Later.
At the trial the rabbi showed no remorse, nor did he demonstrate any emotion readily identifiable to the mob that thronged the courtroom. Denied bail, which he’d never requested, he was trundled out of his cell at the Shelby County jail in a standard issue orange jumpsuit that ballooned about his broomstick frame. Guards led him mincing in his shackles behind the bar and seated him at a table beside his court-appointed counsel. From this vantage he viewed the proceedings with an expression of mild amusement, the way a sleepy child gazes into an aquarium. When asked at his arraignment how he pleaded, the old man, as if offered two equally delectable morsels, seemed unable to choose, and so an obligatory plea of not guilty was submitted. Hence the trial, during which Mr. Womack, the prosecuting attorney, a bald man of impressive girth whose every gesture seemed practiced, introduced a raft of evidence—largely fabricated but passionately maintained—to the effect that young Bernard Karp was the victim of a ritual murder. The boy had been degraded and defiled, made to perform unnatural acts, then murdered sacrificially so that his blood might be utilized in further satanic ceremonies. The prosecutor drew heavily on translations of old czarist documents called protocols to support his charges, and relished describing in salacious detail the compromising situation in which the police had discovered the old man and the boy. A number of witnesses from local law enforcement who’d been at the scene of the crime were on hand to corroborate the prosecutor’s characterization of the event.
The attorney for the defense, Mr. Frizell, an oily jackleg in mismatched plaids going through motions for his minimal fee, took pains (small ones) to point out that the prosecution’s claims had been widely discredited since the Middle Ages; that in any case the blood libel—and here he seemed to contradict himself by giving credence to the very phenomenon he meant to debunk—involved gentile victims, “Jew-on-Jew crime” being virtually unheard of. But the imaginations of the jury, hand-picked for their ignorance, had already been ignited, and as the prosecution’s case also included the establishment beyond a reasonable doubt of motive and opportunity, combined with a dramatic exhibition of the murder weapon itself, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Rabbi Ezekiel ben Zephyr, old as he was (though how old no one could say), was sentenced to life imprisonment for actions so distasteful that the judge, the Honorable Schuyler Few, made a show of spraying his mouth with antiseptic after speaking their name.
“By the authority vested in me by the state of Tennessee,” pronounced Judge Few, “I hereby sentence you the accused, Ezeekyul ben Zefire, to be confined to the state correctional facility at Brushy Mountain for the remainder of your natural life, with no recourse to parole.” Later on, in response to criticism of his failure to impose the death penalty, the judge maintained that a slow death in prison was a crueller fate than the gas chamber, which for the rabbi’s people might be interpreted as a type of a martyrdom. Still, there were those who detected a tincture of mercy.
The trial lasted only a week, in the course of which the media circus was unrelenting. The austere, oak-paneled courtroom was packed every day to capacity, the bailiffs hard pressed to silence a crowd sometimes as unruly as spectators at a bearbaiting. Meanwhile the press had a field day parsing every nuance of the case, the conservative papers weighing in with a vengeance in favor of the rabbi’s execution (some of the yellower journals even suggesting the resurrection of a time-honored tradition involving lampposts and trees), while the liberal press, which had no local representation, derided the kangaroo atmosphere of the courtroom and deplored the rabbi’s demonization, at the same time conceding that the accused might in fact be a demon. Nobody really questioned the old imposter’s guilt. Though most of his followers distanced themselves from their leader after the murder, a steadfast few helped fill the pews and carried placards outside the courthouse reading FREE RABBI BEN ZEPHYR. Frequently interviewed by reporters, they mouthed the kind of gnomic catchphrases that lent substance to the belief that they were under some type of mind control.
The Family Karp were in daily attendance, a bench behind the attorneys’ tables having been reserved for them throughout each phase of the trial. They sat, Julius and Yetta, stiffly during the proceedings, their faces gone slack from the effort of trying to sustain the proper balance of outrage and grief. Still in shock from the turn of events that had taken their only son in so terrible and untimely a fashion, they were nearly as crushed—God forgive them—by the rabbi’s spectacular fall from grace. It was an attitude that neither could admit to the other. But while they tried their best on principle to abhor the old man, glaring daggers at the kippah—raffish as the dented cup of a black brassiere—that rode the back of his head, they fell short of invoking the rancor they sought. Despite the volumes of affection she expressed for her boy and her guilt over all the occasions she’d failed to declare it, Mrs. Karp confided to her husband in a moment of weakness that “the rabbi must have had his reasons”; and while he pretended he couldn’t believe his ears, to his shame Julius secretly concurred. Their daughter, Madeline, was also present for a time, summoned from her career as artist’s model to the funeral of her brother. A nuisance in life, her little brother had proved an even greater posthumous embarrassment owing to the public manner of his demise. But the girl nevertheless dutifully attended the funeral and stayed on for the commencement of the trial, even consenting to pose in all her pneumatic shapeliness for the newspaper photographers. After a few days, however, she became disgusted with her parents’ inability to muster sufficient loathing for the defendant, and told them as much. When they responded that she should bite her tongue about things she didn’t understand, she called them gross, and as the entire courtroom turned to watch her oscillating departure, sashayed again out of their lives.
Arrayed in a Zorroesque outfit complete with piratical headscarf that constituted her widow’s weeds, Lou Ella Tuohy was there as well for every stage of the court case, sometimes with and sometimes without her baby sister of indeterminate age. She bagged school to attend and called in sick at the video store—whose hands-off proprietor told her not to worry; he would institute an honor system until she returned. Throughout the arguments and counterarguments, Lou sat in the gallery among reporters and curiosity seekers, snapping her gum and wondering exactly what had happened to shatter her world. Having never before seen the rabbi in person, she was intrigued despite herself by his benign appearance. A wizened old gargoyle with drooling eyes and yellow beard, sunken cheeks shot through with broken capillaries like purple spider webs, he nevertheless seemed possessed of a dormant vitality. Though stunned beyond apprehension by the ghastliness of what he had allegedly done, Lou—like the Karps, whom she’d thus far avoided—was unable to hate him with the fervency she felt he deserved. Her purpose was to mourn Bernie Karp with all her might, to miss him to the point of obliterating herself, but whenever she looked at the pacific old perp in chains, she was incapable of believing that Bernie was actually gone. This was identical to the feeling she’d had when viewing his cosmetically enhanced likeness in its open casket on the eve of his burial. So-called evidence aside (the evidence being patently a crock), she could conceive of no reason why a doddering holy man should want to murder her boyfriend. Would he even have had the wherewithal? What occurred at the New House on that calamitous November afternoon remained a mystery; the trial resolved nothing, and when the verdict was read and the rabbi hustled off toward his detention, it was his presence that she found herself missing, while she asked Bernie’s forgiveness for her wicked inconstancy of heart.
Even before the trial, at the farcical funeral, Lou had failed to summon what she assumed was the appropriate degree of grief. Bernie’s burial had taken place on a rainy morning in a treeless cemetery whose tombstones appeared to be marching lemminglike downhill toward the Interstate. Due to their proximity to the highway and the rain drumming the striped marquee, the small group of mourners huddled amid a crush of monuments caught only snatches of the rabbi’s graveside eulogy. That was no great loss, since the rabbi from Congregation Felix Frankfurter had clearly not done his homework where the dead boy was concerned. He began predictably enough, his face severe beneath a snap-brim fedora, hands thrust into the pockets of his Burberry coat, by asserting that “the Lord has a plan,” then seemed at a loss to say precisely what that plan might be. Swerving unexpectedly from convention, he began to speculate with an astonishing lack of compassion that “the boy must have been guilty of grievous sins in a past life to have been struck down so prematurely in this one.” Those mourners who had bothered to follow his words—among them the quack psychologist and a few teachers from Tishimingo High, plus some parents who’d twisted the arms of their offspring who remembered the Karp kid (if at all) only for his narcolepsy—exchanged discomforted glances. They avoided making eye contact with the boy’s family, who cupped their ears to hear what they thought they must surely have misunderstood. For the rabbi, changing tacks again, suggested that in any case young Bernard was well out of it “since this world is essentially God’s bedpan.…” Were they witnessing the man’s sudden loss of faith, or mind? In the event, as if having concluded that his voice had been hijacked by another, he clapped a hand over his mouth and remained silent. His thunderstruck expression was captured for all time by press photographers, who’d been standing by for every Bernie-related incident since the murder.
On what turned out to be the penultimate day of the trial the lawyer Frizell had called the rabbi himself to the witness stand. He’d previously summoned a parade of the rabbi’s bochers (as they liked to call themselves) as character witnesses, though their loose-screw testimonies only helped to cement the prosecution’s case. A rogues’ gallery of real estate brokers, Hadassah ladies, auto mechanics, massage therapists, and soccer moms, they failed to impress the jury with their attempts to explain Rabbi ben Zephyr’s theology of God as fun, and succeeded only in digging a deeper hole for the defense. Thus, in an act of desperation coupled with a perverse desire to steal a march on his shyster colleague, Mr. Frizell had Rabbi Eliezer hauled into the dock. In presenting his case, the attorney had downplayed the apocryphal tales surrounding the rabbi’s origins, especially the one about his having been frozen for a century or more, but try as he might (and his efforts were never more than nominal) he’d yet to make a case for the old man as solid citizen. Here was his chance. It didn’t help, though, that Eliezer’s undocumented status compounded his unpopularity, and furthermore, once the rabbi was sworn in, his counsel seemed not to know how to question him, as even with regard to his name the old hoaxer was circumspect.
“For the record, you are Rabbi Ezekiel ben Zephyr, sometimes known as the Boy-bitcher Prodigy?”
“In a manner of speakink.”
The lawyer thought it best to let it go. “And would you please tell the court in your own words what transpired between yourself and the deceased on the afternoon of November fourteenth?”
Said the rabbi, amiably, “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”
By then Mr. Frizell had understood his error: He should at the very least have coached his client regarding the content of his testimony beforehand. The lawyer smoothed his greasy salt-and-pepper hair (most of the salt being dandruff) with his hands, wiped his palms on his pants, and silently wished he’d left well enough alone. But now there was no turning back. “So would you mind telling the jury in your own words what occurred on the afternoon in question?”
“Well,” the rabbi furrowed his brow, then seemed to brighten, his scratchy voice like a fiddle strung with electrical cord, “the last thing I remember, I was doing with Cosette and her mama a popular old-timey technique which by the received tradition is known as Manipulation of the Godhead—”
At that juncture the lawyer had begun to clear his throat with a roosterlike crowing, either by way of warning his client against the wrong turn his statement was taking or simply to drown out his words. “Let’s start at the point when the young Mr. Karp entered your quarters,” he interrupted.
“That I don’t remember. Like I say, the last thing I remember is when Rosalie the mama—she’s a little zaftig, Rosalie—on my face she sits while I’m beyn regel le-regel if you know what I mean with her daughter…” The courtroom, to gauge by its rumbling, knew precisely what he meant, the court reporter’s fingers stumbling over a machine whose keys jammed like a crowd stampeding an exit.
Mr. Frizell tried to alert the old man with gestures that the court had heard enough of his smutty talk, but the rabbi seemed to have found his stride. “You see,” he continued informatively, “as it is below, so is it above; it’s a emb-a-lem, the holy zivvug, the sexual union from humans, for what happens in heaven. HaShem, when He sees what on earth we’re doing, it gives to Him ideas. Then with His bride, His Shekhinah, He does the same, and is restored for a while the order in the universe. For a little while everybody got a extra soul—”
The hush the tzaddik’s speech had induced in his audience was punctured by his attorney’s shouted appeal to “Shut up!” with which the rabbi graciously complied. Facing the judge, the lawyer Frizell removed his glasses with their befogged lenses and announced, “No further questions, your honor.” Then he bowed to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury and sat down again in careless defeat.
Judge Few, as if to break the spell that still held the courtroom, took a pecan from his robe and cracked it with his gavel, then said to Mr. Womack while chewing the nut, “Your witnesh, shir.”
Mr. Womack hoisted his full-buttocked bulk from his chair and blew his nose in a monogrammed hankie whose contents he inspected closely like tea leaves, frowning at what he saw. He reminded the jury that reputable members of the psychiatric community had interviewed the rabbi and declared him competent to stand trial. Having made his point, he directed a steely stare at the rabbi, then turned back to the judge and said, “No questions, your honor.”
In their closing remarks Mr. Womack recited again the litany of the rabbi’s enormities, insisting that the jury had no choice but to find the defendant et cetera; whereas Mr. Frizell, almost devil-may-care in his final argument, said only that appearances can be deceiving. But despite the hostile atmosphere that had pervaded the proceedings from their outset, something had changed since Rabbi Eliezer had taken the stand. The press reported that his blasphemous and obscene testimony, rather than further antagonizing the courtroom, seemed to have inspired in the onlookers a curious sympathy. Schooled though they were in prejudice, the jury nevertheless took an inordinate amount of time to deliberate, the foreman reading their decision like an apology while pausing at intervals to mop his perspiring brow. But once the verdict was delivered, the sentence pronounced, and the old man ushered away, the whole episode receded into the fleeting diversion it had been all along, the attention of the citizenry having been redirected toward the issue of a world aflame.
♦♦♦
IN THE TRANSPORT bus on the way to the state pen at Brushy Mountain, Cholly Sidepocket fought an urge to chew off his legs at the ankles in order to rid them of the irons he’d been made to wear. Now why was that? He’d done bids before; he knew the drill. He’d been in and out of joints since the gladiator schools of his youth, where, though he’d hardly shot a rack of pool since, he’d earned the street name that dogged him to this day. It was a foolish name, though no more foolish than the Two-Tones, Sheetrocks, and Sic Dawgs with which the other homies he’d run with were saddled. The handle had of course nothing to do with who he really was, which was the point, since Cholly had never had much to do with who he really was, at least not until he’d hooked up with the Old Man. Before that, the world was a place you visited like the bone yard in the prison compound, where the conjugal trailers were kept and the housebroken cons received their families. The world was the place where you peddled your crank, shacked up with your skank, as some wannabe rapper was chanting on the tier above; the place you did the crimes they fetched you back to do the time for, which you tried to do so that the time didn’t do you. The system, once you were in it, was everywhere the same bad dream, the problem being that Cholly himself was different now.
Something had got switched on in him during his time with the Old Man, and he didn’t think he could turn it off; he couldn’t shut himself down like he’d done during his previous stretches. Before, despite his size and physique, Cholly’d been able to shrink himself, to fold up his soul like a doodle bug and secrete it in some part of his person where even he couldn’t find it anymore. Because to show signs of humanity in the can was an invitation to the man to break you of those habits that distinguished you from the animals; and you could rest assured they had the means. So the best strategy was to beat them to it, to stupefy yourself, and sleepwalk through the years like some lumbering stiff. It was a condition that couldn’t be faked, for even the most dimwitted hack could sniff out a human being. There had so far been no human beings in evidence at the Brushy Mountain Correctional Institution. Certainly none were at large when they marched Cholly through the monkey house on that first night of his incarceration, though the monkeys were all on view. Some did calesthenics or perused their short-eyes porn with a hand bobbing pistonlike in their lap; some flashed mirrors in an overt semaphore or peeped out through the bars at the new fish with bleary, tombstone eyes.
Familiar as it was, Cholly couldn’t seem to get cozy in the double cell they’d assigned him during the mandatory six weeks’ quarantine on the fish tier. He couldn’t stand the company of the baby gangsta who wept all night in the bunk above his, a weeping interrupted only when the kid jerked himself off, which he did every hour or so. But rather than contemplate strangling him, the obvious solution, Cholly had the wack impulse to speak words of comfort, though he knew better, as sympathy was a sign of weakness and would come back to bite your ass in the form of some sucker hustle later on. So, between the sobs of his cellmate and the other animal sounds that swelled at dawn to an uproar like the Tower of Babel Zoo, Cholly wasn’t sleeping too good. Then the day would begin again with its flimsy pretense of order, which collapsed with the least bit of pressure the way a maggoty carcass crumbles to powder at a touch; only, on A Block the powder was flammable. You had the monotony of chow runs, work runs, rec runs, and showers, the bug juice and special-programs calls, the law library or hospital if you could finesse them, visitations if you had any people left on the outside. But along the way you ran the gauntlet of cell soldiers and screws looking for an excuse to go off on you. There were jailhouse lawyers giving you advice you never asked for, entrepreneurs who ran regular commissaries out of their cages, peddling everything from hot electronics to shanks fashioned from Plexiglas or flint. You had the sad fucks of no known gender exiled to the untouchables table in the mess hall, the pay-him-no-minds shuffling about in their rubber flops, too far gone for the pigs to take notice of anymore, though the inmates, having no better diversion (the TVs in the common areas were unreliable), paid attention to one another, and no matter how forbidding your game face, you could bet that before the day was out some joker was going to get all up in your business. Cholly preferred to keep his business to himself.
He was a big man, Cholly, but that didn’t discourage the gadflies and solicitors. Take for instance Daktari Brown, doing a twelve-year jolt for (as he claimed) smoking in the boys’ room, who suggested that the new man might want to avail himself of his services. Wearing a kufi from beneath which his dreadlocks hung like stogies, Daktari ran a tattoo parlor out of his house, where he was as handy at etching the swastikas of the Aryan Nation as the pachuco crosses of the Raza Unidas and Bloods. Cholly curtly declined his offer, but Daktari, whose ambition was to leave his mark on all and sundry, was persistent, and one afternoon during gate time he prevailed on some power-lifters from the yard to jump Cholly Sidepocket and drag him into his cell. The following knock-down-drag-out raised an alarm that brought the screws running in their extraction gear with truncheons raised.
Coming to in a windowless box stinking of disinfectant, bare but for its stainless steel toilet and sink, the thin pallet and the light fixture that was never dimmed, Cholly wondered if this was what he’d wanted all along. Here he could maybe think straight, his aching head notwithstanding, and review the chain of events that had brought him to this sorry pass. But the truth was that the Special Housing Unit, for all its isolation, wasn’t much quieter than the main line; you could still hear the jabbering of the monkeys with their catcalls and threats, their complaints that the CIA maintained a base of operations in their brain. Cholly didn’t know if it was them or him that needed turning off. In the absence of his ostrichlike faculty, he was forced to listen to the noise that rattled the pipes the cons used as their “phone.” From the hole it was hard to even recall the peace of mind he’d come to take for granted in the employ of the old Jew preacher man. Even now Cholly couldn’t have said what it was about his attachment to that old rounder, with his string of bitches and dingbat disciples, that triggered the memories he seemed to have borrowed from someone else, some warrior he might have been had he not been himself. Had he not been brought up in foster homes where he proved himself unmanageable, and “industrial schools” from which he’d emerged with an arsenal of perfidious skills. Still it wasn’t long, as he squired ‘round the rabbi and watched his back, before Cholly had begun to think he might in fact be someone else, and that someone, he believed, did not belong in stir.
The voices he heard: Were they living men or only the ghosts of past deseg confinements, the jobbers whose names and gang devices were smeared in faded blood over the walls?
“Yo, Argo, holler atcha boy are you there.”
“Franklin, dawg, that yo ebony ass?”
“Honey, if the SHU fit.”
“Good one, dawg! Wha’s crackin? Gimme the dily yo.”
The only lulls in these disembodied dialogues came when the voices dummied up for a passing CO, or when a trustee delivered the sawdust loaves of affliction in their Styrofoam clamshells. But as soon as the coast was clear and their rations choked down—“Holla back”—the chatter would begin all over again. It continued in the chain-link exercise runs that the solitaries were released into for one hour out of every twenty-four.
“Y’all heard the back fence bout them niggahs up on Cee Block? “That the gorilla wing? Nothing but red eyes and booty bandits up there.”
“Tha’s what I’m sayin’. Tier Three, Block Cee, brothahs up there livin’ ghetto fabulous.”
“Dude, you in the O-zone? You done miss me with all that.”
“Got a griot up there; suckah’s tore-up-from-the-floor-up ugly, be teachin’ em to catch theyself a ride without rock or reefer…”
Chinning himself on the bars of his cage to try and glimpse the mountains beyond the walls, Cholly was snapped back to where he was at by their noise, which elbowed his own thoughts clear out of his head. He resented the Old Man now for having given him a taste of possibilities, only to land him back in the drama by his antics. Still, time was he’d have laid down his life for that ragged-out old spieler, and probably would have had not the ladies come running bare-assed out the House of E screaming heart attack. Then Cholly’d left his post to see what was the matter and was instantly bushwhacked by SWATs; he was tossed in the county hoosgow doing dead time till his long-delayed trial, during which he was judged guilty of some imprecise charge and sentenced for an indeterminate term. He was sent off in a transport chain to a facility he’d only caught sight of from the window of the bus, which looked with its looming stone parapets surrounded by shrouded mountains like Dracula’s castle. And all that time he’d been unable to get any news of the rabbi—heard only the rumor he’d been indicted for homicide or some such smack accusation that made no sense. In any case, here was Cholly back on the shelf, where his vintage anger festered under a hide that had once been so impenetrable. In the can your capacity for inspiring fear was your trump card, but in order to inspire it you had to feel it. Well, Cholly felt it now in spades. It threw salt in his game, the fear; it shook his control, and though he’d never even teased himself with the idea before, he began to entertain the possibility of escape.
Eventually removed from the hole and sent back to the general population, Cholly resolved to become a model citizen. He fell into lockstep with the prison routine, walked the tightrope between the man and the trash-talking toughs looking to make a reputation. He kept his own counsel and gave the screws no excuse for writing him up, resisted eyeballing them during the frisks and shakedowns. By forgoing trips to the commissary he amassed a small fortune in scrip, which he could use to bribe the COs who swapped it with the mules for drugs and smuggled loot. In this way Cholly accumulated favors he could call in along with the kites he floated for a release to labor details that might otherwise take years to obtain. Still, a season passed before he was given permission to work in one of the “shops.” Cholly’s was a concrete warehouse with huge fans expelling a hot elephants’-breath, where for eight hours a day he treated rubber gaskets by plopping them into a skillet of boiling water with a pair of tongs. Over time he graduated from vulcanizer to grease monkey in the small engine shop, and always he kept a weather eye open in his movements from building to building for some crack in the facility large enough for a big man to slip through. But Brushy appeared to Cholly Sidepocket to be seamless, its stone cell blocks hermetically sealed by center gates, end gates, and sally ports. Everywhere you looked there was hardware in the service of captivity: tiller-size brakes operating a multitude of deadlocks, systems of brass-handled levers protruding from their panels like organ stops. True, there were windows, unwashed in memory, through which nothing could be seen but the hazy outline of concertina wire and octagonal towers—and beyond them, what?
Sometime during the following fall, after considerable finagling, Cholly was promoted from the shops to the status of building tender. This was a porter primarily assigned to scut work, mopping and sweeping the trash-strewn galleries, emptying ashtrays in the dayrooms, carting dirty linen through a quarter mile of tunnels to the laundry. But while the work itself was menial, the porters were given virtual run of the facility, often entrusted with keys to secure parts of the prison and even access to inmate files. Instead of being cranked up by his greater liberty, however, Cholly felt sandbagged at every turn by his increased exposure to the type of incident that crippled your will. Plodding the prison corridors with his mop and pail, soap balls swinging from his waist, he was called upon almost daily to clean up the aftermath of routine atrocities. He scrubbed the “dressed out” cells on Six Wing, a kind of bedlam where the most depraved prisoners were housed, who flung their night soil about with gleeful abandon—that is, if they hadn’t sewn up their assholes to keep from being sodomized. Once, on Six, Cholly saw a young fish being jocked by his cellmate, who’d stood his victim in a toilet while applying a charged wire to his parts. When he reported the event to the day-shift wing bull, the insouciant officer took a look and remarked wryly, “That’ll sure cure yer rheumatiz.”
A storm came up one afternoon in mid-winter—a violent thunderstorm mixed with snow. Cholly and a few other porters were sweeping garbage from the flats on C Block when Boss Wilcox, prodding Cholly in the small of the back with his quirt, sent him solo to the third-tier gallery, saying, “You don’t need but to dry-mop it one time.” As he trudged up the cast-iron spiral with the mop and bucket from which he’d become inseparable, Cholly, grown mightily tired of late, thought that his own clanking joints echoed the sound of the closing cell-block gates. These days he staggered like the dopers in their thorazine shuffle and wished that his mind were as muddled as theirs, because the only way to fly this miserable bid was blind. Meanwhile the storm that was buffeting the penitentiary challenged the din of the raucous population within, until a cannonade of thunder cracked open the dome of the firmament and the lights went out. Cholly paused on the pitch-dark stair in the momentary quiet, waiting for the generators to kick into gear and the power to return; there would be chaos in the house—already the cons were banging tin cans on the bars—if the power didn’t return. But the blackout continued and the little heat the building retained had dissipated, as Cholly clumped the rest of the way in the dark up to Tier 3, where the entire gallery was illumined in a burnished glow.
Candles had been lit along the row of cells in which the prisoners, keeplocks all, were involved in a variety of unorthodox occupations. In the cell nearest Cholly an albino Negro with zebra stripes tatted over his hairless scalp was seated on his bunk, stringing an instrument that appeared to have been fashioned from half of a giant avocado. Next to him a Red Indian, a rainbow assortment of Sharpies poking out of his bandanna in lieu of a feather headdress, was sitting on the john with his pants around his ankles, limning the margins of a large open book. Next door to him a gawky yahoo with skin like cooked oatmeal—whom Cholly identified as a notorious pedophile—was hanging pink construction paper between curved cardboard struts, turning his cell into a diorama that depicted the ribbed belly of a beast. A brother in a conical cap decorated with stars and crescents poured pearl-colored gunk into a narrow flask and watched it slide around a helical tube of the type used to force-feed cons on a hunger strike. The tube was fixed to a syringe in which the fluid concluded as a drop of liquid gold. A bearded senior in a skullcap pounded shoe leather at an iron last; a splay-nosed gang potentate put the finishing touches on a pair of wings he’d carved from a block of ice, the ice apparently manufactured in his own dunker contraption assembled from scrounged odds and ends. Of course, whatever they created was only temporary; the goon squads would invade their cells and destroy what they didn’t confiscate, a prospect that did nothing to dispel the rapt concentration with which each man bent to his craft. As spellbinding as their occupations, though, was the silence (of all but the wind) that seemed to neutralize the commotion from the other tiers, a silence so complete as to suggest it was itself a kind of contraband smuggled into the riotous big house.
Alien as it was, the atmosphere on Tier 3 impressed Cholly as a place he had experienced before, though perhaps not in his current life. Then slapping his brow, he turned around and revisited the cell where the old man, a filthy apron pulled over his work shirt and scrubs, sat laboring at his cobbler’s bench, where the scent of leather and dye supplanted the usual urine-and-stiff-socks taint of the galleries. Becoming slowly aware of his observer, the old man lifted his smoke-gray head and exclaimed with a near toothless grin, “Cholly Sidepocket, mayn schwartze!” a puff of steam escaping his lips with every syllable.
Said Cholly regretfully, “I ain’t belong to you no more.”
The rabbi stood up and approached the bars with a buoyant, loping step; stir, it seemed, had done him a world of good. He was holding the grainy upper of the brogan he’d been working on by a tongue that lolled from its leather vamp. Then pointing to the floppy topsole with the wooden mallet in his other hand, he croaked, “This is the earth, and this,” nudging the heel with a crooked pinkie, “is hashamayim, the world to come.” Then he tapped with the mallet the bottom of the topsole that dangled its row of hobnails like a yawning jaw, joining it somewhat sloppily to the ill-made upper dripping latex cement like mayonnaise between crusts of bread.
“A shiddach!” he proclaimed with pride. “A match!”
At that Cholly felt the barrel vault of his chest give way and cave in. “Ol’ man, you crazeh as evah,” he managed through a single bearlike sob. The rabbi stuck a liver-spotted fist through the bars and bumped his knuckles against the black man’s thick fingers, still wrapped around the handle of his mop. “Sprankle me, honey gee dawg,” he piped, and having wrenched from his friend a lacerated chuckle, went on to explain: “Everyone that he enters here must abandon hope. But to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope, is given to them a secret medicine. Shah,” placing a bony finger to his lips, “if they knew this, the hopers, they will feel they have been cheated.”
Back on his unit Cholly began to calculate the ways he might get himself transferred to C Block, Tier 3. He knew that the process could take time; he’d have to stay on the prowl, ride it out, maybe get up off a little info and tighten his game. But he also knew that, while you might age rapidly in the joint, and die a thousand deaths, time itself stood still. Time, so to speak, was on ice.
♦♦♦
WHEN SHE WAS seated in a plastic chair at the rickety table across from the murderer, who was holding in either hand a red shoe, Lou Ella struggled to maintain her self-control. They were the ugliest shoes she had ever seen, a travesty of ruby slippers, bits of sequin sewn unevenly onto their heels and toes like the scales of a radioactive fish, globs of glue seeping between the counters and rubber soles. Though she judged herself a pretty tough cookie, the overnight trip across the state in a crowded bus (along with the burden of Sue Lily, who was no lightweight), the shakedown of her purse and then her person, and the shock of the dismal gray prison itself had taken their toll on Lou. Then, presented with the bogus old buzzard in his jailhouse getup, the beanie and outsize denims more foolish than stripes, she was suddenly overcome by fatigue, and the tears began to flow.
The rabbi caused the shoes into which he’d stuck his hands to tapdance on the tabletop. “What are you crying?” he wondered throatily. “How comes it everybody that they see me they got to shpritz tears?” he seemed to ask of the fluorescent lights.
She blew her nose in the pinafore of the unwieldy baby sister she was bouncing on her knee. “You tell me,” she challenged, summoning a hostility she thought suitable to the occasion.
“For your dead lover you weep?” suggested the rabbi, sounding almost hopeful. Despite his ashen skin and runny eyes, the sulfury tangle of his beard, he looked none the worse for wear from his confinement; in fact, his moist eyes seemed almost to shine with a kind of crazed sympathy.
Lou Ella narrowed her eyes and stiffened, then snickered until the snot ran and she had to blow her nose again. “He wadn’t never my lover. He wadn’t but a crush.” The vehemence of her outburst shocked her, though even more surprising was that the old dude actually looked hurt by her pronouncement. He nudged the tacky shoes tentatively in her direction.
“I made you,” he offered, explaining that he’d begun to pursue a new hobby in prison.
A rogue impulse to apologize for having brought him nothing in return invaded her consciousness before she banished it, appalled. Then she inquired pointblank: “Why did you off him?” For there was no reason to postpone the question, having come all this way to ask it. But though she’d rehearsed it in her head innumerable times, it now sounded somehow misplaced.
But if not for this question, to which the rabbi (looking sheepish) had yet to respond, what was she doing in this godawful place? She seemed to be waiting for the old man to tell her, which wasn’t logical; it was tantamount to having made the journey in order to find out why she’d made the journey. Lou ran a hand through her cropped magenta hair. Meanwhile the pitched voices in the Visiting Room, sweltering despite the seagreen film obscuring the windows, were so distracting that she could barely think. The room itself, with its sentinel vending machines and signs warning against inappropriate contact, defied any type of intimacy. At the adjoining table an obese woman in a flowered muumuu the size of a haymow leaned across to slap her son the convict silly after he’d attempted to sing her a yodeled rendition of “Mama Tried.” At another table an inmate photographer snapped a Polaroid of a heavily medicated prisoner shackled to a restraint chair, next to which was parked a moribund old lady in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube up her nose. Infants swarming over the rails of their allotted play area had to be tossed back into their pen by patrolling officers in dress blues, while Sue Lily herself, ordinarily so passive, had begun to squirm and fidget in Lou Ella’s lap.
“Boykh,” she said in a nearly unprecedented ejaculation, becoming so unwieldy that Lou had to excuse herself and deposit the child in the turbulent playpen along with the others; and there she stood gripping the rail, a hair ribbon drooping over an unblinking eye, making ineffable noises that evoked a double-take from her big sister. When Lou Ella turned back to the rabbi, his simpering expression reinforced her conclusion that she’d made a grave mistake in coming here.
After all, Bernie Karp had been dead and buried these past two years and she was getting on with her life without him, wasn’t she? A year out of high school already and although she’d been offered scholarships, advised by counselors what a shame it would be to waste a mind like hers, Lou had elected to stay home and work instead. Her baby sister had been diagnosed with some sluggish strain of autism and was being sent to a special day school that her mama, repeatedly passed over for a managerial post at Fed Ex, could ill afford. So Lou stayed on as a full-time employee at the video outlet whose absentee owner had neglected to convert his stock to DVDs, which meant that the store’s already skeleton clientele had dwindled to a handful of irregulars. As a consequence, the girl had ample time to pursue her reading of Carlos Casteneda, Ekhart Tolle, and Emanuel Swedenborg, though in truth she hadn’t done much reading lately. She preferred to view three-handkerchief romances starring Ida Lupino or Loretta Young from the outlet’s Adults Only section, though the films failed to move her either.
After the trial she’d thought, Now the grief will start, but it never did. There was the guilt, of course, due to the lack of grief, and there was the missing him; she did miss him, though she began to wonder why. After all, Bernie Karp was a very ethereal fellow with neither foot planted firmly on Mother Earth, and what had their hooking up been but a series of small frustrations ending in a large one? True, they’d shared certain common interests, but Lou was beyond all that now; she understood that to be alive was to be fettered to a dying planet where the only release was through some forbidden pleasure. “When’s the tragedy begin?” she’d asked herself, but in place of it, in place of a blast of sorrow that might rupture the glacier in her breast, she felt only an enduring lassitude. Nothing seemed to matter much anymore. Restless in her isolation, she began to seek out the company of unsavory types, syrup heads and aspirin freaks among whom she earned the reputation of being an easy lay. Though she viewed her own bad behavior as a betrayal of her departed boyfriend, Lou found that remorse somehow sweetened the mischief. Was she so angry with him that she wanted to desecrate Bernie’s memory? Well, yes. Yes, she fucking was. But she knew that anger wasn’t the whole of her motivation, and after a time there was little satisfaction in bad behavior either.
One evening, despite her misgivings, she went to see Bernie’s parents, though they’d made it abundantly clear at the trial that she represented associations they would rather not be reminded of. But time had passed and Mr. Karp had recouped his losses since the fall of the House of Enlightenment; he’d acquired an extra chin and an artificial tan which he displayed to good advantage in his TV ads. His wife, wearing a tangerine training suit, touted her enrollment in a Cardio Rebounding class (that involved weighted hula hoops and a mini-trampoline) in which she planned to sculpt her body to complement her blue-rinsed hair. Having apparently made a kind of peace with Bernie’s slaying, they welcomed Lou Ella cordially, inviting her into their home, where they sat on a deep-cushioned sofa holding hands. Skeptical, Lou thought they were either making a show of congeniality or had maybe had themselves lobotomized.
When she’d weathered the shock of their friendly greeting, she asked them in all sincerity, “How do y’all cope?”
They trod on each other’s answers, Mrs. Karp beginning again to praise the virtues of her exercise program while her husband claimed an absorption in business matters. Then a silence during which each, looking askance at the other, waited for their spouse to speak first, until both spoke simultaneously again.
“Pills,” asserted Mrs. Karp, as her husband admitted, “We visit the rebbe.” His wife gave him a subtle elbow to the kidneys, which he not so subtly returned. She swiveled toward him in a show of pique that just as quickly subsided, as she too confessed, “We visit the rebbe.”
The girl was dumbfounded and said so. Begging their pardon, she asked how they could bring themselves to take solace in the man who had wasted their boy. The wife shrugged her own puzzlement, then offered a muddled adage about forgiveness being the spice of life, while her husband declared almost defiantly, “He’s become like a second son to us.”
Taking heart from his impenitence, Mrs. Karp added, though still a little shamefaced, that they had recently begun discussing adoption proceedings. Then she leaned forward to touch the girl’s knee through the hole in her jeans. “You should go and see him,” she ventured, as if recommending a good beautician.
Horrified, Lou Ella muttered thanks for their hospitality, declined an offer of pralines and tea, and left their house abruptly thereafter. But while she dismissed Mrs. Karp’s advice out of hand (it was way weird), the conversation seemed to have awakened a latent impulse—because she did begin to conceive against all her better instincts a desire to visit Rabbi ben Zephyr herself. When the desire had grown to an urgency, she realized what should have been obvious all along: that she needed to go and ask him in person why he’d done what he’d done. What possible reason, she wondered for the umpteenth time, could he have had for icing her boyfriend? The answer would provide some “closure,” wouldn’t it, and wasn’t closure what everyone wanted? Though Lou had the sneaking suspicion that what she really wanted was to open the whole can of worms again.
She’d had to travel all night on the bus from Memphis. That was the only way she could make the connection with the van that shuttled the families of inmates from the nearby town of Wartburg (a gas station and a rusted threshing machine among weeds) to the prison. She’d been surprised, when she contacted the prison authorities, to discover that she was already on the rabbi’s visitors’ list, since she and the murderer had never formally met, but this was the least of the mysteries surrounding Bernie’s death. She informed her mother in the vaguest of terms of her projected trip, which got no more than a weary nod from Mrs. Tuohy, who complained she’d be stuck with Baby Sister all weekend. “Awrat,” sighed Lou, “I’ll carry her wi’ me,” though the truth was that she took comfort in the nearness of the mostly inanimate child. But when the searches began preliminary to the visit, she wished she’d left her little sister behind. It was bad enough, dreadful in fact, when the female guards began to strip-search Lou, making her remove her ballet skirt and tie-dyed underwear, snapping her thigh-highs and probing her private places under the supervision of a male CO. But that they performed a similar operation on Sue Lily, whom they handled like some big-boned glove puppet, was finally the limit. “We’re out of here,” she informed a matron, who ignored her, shepherding Lou and the oyster-eyed child into the hubbub of the visiting room.
Then she was seated before this poor excuse for an Ancient of Days, who offered her his cheesy red shoes, and suddenly the grief that had waited so long in abeyance chose that moment to well up and spill from her eyes. Across the table the rabbi gazed at her with a puppyish affection tinged with pity.
“Fuckwad,” said Lou, incensed at his presumption, “you don’t even know me.”
He raised his bristly brows. “I know by you your pupik tattoo and the taste from your tongue that you burned it one time in your gleyzl chocolate in the Dixie Café,” he said, leaning across the table so that a guard waved his baton between them to signal they should maintain the proper distance. “I know the journey of your soul from a guppy and the Island Mango air freshener you would spray in your room to hide the smell from the funny cigarette.” He was leaning close again, his breath reeking of the lard cutlet he’d had for lunch, crumbs of which clung to his beard. “I know how you trim it, the poobick hair.”
Lou cocked her head, transfixed, unable to tear her gaze from the fretted face that framed the old man’s limpid eyes, the light therein beaming some species of molten moonshine. Involuntarily she stretched a hand over the table to rap on his forehead, scored with wrinkles like a musical staff, and when in response he nodded slowly in the affirmative, she recoiled in disbelief. “You stink of treyf,” she accused, rummaging her brain for more ammunition to injure him with, resisting the fascination that wrung her heart. Shaking her head to rid it of nonsense, she repeated, “Why’d you rub him out?”
The rabbi extended the thoughtful blister of his lower lip. “Maybe I rubbed him in,” he submitted. “To his neshomeh I gave it the liberty to take up a new what you call it… a crib?”
Crib? She hesitated. “What was wrong with his old one?”
“It was stuck tsvishn tsvay veltn—between this side and the other. So I set him aloose.”
“Don’t give me that bull,” spat Lou, “I’m tired of all that hoodoo horse-shit. It’s as phony comin’ from you as it was from him.” Though she wondered at that moment which “him” she referred to. “There ain’t no world but this one and it’s already half in the crapper.”
“He was too much in it, the world,” said the rabbi.
“He wadn’t in it enough,” declared Lou.
The old man let go a sigh like a groan with wings. “That too,” he lamented, winking a watery eye, “that too.”
Anger roiled in the girl, who saw herself in a scene from one of those noir flicks she watched at the video store, one in which Madeleine Carroll as the murder victim’s moll removes a weapon from her purse to get even with his killer. But Lou’s purse held only her makeup, some Goo Goo Clusters for Sue Lily, and a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and besides she had no wish to hurt him anymore. On the contrary, once her anger had fizzled she found that she was strangely relaxed in the killer’s company, enjoying a tranquillity she told herself it was unforgiveable to succumb to. But the clamorous room no longer rattled her nerves; she might have been alone with him in, say, a parlor or the backseat of her mama’s Malibu.
Just then there was a disturbance at one of the other tables. The administrative officer had bolted from the dais to back up a couple of guards who’d confronted a standing prisoner and his female visitor. The two of them were protesting their innocence—the con combative, his companion fussing with her beehive even as she shouted poisonous oaths—while a guard claimed that the photos in the album they’d been poring over were backed with pressed sheets of crystal meth. When the officer made to confiscate the album, the prisoner—ropy biceps, teardrop tats in the corner of an eye—tore out one of the pictures and stuffed it into his mouth, which brought down the wrath of the provoked COs. Voices were raised, batons deployed, canisters of irritant dust sprayed in a scuffle that commanded the attention of the entire room. Lou herself had turned toward the fracas, only to have her attention recalled to the table that the rabbi had abruptly shoved from between them. Then, with an audible crackling of joints or crinoline, he lifted the girl onto his lap. Why didn’t she fight him? This was degrading, no? It was wrong in every category known to man: for there she sat in full view of the room astride the geezer’s knobbly knees with her back against his whistling chest, feeling a sizeable lump in his pants. Buttons were sprung and the lump released, which nuzzled her rump beneath her flounced skirt like a small animal seeking shelter, which Lou felt curiously anxious to accommodate. It occurred to her that she had primped for this occasion—for this “rape,” was it? The word hardly applied, though her underpants were pulled aside and her womb straight-upon filled, while the old perv gummed her earlobe whispering, “The Lord sm-m-mite thee, sweet m-maidl, with m-m-m-madness and astonishmum of heart.”
“Awrat,” Lou heard herself admit, “I’m sm-m-mitten,” cracking up over the delirium of her willing surrender as the two of them took flight.
With eyes closed Lou Ella saw everything through her organs and pores, each facet of her anatomy featuring at least five senses. What they observed, once her lover had irrigated her insides with his luminous seed, were the toppled walls of the prison, the mountains and the pillowy clouds above them, the harum-scarum rooftops of the shtetls of Paradise. She heard from a playpen somewhere back on earth the warbling of her baby sister in the tongue of nightingales, whose language Lou understood perfectly.