God's Ear

by Rhoda Lerman

  Chaim yelled to Mendl. “Please inform Reb Fetner Mincha services don’t begin for another hour. He can’t cross my threshold until seven-ten. He should remove himself from my property.”

  “I’m not exactly asking, Mendl, can I enter the Gates of Heaven,” Yussel yelled, loud enough so Chaim could hear.

  Mendl shook his head no, slowly, from side to side, lowered his eyelids until they were slits, blinked once, snapped a shade shut over the shower-glass window. Yussel leaned on the bell and listened to the first six notes of “Ain Kaloheynu” maybe a hundred times until someone pulled the plug on the chimes.

  When Yussel walked around to the back of the house to find an open window, the dogs hit the fence with G-force. Yussel pulled himself up to the windowsill.

  The kitchen ceiling was so low it almost came down to the top of the refrigerator, which was big enough to freeze four grown men. The kitchen looked like pigs had left in a hurry. On the kitchen table was an open can of Heinz Vegetarian Beans with a fork stuck in it, a can of sauerkraut with a spoon stuck in it, a bag of hot dog rolls, a pile of half-filled paper plates, open mustard, schmutz. Yussel tiptoed, held his breath, didn’t see the crayons on the floor, went sliding, stumbling, arms out, past the turquoise bar, past the triple-strand ficus trees, and into the living room where his super-naturally broken shoulder hit the floor eye-level with the toes of Chaim’s Tony Lama lizard cowboy boots.

  The Miracles of Creation growled. Then Chaim made a joke. “Look at this. We don’t let Fetners in through the door, they come in through the windows. This must mean we’re doing something right when the Fetners can’t stay away.”

  Mendl helped him up. The others laughed at Chaim’s joke. Even bent over double in pain, Yussel towered above them. “So, sit, Reb Yussel,” Mendl from Rikers Island invited. “You want a glass of tea? A cookie?”

  Chaim’s house smelled of sauerkraut and gas. The gas hissed from a small fire burning fake logs over a little spigot. “You have business, Yussel? Maybe you came to sell me some homeowner’s? You need a loan?”

  “Chaim, I have business to satisfy.”

  The Miracles of Creation swelled up, moved away from Yussel, toward Chaim. Yussel took a deep breath. “I ask you point-blank, Chaim, do you own my water rights?”

  Chaim kissed the tips of his fingers, then touched them to the prayer book on his lap, looked up at the ceiling for the answer. The Miracles of Creation looked sideways at each other with sly smiles.

  “No, Yussel, I don’t own your mineral rights.”

  “I said water rights. Do you own my water rights?”

  “No. No. What makes … of course I don’t own your water rights. Why should I own your water rights?”

  “Emes Adonoy, no?”

  “Emes Adonoy, no.”

  Yussel thundered. “On your children’s lives?”

  “On my children’s lives, Yussel.”

  This Yussel couldn’t argue with.

  Fifey the Kluger walked up too close to Yussel, stuck his face in his, covered him with a fine spray of sauerkraut. “So your business is satisfied? We’ll see you back here for Mincha?”

  “You stand there with your hand on the sefer, Chaim, and you say no?”

  “Yes.”

  “So who does?”

  Zipper joined Fifey, then Velvl the Shecter. Together the three of them, like a greasy wall, slid into Yussel’s space. Yussel backed up. They moved him in this way into the kitchen, toward the window.

  “I’ll call you, Yussel. I’ll call you,” Chaim called. “I need homeowner’s. Don’t forget.”

  Yussel, forgetting, climbed out the kitchen window. Mendl, from inside, whispered, “You okay, Reb Yussel? You need anything?” Yussel shook his head no, told him to wait a minute, ran to the car, returned with the pineapple, passed it through the open window to Mendl. Mendl whistled in approval, pulled down the window, pulled down its shade, then all the other shades as Yussel walked around the house.

  So who owns the water? Yussel moved his yarmulke back and forth, cracked himself on the head. He could see nothing on the screen.

  Yussel couldn’t start Bingo’s cab. He looked under the hood, wiped off the battery, checked the oil, kicked the tires, flooded the engine. Chaim stuck his head out the door, offered to call the Texaco. Yussel ignored him. Yussel tried the engine. Nothing. From noplace his father said, “The paradox is, He gives you free choice but He’s the only One Who knows the consequences. I told you.”

  Yussel ignored his father, told HaShem what he thought of Him. “You think You’re the only One who knows consequences? I also know some consequences! The consequences are, someday I’m going to kill Your friend Chaim unless You give me a little something too! You hear me?”

  At that instant, like a clap of thunder, Bingo’s cab turned over by itself, scared Yussel out of his mind.

  20

  A FIRE-ENGINE RED BMW 735 WITH A MAGNETIC SIGN ON THE DRIVER’S door was parked in front of the Arizona. The sign read OFFICIAL TRIBAL CAR. The moon shone placidly on the new lake. Yussel could taste mud in his mouth from his fast, from his fear.

  Indian Joe sat at the bar, drinking coffee with schnapps, making Babe giggle. He was as shiny and alert as a clean spittoon. Babe was having a flamingo pink day. She leaned over the bar, giggled. Indian Joe looked like a friend of Frank Sinatra’s, with a tanning-salon special, a hand-tailored Western-style gray flannel suit with pink stitching, pink shirt to match, a three-inch solid-gold kachina doll with turquoise eyes, a Rolex watch that could be fake, snake-skin boots with silver points on the toes.

  Yussel rubbed his nose, pulled at his beard, wondered if his mother was giggling someplace for somebody. Indian Joe looked up, grinned at Yussel, shot a pink cuff, examined his Rolex, which moved around so smoothly Yussel knew it was a $1,500 Rolex because the second hands on the thirty-five-dollar Hong Kong knockoffs jerk around.

  “You go on, Mrs.” Indian Joe pointed to the kitchen. “We gotta talk man to man.”

  Babe ran out of the room in a quick little dog trot. Indian Joe shrugged, pulled a sheaf of legal papers from inside his pink-stitched breast pocket, flattened them out on the table, and pushed them quarter-inch by quarter-inch toward Yussel as he talked. The universe was tightening up. “I promised your father I’d take care of you. Number one, he didn’t touch her.”

  “Who owns my water rights?”

  Yussel tried not to wonder who he, who her, tried to stare the Indian down. The Indian kept sliding the papers closer.

  “First, he never touched her.” Indian Joe leaned forward, so close his eyes crossed when he looked at Yussel, their noses almost touching. Yussel could see the little hairs at the ends of his nostrils, like Spanish moss.

  Yussel knew at that very moment, as he looked up Indian Joe’s nose, he was going bankrupt. He didn’t know how; certainly he didn’t know why, but he knew it was happening. Yussel tried not to look up into Indian Joe’s nose.

  “So, you believe me, my son he didn’t touch her?”

  “Rosebud’s your son? I paid for all those trucks?”

  “He takes her to his house. I admit that. She’s gotta massage him and rub him with oils and then she’s got these little plastic bags of sagebrush shit and she burns it all over his house, spices, and tells him how he’s going to give her the Messiah that night in the full moon and she’s saying these prayers with her eyes closed, getting ready, she says to him. My son, he’s a simple kid. He says, ‘I’ll get you ready.’ She says, ‘I mean inside.’ He says, ‘That’s what I mean.’ She says, ‘That’s not what I mean.’ He says, ‘Inside, outside, what’s the difference?’ She says, ‘Inside, as in spirit.’ He says, ‘Oh.’ What’s he gonna say? What would you say? Then she wants to give him an enema, a coffee enema. She’s gobbling like a turkey, her eyes closed, rocking back and forth, getting ready, and the sage is burning, and the whole house stinks, so he takes off his shoes and sneaks out of the house, doesn’t go back until she’s gone. It took him all w
eek to get all that shit out of his house. For three days we laugh when he tells it. But he’s scared. Believe me, that one’s loco. The Messiah.”

  Yussel saw the two sets of footprints in the sand on the dunes. Natalie’s gone. Natalie’s back. Natalie’s kneepads. And his father was busy all night protecting Natalie. You didn’t pay attention. A lot of things he hadn’t paid attention to, like where is the Flower Child and where is the Jackalope and why isn’t your wife here and what does Natalie need that would keep her away from Rosebud. The papers were almost across the bar. They were legal papers. Very smoothly Indian Joe maneuvered a ketchup bottle and a sugar shaker out of the path of the papers. Yussel wouldn’t look.

  “And number two, I said there would be a sacred lake on your property. You didn’t believe me then. You believe me now?”

  Yussel said, “It’s a lake. You also said the world would come to an end when we got the lake.”

  “Give it time.”

  The papers were almost at his fingertips. “So now, here.” Indian Joe tapped his manicured fingers on the papers. “Free and clear. Your own house. You believe me?”

  “Okay, Cochise, who owns the water rights to my land?”

  “Eight bedrooms, two baths, apple trees, full modern baths, free and clear. Two stories.”

  “The water rights, Cochise.”

  Indian Joe smoothed out the deed, cocked his head. “You don’t believe me. Your father believed me. I told you there would be sacred water, didn’t I? You have valuable land now. My tribe trusts you with our sacred land and our sacred lake.” He beat at his heart. “My tribe trusts you.” The kachina doll danced on his diaphragm.

  “My tribe doesn’t trust your tribe.” Yussel lifted Indian Joe up by his lapels. He was light-boned, tumbleweed blowing around in the desert. The inside of his mouth could have been a display case at Tiffany’s.

  “DBM.” Indian Joe’s nose hairs moved rapidly. “A tribal corporation. My tribe,” he said softly.

  Yussel dropped Indian Joe into a chair. “Okay. I’m going to your tribe. Where is it? I’m going to tell them how you and your son spent all their money. I’m—”

  Babe yelled from the kitchen, “You’re talking to his tribe. Plus his son.”

  “I have to pay you extra for the water?”

  Indian Joe shook his head no.

  Yussel stalked the perimeters of the room.

  “We leased them out to another party. But I’m giving you a house free, eight bedrooms, full modern kitchen, two baths. Free.” He flagged the papers at Yussel.

  No one had to tell Yussel who had leased the rights from Indian Joe. Chaim, who, like death, couldn’t get enough.

  “So if he owns the water, I have to pay him to use it, right?”

  “You’re getting a house for nothing, Yussel.”

  “Whose side are you on, Babe?”

  “I’m just explaining it.”

  “You think I don’t understand? Is that what you think?”

  Yussel stopped in his tracks, turned on Indian Joe. “How much do I have to pay?”

  “Whatever she wants.”

  “I thought you leased it to Chaim.”

  “He did.” Babe moved between Yussel and Indian Joe. “Chaim subleased.”

  Someone was drilling a hole in his stomach, draining out his fluids, embalming him. Yussel looked at Indian Joe. Indian Joe jerked a thumb up toward the mountain. And that’s how Yussel found out where some of Chaim’s money was coming from. And where the rest of whatever Yussel had left to live on could go.

  “Come on, Yussy,” Babe shrugged, spread her hands. “It’s not that bad. So you’ll call her. You’ll make nice.”

  Indian joe drove the Official Tribal Car. They took Ray-Vac lanterns. Yussel sat in the front seat, Babe in the back. The moon was high and big. Indian Joe said the house wasn’t quite finished yet. They crossed Moffat, drove onto a dirt road, past the cemetery, past the town dump, pulled up in front of a battered, paintless, two-story house. Doors banged in the wind. A gray filthy wisp of curtain blew out of the broken window of an upstairs bedroom.

  “Babe,” Yussel whispered, “this is the old whorehouse!”

  “The new one is occupied.”

  “How can I put my family in such a place?”

  “The shul’s in a bar. You bring to it; you don’t take from it. Also, tell me where else you’re going to find eight bedrooms, enough for all your kids plus your in-laws, plus Shabbas guests. It’s perfect.”

  They walked among old apple trees, a well, an outhouse that was one of the two bathrooms, piles of shipping cartons containing kitchen cupboards, bathroom sinks, one master bedroom Jacuzzi. Yussel kicked the Jacuzzi box. It wasn’t a dummy.

  “You can’t tell much from the outside,” Indian Joe apologized.

  “So, let’s go inside.”

  “You can’t tell much from the inside either. But my son, he’ll have it fixed inside out in no time. Another two weeks you could move in. My son he works like lightning.”

  “Thunder.”

  It was a big house, a rambling house, with the apple trees, probably a good view of the mountains, a little stream behind the apple trees. It wouldn’t be so bad. A swing on the old tree, the kids learning how to fish.

  “Shoshanna picked out the wallpaper and the kitchen already.”

  Yussel thought about a whore wiping between her legs with the curtain in the upstairs window. Yussel thought about all the bedrooms. “We better get it really clean if my kids …”

  Indian Joe grinned, said to Babe, “He likes it.” They drove back to the Arizona.

  Yussel curled up on the backseat. His father made himself small and curled up next to him. He was wearing a silk jacquard robe in beige with dark brown piping, pajamas in beige tussa, with the same piping, a brown-and-beige polka-dot ascot at his throat. His father took out a notepad from the Palace Hotel in Madrid, read a list to himself Yussel couldn’t see, shook his head.

  “How’s it going with the redhead?”

  He didn’t know how much his father knew, so he told him. “Terrific. I think she’s in love with me.”

  “With you?”

  “What can I tell you?”

  His father put his hands behind his head, leaned back into them, looked somewhere behind his eyes, sighed for what had been. Yussel was dying to ask for names. “When I was your age, women were hanging all over me. Of course I was better looking than you. But later when I started losing my hair, my teeth, they were still hanging around so I figured it wasn’t me they were after. It was God. This one mention God to you?”

  “No. She talks about my lips, my hands, eyes, nose, beard. Mostly my beard.”

  “What could something like that see in you?” He shook his head. “She’s got to be intended. There’s no other explanation.” He folded his notepad up, slipped it into his bathrobe pocket. “So just don’t touch. You’re being offered choices, challenges. Just don’t touch. Unless of course that’s intended too. We’ll see.” He snorted. “They never sent me such a sexy challenge. They never sent me to the Other Side either. They’re really serious about you. This is some trip they’ve got you on.”

  “She’s smart.”

  “That makes it worse, much worse. You must be getting closer to HaShem, He gives you such punishments.” His father went back behind his eyes again, shook his head dreamily. “All those lovely broken hearts heading in the wrong direction.”

  Yussel woke up as the BMW bumped down the spur, pulled up in front of the Arizona. Babe had covered him with her coat. The deed to the whorehouse was in his pocket. He stumbled into bed with his clothes on, dialed her number. “Lillywhite, do you ever think you’re heading in the wrong direction, that maybe you’re looking for God, not for me?”

  “I won’t know until I get there, will I? Listen, I know who else you are.”

  Yussel curled into the pillows, made himself deliciously comfortable against her feathery thigh, her goosedown breast. “Who else am I?”

>   “You’re the Rabbi they were sorry they invited to the conference on consciousness. You’d written about old Jews in cellars who were mystics, filthy mystics. You followed me around. I went to buy a belt and you followed me into the store and pinched my ass. Once when I was secretary of the student government in college, there was a dwarf who later became a famous actor, although he died young. He used to follow me up the stairs to the student government offices on the second floor of the student building, and he’d pinch my ass on the way up. I felt about you as I felt about that dwarf. You were too small to hit, too poor to insult, and part of me was you and didn’t belong on the second floor with the big shots but downstairs with the dwarfs and the misfits. So when you pinched my ass in Southampton in the belt store, I hated you because I hated me, and I couldn’t say anything but ask you if you liked the belt. You shrugged. Later that day, most of us sat on the floor of a big room and meditated with Pir Vylat Khan. Two hours I sat with my tongue at the roof of my mouth trying not to think of anything. What a way for a Jew to spend two hours. You knew. I walked out onto the porch in a half-trance, sat down on a wicker chair overlooking the bay. You were standing beside me and put a square of Hershey’s bar into my mouth. You forced me back to where you were. You reminded me who I was. I didn’t want to know I was also the dwarf from the lower floor. I wanted to be up there with the guys in white on the second floor. If you hadn’t pinched my ass, maybe I would have understood the earth of what you were putting in my mouth. I just thought you were the clod. Years later I watched you marry two young children at Waterside. It was raining. It cost three hundred bucks a couple to stand in the rain and eat Nova. And there you were. And I was so sorry I hadn’t taken the rest of the Hershey’s bar. But I was trying to get rid of the dwarf in me. I think it’s called Kill the Jew.”

  The pillows were hard and lumpy. He was being asked to redeem her soul? His body was asking other questions.

  “What do you think? I don’t hate Jewish men. It’s just that they let me down. I expected so much. I wanted so much. I want so much.”

  “I think I wish you were here.”