The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  The gun was heavy and she held it with both hands. She pulled back the safety and remembered to aim low because of the recoil. Then everything stopped and she and Levy faced each other. He looked at her and asked silently, Can you do it, Rachel? Can you kill me? Adam waited for her answer, she thought, and Hawkins; even the clay man waited. She raised the gun slightly, aimed carefully at the man she loved so much, and before she could answer them, or decide anything, she pulled the trigger.

  The blast threw Jacob against the wall. Then some trick of momentum pulled him back into the room and he went down on his knees. Luria screamed and rushed at her, but she turned her gun on him, praying he’d move. He knew it and stopped. The golem stopped, too. She waited, watching Levy. He coughed and looked at her. She couldn’t see his face, but his head was silhouetted against the light from the door and for the rest of her life she told herself that she saw him nod. The rage left her and she sobbed. Tears and cordite smoke blinded her, but she raised the gun, pulled the safety, and fired again.

  His body fell back and lay still. Blood spread on the linoleum and Luria ran to him and knelt in the blood. He lifted him up against his chest and Levy’s head hung.

  “He’s dead!” Luria screamed.

  The smell of mud filled the basement. The thing didn’t move again and she knew that it was nothing there now but a mass of clay without any form. She shoved the gun back in the holster and helped Hawkins stand. He hung on her and she thought she’d fall. Then he pulled himself up against the post. She looked for Garfield. He was trying to stand, too, but he kept falling back. One side of his face was covered with blood and one of his arms hung uselessly. Dworkin helped him up and led him to the door. Garfield leaned against it and Dworkin stayed with him until he was sure he wouldn’t fall. Then the little man went to Jacob’s body and stood at the edge of the pool of blood and looked at his rabbi. He covered his eyes with his hand and said something in Hebrew, and then in Yiddish he said, “Good-­bye.”

  He stood up and took off his cap, which none of them had ever done before in her presence. He held it in his hands and pulled the rim of it through his fingers as he faced Rachel and Hawkins. There were tears on his face and he wiped them away before he talked. Then he said, “We’ll bury him at night somewhere, alone, and tell the others that was what he wanted. There won’t be no trouble.”

  Then Dworkin looked at Rachel and said, “You can stay or go. We can’t stop you. We can’t do nothing, it’s finished for us now, thank God. The war is over.” He paused, then said:

  “But you should know something, Rachel. You should know that the day they rounded us up with our little bags of clothes and made us wait in the square before they marched us to the trains to go to the camp, only one woman from the whole village came to see what was happening to us. One woman. The others could have come, if not to save us, at least to say good-­bye. After all, we’d lived in our section of that town for centuries. But this woman was the only one. She stood at the end of the square and cried and wrung her hands until the Germans shooed her away.” He looked down at his cap. “So you should ask yourself, Rachel, no matter what we are, if you leave us and you have to stand in a square somewhere, who will come with you? Who will even say good-­bye?” They looked at each other for a moment. Then Rachel put Hawkins’s arm around her shoulder and, with him leaning on her, they went to the door where Garfield waited. When the light hit Hawkins’s face, she saw blood running out of his hair, down his face and neck. She’d wipe it away later, and she helped him slowly up the stairs while Garfield followed them, holding the bannister with his good hand.

  Walinsky was in the vestibule. “Was that shots?” he cried when he saw them. “Where’s Jacob?” Rachel couldn’t answer. “What happened to Jacob?” he shouted after them. They kept going out the front door and down the stairs to the sidewalk.

  Tepel was passed out on the front seat of the car, the bottle empty next to him. “Some chickie,” she whispered. She woke him up and they helped Garfield into the car. Then, still leading Hawkins, who was walking more steadily, she kept going. She had to get her car, settle Hawkins in it, then pick up Leah. She tried to think if there was anything she would take with her, then decided she’d leave it all. She had to call Bianco to tell him that it was all right. But she’d do that from the road. She’d say to him what Dworkin just said; it was dramatic and she thought it was what he’d want to hear most. “The war is over,” she’d tell him.

  ††††† Reincarnation.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bari Wood was born in Illinois and grew up in and around Chicago, graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in English. After moving to New York, she worked first in the library of the American Cancer Society and later as a medical editor. She is the author of seven novels, including the bestsellers The Killing Gift (1975) and Twins (1977), adapted by David Cronenberg as the film Dead Ringers (1988). Doll’s Eyes (1993) provided the basis for Neil Jordan’s film In Dreams (1999). She lives in Michigan.

  ABOUT THE COVER

  Cover: The cover reproduces the original stepback cover painting from the 1981 Signet paperback edition. The painting, though uncredited, appears to be the work of Don Brautigam (1946-2008), perhaps most famous to horror fans as the cover artist responsible for many of Signet’s paperback editions of Stephen King’s novels in the 1980s.