Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  "The mags were lying there on the counter wrapped in thick plastic. Salacious Sluts & Blatantly Busty Bimbos... that was the title of the topmost magazine.

  "Salacious Sluts," she repeated, leaning hard, for theatrical effect, on the first consonant of each word. "And the jerk wasn't the least bit embarrassed?" Her husband flashed a sick smile and wagged his head from side to side. Lillian shut the lid on the toilet and sat down. "Back in October… do you remember that ugliness with the little Hispanic girl in Benjamin’s class?"

  Mitzi Brookfield started a rumor that a Hispanic classmate was an illegal alien. The Mexican family dogpaddled across the Rio Grande and picked their way to Brandenburg, Massachusetts where they were presently living under false pretenses. Around midday, Lucinda Rodriguez, the scandalized third grader, went home crying. The next morning, Benjamin spotted the dark-skinned girl, clutching her father's hand, heading in the direction of the principal's office. Later that same day, The Brookfields were call into school to meet with the superintendent. After the unfortunate incident, there was no more mention of undocumented aliens or Spanish-sounding rivers that bordered the southern United States.

  * * * * *

  The following Saturday afternoon, Officer Murphy drove down the street and waved to Benjamin out the window of the police cruiser. Officer Murphy was a tall man with a prominent, beaky nose. Sometimes he pulled over and chatted with the neighbors, but most days he just drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned around and headed back to the main street at a crawl. Earlier in the week he pulled the car over at the mouth of Bickford Street and got out his radar gun. "Whatcha doing?" Benjamin asked.

  "Looking for people in a hurry to go nowhere fast." The officer winked and aimed his gun down the street in the direction of oncoming traffic. He seldom stayed longer than an hour or so. Then he packed up his hi-tech gadgetry and drove away. Today though, ten minutes passed and Officer Murphy's cruiser never reappeared. Benjamin pedaled his dirt bike to the bend in the road where a small crowd had gathered. The cruiser was parked in front of Mr. Jacobson's bungalow, and the Jewish man was sitting in the back of the police cruiser. Normally easygoing and unperturbed, Officer Murphy wore a sullen expression as he climbed into the car, barked something into the two-way radio and drove slowly away.

  "What happened?" Benjamin asked.

  "They arrested the old geezer," a teenage boy replied.

  "What for?"

  The youth shrugged. "Who the hell knows?"

  Benjamin hurried home and told his mother what had happened. She was outside hanging delicate items on the clothesline. Mrs. Carter fixed a clothespin on the tail of a pleated blouse. "Do you need to pee?" Benjamin shook his head. She threw a handful of wet clothing back in the wicker laundry basket and headed back toward the rear deck. "Get your jacket. We're going for a little ride."

  * * * * *

  "I need to speak to the chief," Lillian Carter demanded. At the Brandenburg Police Station, Benjamin sat on a chair near a corkboard with a collection of black and white photos of grubby looking men and a handful of equally uncouth females, while his mother spoke to the officer manning the front desk. After a brief exchange, Mrs. Carter disappeared down a hallway into an adjoining room. Ten minutes later she returned and sat down on the chair next to him. Benjamin looked at his mother. She was studying the collection of mug shots stapled to the corkboard. Another few minutes passed in silence. "What are we doing?"

  "Waiting," Mrs. Carter replied.

  “For what?"

  "For Mr. Jacobson to collect his belongings and join us here in the lobby." Another five minutes passed. Benjamin had lost all interest in the unflattering photos. There were too many and, after a while, they all looked the same. Not that the felons looked alike. There were Hispanics, Negroes, a couple of Asians and a still larger collection of white faces - an army of lost souls. Lost and clueless.

  Finally, the older man with the unkempt beard appeared in the hallway and came out to join them. "Hey, I know you!" Mr. Jacobson ran his bony fingers through Benjamin's hair and flashed a good-natured smile.

  “I’ll be just a minute.” Mrs. Carter disappeared a second time down the hallway.

  "My mother says you made the championship rings when the Patriots won the Super bowl."

  The man laughed making a dry, cackling sound. Benjamin had never heard anyone laugh like that, but it didn't bother him in the least. "I didn't actually make the rings; I designed them. Employees who worked in the jewelry plant actually poured the metal, fastened the precious stones and polished." "How do you like this?" The elderly man extended his right wrist to reveal a thick gold bracelet. "That's my own design. It was very popular - a big seller back in the nineteen eighties. Although, I suppose that was a little before your time." He removed the bracelet and draped it across his knee. "It's 10K, yellow gold Cuban Link."

  "Cuban what?"

  "Cuban link… that's the design style." He pointed toward the center of a strand. "I used a four-millimeter, rope pattern with a hand-crafted lobster clasp." Mr. Jacobson returned the bracelet to his emaciated wrist then held the metal up to the bright sunlight streaming into the lobby from an adjacent window. "Pretty snazzy, huh?"

  "Sure is a swell bracelet,” Benjamin confirmed.

  "You and twelve thousand fifty-three people share the same sentiments."

  "What's that?" Benjamin was pointing at the man's hairy chest.

  Mr. Jacobson reached up with a gaunt hand and fingered a gold chain. Several alternating circular links were coupled with a longer oval section to produce a very masculine braid. "Now this charming bit of artisanship is a Figarucci. The design combines elements of both the Figaro and mariner-style."

  "No, not the chain," Benjamin brought the elderly man up short. "The star."

  He tapped a six-pointed Star of David. "I'm Jewish. It's the symbol of our faith."

  "I know. My mother told me."

  "Religions… they're all the same," Mr. Jacobson rambled on in his easygoing, distractible manner. “As long as the believer’s heart is true, one faith’s as good as another. But you don't have to be a Jewish scholar steeped in esoterica to appreciate the basic sentiment."

  Benjamin had no idea what his neighbor was talking about but it was pleasant listening. Mr. Jacobson's singsong voice seemed to build with subdued intensity and conviction. No matter that the boy understood nothing his neighbor was telling him. The older man had taken him into his confidence; now a pact, a sympathetic communion existed.

  "Do you know," the man reached out and tapped the boy forcefully on the kneecap, "in the Talmud it’s written that every blade of grass has an angel that hovers over it and whispers 'Grow!' 'Grow!'"

  "Grass angels?" Benjamin repeated.

  The old man nodded soberly. Well that was something Benjamin could appreciate. As scatterbrained as she was, Junie B. Jones would also have cherished the notion of tiny, winged sprites flitting about the suburban countryside assisting with lawn care.

  Mr. Jacobson, who seemed a bit bleary-eyed, pulled out a grubby handkerchief and blew his nose rather loudly. "Growing grass… it's an incremental, cumulative process. No need to rush the miraculous."

  Mrs. Carter, who had wandered off to speak with an officer at the front desk finally returned. "Let's get out of here." Lillian muttered. Benjamin took one last look at the cork board. Was the Brandenburg Police Department planning to put Mr. Jacobson's picture up on the Wall of Shame?

  * * * * *

  On the ride home the boy sat in the back. "You could sue the Brookfields for libel," Mrs. Carter spoke without taking her eyes off the road. "Character assassination."

  "At my age?" Mrs. Jacobson laughed making a dry cackling sound. He didn't seem angry in the least. "That Officer Murphy's a nice guy. I don't think he realized…" The old man didn't bother finishing the sentence.

  "Yes," Mrs. Carter agreed, "he just got caught in the middle." Benjamin was still trying to figure out what exactly Officer Murphy
didn’t realize and why, as they were leaving the police station, he came out in the parking lot and apologized to the older man.

  “Mitzi’s mother was the chief instigator.”

  “Did Officer Murphy tell you that?”

  “In a roundabout manner, yes.”

  After dropping Mr. Jacobson off, Mrs. Carter swiveled in her seat to face her son. "How’re you doing?"

  "Good," Benjamin replied.

  Their neighbor, who worked at Balfour Jewelry for thirty-three years, was arrested but then, just as quickly, released and sent home. Officer Murphy and Mr. Jacobson were back on friendly terms. Everything was returning to normal.

  Mrs. Carter pulled the car over to the side of the road and slid the shift in park. She sat staring at the dashboard for several minutes. When another car pulled up behind her, the woman promptly rolled the window down and waved the driver past. From where he sat in the backseat, Benjamin could see the right side of his mother's face. Walled up in some private reverie, the hazel eye never blinked. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Your lips were moving,” his mother pressed.

  “I just remembered something Mr. Jacobson said.”

  “And what was that?”

  Benjamin felt his eyes compress to tiny slits. “Every blade of grass,” he recited with a rhythmic cadence, “has an angel that hovers over it and whispers 'Grow!' 'Grow!'"

  Somewhere in the distance a lawnmower fired up. “What Mr. Jacobson told you… say it again.” Benjamin repeated the Talmud saying.

  Several minutes passed. The lawnmower sputtered and the engine noise was replaced by the trilling of songbirds and crickets. "Mitzi got Mr. Jacobson in trouble." His mother spoke so softly, he could barely make out the words. "For no good reason… from shear spitefulness."

  "Yes, I figured as much." Benjamin felt a wave of despair settling in his gut. He could picture the girl grinning with orgasmic glee when she learned of Mr. Jacobson's arrest. Normal people didn't revel in other people's misery. But Mitzi Brookfield, who was heavyset with orangey hair and ridiculously large freckles resembling liver spots, was an eight year old grotesque - a sadistic monstrosity through and through. "What now?"

  "I'm wondering,” Mrs. Carter ran a tongue over her lips, “what Junie B. Jones might do in a similar situation."

  "Junie's just a stupid kid," Benjamin shot back. "She can just barely tie her shoe laces much less solve the world's problems."

  "A grownup Junie B. Jones," Mrs. Carter amended her previous remark. "How would she handle a preadolescent psychopath?"

  Benjamin didn't like where this was going. The trip to the police station was bad enough, but falling back on a fictional character from a children's book as a role model didn't seem like such a great idea. "Junie does lots of dumb things."

  "Yeah," his mother replied, "but they always turn out right in the end."

  "I suppose so," Benjamin mumbled half-heartedly.

  Mrs. Carter put the car back in gear. "There’s one last bit of unfinished business." She drove to the end of the cul-de-sac and turned the car around. Three streets down, she pulled over in front of a blue house with white shutters. "This won't take long."

  Wowie wow wow! That's a hoot, I tell you. Wait till you hear this!

  Junie B Jones had a dozen and one nifty catchphrases, but none could adequately describe what Benjamin's mother did over at the Brookfields. Mrs. Carter rang the doorbell. Mitzi's mother, a short dumpy woman with a mottled complexion similar to her daughter’s, cracked the door. She refused to let Benjamin's mother in, but listened with a constipated expression, her eyes compressed to tiny slits and lips pinched so tight that the rutted crow's feet on the side of her head stood out in bold relief. When Mrs. Carter finished speaking her mind, Mrs. Brookfield shouted, "Get the hell off my property!" But Mrs. Carter didn't budge. Mitzi's mother hollered all the louder, but the squat woman didn't seem to be making a whole lot of sense that Benjamin could wrap his nine-year-old brain around. Mrs. Brookfield was vindictive just like the daughter. Or was it the other way around?

  The dumpy woman made a motion to slam the door shut, but Mrs. Carter, with a firm grasp on the doorknob, positioned her right leg against the molding and, using the foot for leverage, muscled the door open. Mrs. Brookfield collapsed in a heap, sprawling backwards on the living room rug. Stepping over the threshold into the home, the uninvited guest shut the door behind her. "Aw crap!" Benjamin muttered.

  Five minutes passed. Things got very quiet. The front door opened and Lillian Carter emerged. Before his mother reached the car, Benjamin could hear Mrs. Brookfield let loose with an endless barrage of profanities, and then a second, childish voice began sobbing inconsolably, begging for mercy.

  The bedlam at the Brookfield residence continued unabated as Mrs. Carter turned the ignition key and put the car in gear. At the end of the street, the woman pulled up at a stop sign and looked both ways.

  "Wowie wow wow! That's a hoot!"

  Back to Table of Contents

  Time of Sorrow

  Padding along the tiled rim of the children’s wading pool, the young woman came directly to the lifeguard’s chair. Heavy, charcoal-colored eyebrows sprouted over wire-rimmed glasses. Mottled with acne, the pasty skin would never tan, not in a hundred, cloudless summers stretched end to end. “Peter Ostrowski?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ani rotzah lomar, shmee Ruthie. ”

  “Hello to you, Ruthie,” he said, refusing to pick up on the woman’s garbled Hebrew.

  She wore a shapeless, one-piece swimsuit of solid blue and exuded the slightly warped, God-crazed look of a religious fanatic. “My father, Rabbi Abramson, gave me your name.”

  “Just a minute.” Outside the chain link fence was a wiry alder, which, throughout the summer, sent a steady barrage of fruiting, golden catkins and olive nutlets cascading into the wading pool. From a lanyard around his neck, Peter groped for a whistle and blew a shrill, sustained note. The children, mostly preschoolers and a handful of mothers, climbed up on the slick walkway. With a mesh scoop fitted to a 6-foot, aluminum handle, he began skimming debris, mostly Japanese beetles, alder catkins and grass clippings, from the surface. Five minutes later Peter blew the whistle, three short blasts, and the children scampered back into the shallow water.

  “You were saying,” he said settling back down on his haunches.

  “I’m studying at the University of Jerusalem in September and need a tutor.”

  Something didn’t gel. The pale, owlish girl lacked the playfulness, the joie de vivre, of a student leaving home for the first time on an exotic adventure. “Many Americans studying at the Hebrew University speak only halting Hebrew,” he said evasively. “You can take the bulk of your courses in English and learn the language in your spare time.”

  Peter warned a freckle-faced boy for belly-flopping. The boy scowled and retreated to the far end of the pool. “Your father speaks fluent Hebrew.”

  “Would you take lessons from him?” the girl replied.

  Peter conjured up a mental image of Rabbi Jacob Abramson - an inch or two over five feet, scraggly beard, chain smoking one unfiltered cigarette after another. Glassy, bloodshot eyes - hypertensive, myocardial infarct eyes. A devoutly religious, thoroughly tortured soul. Yes, this would be his daughter!

  Reaching into her beach bag, she removed a tattered volume, which she handed to him. “A friend recommended this.”

  Peter glanced at the title, The Auto-Emancipation of the Jews by Leo Pinsker. “Where’d you find this prehistoric bone?”

  “Hebrew Teachers' College in Brookline. They have quite an extensive collection of Judaica.” Ruthie removed her glasses and gawked nearsightedly. The myopia was so pronounced that Peter doubted she saw much of anything beyond the tip of her nose.

  “Something funny?” Ruthie asked.

  He didn’t realize he was smiling. “For historical perspective, you choose a book over a hundred
years old and written by someone virtually unknown except among Jewish scholars.” Handing the book back to her, Peter added, “For the record, I’m no Jewish nationalist. I think the Israelis are a bunch of narrow minded xenophobes.”

  “My father told me you came back disillusioned.”

  Disillusioned. The word hung in the air like the ever present stench of chlorine.

  In the fall of 2007, Peter Ostrowski went to Israel intent on becoming a rabbi, but, a regrettable incident halted his spiritual quest dead in its tracks. Traveling through Hebron with a group of Jewish seminary students, Peter witnessed the shooting of a pregnant, Arab woman.

  The day had started out innocuously enough. At the Egged Bus Station, the students bought tickets and stood in line with the other passengers heading south. The station smelled sweetly of rotting orange rinds and Turkish coffee. Peter gazed at the scruffy pines and jumble of sand-colored, block buildings which clung precariously to the uneven hills. From the dusty bus station, the Jerusalem countryside wasn’t nearly as picturesque as in the vivid postcards which hung in the kiosks of the Arab quarter. The rolling hills of Vermont or New Hampshire were far more appealing and agriculturally productive, but the devout didn’t make pilgrimage to admire the Judean topsoil or covered bridges.

  There were soldiers in uniform and dark-skinned Sephardic Jews who gestured histrionically and shouted back and forth at each other while spewing airy sunflower seeds in every direction. An elderly woman with chipped teeth and a red scarf knotted around her head, held a live chicken upside down by the ankles. It was unclear whether she was seeing a relative off or planned to board the bus with the scruffy fowl.

  “Nice, Jewish girls!” Peter’s roommate at the yeshiva gestured with his eyes toward a kiosk near the ticket counter. An elderly Arab, his head and lower portion of his face shrouded in a black plaid kefiyah, was waiting patiently while two Israeli women dressed in khaki, military uniforms examined his identification papers. The man looked to be in his eighties with a stubbly, wrinkled face. The more aggressive of the two women, a beefy brunette who wore her military cap at a jaunty angle, kept slapping the tattered papers against the palm of her hand while peppering him with a never-ending series of questions. Her expression was grim, tactless. The second woman was slight-of-build and carried an Uzi machine gun on a leather strap that she kept shifting from one shoulder to the other. She looked utterly disinterested, more concerned with the unmanageable weight of the weapon than any threat posed by the decrepit Arab.