Solomon Gursky Was Here (46 page)

And then Solomon, terrifying Morrie, jumped down from the fence right into the flow of wild nervy horses in the corral. Solomon, Ephraim's anointed one.

Bernard didn't credit most of his brother's tales about his trek to the Polar Sea with their grandfather. But whatever had really happened out there, Solomon had returned blessed with a certain grace, an inner stillness. And watching him now, at ease with the wild mustangs, Bernard grasped that had he been the one to jump into the corral, probably stumbling in the dust, they would have smelled his fear and reared up on their hind legs, snorting, looking to take a chomp out of him. Bernard understood for the first time that he was a coarse, tubby little man with wet fishy eyes, and that he would have to scratch and bite and cheat to get what he wanted out of life, which was plenty, but that Solomon would sit, expecting the world to come to him, and he would be served. He watched Solomon crossing that
corral, he watched choking on envy and hatred, and yet, for all that, he yearned for Solomon's approval. Then Solomon spoiled it by pausing to taunt him, calling back, “Follow me, Bernie, and I'll buy you a beer.”

“Go straight to hell.”

“Aw, you two,” Morrie groaned. “Hey, you're crying.”

“I am not. He's going to
shtupp
Minnie Pryzack now.”

Minnie, comfortably ensconced in the Queen Victoria Hotel for years, was only seventeen when she first went west, working the first-class carriages on the train from Winnipeg to the coast and back again.

“He's going to
shtupp
Minnie and then he's going to join the poker game.”

“They'd never let him play in the big autumn game. Besides, he's busted.”

“I wasn't afraid of jumping into the corral, but then you would have had to come after and you could have been hurt. Is he really broke?”

“They cleaned him out last Thursday.”

Aaron, sprawled at the kitchen table, smelling of manure, his ears and nose clogged with dust, his back aching, counted out his money twice, calculating that he had turned a profit of fifty-five dollars, provided two of the farmers honoured their notes.

Morrie stooped to remove his father's boots and then brought him a glass of lemon tea and a bowl of stewed prunes.

“Paw,” Bernard said, “if you ask me, you work too hard for too little.”

“You're a good boy,” Aaron said. “Morrie too.”

R
ATHER THAN RISK
throwing everything into the pot in the heat of the game, Solomon gave Minnie. his valise, as well as his railroad ticket out and five ten-dollar bills, which would see him through, if things turned out badly. Then he drifted through the kitchen of the Queen Victoria Hotel, climbed the back stairs to the third floor, and rapped three long, two short, and one long on the attic door.

McGraw shot the bolts. “You can't play. Not tonight.”

Solomon didn't budge.

“It's different rules tonight, kid. You know that.”

Not including Solomon, there were five of them gathered together for the big autumn game, the betting soaring so high it could only be risked once a year. McGraw, the owner of the hotel and the blacksmith's shop, a recent acquisition; George Kouri, the Lebanese, who had owned the five-and-ten-cent store and a shop that sold buggies and wagons; Ingram, Sifton's man, who dealt railroad land to the Slavs in their sheepskin coats; Charley Lin, who had owned the laundry and the butchershop, but since last autumn's big game only a couple of bedbug-ridden rooming houses; and Kozochar, the barber and fire chief. A side table was stacked with cold cuts, potato salad, and bottles of whisky and vodka. There were two cots in an adjoining room, in case anybody needed to take a nap or wanted to send down for one of the girls, maybe changing his luck.

Last year's big game had ended acrimoniously after forty-eight hours, one of Charley Lin's rooming houses, the blacksmith's shop, two cow pastures, six heifers, three Polish whores and one Indian one and $4,500 changing hands. The men involved in the big game enjoyed the status it conferred on them by dint of the enormity of their winnings or losses. The game, a curse on the wives, had once been broken up by three of them marching on the tables. Since then it convened at a different place every year. The basement of Kouri's five-and-ten. The back room in the fire station. And this year the attic of the Queen Victoria Hotel. Weeks before the men sat down to the table, the game was the subject of speculation in town, and was denounced from the pulpit by the Reverend Ezekiel Shipley, who blamed it all on the harlots of the town.

McGraw was adamant. “It just wouldn't be right to deal you in,” he said.

McGraw had been against allowing Solomon into the weekly game in the first place. He was hardly a man of substance, like the rest of them, but merely a snooty kid. Besides McGraw liked Aaron, a dummy maybe, but an honest and hardworking Jew. Kouri had been indifferent, but Ingram was also opposed and Kozochar dead against it. “It would be like taking candy from a baby.”

“His money's as good as yours or mine,” Charley Lin said with appetite.

Ostensibly it was the need to teach Solomon a lesson that was his ticket of admission, because the men resented him without knowing exactly why. But there was another consideration. They wanted to impress him with their money and their moxie. That little son of a bitch.

His grandfather had been a squaw man, his father was a peddler, and, for all that, the boy, a mere seventeen-year-old, a squirt, a Jew, strode through the streets of town as if he were a prince-in-waiting, destined for great things. Unfailingly polite, considerate, it was difficult to fault him. If a fire broke out at four o'clock of a sub-zero morning, he was there at once to join the bucket brigade. When Miss Thomson was poorly, laid low with one of those feminine ailments, he took over the schoolhouse, enchanting the children. The Reverend Shipley, who could sniff evil in a year-old babe born to fornicate, sought out Solomon for discussions of the Holy Scripture. He was also more welcome on the reservation than any one of them, and could be gone with the Indians, God knows where, for ten days at a time. But there was something about him that riled the men and made them want to rub his nose in fresh dog shit.

Unlike pushy Bernard or Morrie (a really nice, polite kid), he didn't deign to serve in his father's store. But it was because he could be found there on occasion that the daughters were drawn to A. Gursky & Sons in swarms, blushing if he greeted them, the one he picked out for a buggy ride all but swooning on the spot. And, remarkably, the other young men in town, far from being jealous, vied for his favour, competing to recruit him as a hunting or drinking partner.

Once Solomon just happened to be passing in his buggy when McGraw's wagon was stuck in the mud. Immediately he jumped down and offered help. “No, no,” McGraw protested, kneeling in themuck, his own shoulder to the wheel, “you'll only get dirty.” Then McGraw turned pale, amazed at himself, because he would not have said such a thing to anybody else in town.

Solomon brought two hundred dollars to his first game, his pool-room earnings, and was promptly stripped of it. But he didn't
sulk. He didn't complain. Instead he joked about it. “My initiation fee,” he said.

So when he turned up again he was made welcome, the men digging deep for old hunting stories and gilding tales of past sexual triumphs, determined to prove to him that far from being a bunch of big-bellied hicks they were, if the truth were known, a band of hellraisers.

Solomon did reasonably well in his second game until he foolishly tried to bluff Kouri, showing three ladies, with what turned out to be no better than eights over deuces. He lost a third time and a fourth and now he was back, demanding a seat at the autumn game. McGraw didn't like it one bit. If they cleaned him out people would say they had taken advantage of a kid, but if he won it would be even more embarrassing.

“I must have dropped five hundred bucks at this table,” Solomon said. “You owe me a chair.”

“We don't owe you shit,” Ingram said.

“No IOUs tonight. You want to sit down,” McGraw said, sure that would be the end of it, “you got to show us at least a thousand dollars.”

Solomon laid out his money on the table like bait immediately before Charley Lin.

“What can I get you to drink, kid?” Charley Lin asked.

B
ERNARD BROUGHT HIS FATHER
a slice of honey cake. “Paw, I've got an idea.”

Aaron, dazed by fatigue, itchy everywhere from horsefly bites, only half-listened.

“We could bring in a fiddler on Friday nights. Salt the pretzels more. Start a darts league. I know where we can get mugs with bottoms an inch thicker for the draft beer. Morrie could handle the cash register.”

“And how would we raise the down payment?”

“McGraw buys his beer from Faulkner's. If we switched to Langham, signing a contract with them, they'd lend us some money. So would the bank.”

“Sure. The bank.”

“This isn't Russia, Paw.”

“Neither is it Gan Eden.”

Aaron, his money in hand, shuffled over to a corner of the kitchen, lifted a plank floorboard, dug out his strongbox, unlocked it, and howled and stumbled backward, a stricken man. Fanny, who had been tending to the pots simmering on the wood stove, was instantly by his side. “Aaron!”

His eyes had gone flat. All he could manage was a croak. “It's gone. The money.”

“Some of that money's mine,” Bernard yelled, seizing the box, turning it upside down and shaking it.

Out tumbled citizenship papers, a marriage licence, birth certificates, but no cash and no deed to the general store.

“Should I go to the police?” Aaron asked in a failing voice.

“Only if you want to put your son in prison,” Bernard said.

“How can you be sure it was him?” Morrie asked.

“I'll kill him for this,” Bernard said. And he was off and running, pursued by Morrie. Bernard didn't stop before he stood red and panting before Boyd, the porcine clerk in the Queen Victoria Hotel. “Where's the fucken poker game?” he demanded.

Boyd, his smile bright with malevolence, pointed at the sign behind his desk: no cursing, no spitting, no games of chance allowed.

“Listen, you little shit, if you don't tell me where I can find Solomon I'm going to try every room in the hotel.”

“You go right ahead, shorty, but there are some awful big guys in a number of them rooms, some of them entertaining company.”

A tearful Morrie stepped between them. “Please, Mr. Boyd, we have to find Solomon.”

“If I see him I'll tell him you're looking for him.”

The Gurskys sat up all through the night waiting for Solomon to come home. Fanny moaning and Aaron seated in a chair with his hands folded, his eyes turned inward. “I'm too old to start over again,” he said to nobody in particular.

It was dawn before Bernard slipped into the bedroom he shared with his two brothers and discovered that two of Solomon's
drawers were empty and his valise was gone. Win or lose, he wasn't coming back.

“I'
VE SEEN DEAD MEN
look better than you do right now.”

“Unfavourable winds,” Solomon said to Minnie in the adjoining room. “How much did you bring?”

“Your fifty and the railway ticket and eight hundred of my own and my rings.”

“What happens if I lose that too?”

“Then you must promise to marry me.”

“Minnie,” he said, inclined to be generous, “you must be thirty years old.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“It's blackmail,” he said, scooping up the money.

“Now that's what I call a proposal.”

I
T WAS TIME
to open the store.

“What we should do,” Bernard said, “is hire wagons and move all our stock somewhere safe, because tonight this place may no longer belong to us.”

“He's a minor,” Morrie said.

“Prick. If he signs over the deed and we don't honour his gambling debt, we're asking for a fire.”

Bernard figured he wouldn't run away without saying goodbye to Lena Green Stockings, so he took the buggy and rode out to the reservation. Kids with scabs on their faces wrestling in the dirt, one of them with rickets. A drunk slumped against a tree trunk outside George Two Axe's store, scrawny chickens pecking at his vomit. Flies everywhere. Crows fluttering over the entrails of a dead dog, flying off with the ropey bits.

Bernard entered the tarpaper shack and was enraged to find it stocked with goods that could only have been swiped from A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants. Tea. Sugar. An open ten-pound bag of flour on a high shelf. He found her out in the back yard, seated on a wicker chair with a broken seat, dozing.

“Lena!”

No answer.

“Lena, Solomon left in such a hurry he forgot to give me his new address.”

When she finally raised her head, wizened as a walnut, he saw that she no longer had any teeth.

“It's important that I have it,” Bernard said, pulling a bottle of rum out of his jacket pocket and waving it in front of her.

Lena smiled. “It's the boy with the two belly buttons,” she said, remembering.

“Jesus Christ! Son of a bitch! Fuck! Everybody looks like that coming out of the swimming hole.”

Her head began to slump again.

“Your shack is full of stolen goods. I could tell on you and then they'll come to lock you up.”

Lena swatted a fly.

“Where's he going?”

“To see the world.”

Passing through her shack again, Bernard paused to leave evidence of his passage, and then he went to see Minnie, taking the bar entrance to the hotel to avoid another encounter with Boyd. “I want you to give Solomon a message. Lena Green Stockings told me where he's planning to run to.”

“How did you get that flour all over your suit?”