by Steve Stern
The rabbi extended the thoughtful blister of his lower lip. “Maybe I rubbed him in,” he submitted. “To his neshomeh I gave it the liberty to take up a new what you call it… a crib?”
Crib? She hesitated. “What was wrong with his old one?”
“It was stuck tsvishn tsvay veltn—between this side and the other. So I set him aloose.”
“Don’t give me that bull,” spat Lou, “I’m tired of all that hoodoo horse-shit. It’s as phony comin’ from you as it was from him.” Though she wondered at that moment which “him” she referred to. “There ain’t no world but this one and it’s already half in the crapper.”
“He was too much in it, the world,” said the rabbi.
“He wadn’t in it enough,” declared Lou.
The old man let go a sigh like a groan with wings. “That too,” he lamented, winking a watery eye, “that too.”
Anger roiled in the girl, who saw herself in a scene from one of those noir flicks she watched at the video store, one in which Madeleine Carroll as the murder victim’s moll removes a weapon from her purse to get even with his killer. But Lou’s purse held only her makeup, some Goo Goo Clusters for Sue Lily, and a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and besides she had no wish to hurt him anymore. On the contrary, once her anger had fizzled she found that she was strangely relaxed in the killer’s company, enjoying a tranquillity she told herself it was unforgiveable to succumb to. But the clamorous room no longer rattled her nerves; she might have been alone with him in, say, a parlor or the backseat of her mama’s Malibu.
Just then there was a disturbance at one of the other tables. The administrative officer had bolted from the dais to back up a couple of guards who’d confronted a standing prisoner and his female visitor. The two of them were protesting their innocence—the con combative, his companion fussing with her beehive even as she shouted poisonous oaths—while a guard claimed that the photos in the album they’d been poring over were backed with pressed sheets of crystal meth. When the officer made to confiscate the album, the prisoner—ropy biceps, teardrop tats in the corner of an eye—tore out one of the pictures and stuffed it into his mouth, which brought down the wrath of the provoked COs. Voices were raised, batons deployed, canisters of irritant dust sprayed in a scuffle that commanded the attention of the entire room. Lou herself had turned toward the fracas, only to have her attention recalled to the table that the rabbi had abruptly shoved from between them. Then, with an audible crackling of joints or crinoline, he lifted the girl onto his lap. Why didn’t she fight him? This was degrading, no? It was wrong in every category known to man: for there she sat in full view of the room astride the geezer’s knobbly knees with her back against his whistling chest, feeling a sizeable lump in his pants. Buttons were sprung and the lump released, which nuzzled her rump beneath her flounced skirt like a small animal seeking shelter, which Lou felt curiously anxious to accommodate. It occurred to her that she had primped for this occasion—for this “rape,” was it? The word hardly applied, though her underpants were pulled aside and her womb straight-upon filled, while the old perv gummed her earlobe whispering, “The Lord sm-m-mite thee, sweet m-maidl, with m-m-m-madness and astonishmum of heart.”
“Awrat,” Lou heard herself admit, “I’m sm-m-mitten,” cracking up over the delirium of her willing surrender as the two of them took flight.
With eyes closed Lou Ella saw everything through her organs and pores, each facet of her anatomy featuring at least five senses. What they observed, once her lover had irrigated her insides with his luminous seed, were the toppled walls of the prison, the mountains and the pillowy clouds above them, the harum-scarum rooftops of the shtetls of Paradise. She heard from a playpen somewhere back on earth the warbling of her baby sister in the tongue of nightingales, whose language Lou understood perfectly.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my agent, Liz Darhansoff, for her steadfastness; my editor, Chuck Adams, for his integrity; and the people at Algonquin for their good faith. I would also like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their generous support.
