Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  With saliva freezing in jaws, both sires and dams, dogs and bitches, pups and whelps, slash at one another, then huddle together over their weakest dead to warm with the last pumpings of innards, and then, finally, with the smokelike steam of their panting; in masses emitting whines fiercely piercing at the chirpless pitch of dovish, preyedupon snowbirds flown south to tend to their Nest Eggs, anywhere but here with its graygrim weather and violence. With slobbersome, hotheavy tongues, they bay their own natures separate again in a snort, in a terrible gasp, dispersing in whimpers at dawn, with raging stomachs, with the stirrings of growl, a roar echoing from within the past shared. An instinct, they sense—intruders; they want their bones, a life to bury, other than their own, to grave down into earth.

  The sun setting, and in its wane a host of tapetum lucidum reflect the moonlight risen over the snow, its dusky sandsheen—the Kieferöde, aglow with their eyes. Though it shouldn’t be in conjunction until the opposite season, the Dogstar winks above, Sirius to shine at the very height of the sky: nature resigned to regression, whistled home, put to sleep. Time is dark, and the packs attacking, not attacking, too tired, reluctant, retreating, seem deeply afraid—of what, the lost light, the starlight, the moon’s…of what else might night up ahead: a clearing, burnedover, barren, a forlorn expanse of sand topped with the rime of the prevailing hyemal, the whole of it ringed with stones ritually, and so as if a firepit or altar sunken, unmarked by tracks. Mada meets up with Hamm here, fetched and dogtired, they’re bit up, their clothes hanging in tatters; wounds flapping like the tongues of their limbs, they suck them warm with the wound of the mouth. Then, they hurl the stones of their encampment at the dogs more to air emotion than to injure, soon tiring, toward morning, the death of the stars. Hamm heels up a turn of sand, Mada sighs doubt.

  Opposite the clearing from their entrance, a swath of old growth reduced by burning to husks, this clutch of trees gutted to molder—trees so closely grown, so barren and yet so near and twined, they’re one, as if splinters of the Great Tree, destroyed in the first lightning on the third day of Creation. In the midst of this burnt, wasteheaps, dumped, irradiated, who knows, and you really want to take chances, on trashcans municipal issue from any last Administration, overflowing a grossgummy slurry; above, plastics clinging to ashen branches as if shrouds for ghosts, windingsheets of wind; further: a huddle of wrecked hulls, the chassis of antique cars, junk without tires, up on their gas canisters and cinderblocks for repairs only the dead could perform; a disastrous prop aeroplane lost out of Newark, its propeller smashed, tail-twisted—blame a hurricane named the same as your mother, during which you, my boychick, were conceived; what else, the forest floor: a slippery and fall patching of kitsch novelty postcards once postmarked Atlantic City, lost on their summery ways to grandkinder residing northward in zips 10somethingsomethingother; rotors ripped from defunct telephones, discs gusted to roll edges across the scathed ground; dead AA alkalines, 9volts, spent bullet casings; a clutch of umbrellas, more metal spokes than holed fabric, tumbling around the trunks of trees, picking up radiosignals—foreign and maybe even extraterrestrial, yet outdated, old news of it all—amid screeches scratched on the exposed reticulations of roots; snakespidering a tunnelling web westerly and south toward this tree spanned wide of mysterious metal, its unpainted, autumnally oxidized leaves forming a mottled netting that, upon later inspection, are only odd, interrupted sections of fencing, makeshift and weathered, rusted, breaking here and intermittently there over ravine and ridge, piles and all midden manner of natural swell, the compost of stray cats, the ruin of paper mills, turbine, grist and furnace remains: a fence strung high and taut with barbedwire, tightly coiled to threaten, too, the wires that’ve flurred loose from Parkway’s edge, just further a wave, a thumb out and flag down—powerlines screaming their shadows, torching ponds of stray gas to flame, guttering at trunks of all root sunken with nothing left ringing above them to burn, no soul left to become ash, air, damning sky…

  Benjamin, though…He hadn’t wandered as much as hurled, vomited Himself atop the mess and slithering over, to wriggle with the wind, with the treewind, the dogwind, Godwind geschwind, that of every quarter then against them, too, winds from all opposite fronts that make for this perpetual weather: unopposably gloomy, grave; maneuvering Himself stomached, roly-poled, scraping the clothes from His body, the skin. Unharmed upon reaching the clearing He continues through it, not to the right, and yet neither to the left, as it’s been argued by those who’d wish to forget this Joysey sojourn out of shame, but straight on, directly into the woods further burnt, immediately upon entering which His tshirt’s tail, used to patch the seats of His multiple pants, gets snagged, He rips, it tears; the mend says in white type bolded on blue: Goldenberg, Goldenberg, & Israelien, 25th Annual Firm Picnic, stained with the blood of the chosen.

  A flag, a Joysey standard. Raise it high and proud above the any, all of us as upright as poles. Over the Gatekeeper’s, He remembers…the Development’s, too, had been blue and white and red, with a house in the middle field, stripped of family, its siding striped and windows starry. Benjamin slows into the pace of this memory, the sidewalk stroll from house to house, everyone of them known and the neighbors within them, knowing. An afternoon with His mother recovering outside for a walk, Hanna in the stroller, with Him pushing, to remember…these woods aren’t familiar, though, nothing doing. The little greenery He’d glimpsed, that’d been gardened, neatly, plots both herb and flower left untilled for the season of His birth, with the rest and more public of it landscaped, kept to grated planters along the slabs of Apple, Birch, Cedar, concrete, asphalt, planted to take root amid gravel that would ground the tankings of tiny pet fish, Judy’s gold, those upsidedown floaters flushed down the drain; with the odd weed, Developmentapproved rest assured, superadded for the sake of diversity. Trees separated, appropriately, spaced at intervals surveyed, all paid for by—Depro, the Development Prettification Organization, His father a founding member, and as such open, fair and solicitous, from donations received at the generously anonymous. Each tree would have its sign to own, tacked at trunk: Pick Up After Your Dog, as imaged with a mensch without face kneeling to scoop at poop; Curb Your Dog, no, curb your meaning; No Littering, except for the litters that are signs; alongside plaques that identified each tarred tree with its sponsor, whether individual or business, which was an excellent tax deduction—welcome to the sacred grove of the accountants, Mister Buchhalter, CPA, from down the block a ways.

  Half Benjamin expects those other placards, the Latinate wood, those that identify tree from trees, and from forest, which sort as to type, Genus, species—as if to provide an experience more welcoming, more understanding, by way of introduction to the outer world, the earth unkempt by our trivial science. Him left unprepared for such surroundings, then, these trees so oddly intertwining, grown up from out the earth at any which way angle: these trunks writhing, without fruit, around each other and up; a canopy of closing trunks, obliterating the above; the occasional two trees merged entirely into one, forking into another, growing out the other; strangling two trees growing out from their trunk shared, mutual roots, common ground argued over in a high, conflicting silence…spindly burnouts starved of bark to peel from bone, their pleading limbs waved fanatically, fingers spread to the vault in a supplication charred, and chilling. He makes past them all on tiptoe into berryless branches, bush, through the webs of spiders, their spinneretwork sticking to His face, sticking His mouth from saying, fine dewed silk that holds the light, and then’s ripped through, torn by sound, by the gust with which it’s brought—the faint rataplan of wind, a clattering of the clouds with brandished branches. Fire tears the Kieferöde, a weapon unloading into the later sky, each bullet the beat of a wing…birds scatter, the echoes of their calls disperse into wind, as winds themselves; the snow snows on unabated. And then the smell, which is the promise of smoke, of heatless smolder, then the pineneedles, too, to Him an outer household disinfectant without
any hint of that Floridian citrus, PopPop’s balmy lemonlime: more like an organic dank, an illicit wetness, as if of the panties of His mother schlepping, at the end of a long long day of rushing around, vomitous at depthless stink, the basement’s crotch, that of rot’s own grandmother, mind the hip, the slip to break all cracks; the reek pervades, subsumes, wafts spore, fungi and lichen under the horizon’s door—the woods, He wipes His mouth, an abandoned bathroom…to remember the womb, fold fast the underwear drawer. He’s wet Himself; what’s let is frozen; His knees are spurs of ice.

  To trudge ahead with legs pissheavy, with hands under His arms, digging out the soak of His pits, shvitzing less from His escape than from a motherly exhortation to fear, that and the wet only freezing Him, slowing Him, more. Benjamin’s pants cling tightly to His body, His chest heaves Him out of breath, a babied mass of chattering fat, a shiver tightly wound around a spine. He’s panting for air, air, any air but there’s only the falling flake of ash, smoke flagging a heaven above weather. Then, the burnt wood clears, the trees disposed even sparser until only stumps remain, agelessly ringed, tressed trees within trees, then a fence in the distance, forever far and tall, with barbedwire curled atop, snarled sharp; to lick the metal, and stick. To step over puddling mud, intermittent holes hailed, He’s holding the fence so as not to lose it, its marking there…barbedwire merging with the clouds—they’ve grown into and around each other gnarled ever since the advent of all fall; He’s slowly rimming for an opening, an out, any.

  Along the perimeter, scattered postal letters, these unopened, and more postcards, from Florida, registeredreceipt packages addressed to the same address that is none ultimately under a God’s directory of assuming names, stamped in ink wetted smeared into the earth. Benjamin stoops to overturn a soggy envelope, postmarked three years, two weeks ago in red, another letter to Santa or a party so named, c/o the North Pole; these letters forming circles around stockades of large square package, paperwrapped, tied in horsehair twine, darkstained in oil and leaking slow schematic drips that might only be melt, rainbow wires stick from them, and ticks inside. Iced hearts, about to explode, the spleen of the mechanical. And between these markers, sunken pits, ponds rare as they’re not aflame. Small pollutions, poisonous to think. They sizzle, hiss; their gases give a rise; an eruptive skin, tarthick. He thinks, to make ablutions, to stoop to drink from your own sink. Oil stains of the first rainbow. Ask your reflection—to destroy what world no more. Then further, over the last week accumulated, as if by the unlikeliest of weather up against the fencing—as if an offering to its metal limitation, linked indissolubly to authority’s rule: there’s a whole small mammal frozen, kept from decay by clouds and snow, and, unbelievably, too, from scavenge, placed to keep the form of an altar of halves and quarters, of unnibbled wings and thighs and breasts, most probably poultry, those of a chicken, or a turkey or both marked down on sale Aisle 10 from Thanksgivings and Xmases past, a coin lodged in the whole’s gizzard, perhaps, rendering it inedible, unkosher, tainted forbidden…a blemish festooned with rinds of pork and feet and ears and snouts and those other various entrails and meats of the pig, offal and flesh hung with bacon daintily, delightfully toothpicked to the hoarfrost of chops; ringed by a dozen eggs thrownout upon inspection, candled badly, wafting with the stench of the marsh. It’s an occult kind of ecclesiastical arrangement Benjamin finds here, is frightened by, further adorned with an order of oysters shucked, halfshelled, and a meaningful scattering of mussels, shrimp and squid also frozen to keep, a shellfish assortment, a gift basket of clams. High above this gourmandizing tower, a garment of mixed materials flagged from the fence, barbed to the wire to flap in the cold as if a warning, in its pocket two tickets to the opera or movies for next Friday evening (but cancelled). The entire tabernacle, maybe that’s what this is, Benjamin thinks as He avoids, not wanting to desecrate, not needing the guilt, marked at each quarter by cheap plastic lawn ornaments of the Virgin, themselves individually fenced off by lengths of rosary loosed of beads tied off to wire and trees, each miniature chapel, or church, fronted by the planting of crucifixes, splintered, branches and boughs thonged together to cross; all of it dazzlingly packed and floored with a flossy excelsior, shavings not of wood but of a whole Parkway motel’s worth of shredded New Testaments, as if prayers left behind by pilgrims in the hope of appeal—these being the local losses, and shrines like these appearing everywhere of late; heapings, makeshift piles windily scattered, unholy dumps to which all would, late at night, on dunchbreak from work, or on their ways home from work before nighttime’s conversion, haul all their olden, obsolete embarrassment—their sacrifices; that that’s to be given up, rent then lent out to decay out of season, in the chance of living differently, anew.

  Benjamin wanders amid this incomprehensible humus until, there’s a noise: that weapon again, discharging its last, a strafe to empty, without warning this time—no longer a bird’s death, but a dog’s bark, the report of a howl; echo and echoed talking at the same time, to each other. He falls to the ground amid the stockpiles of worldly denial, this seasonal abnegation, or potluck—it’s a laughingly rumbling, regretful quake; the sky, slit, split, falls from the trees, lands on His head, needles to pierce Him laid splayed.

  An approach sounds on the snow, loud and coldly damn it let them know what’s coming.

  Benjamin raises His head, crawls on His back, His stomach, slowly makes forward.

  A stump stands inside the fence.

  A walking stump, a wanderous wondrous stump, astride the altar, decked with hat and gun.

  Benjamin goes to put his hands up, way up, then realizes that if He does He’ll fall on His face again as He’s crawling.

  I gave at the office! the thing talks, too, I toll you once I done toll you a thousand times—I gave at the office, goddamnit…the goy’s not quite a log hollowed out, but he’s wearing one, held up over his skinny with rawhide suspenders. His beard’s to his knees, bristled with thorns, streaked with berries suspended in the puke induced upon their careless ingestion. On his head’s a helmet, Kaiser Wilhelm style, an apple impaled on its spike. He nudges the muzzle of his gun to target Him—this here’s a Palesteinmade Mwhatever the hell, it’ll hole you right up…Benjamin half bows into a pond, dripping rims the fenceside altar on allfours still, rises.

  You ain’t a dog, is you? the goy asks, lowers his gun, then sets it down against the altar’s fence, squints an eye, the other’s patched with the pad of a waterlily. I ain’t going to say it again, he says. Stand up. Stay. And so Benjamin heels, straightens out, cracks His back. I want you to take off your skins, slowly now, you’re already halfway. And so Benjamin begins to strip, easylike: disrobes His clothes, first shoes and socks, then plural pants, the goy stares, everything, he says, so He gets Himself nude out of the fruity underwear, and the pressed pinned shirts of His father, lays all in a wrinkling heap—throw it over…and the goy slips Him a slop pail on a pulley slid along a downed powerline. Not folding ever, He stuffs His clothes down into the pail, which the goy in the log reels in over the fence, then shimmies up a tree inside, logged torso and legs smoldering trunk, he descends with the clothes he heaps at the rear of the altar. He leans over, strikes a match from his mouth on himself and fires the pile, whistling through oozy gums he blows on it to burn through the soak—puny smoke, the flames gutter: this offering refused, Benjamin’s pants emerge only singed.

  The goy lifts his lily, squints what’s his one good eye at Him and asks, what’re you doing here? To stick a twig in one ear, stick out the other. You lost? Got a name?

  I’m fleeing.

  He scratches at himself, raising splinters—they after you, too?

  Benjamin thinking, who isn’t?

  He peeks past the goy into the fence’s interior, nudging up on His tiptoes and around the altar between them: the growth seems to clear, comes sparser, unnaturally nude; resembling nothing but a risen scalp, a barren balding from haphazard uprooting, use, trod upon, paced gleamingly naked if n
ot purely white, coldbleached leaves and needles giving way to a covering of only a small stubble of saltgrass up from under the snow—a skinned head, rimmed around to the west by an armband of brackish river, flowing toward the east and its trees, the dogs, the Parkway then the Atlantic, there the water refreshed of its frozen clarity, clouded and heavied with salt; this and its compound—apparently, a vast wall—hidden by the forbiddingness of this altar’s late treyf, pilings secreting all access.

  Anyone on the lam’s a friend of mine, the goy’s saying as Benjamin sidesteps idolatrous Madonna statuettes, the shrouding vestments, censers extinguished, and the meltfilled, birdbathing, dogdished fonts and collectionplates stacked. I know a victim and you, friend, whatever your name is, are you ever Him; the goy stooping Him through a hole ripped in the fence, squeezing Him in—its links stabbed through with the voice of the wind, as if in warning but which: flee thither, or don’t; the chains bind His flesh, slice and gash at His pudge. There’s no infiltration here, he promises, serious lockdown, my perimeters are ultrasecure, and he releases a bush back into the wild, on the other side of the fence snapping it into its planting to screen. The goy stands with his hands on his log, proud and beaming, as if after a kind word, a compliment or thanks. He takes from his helmet’s spike its rotted apple and with wrinkly lips lays into the mold, a white fuzzed sheen the same shade as the flesh beneath, he gnaws from it a hunk, spits out half a worm and now has two teeth remaining: you want a bite? he asks, then swipes the mud and the moustache stray from the fruit and with an empty smile offers it out.