The Pinch (45 page)

So when they weren’t fornicating to beat the band, Katie and Pinchas Pin were attempting to atone for the times when they left their child to his own devices. Coming back to themselves after their spent passion, they would coddle and indulge their son. They gave him toys he seemed to outgrow as fast as he received them, plied him with Mrs. Rosen’s compotes and choice cuts of Makowsky’s manna-fed flanken that, with his bird-like appetite, the boy scarcely touched. They took him for strolls along the canal to view the sights that beggared belief, stopping in at various storefronts, some no more than painted facades, where they introduced him to the neighbors’ children. But Tyrone showed little interest in the other kids—whose games included exorcisms and a variation of hopscotch that involved skipping over whole calendar cycles. On their side the kids, all older than he, were wary as well of Tyrone, who wasn’t so much timid as remote. Plus, he was the only kid on the street who (despite the stalled clocks) was still growing in stature and advancing in age, a dreamy boy at a moment when no one else seemed to have need of dreams.

The cautious attitude with which the neighbors regarded the child was extended to his parents as well. It was true that the Pins had been the objects of jealousy and idle talk in the past, but back then Pinchas’s status in the community was unimpeachable, and his wife’s affability had always tended to stem the loshen horah, the gossip. Besides, Pin’s General Merchandise was the long-standing anchor of North Main Street. Now, however, all anchors had been weighed, and from their bobbing vessels and supernal vantages the population deemed the Pins a suspicious lot: their bliss was not the same as the street’s.

For Tyrone’s sake Katie and Pinchas tried to maintain a pretense of normality. They represented themselves as solid citizens in a neighborhood whose permeability to wonders mocked the very nature of solidity. Still, Pinchas reasserted the proprietorship of his business while Katie took charge of her kitchen, the nursery, and the care and maintenance of the obsessed nephew. She helped out in the store, where her husband tried to push his damaged commodities. They didn’t seem to notice how they were perceived as violating the very spirit of the neighborhood, taking the part of earnest merchants when others only played at business. Where Pinchas endeavored to flog his waterlogged flannels and yachting caps, Leon Shapiro might offer, along with a factory rebate, an imp encased in a soap bubble, and Mr. Abraham peddled the philosophers’ stones the kiddies played potsie with. The currency they exchanged was more likely to be secrets than hard cash. But there were other reasons their neighbors signaled against the evil eye whenever they saw the Pins, other reasons why the Pins embraced their standard inventory with such a will.

Because, despite her lickerish vitality, Katie had begun to show signs of decomposition, and out of sympathy her husband had also developed symptoms. Her fair complexion, once dusted in freckles like cinnamon in milk, had acquired a pastry-like flakiness, bits of which dropped into the lap of her apron dress. The dress itself hung from her brittle bones as from a hanger. Her formerly russet hair, discolored and dyed, began to fall out in hanks, revealing patches of scalp the texture of coconut shell. Her green eyes had faded to oyster gray and ran with a viscous humor. The more she appeared to be actively decaying, however, the friskier she became, as if that insatiable hunger might redeem her wasting flesh. But each coupling took a further toll on both her and Pinchas, who was likewise beginning to come apart. Still they yentzed with an ever more fevered determination, further decimating the selves their desire was meant to preserve.

“Katie,” Pinchas had at last to admit while facing a merciless mirror, “let us face it, we are starting to rot.”

To which Katie replied with a transparent optimism, “Bollocks, we’re only shedding skin.”

But with every orgiastic release she experienced, Katie also felt the efforts of her soul attempting to escape its moldering confines. She had glimpsed it seeping out of herself like a bubble from a pipe, an amorphous rose blob suggesting the outlines of a young Irish bride. Then it was Pinchas’s job, sharing as he did her perception, to stuff his wife’s herniated neshomah back into whatever fissure it emerged from. But it was a dim and elusive entity, Katie’s soul, and Pinchas, in the groggy afterglow of their prodigious coition, was often slow in attempting to retrieve it. As a result, the thing had managed on several occasions to detach itself from her person. And once it ventures forth from its mortal frame the incorporeal is selfish: it feels no warmth or responsibility toward its former substance or much attachment to anything else on earth, be it husband or son. It feels only the mindless instinct to wander in the direction whence it came, and Katie’s soul might have fled halfway back to yenne velt, the other world, had not Pinchas managed to recover it in time. But occasionally the husband questioned his own selfishness in not allowing his wife her spiritual freedom. Besides, that oft-repeated effort of retrieval had worn him pretty thin and unseated his own restless spirit, which had also begun to look for a way out of its disintegrating skin. The situation had made Muni think, as he related it in his ongoing chronicle, of the escape artist Harry Houdini, who strove to release himself from straitjackets and sausage casings.

So it was only a matter of time before the ghosts of Katie and Pinchas Pin gave up their ravaged bodies, which continued for a while to pummel one another into a glimmering dust.

Still, their nephew wondered if he could have written their end differently, if even now it might not be too late to change their destiny: they had been in such an agony over leaving behind their only child. But when he reentered his privy-sized room, shadowed by the odd little boy, and gazed again upon the heap of his manuscript, its pages appeared to him as so much spindrift from an already receding tide. Soon, he thought, they would completely evaporate. Also scattered about the floor were a few long-abandoned toys—a wooden caboose, a tin frog, an Indian headdress from which Muni, stooping, plucked a red feather. He returned to the bedroom with the boy at his heels and used the feather to sweep the luminous crumbs from the rumpled sheets into the open palm of his hand. The boy watched him with unblinking jade-green eyes. Muni made a fist around the crumbs in his left hand—where they hissed like the interior of a nautilus shell—and with his right reached for the boy’s, whose small fingers entwined Muni’s own.

“I remember when they had faces,” he said.

“I wish I did,” replied Muni, beyond consolation. He put on his estranged clothing and led little Tyrone down the stairs through the largely liquidated store, then out onto the raised sidewalk above the canal that no longer deserved its name.

Vacant now of vessels except a foundered few, the grand canal of North Main Street was mostly dried up, the once steely blue body of water having separated into standing pools. The dregs of the lagoon were exposed: spittoons and smashed hogsheads, the legs of a supine piano protruding like a belly-up beast from the shallow residue. The air was no longer as tonic as it had been in Muni’s written version, where the atmosphere partook of the bracing climate on the first day of creation. The street was not quite the street of his composition, which had renewed itself daily, so that every morning you had to reacquaint yourself with the drama of your surroundings: the melancholy of the Floradora girl in the ad painted on the wall of Grinspan’s Cigar Store, the grace adhering to the wrought iron volutes of tailor Bluestein’s sewing machine … The dilapidated storefronts had lost their look of scenery suspended from a rigging in heaven and appeared as if about to collapse. The sidewalks were barren of people, giving the impression that the never-ending festivities that had so absorbed Muni Pinsker in his role as chronicler were finally over.

But the festivities, as the boy and his unkempt cousin discovered, had merely moved west to Market Square Park, which was where Muni had been headed in the first place. It was his duty to his aunt and uncle and their surviving offspring to consign the dust of Katie and Pinchas Pin to the hole in the park, the one with no bottom in which the great oak was upended. That way their remains might follow where Muni assumed their spirits had led. He never questioned the sense of this conviction; in his logy and discomposed state it was the only logic the former scribe felt he had a hold of, though it also soothed him somewhat to hold on to the hand of the unquestioning little boy.

Entering the park, they encountered the gathered tribe of North Main Street, assembled as they’d been on that night—yesterday and long ago—when the earth had spasmed and split its seams. This evening they were joined, however, by a crush of strangers. Some were dusty farm families from the open market in the wagonyard off Commerce Avenue, others from the town in their Sunday best, a few brandishing torches though it wasn’t yet dark. Muni was surprised to see that his neighbors mingled so freely with the outsiders, who had kept their distance from the Pinch since the quake. The general mood seemed to extend the holiday attitude that had prevailed throughout the pages of his chronicle, though his co-religionists looked to have relaxed their exultatation, tempered now to a bland expectancy. While some were still costumed in vestiges of fancy dress—the Widow Teitelbaum in her harem pants, Eddie Kid Wolf in his samite robe—most wore their typically drab, out-of-fashion apparel. The children toddled about willy-nilly, their expressions suggesting they’d just waked up from a vivid dream they were trying without success to recall.

Muni was greeted with a cordiality that gave no hint of his long seclusion. Mr. Elster chucked Tyrone under the chin with an arthritic hand, while his dumpling wife exclaimed a bit cryptically, “Every child brings its own luck.” Others remarked with admiration how the boy had grown. The bruiser Kid Wolf snatched him up and set him astride his thick shoulders for a better view of whatever it was the crowd had gathered to see. Tyrone went wide-eyed at the sudden separation from his cousin but soon enough became acclimated to his elevated seat. He was further calmed, it seemed, by the grin he received from the stunted grotesque seated next to him on the stooped shoulders of Morris Padauer. Muni had to stand on tiptoe to look past the wintry garb (though the season was unequivocably spring) of a cluster of Shpinker Hasids for a glimpse of the spectacle, if spectacle there was. He noted with interest that in the midst of the fanatics, looking decidedly refreshed from his underworld sabbatical, stood their sable-trimmed rebbe, Eliakum ben Yahya. What Muni saw beyond them, beneath the roots that had replaced the broad boughs of the inverted oak, made him tighten the fist that gripped his aunt and uncle’s crumbled remains.

For next to the pit, out of which sprouted the roots like Hydras’ heads, was a cedar-staved nail keg, and on the keg stood a hatless black man, his wrinkled dome wreathed in a horseshoe of gray wool. His pants bagged around his spare shanks, and his homespun shirt was buttoned to the throat. His smoked lenses had been removed, so it was hard to tell in the failing light whether his eyes were sunk in their hollows or simply not there. Had his hands not been tied behind his back, he might have serenaded the crowd on the fiddle that someone had hung about his neck by one of its broken strings. Around that same wattled throat there dangled a noose. The rope extended from the Negro’s neck straight up into the leafless tangle then downward again at an incline, its tasseled end resting in the hands of a man in a hood like a dented dunce cap and a white linen robe. The man, his beefy face unvisored and flushed with the pride of his office, resembled a jolly monk about to ring a bell. That’s when Muni noticed that other cowled figures, a few of them holding rifles, were interspersed throughout the gathering.

Between the bell ringer and the nail keg stood another man whose white robe boasted the insignia that identified him as a figure of some rank in the Knights of the White Kamelia. This one, his badger face also exposed, cleared his throat as if tuning an instrument.

“Ghouls and goblins of the Invisible Empire,” he bellowed, “Anglo-Saxon brethren and sistern of our hallowed Dixie, we are gathered here this evenin’—”

“This ain’t no weddin’, Lawyer Poteet!” shouted a voice from the crowd, provoking laughter. Others chimed in to the effect that he should can the speechifying and get on with the main event, but the speaker would have his moment.

“To avenge the evil wrought on our citizens by these ape-like creatures of jungle darkness”—Asbestos turned his head toward Lawyer Poteet as if he hadn’t quite caught the gist—“and make a example of the vile species that would defy our laws and miscegenate,” tasting the word, “with our women.”

There was more laughter, since it was obvious to the audience that, had it ever been the case, the old Negro’s miscegenating days were long over. Some of the assembled yawned demonstratively; a bonneted woman distributed sandwiches and soda pop to her family from a hamper. Then Muni was suddenly moved to ask himself what day it was: for he had the marked impression that this evening—against whose chartreuse sky the park was thrown into stark relief—was fixed to a particular calendar date: rather than containing other days, this one had the distinct character of a Friday evening, when all good Hebrews should be in shul.

The Grand Syklops of the Memphis Klavern continued reciting the laundry list of crimes against nature that the nigra was guilty of, though there was no mention of Asbestos’s specific offense. At one point, spurring his hobbyhorse onward, Lawyer Poteet strayed into territory clearly intended for the ears of Muni Pinsker and his kind, declaring that Caucasians were the true Israelites (you could read it in the Bible) and America the prophesied site of the regathering of the tribes. The Jews themselves (again quoting scripture) were a mongrel breed, “satanic, poisonous, and parasitic.”

His neighbors shifted apprehensively, while Muni came only by degrees to understand what was happening. It had been a rocky passage back from the story he was writing to the one he was living, despite their being in theory one and the same. How, he wondered, had these interlopers come to invade the sovereign precinct of the Pinch? (The interlopers seemed to be asking the same thing with regard to the Jews.) Were such lumpen bumpkins as these really capable of pulling off any authentic mischief? Surely Boss Crump’s hirelings would appear on the scene in time to break up the mob and put an end to their shenanigans (though Mr. Crump’s handpicked high sheriff, Longwillie Tatum, could be seen mingling among the robes in a sheet of his own). Maybe it wasn’t too late for the scribe to hasten back to his room and devise a different course of events, but the prospect of writing anything at all now seemed beyond his powers, and besides, like everyone else Muni was glued to the spot.