The Rabbi of Lud (15 page)

In the coffee shop the next morning it gave me a kick to see reindeer steak on the menu and I seriously considered having some with my eggs, but then I thought, Putz, you’re in Anchorage, a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, maybe two thousand from the North Pole. It wouldn’t be fresh. And I laughed out loud, the joke being that it was on there strictly for the tourists, a tourist item, like all the Wisconsin cheese they tried to sell you as soon you crossed the state line from Illinois when I was a kid, or pecans the minute you hit Georgia, or Key lime pie as soon as you put your toe in Florida. And the cans of beer for two bucks a pop that they dispensed from the vending machines outside my room and from which I’d bought my dinner last night, the pony bottles of booze at five dollars apiece, and even the outrageous prices themselves, that was tourist stuff, too, local color, and it was actually reassuring, in the sense that I was on familiar ground, to realize that Anchorage was a tourist trap. It cheers you to get the lowdown on a place. It cheers you to be able to shift into the rabbi mode in unfamiliar parts of the world. But neither is that why I was wrong to be afraid of them.

After breakfast I went back into the lobby to phone Shelley and tell her I was all right. There was a line but nothing like the night before and, when I put my call through, I sat down to wait for the cab I’d called after I’d told Shelley good-bye. The guy who’d kibitzed me about my robe was there, though he didn’t recognize or even notice me. And some kick-ass, shtarker types I’d seen on the flight coming in. They wore T-shirts and blue jeans, most of them, and looked in their colorless, climateless clothes rather like sailors. They were speaking a sort of quiet shop-talk that I suddenly, even unexpectedly, recognized as conversation and, without understanding why, I was moved and had to lift my handkerchief to my eyes to conceal the fact that they’d filled with tears. Maybe it had something to do with their jargon. As a rabbi, I’m a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferances and lenities—all their official, documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters’ knacks, the oilers’ and operators’ known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.

Was there a broche for laborers?

God spare these men, I prayed. Protect them from frostbite and snow blindness, don’t let them fall through holes in the ice and keep their feet from stumbling into treacherous crevasses.

And where did I get off, I wondered, praying such prayers instead of pouring it on like any ordinary Jew with his customary mash notes and love letters?

“Uh-oh,” said this guy from the night before, the one who’d reminded his pal about the cost of living in Alaska, “ain’t that a company bus just pulled into the drive?”

“Big yellow mother?”

“I’d fucking say so.”

“Who’s the asshole coming off?”

“Honcho holding on to his faggot briefcase like a schoolgirl?”

“Cocksucker with the mincy-ass wiggle-waggle?”

“Guy looks like he’s walking on his pinkie fingers?”

“Oooh, he thinks he’s gorgeous. Doesn’t he think he’s gorgeous?”

“Spike thinks anyone in a suit and tie is gorgeous.”

Spike smashed his left fist into his right palm. “Guy dressed like that is just asking for it. Like handing out an engraved invitation to the old bunghole investigation. This is what I believe.”

The door opened and a well-dressed man with a briefcase came into the lobby of the Travelodge. The men snuffed out their cigarettes. Spike removed his dark woolen watch cap.

“I’m McBride,” McBride said in an uninflected, middle-level executive voice, and took a paper from the pocket of his overcoat. “Acknowledge who you are when I call your name.—Ambest?” he said.

“Here.”

“Anderson?”

“Yo.”

“Jeers?”

“Present.”

“James Krezlow.”

“I’m your man.”

McBride looked up from his list. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you just keep the Here’s, Yo’s, Present’s and I’m-your-man’s to yourselves? A simple ‘yes’ will save all of us time.—Peachblow.”

“Yes.”

“That’s right, Peachblow. Schindblist. Is that right? Schindblist?”

“That’s right,” the cost-of-living man said.

“You’re Schindblist?”

“That’s right.”

“Yes,” Spike spoke up for him. “Yes, sir, he is.”

McBride looked at Spike, whose real name turned out to be Jack Nicholson, the same as the actor’s, then called out the rest of the names on his list. When he was done three people were unaccounted for and there was some difficulty about Jeers’s credentials.

“We haven’t got time to train you,” McBride said. “Either you’re checked out in jackhammer or you’re not checked out in jackhammer.”

“Ain’t there a letter in there from my union rep?” Jeers said. “Geez, he told me he’d send it. Probably with how the mails are these days it might have been held up, but he sure said he’d send one, sir. He gimme his word.”

“The union doesn’t certify you,” McBride said, “the company does.”

“I been working in Alabama, Mr. McBride. I think it’s a different statute in Alabama.”

“You get on that bus you have to qualify. We’ll give you a test at the camp but if you don’t pass you have to get back here on your own. Plus you’ll owe Alyeska for a bus ride.”

“Could you just tell me what that test covers?”

“It covers jackhammer,” McBride said. A few of the men giggled.

“Because I don’t think it’s fair to be checked out on a machine in one state and then have to be checked out on it all over again in another,” Jeers whined.

“It’s better than five hours to camp,” McBride said. “Anyone has to go potty, he’d better make his arrangements now while I take care of the bill for the rooms. How do you like this, Peachblow?” he said. “Just like when we took that trip crosscountry with the folks when we were kids. All right,” he said, “America needs its oil. If I called your name and we understand each other you can board the bus.”

McBride stepped to the desk and some of the men went toward the men’s room while a few others started past me on their way to the bus.

“That is one hard-assed wonkie,” Jack Nicholson muttered.

“Lord Fauntleroy? He’s fucking Kitty Litter.”

“He’s catfood.”

“He’s pussy meat.”

But they’d turned meek as lambs, sheep in blue collars, these drunks and scufflers of the night before. Why, I could have been their rabbi for them! I’d been out of the world, holed up in Lud, the familiar to too many mourners, their tamed rage and creped huff, and forgotten how many affronted hearts there are, the fat census of the peeved. If you took away their right to kibitz reality, what did you leave them? Jeers’s makeshift injuries and whiney griefs were real, however inexpert he may have been with a jackhammer. He’d been led to expect. Never mind what he’d been led to expect, never mind who had led him to expect it. So I’d been wrong to be afraid of them because my fear made theirs redundant. This is what I believe.

Through the big plate-glass window I watched the men climb onto the Alyeska bus, its yellow oddly crusted and used up in March’s dishwatery morning light. They looked vulnerable against the Travelodge logo—a teddy bear in a nightcap and nightshirt holding a candle in a saucer.

McBride turned from the desk and noticed me for the first time. “Are you—” He referred to the sheet he’d been reading from. “Just a minute. Are you Rodenhendrey or Cralus? Is your name Fiske?”

I shook my head.

They swaggered out of the men’s room.

“Hold on,” McBride said, put his hand into his pocket and took out a second sheet of paper. “Rabbi Goldkorn?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You don’t go up today,” he said. “You fly out tomorrow with the bush pilot who’s bringing in the Hebrew supplies.”

“No, I know,” I said. “I came a day early.”

“You’re a rabbi?” a man asked me who’d remarked McBride descend from the bus earlier.

“I am,” I said, “yes.”

“It’s how guys talk,” he whispered. “We don’t mean nothing, Father,” he said, and left to board the bus with the others.

This time the cab looked as if it might have been a bread truck in another life, a floral telegraph delivery. Like strangers everywhere I referred to the scrap of paper in my hand and pronounced the address to my driver like a question, as if we both knew such a place couldn’t exist, that I’d given him the scam numbers and cross-streets of vote fraud. All he did, though, was simply nod, shift his truck into gear, and move it into the street. Cab drivers are wonderful, the tight tabs they keep on their communities.

After we left downtown where neon flared boldly against the ground-level windows of the bars and restaurants like bright shelving paper in a kitchen cabinet, Anchorage became a little less visible in the dusty light and began to look vague, muffled, some wood-frame, firetrap town.

The only totem poles I’d seen had been logos, their power drained out of them, like the sun or a mountain on a license plate, an explorer on a stamp. It had already occurred to me—the snap of reindeer steak sizzling on the grill, the sixteen-bit beers in the vending machines—that our forty-ninth state knew how to hype itself, and I’d begun to doubt it. To suspicion the neither-here-nor-there quality—it was March 28, we were only barely, only technically out of winter—of the light and temperature—it was colder in Lud—and to suspect that highest summer’s midnight sun would, when it finally shone, turn out to be just another pale metaphor. Just as the Dangerous Dan McGrew types I’d seen in the Travelodge and had heard stumbling and singing their way out of the various Yukon and Klondike and Malamute saloons last night had turned out to be actors. Though, who knows? You can’t argue with wreckers and bread trucks changed into taxicabs, or with men in suits springing for eleven-hundred-dollar motel tabs without turning a hair. There was this gushered and gold-rushed, ship-come-in and struck-it-rich feel to things.
Something
was stirring, some new bonanza shining through the chazzerei.

Rabbi Petch lived in a neighborhood that was familiar to me, though I couldn’t think why. There was something mill-town to the texture of things, something peculiarly, even tragically, “American” about it. Then I realized why it seemed so familiar. It was the kind of place I’d seen flooded out on the news, the kind of place tornados touch down, or that gets evacuated in the dangerous wake of overturned freight cars from which clouds of poison gas are escaping. The irony, of course, was that the earthquake which had destroyed so much of Anchorage had left this neighborhood unscathed.

The houses weren’t shabby so much as vaguely exposed, their pores open to the weather, the paint chipping and the metal chairs on the porches rusting out. It was a bungalow sort of neighborhood, raw and rugged, though I was under no illusion about what such places cost. Rabbi Petch had written me about the immense construction costs in Alaska, the high price of land. You could pick up a thousand acres in the wilderness for less money than you’d pay for a good used car, but it might cost you fifty to sixty thousand dollars for a small lot in a city like Anchorage where the sewers and electric and phone lines were already in.

And just who was this changed, charged-up guy, myself, I wondered, already worrying overhead, list price, living expenses, the price of beans—I’d rubbernecked the big red numbers in the windows of the supermarkets, chalked on the blackboards outside the gas stations, and tried to read how much the price of a ticket would set me back off the little sign in the cashier’s cubicle of the movie theaters—just who was this new economic being, me, Spiritual Man figuring, comparison shopping, getting his estimates, counting his chickens? I hadn’t had to think about this stuff since moving to Lud. Who was I kidding? I’d
never
had to think about this stuff. And why, I wondered, was I so perky? What was so awfully terrific about real life?

“Rabbi Petch? It’s me, Jerry Goldkorn,” I chippered at the man who came to the door and peered through the blinds at me.

“We don’t need any,” he said, and turned away.

“I’ve come thousands of miles. Rabbi Petch? Rabbi Petch?”

“Who wants to know?”

“It’s me, Jerry Goldkorn.
Rabbi
Goldkorn? From Lud, New Jersey? We’ve corresponded.”

He opened the door a ways, studied me for a minute, then stepped aside so I could enter. I put three fingers to my lips, kissed them, and touched them to the mezuzah on the door frame, seeing too late that it was a thermometer.

He stared at me. “Boy,” he said, “are
you
religious! Never mind, it’s an honest mistake in this country. Come in,
hurry,
come in, you’ll let in the iceberg.” He shut the door behind me. “Did you hear a weather report? Is it supposed to snow?”

“I haven’t seen a paper, I didn’t watch the news. But it seems pretty nice out, fairly clear, not very cold.”

“Nice out,” he said, “clear. Not very cold. Oh, boy, have
you
got a lot to learn! Don’t stand
there!
What’s wrong with you? Quick,” he said, “go to the southwest corner of the living room!”

“The southwest—?”

“Where all the furniture is.”

It was true. All the furniture in the rabbi’s small parlor seemed to have been stuffed into a single corner. Even his books. It looked as if he were waiting for movers to come and put it all on a truck.