The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  “I would say that he was born, the peanut, around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple.” He breathed on his spectacles and wiped them in his apron. “I got it also on the authority from Doc Seligman that he ain’t entirely a human person.”

  Another subject of local interest was Hershel Tarnopol, who was on a spree. Ever since his father, Oyzer, had heaved his several pounds of sin into Catfish Bayou and gone thereafter into an inconsolable funk, Hershel had run amok in the neighborhood. Before, there had been a general tolerance for his escapades; after all, he’d stolen only essentials of the sort that the blacksmith, whose business was failing due to the tantrums that drove his customers away, neglected to provide their household. There had also been a certain admiration for the boy’s stealth, and the sense that Hershel in his baggy plus fours was a necessary evil. It was as if the merchants believed that, as long as the jug-eared scamp was allowed his petty thefts, the street might be immune to greater incursions. But lately he’d been given to pure mischief, stealing items he could have no real use for: single shoes from the show rack in front of Sebranig’s Custom Footwear, cattle dehorners from Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed, an ormolu clock, a taxidermied owl, canvas puttees. So far no one had actually caught him in the act, but Hershel always made his presence known before merchandise vanished, lest others be given credit for his crimes. What’s more, his pranks, which had thus far been relatively harmless—mixing colored gelatin in water closets, tossing a garfish into the ritual bath—had taken a more destructive turn. Cartridges exploded on the trolley tracks as the cars rolled over them, firing salvos that threatened the lives and limbs of passersby; and while no one had witnessed Hershel’s direct involvement, his conspicuous glee left little doubt as to who was responsible.

  An emergency meeting of the North Main Street Improvement Committee was convened to address the issue of the boy’s delinquency. Leon Shapiro proposed they send a delegatz to Tarnopol’s forge to register their grievances concerning his son: who knew but they might even discover their plundered goods stashed there in plain sight. But no one was willing to risk provoking the blacksmith’s wrath. Neither, interestingly, did a single member of the committee recommend contacting the police.

  One morning Hershel appeared in Pin’s Merchandise with the bill of his jockey’s cap pulled to the bridge of his nose, deceiving no one. Then demonstrating a remarkable lack of prudence, he lifted from its shelf an unwieldy Dandee clothes wringer with a reversible water board, and lumbered away with it in full sight of the proprietor and his menial. Muni looked to Pinchas, who merely shrugged: the kid was an occupational hazard. But in the face of such a flagrant offense to his uncle’s place of business, Muni was seized by a righteous impulse, and flinging off his apron he chased the culprit out the door. In the street Hershel had not made much progress: he’d managed to lug the heavy appliance under the Rosens’ striped awning and just past the soaped show window of Dlugach’s Secondhand, when Muni emerged from the store. At the rate the ganef was plodding, Muni would easily overtake him—and then what? He would teach the boy a lesson. What lesson? Hadn’t he just spent years in a place where your best chance of survival was commensurate with your skill at theft? But here things were different; here there was right and wrong.

  Muni was already at Hershel’s heels and about to grab hold of his collar, when the boy, looking back, dropped the wringer and neatly leaped over it. Not so Muni, whose foot snagged between the twin rollers, sending him sprawling headlong onto the sidewalk in front of Elster’s Discount Furniture. This got a chuckle from Mr. Elster, seated in his doorway in a rotary-back veneer-seat rocker, priced $4.25. There the pursuit might have ended; the goods recovered, the employee could return triumphant to Pin’s. But Muni was still dissatisfied, and having added to his incentive the need to save face, he was doubly determined to apprehend the blacksmith’s son. He yanked the wringer like a sprung trap from his shoe, examined his torn trousers and the bruised knee beneath, and raised himself again to his feet.

  Unburdened of his spoils, Hershel had accelerated his lath-legged pace. Already he was beyond the display racks outside Shapiro’s Dry Goods and the alley that led to the livery stables behind which stood the blacksmith’s forge; he’d passed Blen’s Pharmacy, Schloss’s Greengrocery, and Makowsky’s Butcher Shop, picking up speed. Far outdistanced, Muni nevertheless stirred his limbs into motion. Heads turned as he sprinted across Commerce Avenue past the old auction block that served now as a wagon yard; he crossed Jackson Avenue where the trolley line veered east toward the car barn. He was beginning to enjoy the chase for the sheer sport of it, feeling somehow as if he were outrunning the weariness that had dogged him for so long—the weariness falling away like a splint no longer needed to mend sore bones.

  The blacktop along North Main gave way to the old paving stones underneath; the stones petered out into gravel then earth as the track crossed the desolate stretch that separated civilization from Catfish Bayou. It was a blustery morning: liver-brown leaves from a few withered elms skittering across the barren ground, a chevron-shaped skein of geese honking overhead. Having increased his breakneck stride, Hershel Tarnopol sped down the slope toward the bloated pond; he raced across the crunching shingle and launched himself, legs still cycling, in an arc above the wind-riffled water. Arrived at the brow of the slope, Muni was just in time to see the mammoth pewter-gray fish leap out of the bayou, its whiskers waving like ganglia, its jaws stretched to a cavernous width to receive the boy. As Hershel dropped into its mouth feet first and was swallowed whole, the fish dove back beneath the oily surface with a splash and was gone.

  Almost as astonishing to Muni as the event itself was the lack of surprise his tale of Hershel’s fate generated in the community. Sightings of the big fish had already been reported: it was, as Rabbi ben Yahya’s followers described it, a prodigy grown fat on the iniquities of the Jewish people. Nearly as large as Leviathan, the fish was an unmistakable harbinger of the coming of Messiah, et cetera. As for Hershel Tarnopol, it was fitting that the scourge of North Main Street should have come to such a biblical reckoning as to be swallowed by a whale.

  “Was a catfish,” Muni assured them, proud of his growing ability to recognize local fauna.

  “Nifter shmifter,” they replied. “A fish is a fish.”

  “Don’t split hairs with these clowns,” his uncle Pinchas cautioned him. “You’ll end up meshuggeh as they are.” Pinchas was squeamish whenever the rebbe’s disciples milled about his store inspecting items they could never use. They fingered catchers’ mitts and razor strops like connoisseurs, argued over the kosherness of an ink pen or hot water bottle, but seldom bought anything. When they did make a purchase, Pinchas would bite their coins to ensure their legitimacy. Where did their money come from anyway, since none of them had ever been seen to engage in work? Rumor had it they received remittances from the godforsaken Lithuanian village they hailed from, its inhabitants happy to pay them to stay away. But Pinchas wouldn’t have put it past them to mint their own currency.

  The only person appropriately disturbed by the disappearance of the neighborhood scapegrace was Hershel’s father, Oyzer, who had since allowed his livelihood to languish. The blacksmith (the wags called him Oyzer Destroyser, though never to his face) had surrendered his mad fits of temper to an ominous brooding, and could be seen early each morning shambling with the rod and reel he’d purchased at Pin’s in the direction of Catfish Bayou. There he would sit on the bank until sundown.

  Then there was enough of a nip in the late autumn air to remind Muni Pinsker of the ravening winds that had blown him to this river city, and he knew he ought to count his blessings. But he was restless, possessed of contradictory emotions that he’d thought were forever defunct; and he was haunted by the girl he continued to evade. The visceral charge he’d experienced during his heated pursuit of the thief, to say nothing of its stupendous conclusion, had yet to dissipate. In chasing Hershel, Muni had felt strangely as if he were chasing some
renegade piece of himself just out of reach; his inability to apprehend the boy—or to save him from his impetuous plunge—had left the immigrant lastingly frustrated. For all his gratitude toward his uncle, he’d begun to feel constrained in Pinchas’s employ, no longer satisfied with sorting merchandise, taking inventory, and performing odd jobs. In the midst of stacking flour sifters or pricing jars of disappearing cream, Muni might find himself frozen in place, trying to recall some elusive version of the youth he’d once been. He might emerge from his trance to observe that the clock had advanced perhaps a quarter of an hour—fifteen lost and irretrievable minutes.

  It was during one of these woolgathering episodes that Pinchas tapped him on the temple and wondered if he might be so bold as to intrude upon his nephew’s meditations. “They need from us, the screwballs, a sack chickpeas.” Muni obligingly shouldered a forty-pound bag of the beans that Pinchas ordered specially for the Shpinkers and toted it round to their shtibl on Commerce Avenue above Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed. He trudged up the long flight of rickety stairs to the sanctuary of Eliakum ben Yahya and his disciples, which Muni had never entered before. He was greeted at the head of the stairs by a fish-faced young Hasid, who took the sack without offering any gratuity and told the delivery boy to put it on their tab. Muni might have turned abruptly and departed had he not been a little spellbound by what he beheld. The large room with its warped floorboards and potbelly stove, the grimy windows admitting shafts of light viscous as honey, bore a marked resemblance—notwithstanding the extreme behavior of its occupants—to the study houses of his tender years. But as those years were mainly shrouded in shadows, the scene before him captivated him afresh.

  The skullcapped fanatics yammered and swayed over a raft of open texts heaped atop a trestle table, at the head of which their portly rebbe appeared to be sleeping. Some of the disciples were seated, some standing, and among the standing were those involved in various acts of penance. They flagellated themselves and each other with the leather straps of their phylacteries, one beating his head against a wall until plaster fell. Here and there were materials bespeaking necromantic activities: the armless trunk of a lay figure fashioned out of clay in the process of being molded or abandoned, foundering in the wallow of a galvanized washtub. There were improvised ritual furnishings: a standing wardrobe that functioned as an ark of the Torah, a hearing trumpet that doubled for a ram’s horn, a tricolored map tacked to the wall that, on closer inspection, laid claim to revealing the geography of the World to Come.

  A disputation was in progress under their slumbering rebbe’s nose over how many parasitic cherubim might colonize the nest of his beard. Quotations were cited from Yakov Yosef of Medziboz and The Kumquat of Sfat, assertions made and contradictions submitted until the room was in an even greater uproar. Then Rabbi ben Yahya’s goggle eyes snapped open. Rising slowly to his feet with a melancholy sigh, he began to pace around the table, bonking with a closed fist the head of the odd disciple until that disciple sat back down. He bonked those who rose to replace them, themselves replaced when they sat by some of the formerly seated who stood again. It was a bizarre exercise that cast the rebbe in the role of a diabolical musician pounding the keyboard of a human carillon, though no music beyond the hosannas of the faithful was available to Muni’s ears.

  Who were these cranks that lived largely on air supplemented by a diet of chickpeas? They ate them boiled, fried, tossed them uncooked into their yawning mouths and chewed them to a pithy puree. The chickpeas no doubt accounted for the Hasids’ chronic flatulence, which vitiated the atmosphere of their shtibl. But their flatus was also deemed conducive to a useful upthrust during prayer, and the beans themselves provided the nourishment essential for pursuing their occult experiments. Experiments that played havoc with the commonplace reality of North Main Street. The mystery for Muni was why they had chosen the Pinch for their laboratory, when there were so many other places where Jews of their feather were much thicker on the ground.

  “Because,” Pinchas had explained, though the notion clearly offended his sense of propriety, “they have calculated that will be dead center, the city of Memphis, of the coming apocalypse.”

  The rebbe was back in his cushioned chair, his beard obscuring his ritual garment like the bib of a hair shirt. Serenely he began holding forth on a subject that rang a distant bell in Muni’s brain.

  “From the Angel of Forgetfulness we know that under the nose he tweaks you when you were born, so the soul don’t remember what once it knew in Paradise. But comes the real tweaking when you forget what since you were born you think you remembered. Then you will stop looking within yourself for HaShem. Also will you stop looking for Him without or above or behind or beside yourself either. So where you should look?” The disciples shifted their eyes, lifted and let fall their shoulders in unison. “Nowhere is where! When you are in your body nowhere, you are everywhere in your soul. Let go already from everywhere, you should exchange it for nowhere and nothing.”

  His followers wagged their heads as if they understood what he was talking about. One with a fluttering eyelid, flush with exaltation, exclaimed, “So sublime is nothing that no thinking about it can do it justice!”

  But Rabbi ben Yahya was quick to put him in his place: “Look at who thinks he’s nothing.” The retort was greeted with wholesale sniggering.

  Muni thought he had heard enough, but just as he turned to leave, the rebbe, indifferent to his lingering presence, began discoursing on multiple worlds. “Like dreidls on twin axes they spin, heaven and earth,” he proclaimed, “and when the letters from the dreidls that they make a match, the two worlds kiss and Messiah comes.”

  Again a distant bell tolled.

  Muni was still sleeping fitfully, rising from his cot during the night to look out his window. But there was never anything on the wire between its fixed pulleys except perhaps Mrs. Rosen’s bellying bloomers or a pair of her husband’s dropseat longjohns that she’d forgotten to take in. Sometimes there were slighter garments that Muni tried to ignore, just as he did the silhouettes he saw behind the drawn shades of the apartment above the delicatessen. Was it his fault that La Funambula might never perform again? Somehow he couldn’t help but think that yes, it was. But he’d sidestepped her for so long now that the distance across the alley had become for him as great as the distance from, say, the mines of Nerchinsk to America. So much time had elapsed since their shared tumble that it was too late to change his tack; it was impossible that he should ever speak to her again.

  At the same time he knew an encounter was unavoidable. There had been so many near misses on the street and in Market Square Park; and when the electric lights came back on after the maiden screening of Calamity Anne’s Inheritance at the new Idle Hour Theater, there she was. Jenny walked with a cane since the plaster cast had been removed from her leg, limping with a dignity she’d never evidenced in her former knock-kneed stride. The cane was one of those serpent-headed walking sticks from their nest in the umbrella stand at Pin’s. (She’d also acquired one for the schwartze Asbestos, who was seen to twirl it with surprising dexterity.) No longer attempting to hide from Jenny Bashrig’s approach, neither could Muni meet her eye, though stealing a peek he might detect the trace of a smile playing upon her primrose lips. Then it seemed to him as if the girl were actually enjoying his consternation. Once, as he watched her making her way past Plesofsky’s dentistry on Overton Avenue, she suddenly clenched the cane between her teeth and kicked into a handstand. With her petticoats hiding her head and her ribbed lisle knickers fully exposed, she rounded the corner inverted into North Main Street.

  Several days later, on a raw and windblown February afternoon, Mose Dlugach, looking suspiciously droll in his oilskin slicker, asked Pinchas if he could borrow his nephew for a while to beat some rugs. His own worthless sons were over at the Neighborhood House learning the turkey trot and he couldn’t afford to leave his shop any longer. The rugs were oriental carpets that had been gathering dust fo
r years alongside the assemblage of curios in the attic-like environment of Dlugach’s Secondhand; they could do with a good airing out. Though he couldn’t see what was so urgent about the job that it demanded his immediate attention, Muni nevertheless appreciated the diversion. One at a time he lugged the columnar carpets down the back stairs and into the drab little yard behind the shop. There he unrolled them, draped them over a drooping clothesline, and walloped them with a two-by-four. It was a more strenuous task than he’d anticipated, but Muni, exorcising unrealized frustrations, took pleasure in mercilessly swatting the stiff fabric, raising thunderheads of dust from the pile. Even more than lambasting the rugs, however, he enjoyed watching their intricate patterns unfolding as he spread them over that bald scrap of ground. Then it was as if he were transforming the backyard, with its board fence, rusted wash boiler, and outhouse, into a particolor caravansary.

  One bulky carpet, though, proved to be heavier than the rest. Finding it too difficult to hoist onto his shoulder, Muni dragged it instead out through the rear of the premises and tugged it bumping down the wooden steps. In the yard he used his foot to kick it into a trundling rotation, and as the carpet began to unroll, it released from its dwindling cylinder a hidden girl. It was Jenny Bashrig, who spilled out of the rug as from the curl of a wave, hugging the cane to her chest like a scepter as she continued rolling over and over across the beaten earth. She fetched up against the fence where she lay motionless in her peacoat, while Muni held his breath until she opened her eyes. Then she got a bit stiffly to her feet and stood there, leaning on her cane with one hand, brushing herself off with the other, and all the while laughing fit to burst. The wind discomposed her pitchy hair, strands of which lashed her cheeks until she peeled them away still laughing.