Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  In the days to come, Gus drove up to the top of Mount Terminus a Chinese dwarf who spun miniature plates at the end of bamboo poles, a dozen of them, simultaneously; a mustached, one-armed Greek who juggled five baseballs at a time with his one good arm, his shoulder, and a foot; a strongman who wrestled a wild pig; a team of Russian acrobats who formed atop a single bicycle a reverse pyramid; a lazy-eyed magician who failed to make Gus disappear; a six-foot-tall contortionist who squeezed into a small box from which he couldn’t remove himself; and then there were several dipsomaniacs Gus plied with drink so Bloom could film them stumble about through the maze of the knotted gardens until they could stumble no more.

  * * *

  Except to say that Sam Freed had given him a chance at a new life after he’d fallen on hard times, Gus Levy shared little about his past. Yet Bloom felt at ease in his company. He trusted him. Inherently. Even if he was dressed as one of the henchmen from his childhood nightmares, he didn’t resemble his father’s tormentors. There was warmth and an innate kindness belying Gus’s exterior. Even Mr. Stern, who had stopped by several times to advise Bloom on his holdings, took a liking to Gus. Despite his monumental presence, Gus, a man of his father’s generation, more often than not struck Bloom as a small boy wearing an oversized suit. When he didn’t know he was being observed, Bloom caught him on several occasions burying the tip of his proboscis in a rosebud to take in not a manly snort, but more a feminine whiff. Not long after he arrived, he carried with him—inside the internal pocket of his long coat—a pair of pruning shears, which he used for several purposes. Once, sometimes twice a week, while Bloom filmed his subjects, he would ask Meralda for a vase or a bowl and would clip flowers or fruit, and present them to her at sunset. On the days he wasn’t arranging flowers in a vase or fruit in a bowl, he trimmed back branches in the grove, so they produced healthier fruit, he told Bloom. To occupy his time further, he lumbered up to the top of the tower, where he did as his young charge did: observed the world about them through the eye of the telescope. Communed with the birds. He even went so far as to take with him a bucket of water and a brush to clean the cages. What Bloom liked about him best of all, however, was the respect he showed the guests he delivered to the estate. No matter what variety of woman he met at the door of the studio, after Bloom had finished with her, Gus bowed his head, handed a yellow rose to her, and offered his arm for the walk back to the motorcar. To the one-eyed cowboy, to the one-armed Greek, to the dipsomaniacs who could hardly stand upright, Bloom was introduced as if they were respectable gentlemen. To the most unusual of the lot, he treated their differences with the nonchalance of a man who had experienced the world enough to know when to shrug his bulky shoulders at its most intriguing peculiarities.

  * * *

  One night after Gus had twice been to town and back, Roya appeared before Bloom in the parlor and touched his shoulder. He followed her out the front door and down the drive. When they reached the gate, she handed Bloom a flashlight and pointed to the right, along the stone wall. Bloom turned on the light and there he saw Gus’s black sedan, and in it, Gus, snoozing upright with a shotgun’s double barrel resting against his chest. Bloom approached and woke him. And said, Won’t you come inside, Gus? There are more than enough rooms. Or, if you like, you can sleep in one of the cottages.

  I can’t, said Gus. Simon wouldn’t like it.

  Why not?

  I’m supposed to be looking out.

  What for?

  He grimaced. It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with.

  You’re hugging a shotgun, Gus.

  The big man looked down at the two barrels in his arms, raised his thick brows as if to say, So I am, then said, Walk around and take a seat.

  Bloom did as he was told, and when he was settled next to Gus, Gus said, Simon’s told you of his plans? For the reservoir and the aqueduct?

  Yes.

  Well, the farmers up there near the lake haven’t been in a particularly obliging mood. They sort of have it out for him at the moment. And seeing as it was Mr. Rosenbloom, the departed, who turned the lake’s stewardship over to Simon, I’m afraid they’re not too pleased with you, by association, see.

  No, said Bloom, I don’t see.

  Look, said Gus, it’s like this. You’ve got the farmers out at the edge of the desert there who aren’t too pleased because they say the people down south are going to suck the water right out of their fields, and then you’ve got the citrus farmers over here on the other side of the mountains, he said, pointing out to the basin, who’ve yet to sell to Simon—they’re not too pleased with the amount of money Simon’s offered them for their groves. They feel like they’re getting squeezed. They consider the way your brother does business something of an injustice. But the thing is, the courts have said it’s Simon’s right, and it’s the water authority’s right, to divert the water from the farms in the north, and put the squeeze on the farmers in the south, and it’s the courts, in the end, that say what’s what. So, said Gus, it’s no surprise tempers are up, and, it’s been my experience, when tempers run hot, right minds don’t prevail. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re part of Simon’s venture, see? When people think their livelihood is threatened, anyone will do. Until now there have been whispers about some unpleasant business, nothing more than whispers; nevertheless, Simon wants me here to sit out the nights. As a precaution.

  Despite the unsettling news, the sight of Gus, enormous and armed, made Bloom feel secure. Nothing, he thought, could penetrate this large barrier of a man, this amiable Golem. Nothing.

  The lengths he goes to, Gus remarked after a long silence. It dizzies the mind. After another pause, he added, I know he wasn’t Sam’s natural-born child, but there are times when I wonder if he didn’t inherit a little of his soul. Gus shifted his eyes to Bloom, and Bloom returned Gus’s gaze, hoping Simon’s man would continue on. Sam, Gus said after he and Bloom stared at each other for a little while, he had something of the dybbuk about him. And now I can see it in Simon. Same as Sam. Follow?

  Bloom shook his head.

  Gus went on at some length to explain how Sam Freed started off—not unlike Gus himself—as a dirty immigrant kid working the saloons back east along the city’s Bowery. By all accounts, Sam was a decent, levelheaded boy until he took a job at P. T. Barnum’s dime museum on Broadway, where, day after day, he spent his time attending to Barnum’s cabinets of curiosities. While looking after them, Gus explained, something inside him changed. Gus was convinced a malevolent spirit, a dybbuk, came to attach itself to him. Got him fixated on the freaks and geeks. He fell in love with them, along with the variety acts, the animal shows, the acrobats, ventriloquists, melodramas, the panoramas, the living statuary. While working for Barnum, Gus told Bloom, Sam left behind his family, stopped attending shul, and took up running a numbers and booking racket, to make enough money to rent a small theater. When he secured a lease, he filled the small venue with lewd acts and minstrel shows, worked the same crowds everyone else did, the rowdies and the riffraff, the fancy men, the poor hardworking, hard-drinking bastards who needed to step out on their families at night. The small theater filled up every night—and while Sam might not have conducted himself in the most upright fashion, while he wasn’t the most pleasant of human beings to pass the time with, the man knew his business. And he knew people. He could see right into them, what they wanted, what they needed—and with the profits he made from that small theater, he was in a position to rent a bigger theater, and after some time, Sam had enough dough to buy his own place. For a long time, he continued to work the East Side and the Bowery Boys, and one night he saw something that changed him. One night he saw one of his patrons assault a young, innocent girl in the most unspeakable manner, right there, in one of the balcony seats of his theater, and that night the dybbuk loosened its hold on him, and, like he’d just woken up from a nightmare, he had a vision of something altogether new. He started to imagine the money he could make by putting on
a clean front and going broader, widening the appeal of his acts, making it so women and children didn’t feel scared when walking out for a night of entertainment. They had their own troubles, their own concerns to forget, Sam had said to Gus when the idea struck him, and he took it upon himself to open a place uptown, right on the edge of privilege, at the doorstep of the upright native borns, and he got rid of the drink in the theaters, cleaned up the acts, brought in real, trained talent and mixed it up with the song of the street, clad the working girls in respectable garments, brought in a Henry Higgins to teach them some manners, and after a while found himself growing respectable, a bridge builder, some reporter said of him. And, Gus suspected, he would have continued bettering himself, but, he said after taking a pause, it wasn’t too long after he’d thrown off the malevolent spirit, there was that business with your mother and Leah. Leah, she was the only woman Sam ever really loved. He loved her more than himself. And, well, that changed Sam, reacquainted him with his former scruples, and he began to see in what ways his business would benefit from pressing Jacob, by taking from him what he believed he needed. And, like I said, he knew his business, and it turned out his business benefited. He could always see what was next, Sam, always found the means to push what was new into the world, and for the worse, I think, he bred his ambition into Simon, poisoned him with the dybbuk’s aspirations. And now Simon sees this place as his territory to conquer. To make of it what Sam made in the East, only bigger, a great deal bigger. His own empire, said Gus. With his enemies at the gate and all the rest that accompanies a big head. But you rest easy, kid. The big man patted the shotgun with his hand. I ain’t gonna let nothing happen. And Bloom believed him. The big man gazed into the distance and looked off in the direction of Mount Terminus’s peak for a long while. When he turned back to Bloom, he said, I could take you out there sometime if you like.

  Where’s that, Gus?

  To the lake. On the High Holidays. To pray and fast. Maybe the three of us can go, all together.

  I’d like that.

  If you ask me, Simon could stand to find some solace. He could use a day of rest and peace, to reflect, be written into the Book of Life. If you can believe it, Gus said in the same manner he sniffed at the flowers in the gardens, I’ve been looking after your brother since he’s in diapers. Long enough to know exactly what kind of fronts he puts on. Simon’s not like Sam. He’s got all the makings of a good man. But there’s always some obstacle in his way, always some new affair twisting away at what lives in his heart. He doesn’t know how to slow down long enough to enjoy what he’s got. He thinks he’s like Sam, thinks he’s gotta make himself bigger than he is, that he’s gotta be larger than life generally allows, but … Gus humphed through his cavernous nostrils and let out a sigh that sounded like a small laugh, I’m getting too slow and old to keep up with the size of him. You, Joseph, you can teach him a thing or two about what it is to be a man. A human being. He unconsciously patted the barrels of his gun, and when he did, his stomach rumbled through the sedan’s interior.

  You’re hungry, Gus.

  Gus looked to his wide midsection with some amazement at the sound it produced. I’m hardly at risk of fading away.

  Never mind that. I’ll send Meralda out with some food.

  You shouldn’t trouble yourself.

  It’s no trouble at all. Bloom opened the car door and returned to the gate, where he met Roya, and the two of them walked back up the drive, and when he found Meralda, he told her where Gus was and what he was doing. She would gather together a picnic for him, she said, and carry it out when it was ready.

  * * *

  Every night after this night, Bloom noticed Meralda left the kitchen earlier than she normally would after dinner. When she didn’t return, he went out to check on her, and found her sitting in Gus’s company. A short duration of time the first week, longer the second week, and by the time the three weeks had lapsed, she sat with him well after Bloom had fallen asleep in his bed.

  * * *

  On the twenty-first day of his brother’s absence, Bloom stood in the company of his birds, his telescope pointed down the long stretch of road leading to the sea. He waited. And waited. And waited. And while he waited he searched for unique markings on each of his lovebirds, drew those with the most recognizable features into a book, and recorded their names. Three females he named Scheherazade, Desdemona, and Beatrice. Three males he named Bergerac, Roderick, and Candide. Did the ship skirt the coast of Tierra del Fuego? he asked Desdemona. Did it navigate the arctic waters around Cape Horn? he asked Candide. He returned to the telescope every few minutes to search the line that separated land from sea at the end of the port road, and a little before noon, a plume of dust no bigger than a granule of sand appeared at the edge of the basin, and at just half past noon he could see charging ahead of the burgeoning cloud the lead truck of the approaching convoy. As that truck grew larger in dimension within the telescope’s frame, the tower’s pavilion was overtaken by the same silence Bloom heard the day Simon arrived on Mount Terminus in his roadster. The calls and song sounding from the aviary silenced. The frenetic motion stilled. And a moment later, he heard echoing through the canyon pass below, a beehive of engines. He looked again into the viewfinder of his telescope to see what progress the trucks had made, and when he saw they remained some distance away from the start of the mountain road, he turned the aperture down onto the farthest turn visible to him, and there caught speeding in and out of frame three trucks whose beds were loaded with men. He turned to the next visible bend in the road and a few moments later they again moved in and out of his field of vision. And when they reached the final curve before the turnoff to the plateau, two of the trucks pulled over on either side of the pavement and one parked lengthwise across it. The beds of the trucks now emptied and Bloom could see step out into the sun no less than two dozen men, many of them dressed in overalls, every last one of them holding the barrels of a shotgun across his chest, some wore rifles slung across their backs, others holstered pistols on their waists. They congregated in small groups. Lit cigarettes. Smoked. Paced. Didn’t talk. These weren’t the faces of the conquistadors he knew so well from Salazar’s prints, but like them they wore an expression resembling a religious conviction. The squint eye and pursed lip of piety and righteous intent. There was something about the clarity of their bearing that began to fill Bloom with dread. It was the alignment of faith and duty—the absolute presence of a visible motive—that distressed him.

  He turned to Elijah and said, Some horrible thing is about to happen. To which Elijah responded, Open the door and we shall see. Bloom returned to the scope and watched on. The mob continued to pace without words shared between them, and then, some ten minutes later, the collective of birds again grew silent. Bloom searched the visible turns of the switchback and eventually saw a black sedan slowly making its way up the grade. Upon hearing the approaching vehicle, the rabble bunched together at the center of the road in a disorderly fashion, and when the sedan arrived, they surrounded it in such a way Bloom couldn’t see the face behind the windshield. He prayed it wasn’t Stern. Or Gus. Not even Gus was a match for this army of men. A man whose face was cast in shadow by the brim of a cowboy hat, presumably their leader, exchanged a few words with the driver, then a few words more, and in the next instant, this same man pulled open the car door and, the next thing Bloom knew, the driver—as if he had been swallowed by a mythic beast—disappeared into the scrum of bodies. Bloom watched the butts of shotguns and fists rise into the air, and then silent blows fell, one after the next. They silently pounded, and pounded, and, no doubt, they would have continued their assault had they not heard the rumble of trucks echo through the pass. Like Bloom’s birds, their frenzy calmed. They abandoned the body on the roadside, left it there, facedown, unmoving. And again, they waited in silence, this time, their guns raised, their hands shaking from the aftermath of the violence, with thoughts of the impending violence. Those farmers who were still
smoking flicked what remained of their cigarettes to the pavement and stood fixed when the lead truck rolled up before them and came to a stop.

  Bloom trained his telescope on the cab, and he was able to see through the glare of the glass, Gus behind the wheel, and beside him on the passenger seat, Simon, his eyes looking cold and hard at the sight of the men, at the body laid out on the road’s shoulder. Bloom’s brother casually extended his arm out the window, at which point the young Rosenbloom noticed Simon’s lips curl up one side of his face; a smirk transformed into a grin as he swung his arm down and smacked the side of the door several times. Hard enough, Bloom could hear the thud from this distance. The truck began to rock in such a way it looked as if it were about to lurch forward, and then up along its sides, a number of armed men appeared, each and every one of them pointing a shotgun in the direction of those men aiming shotguns at them.

  Simon allowed the tension to build for a few moments longer, allowed the men on the road to size one another up, before he stepped out onto the macadam in his gleaming white suit and tie, and when he did, Bloom watched his brother step up to the mob. He stared down as many of them in the eyes as he could. He then waited. The same man who pulled the driver from his car now stepped forward, and Simon, without a moment’s hesitation, matched his step. For a long time they said nothing to each other so far as Bloom could see. He could then see Simon’s lips move. Nothing else. Only his lips. His face, otherwise, was stone. He showed no fear. No concern for the menacing figures before him. He pointed to the man on the side of the road and then made a brief speech. Another heavy silence passed. And then the farmer had his say, during which time Simon didn’t so much as blink. He held his ground. And when the farmer had said his piece, he paused for a moment. Observed Simon’s determined indifference, then gestured with the brim of his hat to a man standing behind him. The man he had appointed for the job strolled over to the truck blocking the road, climbed into the cab, and cleared the way. Simon didn’t move. He stood in clear view of the farmer—in defiance of him—for what felt to Bloom like a very long time. He then turned his back on the mob and rejoined Gus in the truck. Two men lifted the beaten man from the roadside and sat him upright next to Simon, then remained on the road with their guns drawn until the convoy continued on its journey, and when it had, the farmers departed. They returned to their vehicles, started their engines, and motored away in the reverse order in which they had arrived. Bloom didn’t move. He could hardly breathe. He stood frozen until the road was clear, and when it was, when Simon’s men had continued their journey to the plateau on foot, he went to Elijah’s cage and said, Thank God.