White Tiger on Snow Mountain

by David Gordon

  Leah didn’t come to shul that night. The rabbi arrived alone and said she was sick with the flu, a fever and a headache. “I guess it’s going around,” he said. “How are you feeling? Better?”

  “Fine,” I blurted guiltily, but I felt like I was dying. I hoped I was, anyway. I sat through the service and actually paid attention for the first time, keeping my eyes on the rabbi and off the balcony. It helped a little. The sound of those words I couldn’t understand relaxed me, the prayers like songs, beautifully meaningless.

  Leah wasn’t there the next day either, and when I got out of synagogue, I went straight to the Saloon. There was a line of people waiting, but when she saw me, Olga squeezed me in.

  “Darling, you look awful,” she said, easing me into the chair and resting my head on the sink. “You need a nice shampoo.” I sighed as the hot water washed over me. “You know what else you need?” Olga whispered as she lathered me up. “A manicure. Sonya over there gives a great manicure.” I opened one eye. A buxom girl with long dark hair was polishing an old lady’s nails. “She just moved from Russia,” Olga went on. “She needs a nice Jewish husband.”

  “Maybe next week,” I said, eyes closed.

  Again that night I paced in my cage, thinking, thinking. I went by Merv’s, but he was out. I sat on his step and was trying, with the help of a cigarette, to breathe, when I thought I heard a voice come from the bushes.

  “Larry?” it whispered.

  I looked closely. No feet were sticking out tonight. The shrub just looked at me like I was crazy, mad as Moses in his desert.

  “Larry?” it called again, softly, and I answered, softly, “What?”

  Leah stood up and pushed her way out, brushing the twigs from her hair.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her. She threw her arms around me and began kissing me randomly, blindly, kissing my cheeks, nose, chin.

  “Leah,” I said, guiding her back across the dirt yard to my place. “I can’t believe you came.”

  “I had to. I couldn’t stand it. I snuck out. But I didn’t know which house was yours.”

  “Leah, I have to tell you, you don’t understand about me.”

  “I know, I know everything, my love. I know you’re not Jewish and you don’t even believe in God. I know you don’t care about my father. You don’t care about anything. Good. I won’t either. I’m glad you’re a goy and an atheist who lives like an animal and doesn’t care about what God or people think.”

  Animal! This was news to me. I looked at my dusty mattress, my cardboard carton of clothes, and the bigger carton I used as a table.

  “Who said animal, your dad?”

  “I know it because that’s me too. I knew it all my life. I was just waiting for a reason to go. For you. I want to run away with you. I want to live and work and go to school and read books with you. And I want to have sex.”

  After that I said nothing because she took off her clothes, everything, she just peeled it all off and stood before me completely naked, looking me right in the eye and smiling, with her fists at her sides, like she was going to enjoy this fight. She looked so happy and brave. Afterward, we fell asleep, still clutching each other tightly, as if in fear, but my sleep was calm and without dreams. When I woke up, I felt as if I’d slept for a week.

  Being careful not to wake Leah, I found my shirt and pants, stepped into my shoes, and went to see the rabbi. Halfway down the block, I realized that I hadn’t brushed my teeth. Fuck it, I thought. There’s no turning back now. The sun was out again and the morning smog was crystalline. The leaves and the grass blades were lit and blurred, the car windows like dusty mirrors. I found him in the study in the back of his house, head bent, beard in a book.

  “Excuse me, Rabbi. Can I talk to you?”

  He looked up from the book, his beard keeping the place. He smiled. “What are you doing here on Sunday? Today you should be resting and I should be coming to turn on the air.”

  I smiled back. “But I came to you for advice.”

  “Ah, you’re not hot enough? You want my hot air too? OK, good, sit, sit.” He waved impatiently at the worn chairs. “You make me nervous standing like a soldier.”

  I sat in my chair. A feather jumped out of the cushion with a little sigh. My hands were sweating. Those brown eyes, the same as Leah’s, were beaming at me from the photo. Or did they look mad? I took a breath and said it: “Rabbi, I’m in love with a Jewish girl. She’s from a very pious home, so I’m sure her family will be upset. I don’t want to hurt them, but I love her. What do you think I should do?”

  The rabbi’s face showed nothing. “The girl, she feels the same?”

  “Yes, Rabbi.”

  “How can you know it’s love?”

  “Because from the moment I saw her, I’ve felt sick all the time. No, that’s not what I mean.” I waved my hands, as if to erase that line, then slumped back in my chair. “I don’t know how I know. It’s a mystery.”

  He didn’t speak, but his fingers and his lips moved a little, tapping the book, chewing his beard. His eyes focused on the space above my head, as if the truth were there in a cartoon bubble. Suddenly, he leapt up and came around the desk. I thought he was going to hit me. With that withered little body and those soft, white hands, it would’ve been like a child throwing a fistful of rose petals at me, but still, I would not have been able to bear it. Instead he sat on the other chair, which gasped and then exhaled deeply.

  “Let’s talk turkey,” he said. “We’re in Los Angeles here. It’s not Minsk, thank God. If she goes with you, I can’t stop her.” He shrugged. “This one I could never control anyway. She’s wild. Like her mother was. But you, you think you can do better? How will you support her? How long do you think she’ll be happy, living on air? She’s a princess. Raised to be a queen. No offense, but she’s stronger than you are, believe me. She’ll crush you.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “She’s a queen.”

  “Like her mother,” he said again. I said nothing. We both looked down, and a moment passed there between us.

  “Why don’t you convert?” the rabbi said mildly, as if suggesting fish for lunch.

  “What?” I looked up, to see if he was smiling, but he wasn’t.

  “Become a Jew,” he told me, calmly. “Become a Jew and I’ll give you my blessing. Then I’ll help you with the money. I’ll send you to study. To become a rebbe.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not you? I knew it when I met you, that God had sent you to me for some reason. Maybe this is it. Who can understand God? We can only follow the path that he has written in our hearts. Now, I think I can see what he wrote in yours: ‘Become a Jew. Marry Leah.’ ”

  Madness, I thought, the most ridiculous thing in my whole ridiculous life. Leah didn’t want a rabbi. She didn’t even want a Jew. She wanted me. And how could I be a rabbi if I didn’t believe? But if, by some chance, God did exist, then how could I refuse to play the hand he dealt me? With the stakes so high, how could I not bet my life? And if there was nothing? It was true: I did not believe in God, but I was beginning to believe in miracles, miracles and whatever is the opposite of miracles, terrible wonders. Yes, this life is a whirlwind, and what can guide us through it? Not our eyes, not our ears, not our brain. What difference does it make what we believe?

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  He stood and grasped my hands, guiding me to my feet. His eyes were sad, wet, blazing. He squeezed my shoulders. “My son,” he said. Then he kissed me, right on the mouth. I felt his beard on my lips. “Now go,” he said. “Go to her. Run.”

  I ran. I didn’t go back around the block. I ran out the door and across the street and cut through the neighbors’ yards. I jumped over their bushes. I stopped for a second to yank a flower, a big orange flower, the best one, out of the ground, roots and all. A car honked and someone yelled and the dogs started barking and I ran past them, across the alley and over the wall, back to where my wild bride lay sleeping.
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  Vampires of Queens

  My mother buzzes me in. I cross the dim lobby with its red tile floor, its fake electric torches and threadbare, medieval furniture, and there it is, open, humming, as if waiting just for me. I hesitate. I stalk ghosts through the hallways of this building, track assassins with my disc gun in the basement, fight off hordes with spinning kung fu leaps on the stairways, three perfect scratches on my chest like Bruce Lee in the posters on my walls, but I’m not allowed to ride the elevator alone. It tends to get stuck between floors. Still, seeing it there, with no one looking, I walk toward it slowly, dawdling, planting a foot in the center of each tile, almost hoping it will close and roll up past the window in the door, but it doesn’t, it waits and, as though climbing aboard a ship in bad seas, I step on, one foot at a time. The door slides shut behind me. It’s only then that I see him there, in the corner, the old blind man who lives on the top floor. He’s wrapped in the wings of his black overcoat, with the high collar and the burn holes and the crusted egg yolk on the sleeve. One white hand folds over the other on top of his white cane, and in the pocket, I see the neck of a flat brown bottle with a pink paper seal on the cap. His chalk head faces nothing, the skin like old wallpaper peeling from his skull. A veined egg. I hold my breath and freeze as the cage begins to rise, turning the arrow above the door. He turns to me and shows his dog teeth and says, “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.”

  As soon as he smiles, I know what he is.

  That night it snows and, as if in celebration, my family goes out for Chinese food. Fat as petals, white as clouds, the silent flakes come parachuting in. You’d think heaven had finally invaded the earth. By tomorrow, all this will be gray slush and icy wind. But tonight it is a comforter spread by the sky, softening every sound, brightening every light, pillowing each mailbox and water tower and frosting every wire. Round, padded figures, barely recognizable as our neighbors, lumber about in mittens and hats, thumping and sliding, like furry, awkward creatures, newly made and just learning to walk on the slick ground, to catch rich flakes on their tongues. The lines between street and sidewalk, lamppost and tree, erase themselves like the line between horizon and sky. The stars flicker down like moths. They dance in the haloed lamps.

  Later, at the restaurant, I toss a penny in the fake stone fountain of candy-colored lights and make a solemn wish that I am, even now, forbidden to utter. But fate answers, and before my soup is gone, my hands begin to itch. Tiny pink spots form like lichen, and the more I scratch them, the larger they grow. Burning pins jump across my arms, twitching and biting like wires.

  By the time we get home, hives have risen on my face and my mother sends me to bed. The pink eruptions unfold in my skin like crushed flowers. Roses clog my throat. Electricity crackles over the surface of my body. I get lost in the living room and can’t reach my door. A menacing brown couch blocks my way. The carpet sways like a field of wheat. When they find me, I’m burning up. All my features are blown up to twice their regular size. I’m a cartoon. I feel a black hand in my chest, squeezing my lungs. A skeleton hand, tight in a black leather glove. The air sings through my windpipe and fever eats holes in my mind, like salt burning through the ice. The doctor appears, pajamas under his gray pin-striped suit. White hair wings his pink skull. The needle stings going in, and I smell something burning, like birthday candles melting in cake. Outside my window, as frost grows on the glass and the world retreats into whiteness, a vast sky opens like a furnace above us, a black heart consuming stars and grinding them into embers.

  I guess I’m allergic to the world or something. Invisible enemies inflame my eyes and skin. Microscopic mold spores in the air clog my chest. Bronchial asthma, some doctors claim. Others say asthmatic bronchitis. I can’t have corn or cucumbers or eggs. And for the first time I realize how much I love these things that I’ve always been indifferent to.

  “I want eggs, I want eggs,” I moan over juice and toast. Milk is phlegm-producing, so I have to watch dairy too. Twice a week I go to the doctor’s office for injections. He takes the steel needles from the sterilizing machine and pushes them through the rubber seal on the little bottles of clear fluid. It burns a little, but I don’t care. It’s a small price to pay for the miracle he has bestowed: a note permanently excusing me from gym. Finally, I am delivered from that hell they call phys ed. Awkward, weak, and timid, I can’t shoot or dribble or hit. Balls thrown at me bounce off my hands, if I’m lucky. My eyes flame up in the light, and I can’t see well enough to swing a bat. So my parents buy me mirrored sunglasses to shield my red, raw eyes, and during gym I sit on the sidelines with my book or chat with Bill, the epileptic kid.

  On the weekends, I stay in and read. Then, as day ends, I am let out to play for an hour or two in the twilight. Sometimes, as I wheel my bike through the lobby, I see the blind man, sprawled and snoring in the tall, tattered armchair that commands a regal view of the mailboxes. My mother clucks and tells my father that she saw him passed out drunk again, but I know what he is really doing. I picked out my dark glasses to be like his. I go out when everyone else comes in. He is waiting for dark, when he is free and everyone else is blind.

  Everyone feels sorry for me, but secretly I’m thrilled. Without the pressure of having to take part in something, do something, be something, I pass whole days without fear or boredom. Who could get tired of reading? I carry a book at all times, and at any moment, on the train, in a store, at Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by shouting relatives, I can open the cover like an escape hatch and drop through. I read to disappear and carry books like spies carry cyanide in their teeth. Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

  After school Christine and I stop along Northern Boulevard and build a fort. The snow along the street is streaked with soot and shit, but pure flakes spiral in to shawl our shoulders. The plows have thrown up huge drifts, bristling with unearthed trash. Ducking low behind the wall, we pack the snow into dozens of hard bombs. It will be days before reinforcements arrive and we have to hold them off ourselves, sniping at the enemy supply line. Christine’s straight blond hair has never been cut. Her eyes are a frozen blue. The wind whips gold strands around her hat and her tiny ears, and the tip of her small nose turns red.

  “Fire!” We launch an attack on a truck going down the avenue. A snowball echoes loudly as it whacks the side of the truck. Direct hit. A bus comes along.

  “Fire!” We stand and take careful aim at the windows. It’s an express bus and not allowed to stop, so the driver can’t get us even though he glances over just as I open up. The snowballs stick where they hit. A car comes next. This time we shoot too early, and a snowball thumps the hood. The car skids, lurching across the ice, and stops. The driver pops out, a big man with a beard.

  “Hey, you little shits!”

  “Retreat!” We run down the alley behind Woolworth’s and jump on garbage cans to clamber over the wall. We come out on the other side of the block and slip into a basement window I know is never locked. We flatten ourselves to the pocked concrete wall, breathing hard, while my eyes adjust to the dark.

  “Do you think he followed us?” Christine gasps, chest heaving.

  “Shh . . .” I listen hard, trying to pick out our bearded pursuer from the landscape of crunching snow and hissing tires above. Now I can see the piled cartons and spiderwebs around us. In the corner where we’re crouching, white cigarette butts and an empty bottle glow in the snowlight, covered in a lifetime’s dust. I see a plastic cap like the one from the needles the doctor sticks me with. I pick it up and put it my pocket for evidence.

  Holding my breath, I stand on a box and peek over the windowsill. Suddenly, it’s evening and the streetlights are on outside, burning white in the blue air, with a swarm of pinpoint snowflakes clouding each lamp like static. Legs go by. Cars bounce through potholes full of black water and shards of ice.

  “I don’t think he saw us,” I report. “But we better hi
de here awhile. He might still be out there looking.” We sit on the floor and pull off our wet gloves. My pants are soaked, and I’ve lost another scarf. I must have left it at the fort, but I can’t go back there now. Christine takes a bag of M&M’s from her coat pocket.

  “Want some?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you know what I do sometimes?” she asks, sorting the M&M’s by color and giving me half the reds. “I hide candy under my pillow, and then in bed, after I’ve brushed my teeth and said my prayers and everything, I eat it.” Prayers? I brushed my teeth but didn’t say prayers.

  “Why do you say prayers?”

  “So that God doesn’t kill you while you’re sleeping. Otherwise you could die while you’re sleeping and never even know you were dead.” I suck an M&M until the chocolate bleeds through the shell. Christine finishes counting the yellows and looks up at me.

  “Elliot?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What sign are you?”

  I search my mind for a clue.

  “We don’t have signs. We’re Jewish.”

  “Oh,” she says, seemingly satisfied with that answer. Maybe, I think, that’s why I don’t pray either. God won’t kill Jews. Although, according to my mother, almost everyone else will.

  “Elliot?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know how to kiss?”

  I shrug. I don’t.

  “Me either.” We sit in silence. I hear the blood booming in my ears, as if I were slipping over a waterfall. I want to say something but I can’t.

  “Should we try it?” Christine asks. I nod. We bring our faces close, and I feel her breath like a flower brushing my cheeks, like a warm snowflake feathering down. Carefully, we press our lips together. Her mouth is soft and tastes like chocolate. It’s good so we try it again. She wraps her arms around my shoulders. I can’t believe this is happening, so I kiss her cheeks. She seems to like it. I kiss her neck. It is even whiter and smoother than her cheek, the pale chill touched with rose, warm beneath the skin, like burning snow.