The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  I knew there were artists who cultivated such crackbrained visions, could even name some that might be cited as Tyrone’s “masters.” But this was the authentic horror vacui, and it was humbling, if not downright stupefying, to be standing there in the presence of a certified maniac.

  Having seen us into the room, our minder entered behind us and shut the door, compounding the claustrophobia that already gripped my gut. We were now completely immersed in the painter’s element, and I wondered: had Tyrone been spurred by his dementia into interpreting Muni Pinsker’s fabulations, or had the fabulations themselves driven Tyrone mad? Meanwhile our escort, peering owlishly over his horn-rims, had turned curator: “He works in a number of mediums, mostly cheap watercolors, though in recent years he’s used the tempera poster paint the Hadassah ladies send him.” His intonation itself was as unctuous as oil from a tube. “They also provide him with preprimed canvases, though he still prefers cardboard and construction paper. The art is quite primitive, as you can see, without logic or perspective, but the blockish figures have a certain folkish charm.”

  I could have brained him with a brickbat. Did he think the artist was deaf and dumb? From Avrom I knew that Tyrone Pin had been born late in the lives of his parents, Katie and Pinchas, so late in fact that neither survived his childhood. Orphaned, he was looked after by his cousin Muni, who inherited him along with Pinchas’s store, and at a relatively tender age the boy had gone to war.

  The mirrored door of a small medicine cabinet hung on the wall above a sink, its glass smeared with enamel in the shape of a mask, with a beard like surf and a deep-creased brow. Looking into it Tyrone would see his own eyes peering out from the face of an Ancient of Days, into a cell in a madhouse appointed in the spitting images of those that decked the inside of his skull. “Hab rachmones,” I heard myself say under my breath, a Yiddish phrase I’d picked up from my reading, meaning “Have mercy.” I vowed then and there to curb my use of mind-altering substances.

  Rachel, in the interim, had assumed her professional demeanor. Removing a small handheld tape recorder from her purse, she asked permission with the arch of a brow to switch it on. Then she edged closer to Tyrone and inquired of him calmly, “What are you working on?” I was proud of her for ignoring the curator or keeper or whatever he was, who cautioned her that the patient was beyond her reach. Tyrone continued daubing with his brush at the composition in front of him, his mouth still speaking silent instructions to his hand. He gave no indication of having heard his interviewer. “Do you know where you are?” she asked, again with delicacy, and in my mind I answered for him: “Somewhere else.” The radiator twanged like a Jew’s harp, the heat in that hermetic room intensifying the chemical taint of the assorted pigments. Rachel persisted softly in her questions, holding her device close to Tyrone’s lips as if to catch a stray mumble or sigh, though the artist never showed the least awareness of her presence. But at one point the words he was mouthing became briefly audible.

  “I can sleep in the window,” he said, the statement half a question, “with the curly dog coats?” His voice was a rusty hinge.

  “Yes,” said Rachel, gently encouraging. “Sleep wherever you want.”

  He became a touch more declarative: “And tomorrow we’ll go to the circus under Jenny’s dress.”

  Rachel blushed a peachy pink. “Sure thing, the circus.”

  “When I would jump on the bed,” he mused, still without looking up, though his lips twitched as if in an effort to smile, “my head got stuck in the ceiling and my legs would go …” Here he actually kicked his legs a bit under the table.

  Rachel said she was sorry.

  “One time I pulled the barnacle goose out from the ground by his beak,” he continued, “and hid him inside the pendulum clock.” We were all—even the keeper who’d cupped an ear—straining to make sense of his utterances, when he suddenly raised his head from its former focus with an expression of acute distress.

  “My back aches where they pulled out the wings,” he proclaimed. He looked at us then and began to snigger so uncontrollably that I wondered if he’d been putting us on all along. But just when it seemed that he might be in danger of coming undone, the tears streaming in freshets down his cheeks, he inhaled and abruptly ceased; again he bent toward his watercolors, muttering “The people there were made out of flies.”

  For the first time since we’d entered his room, Rachel turned toward me, her oval face stricken in an echo of the artist’s agitation. By this time, however, his language had ebbed back into soundlessness, his face bent in its fixated attention to the picture at hand.

  On the drive back to Memphis, still a little unstrung from the encounter, I only half-listened to Rachel expressing annoyance. “Well, that was a waste of time,” she complained; she seemed to be talking to herself for my benefit. “What did I learn? Not to go chasing after wild geese … barnacle geese yet.” Despite a moist eye she blew a derisive raspberry, then further irked by my enduring silence, persisted: “I know what you’re thinking, Lenny.” I wasn’t aware of thinking anything. “You’re thinking we’re in one of those movies where the mismatched couple meets some holy fool and then bond over the experience?” She groaned at the very idea, while I, still trying to recall if I’d ever seen such a movie, said nothing: let her fume. I bit my tongue rather than tell her how much, at that moment, I wanted to kiss her neck.

  It had turned bitterly cold outside, the delft-blue sky retreating from an onslaught of dark clouds. I caught a glimpse out the window of a scarecrow in a stubble of cornstalks, just as Rachel reached across the seat to squeeze my hand. My breath caught: the gesture seemed to effectively erase our previous intimacy—the night that never happened—and replace it with something more durable. I knew enough to stay mute, since any blurted declaration from me might undo the moment. A few seconds passed and she removed her hand anyway, having perhaps thought better of it. But the reason turned out to be purely practical, because it had started to snow, great saucer-sized flakes of a kind rarely seen in Tennessee. The fallow pastures and tilted silos were turned almost instantly into features out of Currier and Ives, an absurdly precious landscape that neither of us, hazardous driving conditions aside, were of a mind to disparage.

  I told Avrom we’d visited the madman and he asked me what did I want, a Good Samaritan medal? But it was one of his talkative days and, after his habit of doling out information in short rations, he let it be known that Tyrone had been among the troops who liberated the camps.

  “How do you know?” I asked, expecting the usual bull.

  “Because I was in it, the lager.”

  I assumed that his reply was intended as a conversation stopper; any reference to that place usually was. But I had acquired, at least provisionally, a girlfriend and so considered myself a man of some substance, and on the strength of that credential pressed him to elaborate. To my astonishment he made a terse admission: as he lay fevered and anemic in the camp, he was the captive audience of a meshuggeh GI who hunkered beside his cot and hokked him a tscheinik; told him a tale no one who could walk away would have listened to. It had to do with a fabled place called the Pinch, which became entangled in the survivor’s delirium, and when he recovered he (the survivor) conceived the desire to make the journey to see for himself.

  “I came, I saw,” said Avrom, picking a nit from his beard and flicking it; then a shrug conveying volumes of disenchantment. “I’m still here. Sitzfleish it’s called.”

  I felt privileged to have received the disclosure but was damned if I’d let him know it.

  Outside the shop the strikers were marching from Beale Street to city hall and from city hall back to Beale again, tramping through the slush left over from the deepest snowfall the city had known. All the world’s woes had slept for a day under a white counterpane then woke the next morning to sunshine and took back the streets. Beyond Main there was a war on: place-names like Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu were dropped as commonly into conversation as o
ne might say Electric Kool-Aid. I hadn’t heard from Rachel in days, though how could I? I had no phone. Of course she might have called Avrom’s shop or dropped by the 348, and I might have sought her out at the Folklore Center in its mossy mansion on Peabody Avenue. But for the time being I liked recollecting her in tranquility, isolating her constituent parts—the curl the size of a finger ring at the nape of her neck, her calves as slender as bowling pins, her occasionally envenomed tongue. I was also reading The Pinch at a page or two every night, advancing hesitantly the way you’d enter a cavern whose sunlit mouth you’re afraid to lose sight of.

  My besotted affection for Rachel somehow contributed to the intensity of my reading, or vice versa. Whatever the case, when I shut the book I was still flocked about by its contents; merchants, thieves, and errant souls continued to divert me from my own historical moment. I remained anchored to the past by the weight of the washbasins, lard presses, and canister mills in Pin’s General Merchandise, which I dragged about in my mind like the clanking strongboxes that trailed Marley’s ghost. Avrom would remove his dentures and clack them at me to get my attention; Lamar would poke a finger at my chest, exhorting me to raise the price of cannabis; he was apparently in some kind of trouble. Sometimes I was afraid my transported involvement in the book put Rachel out of reach as well, and I would try and resist reading further. I’d try to get back to the familiar desolation of North Main Street, leave the apartment and run downstairs as I did this morning, only to find myself waist-deep in a morass of floating sundries like Alice in her pool of tears.

  6

  Afterglow

  “You shouldn’t take it so personal,” argued Jenny with respect to the havoc the quake had unleashed. She was dusting herself off at the edge of the crevasse they had just hauled themselves out of, inspecting her various contusions. So casually did she examine herself that you’d have thought she’d only taken a minor pratfall rather than dropped out of the sky into an abyss. But Muni, bruised, abraded, and shaken to the core, couldn’t help but believe that their treetop liaison had touched off the calamitous consequences.

  “We should have first to been married,” he proclaimed.

  Jenny gaped at him in disbelief. “From where did you get such a big head?” she asked him sharply, while beyond her their panicked neighbors scurried here and there in the altered landscape. “You think it matters to God what you did?”

  “But Jenny—” he began, and was silenced by the disappointment he read in her face. When he found his tongue again he submitted glumly, “Your question that the rabbis have debated it for centuries.” Then instantly he was sorry for his betrayal; he was ashamed that the event, its earthshaking proportions notwithstanding, had supplanted the unfathomable delight he’d experienced in their intimacy. Still he couldn’t let go of the guilt he felt for having set the planet awry. Having done so, were they now supposed to bask in some dewy-eyed postcoital glow? Scarcely able to control the trembling of his hand, Muni attempted to dab with his shirttail the sickle-shaped scar on Jenny’s chin, then gave it up. “How can I join with you in the fraylikheit, the gladness, after what we just been through?”

  For the oak, in toppling, had not fallen onto level ground. Had that happened, its limbs might have absorbed the shock and the couple, still suspended in its branches, climbed down handily. Instead the entire tree, at the end of its long decline, had pitched top foremost into the chasm that opened beneath it and had caused it to fall over in the first place. Market Square Park had shifted like the head of an awakening colossus and yawned, its acorn-strewn turf developing jaws that gobbled up the oak in all its leafy luxuriance. Then with such gathered velocity had the tree tipped groaning into the hole that it was virtually upended; its broad limbs, thus inverted, were stuffed into the maw of the gaping cavity so that its unearthed roots now protruded above the ground. They approximated in their height and breadth, those tangled roots, the original tree. And perched among them were a company of improbable creatures who, uncomfortable with their sudden exposure, leaped onto the grass and scattered in their various directions.

  Muni and Jenny had managed to hold on, riding the bough they clung to all the way down into its subterranean berth. Dazed and disoriented after the tree had come to its jolting rest—wedged upside down in the crevasse—they were amazed to find themselves still in one piece. Then came the task of climbing out of a stygian shaft that may have had no bottom, a chill sepulchral breeze wafting out of its depths. Clambering up the downed tree proved much harder than mounting the oak when it stood erect. The climb was especially difficult for Muni, who lacked Jenny’s agility in the first place and was moreover in shock. But the girl, apparently as skillful at spelunking as at scaling heights, endeavored despite her bum leg to aid her young man at each stage of their ascent. She grabbed him by the wrist, hauled him by the shirt collar and the seat of his pants, even as the earth continued to hiccup and rumble, threatening to dislodge them from every hard-earned purchase. In this way they were able to grapple by degrees along the knotty trunk, sometimes squeezing between the branches and the bedrock laid bare by the eruption. Surfacing at last into an ocher-red evening, they discovered the park transformed, its previously horizontal lawn bunched like a rug. Hysterical neighbors tottered over the rolling paths while dogs stood frozen in their tracks. But instead of the exhilaration the couple might have shared at having survived their ordeal, they exchanged cross words. Then before Muni could speak again and add further fuel to the fire, Jenny put a finger to his lips, took his arm, and led him out of the park.

  The neighborhood was practically unrecognizable. Wooden buildings, flimsy to begin with, leaned against each other at precarious angles, if they hadn’t already fallen down. The sturdier structures, jogged from their foundations and further disturbed by mysterious flickerings from within, had shrugged layers of bricks and mortar onto the pavement, their cornices and moldings dropping off like rotten limbs. Most of the citizens had vacated their apartments and fled toward open spaces, but one or two were left hanging from windowsills while friends and relations hopped about underneath them with open arms. Taking in the scene from the raised sidewalk in front of Schloss’s Grocery, Jenny and Muni squeezed each other’s hands. Chimneys had collapsed and gas mains burst, releasing flames that rose from the streets like fumaroles illuminating a sulfur sky. Ruptured pipes spewed boiling water up through the asphalt, the water rushing forth to meet the stream that coursed from the breach that had opened at Catfish Bayou. The alluvial soil around the bayou, loosened by the quake, had slid into the frothing water causing the pond to overflow its banks. A channel was then created that forked around a stalled trolley and merged again to gush into North Main Street. Show racks and furniture were washed from their displays in front of the shops and carried before the flood, which swept all manner of detritus along with it: baby buggies, herring barrels, a loveseat, a bass viol. Rats, possums, and raccoons were also caught up in the surge, paddling desperately to stay afloat. Some had managed to scramble aboard the casket of a yellow fever victim disinterred from the sandy loam around the bayou. The whole floating menagerie poured past Commerce, Winchester, Market, and Exchange Streets, debouching into the basin of Poplar Avenue, where it swerved and cascaded downhill toward the levee.

  One notable feature amid the general chaos was the portly Rabbi ben Yahya, flanked by his disciples and sporting his best beaver shtreimel as he waded into the flood. He was blowing discordant tekiot on an undulant ebony ear trumpet weeks before the holidays, while his Hasidim, dodging debris, danced an ecstatic hora in midstream.

  Later, legend would have it that the current of the Mississippi River had reversed itself and flowed backward for hours, that tremors could be felt as far away as Nashville and New Orleans. People would claim to have witnessed portents: swarms of passenger pigeons had set upon cornfields devouring acres of crops; apple-green parrots, never before seen in these parts, had populated whole stands of catalpa trees. Cattle lowed in chorus and huddled t
ogether, as did other animals—bears, foxes, panthers, coyotes—not known for their camaraderie. The moon was pink; a forest had seen a mass exodus of squirrels; there were glades carpeted in a ropy weave of snakes. But for all these ill-omened sightings, the earthquake was not a far-reaching cataclysm: the rest of the city seemed to have been passed over, the damage confined almost exclusively to the Pinch.

  Aftershocks continued to rattle the ground and ring the chimes of nearby churches, their clanging competing with the bells of fire stations all over town. A motorized steam pumper churned upstream into North Main and was briefly amphibious before becoming swamped. Firemen in steel helmets leaped into the waist-deep water and spread a net beneath the rotund Mrs. Gruber, who dropped from her fire escape like an overfed baby from the beak of a stork. The better part of the fire brigade, however, had been dispatched to the Phoenix Boxing Arena over on Front. That great barn-like structure, which was hosting the long-awaited rematch between Sailor Merkle and Eddie Kid Wolf, was in full conflagration. Its fractured gas lines, unintentionally ignited by an attendee’s cigar, had caused the place to go up like a signal flare. At the first cries of alarm the spectators had abandoned the premises in a stampede that trampled several unfortunates under foot. The heat from the arena’s flames cracked the windows of adjacent buildings, their glass panes breaking with the pff-pff of air rifle reports. In the backyard of Dlugach’s Secondhand a geyser of mud and brimstone had erupted, and riding its crest (in his short pants and middy blouse) was Benjy the ancient child. From the window of their apartment above Dlugach’s, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, his presumptive parents, leaned out in a vain attempt to rescue the boy.