The Pinch (55 page)

But there was nothing spectral about the talon-like hand he thrust into the desk drawer in front of me, extracting a pair of rusty scissors. He raised them above his head where they hung poised to settle scores with the young shmuck who’d torched his store and betrayed his legacy. I deserve this, I thought, and closed my eyes, still half-expecting I might wake up in my hospital bed. Peeking through my fingers, I watched in awe as the celestial geezer plunged the scissors not into my heart but my thigh, stabbing through the baggy pantsleg and cutting a seam in the plaster cast. Then clenching the instrument pirate-style in his gums, he ripped the layered plaster, which came apart like an opened cocoon, and liberated my leg. He raised me up by the sore armpits and shoved me toward the door, expediting my forward motion with a well-placed kick.

I stumbled coughing and half-blinded out onto the pavement, where I was greeted again by the unpeopled morning. Behind me the fire roiled, the shop’s dusty front window splintering from the inferno inside as the soldiers beat their retreat out the door. There were sirens in the near distance, men and trucks only minutes away, though I knew they would arrive too late. I wiped my watering eyes with my sleeve and suffered shooting pains throughout my body, an infestation of pins and needles in my game leg, all of which served only to animate me the more. I proceeded in a southerly direction along Main Street, its stores closed and boarded up against looters, the thoroughfare barren but for the odd sentry or armored tank. A phrase came into my head: “The royal road to romance,” which struck me as so comical that I tried a few warmed-over others. “He lit out for the territory with only the clothes on his back.” A breeze fluttered my torn pantsleg in unison with a banner hanging over the street announcing the commencement of this spring’s Cotton Carnival; a flyer taped to a lamppost advertising the Elder Lincoln Memorial Concert at the Overton Park Shell also waved. We flapped—the banner, the flyer, the flitting pigeons, and myself—like flags at a regatta, which somehow increased the hilarity of my circumstance. I had to stop and surrender to a fit of laughter, a whooping fulmination that escaped my seared lungs with a sound like a raucous sneeze.

“Gezuntheit!” came the sublime squawk from behind me. I might have glanced back over my shoulder at its source but instead stayed true to the words I’d spied Muni Pinsker scribbling on the page in his suffocating little room.

“Limping forward again,” he had written, “Lenny never turned around to give a look on the angel with the scissors and the flames. He figured was nothing already but rubble and ashes, the bookshop, like the district a few blocks to the north that they called it the Pinch.”

Portions of this book appeared in
Fiction Magazine, J&L Illustrated
, vol. 3, and
jewishfiction.net
, no. 14.

My thanks to Fiona McCrae and the very fine people of Graywolf Press, and as always to my steadfast friend and agent, Liz Darhansoff.