The Pinch (54 page)

I was restrained by traction, catheter, and IV tube from inflicting further injury to my person. Murder and betrayal are the whole of the law, I concluded as I lay there bereft of speech. The monitor tangled in cords beside my bed blinked and whirred as if some jackpot had been struck: it was the signal for another pair of visitors to make their unannounced appearance from behind the curtain. This is your life, I thought.

Rachel and Dennis donned tepid smiles to greet them: the middle-aged man and woman shaking their heads in unison at the foot of the bed. “Oh, Lenny,” lamented the gentleman, and heaved a ten-pound sigh. His eyes behind his library-frame glasses were puffy, his nose porous and pickle-shaped like my own; the receding tide of his crinkly hair left behind it a littoral of wrinkled pink brow. Foursquare in a madras sport coat, he was holding, like the tail of a fish past its prime, the same hippie paper (the
Glass Onion
) Rachel had brought with her. “Lennylenny.” His sigh was seconded by the woman beside him, her attitude of condolence as subverted by her tangerine pantsuit as was his by the plaid sport coat. So far they’d refrained from advancing any closer, for which I was thankful, since the distance aided me in my effort not to recognize them.

“So Lenny,” the man ventured at length, “how do you feel?”

Rachel had thoughtfully worked some mechanism that caused the bedstead to raise me nearer to a sitting position. “Never better,” I managed, which was apparently the wrong answer, because the man practically barked, “Just what did you think you were doing down there?”

“Myron,” cautioned his companion with a hand to his sleeve, but no sooner did she quiet him down than she too started in on me. “Aren’t you even a little ashamed?” A neon vein pulsing at her throat.

From the bottom of my heart I admitted, “I’m a lot ashamed,” but their still-nettled demeanor implied that they didn’t believe me.

At that point Dennis cleared his throat and took a step in their direction, offering his glad hand by way of cutting the tension, and making conspicuous my failure to provide introductions. “I’m Dennis Kavanaugh,” he said, confident of the good impression he made on his elders. “And this is Rachel,” placing an arm around her waist, “my fiancée.” Whereupon the newcomers reflexively adopted a civil manner. The sport coat introduced himself as Myron Sklarew, the patient’s father, and cranked Dennis’s hand heartily in return. “I’m Mrs. Sklarew,” submitted his pantsuited spouse, “Lenny’s mom,” smiling sweetly as she pinched the tips of Dennis’s fingers.

The law student launched without preamble into chatty conversation. Assuming common cause, he employed his best forensic vocabulary in describing the inconvenient position the garbage strike had placed the city in. Rachel, to her credit, kept mum, perhaps remorseful at having savaged my last article of faith with her announcement. Then, as it looked like Dennis and my putative father might be on the verge of bonding over their mutual contempt for the poor, she gently touched the arm of her intended; she reminded him they’d been about to depart. “We have a prior engagement?” Dennis looked at her as if this was news to him but acquiesced to her resolute features.

She turned to me before leaving to mention something about how the B’nai B’rith Home had assumed power of attorney over the estate of Tyrone Pin, some of whose paintings now sold for upwards of …, but I was no longer listening. Then she reached across the nightstand to give my hand a squeeze. Maybe it was a tender squeeze, fraught with the pathos of unrealized desire, but to me it felt perfunctory, the way an arthritic squeezes a rubber bulb.

I wanted to tell her I’d never wash my hand again but couldn’t even summon that much spleen.

As soon as they were gone the alleged Myron Sklarew, somewhat placated, informed me, “I phoned Kenny Kurtz down at the
Commercial
—he owes me, Kenny—and asked him to call off his dogs. Otherwise you’d have been swarmed by journalists wanting the scoop on the only white face in that mob of schwartzes.”

I thanked him.

“He told me nobody had yet identified you and we agreed it should stay that way.”

Then his wife chimed in. “It’s bad enough our own rabbi has to get involved with those”—she choked down the ill-bred language on the tip of her tongue—“but you Lenny, what did that mess have to do with you?”

“Nothing,” I conceded.

There was a silence during which they put on their concerned faces once again and I thought I knew what was coming. They were about to relent and invite me to come back home, all was forgiven, and for a weak moment I thought I might cave in to their appeal. After all, they hadn’t been such bad parents, just clueless like everyone else: add denying them to the list of things I was ashamed of. But instead of flinging wide his arms, Myron gave a nod to his wife who copied the nod with righteous chins and withdrew a letter from her purse. Her husband took the letter from her hand and stepped forward to give it to me. The return address on the envelope—County Draft Board 480, Shelby County Federal Building, Suite 369—said it all. Seeing that I made no move to open it, he leaned over and tore it open for me, bending my fingers until they pincered the page bearing its official stamp:

It seemed I was being ordered to report for conscription into the Armed Forces of the United States of America. I was given a specific time to appear for a physical examination that would precede my immediate induction into the military.

“We spoke to the doctor,” said Myron. What doctor? I’d been visited so far only by interns, who glanced at my chart, then at me, as if to verify they made a match before briskly walking away. “He says you should be shipshape in a matter of weeks. Plenty of time to heal before,” glancing at the letter, “your call-up date.”

Then he took a paternal tone, which my presumptive mother complemented with an expression that risked creasing her cosmetic mask. “Do the right thing, son,” placing a hand on my scarified arm, “and we’ll be proud of you.” Don’t, he didn’t have to tell me, and you’re nothing to us.

Gazing up at them from my procrustean bed, I replied, “Who did you say you were?”

I waited for the next round of visitors to appear from behind the curtain and bring me some fresh mortification: the living had had their turn, so how about the dead? Where was the ghost of Elder Lincoln come to demand I wreak vengeance on his killers? Where was Avrom—though I didn’t yet know he was gone, his casket conveyed by pallbearers dispatched from the Shelby County Penal Farm—where was he, my old boss, come forward to dump a steaming burden of fate in my lap? But nobody else arrived, the world was scoured of ghosts, and the tears that once flowed so easily were as dried up as Rachel’s flowers dying of thirst on the nightstand.

I was released from the hospital a couple of days after the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, feeling as fragile as Humpty Dumpty. Hobbling on crutches into the April morning, I was assailed by bright sunshine like a hail of thumbtacks, my eyes acutely sensitive since the blow to my head. Pink azaleas and yellow buttercups trumpeted their shrill colors from a nearby park, and I winced from the mordant scent of lilacs. The natural world, it seemed, was in the process of reclaiming the man-made, which looked to me to be in retreat, the city strangely quiet, the traffic sparse to nonexistent; and I, with my pallor and plaster cast, stitches like railroad crossties over the shaved patch on my skull, was a suitably walking wounded survivor of the uninhabited landscape.

My armpits and ribs ached from the pressure of the aluminum crutches as I made my way to the nearest bus stop. I engineered the precarious business of boarding the bus and rode downtown, where I dismounted on Main Street with equivalent difficulty. Negotiating the last few meters from the corner to the Book Asylum, I unlocked the door and swung across the threshold into the semidark. I inhaled the shop’s attar of arcane philosophies, forgotten histories, and baroque tales, and was at once relieved. The tall shelves were ramparts from behind which I could look out onto the armed camp of downtown Memphis, where fatigue-clad Guardsmen with fixed bayonets patrolled the street on foot and in jeeps. I was under siege, which suited my mood, holed up as I was in Avrom’s sanctum while the nation burned. Leaning the crutches against the wall, I lowered myself into my former boss’s chair, then lifted the dead weight of my rigid leg until it rested on top of the desk. Also atop the desk, where I’d left it, was Muni Pinsker’s “history” of the Pinch.

I hadn’t the least temptation to pick it up, or so I told myself, though I poked it like the curious artifact it was. I blew the dust from its cover, then I picked it up, opened it, and pitched headlong into its splashy contents. It was evening in the book, an evening partaking of the properties of dawn, and a wedding was in progress on a flatboat anchored to no particular season in the North Main Street canal. The vessel was “floodlit” by the moon’s reflection on a scattering of seraphic fingernail parings floating on the surface of the water. The canopy, sagging like a pelican’s pouch from the load of children peeking out of its sling, was held aloft by a flock of hoopoes with the heads of sages. Gottlob the jeweler, late as usual, was paddling furiously out to the boat in his leaky tub to deliver the ring. Its stone was cut from a sacred jacinth by means of the Shamir, the worm that had hewn the blocks for the Temple in keeping with the commandment that no iron be used in constructing the altar of God. On board the boat the staid Rabbi Lapidus, a rooster tucked under his arm as a sign of fertility, charged the lovelorn to “be always heartbroken, mein kinder, for only then can you keep evil away.”

A balmy, schnecken-scented breeze emanated from the oven of Ridblatt’s Bakery, under whose awning shuffled a Hasid with his nose in a volume of Talmud. He stepped off the curb and ambled several strides over the water before he realized where he was and promptly sank. A few doors down, Pin’s General Merchandise was dark, a sign on the door announcing CLOSED FOR FENCY YENTZING. Upstairs Pinchas and Katie Pin were in flagrante, while down the hall their nephew, Muni, gleeful in his unwashed underwear, was busy scribbling on the pages in his lap. Behind him stood a silent, ginger-haired child peering over his shoulder in an effort to see what he was writing, and beside the child hovered a scruffy old party in red suspenders, also rubbernecking. To the knobby blades of the old guy’s wilted shoulders were appended a paltry pair of wings, no bigger than a chicken’s, their pinfeathers as spotty as the fuzz on his ill-shaped head. I too was seized by a desire to kibitz and tried to sidle between the little boy and Avrom Slutsky, for the transfigured old gaffer was none other than he. But while the kid stepped aside the old man gave me a sharp elbow to the kidneys, turning to shout, “Gay avek! Get outta here!” The shout, which was familiar as his standard glottal screech, had at the same time the sonorous authority of a bat kol, a voice from on high.

“Awright,” I sulked, “I can take a hint,” and slammed shut the book.

Then I wondered: What just happened? Still reeling from my swift eviction from Muni’s creation, I was neither here nor there; I came back only by gradual degrees to an awareness of 1968, to which I was banished. The shop now appeared to me less like a grotto than a moldy funk hole. If only, I found myself wishing, someone had come along to close the book’s cover while I was reading. Then, while my body remained sitting at Avrom’s desk, a hollow effigy no more substantial than a meringue, my spirit would have been happily trapped in Muni’s pages—where, incidentally, the draft board would never find me …

Such was my reasoning as I turned to withdraw the envelope from the pocket of my leather jacket draped over the chair behind me. I removed the letter, unfolding it with curious anticipation like a map that might give me back my bearings, then entertained a maverick notion: What if I went to war? It was after all a young man’s rite of passage since the dawn of history, to embark on the great adventure and return (if he returned) marked by an awful wisdom and a cauterized soul … And again I thought I heard the strident voice—a tinnitus no doubt prompted by my head injury—crying, “A nekhtiker tog! Are you nuts?”

I took a breath and carefully lifted my hampered leg from the desktop, planted it on the floor, and opened the drawer. A sepulchral odor rose from its interior. I rooted among the clutter of unpaid bills, the yellow fabric Magen David, a worn scrapbook full of buff-brown circus clippings, until I found a box of wooden matches. Striking one, I set fire to the letter.

I watched it burn until the flames threatened to scorch my fingers, then let it drift out of my hand. A flaking black carbon zephyr on orange wings, it lit on the desk atop Muni’s weathered volume, which ignited. A frayed corner of the book cover had absorbed the flame like a wick, and the book was instantly engulfed. I was fascinated to see how it seemed to welcome the combustion. I might have smothered the little blaze with a sleeve, snuffed it out like a candle; it was nothing but a lambent flickering. But instead I watched, interested, as the flames sprawled across the cloth cover, hardly believing the book could be so rapidly consumed. Then the small conflagration spread to some stray volumes on the desk, which proved equally flammable, their sparks rising like blown spores dispersed to the nearby shelves, where a wall of books seemed to have been awaiting its own incineration. In a few seconds the shelves had burst into trellises of efflorescent flame.

I remained transfixed by the sight until the door flew open and a cadre of National Guardsmen charged in, presumably alerted by smoke issuing from the shop. Callow weekend warriors not much older than me, they stormed the premises as if they meant to battle the fire with their rifles; they held kerchiefs over their faces and began to rush here and there at cross-purposes, calling for buckets of water. Close to choking myself, I was nevertheless ignored in the mayhem, still lacking the will to lift myself from the chair. Then one of the tall shelves toppled over, crashing to the floor in a spray of glittering sparks, out of which stepped, God help us, my beatified boss, having apparently followed me from the pages of Muni’s book. His pinions appeared to have grown considerably; covered now in an eider of frothy feathers, they even flapped a bit, fanning the flames. His countenance was more terrible than any of the crabby aspects he’d assumed in life: eyes flashing, hair floating (at least the few strands that were left to him), his scraggly beard curved like a cutlass at its tip. This was not a guardian but an avenging host, who loomed above me in utter indifference to the fact that I refused, despite my dread, to believe in him.