As I continued to lash out boorishly on all sides, I visualized a sweat-soaked Miriam and Blair experimenting with positions never dreamed of in the Kama Sutra. I was overcome by dread. Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once put it. Well, not quite. Same cottage, but a different cast. And this time, fortunately, I lacked a gun. Finally, at six p.m., I called the cottage. I counted fourteen rings before Miriam, obviously loath to be roused from a post-coition nap, or interrupted while posing for yet another pornographic photograph, answered the phone. “We won’t be able to leave here for another hour,” I said.
“You sound awful. What’s wrong, darling?”
“Be there eight-thirty the earliest,” I said, hanging up. Then I rounded up the kids and started for the cottage immediately. If they were intending to shower together, I planned to catch them in the act.
Animals.
Mike and Saul, sensitive to my mood, were moxy enough to pretend to doze all the way back to the lake. “You’re to tell Mummy you had a terrific time. Right?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
No sooner did I pull up, bounding out of the car, ready for mayhem, than Miriam was at my side, glowing, greeting me with a hug. “You’ll never guess what we’ve done,” she said.
Brazen bitch. Whore of Babylon. Jezebel.
Taking me by the hand, she led me to my tractor parked in the back. “Remember you were going to pay Jean-Claude to cart it to the dump and buy a new one?”
“Yeah. So?”
She made me sit in the saddle and handed me the key, Blair smiling his modest “aw shucks” smile all the while. I turned the key, pumped the pedal, and the motor hummed.
“Blair worked on it all afternoon. He cleaned the spark plugs, changed the oil filter, and did God knows what else, and just listen to it now.”
“You must be careful not to flood it in the future, Mr. Panofsky.”
“Well, yeah. Thank you. But I really must go to the john now. Excuse me.”
Locking our bathroom door, I opened the cupboard under the sink and found my hair still in place on her diaphragm container. And there was no detectable weight loss in Miriam’s tube of vaginal jelly. But what if he had jumped her, and she didn’t use either, and I was now going to be the father of his child? Probably a vegetarian. Certainly a subscriber to Consumer Reports. No, no. Still troubled, but also more than somewhat guilt-ridden, I replaced the kitchen scale, lifted a bottle of champagne out of the kitchen fridge, and brought it to the dining-room table.
“What’s the occasion?” asked Miriam.
“The redemption of my tractor. Blair, I don’t know how we ever got on without you.”
With hindsight, I guess I shouldn’t have uncorked a second bottle, and a bottle of Châteauneuf to go with Miriam’s osso buco, and then the cognac. Refusing the cognac, Blair primly covered the proffered snifter with his hand. “Aw, come on,” I said.
“I hope I’m not failing a test of my masculinity,” he said. “The truth is I’d be sick if I had another drop to drink.”
Then, inevitably, he launched into his daily Vietnam sermon, excoriating Nixon, Kissinger, and Westmoreland. In no mood to acknowledge that I had no time for that bunch either, I said, “Sure it’s a dirty war, but Blair, don’t you feel just a wee bit guilty, a man of conscience like you, allowing this war to be fought largely by blacks and rednecks and working-class kids out of the inner cities while your middle-class ass is safe in Canada?”
“Do you think it’s my duty to be out there napalming babies?”
Miriam changed the subject, and then a real imbroglio threatened. Blair’s sister, it turned out, a storefront lawyer in Boston, also headed an organization that sought employment for the deaf, the blind, and the wheelchair-bound. Rather than allow that this was truly admirable, I protested, “Yeah, but they would be doing able-bodied men out of jobs. I can see it now. Our house is on fire and they can’t find it because they’re blind. Or I’m in intensive care, whimpering, ‘Help, help! Nurse, nurse! I’m dying.’ But she can’t hear me because she’s a deaf-mute.”
His last night with us, “Uncle” Blair built my enchanted kids a bonfire, and I sat on the porch fulminating, nursing a Rémy Martin and pulling on a Montecristo. Watching them out there on the shore, toasting hot dogs and marshmallows, I hoped that sparks would start a forest fire and that Blair, wanted as a pyromaniac in “The Fourth Reich,” would be led away in handcuffs. No such luck. Strumming on that bloody guitar of his, Blair was teaching my kids Woody Guthrie ballads (“This Land Is Your Land,” and other lefty daydreams), Miriam joining in. My family, the mishpocheh Panofsky, only two generations removed from the shtetl, transmogrified into an old Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Blair was gone before I came down for breakfast the next morning and that, I figured, would be the last I’d ever see of him. But then the postcards began to trickle in from Toronto, individual cards addressed to Mike and Saul, inviting them to become pen pals. Picking them up at the village post office, my first thought was to dump them in a rubbish bin, but I feared Miriam might find out. So I produced them at the dining-room table to cries of delight from my treacherous children. Quislings, both of them. And those of you too young to know who Quisling was can look it up under — under — you know the country next to Sweden. Not Denmark, the other one.73 “Of course you must answer him, kids,” I said. “But the cost of the postage stamps will come out of your allowances.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” said Miriam.
“I haven’t finished yet. Tonight I’m taking everybody to Giorgio’s for dinner.”
“And tell me, Père Goriot, will the kids have to pay for their own burgers and fries, and eat up at record speed, so that you can get home in time to catch the first inning of the ball game?”
Then Blair sent Miriam a copy of an article he had written for the American Exile in Canada, which she attempted, unavailingly, to hide from me, as even she was embarrassed.
Suppose Canada, Blair ventured, was forced by the masses of its people to assert independence “by nationalizing U.$. owned industry and ending the free reign of U.$. investment. The inevitable U.$. invasion would be tough, brutal, and blood-letting.” But, Blair figured, Canada would win:
The important thing to remember in the eventuality of a Yanqui invasion is that the mass of Canadians would fight the pigs. Guerrilla and partisan struggle would decimate the Yanqui invaders. The mass of Canadians would support the partisan defenders, aid them, feed them, hide them, adopt them as their brothers. We must learn from the Vietnamese how to struggle against Yanqui invasion.…
Didn’t that prick know that the last time the Americans had descended on Montreal, Lt.-Gov. Guy Carleton had fled, the city had capitulated, and a spokesman for the habitants, Valentin Juatard, had greeted the Yanqui pigs as brothers, saying, “Our hearts have always desired union and we have always received the troops of the Union as our own.”
4
Zipporah Ben Yehudah
Dimonah
Negev
Eretz Yisroel
Tishri 22, 5754
The Clara Charnofsky
Foundation for Wimyn
615 Lexington Ave.
New York, N.Y.
U.S.A.
Attention Chavera Jessica Peters and Dr. Shirley Wade
Shalom, Sisters,
I was born Jemima (after the eldest of Job’s three daughters) Fraser in Chicago thirty-five years ago, but since I came to the town of Dimonah in the Negev four years ago I pass by the name of Zipporah Ben Yehudah. I am a Black Hebrew, a follower of Ben Ammi, the former Illinois state wrestling champion who taught us we were the true Israelites. Yes. A Black people dispersed by the Romans to Africa, and then brought as slaves to America. Our bros include the South African Lemba, who also call themselves Israelites even if they don’t keep glatt kosher any more. In the year 1966 of the Christian Era, Ben Ammi, still preaching in Chicago’s South Side, had a vision that came to
him in the fire-bombing of a liquor store. Rapping with Jehovah, he learned it was time for the true children of Israel to make aliyah. Three hundred and fifty cool cats took part in the Great Exodus, and now Gott zedank we number 1,500 but continue to suffer like the slings and arrows of the anti-Semitism of the white Jewish usurpers.
Let me tell you, being a Black Jew in Eretz Yisroel is no bowl of cherries. There are golf clubs in Caesarea that won’t have us and restaurants in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that are fully booked if we turn up. The Israelis of pallor disapprove of some of our rituals, especially polygamy, which is based on a true reading of the Five Books of Moses. We shame them, perhaps, because we are more observant than they are. We fast for the entire Shabbat. We are strict vegetarians, avoiding even milk and cheese. And we don’t wear synthetic clothing. In a nutshell, we have returned to the true faith, before it was corrupted by “Euro-gentile” civilization, so called.
We are patriots. We don’t dig Muslims because they were the main slavers. And we are against a Palestinian state. Our community is rigidly disciplined, far removed from the Black street culture of Chicago. In spite of what you might have read in the Jerusalem Post we don’t do drugs. Our children bow slightly when greeting adults and our women defer totally to their husbands. The ultimate word in all matters belongs to Ben Ammi our Messiah whom we call “Abba Gadol,” Great Father.
Our mishpocheh, made up of seven “soul” bands, is feared, because bigots see us as the vanguard of a huge Black migration under the Law of Return. But, according to our Abba Gadol, there are at most 100,000 American Blacks who are of Israelite descent. True, Israelite tribes in Africa may number some five million, but we don’t expect more than half a million to join us here.
I wish to disown what one of our teenagers allegedly told a white reporter from Jerusalem Report:
“In the year 2,000 gonna be a big apocalypse. Volcanoes and everything. You gonna see Blacks comin’ in from all over the place back to Israel. Then we gonna run the country.”
Sisters, the reason why I’m writing to you is I am in need of a grant, say $10,000, so my bunch can begin work on composing a rap Haggadah, inspired by the poetry of Ice-T. This would be our gift to Eretz Yisroel. Sort of a latter-day Sixth Book of Mo.
Thanking you in advance I remain,
Respectfully yours,
ZIPPORAH BEN YEHUDAH
5
“My name’s Sean O’Hearne,” said the detective, who turned up a day after Boogie’s disappearance, extending his hand. “I think we should have us a little chat.”
His more-than-firm handshake was sufficient to put my finger bones at risk, and then he suddenly flipped over my throbbing hand as if he meant to read my palm. “Those are some blisters you’ve got there.”
O’Hearne, not yet gone to fat, or balding, or cursed with wet cough seizures that made his eyes bulge, wore a straw fedora and a racing-green gabardine jacket and tartan slacks. As he settled into a bamboo chair on my porch, I caught a glimpse of his two-tone golf shoes with tasselled tongues. He intended to spend the afternoon on the links. “That Arnold Palmer is something else,” he said. “I caught him once at the Canadian Open and figured to go home and make a bonfire of my clubs. What’s your handicap?”
“I don’t golf.”
“Oh, more fool me. I figured that’s how you got those blisters.”
“I’ve been digging a trench for an asparagus patch. Have you guys found Boogie yet?”
“They say no news is good news, but maybe not in this case, eh? The police launch and divers have both come up empty and, so far as we know, nobody has picked up a hitchhiker wearing a bathing suit and flippers.”
O’Hearne had arrived in an unmarked car, followed by two Sûreté du Québec cars. And now four young cops, feigning boredom, started to wander over the grounds, obviously looking for signs of freshly dug earth. “You’re damn lucky not to be stuck in the city in this heat,” said O’Hearne, removing his straw fedora and wiping his brow with a handkerchief.
“Your guys are wasting their time out there.”
“I had me a place once on Lake Echo. Not as grand as this, just a little shack. But I remember how you always got to worry about ants and field mice. So before leaving every weekend you got to clean up and bag the rubbish. Do you drive yours to a dump?”
“I leave it outside the kitchen door and Benoît O’Neil collects it. You want to go through it, be my guest.”
“You know, I can’t understand you’re not telling the first officers who came round —”
“They didn’t come round. I sent for them.”
“— what transpired here, given how upset you must have been, losing your friend like that, thinking he was drowned.”
“He’s not drowned. He’s broken into somebody’s cottage and he won’t be heard from until he’s finished every bottle of booze he can find.”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. But there have been no break-ins reported.”
“I fully expect a sobered Boogie to turn up here later today or tomorrow.”
“Hey, maybe Mr. Moscovitch is still somewhere out there in the woods in his bathing trunks. God, the mosquitoes must be driving him crazy. I’ll bet he’s getting hungry too. What do you think?”
“I think you should be covering every cottage on the lake until you find him.”
“That’s your considered opinion, eh?”
“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Nobody suggested you did. But maybe you could help me fill in some of the boring details, just for the record.”
“Would you care for a drink?”
“I wouldn’t say no to a cold beer.”
So we moved inside. I fetched O’Hearne a Molson and poured myself a Scotch. O’Hearne whistled. “I’ve never seen so many books outside of a library.” He stood close to a small ink drawing hanging on the wall. Beelzebub & Co. ravishing a nude young woman. “Hey, somebody has a real sicko imagination.”
“It’s by my first wife, not that it’s any of your business.”
“Divorced, eh?”
“She committed suicide.”
“Here?”
“In Paris. That’s in France, in case you didn’t know.”
I was on the floor, my head ringing, before I even realized I had been hit. Startled, I scrambled to my feet on rubbery legs.
“Wipe your mouth with something. You don’t want to get blood on that shirt, eh? I’ll bet it comes from Holt Renfrew. Or Brisson et Brisson. Where that bastard Trudeau74 shops. Your wife’s been in touch with us. Correct me if I’m wrong, but according to her there was a misunderstanding here early Wednesday morning, and you thought you had reason to be angry with her and Mr. Moscovitch.” Flipping open his little black notebook, he continued, “According to her, you drove in from Montreal, arriving unexpectedly early, and surprised the two of them in bed, and thought they had been, well, fornicating. But, and I’m quoting her again, the truth is your buddy was a very sick man. She brought him breakfast on a tray, and he was trembling so bad, chilled in spite of the heat, his teeth chattering like crazy, that she got into bed to hold him, just like a nurse might, and that’s when you barged in, sore as hell, jumping to conclusions.”
“You are such a prick, O’Hearne.”
This time he surprised me with a quick punch to my stomach. I reeled, sucking air, and slid to the floor again. I should have stayed put, because no sooner did I get up, lunging at him, than he slapped me hard across the face with his left, and then walloped the other cheek with his right. I ran my tongue against my teeth, probing for loose ones.
“Now I don’t buy it lock, stock, and barrel either. Not the whole bobbe-myseh, eh? I know some Yiddish. I was brought up on the Main. You’re looking at a professional shabbes goy. I used to earn nickels and dimes Friday nights, lighting fires for religious Jews, and I never knew a finer, law-abiding bunch. I think you ought to wipe your chin again.”
“You were saying?”
“Hey, it must have knocked
you for a loop. Your wife and your best buddy in the sack together.”
“Let’s say I wasn’t pleased.”
“I don’t blame you. Nobody would. Say, where did Mr. Moscovitch sleep?”
“Upstairs.”
“Mind if I take a peek? It’s my job, eh?”
“Have you got a search warrant?”
“Ah, come on. Don’t be like that. Like you said, you’ve got nothing to hide.”
“First bedroom to your right.”
Fighting anger, commingled with fear, I went to the kitchen window and saw one of the cops moving into the woods. The other one had emptied my garbage pail and was going through the contents. Then O’Hearne returned, one hand held behind his back. “Damn peculiar. He left his clothes behind. His wallet. His passport. Say, that Moscovitch has sure done a lot of travelling.”
“He’ll be coming back for his things.”
He dug into a jacket pocket. “You’re fucking with me, Panofsky. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was marijuana.”
“But it’s not mine.”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, finally bringing his other hand round from behind his back. “Look what I found.”
Damn damn damn. It was my father’s service revolver.
“You got a permit?”
That’s when panic got the better of me and I blew it. “I never saw it before. It must be Boogie’s.”
“Like the marijuana?”
“Yeah.”
“Only I found it on your bedside table.”
“I have no idea how it got there.”
“Hey, you’re some sucker for punishment, aren’t you?” he said, slapping me so hard I lost my balance again. “Now let’s get serious.”