Corky's Brother (21 page)

Izzie brushed himself off and looked up at Mr. Gleicher.

“What—what was that—?” Mr. Gleicher said, turning to Elijah.

Elijah backed away now. “Hey, Shorty,” he said to Izzie. “I'll give you your glove later—by the subway stop. This guy's out of it—”

Mr. Gleicher looked down as if he had just woken up and was wondering how Izzie had gotten there. He looked at his hands, then back at Izzie. “Come here,” he commanded Elijah. Elijah looked away. “I said to come here!” he repeated, raising his voice, and Elijah shrugged and came toward him obediently, hanging his head. “What you want, man—?” he asked, but there was little defiance in his voice.

Izzie rose from the ground and took a step toward our group of guys, but Mr. Gleicher whirled on him, grabbed him by the arm, right on the muscle, and pulled him to his side. “You apologize to this boy,” he said to Izzie. He put his arm around Elijah's shoulder, very gently, and bent down and whispered in his ear. Elijah whispered something back, and he stayed at Mr. Gleicher's side, sort of leaning against him. “You apologize to Elijah,” he said to Izzie.

“What for?” Izzie said, and Mr. Gleicher squeezed his arm so hard that he howled.

“Apologize for what you called him. I won't have it!”

“Okay. I'm sorry, I guess—”

“He has a name,” Mr. Gleicher said.

“I'm sorry,
Elijah,”
Izzie said, and Mr. Gleicher let go of him. He stayed next to Elijah, though. It was really strange, the two of them next to each other, Mr. Gleicher running his hand over Elijah's head, and Elijah looking smaller than ever.

“Where do you live?” Mr. Gleicher asked Elijah.

“With my father,” Elijah said, but he didn't look up.

“And where is that?”

Elijah shrugged. “Away from around here. You don't know.”

“Don't be afraid,” Mr. Gleicher said. “We are all your friends—isn't that right, boys?”

We mumbled that it was, and then Mr. Gleicher began going into this long lecture to us about brotherhood and prejudice. It was crazy—you never would have expected it from him, it was the kind of speech the rabbi might have made, only less stern—and the longer he went on, the more Elijah smiled out at all of us from under his arm. A few times some of us started to interrupt him to tell him we didn't dislike Elijah at all—but I think we all knew it was useless to try to explain. “I didn't mean anything,” Izzie blurted out once. “I just wanted to catch him—” But Mr. Gleicher ignored him and went on about how as Jewish boys we had a special responsibility to befriend those others of the world who had suffered as the Jewish people had. I don't think anybody had ever heard him talk so much. And just when we thought he'd finished and was going to let us go, he reached into his pocket and took a photograph from his wallet. He looked at the picture for a while and it seemed to change his mood, to soften his features.

“Sit down, boys. Sit down. I want to tell you a story.” There were about twenty or thirty of us altogether, not counting the girls, and Mr. Gleicher sat down in the middle of us, suit and all, Elijah sitting cross-legged by his side, still leaning against him, and he passed the photograph around. It was a picture of an old-looking Negro man in an Arab-style costume, with scar marks on his face like you used to find of Africans in the
National Geographic
. “This story was not in the
World Over,”
he began, and then, as we sat there in absolute silence, for a good half hour he told us how two days after he had had his knee blasted and had been left for dead on the desert with all the other men in his unit killed, he had been rescued by a group of wandering black men. I forget what he called them—some tribe of nomads. At any rate, the important part of the story was that these black men had hidden him and nursed him back to health, transporting him across Israel with them, even though they were risking their lives whenever Egyptian or Syrian or Arab patrols came to check their camp. Mr. Gleicher went on about how the chief of these wandering black men was one of the wisest men he'd ever met—like a rabbi from the time of the Temple, he said—but the parts we were most interested in, of course, had to do with the adventures and the close calls he'd had while being taken across the country to Jerusalem. Then, when he'd finished, he made each of us go up to Elijah and shake his hand. The thing I remember most was the strange look on Mr. Gleicher's face, and the gentle way he kept running his hand over Elijah's head, with his eyes shining the way they did in the
World Over
picture when he was wearing his Haganah uniform. And I remember thinking, because of the way he treated Elijah, that it would be nice if he married again and had kids of his own—maybe with a Hebrew school teacher like Miss Berg, who taught us music on Sundays.

“Hey, listen,” Elijah said to Mr. Gleicher when we'd all finished shaking his hand. For a second, from the way he was eyeing Mr. Gleicher, I got scared he was going to ask him if he wanted to order anything. But he didn't. “I got a question for you,” he said. “How come you practicing running with all these Jew kids—?”

Mr. Gleicher smiled and told Elijah it was for Field Day—and then he started to explain why we celebrated Lag B'Omer the way we did, with races and dances. At first all of us sighed and got ready for the religious stuff we expected to hear—but instead Mr. Gleicher began to talk about the way the Jews had fought against the Roman armies eighteen hundred years ago, and about how, as in the Arab War, even though they'd been outnumbered ten to one, they had been victorious. He mentioned Rabbi Akiba also, and the ending of the plague that Lag B'Omer commemorated, but mostly he spoke about the army of Jewish rebels led by Bar Kochba—the hero the trophy was named after. He told us how Bar Kochba lived in the hills, with bands of raiders made up not only of Jews, but of volunteers and outcasts and outlaws of all kinds—maybe even black people, he told Elijah. He described how, striking mostly at night, using bows and arrows and homemade weapons, Bar Kochba had conquered village after village, town after town, until the rebels had retaken the holy city of Jerusalem from the great Roman army—he made Bar Kochba seem like some kind of Jewish Jesse James or Robin Hood. I don't think there was a single one of us who walked home that afternoon not feeling good about being Jewish—and not feeling that having to go to Hebrew school wouldn't have been half bad if there were more holidays like Lag B'Omer and more Jewish heroes to study like Bar Kochba.

Elijah walked along with our group of guys, talking about Mr. Gleicher. “That guy's got cool stories,” he said. “He's okay.” When we got to the subway stop, he gave Izzie the glove and Izzie gave him the two dollars. Then he asked us what else we were going to buy. “You want some of them Jewish stars to hang around your neck?” he asked. “Or some official Major League baseballs? How Tjout a wallet for your fathers?” We were feeling good and a few of us ordered things from him. He seemed to like it more if you bargained with him—I remember I was able to get him down from sixty cents to a quarter for a baseball—and when we were done and he'd put his pad away, he gave each of us a ballpoint pen, free. “That's for good will,” he explained, “cause you guys are my good customers.” He giggled. “—Even if you do try to Jew me down.” He left then, waving to us. “I see you guys tomorrow. I have the goods.”

Elijah showed up for practice the next day, loaded down with the stuff we'd ordered, and he showed up the day after that, too. In fact, for the next two weeks, he was there every afternoon, running in front of us, saying the same thing, again and again: “C'mon, Jewboys—catch me, mothers—” And the more we tried to catch him, the more he'd laugh.

“You Jewboys are getting faster, though,” he said at the end of the first week, while he walked us home. “Must be those rings I been selling you.”

“I don't know if it's the rings, or what,” Louie said. “All I know is, since you started running with us we've cut our relay time by twelve seconds. If we can cut it down another eight or nine, we might still have a chance on Field Day.”

“If you give me some money, I come to that race next week, run in front of you,” Elijah said. “If it make you run faster, I call you worst things than Jewboy. I know some good words for Jews.”

“We'll see,” Izzie said, but from the way he was looking at Elijah, I could tell he was beginning to think about something else, cooking up one of his wild ideas. “We gonna see you at the movies tomorrow afternoon?”

“Sure,” Elijah said. “I promise you, didn't I? I keep my word, you can count on that.” He put his arm around Izzie's shoulder. “You guys my friends, like Mr. Gleicher says. Since you buying stuff from me, my old man treat me good.”

“What's your old man do?” Louie asked.

Elijah smiled and looked straight at Louie. “Okay. So long as we been friends a while now, I can tell you.” He paused, and then told us, real proud. “He's a man of the Lord!” He shook his head up and down and puffed out his chest. “He's a minister of the church, the Lord spoken to him direct. Everybody in our neighborhood scared of him—he make you scared blue if you meet him.”

“A black rabbi!” Izzie exclaimed, and when we laughed—thinking of our own rabbi, I guess—Elijah laughed too.

“That's pretty good,” he said. “We got a real black rabbi, though, lives a few blocks away. My old man hates him, says the Lord gonna strike him down. All his congregation too. Old nigger men, reading Jew newspapers—”

Izzie's eyes lit up, and he began asking Elijah about the black Jews. It was true, Elijah swore—you could ask Mr. Gleicher. In fact, he said, Mr. Gleicher had been talking to him about the black Jews two afternoons ago, when they'd taken their walk. Every afternoon that week, while we went through our exercises, Mr. Gleicher had taken a walk with Elijah down to the end of the Parade Grounds, where the good ballfields were, the ones that were fenced in all around, and had grandstands. Elijah swore to us that Mr. Gleicher knew about the black rabbi who lived near him—and had asked him all about the black Jews of the Tompkins Park synagogue.

“My old man,” Elijah said, “he got nine wives, too. I told Mr. Gleicher all about them. I come from the first one, though—so I gonna be head of the church when he dies.” He suddenly stopped and looked around. “You guys wanna hear me talk in tongue?”

“Do what—?” I asked.

“You never heard nobody talk in tongue?” he asked, and when we all said we hadn't, he seemed surprised. “I tell you what, I do it the first time for you, I don't charge you nothing. Then if you like it, we make up a price for after.”

“Okay,” Izzie said, and we stood around Elijah in a circle. “Talk in tongue.”

“Can't do it here,” he said. We were on Bedford Avenue, near Lenox Road. “Too many people around.”

“Nobody's home at my house—” I offered.

When the guys piled into my living room a few minutes later I got out some milk, and the candy from my mother's breakfront, and then Elijah told us to sit down around him and that we could help him by repeating what he said sometimes, or clapping our hands. He said he wasn't sure he could do it without his father's presence but that he would try—and then he started in. At first he just said some crazy sayings about Jesus Christ and the blood of the lamb and about the Lord coming into him. None of us was brave enough to repeat the stuff about Christ—not in my living room, anyway—but I remember clapping and saying things like “Come into my heart, Lord!” and “Fill my spirit with the love of everlasting,” and short things like “Oh yes, Lord!” and “Hallelujah!” We were enjoying it, clapping and watching and repeating what Elijah said—and then he suddenly seemed to go crazy, jerking his body every which way, moaning like a wild man, and shaking his head back and forth as if it were attached to a pneumatic drill. He didn't need our clapping after that. The only thing he needed was our hands. He went around to each of us, falling on his knees, taking our hands and making us press them into his forehead and his eye sockets. After a while he started rolling around on the floor, saying he was seeing God, and God was working in him, driving out the devil—but now he was talking a lot about his father, too, and the money he was bringing home for the Lord, and I kept glancing at the door, praying that my mother wouldn't suddenly show up.

The more frantic he got, the quieter we got. After he'd stood up and shouted, with just the whites showing in his eyes, he suddenly seemed to go completely berserk, spouting stuff in a language none of us could understand, never seeming to take a breath. Then he shrieked and fell to the floor, rolled over once, and lay there. I was sure he was dead.

We sat on the edges of our seats, staring. “Holy mackerel!” Izzie said. Elijah lay perfectly still, his arms stretched to either side, his head on his shoulder, one foot crossed over the other. His chest didn't move and we were petrified, not knowing what to do. “I—I think he stopped breathing,” I said. Louie suggested we put a mirror under his nose, to see if he was alive, but none of us moved to get one.

Then Elijah sat up. “That's speaking in tongue,” he said, smiling. He really gave me the chills when he sat up, I remember—worse than in a horror movie, when a dead person suddenly comes to fife from a coffin. “How you like it?”

“Are you okay—?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “You Jews never see any of that stuff, huh?” He took a piece of chocolate from the dish on the coffee table and popped it into his mouth. “I do better than that in the church—my old man says I'm the best he ever seen for a boy my age. How you like it, huh?”

We all sort of nodded that we liked it, but it was as if we were in a daze. “I tell you what—you get some more guys to come up to one of your houses, pay a dime each, I put on another show for you guys for nothing. Okay?” He ate another piece of chocolate. “Man, I get hungry after speaking in tongue. Mouth dry, too. You got some soda?” he asked me. I went into the kitchen and brought him a bottle of Seven-Up. “Anyway, this was nothing,” he went on. “You get ten or fifteen guys, I really go good. This just coming attractions.” He handed me back the bottle. “I got to go now, before your folks come home. They won't like me here—that's for sure. I see you guys tomorrow. Twelve-thirty, in front of the Flatbush Theater.”