It’s politicians. It’s the Jew banker-owners, with mortgages on Wind Ridge, Bobtown, McCracken, Cheet. Let the mines burn, let the mines shut down, declare bankruptcy. Nobody gives a damn for the people who live here, that’s how the Jew-bankers make billions of dollars and the U.S. government countenances like the U.S. government supports Israel.
Some places, the ground is hot to the touch. Sinkholes, poisonous gases. You couldn’t play outside. After a snowstorm there’s places like raw wounds, where the snow has melted. In 1983 it was declared a Hazardous Area. Residents of Akron Valley were evicted from their houses but there were those who refused to leave.
Yet the fires smoldering below are never seen. A visitor from the outside coughs and wipes at his eyes and complains of the stink but not people who live here. Why should we leave, this is our home.
The State of Pennsylvania has seized some properties within the Danger Zone but not others. There is less budget now for relocating. The ones who were relocated caused a stink of their own not liking the deals. Wait for people to move away on their own. Wait for people to die off.
Yet nobody will die. They are in their eighties, nineties. Some younger, like Delray Busch, not even sixty. Why should we leave, this is our fuckin’ home. The county and the state pay welfare. We keep our lawns mowed. There are two churches: Methodist and Church of God. It’s seventeen miles to Akron Center where the Consolidated School is. It’s twenty-one miles to Frostburg where there’s a discount mall and a Safeway. Eighty miles to Pittsburgh. This is not the edge of the world, there’s TV.
You need a satellite dish, because of the hills. Once you have it there’s how many stations? Maybe two hundred.
At first people thought the smoke would kill off the trees and grasses but it does not. Some houses, women grow roses. There was a warning about growing your own vegetables but not for years. A long time has gone by. Some days, the smoke is more like vapor than actual smoke. So maybe the fires are dying down.
Along Main Street there is the old Sunoco station, the shuttered Royal Theatre, Walgreens. Broken windows, rotting roofs. Strange to see grasses and saplings growing in the street, but beautiful, too. And at South Main there’s people living in two or three of the old houses.
The bird population is up. Not just starlings and grackles but jays, cardinals, robins, songbirds. The temperature is higher on the average than anywhere in the state. Over their windows people tape polyethylene sheeting to save on fuel. It’s too much trouble to take the sheeting down in the spring so the windows are permanently covered. Like glaucoma-clouded eyes.
Purest anthracite coal in the U.S. Can’t trust the government but used to you could trust the Union but no more. My help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.
Where do you live they asked the Tattooed Girl. I live in Hell she laughed. For always the Tattooed Girl was good for a laugh.
And yet. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her cunning.
7
IN THE NEW YEAR, much would be changed.
Yet he lived as if in the historic present tense.
Lacking the shield of Aeneas. Lacking the personal/historic perspective.
“Alma? I’ve been thinking.”
Rehearsing these words. So he might speak calmly, not betraying the excitement he’d been feeling all morning.
For it wasn’t a comely thing, the quavering excitement of a man of young middle age in the presence of a girl of perhaps twenty who frowned like a schoolgirl uncertain of her lesson, not daring to meet her schoolteacher’s eyes.
“I’ll be needing you to assist me more hours of the day, starting next Monday. And so it might be more convenient for you to move into the guest room . . .”
Of course, Alma’s salary would be raised.
In the New Year, much would be changed.
8
IN THE NEW YEAR.
“Fuck those steps. God damn.”
Snow now came heavy and wet and the nineteen stone steps had to be negotiated with extreme caution. They had to be shoveled and kept clear of ice. Of course he’d hired a snow removal crew for that purpose and for shoveling the sidewalk in front of the house but still the steps were treacherous immediately after even the lightest of snowfalls, sleet, freezing rain. And could he ask his assistant to help him on these steps? Yes he could but could he ask her repeatedly? And was this fair, was helping a two-hundred-pound panting man up nineteen stone steps in a freezing wind a legitimate task for an assistant who wasn’t an acknowledged attendant or a nurse?
“Alma. Thank you! This won’t happen again, I promise.”
Swallowing his pride then, not every time but sometimes he entered the house by way of the side, rear door, the old delivery entrance door leading to the shabby back stairs. At this door there were only three or four steps, and no one likely to observe if, on a bad day, Joshua Seigl leaned heavily on his cane and dragged himself up like a bundle of sodden laundry.
9
IN THE NEW YEAR.
She moved into the guest room on the ground floor of Seigl’s house. For now she was a full-time assistant to the man. Her salary was raised. She was thrilled to tell Dmitri Meatte but did not tell him exactly how much higher her salary was now.
Seigl smiled the schoolteacher smile. Plucking at his whiskers that were shot with gray and needed trimming and sometimes she saw without wishing to see a gleam of saliva on his lips.
“Alma? If the room is too cold, or too warm, here’s how the thermostat works . . .”
Yes, Mr. Seigl. Thank you.
10
SHE HAD NO clear idea why I hate him. Hate his whiskers, his fat Jew lips. On slow dull lonely days her heart would have stopped its beating except I hate hate hate made it kick and race. There was the swoon of anticipation of telling her lover such words to make her lover laugh and grunt with satisfaction and look to her listening for more. See, he’s having trouble walking some days? Climbing stairs. Doesn’t want to say that’s why he wants me around all the time now. It’s like he’s surprised every time he can’t make it on his own. Bullshit. Like a little kid crapping his pants pretending he didn’t know it was going to happen, it isn’t his fault.
Making Dmitri laugh.
The Tattooed Girl was funny as somebody on TV. Once she got going. Or once she was high.
Like liquid flame in her veins was the Tattooed Girl’s hatred of her employer. The Tattooed Girl was one to hate her employers male or female but now the insult to the injury was, this fucker’s a Jew.
I see him picking his nose. Noises he makes when he thinks he’s alone. Pulling at his whiskers like there’s ants in them. That drives me crazy. And all the papers and crap he has in that house. “Manuscripts”! Like it’s something holy, he’s the messiah and hot shit. Like the world should give a shit about him.
Sure she could concede, Seigl was kind. Sure Seigl was courteous. Sure Seigl was a gentleman not like every other asshole she’d worked for in the past ten years. Sure he paid her well and always on time. Never bossed her around mean and sarcastic like other men.
(Like Dmitri Meatte sometimes? But Alma was in love with Dmitri Meatte.)
The Jew never touched her, brushed against her. Anyway not yet.
She hardened her heart against him not wishing to feel sorry for him. Whatever was wrong with him. Seeing his shaky hands and the glisten of sweat on his face she turned away with a smile of childish cruelty. Good! Now you know.
Her father Delray Busch had had the shakes as long as she could remember. Raising his hand to his children in threat and the hand shook but you cringed just the same for that hand could strike, and strike hard. So too her uncle Mason, a tremor in both hands. And there was grandpa with something the doctor called Parkinson’s. Half the men in the Busch family had emphysema. And Alma’s mother was always coming down with bad colds, bronchitis. You couldn’t blame just the mines the men worked or the smoky air, common sense told you it was cigarette smoking, too. Not that any
body gave a damn enough to stop.
There was asbestosis some people had, too. Like emphysema. You ended up hooked to an oxygen tank, sucking air twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life. If you were lucky.
The Tattooed Girl was one of the lucky ones in fact. Why Alma was prone to be in a good mood. A single beer, a single joint, some guy feeling her up and saying kind words to her, Alma’s in a party mood. What you’d call a party girl. Would’ve made a fantastic Playboy bunny! A guy she’d known in Pittsburgh took some photos like for a centerfold to send to Playboy, Penthouse . . . See, Alma left Akron Valley and never a backward glance.
Her father might be dead by now. Coughing out his lungs. For sure, her grandfather. Nobody’d sought the Tattooed Girl to invite back for any mourning or funeral not that they could’ve located her anyway. Nobody’d sent out Have You Seen Me? flyers seeking the Tattooed Girl.
Not that Alma cared. Fuck, no.
Not that she gave a thought to it. Back there. It was hard enough to remember last month, last week. Yesterday. And now there was this new thing in her life, this new job. In this new place.
Hate hate hate him: the Jew.
She could not have said if it was Mr. Seigl’s Jew-ness she hated, or hating him, and knowing he was a Jew, that was why. Which came first. Maybe she’d never have guessed he was a Jew except Dmitri made so much of it. (She’d never have guessed the sister “Jet” was any Jew for sure.) Or was it maybe instinct? Something you could smell almost? But she’d hated that fucker Scanlon at the bookstore worse and Scanlon was purely white.
It was like trying to figure out why they’d tattooed her, the guys she’d trusted. Feeding her vodka and some kind of meth? crystal? she’d never know, and what the fuck difference did it make she was fucking grateful to wake up afterward, O Christ. Sweating so she’d dehydrated to the point, they would inform her at the ER, her kidneys and liver near about collapsed like sinkholes, leaving her to be found like trash behind a Big Boy Dumpster by the river. Pissburgh! She hated Pissburgh to her dying day. But trying to figure out why the tattoos, and why so ugly and scrawly, like the tattooist was nodding off, what the tattoos might mean . . . She couldn’t.
It was like wrong-sized things had gotten inside her skull. Mismatched and broken boards.
Hate him! Panting and puffing like a hog. Red-faced hog. If he ever touches me . . . It infuriated her that other people seemed to like Seigl. So much! Now he was having her answer the phone for him and she took messages and these were invitations to dinners and to universities to give lectures and to teach and the callers spoke in respectful terms of Joshua Seigl and she was instructed to say yes she would give Mr. Seigl the message and yes he would return the call as soon as possible and hanging up the phone she was breathless with indignation and the urge to cry Fuck him, and fuck you. Hot-shit you think you are don’t you!
And so many letters. To him: Joshua Seigl. Where she, Alma Busch, had never received any letters in her lifetime and would never. And no one of the Busches had ever or would ever.
To her lover Dmitri she’d brought some of these. A card she’d found inside a beautiful leather briefcase shoved away at the rear of a closet of manuscripts:
December 17, 1996
Dear Professor Seigl,
We want to thank you for this wonderful seminar.
Here is a small token of our gratitude. Please come back to Palo Alto soon!
Krista Jessica Eric Michael Kate Brian Scott Lyle
And Seigl hadn’t ever used the briefcase, it was brand-new you could tell. Probably forgot he’d ever been given it.
(Dmitri frowned at the card and muttered Bullshit! and tossed it away. The briefcase he liked. Alma’s heart swelled with pride, Dmitri liked the briefcase a lot. It was real classy made in Milan. He could sell it or pawn it. But maybe he’d keep it for himself.)
Gold cuff links she gave her lover, too. For he had a weakness for such things. As a waiter at The Café he oiled his hair and combed it straight back from his forehead Italian-style and made sure he looked good every night, sexy-smooth and cool. And he wore the gold cuff links engraved with initials A.D.S. Alma had found in a bureau drawer in the bedroom she slept in at her employer’s house. He’d wished Seigl would turn up at The Café that night but Seigl had not. (In fact Seigl hadn’t appeared at The Café for weeks. Not for dinner, and not to play chess.) Who was A.D.S.? Somebody dead probably. As near as Alma could figure out most people in the Jew’s family were dead and he had no children and his crazy bitch of a sister had no children either. The cuff links weren’t really Seigl’s so it wasn’t stealing to take them and he’d never know they were missing because he’d never known they were there.
Mostly that was why she hated him. Because he didn’t know what he owned. Like a blind man his eyes were turned inward, like a deaf man he heard only the sound of his own voice inside his head. She hated him because he had money. Because he had money and didn’t even spend it! Because there were checks inside some of the envelopes she’d opened, thousands of dollars in checks he’d never endorsed and never cashed because he’d never known about them. And he lived in that house. Alone in that house. How many rooms she’d never counted all the way and half of these rooms closed off because Seigl had no use for them. And people in Akron Valley with five or six kids living in some wood frame “bungalow” at the edge of a sinkhole or they lived in trailers.
Jew-money it must be Seigl had inherited. Because you never saw the man work. Never any actual work. Not even teaching you’d expect someone like him to do. (Some mail came to Dr. Joshua Seigl but he was no medical doctor. He’d told her why he was called Dr. but she couldn’t remember.) Helpless as a baby he was. Could barely turn on the stove for himself. Couldn’t find the vacuum cleaner. (Alma found it. In a closet.) His groceries were delivered. Other men came to shovel snow for him, trim trees after a windstorm. Not just whatever was wrong with him now, you could see he’d always been this way. Whoever had brought him up had spoiled him. Maybe it was a Jewish thing, spoiling the men, keeping them helpless. If Seigl rinsed plates to put in the dishwasher there’d be dried food on them. If he rinsed a cup he’d drop and break it. Two-thirds of his dishes were chipped and cracked and even Alma could see they were expensive china. Fancy heavy silverware, tarnished green. (Alma waited for Seigl to ask her to polish this silverware, anyway some of it, but he never did.) She’d smuggled out forks, knives, serving ladles to show to her lover but Dmitri said it was worthless to him, all ugly and tarnished and if he took any of it to a pawnshop he’d be fingerprinted and under suspicion of theft so it wasn’t worth it.) What really pissed Alma, she had to laugh out loud, though Seigl had a washing machine and drier in the basement he sent out his laundry every week to Mount Carmel Laundry & Dry Cleaners and they sent back everything ironed, and charged Seigl about as much as Alma made in a week: not just white cotton dress shirts but his undershirts, shorts, pajamas, towels and sheets!
(Why didn’t Seigl ask her to do the laundry? Laundry was easy. Ironing was easy. Just one person, it would be so easy. But he never seemed to think of it, and Alma wasn’t going to suggest it though she washed her own things now she was living in the house including her towels and sheets. She was starting to remember how she’d helped her mother with the laundry, hanging it outside on the line. Before the air in Akron Valley turned bad. How the fresh laundry smelled in the sun. Pressing her face against it, sniffing.)
Books by Joshua Seigl he had in his study. Some of them were in foreign languages. Dmitri said Seigl was famous but the Tattooed Girl had never heard of him so he couldn’t be very famous! He pretended to be modest but Alma knew better. There was pride and vanity in those books. Just the fact they existed. Alone in Seigl’s study one day she pulled one off the shelf and opened to a page of words solid as mud and gave up after a few seconds, it was such bullshit. The way nobody ever talked, just meant to intimidate. Dmitri said the book to read was The Shadows and this looked more promising, maybe she’d read
it sometime. A story of some people in a family, Alma could follow. Though the story was set in Germany and in the “camps” as the back cover said and Dmitri said what the Jews claimed was done to them by Hitler was questionable, it depended on which side you wanted to believe.
Another thing that pissed her was: so many books.
It smelled in the house in damp weather, gave her a headache. Maybe there was mold or bacteria or something breeding in all those books. What’s he trying to prove, Alma wondered. Some days, it was like a graveyard. And he’d left for her in the downstairs room the big heavy book from the Book Seller “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live”: A History of European Witchcraft! Like she should want to know about centuries ago in Europe, or maybe he thought she was interested in witchcraft and the Devil and he was, too, and they could talk about it sometime, and he’d come on to her then, that was his plan. But he never asked her about it. Days went by, and weeks. And Alma never spoke of it of course. Actually she paged through the book sometimes sitting on the edge of the bed before turning out the light and she’d get kind of interested in it, and feeling almost scared like these things were real, they’d happened to real women like her, who’d been drowned by dunking, or burned alive, or “pressed” to death between boards while Catholic priests said prayers over them.
Some of the illustrations, Alma was fascinated by. Like nightmares. Like things that, if she’d had bad luck, could have happened to her.
Seigl’s crazy bitch of a sister screaming in her face, slapping and clawing her. Almost, Alma had thought the woman would try to strangle her. “Jet”—a weird name. Didn’t seem to be any kind of Jewish name. She’d seen something in the Tattooed Girl’s face and it was like she knew Alma was the enemy.
The Tattooed Girl Page 14