The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  The cop had fallen to the pavement with Elder still on his back, his legs clinching the man’s utility-laden waist while his fellows continued their cudgeling. They pounded him, the “apeshit nigger!,” with an abandon so indiscriminate that some of their blows struck the downed patrolman as well. Then, when it seemed that their battery was unavailing, that no amount of punishment could make Elder let go of his nearly asphyxiated victim, one of the cops—his angular jaw grinding gum—pulled out his semiautomatic. The gun went off with a hollow clap, a plume of rose-pink mist spouting from Elder’s head. It jerked, his head, as if he were trying to work a kink from his neck before he lay still on top of the cop, who rolled out from under him speckled in blood. Then I wish I could say I was compelled by impulse, catapulted into action by the gun’s report, but I fully understood the pointlessness of my action as I leapt astride the back of the cop who’d pulled the trigger. I rode him a few tottering steps of a heartsore piggyback before a chandelier burst in my skull.

  Back before his Jenny had returned to the city, when he was still compiling his history, Muni Pinsker—remembering the future—described a skinny kid shelving books in a used book store on Main Street. The kid’s name was Lenny Sklarew and he was about to misplace a volume called The Pinch. Muni paused a moment in his writing, wondering if this nishtikeit character really existed, or would ever exist. “And what’s he doing in my book?” Then the scribe inhaled the tainted air of his room and proceeded to recount Lenny’s adventures without giving his claim to legitimacy a second thought. That was Muni’s method: what was drawn from life and what was imagined were consubstantial.

  There were few details of Lenny’s biography worth documenting, the facts so sketchy that Lenny himself came to forget them in time. He grew up in a ranch house in an East Memphis suburb, so far from the river that the river was only a rumor. His parents were joiners, acquisitive types disappointed by the boy’s lack of ambition. (“Can he really be ours?” they sometimes mused.) He was a poor student, had few friends, and spent his waking hours reading novels and watching black-and-white movies on TV. Owing to a severe case of cystic acne during adolescence, he suffered from a shamefacedness for which he compensated with wisecracks and bluster. Often he felt he didn’t deserve to be loved. Conversely, due to inveterate dreaming, he conceived the notion that he was the hero of his own bootless life. Once, having called his own bluff, he joined a mass demonstration in support of striking sanitation workers. When the march disintegrated into chaos, Lenny, caught up in the melee, was hit over the head by a cop. He came to strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance attended by a pair of bantering paramedics.

  “So Adell,” he heard one of them saying through the ringing in his ears and the crackling of a shortwave radio, “you know what happened to the nigger who looked up his family tree?”

  “Wait, Ricky, don’t tell me; I believe I do know.” A grunt, presumably the sound of Adell thinking. “Okay, I give.”

  “A gorilla shit on his face.”

  There was a reciprocal wheezing and hooting that passed for laughter. Then Adell: “I got one, Ricky. Wha’d the sheriff call the nigger that was shot fifteen times?”

  Replied Ricky without missing a beat, “Worst case of suicide I ever seen.”

  “Aw, Ricky, you anus.”

  More wheezy laughter and Lenny opened an eye, the other swollen shut and sealed with dried blood. He saw the two paramedics seated on an aluminum bench alongside him in the joggling ambulance. One had a head like a royal-pink egg raddled with purple veins, the other an elongated equine face, though Lenny couldn’t tell whether his perceptions were accurate or the result of his murderous headache. They were wearing matching navy polos with EMS emblems.

  “Looks like our agitatin’ boy is still among the living,” averred the horse face.

  “I’d speckalate,” said Ricky, “that this’n’s done contracted your jewrish strain of jungle fever.”

  “Hey, Ricky-tick, y’ever hear about the jew lady asked her husband to ‘Give me ten inches and make it hurt’?”

  “Naw, Adell, I ain’t.”

  Adell rubbed his palms at the prospect of a joke his partner hadn’t heard. “He fucked her twicet and threw her down the stairs.”

  The laughter this time was more lukewarm on Ricky’s part, who countered, “You know what happens when a jew walks into a wall with a hard-on?”

  While Adell pondered, their patient, despite his intense pain and prostration, offered by way of an automatic response, “He breaks his nose.”

  The medics exchanged looks, then leaned over Lenny in tandem.

  “He seems to be ezibiting vital signs,” was Adell’s studied opinion.

  “Better get to work on him pronto, Tonto,” pronounced Ricky. “You know the drill.”

  “Look, listen, and feel,” Adell recited by the book, the two of them becoming suddenly all business.

  “First clear his airway,” said Ricky, pulling rank. “Head tilt, chin lift, jaw thrust. I’ll do the poopillary.”

  Following orders with perhaps more zeal than the situation called for, Adell yanked Lenny’s head into a number of unnatural positions, while Ricky turned the patient’s unbruised eyelid inside out. Lenny struggled against their good offices as best he could given the unyielding snugness of his leather restraints.

  “Fucker’s done gone into seizure,” advised Ricky, “prob’ly the result’a nerlogical impairment. Adell,” his partner stood to attention, banging his sconce on the ambulance ceiling, “administer traykl intubation and use your large-bore combitube.” Smiling a bit diabolically, Adell began trying to shove a plastic tube into Lenny’s throat, though his victim whipped his head back and forth to avoid it. Meanwhile Ricky was preparing a king-size hypodermic needle, sparing a wink of his piggy eye for the wounded young man as he gave it a squirt.

  At that point the ambulance, its siren blaring, began an uphill climb, the abrupt ascent causing the medics to momentarily lose their footing. They braced themselves against the sides of the van as the trauma lights flickered and a defibrillator fell from the wall. Then the van hit a pothole and the double doors at the rear, which had apparently been inadequately closed, swung open. Regaining his balance, Adell must have assumed that Ricky would tend to the doors, because he persisted in his attempt to stuff the tube down Lenny’s throat; but Ricky grabbed his arm.

  “Whoa, bubba,” he cautioned, “we’re headed uphill with the doors wide open.” Adell seemed puzzled that his partner should be thus stating the obvious. “I say,” repeated Ricky more declaratively, “we’re riding uphill with the doors wide open and the stretcher’s starting to slide.” He cut his eyes toward the floor, underscoring the motion with a bobbing chin until Adell, a little slow on the uptake, finally took the hint, releasing the lock on a caster with the toe of his boot. “And,” he added, in harmony now with Ricky’s sham alarm, “the got-dam thang’s fixin’ to roll out the back of the van!”

  It didn’t roll quite far enough on its own to satisfy the medics, however, so Ricky shouted to the driver over the screeching siren, “Pedal to the metal, Cooter, we’re ’bout to lose this guy!”

  Duly alerted, the driver stomped the accelerator, causing the ambulance to jolt precipitously forward and the gurney with its pinioned patient to shoot out the vehicle’s rear end.

  It landed in the street with a tumultuous clattering that nearly jarred Lenny’s bones out of his skin and kicked what wind was left from his diaphragm. Its accordion frame having collapsed to the level of the curb, the stretcher began traveling downhill, gaining speed as it headed west along Madison Avenue, veering into the traffic headed east. Lenny wrestled in vain against the straps that held him, his panic anything but blind, since his good eye—its lid peeled back by the medic—stared helplessly into the oncoming traffic. Then a curious thing: he was launched beyond fear, utterly defeated by the sheer moronic opprobrium of his predicament. Fear was no longer an issue, for so complete was his immobilization that he
felt oddly secure, as if bound to a mast in a storm. The cars honked and swerved to miss him, their windshields hurling shards of sunlight, sleek ornaments pointing like warheads from their hoods. But as the stretcher gathered momentum, Lenny experienced only an abysmal shame at how his situation mocked the ill-starred significance of this day. What had he thought he was doing in the first place—a muddy-brained white guy with only the flimsiest claim to a social conscience, or any kind of a conscience at all? Did he think he could dabble in history like he’d dabbled in romance?

  The gurney rattled down the avenue at breakneck velocity past an automobile showroom, a rubber die workshop, a YMCA. Keeping pace with it—Lenny thought he observed—was the demon Ketev from the Left Emanation, tumbling alongside with his calf’s head impaling his fetal-curled body on the horn that sprouted from his brow. Cars skidded, one sideswiping another; tires squealed and horns caterwauled; pedestrians looked on balefully, while Lenny’s skull throbbed to the point of rupture with the magnitude of his disgrace. When the gurney careered beneath the turning juggernaut of an A&P truck and jumped the curb, its passenger almost welcomed the yowl of his shattered bones and the Lenny-shaped indentation he anticipated making in the metal foundry’s brick wall.

  On returning to the Pinch Jenny Bashrig, formerly La Funambula, found a neighborhood past its prime, its citizens gathered in the park to observe a public enormity. She never paused to question the psychic connection that had drawn her back at that evil hour; there was no time for idle conjecture. Without scrupling she climbed into the branches of the upside-down oak in the forlorn hope that someone might rescue the fiddler while she distracted the mob. But that had not happened. And when she descended to find the crowd dispersing and the sad-sack scribe waiting there with the moon-eyed boy beside him, she knew that she’d already said so long to the circus. It was a fact to which she would never be wholly reconciled.

  Taking stock of her old lover’s uncouth condition, she had only this to say: “You look bad enough to make an onion cry.”

  For his part Muni endeavored to coax his mouth into speech, but so far no words had emerged. It was frightening out there in the open air without a text to follow, and he seemed incapable of improvisation. He could guess that for Jenny the long absence was perhaps an unbridgeable gulf between them, though for him it was as if no time had elapsed at all. He saw that her dark eyes were brimful of tears, her features (sharper than ever) drawn tight with grieving. Unable to speak he stepped forward to lift the shawl, which dangled from her hand, and drape it over the shoulders that her scanty costume left bare. Then he stepped back swiftly lest the gesture be taken amiss.

  “Jenny,” he managed finally, “what should I say?”

  She considered. “You can say, ‘I’m a prick with ears.’ Say, ‘I should sicken and remember.’ Momzer, you should be eaten alive!” she shouted. She choked on an effort to release another curse, for want of which she resorted to slapping his cheek. She slapped him forehand and back, his head swiveling left and right with each cuff, so that he had at last to grab hold of her in order to subdue the buffeting. He held her firmly, folding her in his arms for fear she might come apart from her violent sobs. They stood like that for a time, both of them racked by her grief, until Jenny’s body began gradually to grow slack and cease resisting. But even then Muni didn’t let go. With his nose buried in her hair, he sniffed the miscellany of fragrances—pine tar, hibiscus, chimpanzee—that she’d brought back from her travels; while his cheeks, still stinging, were further lashed by the strands of hair working their way out of her bun.

  Then suddenly reawakening to the cursed place they were in, Jenny cried, “Get me out of here!” As Muni began to escort her from the park, she took one last look behind her at the upstanding roots which creaked from the gentle swaying of the hanged man, a breeze teasing an Aeolian murmur from his fractured instrument. An armed Klansman was stationed in the shadows beneath him to discourage anyone who might want to cut down their ill omen too soon. As she turned back toward Muni, a quote from the drowned clown’s store of favorites escaped Jenny’s lips: “An oasis of horror,” she breathed, “in a desert of boredom.”

  Heartened by her utterance, which was at least in the realm of communication, Muni dredged up a platitude of his own. “They say,” he ventured, “that if so wish the righteous, they can make a world. Likewise the putz, if he don’t pay attention, can lose one. A world, that is.”

  Jenny allowed herself one more sniffle, then no more. “A philosopher yet,” she said bitterly.

  Near the entrance to the park she paused to collect the carpetbag she’d stashed under a bench. When she stood up again, she pointed to the fey child that was still holding Muni’s hand and inquired, “What’s this?”

  Muni explained that Tyrone was the boy that Katie and Pinchas Pin had had late in life before their dual demise.

  Smiling wanly, Jenny licked a finger, thrust it into the blaze of the boy’s ginger hair, and made a sizzling sound. The kid didn’t return her smile but nevertheless raised his limpid eyes in acknowledgment.

  “When I left,” said Jenny, with delicacy, “Katie was dead already. Since when do dead ladies have babies?”

  In response little Tyrone admitted, “I don’t think I’m a hundred percent human boy.”

  Jenny harrumphed. “Life swarms with innocent monsters,” she remarked, for despite all she was proud of the education she’d received during her voyaging.

  “I have to pish,” said Tyrone, as if to prove he had also the needs of an ordinary child, though looking at him neither Muni nor Jenny was fooled.

  The North Main Street they encountered as they trudged back from the lynching was a detritus-clogged artery, its commercial establishments in a shocking state of disrepair. The proprietors of the shops and residents of the lodgings above them stood brooding over their broken surroundings, as if the death of the Negro had recalled them to the unimpassioned rhythm of their days. Where had they been for what amounted (when they were able to gauge the interlude according to a standard calendar) to years? The earth itself looked to have aged in their absence, its surface shelf-worn and unsparingly lived upon, though their neighbors appeared much the same. (Some even looked, despite their joylessness, to have improved in their general appearance.) All were aware as never before that a vital and prospering city was spread out around them, which the Pinch had failed to keep pace with. Why, wondered some, had they not decamped before it was too late?

  “A shmutsik dump” was the judgment heard frequently as the merchants went through the motions of reclaiming their sidetracked livelihoods. “We’re poor!” the families complained, having apparently never noticed before.

  Muni’s courtship of Jenny Bashrig, whom Mr. and Mrs. Rosen had welcomed back into their household with open arms, was a brief and diffident affair. Neither pretended that the second chance they’d been afforded was a continuance of the passion they’d known in the days before the quake; their renewed sympathy for one another had little in common with the infatuation that had shaken them beyond sanity at the top of the tree in Market Square Park. That jarring romance belonged to a prelapsarian period that neither Muni nor Jenny could clearly recollect, a variety of forgetfulness they had in common with the rest of North Main Street. What they shared now was a mutual sorrow, both believing they’d shelved their own particular sadness to mourn what the other had lost, then discovered in that unpretty process that much of what they’d lost was the same. In the event, they soon made a tentative peace with one another and found in their reacquaintance that something of the original fondness had endured. For a couple without fountain pen or balance pole to cling to, it was enough.

  When Muni said, “Marry me already?,” Jenny replied, “Why not?,” then squashed the reasons that tried to give voice. They were wed, after registering with the proper authorities, in a private ceremony in Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya’s chambers above the feedstore, with only Tyrone, the Rosens, and the rebbe’s handful of disciples as
witnesses.

  Their choice of the old holy man was largely a practical decision, since his rogue offices could be had cut-rate as compared to the inflated services of the established synagogues. (Some of which, in their lordliness, alleged that nuptials officiated by ben Yahya were not authentically sanctified.) Also, the couple felt frankly sorry for the old man, whose bluff good health had begun to deteriorate rapidly since his return to the Pinch. The salubrious benefits of his underworld furlough were short-lived, and it appeared to anyone who noticed his corky flesh and the troughs beneath his lusterless eyes that he’d come back from the afterlife to die. In the meantime he was being neglected by his disillusioned followers; so maybe, thought Muni and Jenny—united in their good intentions—a wedding would lift his spirits.

  The occasion, however, was a little soured by the stiff-necked presence of the Hasids, who had become ever more doctrinaire since their rebbe’s return: they withheld their “Mazel tovs” at the crushing of the goblet, as there could be no real mazel until the Messiah came; frowned at the lopsided halo that the old man, with his waning powers, made to appear above the bride and groom’s heads. While music was in any case absent in the ghetto since the death of the fiddler and the pawning of the Widow Teitelbaum’s gramophone, they no longer deemed it kosher to chant or dance. Since the end of that murky period that they regarded as the failed result of their mystical experimentation, they had become increasingly rigid in their adherence to the letter of the law. Attempting to impose their intolerance on one and all, they policed the neighborhood (though the shopkeepers shooed them away like flies); they routinely accused individuals of having committed sins punishable by HaShem with chancres and bloody flux, and even tried to organize a rabbinic court to excommunicate Ivan Salky for having donned the phylactery of the arm before that of the forehead.