Joshua Cohen - Witz

A white who’s not white, don’t ask Him to explain…He, shtum and on foot, arrives in the axis. Here in the middle of the newest tundra, in the middle of the middle of no money, that’s one thing, no warmer woolen sweater or sweatshirt, fleece or Hanna’d say pullover or anything like that, that’s another, it’s freezing out, the middle of middling nowhere, now what, now nothing. What might be the wind’s Ben complaining. Having wandered through the night, toward the end of the temporal Sabbath, lo He beholds lights in the distance, a twinkling grace saved from perpetual powder, strung out to dim poles a God knows where, and’s not telling. Through the lenses of His glasses, frozen with fog, He makes out a line of vehicles, raggedly running and not, motley: golfcarts registered to corpses, asses liened off neighbordebtors, repod burros, donkeys and horses, ponies and mules, loadfoaled, collapsing beburdened, pickup trucks, sleighs yoked to tractors hitched to their owners and hauling forever, heaps of hide, spring and sprocket who could ever hope to name anything but a mechanical apology, I’m sorry geared to strip down — all given the pallor of exhaustion in three coats of dull finished with wan under the dim lights of the highway that haven’t yet been cut off by the state to discourage such driving on Shabbos. Them waiting, as it’s been handeddown, whispered down the line, for Molly Mashke’s OffReservation Schnapps Emporium to open when the sun’s finally set, and so contrary to the concern’s NonStop reputation, it seems to be a roundabout 24/6 operation. Hoofing it across the gulagish in search of the open, amid all this open, the finding lost amidst the found, only to become blocked, stopped, disallowed: verily it comes to pass that Ben wanders straight into this line lining across His path and forever and pathless; that His line has in the midst of such freedom come to intersect the line of these Injuns, innumerable and thirsty and prepared to pay through the throat for the sanctification of quench, and to intersect it exactly at its midpoint, halfway between the last thirsty Injun (of course, it’s tempting to speculate, as have many of our best and brightest, that these Injuns are linedup in order of thirst, of desire), and the threshold of the elusive, perhaps merely mythic, liquor purveyor; the line winding down the road, or the line is the road, slick sprinkled with cornmeal against skidding, slippage, to keep anyone from tailing them to harm through their wait, their patience this Shabbos, for its three soused stars, the hungover light of the sun. Ben can discern only animals and vehicles and their idling people in both directions: no end of the line and no beginning either, on this disembodied arm of this swastika mirroring all; and further on down the line, Mexicoway, so far as to be certainly foreign: Heber backtracking north with Mada in their limo requisitioned on the moment in Siegeles spurred hard, brakeless, its transmission on the clunk, and behind them Frank Gelt in a rental Hummer (on his way out to check on an Angels tip his convertible unreported stolen outside a Barstow motel, creditcards, too, he left in the glovebox at Needles so he pays all plus extra mileage in cash, saves receipts, prays reimbursement); they’re trafficjammed, fisting their horns thinking instinct they’re back in the city where when you make noise, you make life go; the lights getting greened in jealousy at the very red of impatience, the lanes only what’s made of them, lane; and then behind, far far behind and there unsuspected, almost at the border where they’ve bought with favors forged documents with which to evade recognition, the Marys, in the van in which they’d followed Him on tour (thanks new plates): they’re still costumed though off the clock, most of them lying atop a Hotel & Q’asino mattress gutted of stuffing in the bay in the back, its hubby, orificetight space studded with pillows in the style of an Oriental harem, perfumatory, tented with stolen towels and sheets; like everyone else — and though for them there’s no money involved only guilt in the gut, Hanna’s, them made family to disappointment, in themselves and in Him — they’re determined to find Him, to bring Him on home; forget bounty or bonus, it’s a duty, a love…His mother and sisters to pass the long while holding shiralongs, playing guessinggames, I’m thinking of more than twenty questions with the answer always Him, taking turns sleeping in the rear as Rubina usually or is it, as it’s jammedup and waiting and honking Batya just now, but how she’s too young to drive, idles them out of gas.

Ben holds up his hand to an elder withered to the perfection you’d expect to pay for in these parts, an Injun standing amid the throng, holding up and open his palm. In his other hand, he holds a miniature totem, topped with a scrap of plywood nailed, on which is scrawled an I …which must mean Information, indicative of progress, a palaver, and so Ben bows His head, like let us hold speech.

How, says the elder.

How what? He asks, thinking why not.

Howdy, he says, digging his totem into the ice and the dirt — donations are welcome, deal white with me, will you? He stands silent and straight and in-expressive as if a totem himself.

Ben forces on the elder a laugh, and he loosens up, pities with piety, waves Him over to meet his young squaw: a starved shy but pregnant girl, a refugee from the Navajo who despite their reputation for resistance, for violent survival, have all been already converted, he tells Him; then has Ben help shoe his horse while he — what else to do, not enough food — starts in with the nails on his kinder. If nothing else, he has a sense of humor. Not taking no, he offers Ben the freedom of his camp: lets Him sleep in line that night, the line that doesn’t move, as if anyone’d expected it to, the night that doesn’t move either, only its lights, which sway in the wind, which braid, as if to candle themselves with the powerlines, and then fire — lets Him sleep in the stow of a wagon on a heap of rank hay come loose from its bales, flameready, flecked pestilent with dung, nested infestation, the hatched eggs of vermin and varmint; amid the sleeps of the elder’s family of six with they threaten at least two more on the way, how they tussle in there, maybe even three by the end of the week — until just like tomorrow next Friday arrives, night, and with it as always the beginning of Shabbos again and so they prate at preparing wherever they stand, turning around to face east and now the Blessed art Thou firewater of its holy store are located, if at all, in the exact opposite direction. They’ll turn west again when the sun sets the next night.

You’re not safe here, the elder says preparing Kiddush that eve over what they’ve scooped of the weathering melt steeped with the peels of grapes saved and stored. I know who you are. I’m not just a native, I follow the news. And it’s not just my family, I fear for you, too. He holds aloft a murky tin cup, and there’s silence because none of them have yet memorized the blessing, the bracha. Over the washing, done from the depths of wheelrut puddles and hoofsinks, but before the breaking of bread, two cold loaves of corn, he takes Ben aside and whispers to Him: after we make Shabbos, it’s best you be gone, then returns to his kinder (his shayna shanya kinder), promising them — when we get to the store, I’ll trade up for more wine.

Ben sets out from the axis, walking two days, wandering three days, four, traversing four lines, arms, roads, and their people, kith and kined worlds…ways that might all be the same way, as the days of repetition lead toward the closing: blockade; with the meal spilled upon the ice then the savory salt, and there’s only one road left open…this the hardestrocked road, winding a way past the touristed ruins, originals destroyed whether by earthquake, fire, raid, or by time itself a God and then like Him or it reborn, again resurrected if only for the fast, distracted worship of weekenders ingathered; then, up to the so described, you sold me majestic vale of Third Mesa — how the pamphlets and brochures and catalogs available for a nominal investment of faith say windswept, say mighty with height, the site of the invisible archway by which the spirits of the dead might enter this world, and then exit, taking leave in a deep fall forever into the grandest of cañons. At least it’s not so small that you’d miss it.