“Very cozy,” I agreed.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s hard sometimes to tell the difference between what’s genuinely cozy and what’s only cabin fever. That’s why I won’t wear the sort of shirt you’ve got on.”
It was a red-and-black checked wool Pendleton I had on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“That lumberjackie stuff. You look like a wood chopper. It gives me cabin fever just to look at you. Brr. I’ve got the chills. Brr. My teeth are chattering. I can smell your long Johns.”
“They wear these shirts up here.”
“More folks die of cabin fever in this state than they do of cancer, than they do of the heart attack, shoveling snow. It’s why I wear a suit, it’s why I wear a tie. It’s why I go around the house like it was Yom Kippur downtown. When they find me I’ll look like I put up a fight.”
“Really,” I said, “it’s not that bad out.”
“I know what I know,” the rabbi said darkly.
“What do you do about services?”
“I call off services.”
“They don’t object to that?”
“I tell them it’s a snow day, we’ll make it up later.”
“They stand still for this? Does everyone have cabin fever?”
“Everyone.”
“Rabbi Petch,” I said, “I’m drinking your tea, I’m eating your biscuits. It’s not my place to quarrel with you, but I’ve got to believe you’re having me on. That maybe this is something you do up here. Some initiation thing, to see can I take it, do I have the right stuff, as if I’d crossed the equator for the first time, or passed the international date line. To tell the truth, you’re mixing me up. In your letters you made it sound attractive. Now it’s as if you were trying to spook me. It’s not necessary. We had no deal. I’m not moving in on you. The people in New Jersey don’t even know about you. They don’t know my intentions. I have no intentions. I told you what the position is, what my situation entails. That this was just supposed to be a break for me, to see how I worked out in the parishes, to see could I handle the pastoral parts.”
“The pastoral parts,” he said. “That’s nothing. That’s the least of it, the pastoral parts. Even the weather, that’s nothing too. Even the cabin fever. What you’ve got to look out for are the Russian Orthodox. You’re looking at me as if I was nuts. Russians discovered this place. They battled the natives years, some hearts-and-minds thing. Then they converted them. They did. The Russian Orthodox church is very popular with the natives. All those onion-shaped domes that you see. You do. You see them everywhere. In Sitka. In Juneau, the Aleutians. Up and down the Kenai Peninsula. Kodiak. Even right here in Anchorage. (You know there are scholars who believe the igloo is a serendipity? That some native was trying to build a little Russian Orthodox church out of blocks of ice and snow? Monkey see, monkey do. Who knows?) Anyway, watch out for them. You see any Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers come roaring in on their dogsleds, waving their whips over their heads, hollering ‘Mush!’ and thinking whatever the word for ‘pogrom’ is in Eskimo, in Ice, get out of their way because they’re looking to beat the living shit out of you. Hey,” he said, “they learned from the best. Free Soviet Jewry, yes, Rabbi? So that’s another reason I don’t go out, why I declare so many snow days.”
“Mush?”
I swear I knew what he was going to say. I swear it.
“Ice for ‘Jews.’ It eggs on the dogs.”
And let them pass, Petch’s pensées. Only the distraction of the rabbi’s high-grade cabin fever. Some distraction. Some only.
One of the disadvantages of being without a wife in company is that when it’s time to vamoose there’s no one with whom you can make eye contact. Your body language falls on deaf ears. One of you can’t signal to the other of you that it’s time for the baby-sitter line to be offered up, the tomorrow’s-a-working-day one. I was on my own. There should be no hurt feelings. He means no harm. Be polite with this all-cabin-fevered-out colleague. I shifted my weight, I cleared my throat, I tamped at the corners of my lips with my napkin, Ice for “be seeing you,” for getting the hell out of there.
“The deal’s off then?” Petch said.
“What deal? We had no deal.”
“You know,” he said. “I can’t come to New Jersey? We can’t trade? The prince and the pauper?”
“Rabbi Petch,” I said.
“Listen,” he interrupted, “I make a bad first impression. I know that. I do. I’m paranoid. Hey,” he said, “if Jews had priests and bishops I’d be on the first boat out. They’d hang me out to dry in the diocese’s designated hospital.”
“Please, Rabbi.”
“No, please, come on. The way I talk? A learned man? Listen,” he said, and lowered his voice. Close as we were, I had to lean forward to hear him. “Listen,” he said, “they don’t know what to do with me. The congregation wants to be fair. They come over. Machers and shakers. Boiling mad. Determined. Minds made up. Once-and-for-all written all over their faces. But you know? They’re stunned when they see. Humbled. All of a sudden the cat’s got their tongue, they don’t know what to say. They’re thunderstruck in the southwest corner. They can’t do enough for me. However they were feeling, whatever was on their minds, on the tip of their tongues, it’s forgotten. All is forgiven. And I know what was on their minds, the tip of their tongues. I could say it for them. You know something? Once I did. I really did. I spoke their piece for them. From the tip of my tongue to the tip of their tongue.
“ ‘Rabbi Petch,’ I said, ‘how are you today? Cold all better? Good, excellent, alevay! We were worried. As a matter of fact, Rabbi, now that you’re feeling so much better, it might be a good time to tell you something that’s been on our minds, on the tip of our tongues. Some of the board members have noticed that you don’t quite seem to be feeling your good old self of late. Not precisely a hundred percent, not specifically par value. Well, it’s this winter, Sidney. It’s been a terrible winter this winter. It’s taken its toll from the best of us. Dan Cohen, for example. A shtarker like Dan. Heck, Rebbe, weather like this, unrelenting, you’d be a shvontz not to get shpilkes. We’re all shlepping. Anyway, we had a meeting, we put our heads together, we had a discussion.’
“ ‘Loz im gayn. It’s been a hell of a winter, he’s starving for light.’
“ ‘Loz im gayn? Loz im gayn? Loz im gayn where? Sid’s a widower. His brothers are dead, his sisters. All the mishpocheh got eaten up and picked clean in the Holocaust.’
“Someone said no, someone said yes. Someone said no again. Someone looked it up.
“ ‘Sidney. Sid. Kid. The long and the short. We made up a collection, we collected your airfare. We dipped into capital. We collected something extra. You’ll be home for Xmas, Rabbi. Come April, alevay, you’ll be searching for leaven, licking a hard-boiled egg, sucking parsley and charoses from between your teeth and having Pesach with your Aunt Ida in Arkansas hiding the afikomen from the pickaninnies. Next year in Little Rock, this is your life!’
“They never had the nerve. Even after I said it for them they never had the nerve. They went off biting their tongues, kicking themselves in the behind. So New Jersey was my idea. I can do what you’re doing. Bury people, say a few words. They’d put up with me in New Jersey, with my ways. In New Jersey I wouldn’t even have ways. Only here I have ways.
“I’m a spiritual, God-fearing guy. God-fearing? He scares the bejeesus out of me. I’m very impressed. Well, He makes an impression. All the ice and that darkness, the disproportionate strength of a bear. The whiteness of whales.
“Listen,” he said, “go in good health, but promise me.”
“Promise you what?”
“You’ll keep an open mind.”
“Certainly,” I said. “I will. I promise. But now,” I said, “if I could just use your phone. I’ll call a cab. I have to get going.”
He nodded in the direction of the telephone.
“You’ll write me?” he
said when I’d made my call.
“Write you?”
“From the pipeline. You’ll let me know how things are?”
“Sure. I’ll drop you a line. Well,” I said, carefully making my way through Petch’s obstacle course, “thanks for the tea. And thank you for seeing me.” But he wasn’t listening. He was peering out the window, looking hard at whatever it was he thought he could see in the gloom, March’s short daylight already shutting down.
“Is it my taxi?” I asked him.
“What?”
“Is it my taxi? Has my taxicab come?”
“What?” he said. “No. I don’t like the looks of it out there. Something’s up. If I were you I wouldn’t even try to go out this month.”
Remarkable. Wait. This is remarkable. What happened. Just remarkable. Maybe I should tell you—the guy? That I shared the ride with? In the wrecker? He turned out to be my bush pilot. Same guy. The law of no loose ends. What goes around comes around. The law of the return.
Well. We didn’t have such smooth sailing. To Moose Lip. Or Bear Claw. Or Seal Shit. Or Caribou Dick. Or Wolf Tit. Or whatever other made-in-its-own-image totemics the municipalities, settlements, campgrounds and wickiups went by in those cold arrondissements along that booming Ice Belt.
We came down in trees. Sergeant Preston and the Rabbi.
“I want you to know,” Skyking said, “I take complete responsibility for this disaster.”
“You do.”
“Complete responsibility. The FAA won’t have to come up with any black boxes on this one.”
“They won’t.”
“Pilot error pure and simple.”
“You’re some up-front guy,” I said, shivering, jumping about, blowing on my mittens and pounding my hands together now we were clear of the plane.
“Mea culpa, Rabbi.”
“Nobody’s perfect, my son,” I said, larky, in extremis the wiseacre.
“I just can’t for the life of me figure what happened,” he said, and launched into a song and dance I couldn’t follow.
“We were never higher than five or so angels,” he said. “Our attitude was always righteous and the artificial horizon might have been turned off for all the pitching and banking it displayed. We weren’t below, and I never busted, minimums. We enjoyed CAVU weather straight up in the civil evening twilight. There wasn’t any clear-air turbulence to speak of, and I never had to crab. I could have used some cultural features certainly, but what’s a fellow to do, make them up? Heck,” he said, “we even had eminence. And no use for a DF steer even if there’d been an FSS on our right wing. I didn’t have to lean and seemed to be greasing it on. My Pop Teases Fat Girls. Everything going so smooth we could have joined the mile-high club if either of us had felt the need or been better looking. We were never close to issuing a pan pan pan let alone a mayday, and if we were even close to coming out of the envelope I never heard about it. I didn’t red line or run scud or catch any lint in my transponder. I topped off in Anchorage so that wasn’t it, and if we didn’t get any pireps, airmets or sigmets, it’s because there just weren’t any weather conditions. True Virgins Make Dull Company? Perfect, A-OK. I wouldn’t have said boo to them over the Unicom frequencies even if I’d had the chance. Hell, my V speeds were good, to say nothing of that nice VASI light effect I was catching from the ice. Red over white, pilot’s delight. I never even needed VOR, and you were with me during the walk around. I’ve got good paperwork, Padre. I can’t for the life of me figure what could have gone wrong. If anything even did. It’s against all odds.”
“Maybe we didn’t crash,” I said. He knew too many acronyms and mnemonics, a chap too talky for the stereotype I’d have welcomed. A man in his position, in charge of machinery that can kill you, owes it to the customers to be taciturn, reserved, to play everything close to the chest. To tell you the truth, I don’t even like it when the first officer on a big commercial jet chats up the scenery. His eyes should be on the instrument panel or looking out for traffic. This guy, Philip, took me too much into his confidence altogether. Even while we were going down Philip was hollering information at me.
“Uh oh,” he shouted as the plane swung out of control and lost altitude, “something terrible’s happening! If I don’t get a handle on this situation we’re going to crash and die! The skin of this aircraft’s too thin, it won’t stand up to a real impact. I’ve got to get her nose up over those razor pines. See, in these temperatures the needles on the trees are like swords. All we have to do is just brush against them gently and they’ll slash shit out of our gas tanks. Then it’s Pow! Bam! Fuck! I’ll lay you dollars to donuts we explode! We won’t even get the opportunity to crash! Goodnight, Nurse, will you just look at the glare on that ice? It’s curtains for sure now. It’s too thin. Oh, it’d hold a couple of good-sized boys and girls on sleds and skates, but never the weight of a crashing, runaway airplane. The way I see it, we’ve got this last-minute, split-second decision to make. It’s a question of whether we want to impact in the razor pines, explode, catch fire and die, or go for the ice and drown. Those are the alternatives, but we have to make our minds up quick.”
“The ice!” I screamed. “The ice!”
And even though we came down in the trees, it was good to know that I wasn’t bad at the nick-of-time, last-minute, split-second stuff. And terrified that what had occurred to me hadn’t to Philip. That the ice may not have been as thin as he thought, and that even if it were there might still have been time for us to scramble out of the plane to safety.
“Wow,” Philip said, as we were set down, the plane’s right wing and tail cradled, resting, hung like a hammock in perfect, miraculous balance between the heavy branches of two razor pines, “did you feel that? A thermal! A save-ass, opportune, eleventh-hour thermal!”
“God is a mensch.”
“Tell me about it,” the pilot said, “we were going down for the count. Of course I was putting on the back pressure trying to get the nose up, but that updraft came out of nowhere, caught us and set us down again gentle as Mother.”
“He’s a baleboss.”
“A thermal!” he said. “In Alaska! At this time of year! We’re sitting pretty in the trees. As if we were held in so many palms.” He started to laugh. “In Alaska!. Palm trees!”
“He got de whole worl’ in he han’.”
Now, an hour or so into the aftermath, we were still cozy. We could have been soldiers before an attack, talking things over, our sweethearts back home, our plans for the chicken farm once the war was over. We could have been brothers sharing a bedroom, boys in a treehouse discussing the mysteries. We could have been crash victims. We could have been warmer.
The plan was to stay in the plane until it was light enough to see. Then, carefully as we could, we would try to extricate ourselves from the cabin, one of us looking out for the other and displacing his weight like a fellow leaning back out over the sea in a boat race.
What Philip had forgotten, and what I hadn’t known, was that though we were only three or four hundred miles north of Anchorage, the threaded latitudes and longitudes of earth were already drawing together, coming to a point, light tightening, geography’s diminished lattices and trellises, actually closing in on themselves, its patchwork weave of time and distance drawing together toward the perfect gathered pucker of the Pole. It was the old deceptive business of altered space I’d first noticed when we were landing at the Anchorage airport. Something happened up here. Time and space confounded each other. Tricks were played. At any rate, first light didn’t break until around noon. We’d been caught in the trees at about six o’clock the night before, stuck in the small plane for maybe eighteen hours, peeing in thermos bottles, jars of instant coffee, pots and pans, like vandals pissing up a storm in your kitchen. And whenever the cramp in our bodies got too great and one of us had to move, the other watched him in the great concentrated dark and compensated for his movements, contracting as he stretched, shifting in mirror image. We were li
ke people crossing a tightrope together.
“I’m yawning on three,” said Philip.
“Go ahead,” I said, “I’ll swallow and cover for you.”
Which stood us in good stead when it finally got light. And we saw just how precarious our purchase really was.
“Christ,” I said.
“Jesus,” said Philip.
We hung by a thread.
“The thing of it is,” Philip said, “we don’t want to go make any sudden movements that would tend to tumble this aircraft out of its tree.” He was whispering. “The thing of it is, we’ll be wanting to wait for a hard solid freeze to come up, then push the son of a bitch while it’s still in one piece out onto the lake ice—see,” he said, “it’s just water—so’s we can take off again someday.”
“Where are we?”
“God,” Philip said, “I don’t know where we are. I’m all turned around. Lots of this country ain’t ever been mapped. For all I know we discovered this place.”
Making use of all we’d learned in the dark about each other, our close-order drill valences and physics (though neither of us mentioned it—we weren’t the same height; I was taller, he was heavier—I could have told you Philip’s weight to within half a pound; he could have told you mine), it still took us almost two hours to climb down out of the plane. He had lain an open toolbox on the seat and spread out various tools between us like a complicated run of cards. From these we chose iron chunks of ballast to stuff into the pockets of our parkas. Now we moved stiff as figures on a big Swiss clock. He opened his door. I reached for the hammer. He moved his head like a pitcher shaking off a sign. I picked up a wrench and leaned my head against my window. He raised his left leg and swung it slowly toward the open door. I put a hammer and jar of nails into my coat. I opened my door and turned both knees toward it. He reached back and took a pliers and screwdriver into his hand. I drew a file, he drew an ax handle. I picked up a knife. He picked up a chisel and a planing tool. “Can you reach your arm back behind your seat and get my duffel bag?” he said. “Watch it, it’s heavy.”
The Rabbi of Lud Page 13