Solomon Gursky Was Here (67 page)

Moses threw things into a suitcase, drove to Dorval airport, the other side of Montreal, and caught the first flight to Edmonton. He had to wait three maddening hours before he could make a connection to Yellowknife, where he immediately set out for the Canadian Armed Forces search-and-rescue headquarters, volunteering to serve as a spotter. The search master, adding his name to the list, told him that two long-range Hercules transports had already been crisscrossing the area of the highest probability for three days, flying a mile apart at a height of 1,000 feet. The area of the highest probability was
calculated to be 350 miles long and 250 miles wide. In the event of a siting, para-rescuers were standing by equipped with a long-range Labrador helicopter, prepared to take off immediately. The good news was that Henry's party had certainly reached their destination, remained in camp for a day, and then started back with sufficient food and fuel to get them home. A land search was also underway, Eskimos fanning out over Henry's most likely route home.

The next morning a whiteout grounded the search planes and Moses passed most of the day in The Trapline with Sean Riley.

“He should have taken his dogs,” Riley said, “not those goddamn snowmobiles. You can't eat snowmobiles.”

“What are their chances, Sean?” “They're crossing some damn unforgiving country, but if Henry's okay, they're okay. If not, not. Henry knows the terrain, but Isaac's no damn good and Johnny's a druggie. If Henry's out of it, those kids could head off any which way, providing the snowmobiles haven't broken down.”

“All three of them?”

“Bloody unlikely I know, but there's been an accident for sure. Somebody overturned or went over a cliff or into a crevice or how the hell do I know what, and maybe they've set up camp and they're waiting to be rescued.”

“Didn't they take flares with them?”

“If I had to guess I'd say they lost the sled with the flares and what we got to hope is that it wasn't also the one with the food and the fuel. Look, Moses, they're good for ten days out there, maybe two weeks, before we have to worry.”

Another two days passed before the search planes were able to take off again, this time flying at five hundred feet only a half-mile apart. Moses, like the rest of the volunteers, was only capable of logging ten minutes at a stretch as a spotter, harnessed into the open loading hatch at the rear of the Hercules, squinting at the ice and snow skidding past in temperatures that ran to forty below.

They flew out day after day, weather permitting. Then, on the twenty-third day, the camp was sited, a solitary figure scrambling out of a tent to wave frantically. The Hercules swooped low, dropping a
survival pack, and the para-rescuers started out in their helicopter. Security was thick at Yellowknife airport, but Sean Riley managed to have a word with the helicopter pilot shortly after he landed, and then he hurried off to The Trapline to meet with Moses. “Henry's dead. A broken neck. Johnny starved to death. They've brought in Isaac and they've got him in the hospital now. The RCMP are guarding his room.”

“Why?”

“They lost the sled with the food. Isaac survived by slicing chunks out of Henry's thighs,” Riley said, ordering double Scotches for both of them.

“What about Johnny?”

“He refused to nosh on the great-grandson of Tulugaq, but what did he know? Little prick was just a savage. Are you going to be sick?”

“No.”

“Look here, Moses, Henry was already dead. You might have done the same. Certainly I would have.”

Moses ordered another round.

“Isaac swears he didn't dig in until the tenth day out there,” Riley said, “but the helicopter crew told the RCMP they found little bags filled with cubes of meat hanging from his tent. If Isaac had waited ten days, like he said, Henry's body would have been harder than a frozen log. Splinters is what he would have got, not
boeuf bourgignon
. Something else. Bizarre, if it's true.”

‘‘Let's have it.”

“Isaac says he was attacked by ravens one morning. Maybe he was delirious or he dreamt it.”

Rumours of cannibalism were all over town. Reporters, attracted by the Gursky name, flew in from Toronto, London, and New York. Convening in The Trapline, they concocted a verse to commemorate the event:

There are strange things done 'neath the Midnight Sun,

but the thing that made us quail

was the night the Jew

in want of a stew

braised his father in a pail.

Moses decided not to stay on for THE CORONER'S COURT INQUIRY INTO THE MATTER TOUCHING UPON THE DEATHS OF:

HENRY GURSKY, and

JOHNNY POOTOOGOOK.

However, he was still in Yellowknife the morning they released Isaac from the hospital, flanked by lawyers. “My client,” one of them said, “is still suffering from bereavement overload and has nothing to say to the press at this point in time.”

Five

Considering the nature of Isaac's sin, there were lengthy deliberations before the
yeshiva
agreed to take him back, and then only on sufferance.

“How could you do such a thing?” one rebbe asked.

Another rebbe said, “The other one maybe. But your own father,
alav ha-sholem
?”

“The other one was
trayf,
” Isaac responded, glaring at them.

He had come home only once since he had been acquitted by the coroner's inquiry, grudgingly come to spend the
Aseret Yemei Tushuvah,
the ten days of repentance from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur, with his mother, avoiding the Sir Igloo Inn Café and the Hudson's Bay trading post, where the teasing was relentless.

“Have you come back to roast your mother for dinner?”

No answer.

“Nurse Agnes likes men to eat her. Try her.”

Friday evening, he stood defiantly at the door of his father's house, waiting for the Faithful camped on the edge of the settlement to appear, beating on their skin drums, parading their traditional offerings before them, but nobody came.

“Any of them would have done exactly what I did,” he shouted at Nialie, slamming the door to his room, and collapsing on the bed that had the letters of the Hebrew alphabet painted on the head-board. A deadly
“gimel”
flying out of the raven's beak. Nialie brought him a bowl of soup.

“And if one more person tells me what a saint he was,” Isaac hollered, “I'll punch him out! There was another side to him! Only I know!”

“Know what?”

He pitied his mother too much to tell. “Never mind.”

Eventually the
yeshiva
principal found out about the marijuana and the Puerto Rican maid.

“It is written,” Isaac argued, quoting Melachim, “that a king may take wives and concubines up to the number eighteen, and I am descended from the House of David.”

Once Nialie discovered that her son had been expelled from the
yeshiva,
she stopped his allowance. An infuriated Isaac went to the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue.

“I want to see Lionel Gursky.”

“Have you an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“I'm his cousin.”

A stocky teenager in a black leather motorcycle jacket, stovepipe jeans, and cowboy boots. Sleek black hair, hot slanty eyes, brown skin. “Sure,” she said, amused.

Even as a security guard approached, Isaac slapped his passport on the counter. The guard snorted, incredulous, but put in a call to Lionel's office all the same. There was a pause, then he said, “Take the elevator to the fifty-second floor. Mr. Lionel's secretary will meet you there, kid.”

Isaac trailed behind the young lady who led him to Lionel's office, his eyes on her legs.

“Mr. Lionel is already late for a board meeting. He can give you ten minutes.”

She had to buzz him into Lionel's outer office, monitored by a TV eye and attended by an armed guard. Behind the guard, rising over a Ming dynasty vase laden with gladioli, there loomed a portrait of Mr. Bernard.

Another set of doors, seemingly solid oak but actually lined with steel, slid open. Lionel's corner office was the largest Isaac had ever seen. Antique desk. Leather sofas. Matching wastepaper baskets fashioned of elephant's feet. Thick creamy carpet. Silken walls. A framed
Forbes
magazine cover of Lionel. A painting of cod fishermen in the Gaspé. Photographs of Lionel shaking hands with President Nixon, bussing Golda, embracing Frank Sinatra, dancing with Elizabeth Taylor, presenting a trophy to Jack Nicklaus.

“Your father was a saint and a role model for the rest of us poor sinners,” Lionel said. “Please accept my belated condolences.”

Isaac, his smile ambivalent, explained that he had left the
yeshiva
following a religious dispute, and now wished to enroll in a secular school, continuing his education in New York, but there were problems. When he was twenty-one he would inherit millions as well as a nice bundle of McTavish stock. Meanwhile, his mother controlled everything. She was determined that he return to the Arctic.

Lionel's secretary intruded.

“Thank you, Miss Mosley. I'll take that call in the library, but you stay here and keep my cousin company, will you?”

Isaac began to prowl about the office. He drifted behind the antique desk, sat down in Lionel's chair, and spun around.

“I don't think you should do that.”

“Now I have to piss,” he said, leaping up.

“There's a men's room down the hall,” Miss Mosley said, tugging at her skirt. “First right and second left. Security will give you a key.”

“Isn't there a can right here?”

“It's Mr. Lionel's.”

“I promise to lift the seat.”

At first glance, the medicine cabinet yielded nothing of interest, but a tray on the glass table was filled with cuff-links: pearl, jade, gold. Isaac pocketed a pair and plucked the most promising bottle of pills out of the cabinet.

Lionel's secretary had gone, displaced by the guard from the outer office.

“Hey, what happened to my baby-sitter, man?”

“You just sit there like a good lad and wait for Mr. Lionel.”

But Lionel didn't return. Instead he sent a short man, plump and pink, with a full head of curly ginger hair. “Your father was a wonderful human being,” Harvey said. “I say that from the heart. Mr. Lionel sympathizes with your situation and admires your ambition. He has instructed me to put you on an allowance of two hundred dollars a week, which we will credit to your bank once you fill me in on the details. Later there will be some papers for you to sign.”

“When do I come back for them?”

“They will be mailed to you. Meanwhile, this envelope contains a thousand dollars in cash.”

“Where's my fucken cousin?” Isaac asked, snatching the envelope.

“Mr. Lionel says you must come to see him again soon.”

Isaac rented a one-room apartment on W. 46th Street near the corner of Tenth Avenue, supplementing his meagre allowance by picking up jobs here and there that didn't require a green card. Bussing tables at Joe Allen's. Washing dishes at Roy Rogers on Broadway. Passing out cards on the street for DIAL 976-SEXY.

S
EVERAL MONTHS LATER,
fifteen years old now, he stared at his ceiling, unshaven, his back adhering to his futon. The summer heat of his one-room apartment a torment, he reached for his tiger-striped jockey shorts on the floor and wiped the sweat from his neck and face. Then he rolled a joint and groped blindly for a tape, slamming it into his Sony. No sooner did he hear the gale-force winds raging across the barrens than he giggled fondly. There was the distant howl of a wolf, electronic music, the sounds of human struggle, and then the narrator faded in:

“The Ravenmen, man-shaped creatures from the ancient spirit world are attacking the good people of Fish Fiord; their fingers bearing the talons of an owl; their noses formed like the beak of a hawk; their great arms feathered and winged. Many of the villagers run in fear, but others fight on against fearful odds. In the forefront is Captain Cohol, pitting his prowess against the pitiless pillagers, fighting like ten men in a gleaming circle of death …”

Posters and bumper stickers were plastered to the walls of Isaac's apartment. Posters of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger. Sandwiched between Black Sabbath and Deep Purple was a garishly coloured picture of the Rebbe who reigned over 770 Eastern Parkway. A nude Marilyn Monroe, sprawling on a white rug, smiled at the Rebbe from the opposite wall. Glued to the poster was the crest Isaac used to wear on the breast pocket of his jacket, certifying that he was a foot soldier in the ARMY OF HASHEM. A car bumper sticker pasted on another wall read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW.

Those days, Isaac thought, inhaling deeply.
Yeshiva
days. Waking in the wintry dark to say his
Modeh Ani,
the Prayer of Thanks Upon Rising:

Modeh ani lefaneha, melekh hai v'kayam.

I offer thanks to Thee, O Everlasting King.

Sheh hehezarta bi nishmati b'hemla.

Who hast mercifully restored my soul within me.

Fuck the
yeshiva
. And flick the Gurskys too. Some family. Lionel, that scum-bag, had never agreed to see him again. Mind you, he was only a cousin. Lucy, his aunt,
his only aunt,
had treated him even worse. Not to begin with. No sir. To begin with she had thought he was the cutest thing since sliced bread. He had first gone to visit Lucy in her apartment in the Dakota while he was still studying at the
yeshiva
. He rang the bell clutching a beribboned box of Magen David Glatt Kosher chocolates, unaware that he was intruding on a cocktail party. A little Filipino in a white jacket answered the door and then an out-of-breath lady wearing a tent-like kaftan chugged down the hall to greet him. She was immense, bloated, heavily made-up, her glittering black eyes outlined with something silvery, her chins jiggly. Lucy grasped a retreating Isaac and held him at arm's length, bracelets of hammered gold jangling. Isaac, who still wore sidecurls, a wispy moustache and just a hint of beard, black hat, long black jacket, thick white woollen socks. “Oh my shattered nerves,” she called out in a voice loud enough to command attention. “Look, everybody, it's my nephew. Isn't he super!”