The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  “Jesus, it is.” I felt the plane rock.

  “Wait,” Philip said, “let me help.” Together we brought the big duffel up over the seat and maneuvered it between us. We were practically back-to-back now, poised at our open doors. “All right,” he said, “is that your briefcase back there?”

  “About five or six pounds,” I told him.

  “Empty it,” Philip said.

  I pressed the buttons that released the hasps, overturned the briefcase and let its contents spill out. I handed Philip the empty case.

  “Can you get my duffel?”

  “I already have.”

  “That’s gin then!” Philip declared, and both of us dropped out our opened doorways and fell the ten or so feet to the ground below.

  Which is when he went into his rant about angels and attitudes and minimums that remained unbusted. His rap about crab, eminence, and the civil evening twilight. The old Alphabet Soup Rag—all CAVU, DF steers and V speeds. When he didn’t red line or run scud and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Pireps, airmets and sigmets—that old black magic. Essentially good news his disacclamation of responsibility. Essentially music to my ears this music to my ears. I knew that by laying our mishap at the feet of magic, he was indicating we might just get out of this yet.

  Though I barely heard him, was scarcely listening. Too taken with where I was. (I didn’t know where I was.) Studying what I would probably be able to see for only another hour or hour and a half. The queer, mysterious, hidden sun not so much shining as somehow manifest behind a scrim of sky, its light like the stretched-out color of water in a cup. The endlessly repeated shape of the almost colorless trees that seemed, across the lake, to follow the steep curve of the otherwise featureless earth. I had thought of wilderness as a profusion of texture and color and life, some extravagant display, but this, this was what wilderness really was. I couldn’t conceive of such emptiness. Did God know about this place? Maybe Philip was right. Maybe we discovered it. How could it be mapped? It was unmarked. No birds, I was sure, dwelt in its trees. Did fish swim in its greasy, unannealed water? Nothing lived here. Strike the earth anywhere here, with a pick, with an ax, and you’d crack soil permanently frozen, make a sound faintly brazen, some shrill chip of noise. God worked with the political, with the cantons and cities and principalities. With the nations and kingdoms. He needed a side to be on. Someplace populated enough to support a franchise. He’s this through-and-through City-Kid God and never took hold in wilderness. Which is why, counting pit stops in Sinai, it took the Jews forty years to cover the hundred and fifty or hundred and sixty miles from Cairo to Canaan.

  Dear Rabbi Petch, I thought in my letter. How are you? I am fine. Who owns the North Pole? The whiteness of whales indeed! Yours truly, Jerry Goldkorn.

  “Hey,” Philip said, “we’ve got to figure some way to get that plane down from out of them trees before some big wind comes up and does it for us. Did you ever use an ax?”

  I explained how certain classes of men contracted heart attacks just mowing their lawns.

  “Oh,” Philip said.

  “Not me,” I said. “I don’t mean me. Did you think I meant me? Give me a break. I’ve split kindling and made little balls out of newspaper. I’ve built fires in fireplaces.”

  We chopped at branches and felled trees until full dark when it became too dangerous to continue. That night we lay together under the branches and pine needles for warmth.

  And worked until dark again the next day and slept once more under our wooden blanket, developing in those odd, four-hour daytimes a curious, exhausting jet lag, time flip-flopped, bringing me awake at one and two in the morning with a terrible urgency to crap in half-dozen-ounce increments the twelve-ounce-per-person provisions it was actually state law in those days that pilots carry aboard their planes in the event of just such emergencies. Philip was different. He felt the urge as soon as it got dark at three-thirty in the afternoon.

  And were at it again at the crack of noon on the fourth day too. Chopping until we had enough wood to make a six-foot wooden hill beneath the airplane and enough left over to build a blanket.

  Then, close work this, we filed and sliced at the trees in which our plane was cradled, cutting away at boles and projecting branches like butchers trimming fat.

  With long levers we carefully poked and pried the plane loose from out of the smoothly forked branches we had molded for it, and lowered it gently onto its new wooden base.

  Somehow it struck me as a very biblical and oddly satisfactory solution.

  Now, kept from the wind, we could sleep in the plane. Though I must be frank and tell you it wasn’t easy that first night. We dozed on and off. We were, of course, both of us gamy. But that wasn’t it. Though perhaps, in a way, it was.

  Don’t misunderstand. I’m talking here of some dark, masculine nostalgia. My sense that night of my own and Philip’s rough stubble and all the soured perfumes of our decay. Each other’s proximity a vouchsafe of the mortal. Oh, oh, this is hard. I’m looking for the clay equivalencies, some queer mix of broken exhalation and busted wind at close quarters on a haimish plane. The knowledge between us of our seasoned, salty flies and marked underwear. Never all night to be without the strange assurance that all men are fleishik and stand contrary to the principles of such a clean, inhospitable geography of raw phenomena, human finger-food in all that ice and in all that darkness against the disproportionate strength of the bears. Suddenly realizing the wind hadn’t blown once during those four nights when we required calmness to keep the plane slung snug and orderly as a hammock in its trees. Yea, oh yea, I thought, grateful to a God Who answers the rough rabbinics of even unasked prayer, and wondered: Hard? Hard? What’s so hard? There are no difficult davens. Ain’t it just like I told Philip? Don’t he do too got de whole worl’ in he han’? Forgetting for the moment to remember where we were, where we were really, unconscious of all those raw, difficult, powerful phenomena—the tundra and temperature and true magnetic north. Out of my rabbi mode and chatting away with Philip, who couldn’t sleep either. In the fetid cabin of the grounded airplane recruited yet once more into the sedated collegiality we’d shared after the initial excitement of the crash, Philip just beginning to tell me something about his duffel bag when both of us noticed that other wonder—the crack of the noonday dawn. To see—talk of mortality—that we’d been caught with our pants down.

  The wind hadn’t blown. It had remained calm, had it? Yes? God answers even unasked prayers, does He?

  Two huge black bears, drawn great distances through the crystal neutrality of the calm, windless air, by our poor scat, stooped to sniff where we’d squatted on either side of the airplane; then, standing upright, looked up at the machine in which we were sitting and made a face.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Philip murmured. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  “Surely,” I whispered, “they’ve seen airplanes before.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “They must have.”

  “Sure,” Philip said, “lots of times. Maybe what interests the sons of bitches is that they ain’t never before seen one that could throw down one or two dozen razor pines, saw them up into manageable logs, knock them into a roost, then fling its shit out of the nest after it was done with it.”

  “They think we’re a bird?”

  “Do they think they can take us is what. Listen,” Philip said, “Jerry, I’ve heard about this. Some clowns like to hunt out of airplanes. Hang a rifle out the window and potshoot anything that moves. Wild West antics. Like standing on the observation platform and offing the buffalos. Strictly illegal, of course, and a bush pilot would lose his license if he ever got caught, but it happens.”

  “Did you do this?”

  “What, shoot? Hell no, I don’t even fish.”

  “Fly the plane,” I said. “For the hunter.”

  “Do you know what it was like up here before the pipeline? Oh, sure,” he said, “now it’s all boom town and gold rush days, but y
ou come back in a few years, after it’s done, and they’ll have invented the Rough ’n’ Tough industry. There’ll be roustabout museums wherever you look. Nostalgia cakes. Maybe there’ll even be a Bush Pilot Hall of Fame. And except for maybe something a little less than a tiny handful of World Canned Salmon Corporate Headquarters down in Anchorage, there won’t be nothing else here. It’ll be like it was before the pipeline. Because this country won’t ever be civilized. I’ve got nothing to apologize for. I’m a bona fide pioneer. Pioneers do things. They’d do other things if they could, but they don’t always have the choice.”

  This, it seemed to me, was inappropriate, improbable conversation to conduct while seated inside an airplane mounted on a heap of logs actively mistaken for a giant pterodactyl-sized bird by fierce bears in open country, but Philip, either propelled by guilt or driven by some idée fixé, had evidently hit upon his theme and was apparently content to explain himself to me at even greater length. Always while he spoke the notion never left my head that at any given moment he might become so exercised that the bears would mistake his passion for some loose atavistic theme that turned on the smell of rage and apoplexy and that then, out of simple, time-honored principles of self-defense and self-preservation, they would storm the plane and kill us. He continued.

  “So don’t charge me with breaching the codes or violating the folklore. The most they can get me for is unsportsmanlike conduct. What I did they don’t even throw you in jail for. They can suspend your license, hit you up for a fine, but we’re still talking the thin end of evil. I don’t even own a rifle. Tops, I was an accessory. All I did was drive the getaway car. Do you know what it was like up here before the pipeline? Like some frozen fucking Appalachia, that’s what.”

  “Hey, easy,” I said, alarmed by his excitement.

  “You want a statistic? That could give you the idea? Do you? Listen to this. In the fifteen years since they’ve been keeping records, you know how much money has been made from shoveling snow up here? I’m not talking about the highway department or the department of streets. You know how much? Clearing off snow? Counting kids, counting guys out of work? None. Zip. Not a nickel. They’re an independent people. They shovel their own walks, put in their electric, their plumbing. You’d think there’d be odd jobs, that it’d be the odd-job capital of the world up here. The hell you say. Nothing doing. You got a plane, you do what they tell you. If either one of those mothers think I’m responsible that their relatives were turned into carpet or a trophy for the game room, let the record show I ain’t the only one. There’s plenty could be tarred with that brush!”

  “Please,” I said, “you’re giving off frenzy. If I smell chemicals on you, what do you suppose those bears make of you?”

  “I don’t care,” Philip said, “death’s death. They’re shot from a plane, they’re picked off by some mug in the snow. Tell me the difference again.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I ain’t any Lucky Lindy. I ain’t no Red Baron. I couldn’t pick and choose my jobs and ways. Not everyone gets to fly the medical supplies into the village or make the dramatic drop on the pack ice, the radio equipment, the flares and toilet paper. Even if I’d been a better pilot I could never get in with the right people, the environment monkeys and wilderness teamsters that run this place. It’s enough they let you hang around to do the dirty work and odd jobs.”

  “You said there weren’t any odd jobs.”

  “What odd jobs there were.”

  “What odd jobs were there?”

  “What do you think?” he said. “I smuggled snow.”

  And this conversation improbable too, yet suddenly flashed back to the halcyon days when we were cozed comrades, the sedated collegiality of those predawn hours before it was over the top. While we were still boys in the treehouse chatting up the mysteries.

  “Because there really ain’t any economy,” Philip said. “Not in any ‘Hey, patch your roof for you, mister?’ sense there ain’t. Not in any ‘Who’ll take these caribou steaks off my hands for me?’ one. Not even in any underground sense—stolen goods and tips and money passed under the table. The cash crop up here is wilderness itself.”

  “Tourism?”

  “I’m not talking about tourism. I’m talking about climate, I’m talking about distance. It’s a cold culture. I already told you,” he said, “I smuggled snow. I was a snow smuggler.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said impatiently.

  “Rabbi, the morning I picked you up, did you have breakfast at the motel?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Can you remember what it cost you?”

  “It was expensive,” I said, “twelve or thirteen dollars.”

  “What we do here,” he said, “—you, me, Alyeska, the cab drivers on their dogsleds and snowmobiles, the blue-collar help that flies in every day from the Outside, all them wilderness teamsters—is factor cost into the price of soup, jimmy profit and inflation into the price of doing business. We’re all smugglers.”

  “The bears,” I said, “one of the bears …”

  “Don’t make eye contact with the bastard. They see everything. They read lips. Nothing gets by them. Nobody can show them a poker face good enough. Let’s just continue our chat.”

  “Tell me,” I asked nervously, “you said you’d heard about this. Has it happened before?”

  “What? You mean to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “The silly gringo son of a bitch I was with, he had me fly in low so he could get a better shot. He mowed one down like it was Dillinger.”

  “With a rifle?”

  “With a machine gun.” Philip shuddered.

  “What?”

  “There were two bears. One got away. The Tlingits say bears hold grudges, that all animals do. That they pass their wrongs on in some deep, blood-feud way. I was just thinking,” he said, “that what if what drew these two was revenge? That, I don’t know, maybe they caught a whiff of 10w-20 up their muzzle and think they’re on to us.”

  I glanced at this fellow with whom I’d been sharing the close quarters of the cabin for almost a week. We would probably die together. It hadn’t occurred to me you could die with people you didn’t much like. Clearly you could, however. One of the beasts, the one who’d been nosing around in my cold feces, began to swing its long head like a signal in the direction of the cockpit, pointing us out to its companion in some sidelong, ursine “Get this.” As instructed, I bobbed and weaved out of range, refusing eye contact. “Is there anything else we can do?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Like what,” Philip said, “crouch down under our desks with our heads covered? Everything that can be done is being done.”

  Oddly, I was relieved to hear it, and, when I dared look again, the bears were gone. So now I’m convinced there’s a certain amount of truth in what Philip told me. There’s magic in lying doggo. And if this is a conclusion of ostriches and doesn’t always work—there was difficulty, recall, when we resorted to it as a principle in warding off the Nazis—sometimes it does. As with most magic you have to pick your occasions. And know the beast you deal with, too, of course. But I was relieved as much by Philip’s bravery as by anything else. On which I complimented him.

  “Hell,” he said, “if you can’t be a wise man, you might as well be a brave one.”

  “Maybe you’re a wise one too,” I said. “You seemed to know your onions with those bears.”

  “Nah,” he said, “wise men don’t get into things.”

  “Like what? This little setback with the airplane? You’ll get us out of it. I’ve every confidence. Sooner or later someone has got to pick up one of those radio messages you’ve been sending. We’re as good as rescued.”

  “What? From this?” He spoke into the microphone attached to his headset. “Calling all cars, calling all cars. Be on the lookout for a blue Cessna 250 crash-landed somewhere in Alaska and mounted in pine trees like an egg. Shit, Rabbi,” he said, “the damn
thing’s been on the fritz ever since before we even got into trouble.”

  “The radio? What’s wrong with the radio?”

  “Busted,” Philip said. “Out cold. It runs on the power generated by the engine.”

  “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s a question.”

  It was a blow against optimism.

  “I’m a believer,” he told me suddenly.

  “You?” I said. “You’re Jewish?”

  “No,” he said, “not Jewish. A believer. In God. In the services and ceremonies. In you guys. In, you know, middlemen. Men of the cloth. In your special relationships. In, no disrespect, the mumbo jumbo. In, forgive me, the voodoo, in smoke from the campfires. Like, you know, how one minute you can be knocking off a piece for yourself, all tied up in sin and on the road to hell, say, and how the next the preacher says ‘Do you take this woman, do you take this man?’ and everything’s copacetic in Kansas City and the eyes of God too, and you can begin the countdown to your first anniversary. A believer. A couple drops of water spritzed in the cradle cap and—bingo!—you’re baptized, your sins are washed clean and some baby’s a brand-new citizen of God. With the right words you can exorcise a ghost or turn a wafer and a sip of wine into God Himself. Hey, you can bless bread, or people’s pets, or the whole damn commercial fishing fleet if you wanted. You probably know the words to special prayers,” he said, “that could fix our radio and get us out of here right now!”

  Well, I thought, say what you will about old Phil, he’s going to die with his faith on.

  “Particularly,” he said, “now we got all this special Jewish equipment I was able to pick up for you before we left.”

  “What special Jewish equipment?”