by Steve Stern
Indifferent to the menace in their voices, Ruby said only, “I’m touched.” He had supposed they were keeping tabs on him, had even expected they might try interdicting him if he left the apartment, though he hadn’t thought they would wait till the last minute. Still he knew better than to believe he could simply waltz out of Naftali’s orbit scot-free. Nobody just walked away. For one thing, he knew too much about Naf the Sport’s organization to be allowed such an uncurbed liberty. Though assured as he was that one could never turn his back on the rackets, turn his back was precisely what Ruby did, as he began again to board the train. That was the cue for Naf’s senior cat’s-paws to haul out their heaters from the holstered concealment of their armpits. Almost simultaneously Yehezkel and Yigdal dredged their pockets to produce weapons of their own, waving Mausers that held the Browning semiautomatics in a stalemate of silent respect. In the ensuing standoff Ruby felt a twinge of fellowship, even gratitude toward his uncles for backing him up, a feeling that just as quickly dissipated. Then, allowing his cardigan to slip from his shoulders onto the concrete dock, Kid Karp was once again prey to eruptive reflexes. Seeing his nostrils flare and the vein throb at his temple, Shtrudel Louie and Turtletaub, who recognized the symptoms, lowered their pistols and took a step backward, then seeking the better part of valor turned about and reluctantly quit the field. Left to their own bewildered devices, Little Lhulki and the fledgling goons also fumbled for their sidearms, but Ruby was on them before they had a chance to draw. In his rage he began to feel a familiar rapture that was as short-lived as his gratitude had been; there was finally no pleasure in throttling his enemies, no pleasure to be had by any means, a realization that slowed his battling limbs not at all.
As they watched their nephew’s one-man juggernaut, the twins exchanged sidelong glances, Yigdal raising his left eyebrow in an approving gesture complemented by the raised right brow of his brother.
THE TRAIN WAS already in motion, the station bulls blowing their whistles as they charged down the platform toward the scuffle, and Ruby, disengaging himself from his flagging opponents, dove into the reefer car. He peeked out to see the hoodlums dispersing at a stumble in their several directions (the twins had already vanished), then slid closed the heavy boxcar door. If he’d been listening, as the train nosed under the Hudson and resurfaced in the industrial wasteland on the other side, Ruby might have heard what sounded like the belated echo of that slamming door—but was in fact the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Not that the noise would have meant much to Kid Karp, for whom the party was already over. Without checking to see if the door would open again from the inside, he had pulled on his dead papa’s sheep’s pelt and hunkered down with his back against the rotting casket. The dense air machines moaned as they circulated a polar draft tinged with the stink of ethyl chloride from the bunkers at either end of the car, while Ruby huddled in the pitch dark, shivering on the wood-sheathed floor. Already a numbness had begun to infect his extremities, a corollary to the numbness that gripped his brain. Never once during the journey was he tempted to get up and inspect the cargo the casket contained; neither did he relieve himself in the bucket his uncles had provided for that purpose behind a rack of cold pork shoulders and butts, so bound up were his insides with frost. His limbs became rigid, eyelids stuck at half-mast, ice riming the sparse stubble of his beard, and his lips were aniline blue. Transporting the rumor of a man trapped in a block of ice, he was himself becoming solid ice in the shape of a man.
The rhythm of the rails with its half-absorbed incantation—meshuguneh meshuguneh a shreklekeh zach—worked to seal Ruby’s trance, leaving him a passive witness to memories of the bones he’d broken, ladies degraded, gents humiliated on a whim in the backstreets and cellar clubs. He reviewed them like a succession of shades left over from another incarnation, one that had no bearing on the present rattling mortification of this life after life. He had no sense of the passage of time, of whether he was awake or dreaming; if he froze to death it would be an anticlimax, and insofar as he could think at all, Ruby thought he might remove his papa’s parka to help facilitate that end. But that would be letting himself off too easily, and besides he wasn’t sure he could lift his arms.
Lynchburg, Virginia, was the train’s terminus. When the roustabouts opened his boxcar to unload it, what they saw held them as stockstill as the apparition within. Eventually someone sent for the plug-chewing foreman, who had Ruby carried into the station office to determine his degree of vitality. There they perched him on a potbellied stove and began to unfold his stiff limbs as if coaxing parts of a rusted machine into operation. They cranked his jaw like a pump until words spilled out, a mumbling that promised them compensation for assisting in the transfer of his lading to a westbound freight. But along with the thawing of his joints came the helpless release of his bladder and bowels. “Boy done messed his britches,” declared the foreman, as the yard hands fled the office in disgust, though some returned to accept their gratuities from the hands of the sullied passenger. Then they fetched Ruby’s duffel and, while he cleaned himself up, conveyed the rabbi on a handcar via an intricate spaghetti junction from the Union Pacific to the Sequatchie Valley Line. A day later at the freight-yard in Knoxville the procedure was more or less repeated, the casket transferred this time to a brine-tank reefer of the Tennessee Railroad, bound for Memphis in the far southwestern corner of the state.
It was early evening when the train pulled into the yard on the edge of the river bluff. Still poker stiff in his movements, Ruby nevertheless oversaw the removal of the tzaddik’s box from the railcar to a nearby baggage wagon. It was a balmy, overcast twilight, and branched lightning above the depot and the river below it made the dome of the sky look as if he were viewing it from the inside of a hatching egg. In the prestorm atmosphere the air tasted of mercury, and the fragrance of honeysuckle overwhelmed the odor of cinders and engine grease, further narcotizing Ruby’s muddy brain. As a consequence he was only half aware of a passing porter, the man leaning at an impossible angle into a hand trolley laden with lumber stacked higher than his head. Blind to the path in front of him, the porter nudged the wagon with his overloaded trolley, dislodging the wooden chock wedged beneath a rear wheel. Unhobbled, the wagon began to roll slowly backward over the gravel embankment and onto the cobbled levee, its burden bouncing about the boards of the flat bed as the vehicle started to pick up speed. Ruby watched with only moderate interest as the runaway wagon careered toward the bottom of the slope, splashing into the river in a geyser that promptly subsided along with the vehicle’s forward momentum. The casket, however, was further propelled into the water, where its decayed cedar planks splintered on impact. The zinc lining floated free a few seconds like a wallowing washtub, then abruptly capsized and sank, but after the length of an inheld breath its frozen contents bobbed to the surface and continued to drift out upon the turbid Mississippi.
At that point Ruby was shaken from his stupor. His limbs were still so rigid that he felt as if he were confined to a suit of armor, but as he lurched down the hill the gauntlets and greaves began to fall from his body. By the time he’d descended half the incline he was sprinting with the alacrity he’d always relied on. At the foot of the bluff he leaped into the mile-wide river, invigorated by the shock of cold water, and began splashing toward the escaping hunk of ice. Here it dawned on him that he didn’t know how to swim, despite which he managed to stay provisionally afloat, thrashing and sputtering after the ice that the braided current carried farther beyond his grasp. Coughing up a throatful of water, he churned his arms and feet in another desperate effort to reach his frozen consignment. This time he was able to get a tenuous grip on the slick-sided berg, only to have it slip away again, leaving him to sink below the surface of the river. He felt the weight of his clothes dragging him down, the tar-black water closing over him, but just as he’d resigned himself to drowning, the current buoyed him back up from the depths, bearing him into a whirlpool where the stalled block of
ice had begun to spin like a compass dial. There Ruby made to grab hold of it once again, wrestling the slippery mass as it rolled and turned turtle, clutching it in a bear hug as it spun out of the maelstrom and continued to sail downstream. A flash of lightning illuminated the bridge, the retired paddlewheelers moored to the Arkansas shore, and the supine old man in his crystal coffin whom Ruby had never quite believed in till now. There was a rending sound as if the Almighty had split his pants, another flash that sewed the water with silver, and Ruby saw that he and the rabbi were not alone in the stream. They were escorted by an armada of ice rafts released from the tail end of winter in the northern states on their way to dissolve in the Gulf of Mexico. Then a thunderclap and the sky cracked open, the deluge began, and both the youth and the old man he was riding were captured in a casting net tossed from a dinghy by a pair of colored kids.
2001.
Because the video rental store where Lou Ella worked featured only films adapted from Broadway musicals (the owner was an eccentric with a private income), there was a very limited clientele. As a result, Lou had a lot of time for reading. Lately, despite the dismay the book had caused Bernie, she kept returning to the less didactic chapters of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr’s autobiography, The Ice Sage. She especially enjoyed the sections describing the rebbe’s serial adventures before he was born as himself. For the infant Eliezer, a prodigy in the womb, had managed to elude the Angel of Forgetfulness, the one responsible for tweaking you under the nose at birth. This is the touch that causes an infant to forget its past lives and any interim time spent in Paradise. By curling his upper lip monkey-fashion over his philtrum as he was yanked from between his mother’s legs, the newborn was able to deflect the angel’s retrograde flick, thereby leaving him with a taste of heaven on his lips all his days. Consequently he remembered the entire genealogy of his previous soul migrations, his gilgulim. He recalled his humble beginnings as a locust that had participated in the ten plagues of Egypt, as a flea in the ear of the Prophet Habakkuk, a bat in the cave wherein Simeon bar Yohai spent thirteen years translating the natural world into holy writ. In his most ignominious embodiment Eliezer was a cat a Cossack hetman had sewn into the belly of a pregnant Jewess whose fetus had been excised. Thanks to an amulet blessed by a lamed vovnik, however, the woman survived and the cat was born as a human child, a pious daughter who eventually married and bore a litter of seven children, all given to burying their feces in sand. There were other human incarnations the rabbi recounted on the way to narrating his own, such as his birth to a poor Jew and his wife in the Transylvanian Alps. The baby was snatched from his cradle by an eagle and dropped over an Arabian desert where he landed in the common kettle of a Bedouin tribe who raised him as their own. But a nameless itch spurred him to wander through several countries, faiths, and lives until his soul was born again into the family of Zephyr Threefoot, a charcoal burner in the Polish village of Boibicz. There the eloi, the prodigy, was from childhood a prey to spontaneous ecstasies. He had always to check clocks to keep himself anchored in time, to wear spectacles in order to see individual persons and objects, since without them he saw everything in its cosmic unity. As a toddler he had on his own initiative slathered pages of Torah with honey and gobbled them up, so that by the time he was old enough for cheder he could regurgitate the entire Pentateuch.
“In those days you could say that me and God were thick as thieves,” the rebbe had written (via the medium of Sanford Grusom’s no-nonsense prose). “Together we performed your standard miracles and exorcisms; we healed lepers, vanquished werewolves, shooed away demons from circumcisions, staged mixers to introduce souls without bodies to bodies without souls—that sort of thing. And always I remained, as they say, a hand’s breadth above the earth.…” Then after a long and auspicious career that had drawn to him a circle of devoted followers, Rabbi ben Zephyr was at his prayers in his customary spot beside Baron Jagiello’s horse pond when a sudden storm came up.
The rebbe made it clear in his memoirs that he had little patience with the yokels who’d carted him about in a casket like a vampire for over a hundred years—since all they’d had to do was melt the ice (and maybe rattle a grager in his ear) to bring him out of his trance. Still, he allowed that his lengthy dormition had been a kind of blessing because he’d reawakened to the world with renewed fervor. In his second coming he felt he had a mandate not so much to lift up lost souls as to restore them to their rightful place on earth. Of course he offered the conventional transcendence to seekers, but only as a preliminary relief, after which they would be better equipped to take advantage of the material world. This was the point where the argument became a bit fuzzy for Lou, twirling a coil of viridian hair around a thrice-pierced ear. She was unsure how the rebbe’s ministry had swerved from the traditional theme of redemption through spiritual discipline to a passionate embrace of the free-market economy—never mind a strain of self-interest the girl had not encountered since she’d first read Ayn Rand. Nevertheless she was a pushover for a good hagiography, especially one written about himself by a living saint.
Which isn’t to suggest that Lou had any inclination to visit his House of Enlightenment. Having a boyfriend with his own saintly proclivities was handful enough for her, thank you very much. Moreover, she was greatly concerned about Bernie these days and felt in large part to blame for his current condition. True, she’d been frustrated at his inability to take her beyond herself, but having used what charms she had at her disposal to reel him back to earth, she now wondered if her efforts might have backfired. Lately he seemed to dwell in a kind of perpetual ekstasis-interruptus—a phrase of her own pleased coinage. Tiresomely he expressed his gratitude for what he regarded as her well-intentioned efforts at seduction, insisting that, had she not drawn him back, he might have crossed over for good. Such a woman was worth more than rubies, he assured her, prompting a dry response from Lou Ella to “that old saw.”
“I guess,” she chided him, not without malice, one evening beneath the Harahan Bridge as they sat watching a late-summer sunset, “I guess you got to be an inept before you can be an adept.” Then she was rendered speechless when Bernie suddenly thrust aside his grandfather’s journal and shouted, “Marry me!” The plea was accompanied by the ticktock of the wipers that he’d accidentally switched on in his attempt to fall to his knees on the floorboard. Wedged awkwardly between the dash and Sue Lily, whom Lou had been bouncing on her lap, he further promised that if she wasn’t ready he would remain in a state of self-imposed groundedness until she was.
Lou closed the jaw of the mouth-breathing baby sister, who seemed not to be growing any older, and returned her to the backseat. “And that’s what passes for being faithful in your pea-brain?” she replied, having finally found her tongue. “Ooie gevalt, I’m faithful by default,” she mocked him, never able to resist a dig at the subject of his chastity. But while she was realist enough to know that a wedding was not in the cards, she nevertheless allowed herself to picture it: the gaunt groom in a tophat like Mottl the Tailor from Fiddler on the Roof (she’d become well acquainted with the video store’s musical archive), the bride in what?—maybe Sally Bowles’s merry widow, fishnet stockings enmeshing the dolphin tattoo on her thigh. The two of them standing beneath an ocelot chupeh with their feet “a hand’s breadth above the earth.” Impatient with herself for succumbing to fantasy, she snarled, “Get up, dude,” and when he had she added almost tenderly, “Bernie Karp, you’re a visitor from outer space, and some day…” She failed to finish the thought.
While she liked to think of herself as a girl of broad experience, Lou sometimes felt that with this strange boy she was in over her head. “I s’pose you think your mad affection for me is flattering,” she said. “It makes me feel like some temptress and all, like I’m Sa-lou -mé.” Lingering accusatorily over the middle syllable.
“Doesn’t it?” Bernie asked artlessly.
She gazed at the mare’s nest of his hair, his increasingly cadaverous bod
y, which he inhabited with ever more authority. “Well,… yeah,” admitted Lou, touching his hollow cheek before giving it a peremptory slap.
Having summoned him as a witness to the quotidian, she fretted over what she had done. Because the more closely he examined life on earth, the more besotted he seemed to become with it, while the more urgently in need of redemption he found it to be—in light of which his newly hatched desire to save some corner of creation seemed all the more futile and picayune. Thus were his emotions dangerously mixed. Meanwhile in the present climate of global mayhem, what with the blood of foreign wars lapping at the nation’s doorstep, it was practically a crime to be in love. Children informed on their parents, parents feared their children, and antichrists were detected in all walks of life. Bernie’s own rebbe, risen like gangbusters from his protracted slumber, was himself in peril of being apprehended for a felon. Recent newspaper editorials tried to link the Prodigy and his followers to subversive activities, even insinuating that the House of Enlightenment was a terrorist cell. This despite a philosophy that seemed to the girl to have less in common with Osama bin Laden than with Norman Vincent Peale. But it troubled her to see Bernie so obviously distraught: Whether or not he had the makings of a saint remained in question, but she didn’t think he was hero material, and heroic measures were what she figured it would take to save Rabbi ben Zephyr. Her only solace was that they still had some chapters ahead of them before finishing Grandpa Ruby’s journal, and she thought she could keep the boy from doing anything stupid until they got to the end. Lou wanted never to get to the end.
