Authors: Stanley Elkin
Or, like flying directly into his beard.
“Well,” I said, “bright enough for you?” And winced, frightened by my pointless nerve.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “you start to look forward, you really do. Gone so long, in all that cold and dark, wearing the same mittens and snowshoes weeks on end, you forget what it’s like. Civilization. The comforts and mod cons. And begin to believe God’s all there is, and that all He ever made was weather, conditions to test your mettle, ice to suffer by and humiliate your character. But now spring’s come and I remember all I’ve been missing—the amenities that make all the difference. Sterno, for example, simmering beneath good old-fashioned home cooking.”
Philip confessed he was a news junkie himself, and told us that in
his
position, Bloombeard’s, it was current events he’d have missed most, and that though he hadn’t mentioned it while we were still technically crash victims, when 10:00 P.M. rolled around and the Eyewitness News came on TV, he couldn’t help but wonder who had been raped, who had been murdered, whose house had burned down, who had been lost in natural disasters. He took some comfort, he said, from the fact that when we were out of radio contact with civilization, and he couldn’t get the engine to turn over, we were something of a current event ourselves.
“Oh, current events,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers dismissively. “The Four famous Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Mr. War, Mr. Famine, Messieurs Pestilence and Death. I’ve never been much connected with novelty myself.”
Oh? I thought. Look me in the beard and say that. “But, Tzadik,” I said instead in the rabbi mode, “isn’t it important, particularly in these times of tribulation between ourselves and our Arab cousins in the Holy Land, in Eretz Yisro’el, for us to be informed and keep abreast of the developments? To search for peace? To seek, I mean, some equitable solution to our problems?”
He looked at me for a long while before he answered.
“You’re one of these ‘root causes of terrorism’ guys, ain’t you?” he said.
“Well …” I said.
“No,” he said, “I can see it. You are.”
To tell you the truth, I
was
a little troubled by some things the Israelis had been doing. The world was a complicated place. There were no open-and-shut cases. There was enough guilt to go around. Of course it was outrageous that the Syrians took pot shots at us from their vantage point on the Golan Heights, or that the PLO could lob shells into the kibbutzim along our northern borders wounding and killing our children, or that they planted bombs in buses and on supermarket shelves in boxes of detergent or mixed in with the oranges in the produce department. Certainly it was wrong to hijack airplanes and harm innocent civilians. But they had their grievances. There was no denying it. The Israelis were on the West Bank now, laying foundations, making it over, turning it into the new Miami. And the camps! For generations now the Palestinians had been crammed into rat-infested quarters open to the sky, forced to live out in the weather like a city for Lears. How different were these “camps” with their running sewers from the favellas of the hopelessly impoverished or even from the ghettos of our own people?
“Yes,” he said. “I can see it all over you. You want to be fair.”
“Well, it’s their homeland, too. And, strictly speaking, they were there first, you know.”
“Fuck them,” he said.
“Please, Tzadik,” I said, “this is not an argument.”
“And finders/keepers
is?
Let me tell you something, kiddo. There are higher principles than finders and keepers.”
“Hey,” said Philip, “I think I’m getting a Fairbanks AM station.”
“Because you don’t kill someone over finders/keepers. A homeland? A homeland they want? What,” he said, “they’re imprinted to deserts, allergic to ice? Let them live on the glaciers. Let them have a go at making the icebergs bloom.”
This was some rebbe we had here. Suddenly I was telling him all about myself, what I did in New Jersey.
“A rabbi is not a thoracic surgeon,” I said. “He is not a proctologist or an ob-gyn man. He doesn’t set your bones or flush out your ears. But all I do is say prayers over dead strangers. Tell me, Khokhem, is it right for me to specialize like that?”
“No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. It doesn’t make a difference if they’re strangers. Or that you don’t feel a genuine anguish for their loved ones. Grief is only a form, a kind of a courtesy. It’s something we have to do. It’s a sacrament. Not like sitting shiva or saying Kaddish or putting pennies on their eyes. Just grief. Grief itself. If you’re properly shocked when you hear bad news. If you’ve got”—he waved his arms about at the invisible mountains of ice beneath and all around us—“sand.”
And then, while Philip tapped his toes to the music coming in on his headphones from the Fairbanks radio station, Flowerface launched into the wisdoms. He told us how God did
too
create evil. “And you know something?” he said. “It’s a good thing He did.”
“It is?” I asked, surprised.
“Sure,” he said, “it shapes our taste.”
I lifted a headphone away from Philip’s head, bobbing to the rhythms of Fairbanks radio. “What?” he said.
“Cut out the dreaming and listen to him. This ain’t no sock hop. He’s telling us worthwhile stuff. Go on, please, Macher.”
He looked hurt, Philip. I regretted what I’d said and fumbled with his earpiece, trying to replace it, when Petalpuss stayed my hand and began to draw it toward his beard, guiding it into that luxuriant garden. “Be careful,” he whispered, “of the thorns and thistles.” I jerked my hand away as if it had been scalded. (Though I swear he let go first, his reflexes beating my reflexes.) Then he turned to Philip and apologized for me. “It’s not what you think. He’s a rabbi and has faith in lessons, the vicariousness of the heart’s bright ideas. Incidentally, what was that song you were listening to just now?” Philip told him and he nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “Sometimes, when the weather let up and it got warm enough to whistle, I’d whistle that one myself.”
“Really?” Philip said.
“Oh, yes,” said the man with the flowers in his beard. “It’s a very catchy tune. It perks a man up who’s been praying while the midnight sun goes down if there’s a cheery tune to turn to.”
“Really?”
“I just said so,” he said. “But I have to tell you, it doesn’t let you off the hook that we share the same taste in music. That’s coincidence, not character, and don’t redound to anyone’s credit. Jerry was right finally to pull the headphone off your head. I’m only sorry he didn’t catch your ear in his fist.”
“Oh,” I said, “no. I only meant …”
“You did your duty. It don’t make no difference what you meant.”
“He’s right,” said Philip.
“He is,” I agreed. I turned back to the man with the flowers in his beard. “What else?” I asked him. Because, though I still had no idea where we were—Philip, when he’d discovered our coordinates, had passed them on to us but they hadn’t meant anything—I didn’t care. It was
all
wisdom now—how he’d spoken to Philip, to me, what he’d been saying. I knew there was plenty more where that came from and never wanted the ride to be over. Why, I was like a kid, staring out the window of a Pullman car berth, lulled by the mysterious geography of the night, seduced by the steel percussion of tons.
He spoke to us, instructed us, taught us, even Philip into it now, rapt, engaged as someone counting. Old Posypuss (because I didn’t know his name, because he never said it, because I never asked) wising us up, even in English his voice cadenced as an uncle’s aliyahs, like broches lilted as lullabies. One time he paused to ask if either of us had a cigarette we could spare and it seemed so out of character I questioned whether I’d heard him correctly.
“You smoke, Khokhem?”
“I butter my bread.”
“Beg pardon, Tzadik?”
“What, I’m going to be killed by an omelet? French toast? A Carlton, a Vantage, a Lucky, a Now? They want me that bad, let the pikers come get me.”
“Beautiful,” I told him.
“Ah,” said Philip.
“Sure,” said the man with the flower-strewn beard, “a parable in every box. Philip, please,” he said. “Watch the road. Look where you’re going.”
We landed at Prospect Creek camp by the Jim River, thirty or so miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was full daylight and Philip took me over to Personnel, where I was photographed and issued an identification tag while he filled out Emergency Landing and Distress forms required by the company if he was to claim Distress and Hazard reimbursement, and which I, as his passenger, had to witness and sign.
“Hey,” the clerk explained, “it’s red tape but we have to have it. Otherwise these clowns would crash-land in just any old snowbank and loll around in the midnight sun building the old D-and-H to the tune of five bucks a day till their rations was gone and they
had
to lift off again.”
“Five dollars a day? Why would anyone do something like that for just five dollars a day?”
“Hey,” said the clerk, “you kidding me, Padre? Because it’s an
angle.
Because it’s another angle, and life up here is lived as if it was ge-fucking-ometry.”
The clerk turned out to be right in a way, but missed the real point, I think. (This isn’t my rabbi mode now—I had, when I was in Alaska, little occasion, as you will see, to fall back upon my rabbi mode—so much as my apocalyptic one.—Ice. The world will not end in fire—you can
see
fire; darkness was the mode here—but in ice.) Which wasn’t angles, not entirely angles anyway, so much as a sense the men—we—shared of being stuck along some infinite loop, embraced in the stifling bear hug of a closed system. What that clerk called angles were only the sharpish edges with which they meant to nick the system, to let a little light bleed through. If they often seemed frantic as children, on liquor, on pot, if they engaged, on days off or at times when it was impossible to work, in endless tournaments of round-robin poker, gambling for table stakes higher than any ever seen in Vegas or my beloved New Jersey, it was because they—we—were so caught up in our terrible doomsday cynicism. The impressions I’d had in Anchorage, of wartime, of gridlock, of the sky’s-the-limit life, and which Philip had explained to me up in our little wooden nest egg while we waited for the weather to warm up so the lake could freeze over, as the general Alaskan scam, were not only reinforced from the moment we touched down on the Prospect Creek landing strip (and had to sit in the plane while the gas tank was refilled, at a dozen bucks a gallon), they were raised from impressions to rules, the forced, improbable etiquette of the North.
When I finished at Personnel the clerk handed me a map of the Atco units, circled the useful addresses like the girl behind the rental car counter at the airport (my quarters, Personnel, the Assignment office, the dining hall, the chapel, the infirmary, the card room, the club, the camp theater), and instructed me to report to the Assignment trailer after I’d eaten. There were, I understood as I made my way along the corridors and modules—it was a little like strolling through a troop train—essentially two basic models the company had drawn upon here—the Army, and the Starship
Enterprise.
After I unpacked and had my meal—the food was marvelous, thick steak, wine, lobster, and everything served on table linen the texture of men’s old white-on-white shirts—I reported to the Assignment office.
It was McBride himself who invited me to enter.
I’d seen him only once, at the motel in Anchorage the week before, and we couldn’t have exchanged two dozen words, but it was like, I swear it, coming upon one of my oldest and dearest friends. Maybe it was the suit and tie, except for Petch’s the last I’d seen since going down in Philip’s airplane, or the voice, not only uninfected but smooth, without twang or accent, a reassuring sound of the civil. It could even, God help me, have been his briefcase, a signal of routine, of a world where men went to business each day and returned each night, late for supper if they’d been held up by traffic. The only discordant note in the ensemble was the yellow hard hat he wore, but even this could have been ceremonial as his suit or symbolic as his briefcase, a reminder to the men that, please, let’s never forget it’s still Alaska up here, we’ll be blasting, working with heavy equipment, there could be avalanches, I love you guys, let’s be careful out there. And he’d signed my motel chit (and reminded the men that it was like when the family had taken their trip cross the country). I’m no, God forbid, Eddy Tober but, no offense to Flowerface, a fella needs a father figure he can
rely
on once in a while.
So, as you can imagine, I was more than a little excited to see him.
“Mr. McBride,” I greeted him, “how
are
you! I guess you heard about the trouble we had. It was touch and go there for a while, but Philip kept his head on him—he’s a good man, Philip is—and we had a couple of very lucky breaks there, which I’ll tell you the truth I figure we had coming in view of the near-
tragic
stuff we went through. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and here I am, a week late but rarin’ to go. Oh,” I said, “which reminds me. Did Rodendhendrey ever show up? Did Cralus? Did Fiske?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your rabbi, Mr. McBride. I’m Rabbi Goldkorn, sir. We met at the Travelodge? In Anchorage? I have to laugh. You didn’t know me then either. You thought I might be Fiske. Or Rodenhendrey. Or maybe Cralus. It’s just that I’d never been taken for a Rodenhendrey or Fiske before. I suppose a Cralus. Cralus is one of those names that could be anything really, but Rodenhendrey? Fiske? No way. That’s why I have to laugh. Though I want you to know I’m reassured you don’t
have
these preconceptions. It makes me more comfortable, it puts me at ease.”
“You’re at ease?”
“Well,” I said, “we’ve been through some rough circumstances, the pilot and me. There were times we both had to wonder whether we’d make it. I guess I’m just relieved, maybe a little nervous.”
“You’re my rabbi? Sure,” he said, “now I remember. You arrived a day early.” You were flying up the next day with the Hebrew supplies.”