The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  A storm came up one afternoon in mid-winter—a violent thunderstorm mixed with snow. Cholly and a few other porters were sweeping garbage from the flats on C Block when Boss Wilcox, prodding Cholly in the small of the back with his quirt, sent him solo to the third-tier gallery, saying, “You don’t need but to dry-mop it one time.” As he trudged up the cast-iron spiral with the mop and bucket from which he’d become inseparable, Cholly, grown mightily tired of late, thought that his own clanking joints echoed the sound of the closing cell-block gates. These days he staggered like the dopers in their thorazine shuffle and wished that his mind were as muddled as theirs, because the only way to fly this miserable bid was blind. Meanwhile the storm that was buffeting the penitentiary challenged the din of the raucous population within, until a cannonade of thunder cracked open the dome of the firmament and the lights went out. Cholly paused on the pitch-dark stair in the momentary quiet, waiting for the generators to kick into gear and the power to return; there would be chaos in the house—already the cons were banging tin cans on the bars—if the power didn’t return. But the blackout continued and the little heat the building retained had dissipated, as Cholly clumped the rest of the way in the dark up to Tier 3, where the entire gallery was illumined in a burnished glow.

  Candles had been lit along the row of cells in which the prisoners, keeplocks all, were involved in a variety of unorthodox occupations. In the cell nearest Cholly an albino Negro with zebra stripes tatted over his hairless scalp was seated on his bunk, stringing an instrument that appeared to have been fashioned from half of a giant avocado. Next to him a Red Indian, a rainbow assortment of Sharpies poking out of his bandanna in lieu of a feather headdress, was sitting on the john with his pants around his ankles, limning the margins of a large open book. Next door to him a gawky yahoo with skin like cooked oatmeal—whom Cholly identified as a notorious pedophile—was hanging pink construction paper between curved cardboard struts, turning his cell into a diorama that depicted the ribbed belly of a beast. A brother in a conical cap decorated with stars and crescents poured pearl-colored gunk into a narrow flask and watched it slide around a helical tube of the type used to force-feed cons on a hunger strike. The tube was fixed to a syringe in which the fluid concluded as a drop of liquid gold. A bearded senior in a skullcap pounded shoe leather at an iron last; a splay-nosed gang potentate put the finishing touches on a pair of wings he’d carved from a block of ice, the ice apparently manufactured in his own dunker contraption assembled from scrounged odds and ends. Of course, whatever they created was only temporary; the goon squads would invade their cells and destroy what they didn’t confiscate, a prospect that did nothing to dispel the rapt concentration with which each man bent to his craft. As spellbinding as their occupations, though, was the silence (of all but the wind) that seemed to neutralize the commotion from the other tiers, a silence so complete as to suggest it was itself a kind of contraband smuggled into the riotous big house.

  Alien as it was, the atmosphere on Tier 3 impressed Cholly as a place he had experienced before, though perhaps not in his current life. Then slapping his brow, he turned around and revisited the cell where the old man, a filthy apron pulled over his work shirt and scrubs, sat laboring at his cobbler’s bench, where the scent of leather and dye supplanted the usual urine-and-stiff-socks taint of the galleries. Becoming slowly aware of his observer, the old man lifted his smoke-gray head and exclaimed with a near toothless grin, “Cholly Sidepocket, mayn schwartze!” a puff of steam escaping his lips with every syllable.

  Said Cholly regretfully, “I ain’t belong to you no more.”

  The rabbi stood up and approached the bars with a buoyant, loping step; stir, it seemed, had done him a world of good. He was holding the grainy upper of the brogan he’d been working on by a tongue that lolled from its leather vamp. Then pointing to the floppy topsole with the wooden mallet in his other hand, he croaked, “This is the earth, and this,” nudging the heel with a crooked pinkie, “is hashamayim, the world to come.” Then he tapped with the mallet the bottom of the topsole that dangled its row of hobnails like a yawning jaw, joining it somewhat sloppily to the ill-made upper dripping latex cement like mayonnaise between crusts of bread.

  “A shiddach!” he proclaimed with pride. “A match!”

  At that Cholly felt the barrel vault of his chest give way and cave in. “Ol’ man, you crazeh as evah,” he managed through a single bearlike sob. The rabbi stuck a liver-spotted fist through the bars and bumped his knuckles against the black man’s thick fingers, still wrapped around the handle of his mop. “Sprankle me, honey gee dawg,” he piped, and having wrenched from his friend a lacerated chuckle, went on to explain: “Everyone that he enters here must abandon hope. But to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope, is given to them a secret medicine. Shah,” placing a bony finger to his lips, “if they knew this, the hopers, they will feel they have been cheated.”

  Back on his unit Cholly began to calculate the ways he might get himself transferred to C Block, Tier 3. He knew that the process could take time; he’d have to stay on the prowl, ride it out, maybe get up off a little info and tighten his game. But he also knew that, while you might age rapidly in the joint, and die a thousand deaths, time itself stood still. Time, so to speak, was on ice.

  ♦♦♦

  WHEN SHE WAS seated in a plastic chair at the rickety table across from the murderer, who was holding in either hand a red shoe, Lou Ella struggled to maintain her self-control. They were the ugliest shoes she had ever seen, a travesty of ruby slippers, bits of sequin sewn unevenly onto their heels and toes like the scales of a radioactive fish, globs of glue seeping between the counters and rubber soles. Though she judged herself a pretty tough cookie, the overnight trip across the state in a crowded bus (along with the burden of Sue Lily, who was no lightweight), the shakedown of her purse and then her person, and the shock of the dismal gray prison itself had taken their toll on Lou. Then, presented with the bogus old buzzard in his jailhouse getup, the beanie and outsize denims more foolish than stripes, she was suddenly overcome by fatigue, and the tears began to flow.

  The rabbi caused the shoes into which he’d stuck his hands to tapdance on the tabletop. “What are you crying?” he wondered throatily. “How comes it everybody that they see me they got to shpritz tears?” he seemed to ask of the fluorescent lights.

  She blew her nose in the pinafore of the unwieldy baby sister she was bouncing on her knee. “You tell me,” she challenged, summoning a hostility she thought suitable to the occasion.

  “For your dead lover you weep?” suggested the rabbi, sounding almost hopeful. Despite his ashen skin and runny eyes, the sulfury tangle of his beard, he looked none the worse for wear from his confinement; in fact, his moist eyes seemed almost to shine with a kind of crazed sympathy.

  Lou Ella narrowed her eyes and stiffened, then snickered until the snot ran and she had to blow her nose again. “He wadn’t never my lover. He wadn’t but a crush.” The vehemence of her outburst shocked her, though even more surprising was that the old dude actually looked hurt by her pronouncement. He nudged the tacky shoes tentatively in her direction.

  “I made you,” he offered, explaining that he’d begun to pursue a new hobby in prison.

  A rogue impulse to apologize for having brought him nothing in return invaded her consciousness before she banished it, appalled. Then she inquired pointblank: “Why did you off him?” For there was no reason to postpone the question, having come all this way to ask it. But though she’d rehearsed it in her head innumerable times, it now sounded somehow misplaced.

  But if not for this question, to which the rabbi (looking sheepish) had yet to respond, what was she doing in this godawful place? She seemed to be waiting for the old man to tell her, which wasn’t logical; it was tantamount to having made the journey in order to find out why she’d made the journey. Lou ran a hand through her cropped magenta hair. Meanwhile the pitched voices in the Visiting Room, sweltering despite the
seagreen film obscuring the windows, were so distracting that she could barely think. The room itself, with its sentinel vending machines and signs warning against inappropriate contact, defied any type of intimacy. At the adjoining table an obese woman in a flowered muumuu the size of a haymow leaned across to slap her son the convict silly after he’d attempted to sing her a yodeled rendition of “Mama Tried.” At another table an inmate photographer snapped a Polaroid of a heavily medicated prisoner shackled to a restraint chair, next to which was parked a moribund old lady in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube up her nose. Infants swarming over the rails of their allotted play area had to be tossed back into their pen by patrolling officers in dress blues, while Sue Lily herself, ordinarily so passive, had begun to squirm and fidget in Lou Ella’s lap.

  “Boykh,” she said in a nearly unprecedented ejaculation, becoming so unwieldy that Lou had to excuse herself and deposit the child in the turbulent playpen along with the others; and there she stood gripping the rail, a hair ribbon drooping over an unblinking eye, making ineffable noises that evoked a double-take from her big sister. When Lou Ella turned back to the rabbi, his simpering expression reinforced her conclusion that she’d made a grave mistake in coming here.

  After all, Bernie Karp had been dead and buried these past two years and she was getting on with her life without him, wasn’t she? A year out of high school already and although she’d been offered scholarships, advised by counselors what a shame it would be to waste a mind like hers, Lou had elected to stay home and work instead. Her baby sister had been diagnosed with some sluggish strain of autism and was being sent to a special day school that her mama, repeatedly passed over for a managerial post at Fed Ex, could ill afford. So Lou stayed on as a full-time employee at the video outlet whose absentee owner had neglected to convert his stock to DVDs, which meant that the store’s already skeleton clientele had dwindled to a handful of irregulars. As a consequence, the girl had ample time to pursue her reading of Carlos Casteneda, Ekhart Tolle, and Emanuel Swedenborg, though in truth she hadn’t done much reading lately. She preferred to view three-handkerchief romances starring Ida Lupino or Loretta Young from the outlet’s Adults Only section, though the films failed to move her either.

  After the trial she’d thought, Now the grief will start, but it never did. There was the guilt, of course, due to the lack of grief, and there was the missing him; she did miss him, though she began to wonder why. After all, Bernie Karp was a very ethereal fellow with neither foot planted firmly on Mother Earth, and what had their hooking up been but a series of small frustrations ending in a large one? True, they’d shared certain common interests, but Lou was beyond all that now; she understood that to be alive was to be fettered to a dying planet where the only release was through some forbidden pleasure. “When’s the tragedy begin?” she’d asked herself, but in place of it, in place of a blast of sorrow that might rupture the glacier in her breast, she felt only an enduring lassitude. Nothing seemed to matter much anymore. Restless in her isolation, she began to seek out the company of unsavory types, syrup heads and aspirin freaks among whom she earned the reputation of being an easy lay. Though she viewed her own bad behavior as a betrayal of her departed boyfriend, Lou found that remorse somehow sweetened the mischief. Was she so angry with him that she wanted to desecrate Bernie’s memory? Well, yes. Yes, she fucking was. But she knew that anger wasn’t the whole of her motivation, and after a time there was little satisfaction in bad behavior either.

  One evening, despite her misgivings, she went to see Bernie’s parents, though they’d made it abundantly clear at the trial that she represented associations they would rather not be reminded of. But time had passed and Mr. Karp had recouped his losses since the fall of the House of Enlightenment; he’d acquired an extra chin and an artificial tan which he displayed to good advantage in his TV ads. His wife, wearing a tangerine training suit, touted her enrollment in a Cardio Rebounding class (that involved weighted hula hoops and a mini-trampoline) in which she planned to sculpt her body to complement her blue-rinsed hair. Having apparently made a kind of peace with Bernie’s slaying, they welcomed Lou Ella cordially, inviting her into their home, where they sat on a deep-cushioned sofa holding hands. Skeptical, Lou thought they were either making a show of congeniality or had maybe had themselves lobotomized.

  When she’d weathered the shock of their friendly greeting, she asked them in all sincerity, “How do y’all cope?”

  They trod on each other’s answers, Mrs. Karp beginning again to praise the virtues of her exercise program while her husband claimed an absorption in business matters. Then a silence during which each, looking askance at the other, waited for their spouse to speak first, until both spoke simultaneously again.

  “Pills,” asserted Mrs. Karp, as her husband admitted, “We visit the rebbe.” His wife gave him a subtle elbow to the kidneys, which he not so subtly returned. She swiveled toward him in a show of pique that just as quickly subsided, as she too confessed, “We visit the rebbe.”

  The girl was dumbfounded and said so. Begging their pardon, she asked how they could bring themselves to take solace in the man who had wasted their boy. The wife shrugged her own puzzlement, then offered a muddled adage about forgiveness being the spice of life, while her husband declared almost defiantly, “He’s become like a second son to us.”

  Taking heart from his impenitence, Mrs. Karp added, though still a little shamefaced, that they had recently begun discussing adoption proceedings. Then she leaned forward to touch the girl’s knee through the hole in her jeans. “You should go and see him,” she ventured, as if recommending a good beautician.

  Horrified, Lou Ella muttered thanks for their hospitality, declined an offer of pralines and tea, and left their house abruptly thereafter. But while she dismissed Mrs. Karp’s advice out of hand (it was way weird), the conversation seemed to have awakened a latent impulse—because she did begin to conceive against all her better instincts a desire to visit Rabbi ben Zephyr herself. When the desire had grown to an urgency, she realized what should have been obvious all along: that she needed to go and ask him in person why he’d done what he’d done. What possible reason, she wondered for the umpteenth time, could he have had for icing her boyfriend? The answer would provide some “closure,” wouldn’t it, and wasn’t closure what everyone wanted? Though Lou had the sneaking suspicion that what she really wanted was to open the whole can of worms again.

  She’d had to travel all night on the bus from Memphis. That was the only way she could make the connection with the van that shuttled the families of inmates from the nearby town of Wartburg (a gas station and a rusted threshing machine among weeds) to the prison. She’d been surprised, when she contacted the prison authorities, to discover that she was already on the rabbi’s visitors’ list, since she and the murderer had never formally met, but this was the least of the mysteries surrounding Bernie’s death. She informed her mother in the vaguest of terms of her projected trip, which got no more than a weary nod from Mrs. Tuohy, who complained she’d be stuck with Baby Sister all weekend. “Awrat,” sighed Lou, “I’ll carry her wi’ me,” though the truth was that she took comfort in the nearness of the mostly inanimate child. But when the searches began preliminary to the visit, she wished she’d left her little sister behind. It was bad enough, dreadful in fact, when the female guards began to strip-search Lou, making her remove her ballet skirt and tie-dyed underwear, snapping her thigh-highs and probing her private places under the supervision of a male CO. But that they performed a similar operation on Sue Lily, whom they handled like some big-boned glove puppet, was finally the limit. “We’re out of here,” she informed a matron, who ignored her, shepherding Lou and the oyster-eyed child into the hubbub of the visiting room.

  Then she was seated before this poor excuse for an Ancient of Days, who offered her his cheesy red shoes, and suddenly the grief that had waited so long in abeyance chose that moment to well up and spill from her eyes. Across the table the
rabbi gazed at her with a puppyish affection tinged with pity.

  “Fuckwad,” said Lou, incensed at his presumption, “you don’t even know me.”

  He raised his bristly brows. “I know by you your pupik tattoo and the taste from your tongue that you burned it one time in your gleyzl chocolate in the Dixie Café,” he said, leaning across the table so that a guard waved his baton between them to signal they should maintain the proper distance. “I know the journey of your soul from a guppy and the Island Mango air freshener you would spray in your room to hide the smell from the funny cigarette.” He was leaning close again, his breath reeking of the lard cutlet he’d had for lunch, crumbs of which clung to his beard. “I know how you trim it, the poobick hair.”

  Lou cocked her head, transfixed, unable to tear her gaze from the fretted face that framed the old man’s limpid eyes, the light therein beaming some species of molten moonshine. Involuntarily she stretched a hand over the table to rap on his forehead, scored with wrinkles like a musical staff, and when in response he nodded slowly in the affirmative, she recoiled in disbelief. “You stink of treyf,” she accused, rummaging her brain for more ammunition to injure him with, resisting the fascination that wrung her heart. Shaking her head to rid it of nonsense, she repeated, “Why’d you rub him out?”