“When he had given away all the gifts he had to give, and disposed of all his food, he seemed physically to slump, somehow to collapse in the face as though he’d been rendered suddenly toothless, all expression fled from him. He seemed—we all felt it, I think—not only to have used up all his worldly goods and chattels, but all his ideas as well, all the hope he might ever have had for a future. This is important. I must make myself clear. Understand that he did not suddenly appear bereft or deprived. He did not seem desolated or stripped. No grief was in it. Nothing was in it. As if all the wise old man from the different village altogether who’d brought the potlatch to life by rising and proposing his toast to nothing at all had to do to see the toast bear fruit right before his eyes, was just stay awake long enough to see John Lookout’s face at that moment. It was the empty, vacant, neutral face of someone not very interesting in pre-REM sleep.
“But just then, quick as it had emptied out, quick, that is, as a tire blown on the highway, it filled up again. Lookout jumped up, smacked himself in the head, ran out, and was back in a minute with an unopened case of French champagne. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said. ‘I’m all farblondjhet tonight. There’s still some champagne left. Who needs a refill? How about it? How about it, Nanook?’ Nanook, who looked as if he was going to throw up, groaned and covered his lips with his fingers as you might cover your glass with your palm to decline wine. ‘You? Charley Feathers? No? How about you, Patricia Whale-water? No one? You’re sure? No takers? You’re sure? All right, it’s going going gone then, everybody,’ he said, and started to smash the bottles of champagne. He threw them against the walls of his house, he threw them on the floor. With all his might he threw them through his closed windows. He uncorked the last two bottles and emptied their contents over two handsome woven rugs he had apparently forgotten to give away.
“In the silence that followed we were not only too embarrassed to look at John, we were too embarrassed to look at anyone else either. I suppose that’s why we never knew who the guest was that finally spoke, who broke the silence and pierced that tight ring of eyewitness shame we all feel when someone fails to bridle an enthusiasm that has passed beyond mere enthusiasm and spilled over into the red zones of lost control and flagrant zealotry.
“ ‘That is a fine icebox someone has sold you, John Lookout,’ the guest said. To alter the mood. To save the party.
“ ‘Oh, do you think so?’ John asked. Then he opened the door of his G.E. frost-free refrigerator and ripped it off. He removed its blue plastic crisper, set it on the floor and jumped up and down on it until it was in pieces. He did the same with the butter tray, tore out the wire shelves, destroyed the icemaker, and then went to work on the motor itself, being careful to spare, out of respect and courtesy to his guests, only those parts where the freon was stored.
“A strange thing happened.
“The mood altered once more. The zealotry retrograded back into enthusiasm again, and the enthusiasm re-metamorphosed into that ostentatious generosity which is the impulse and impetus of a potlatch in the first place.
“There was a frenzy of generosity. One Indian was so moved he gave away the lead dog of the dogsled team that had fetched him. The man he gave it to was so moved he shot the dog.
“Desperately they tried to part with the gifts they’d been given, and, when they couldn’t, they destroyed them. And when they ran out of things to destroy that John Lookout had given them, they turned on their own property and destroyed that. Mukluks went, parkas. Snowshoes, canoes, curved ulu blades for gutting fish. Everything, everything! All were caught up in the spirit of the celebration. After a time, when there really was no more property left toward which they could demonstrate their indifference, they seized upon their own families. Braves beat their squaws, squaws hit their papooses, papooses scratched at their mosquito bites until they became infected. Even then that terrible nexus of generosity cum enthusiasm cum ostentation cum zealotry wasn’t finished. When you thought it was over, something else would happen. Someone rose, for example, stuck his finger down his throat, and regurgitated the entire feast he had consumed just hours before. It was awful,” he said, remembering, “awful. You couldn’t know how they would ever manage to end it.
“It was the major trope of that particular potlatch, and the source of an important new Indian stereotype—the Indian-taker.” He paused. “It was a sort of Black Thursday for them, you see, and effectively destroyed the Indian economy in that part of the high Yukon for years.”
“How did they?” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“How did they manage? To end it.”
“Oh,” he said. “When I took out my ulu and started to shave off my beard.”
It was stuffy in the cabin and I cracked open one of the plane’s Plexiglas windows, surprised to feel the air, soft and dark and balmy as the sweetest spring. It was even a little warm, in fact, and Philip and I removed our outer garments. Flowerbeard seemed oblivious to the weather, and not only didn’t take his parka off but hadn’t even lowered its hood, which still covered his knit woolen watch cap. Indeed, he was talking again, launched, I supposed, into another tale, as oblivious to his audience as he was to the temperature.
He was speaking of the alienated Tinneh Indians, who are not only tribeless and clanless, but are without families, too. He was telling us how generation after generation of Tinnehs break away from each other, how parents divorce and children are placed in orphanages or live for a while with a mother or a father and then run off. (Identical twins, he told us, everywhere else handcuffed together by the genetic code, will, among the Tinneh, over time, burst their mutual bonds, drift apart, fall away, dissipate affinity, annihilate connection, disfigure resemblance, climb down some great, ever-attenuating chain of relation, and move from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.) And how at one time they probably outnumbered the Tlingit, Haida and Athapaska tribes combined but were now reduced to perhaps a handful of individuals, rare in the general Alaskan population as Frenchmen. It was actually pretty fascinating. I know I was interested, and even Philip seemed to have lost, maybe even forgotten, his odd hostility to this man who was now clearly become our guest—I felt my host’s role and offered to share the last of my portion of our survival biscuits with this queer Elijah of a fellow—and was concentrating on what he was saying as hard as I could. When suddenly he broke off. “Oh, look,” he said, “the sun’s up. Now we can work the plane down off these logs and get out of here.”
“Oh,” said Philip, fixing his hostility in place again, “and once that’s done, how do you propose we take off? Seeing, I mean, as how the lake is all melted and more suitable for a toddler with a pail and shovel than for some bush pilot stuck in an airplane without a pontoon to its name?”
“Isn’t it frozen?” said the wandered Jew. “Maybe it’s frozen. I think it’s frozen.”
“What, are you kidding,” scoffed Philip, “in weather like this? Like Opening Day in the horse latitudes?”
“I’ll go check,” the flower-bedecked man said and, limber as someone a third his age, was past my knees, had the cabin door open, was out of the plane and onto its wooden perch and dancing down the thick jigsaw of logs as if they were stairs. The next we knew he was leaping up and down on the surface of the frozen lake. “It’s solid,” he called, jumping. “It’s frozen through. If it holds me it can hold the plane. I weigh thousands of pounds.”
“I hate a showoff,” Philip muttered.
“Shh,” I cautioned.
“Yeah, yeah,” Philip said, “nevertheless.”
And before we could accommodate to the queer disparity of temperature between where we were situated in the plane and where, not fifty yards off, the lake existed in a different climate altogether, he had come back, shrugged out of his heavy outerwear (more, I guessed, for our benefit than his own), had signaled us out of the cabin and, clever as a moving man, was directing us in the this-
goes-here/that-goes-there displacements and arrangements, furiously pulling the timbers away as if they hid children covered in a cave-in.
Maybe because there were three of us now. Or that one was a man with flowers in his beard. At any rate, we finished just as the sun was going down and were rolling the airplane out onto the ice when Philip offered his objection. (And me silently pleading with him: No, Philip, please. Not, Don’t bother. Because that wasn’t the point. The bother, the wasted energy. But because I was a theologian, even if only of the offshore sort. Because I was a theologian and knew that when you’re sitting in the wilderness rubbing on a Torah’s wooden handles and hocus pocus, lo and behold, who should appear but some stranger that he’s got something as out of the ordinary as chin whiskers on him that look as if they might have been cultivated by the very folks who brought you the Garden of Eden, let alone trimmed at and mowed on by magic Jap floral arrangers, and the newcomer mentions he weighs thousands of pounds though he’s light enough on his feet to jump up and down on water, you don’t whimper and whine at him or make nag-nag at your human condition.) But the last thing this Phil is is shy. Something’s on his mind, he lets you know. “I suppose,” Phil says, “you have some special way of starting up a dead, battered-up engine that’s seen its last days.”
“Turn the key in the ignition.”
“Right,” Philip said, and we got in the plane. Before you could say abracadabra it was full dark, the engine coughed and turned over, and we were roaring down the ice to a blind, treacherous liftoff, Philip not knowing if he could risk pulling her nose up now or whether he still had some room left to muscle her a bit and maybe gain a little more speed and momentum before crashing into the razor pines on the opposite shore of the little lake, when at the last minute the northern lights came on like the bombs bursting in air and it was suddenly bright enough for him to see what to do.
“So,” Flowerbeard says once we’re at cruising speed and Philip’s established radio contact again, “be it ever so humble there’s no place like home. Even the sky seems familiar. It’s good to be back. You know?”
And I’m thinking: Sure, if you live in the sky. If you live in the sky and your house is on fire. Because that old aurora borealis was blazing away in front of our eyes like a forest fire. The primary colors at kindling point. At green’s ground zero, at yellow’s, blue’s, red’s. (It was like being in the center of the midway at a state fair among the garish, glaring, glancing illuminations and kindled neon of the rides, the blazing calliopedic centripetals and centrifugals of light, in altered gravity’s dizzied sphere, hard by the game booths bright as stages. Or like hobnobbing among all the invoked wraiths of light and color like some Periodic Table of the Sun, the conjured avatars and possibilities of its bright erogenous zones and all the heightened decibels of heat, silent banging bursts of fireworks exploding like bouquets of semiprecious stone, amethyst, sapphire, topaz, garnet—the gem boutonnieres. Commanding the spicy savories of hot solstice and, oddly, remembering wicker, recalling bamboo, mindful of, of all things, summer’s swaying, loose and ropy hammock style, the interlocking lanyard of the deck chair and chaise like a furniture woven by sailors, recollecting—most queer at this altitude—the littered life outdoors, stepping on candy wrappers, condoms, the sports pages like a dry flora and everywhere setting off the sounds of localized fire like a kindled shmutz, or the explosion of all our oils and fats and greasy glitter like stored fuel.)
Or, like flying directly into his beard.
“Well,” I said, “bright enough for you?” And winced, frightened by my pointless nerve.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “you start to look forward, you really do. Gone so long, in all that cold and dark, wearing the same mittens and snowshoes weeks on end, you forget what it’s like. Civilization. The comforts and mod cons. And begin to believe God’s all there is, and that all He ever made was weather, conditions to test your mettle, ice to suffer by and humiliate your character. But now spring’s come and I remember all I’ve been missing—the amenities that make all the difference. Sterno, for example, simmering beneath good old-fashioned home cooking.”
Philip confessed he was a news junkie himself, and told us that in his position, Bloombeard’s, it was current events he’d have missed most, and that though he hadn’t mentioned it while we were still technically crash victims, when 10:00 P.M. rolled around and the Eyewitness News came on TV, he couldn’t help but wonder who had been raped, who had been murdered, whose house had burned down, who had been lost in natural disasters. He took some comfort, he said, from the fact that when we were out of radio contact with civilization, and he couldn’t get the engine to turn over, we were something of a current event ourselves.
“Oh, current events,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers dismissively. “The Four famous Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Mr. War, Mr. Famine, Messieurs Pestilence and Death. I’ve never been much connected with novelty myself.”
Oh? I thought. Look me in the beard and say that. “But, Tzadik,” I said instead in the rabbi mode, “isn’t it important, particularly in these times of tribulation between ourselves and our Arab cousins in the Holy Land, in Eretz Yisro’el, for us to be informed and keep abreast of the developments? To search for peace? To seek, I mean, some equitable solution to our problems?”
He looked at me for a long while before he answered.
“You’re one of these ‘root causes of terrorism’ guys, ain’t you?” he said.
“Well …” I said.
“No,” he said, “I can see it. You are.”
To tell you the truth, I was a little troubled by some things the Israelis had been doing. The world was a complicated place. There were no open-and-shut cases. There was enough guilt to go around. Of course it was outrageous that the Syrians took pot shots at us from their vantage point on the Golan Heights, or that the PLO could lob shells into the kibbutzim along our northern borders wounding and killing our children, or that they planted bombs in buses and on supermarket shelves in boxes of detergent or mixed in with the oranges in the produce department. Certainly it was wrong to hijack airplanes and harm innocent civilians. But they had their grievances. There was no denying it. The Israelis were on the West Bank now, laying foundations, making it over, turning it into the new Miami. And the camps! For generations now the Palestinians had been crammed into rat-infested quarters open to the sky, forced to live out in the weather like a city for Lears. How different were these “camps” with their running sewers from the favellas of the hopelessly impoverished or even from the ghettos of our own people?
“Yes,” he said. “I can see it all over you. You want to be fair.”
“Well, it’s their homeland, too. And, strictly speaking, they were there first, you know.”
“Fuck them,” he said.
“Please, Tzadik,” I said, “this is not an argument.”
“And finders/keepers is? Let me tell you something, kiddo. There are higher principles than finders and keepers.”
“Hey,” said Philip, “I think I’m getting a Fairbanks AM station.”
“Because you don’t kill someone over finders/keepers. A homeland? A homeland they want? What,” he said, “they’re imprinted to deserts, allergic to ice? Let them live on the glaciers. Let them have a go at making the icebergs bloom.”
This was some rebbe we had here. Suddenly I was telling him all about myself, what I did in New Jersey.
“A rabbi is not a thoracic surgeon,” I said. “He is not a proctologist or an ob-gyn man. He doesn’t set your bones or flush out your ears. But all I do is say prayers over dead strangers. Tell me, Khokhem, is it right for me to specialize like that?”
“No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. It doesn’t make a difference if they’re strangers. Or that you don’t feel a genuine anguish for their loved ones. Grief is only a form, a kind of a courtesy. It’s something we have to do. It’s a sacrament. Not like sitting shiva or saying Kaddish or putting pennies on their eyes
. Just grief. Grief itself. If you’re properly shocked when you hear bad news. If you’ve got”—he waved his arms about at the invisible mountains of ice beneath and all around us—“sand.”
And then, while Philip tapped his toes to the music coming in on his headphones from the Fairbanks radio station, Flowerface launched into the wisdoms. He told us how God did too create evil. “And you know something?” he said. “It’s a good thing He did.”
“It is?” I asked, surprised.
“Sure,” he said, “it shapes our taste.”
I lifted a headphone away from Philip’s head, bobbing to the rhythms of Fairbanks radio. “What?” he said.
“Cut out the dreaming and listen to him. This ain’t no sock hop. He’s telling us worthwhile stuff. Go on, please, Macher.”
He looked hurt, Philip. I regretted what I’d said and fumbled with his earpiece, trying to replace it, when Petalpuss stayed my hand and began to draw it toward his beard, guiding it into that luxuriant garden. “Be careful,” he whispered, “of the thorns and thistles.” I jerked my hand away as if it had been scalded. (Though I swear he let go first, his reflexes beating my reflexes.) Then he turned to Philip and apologized for me. “It’s not what you think. He’s a rabbi and has faith in lessons, the vicariousness of the heart’s bright ideas. Incidentally, what was that song you were listening to just now?” Philip told him and he nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “Sometimes, when the weather let up and it got warm enough to whistle, I’d whistle that one myself.”
“Really?” Philip said.
“Oh, yes,” said the man with the flowers in his beard. “It’s a very catchy tune. It perks a man up who’s been praying while the midnight sun goes down if there’s a cheery tune to turn to.”
“Really?”
The Rabbi of Lud Page 17