“You’re too good for me. Wanna try box ball?”
By age eight Harry was bored with chess; however, his frenzy to defeat Zadeh never subsided, though he had learned to hold back the tears until he had locked himself in the bathroom. It was still so.
Eight almost had been the last year of Harry’s life. Zadeh had tried to cure him of an acute stomachache with the all-purpose high colonic. Harry had fled the greased nozzle which had been introduced into him many times. When pulled from under a bed by his father and Dr. Bluestone, the immediate diagnosis had been a burst appendix. The operation was performed just in time. Zadeh pooh-poohed the idea that had he caught up with Harry, he would have killed him, and further maintained that Bluestone was a quack who had ordered surgery when a good bowel movement was all that was needed.
The random bin of facts housed two competing considerations as to hereditary insanity: On the corroborative side was Zadeh’s father, who one evening had left his house in Warsaw to buy a newspaper and disappeared for fifteen years. During that time, it was fairly well documented, he had established families in South Africa and elsewhere. Returning to Warsaw, he entered his house, sat down at the table from which he had risen fifteen years previously, and demanded supper. His wife complied wordlessly,
On the nay side of the madness ledger was Harry’s own relationship with inanimate objects. Treasured jazz records spoke words that were not imbedded in the grooves. Each school-day morning he said good-bye to his father’s hat. He even spoke to God, but only to secure a pennant for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Certainly there was nothing abnormal in all that.
No, neither his grandfather nor he nor anyone in his family was crazy.
As Harry’s father said: “A Jew needs all the friends he can get.”
CHAPTER
10
SOMEONE TUGGED AT HARRY’S KNICKERS. SOLDIER, STOOPED OVER him, was wiping sand from the bike.
“Damn, you shouldn’t let sand get in, it’s like … Damn, especially this brand new one.” His fingertips glided along the handlebars, as if rimming fine crystal.
“What are you doing on the beach, Soldier?”
Soldier slid his hands inside his torn-at-the-elbows army field jacket to hitch up grease-stained khaki pants. The wind lifted and let fall the threads of his unraveling wool cap. He shrugged.
“Damn, I got a room on West Sixth for when I don’t stay at Woody’s and I like to walk along the beach to Woody’s. You headed that way?”
“Yes.”
“Damn, wanna walk together? You can roll the bike in the hard sand, not to clog up the chain.”
“Sure, Soldier, I’d like that.”
“Damn, you like the beach, Harry?”
An automatic shrug prefaced all Soldier’s speech, triggering the damn which hung by itself, unconnected.
“Yes, I do. It makes me feel clean.”
“Damn, I coulda said that. There weren’t no beach where I was brung up. The first one I seen was in France, at the hospital they sent me to. It was a town called Deauville, but we called it Doughboy.”
Soldier laughed, provoking a tic in his right cheek. He slapped it.
“Does it hurt?” Harry asked.
“Damn, no. My grandpa had it. Said it weren’t no different from a yawn, except you done it with your cheek instead of your mouth. In church he’d point to folk yawnin’ and say, ‘If they done like me, it’d be more polite.’”
Harry imagined little Soldier in church with his grandfather. Everyone looked like Judge and Mrs. Hardy, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, except for a miniature Soldier, ragged in khaki. The congregation sang the favorite hymn of the Irish kids at school: Onward Christian Soldiers and leave the Jews behind.
Soldier kicked at the sand.
“Damn, I did like that beach in Doughboy. They’d come and pull me off it, like I had got lost. I hadn’t. I just wanted to feel the soft sand and look at the water that never ended. I like things that never end. Like sometimes just before you fall asleep you think it’s forever. I don’t mean die. Just sleep happy forever.”
A barefooted, bent-over beachcomber, scarred shoes dangling from laces tied around his neck, slowly approached.
“Hey, Soldier,” he said, “how’s it go?”
“Damn, any luck, Robbie?” Soldier asked.
The man straightened, unfurling into a six-foot-nine-inch stick figure, covered from neck to ankle by a pepper-and-salt overcoat. Between the lapels of the upturned collar, his nose, like a turtle’s head, tested danger. He took from his pocket a few pennies and nickels.
“Not much,” he said, offering examination of the oxidized booty, “but I think I got an Indian head nickel. If I can clean it proper, it should be worth something.”
He doubled over as if hinged at the stomach and fought his way against the wind. Soldier angrily kicked a divot of sand into the ocean.
“Damn, that was Robbie. He used to be The Human Skeleton ’till he got a rash all over him. Folk don’t like to look at rashes. So now he looks for Indian heads. I hope he found one.”
Soldier began a dry, choking cough. His body shook like a pummeled rag doll. He bit for air. Harry feared that he could literally break apart. He sank to his knees. Tears squiggled crystalline worms on his cheeks. A high-pitched inhalation gradually subdued the cough.
“Soldier. Is there anything I can do?”
“Damn, it’s past now. I once won a medal in a track meet. Now my lungs are full of … damn, sometimes I get mad.”
Grabbing Harry’s offered hand, Soldier pulled himself up, then jumped to retrieve the bike that had fallen and was being decorated by blowing ocean foam.
“Damn, it ain’t new no more. It’ll never be new again.”
“You like new bikes, huh Soldier?”
“Damn, yeah. I never had one when I was a kid, but I can’t say I really missed it. I loved puttin’ bikes together from parts I got at the town dump. I was better at fixin’ bikes then. Had more patience. Now it’s sort of, if it don’t fit perfect, it’s the best I know how.”
“You do a good job, Soldier. Bikes aren’t easy to fix.”
“Damn, thanks Harry, but I know better. You know when I got my first new bike?”
“When?”
“Damn, it was in Doughboy. I was walkin’ in the town and I spot this bike store. I point to a black job, and hold out a fistful of parley-vous money. This old guy with a mustache who looked like a walrus goes bug-eyed, grabs most of the dough and shoves the bike at me.
“I went tearin’ through that town like a bat outta hell. I recollect people pointin’ at me and shoutin’ somethin’ like ‘ooh law lee.’ There was a lot of carriages pulled by horses with women with big hats in ’em. The horses whinnied when I went by and God help me if the drivers didn’t sort of salute me by raisin’ their whips over their head and yellin’ somethin’ in parley-vous. Behind me I could feel my bathrobe flyin’ and my slippers was almost comin’ off. I guess I rode like that for fifteen minutes before the hospital folk caught up with me. They told the walrus to give me back my money. Oh, was he mad! And he was right. He sold me a new bike and now it would never be new again. They kept on askin’ me if he gave back all my money. Now how was I supposed to know that? But I said yes, hopin’ he had pocketed a few bucks for what he deserved.
“When we got back to the hospital they took all my money and put it where I couldn’t get at it. But, whoa-eee that was a ride!”
“I’d like to go to France on the Ile de France. I see her out there, coming in and going, “Harry said.
Soldier followed Harry’s eyes to an empty horizon cut short by a curtain of low black clouds.
“Damn, how can you tell it’s this Frenchy ship? You got spyglasses that could read the name?”
“Nah, I got a book with pictures of all the ocean liners—front, sideways, how many stacks, their record time for crossing the Atlantic, how many passengers and crew. Once you read that, you can spot a ship easy.”
“Damn,
I’d like to see a book like that.”
“I’ll lend it to you, Soldier. I know it all by heart anyway.”
“Damn, would ya Harry? I’ll give it back, I promise. But you gotta remind me. My memory ain’t no good no more.”
Harry suddenly felt as if he were meeting Soldier for the first time. Previously he had been a tool to fix his bike, a head-banging spectacle, another deformed Coney freak. Everyone, it seemed to Harry, played chess using everyone else as designated pieces. The king and queen of England were coming to the U.S. on the Queen Mary. Soldier, his proud military uniform become a mourner’s sack-cloth, his once eager face rubbed with ash-gray beard stubble, was the undefended, lonely pawn, sacrificed for all the kings and queens of Europe.
A swirling black cloud smothered the sun. The wind asserted primacy as nature’s messenger. Harry shivered. He looked at Soldier’s knuckles, joined to his by the handlebar. He felt close, empowered to ask a friend’s question.
“Is that because of what happened to you in the war?”
Soldier’s peach-pit–shaped eyes blinked slowly, trying to focus or perhaps forget.
“Damn, it was that mustard gas. I was always crazy about mustard too, could eat it with a spoon, and the doctors tellin’ me that it was burnin’ my lungs and givin’ me spells. I asked how come I didn’t smell it. They told me it didn’t smell like mustard. Didn’t smell, not at all. But that don’t make no difference in the way I feel about mustard. When I go by Nathan’s, I like to puke. I can’t even try and eat mustard, even though I think I’m still crazy for it.”
“I’m sorry, Soldier.”
“Damn, it’s OK, Harry. I’m alive. There’s plenty who ain’t.”
“Did you kill any Germans?”
“Damn, no, and I’m glad for that. I didn’t join up to kill anyone. It was to get the war over. That’s what the president and everyone was sayin’: it was up to us Yanks to get the war over. Damn, killin’ was never a part of it.”
“I’d kill Germans.”
“Damn, would ya. I got some German blood in me.”
Harry tightened his grip on the handlebar.
“I’m Jewish,” he said, making amends for not defending his mother in the bike store.
“Damn, that’s nice. The army was the first place I met Jew people. A lot different from what I was taught. I was lookin’ for their horns. In the hospital there was one just like me with the mustard sickness. Never talked, not one word. Just hummed songs I didn’t know. Wonder where he is.”
Soldier stared at the bike quizzically, scratching the back of his neck.
“Damn, how long did Woody say you could keep this one?”
“Woody gave it to me.”
“Damn, gave?”
“Yes, gave!”
“Damn, watch out.”
“I’m not lying!”
Soldier put his hand on top of Harry’s.
“Damn, I didn’t mean that. Give it back.”
“Never!”
“Damn, Harry, what does he want you to do for it?”
“Nothing.”
“Damn … Please, Harry.”
Soldier shook. Harry, anticipating another coughing spell, took the slips from his pocket.
“Collect these.”
“Damn, don’t do it Harry! It ain’t the slips. I done that. It’s Woody. He wants to mess people up.”
“How do you mean?”
“Damn, Harry, I’m sick. But not as sick as everyone thinks. I hear things because people talk like I ain’t there. Woody wants to make everyone like him.”
“Soldier, that’s crazy.”
“Damn. No it ain’t Harry. He …” Soldier shook his head violently, trying to dislodge the elusive words. “He gets you so you have to live his life. I seen it. I heard him say: “‘Now they’re screwed like me.’”
Harry decided not to listen too long to a madman.
“Soldier, I’ll think about it … Soldier, would you give Woody the slips for me? It’s cold and I’d like to get home.”
“Damn, Harry, sure.”
Standing on the boardwalk, Harry watched Soldier’s back grow smaller. Every six steps, he would skip and almost lose his balance.
Some track medal, Harry thought.
CHAPTER
11
HARRY PEDALED FRENETICALLY TO ESCAPE THE DAY, SPEED DISTANCING him from the freaks’ bodies, Soldier’s tics and the human skeleton’s rash and toward a cleansing antidote: Bama’s warm, kneading hands and cat-wet kisses. Before he could ring her bell, the door flew open. She pulled him into the house.
“Oy, Heshele, precious one, it is the Papa. He is sick. Come see,” she wailed.
Zadeh lay on his back on the bedroom floor, his blood-drained face twisted into a lopsided Halloween terror mask. Spittle dribbled out of the corner of his mouth and fell to his chest like a Lilliputian waterfall.
“Bama, did you call an ambulance!”
“I call the police.”
“Did you speak English? Did you tell them your address in English?”
“I think yes. I am not sure.”
Harry ran to the phone and demanded Coney Island Hospital emergency. The doorbell rang. Bama led two cops into the bedroom. The hospital answered. Harry shouted: “Emergency! Forty-nine Neptune Avenue, ground floor, a man is very sick.”
The receiver was jerked from his hand. One of the cops whispered into it: “This is officer Dunn. It’s a stroke. He’s alive, just. Bring emergency equipment.”
He laid a fat index finger that smelled of cigars over Harry’s lips. Harry nodded.
The other cop was having little luck in moving Bama out of the bedroom. He motioned to Harry for help.
“Now, Ma’am,” he said, “you mustn’t touch him. The ambulance is on the way and everything will be all right. This nice boy here—your grandson?—called the hospital. Why don’t you go sit with him until the doctors come.”
She widened the spread of her feet. She would not do as he asked. He was the enemy, an anti-Semite. Yet she had called the cops. Harry wondered how that worked in her mind.
“Call the Mama!” she screamed at Harry.
He dialed.
“Hello, Mom?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Zadeh,” he said—the name was suddenly silly, not carrying the necessary official gravity—“your father …”
“Yes, yes! What! Arrested again?”
“No, sick. A stroke.”
A short shriek.
“How do you know?”
“There are cops here.”
Bama plunged toward him and grabbed the phone.
“Leah, the Papa, the Papa!”
Bat squeals escaped the receiver.
“Leah, Leah, what will I do? The Papa, the Papa!”
He heard the line go dead and tried to wrest the phone from her, but she would not give it up. A cop tugged at him. “Listen, kid, let her have the phone. It’ll keep her out of the room.”
An ambulance siren grew closer and louder, a finger of noise pointed at Jacob Simon Fishman, a stranger become an intimate because he was wrestling with mortality. Men showing white garments under their overcoats wheeled a stretcher into the bedroom. Through the closed door Harry heard loud voices, which he tried to decode to life or death. A cop emerged. He led Harry away from Bama, who still clutched the phone, moaning the Papa, the Papa to a busy signal, and dropped a heavy arm around Harry’s shoulders.
“Kid, your grandfather is dead. They did all that they could, but it was a very serious stroke. Look at it this way: even if he had lived, he would have been a vegetable. So maybe he’s better off.”
Harry saw Zadeh at his unvarying morning ritual: biting into the raw onion that assured bowel movements and longevity. But it was not the face he had watched licking the stinking juice off his chin. It was the stony, sculpted agony of the bedroom. He tried to blink it away, but he could not. He ran through memories: hand-in-hand walks; being shown off to fellow workers at the l
eather factory; standing poised at the fishing pier; staring across a chessboard. No use. Zadeh was contorted flesh, bubbles of spittle. Harry sobbed, frightened by his mind’s impotence.
The cop drew Harry’s face onto his blue-coated chest. Cigar odor clogged his nostrils. Harry gagged. He tried to pull away but the cop increased the pressure, crushing his nose.
“That’s it, kid. Get it out here. I know your folks are coming. But till then you’ve got to take care of your grandmother. Now, stop crying and we’ll go and tell her.”
He released his pressure. Harry inhaled deeply.
“You ready?” the cop asked.
Harry nodded. But for what he was ready, he did not know. They were about to tell a woman who could not imagine life without her husband to start imagining it. In India, wives burned themselves with their dead husbands. Maybe they were right. They approached Bama, who squinted at the cop, slowly nodding her head.
“He has died,” she whispered to Harry.
Harry did not answer. Silence sufficed.
The cop began to break the news.
“Ma’am, your husband …”
Bama dropped the phone, doubled her fists, and pounded at the cop’s chest. Particles of dust rose between them. Instinctively, the cop reached for his billy club. His hand rested on it as spat Yiddish crackled at him.
“Assassin, maker of pogroms, killer of Jews, Cossack, may your entire family die horribly in a plague!”
The cop nodded his head. He understood her grieving and the spoken memories of her dead husband. He stepped back. Bama’s fists continued, chopping air.
The bedroom door opened. Like a figurehead, the other cop led a furled white sail past them. Bama leapt toward it, ripping away the sheet.
“Yakov Shimon, Yakov Shimon,” she wailed, shaking the corpse’s shoulders to awaken him.
It was the first time Harry had heard Bama call Zadeh by his given names. She sounded like one of the lost little girls sobbing forlornly into millions of wrong faces on a summer Sunday on the beach.
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