronicle. So far I’d steered clear of that chapter, not wanting to encounter some fate incompatible with the one I might choose for myself, assuming I had a choice in the matter. Now, however, I wondered what the text could reveal beyond an account of Lenny opening a book to read about a moment when Lenny opens a book. Like Moses receiving the Torah in which he reads the story of Moses receiving the Torah, world without end … (“Look who thinks he’s Moses.”)

I opened
The Pinch
to where I’d left off the night before, at the part where the trucks came and went from the park and the merchants of North Main Street began again to contact wholesalers and contractors beyond their neighborhood. I read that another artesian well had been located in a sand aquifer by means of a water witch in Orange Mound, that the Reverend Billy Sunday accompanied Sheriff Hoss Tatum, Longwillie’s cretinous son, on a “still” raid in the Loosahatchie Bottoms. Machine Gun Kelly was captured in his skivvies in a bungalow on Rayner Street, and Lenny Sklarew …

The door chimes jangled and I looked up in the vain hope of seeing old Avrom hobbling back into the store. The goldbrick, he’d been exaggerating his symptoms as usual. What need did he have of dying anyway, when his closeted residence here in the Book Asylum was just as good as? But instead of my old boss there appeared an elderly colored man attired in a back-numbered suit that practically swallowed his meager frame. His face was dour, his cotton-boll hair, when he’d doffed his hat, center-parted like opposing waves.

An actual customer.

“Can I help you?” I asked, because it occurred to me that, shipwrecked as I felt, I needed to make some scratch. I was down to pennies since Lamar had taken a powder, and I hadn’t received my starvation wages from Avrom in weeks. Nor was there anything in the drawer of the antique cash register beyond a little silver and some paper-clipped IOUs. Then it interested me that, aside from my native distrust of private enterprise, to say nothing of my battered heart, an entrepreneurial impulse seemed to take hold. Was this what Muni Pinsker had felt when he quit his writing (or the writing quit him) and took over the operation of Pinchas’s store?

“I need a good book,” I thought I heard the man say in his deliberate cadence.

Eager to show my familiarity with the Harlem Renaissance, I began naming titles from the canon. “We’ve got
The Blacker the Berry
by Wallace Thurman and
Nig
… ummm …
Negro Heaven
by Carl Van Vechten—” when he interrupted me.

“I said
the
good book.”

I looked at him quizzically. “You mean the Bible?”

“Yassuh. I lef’ home this morning without mine.”

Prying myself out of Avrom’s chair, I inquired, “Any particular edition?”

“The good news edition,” he asserted, as if to say, is there another?

I nodded, though I hadn’t a clue what he meant, and went to the Religion shelves. From a row of Tanakh, Pentateuch, Vulgates, and Masoretic texts I chose a Revised King James version published by the Gideon Society. He snatched it from me and began thumbing its pages with urgency.

“‘So God created man in He own image,’” he read aloud. “‘In the image of God He created him.’—Genesis one, twenty-seven.” He gazed a moment over the rims of his spectacles, seeming to take my measure, then began frantically riffling pages again. “‘Is this not the fast I choose,’” he intoned, stabbing the page with an index finger, “‘to loose the bonds of wickedness and undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?’—Isaiah fifty-eight, six.” His authoritative delivery suggested he might be a preacher, and I was his congregation of one. “‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’—Amos five, twenty-four,” he practically sang, when I remembered it was the day of the big march in support of the garbage strikers. The reverend was apparently priming himself for the occasion.

Having satisfied himself with these passages, he returned the scripture to me so forcefully that I had to take a step backward to receive it. He continued to stare at me, his quince-yellow eyes boring auger-like into my own.

“‘Then fool,’” he pronounced, “‘not nex’ year, not nex’ week, not to-morrah, but this night thy soul is required of thee.’—Luke twelve,” upon which he turned and scuttled out of the shop without bothering to close the door.

“But it’s not night,” I objected at his parting, albeit idiotically. I hit the NO SALE key on the register and wondered why it was my lot to be always hounded by sanctimonious old gadflies. I understood well enough the moral imperative I was meant to draw from his visit: Who cowers in a shop nursing his nebbish ego when history is calling just outside the door? Stop already with the lotus eating and join the struggle for justice and equality; there are larger issues afoot than self-centered concerns that “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” And so forth. But I was far beyond being susceptible to such a conspicuous pricking of conscience.

Nevertheless, when I set down the Gideon Bible on top of the single edition of
The Pinch
, I had the troubling notion that I was laying a trump card over an inferior suit. I got up to close the door, but instead of pulling it to, stepped over the threshold and pulled it shut from outside. Then I began to follow the right reverend gent down Main Street.