The Tribe

by Bari Wood

They were going to walk and he was the only one who could stop them. He could do it. The people on that block hated cops, but they hated Jews more, so they’d talk and he’d get a sane description of the fourth man. If he didn’t, he’d do to the tribe what he’d planned for the kids, he’d find the weak link and push. Dworkin . . . little Dworkin with his soft brown eyes was his man. He’d pull him in at midnight and at six in the morning, at all hours, until the old bastard had his days and nights all mixed up. He’d pull him in on Friday nights and on Saturday morning, and there’d be nothing for him to eat but ham sandwiches. Hawkins grinned. He’d make sure the others knew what was happening and they’d push Dworkin, too, so he’d be getting it from both sides. In a week, a month at the most, the old fart’d break and deal. Jews were good at deals, Hawkins thought nastily, and he’d have his fourth man. The big one in the poncho, the key, and once Hawkins had him, he’d have the rest of them.

  It’d be a big case, bigger than Son of Sam. Vigilante Jews Kill Five Spanish Kids. Big news, big time. The case would make Hawkins’s name and, best of all, the whole bunch of lying Holy Rollers would spend the rest of their lives in the can. Levy too. Especially Levy.

  The prison barber would shave his beard and cut his hair. He’d wear blue work clothes like Meyer Garfield and he’d live like the rest of the killers. But for how long? How long could a skinny old man with skin like white paper last at Ossining? A year, Hawkins thought, maybe two. He’d die alone in his bunk with the toilet next to him in his cell. Or in that bare yard under the basketball hoop with a circle of murderers, rapists, and thieves for company. . . .

  Hawkins bent double like a man with a cramp because he suddenly remembered that when Levy left the barber they’d take him to the showers. They’d strip him like they’d stripped the prisoners in the camps. Then they’d lead him, shivering and frightened, to the stone shower room. They’d give him soap like the SS had given the condemned and he’d stand alone on the cold floor under the shower head like all those other people had done, waiting for water or gas to come out of the holes in the rusting metal. Hawkins groaned again and someone touched his shoulder.

  “You okay, man?”

  A huge black man squatted next to him. He was sixty and overweight; he was wearing a light gray silk suit, gray silk shirt with a maroon tie, and gray alligator shoes. His face was coarse, deep lines ran down the sides of his mouth, and his hair was powdered with gray. But his eyes were large, soft, and kind, and his hand rested gently on Hawkins’s back.

  “You sick, man?” he asked.

  Hawkins looked past him and saw a gray Cadillac almost the color of the suit waiting at the end of the dock.

  “Hey, boy,” the black man said, rubbing Hawkins’s back gently. “Nothin’ kin be so bad. I’ll git you a drink, a steak, find you a little nookie, you’ll be okay, boy.”

  “I’m okay,” Hawkins said.

  “No, you ain’t. You in awful condition . . . what happened to you?”

  Hawkins looked at the other man’s gentle homely face and said, “A man I love is a murderer, and I can make him pay for it—” he stopped. The man put his hand under Hawkins’s arm and pulled him effortlessly to his feet. He brushed at Hawkins’s jacket.

  “A man?” he said. “A lover man, a frien’, what?”

  “Like . . . a father,” Hawkins answered.

  The man stopped brushing and looked very serious. “You can’t bitch aroun’ with yo’ daddy, boy, no matter what he done.”

  The man let Hawkins go, and after a moment Hawkins took the tape and the report out of his pocket. The man watched him closely as he walked to the very edge of the dock. He looked down at the river that ran at his feet, crumpled the report into a ball, drew back his arm, and threw the tape and report out into the river. The tape sank at once. The report fell slower, held up by the wind. It hit the water, bobbed, then blended with the other litter and Hawkins couldn’t see it anymore. Tears he couldn’t control ran down his face and the other man took his arm, clucked with sympathy, and led him gently but insistently off the dock to the sunny street.

  Chaim Garfield sat at the kitchen table with half the paper. He hadn’t seen one since the holiday started, or heard the TV or radio. He was hungry, and before the formal cold meal to break the fast of Yom Kippur he had half a bagel smeared with butter and cream cheese and a glass of sweet wine. There would be guests soon, people from his shul who visited him every year at the end of the holiday, and his wife and daughters were arranging platters of cold fish and cheeses and hard-­boiled eggs. One of his sons-­in-­law was across the table from him with the news section, the other had turned on the TV in the small bedroom, and his granddaughter was asleep in her portable crib in the big bedroom. The women talked quietly, the TV noise was only a murmur, and he chewed his bagel and looked out at the river, feeling, as he always did when this holiday was over, a great sense of peace. The feeling bemused him. He’d atoned for sins he hadn’t committed in the name of a God he didn’t like, and he couldn’t understand why the experience gave him peace. He shook his head at his reflection in the window. No one noticed. His son-­in-­law finished the first section of the paper and they traded. The murder of the five boys was on a back page and he read the story.

  He wondered how Jacob Levy would feel reading the same story. Maybe he was a vengeful man and the murders satisfied him. But then Garfield thought about the mothers of the dead boys and he tried to weigh the two sets of grief against each other, the mothers’ for their dead sons, and Levy’s for his. He knew he’d never be able to take sides and if he didn’t stop trying he’d wind up feeling so lousy he’d have to go to sleep. Then he noticed the word clay in the story. It reminded him of something and he made himself think about that so he could stop thinking about Jacob Levy and the five mothers. He finished his bagel, had another glass of wine, and tried to think what it reminded him of, but couldn’t. He read the story again. The article said the clay might have been used to express contempt, or as part of some esoteric ritual. Neither made sense to Garfield.

  “Did you read the story about the five boys in Brooklyn?” he asked his son-­in-­law.

  “Yeah . . . some mess.”

  “Dave . . . does the mud or clay remind you of something?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Garfield shook his head. “I don’t know. Just something . . .”

  Dave Schermer shook his head. “Sorry, Pop. I can’t help. Don’t worry, it’ll come to you.”

  The doorbell rang. “Oy!” Ada cried, “they’re here. Sara, put on water for tea, Chaim, put on your jacket. . . .” She grabbed the platter, rushed out of the kitchen. Garfield reluctantly folded the paper over the story of the dead Eagles. David was right, he thought. It would come to him in the shower some day, or when he was polishing the ceremonial silver, or saying a brocha. Hours, days, years from now; when he’d stopped thinking about it.

  Labor Day weekend ended the best season in the history of Bianco Bros. Notions and Variety, and Louis Bianco decided to take his family to Nova Scotia for three weeks. It was a hot muggy day in the middle of September and he stopped by the store to get his deep-sea-­fishing equipment, which was stored in the basement. The heat had seeped in through the stone walls, and the basement was hot and damp. He collected the rods, reels, and tackle box, then stood for a moment smelling the air. After a long hot spell like this, and when the air was very damp, he thought he could still smell traces of the big bottle of Prince Matchabelli cologne he’d broken thirty-five years ago. The stuff had soaked into the cement floor and the heat and dampness brought it out again. He breathed in. He could smell it all right, and he wondered where Abrams was, and Pearce. He’d meant to call Abrams or write to him. He still had his address in the old leather book they kept next to the phone. But the address was as old as the faint smell around him and Abrams had prob­ably moved away years ago, or maybe died. Pearce was in his seventies, if h
e was still alive. Speiser was dead and so were most of the men on that list by now, Bianco thought.

  “ ‘Hardly a man is yet alive . . .’ ” he said softly. Then he tucked the rods under his arms and carried them and the tackle box up the stairs.

  By the time he got back home, the story of the boys’ murder in Brooklyn took up two paragraphs on page thirty of the Post and there was nothing in it about clay.

  PART TWO: RACHEL LEVY

  Chapter 1

  Rachel heard murmuring; she thought it was part of a dream. In it she was carrying Adam, who was amazingly small and light, to a canoe, like the one they’d rented when they went through the wilderness park in Minnesota. She carried him easily at first, then as the woods got deeper, and the sun started to go, his body got heavier, and soon she was staggering along the trail, toward the canoe that waited at the edge of one of the lakes. He was alive and awake, his eyes were bright, and he talked to her, to make the trip go faster. She didn’t listen to what he said, but the sound of his voice was a comfort, and before long she reached the canoe, laid him in the bottom, careful not to bang his head on the slats. Then she got into the stern, and with a sweet movement that no one who hadn’t portaged could appreciate, they slid across the shallow end of the water and out into the lake. He couldn’t move, but he talked as she paddled, the murmuring of his voice spread over the flat water.

  She woke up and opened her eyes, but the murmuring went on. She had a pain between her legs, her back hurt, and she knew she’d had the baby, and that it was Jacob sitting next to her bed, praying or just talking to himself. She was glad to be alive, not on the lonely lake with her paralyzed husband. She turned her head to smile at her father-­in-­law, and saw Isaac Luria sitting on a chair next to her bed, his lips moving, his fingers rubbing something flat and silver in his hand. He saw she was awake, and he stopped talking and put the silver whatever in his pocket.

  “The baby?” she asked.

  “A little girl,” he said. “But perfect. Seven pounds four ounces.” He looked at her like he always did, with the same flat look he’d give a chair or piece of meat. Yet, she thought, he’d been praying for her, or over her, or something, and she smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, just regarded her without any expression on his face.

  Suddenly she wanted him out of her room.

  “Jacob . . .” she cried.

  “He’s eating,” Luria said. “He’s exhausted and needs to eat.”

  She lay still, watching the ceiling, then the snow that blew against the window. She asked him when she could see the baby, and he said he didn’t know. Then she asked where Golda was, and he told her Golda was with Jacob. His voice was soft, and she knew he was trying to sound kind. They didn’t say anymore to each other and she tried to fall asleep. She closed her eyes but couldn’t forget he was there; she even thought of trying to get out of bed, when the door opened and she saw Jacob. He threw his arms wide and shouted so loud nurses came running down the hall.

  “It’s a little girl, Rachel. The prettiest baby in the whole world.”

  Rachel and Levy learned how to take care of the baby together. Golda showed them how to bathe her and she recommended brands of powder, paper diapers, cotton, baby oil, even though she’d never had a baby herself. She said she’d read a lot, so they listened to her. They called the little girl Leah. She was born with hair, which was thick and black, and curly by the time she was three months old. Her eyes turned hazel, then brown. She didn’t get fat enough to suit Levy, and he worried, even after the doctor said she was fine.

  On Fridays, Rachel lit the Sabbath candles according to Jacob’s instructions. She shielded her eyes against the glow the way he taught her, and with him and Leah watching, she held her hand flat and waved it around and between the flames in an odd Eastern gesture, the meaning of which was lost, but Jacob said women did it anyway.

  She cooked, kept the house, helped Levy in the store in the afternoons with Leah in her playpen next to the cash register. She played cards on Tuesdays, went to the movies on Saturday with Golda or Barbara Fineman, and thought that it would have been a good year if she could sleep nights.

  Getting to sleep was the problem. It was quiet and she was used to noise. In Minnesota, other professors had parties, or played Bach, Mozart, Scriabin until late at night. In Brooklyn, trucks ran all night between fisheries on the bays and the bridges. When she was growing up, people walked under her window from Central Park to Columbus, talking, laughing, yelling until late, and buses ran all night. But in Laurel, it was quiet. She tried to imagine that she could hear the surf on the other side of the Island, or the sea birds, but the quiet defeated her imagination and she stayed awake until she heard Levy leave his room, which he did every night, and go into the baby’s room. Then she’d fall asleep. If she didn’t, she would think about Adam, and that was dreadful because she didn’t remember him alive, diminutive, vibrant, and with the brightest eyes she’d ever seen; she remembered him in his coffin. Levy had warned her not to look. Orthodox Jews never looked at their dead, but she had insisted. He had been too sad to argue, and the mortician, after a few hours of preparation, lifted the simple coffin lid and she looked into her dead husband’s face. Pancake makeup covered dry rubbery-­looking gashes from the knives, and the lids covering the protruding eyeballs looked too thin to keep out the light.

  Before they killed Adam, nothing frightened her; now, if the baby coughed, she called the doctor. If she ran a fever, Rachel wanted to take her to the hospital. She paid the mortgage on the twenty-­fifth and had the van tuned up every three months. She bought five pounds of coffee at a time and ten pounds of sugar because she was afraid of running out. She bought a whole case of toilet paper and in the middle of wrestling it down to the basement, the absurdity of what she was doing hit her and she sat on the basement steps and cried until Leah, in her crib, started crying too. The worst, craziest fear was of the doorbell because when it rang, she thought automatically of the story The Monkey’s Paw and she had a glancing image of opening the door and looking into her husband’s dead face, the eyelids blown away like spider webs and the poor bare eyeballs staring at her, weeping from the light they couldn’t shut out.

  She lost weight, got dark rings under her eyes, and decided that what she needed was fresh air. She started driving out to the beaches with Leah. Leah loved it; she screamed when the waves broke, and clutched wildly at the sea gulls that flew over their heads. Rachel looked out over the gray water toward Europe; Finland was there, she thought; Norway, Russia. “Home,” she whispered to Leah. But she knew if she ever found that flat ice plain her grandmother had told her about, it would be covered with factories. Ten thousand factories, all making rubber boots. “Rubber boots,” she told Leah, who waved her hands and cried “ubbah.” Rachel started back to the car, then saw a black man in fishing boots standing in the water almost up to his knees, casting into the waves. He had the same strands of white in his frizzy hair that Roger Hawkins did, and even though she knew it wasn’t Hawkins, something about the figure was reassuring; she crossed the pebbles and stood near him; he didn’t move away.

  “Did you get anything?” she asked, wanting to hear his voice.

  “Not yet,” he said. He didn’t sound like Hawkins, except for the soft timbre some black men’s voices had.

  “What’s running?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Blues maybe.”

  He kept his back turned and she left him alone. When she got home, she looked for Hawkins’s name in the address book. It wasn’t there and she called Levy at the shop. He was quiet at first, then he asked, “Why do you want his number?”

  “He was Adam’s best friend and we haven’t heard from him for almost a year, Jacob.”

  “He’s a busy man, Rachel. When he has time, he’ll call,” Levy said and he hung up. She went out to the Florida room and stood next to the window wall and looked out for a long time, tryi
ng to figure out why Jacob should sound so cold about calling Roger Hawkins. Hawkins had been Adam’s best friend. “If I was in trouble,” Adam had said once, “I’d call Hawkins. I feel safe with him. We used to go to Astoria, to the Italian section where they hate blacks and Jews the same, and we’d sit in any bar there, with the whites trying to look like they were going to kill Hawkins because he was black and me because I was a nigger-­lover, or a Jew, and either way they hated me. I’m a little guy and they smirked when I stood up to go to the can or order another beer but I always felt safe with Roger. Not just because he was big. Though he is. One of those men who never seem to stop standing up. He says he’s six three. I think he’s taller. . . . But anyway, it wasn’t just that. It was this gentleness about him. A wall of gentleness and humor. And pretty soon he’d smile at the wops at the bar and their eyes would lose that hard look, and I’d remember what handsome people they are, and I’d be smiling too. We made friends, just like that. If I’m ever in trouble, Rache, get Roger Hawkins. If you’re ever in trouble and I can’t help, get Roger Hawkins.”

  Was she in trouble? She couldn’t sleep and she longed for company that wasn’t Jewish and female. Or Jewish and a dentist from Centerreach or a psychiatrist from Glen Cove.

  She called information. She knew he lived in Queens, but she didn’t know the street. She knew he lived with his mother, which seemed crazy, since he could have lots of women, but she didn’t know his mother’s name. There were three R. Hawkinses listed in Queens. The second number she called was his. His mother answered and gave her his office number. His secretary answered there. Rachel held on while the woman went to get him, and she realized that she was looking forward to hearing his voice so much that she was a little breathless. But it was the woman who came back on, saying that he was busy and he’d call her back. She hung up and thought that after all this time he could talk to her at least for a second. Or tell her himself that he was busy and would call later. She heated up the soup, sliced the roast.