The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  The hypnotist wasted no time in rousing them again, rapping their heads with his knuckles till Rose and Morris sat abruptly upright.

  “Feeling kind of amorous, are we?” asked Splendido. Mama Rose made a flirtatious moue in response to which her husband raised and lowered his monobrow suggestively. The spectators succumbed to a nervous tittering. “Perhaps you will give to the audience a lesson from romance.”

  The couple needed no further encouragement. At once they were entwined in a heedless embrace, clinging to one another with grappling arms and legs as if seeking wrestling holds. Morris planted suction-cup kisses over his wife’s face and fleshy neck, popping a button at the top of her bodice in his passion; while Rose, her coiffure askew, grabbed hanks of her husband’s ebbing hair in her fists. Every blatant moan he extracted from his wife elicited another endearment from Morris: “Hartzeniu! Sweet hamantash!” The audience was in fits, though some shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, moved to concupiscence by the heat of the demonstration. At one point the pygmies wheeled on a gauze-curtained hospital screen, which Master Splendido, making a show of discretion (it had after all been billed as a family revue), placed in front of the lovers. But the sounds emanating from the shadow play behind the curtain provoked even greater gales of laughter than had the couple’s groping in plain sight.

  At the back of the house Benjy seethed, the public humiliation of his foster parents having brought him to the brink of tears. The sensation had no place in his emotional repertoire; sympathy was not a common function of his species. His time among mortals, aggravated by the insults of his outdated age, must have softened him, which was itself a cause for indignity. He was further incensed when a pair of minstrels reappeared to accompany the lustful cries of the Padauers with screechings and tootings on their fiddle and flute. This sent the audience into convulsions. Benjy suspected that what he was seeing was not so much entertainment as a type of revenge. The pipsqueak hypnotist was after all a meshumed, a convert, gone over entirely to the tribe that had abducted him. He’d recognized his original begetters and was punishing them for the threat they posed to his disowned identity. Rather than embrace them as a returning prodigal, the little renegade had chosen instead to reject his birth parents outright: their degradation would put the lid on that rejection and by extension his rejection of humankind.

  Such was the case, based wholly on instinct and enlightened self-interest, that the aged outcast had constructed against Master Splendido. Then it followed that, instead of making himself the instrument of their reconciliation, the greatest gift Benjy could give to Mama Rose and Mr. P. was to save them from their natural son.

  He slid from his chair and began a resolute if splay-footed approach to the stage, bent on a showdown with the wicked child. It would be a duel between conjurors, with Benjy summoning the array of powers he’d inherited as a veteran shretele. There was the ability to shape-shift and render himself unseen, though colitis and lumbago had taken their toll on those faculties. (The most he could command in the way of invisibility now was to make himself a bit blurry about the gills.) There was the talent of invoking mind-bending incantations in occult tongues, none of which he remembered, or calling on animal helpers, though even friendly dogs shied away from him these days. He could still sour milk at a glance and tie the hair of sleepers in granny knots, but such skills would be of little use here. So what was left but a sixth sense that had small value now that the other five were so severely impaired? By the time he’d managed to scramble onto the stage he realized that he was virtually unarmed. Regardless, Benjy—he owned the name now that its previous possessor had forfeited it forever—intended somehow to unmask Master Splendido for the imposter he was.

  The cabaret audience was still in stitches over the mounting crescendo of the Padauers’ dalliance behind the curtain, so no one paid much attention to the diminutive newcomer who’d lately taken the stage. In the interim a dwarf vocalist had joined the musicians, integrating Mama Rose’s rapturous oys into a song whose refrain went “I wanna be an oy oy oyviator.” Busy conducting the whole cacophony, the hypnotist had also yet to remark the intruder; then, out of the corner of an azure eye, he did. He ceased the rhythmic waving of his hands and faced the shrunken atomy, removing his hat to make a sweeping bow.

  “Paskudnyik,” croaked Benjy, “a thunderbolt in your pants if you don’t release from your spell these good people.”

  Master Splendido seemed to welcome the challenge. He’d already withdrawn the tin doll from his deep pocket, but Benjy was much too shrewd to be seduced by her hoochie-kooch. He ignored the hypnotist’s injunction to “Watch Jemima dance” and instead looked the kid straight in the eye. He steeled himself to do … what? Maybe head-butt him in his kishkes, the beautiful boy, with his blue eyes flecked with gold like tiny fishes swimming in circles, the circles themselves spinning like pinwheels. Peering into them, the old hobgoblin, centuries old in fact and very sleepy, lost all consciousness.

  “What looks here like a miniature Methuselah,” pronounced the hypnotist in the fullness of his authority, “is really a chicken.”

  It would have been diverting enough just to leer at the little eyesore who’d dared to defy the child phenom. But to see him now as a docile subject dropped into a squat, beginning to cluck and flap his elbows like wings, sent the audience into an orgy of belly laughs and guffaws. That the hypnotist’s subject did actually manage to stay aloft for some seconds in his maniacal flapping only increased the general mirth. Then Master Splendido invited the spectators to toss any spare change they might have in their pockets and purses onto the stage. A hail of coins showered the ensorcelled Benjy, who, waddling awkwardly here and there, proceeded to peck at the scattered pennies and dimes; he paused just long enough in his foraging to raise his chin, shaking his head to facilitate the sliding of the coins down his gullet. So loud was his contented squawking, to say nothing of the peals of rooftop hilarity, that the symphonic climax of the couple behind the screen was drowned out. Nor was it observed that the man and wife had warily poked their heads through a gap in the curtains.

  “He’s too gristly for roasting,” judged Splendido with respect to the chicken, “but he might make a tasty soup.”

  He clapped his hands and a party of pygmy minstrels, stripped now to grass skirts with bones through their noses, carried out a large zinc boiler possibly commandeered from the cabaret kitchen. It sloshed over when they set it down on the boards, steam coiling out like hooded cobras. Then, pursued by the pygmies, the pseudochicken ran gabbling and squawking about the stage as aimlessly as if he’d lost his head. In the end he was tackled and bound hand and foot with lengths of rope, though he struggled in a welter of imaginary feathers. In the throes of his furious resistance, however, Benjy became dully alert to a fact of his trussed condition: how it was analogous to his plight on that memorable night some years ago when he was smuggled into the Padauers’ apartment. The realization was sobering enough to rouse him from his trance. An awareness of his present circumstance returned to Benjy as it had for his foster parents, whose tempestuous trifling had jolted them back into a consciousness of their whereabouts. Of course they had no recollection of what had happened or how they’d arrived at such a pass; nor did they recognize the author of the event as anything more than the puerile principal of the evening’s program—who, with the help of the near-naked minstrels, had hoisted their little Benjy above the cauldron and was about to drop him in.

  This the Padauers could not abide. They hesitated only a moment, as if trying unsuccessfully to recall some unrelated issue, then shared a mutual shrug and, with their clothing still immodestly disarranged, charged forth from behind the screen. Mama Rose went teeth-first for the hypnotist’s tender calf while Morris grabbed his throat and a fistful of his golden locks with tenacious fingers. Taken off guard, Master Splendido lowered his hands to defend himself, leaving the unsupported weight of his victim to slump onto the crown of his hat, shoving the stovepipe over his ears an
d eyes. His assistants—their bare chests like saloon doors on spindle legs—backed away from the frenzied interference. In the succeeding fracas Benjy was left to tumble onto the planks, where he wriggled like a bug from a chrysalis as he shucked off his bonds. Besieged by the Padauers, Splendido had lost all pretense of his magisterial presence; blind now and powerless to fend off his assailants, he’d begun to bawl like the child he was. At length his whimpering incited his tribe to regroup and make an effort to come to his rescue. The aborigines that had already taken the stage were joined by the costumed strutters, all of them swarming over the couple who’d disabled their young headliner. Semi-recovered from his ordeal and seeing his family in danger, the self-liberated Benjy trotted headlong into the fray; promptly tossed out, he turned about and headed back into the scrimmage again undismayed.

  The audience, having assumed that everything thus far was part of the act, were confused by the current turn of events. If they’d been previously well disposed toward the entertainers, they were dumbfounded now to the point of outrage. With the defeat of the Confederacy always fresh in their memories, it was not in their nature to sit idly by while Caucasians—albeit of Hebrew extraction—were torn apart by cannibals. However misguided their motives, a score of the diners abandoned their tables to storm the stage, some producing concealed weapons (such as a sword unsheathed from a cane) in the process. Standing beneath a pergola twined in artificial grapevines, the treble-chinned maître d’ signaled frantically to the waiters to intercede, while the waiters waved back in amiable helplessness.

  But the shretelekh are finally not a confrontational race. The present kerfuffle notwithstanding, they much preferred flitting stealthily among mortals, creating discord then becoming scarce. So rather than make a stand against such wholesale insurgency, they scattered. Some slipped back behind the sequined curtain; others dove through skylights and bulkheads in varying stages of anatomical evaporation. They took with them their stolen child in his crushed stovepipe, who for all his talents remained perfectly discernible: a royally spoiled and squawling brat.

  Indifferent to their own scrapes and abrasions, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer made to soothe their little goblin, Mama Rose straightening his sailor collar as Morris smoothed the part in his few remaining hairs. Benjy fairly purred at their petting. On the walk back from the Peabody Mrs. Padauer began to hum one of the jaunty minstrel airs (was it “Under the Matzoh Tree”?) while her husband asked her teasingly, “Mama, did we have tonight enough fun?” Then he stopped at a newsstand to purchase, for the first time in his life, a Havana cigar. They strolled home slowly in the cool of the evening, since Benjy’s short legs were especially bowed from the weight of the coins he’d swallowed. But after he’d used the WC—the loot having proved a much-needed laxative—he winnowed and washed the coins from his movement and presented his mama with a bulging piggy bank.

  While Pinchas Pin was otherwise occupied, the czar was overthrown and the revolution that the merchant had waited for for so long finally happened. The so-called Sodomites of South Memphis, sworn enemies of the Pinch, released a sheet of raw ooze and filth from Carr’s tannery into the bayous around North Memphis; but that was before Pinchas’s time. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat on a flagpole above the Commercial Appeal building on Second Street as a crowd watched from Court Square then grew bored; but that came much later. Meanwhile, on the night he and his improbable companion Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya set out in pursuit of Katie’s absconded spirit, Pinchas was less concerned with this world than the next.

  When he and the rabbi arrived by dinghy at the shore of Market Square Park, the inverted tree at its center was illuminated by a jumble of lantern-lit shacks. They were small, jerry-built shacks nestled amid the network of gnarled roots that had reared up in place of the great oak’s undulant branches. The shacks were made of the kinds of odds and ends from which the Jews constructed their sukkah booths, though to Pinchas’s knowledge it wasn’t Sukkot. Or rather, it was Sukkot, Passover, Purim, and Hanukkah rolled into one. For just as on holidays the Jews acknowledged themselves to be living contemporaneously with their biblical forebears, so in this new dispensation did all the holidays occur at once. And through the fabric walls of the booths, some of which dangled like lockets from ropes and chains, Pinchas could see the silhouettes of North Main Streeters at their tables observing simultaneous celebrations. The sight halted him a moment in his tracks, though it only took a tug at his sleeve from Rabbi ben Yahya to bring him back to the mission at hand.

  “Did you think I forget!” fumed Pinchas, who needed no prompting.

  “Touchy touchy.”

  Pinchas sighed, sparing a worry for the frail old man who’d offered himself as his safe passage to the underworld. He’d always judged the tzaddik and his followers to be frankly insane, and now, when the old dotard should have been on his deathbed dispensing holy madness to his disciples, here he was leaning on his cane at the edge of an abyss. He was meshuggeh all right, as must be the dry goods merchant who had agreed to follow his lead.

  Always Pinchas had regarded himself as a forward-thinking man, who, had he lived in the age of Spinoza, would also have been declared a heretic. But his wife’s untimely end had reduced him to a fool like the rest of his demented neighbors. The rebbe had explained it all so plainly in the boat on the way to the park: how, thanks to the interference of himself and his fanatics, below was now above, and vice versa; existence was turned on its head. This afforded the individual a rare opportunity, since one could now enter the afterlife (which in this instance came before) without having to die. By the same token, those who expired during this erratic interlude were not officially defunct. Katie had perished at an opportune moment …

  At which point Pinchas had shouted, “Shvayg!” and held his ears; for his yearning after his departed wife finally wanted no explanation. It wanted only her foggy green eyes and washed-out terra-cotta hair, the swan’s-neck curve of her spine in her taffeta waist; it wanted her flashes of temper, her terrible jokes (“They say Saint Paddy chased the snakes out of Ireland, but he was the only one who saw the snakes”), her roast potatoes like kidney stones. In the absence of Katie’s animate presence, Pinchas’s desire for her had overwhelmed his grief and stunned him with the force of an apoplexy. Then it had set him in motion.

  Throwing away his cane, the rebbe leaped with a single bound from the lip of the crevasse into the roots of the tree. With an agility that seemed to Pinchas indecent in one of his dropsical and dilapidated years, he lowered himself as far as the base of the sunken trunk; then crab-like he began to scramble down its incline until he was swallowed up by darkness. Leaning over the edge of that obscurity, Pinchas froze. How pointless it would be—he reasoned—if in the course of chasing after his lost wife, he should lose himself. But frightened as he was of the descent, he found he was even more frightened at the prospect of losing sight of Rabbi ben Yahya. So the merchant, no young man himself, overcame once again the rational turn of mind he’d set such store by and, exhaling a prayer, made the thrilling leap into the roots.

  He caught hold, absorbing the bruising impact with his chest and chin, and astonished at finding himself still in one piece, hugged the tree for all he was worth. Then, with extreme caution, he began the treacherous downward climb. Steep as was its declivity, the thick trunk was studded with hollows and knobs, so there were no end of ridges and footholds to hang on to, and the cool loamy scent of the earth was somehow beckoning. Even now Pinchas was skeptical that the tree, in its inversion, could serve as an artery between two worlds, but once he’d begun his descent he seemed to have left (along with his logic) his fears largely aboveground. He gave himself up entirely to this penumbral element, which presumably had a logic of its own—one he hoped to discover as he inched his way down the long incline. It was an endless descent that provided him plenty of time to contemplate his objective: for Katie’s runaway soul, in its corporeal aspect, was—he believed—inextricable from his own. He had the sense that, sink
ing farther into the earth, he was sounding the depth of his devotion, which ought not—if he were worthy—to have a bottom.

  He was deep enough now that the hole above his head had shrunk to the size of a penny embossed with a silver sliver of moon. Though the coin had no capacity to shed light into the fissure, the spores and slick mosses that Pinchas encountered appeared to give off a phosphorescence of their own. An orchid-like flower sprouting from a knothole shone like a gas burner. There was sufficient light to give the merchant fair warning that he should halt and let pass the fiddler Asbestos, who was tapping his way out of the mouth of a broken sewer tunnel. The fiddler was followed, as he groped his way round the tree trunk and into a similar segment of sewer pipe on the other side, by a raggedy column of Negro men. Each had an arm on the shoulder of the one in front of him so as not to be left behind in the dark, as they disappeared into the far conduit. Farther down, there was more traffic and Pinchas had to make way for a party of elemental creatures (some still in costume) with a pouting human child in tow. Back from their theatrical exile, they skirted the tree’s broad diameter and burrowed into an oval grotto on their way to reclaim their native haunts.

  Though he must have been by now many fathoms beneath North Main Street, Pinchas had yet to arrive at the spreading branches that had tipped foremost into the crevasse when the oak was toppled. The nubbly trunk itself seemed interminable, and where, by the way, was the old rabbi who’d volunteered to be his guide? For some reason Pinchas refrained from shouting after him, afraid perhaps that his raised voice might cause a cave-in. Or was it that in the quiet of his descent he rather cherished the solitude?