by Steve Stern
What was her greatest disappointment? When, after having her tonsils out at age eight, she’d written to Neil Sedaka to come visit her in the hospital and he didn’t show. Once she caught her big sister in a primal embrace with the country club golf pro and wrecked their moment by laughing until she spat up. She was a daddy’s girl until he suggested a fix-up with an old friend’s son, the feckless heir to a radiator steam trap industry. She had a thing for animals: her favorite TV show was Zoo Parade, her favorite book National Velvet, which had surpassed even Anne Frank’s diary as a teenage passion. She traveled in Israel and Egypt the summer after high school graduation with a boyfriend who claimed not to have had a bowel movement during their entire month abroad. Despite her practical bent (she’d been treasurer of a Brandeis College political action committee and worn a gas mask to an uneventful demonstration), she thought she might like to die like Joan of Arc.
Then it would be my turn, though her interrogations tended to be less specific, as when she asked, “So Lenny, why are you such a—to put it mildly—such a case?”
“Blame it on my childhood.”
“Your childhood.”
“As you know I was snatched from my cradle by a buzzard that dropped me on the doorstep of a London blacking factory …”
At which point during that particular exchange she had stiffened and turned away from me. I sat up in bed to find her staring at the opaque glass of the window that gave back the reflection of her seal-sleek body. My eyes slid down her breast and clung to the nipple like Harold Lloyd hanging on to the face of a clock.
“You’re not really an authentic human being,”she mused, and in case I hadn’t got it that she had my number, “are you, Lenny?”
“Me?” I said, dodging the subject lest she think she’d struck a nerve. “I’m an open book,” I insisted, reaching for the book and opening it to the place where we’d left off reading—the part where old Yoyzef Zlotkin, who sorted tin at Blockman’s junkyard, developed the faculty for what is called kfitzat ha-derekh, or the seven-league leaping of the way.
“I interviewed his granddaughter Mindy Gerber last week,”put in Rachel, albeit a bit mechanically. “She graduated from White Station High School and went to Yale on a full scholarship, one of the first women to take a PhD in physics. All she recalled of her zayde was a disagreeable odor.”
In 1855, according to Muni Pinsker, Mayor Israfel Baugh and Dr. Roscoe Dickinson settled their feud with pistols for two, coffee for one, behind the slave pen on Exchange Street. In 1924, Clarence Saunders of Piggly Wiggly fame built a palace of pink marble out on Central Avenue, and in the thirteenth month of 1913, a month that included all others, the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol, in his frustration, threw his anvil into the soup of Catfish Bayou. It was a ponderous anvil that took what remained of the blacksmith’s once fabled strength for him to toss it, and the colossal splash caused a shower of displaced fish to fall all about him. Walleye, garfish, and even a Cretaceous alligator flopped in the mud at his feet, though none appeared to have swallowed his lost boy.
Poking about the bank inspecting the fish, the blacksmith did unearth a beaver-felt shoe he recognized as having once belonged to his son Hershel. Contemplating it awhile, he reasoned (aware that his reasoning was skewed) that perhaps the fish that took the boy might return for what it had left behind. So he hung the shoe on his hook and cast it into the muck. Still no luck. Then Oyzer did a thing that would have been unthinkable during his ferocious days. Though he set no store by religion anymore, and assumed that God had as little use for him, he went to visit the Shpinker rebbe. Why? Because that’s what North Main Streeters had done—furtively, to be sure—whenever the absence of all other options left them wondering if there was more in heaven and earth than they cared to believe.
Oyzer’s neighbors, starry-eyed from an excess of belief, ogled him from atop the sandbag seawall as he trudged through hip-high water on the way to ben Yahya’s shtibl. But the rebbe wasn’t there. His disciples, however, were still in residence, behaving more like a mob in a tavern than daveners in a holy place. Their monkeyshines ceased abruptly upon the entrance of the terrible blacksmith.
“You can tell me please where is Rabbi Eliakum?” inquired Oyzer, his hangdog humility annulling his bull neck and barrel chest.
The schnapps-soaked Hasids looked at one another. Surely the blacksmith’s subdued condition was further proof (if they needed it) that the messianic age had arrived. One of the Shpinkers, reclining on the floor with a dead chicken for a pillow, informed him to the amusement of his fellows, “He went in the Cave of Machpelah.”
Another, plucking a still-wriggling fish by the tail from Oyzer’s pants pocket, chimed in, “He went like Akiva in Abraham’s bosom alive.” Others got into the act, enjoying the fact that the blacksmith could be teased with impunity; they gathered round him, continuing their taunts: “The rebbe went in Gehinnom to lasso with his tefillin the devil Asmodeus.” They danced around him, a manifest version of the internal demons that had harassed him throughout the years. At some point the blacksmith’s neck tendons began to swell and he trembled in all his limbs, seeing which the disciples left off their sport. They grew quiet again, bracing for the violent outburst that was surely at hand, but all Oyzer released was a spate of hot tears.
So daunting was this display that it convinced at least one of the Hasids, a rodent-faced lad with a pronounced overbite, to abandon the high-handed antics in favor of pity. He attempted a serious explanation of the rebbe’s disappearance—“When is exposed the hidden saint, his work here is done”—then looked dismayed that the explanation sounded so much in line with the taunts.
With no reason to tarry, the still-sniffling Oyzer turned to go, when the earnest disciple seemed possessed of a realization: “No more is he the blacksmith,” he proclaimed, indicating their visitor with a gesture. “The fisherman is he become!”
“The fisherman!” echoed others of their minyan, as if a veil were lifted and the blacksmith’s true identity revealed.
The earnest Hasid had moved to the long table upon which lay a double-crowned Torah scroll. Reverently peeling a negligee from the scroll, he began to unroll the vellum parchment until he found the passage he was looking for. “Toyreh is the best of merchandise,” he declared, producing from a pocket a pair of pinking shears. Then like a haberdasher cutting fabric, he guided the scissors in their munching progress across the passage and held the clipped fragment of scripture aloft. The others seemed disappointed that the fellow wasn’t instantly atomized by a fist of lightning but accepted his demonstration as more evidence that a new order obtained. All was permitted.
“The Toyreh one studies in this world,” stated the rodent face, “l’havdil, it’s nothing compared to the Toyreh one studies in the next.” The implication being to all within hearing that they hadn’t seen anything yet. Then coming forward he pressed the passage into Oyzer’s thick mitt. “Fisherman, put in your pipe this and smoke it.”
Of course Oyzer did not smoke or drink or engage in any kind of profligate activity; his remorse had always been sufficient to fuel his immoderate wrath. But despite the dubious authority of the Shpinker disciples, cantankerous in the absence of adult supervision, he began to think of himself as “the fisherman.” As if that designation relieved him of the onus of being Oyzer Tarnopol. Plucked from his cheder at an early age to become his father’s apprentice, he’d forgotten the little Hebrew he knew, and so was unable to read the scripture he’d been given. But it nevertheless assumed for him a talismanic cachet.
Early next morning—a morning like the others that came and went without advancing the calendar date—the fisherman was back at the bayou. Dawn, he recalled from his days along the Wieprz, was an optimum hour for angling, though that was the extent of his knowledge of the pastime. The fog hung like lace tatting over the water, on the other side of which Oyzer was able to descry some figures emerging from a large conduit. This was the conduit that the old Gayoso Bayou, converted aft
er the yellow jack plague to a sewer main, spilled out of into the Catfish cove, and from its mouth appeared a procession of spectral figures. A fever blister of a sun shone through the fog, illuminating the blind fiddler Asbestos as he picked his way at the head of a plodding file of colored men. Pausing in the sludge outside the tunnel, the musician clamped his cane between his teeth, removed his instrument from the gunny sack, and began to improvise a humoresque. It was a mercurial air in marked contrast to the dirge-like pieces he was generally heard to play around North Main Street, and the men seemed to scatter in time to its sportive rhythm. Some made for the shanties north of the cove while others stepped into pirogues and paddled for the narrow channel that led into the Wolf River tributary. A little stimulated by the music himself, Oyzer stuffed the passage of scripture into Hershel’s shoe; he snagged the shoe once again on his hook—a hayhook he’d optimistically fastened to the end of his line—and cast it over the pond.
At once a gigantic fish broke the surface with a three-story splash and struck the bait before the shoe had a chance to hit the water. The horsehair line grew taut and the spool spun rapidly as the fish ran free with the beaver-felt lure. The resulting tug nearly pulled the cork grip from Oyzer’s hands, yanking him forward at a stumble into the shallow water as he tried to hang on to his rod. With only a rudimentary experience of the sport, he understood that he was seriously outmatched, giving up already the farcical misnomer of “fisherman”: a wretched smithy was all he was.
“Palm the rim,” came a harsh smoker’s voice from behind him.
Oyzer strained to look over his shoulder, where a pink-eyed rustic in a dusty sack coat was standing.
The man spat a stream of tobacco juice. “Palm the rim of your spool to give it some drag,” he said, gesticulating with his hand. “Use your thumb.”
The blacksmith applied pressure with his cudgel-sized thumb to the reel’s rotating spindle and felt a slight retardation of the big fish’s headlong run.
“Now play that sucker,” said another more nasal voice. “Click and pawl.”
Oyzer turned again to see that Pink-Eyes had been joined by a lantern-jawed gent in a battered straw skimmer.
“He ain’t got no clicker, Ethel; that’s a cheap-ass Alright reel.”
“Should of bought hisself a Orvis multiplier; them’s got a slide drag for easy retrieval of your got-dang game fish.”
“Myself,” said the original kibitzer, “I’m partial to the Pflueger direct-drive, which it’ll let you feather your line with a forefinger.”
“Had me a Pflueger oncet,” countered Ethel, “but the got-dang bird’s-nest device couldn’t keep the line from snaring.”
“You should try shometime the Koshmic quadruple,” came a third voice that Oyzer, facing forward again, recognized as his neighbor Alabaster’s, speaking as usual through a chomped cigar. “With the fifty-pound tesht I uzhe it, and alwaysh with the woolly booger lure.”
There commenced a heated debate concerning the virtues of woolly boogers versus mayflies, caddises, midges, and hare’s-ear nymphs, but by then the blacksmith wasn’t listening anymore. He was struggling to maintain some traction against the prodigious fish pulling with the might of a man-o’-war at the end of his line. Resigned now to contending with the fish not as an angler but as a stiff-necked Jew, Oyzer was able to draw again on some portion of the blacksmith’s strength. He’d managed to slow without halting the free run of the fish toward the channel outlet by applying pressure to the reel, but was unable as yet to summon enough force to reverse the clockwise revolution of the crank handle. As a consequence, leaning backward at an inordinate angle with his heels dug into the mud, the blacksmith was in a stalemate with the powerful fish.
He was aware that a growing number of spectators had gathered behind him, heard snatches of advice he ignored, knowing in his bones that he must bring in the fish on his own or not at all. The fog had lifted and the sun shone forth on a brilliant late spring (or early fall) day. North Main Streeters had ventured beyond the enchanted zone to mingle with a few gentile citizens alerted to the blacksmith’s struggle. As Oyzer gripped the handle of the still turning reel, the cane rod was nearly bent double from the tension, but miraculously it did not break nor did the line snap. Miracles notwithstanding, however, what was called for was simple brute strength. But while the veins stood out like cordage on his ham-sized forearms, Oyzer was unable to wind the spool in the opposite direction. He groaned aloud, his red face contorted in the anguish of his effort, but the handle on the reel would not be moved.
In describing the deadlock from the confines of his narrow room, Muni Pinsker evoked epic contests with legendary denizens of the deep, associations that lent velocity to his pen. But the thoughts of Oyzer Tarnopol, who shared no such associations, were elsewhere: he told himself that, had he interfered on that black day back in Hrubeshoyb, he could only have succeeded in getting himself murdered alongside his wife and daughter, thus leaving his son an orphan—and that, however, was finally no excuse. Meanwhile the blacksmith’s neighbors, Jew and yokel alike, had tied an anchor rope around Oyzer’s thick middle and hauled on it as in a tug-of-war to prevent his being pulled farther into the drink.
Morning gave way to afternoon then evening—the orange sky deepening to plum—then morning again, the first day; and still the blacksmith held fast in his struggle with the fish. Sweat streamed in runnels from his brow, tiny blood vessels bursting in the whites of his eyes, which he squeezed shut; he clenched shut his jaw, though he opened his mouth periodically to receive the chicken soup that Mrs. Rosen insisted on spoon-feeding him. The neighbors, heaving at the hawser that kept him from pitching forward into the bayou, spelled each other, comparing fish tales of their own as they rested before taking another turn. Then another evening and morning, the second day; and Oyzer’s neighbors began to show signs of fatigue and restlessness, some wondering why they’d left the scintillant waters of their canal to assemble by this noisome sump. Most of the goyim, grown bored with the marathon encounter, had begun to wander off, as what had they been waiting for anyway? The lunker, presumably stalled below the surface, had yet to reappear, which made one question whether it even existed. Most likely the big Yid had snagged his hook on a scuttled flatboat. By the third evening the blacksmith’s trunk-like legs were sunk to his thighs in the gumbo, so that he looked to have been planted there, more an immovable fixture of the landscape than a man.
Oyzer himself, his every sinew and nerve on fire, his brain an ember, wondered whether the fish remained on his line, or was it that—his thoughts unraveling—the dead he’d deserted were attempting to pull him under? How he’d resented his son for whose sake he’d refrained from taking his own life, though staying alive was surely the punishment he deserved. But with Hershel vanished, what reason was there not to surrender? Maybe it was time to follow the sins he’d flung into the bayou. Ever fewer of his neighbors now manned the rope that held him against the opposing tow, and the suction of the mud he was lodged in could scarcely offset the leverage he’d lost. Soon what strength he had left would fail him, his heart would burst from the strain, and he would be dragged into the water to perhaps become food for the very creature he battled with. It would be a welcome end. But in the meantime he owed it to the family he’d betrayed to prolong his agony.
There was no telling how much time had passed—another day and night?—when suddenly in the gusty late afternoon the line went slack. With the cessation of tension the blacksmith fell backward into the sludge, along with the handful of neighbors still tugging at him from behind: the fish must have slipped the hook. But standing on the bank in back of them were Oyzer’s initial observers, volunteering a different conclusion. The pink-eyed one said, “Thang’s done turned around,” and the lantern-jawed other, “Git up now and wind your reel like a scalded devil.” Because the lunker had apparently doubled back and was swimming straight toward them, the broad V of its wake ruckling the surface of the coffee-colored water. Muddled and co
vered in slime but not quite defeated, Oyzer hauled himself to his feet and began to crank the previously unyielding handle. He cranked with a galloping alacrity that caused smoke to emanate through the vents of the aluminum reel and the braided line to smolder from the friction. He cranked until his shoulder was practically thrown out of joint and another circuit of the handle seemed beyond his powers of endurance. At that point the line grew abruptly rigid again, and calling on some reserve fund of strength (donated in part by the chronicler Muni Pinsker in his description), Oyzer locked the reel and heaved the rod upward. Crying “Gottenyu!” he thrust it into the air until the titanic fish hung suspended from a slender bamboo wand as curled as a shepherd’s crook. Seeing how he wobbled so unsteadily, nearly impaled by the hilt of the rod wedged against his gut, others came to the blacksmith’s assistance.
He hadn’t set out to catch a mythical monster, but there it hung: awesome and shuddering, a dreadnought of an aquatic vertebrate, oily water pouring from its massive silver flanks. It was risen only partway out of the bayou, the great saw-toothed fan of its dorsal fin only half exposed, its thrashing tail concealed beneath the churning surface, gills puffing in and out like the bellows in Oyzer’s forge. The diminished crowd of onlookers was swiftly reconstituted, the hardier pitching in to help uphold the rod as if rallying to raise some mammoth primeval standard. But as they held it aloft, the monster, its eyes dull as old chrome, opened its jaw to show a double row of needle-sharp teeth before sliding back into the turbulence. In its place was another fish, smaller but still monumental, its torpedo-shaped flanks louvered with breathing tiger stripes. Then that one also opened its mouth and slid back into the cove, leaving a lesser giant still on the line. Lifted high enough above the water to reveal its cankered underbelly, its forked tail slapping the air, that fish too slipped back into its element, leaving behind it young Hershel Tarnopol hanging by his collar from the rusty hook. He was grinning around the piece of paper clenched between his crooked teeth, his legs cycling slowly in his baggy plus fours; in his hands he held a large round loaf of baked challah bread.
