Joshua Cohen - Witz

STEINSTEIN:: STINESTINE, STEINSTEIN:: STEENSTEEN,

STEINSTEIN:: STINESTEEN, STEINSTEIN:: STEENSTINE,

STINESTINE:: STINESTINE, STINESTINE:: STEENSTEEN,

STINESTINE:: STINESTEEN, STINESTINE:: STEENSTINE,

STEINSTINE:: STINESTEEN, STEINSTINE:: STEENSTINE,

STINESTEIN:: STINESTEEN, STINESTEIN:: STEENSTINE,

STEINSTINE:: STINESTEEN, STEINSTINE:: STEENSTINE,

STINESTEIN:: STINESTEEN, STINESTEIN:: STEENSTINE…then above everything, at the very fall of the wall, the height of its highest loosening brick leaning to topple atop the slats of the trees roofing the trailer — it’s the head of a dog, killed in attack or that’s just how its expression’s been preserved for the mounting.

And, what’s this is all Benjamin thinks to say, standing naked.

Don’t you know, Leeds says on his way up the stumps to the trailer, figgering I’ll trust you — it’s the plan, understand.

No.

I’m just pulling your putz, son, what’s that they say, pishing buttons, and he gasps, leaning his head out the trailer’s lone window, also its chimney, and puffing smoke — this stuff was here when I moved in, you know, came with the wall…

But you must be freezing, he tries to say, through deeply worrisome coughing: come inside, chow’s almost on.

A trailer little more than an oven, its longways spanned down the middle with a flagpole fallen, suspended from window to window, one of its ends still topped with an eagle melted of wings: stolen from its stand outside the local euthenics school, a State Police outpost abandoned to tragedy and its rampageous dogs, a city hall with no city left to its name once the ironworks went bust, the mill broke down, rolled its stone to seal tight its sepulcher. It’s now the spit for the pig, the leftover half of a whole sow Leeds’d been feeding on the finely mealed remains of minority mutts then slaughtered just last week for his Xmas, since turned, a mite sour: an appreciably fat, devastatingly hairy faygele pinko of a sacrificial animal, an oinker one flank remaining being lashed with thick whips of greasy flame, a conflagration fed halfwise, crosssectioned, with bushels of leaves drifted down on wispy midnight wipings of dreck, then stoked, too, toward its premium rump, with its young — Leeds left its piglets inside as a sweetening. Kill and heat, a recipe as old as fire and death. To improve, he takes what’s left of the apple from his helmet, stuffs it into the mouth of the porker. A locomotive puff: a snout’s two smokestacks, one for you, one for me. Tickled pink, more like gagged. Pig, the food of the Gods, Leeds says as he heaps on it rocksalt that might be nits from his hair, the only white meat for me. Trichinosis, it’s government fearmongering, don’t be fooled, it’s all disinformation…subversion, a repression mentality — afraid of the psychic gifts, keep on giving. Benjamin freezing and unable to breathe. Mind it, will you? It just needs to warm up…and Leeds heads outside, returns up the stumped stoop with a canister of gas, pours it to empty over the spit; it flares, their meal singes; he leans over to savor and so basting the whole dish crude with his beard, then shoves an arm up the animal’s tract — it comes out utterly far from clean, so treyf ’s served.

A table’s outside, one of the portapotties toppled lengthwise, halfway drained, and Benjamin’s sent out to set it.

Plates? He asks again at the doorway and Leeds distractedly hands Him a sheaf of papers that comment last week in obituary, eulogistic columns.

Utensils? Welltrained, brought up civil. And what does He get for His trouble, which’d been Hanna’s — only an annoyed eye, lilied disgust. Fork and knife…meaning, with what are we supposed to sup the food that God hath given of Himself unto us? With another one of God’s gifts, with two of them if we’re lucky, that of our hands that’ve been wrought in the image of His. Give me yours, says Leeds stomping outside, here hold mine — nothing weird about it at all. To say grace, then Amen, not a woman or an anything else. With his left he stirs at the tableside toilet, wrenched from the potty, plungering away at its moonshine brewing, pure grain, joy juice with just a dash of melted weather to taste. He offers Benjamin a preprandial sip from the rubberized font: al-cohol, he says, only good turn the Ayrabs ever done us, though why they won’t drink the stuff themselves, don’t ask me; goddamned diaperheads, sandshvartzes, though they have the right idea as far as Palestein goes, I say burn, baby, burn it all the damn down…not just in His throat, this rare heat: the smoke pouring pink from the trailer’s chimneyblack window. Leeds rouses from his squat atop the table’s disembodied potty, hunts a peck around, retrieves from a rut in his yard under heaps of fallen wall, amid paperings and jaculatory jot, a rusted chunk of chainsaw, takes it up the stumps with him inside, feels fingers over its tracks pushing splinters out and through, then revs with the ripcord, slices off a hunk of pork, taking a good stretch of his beard along with it, wiping, a napkin.

At stoopfoot, Benjamin holds out His newspaper scraps — necrology plus erroneous sevenday forecast — rustling, shaking, already drunk. Leeds tosses to them a generous flank, then revs again for himself and slices, serves to walk his meal back outside. Hope you’ve worked up an appetite. Dig in. But He waits for His host to partake, which is more fear than respect, or pleasantry, Hanna’s polite. Leeds’ head rears up, dinosaurlike, as if a raptor rapt for prey, this old, oddly carnivorous bird: nearfeathered facialhair, thin wrinkle mouth its lips dripping grease, undifferentiated gross, strands of sinew stuck askew from between remnants of fillingful teeth, stoops themselves, stumps, ruts amid gums, nubby rots, or just one of them, or half, and a tongue, or else none at all maybe and tongue forked, perhaps, no tongues that aren’t meat just hanging from the hole whose, He observes, dentition lacks entirely, lost or pulled it’s anyone’s guess.

Pork: Benjamin had never had it — who do you think He is, thank His parents, their rabbi, his insatiably parochial God — had never seen or smelled it, heard its own goddamned oink, never petted a specimen at the zoo, no, neither, but He anyway knew the restrictions, He’d been born knowing. He’d never not kept kosher, when and how the opportunity to pig out on forbidden foods? Wherefrom trefyheadedness, who would even think or ever could?

He knows that His virgin doesn’t serve Him, that first taste, it’ll sicken, it has to, poison even, has already without it, a lip, a mere sniffling lung. All in His head, His head’s saying: psychosomatic the symptoms, the parasitic signs, a worming, and Benjamin’s feeling them, too, wriggling up His fingers, down His throat, furrowing the burrows of brain — imagining small, generically animated pigs pink as sin, shvitzing hot as psychedelically napalmed, turning flips in His gut, rooting around down there in the bile colonic, dirty snouts flaring deep amid the gastric denature: His stomach, the trailer, piglets nosing evidence from off the westernmost wall. An estimable mouthful, a steaming morsel — such virginal schmeck weighs upon His tongue yet to be downed, the meat and not the lingual anatomy that if swallowed itself would choke and make bestially dead, which is why the drink, grained booze more and more of it He plunges, too much and profane of a Kiddush, it’s never enough: L’Chaim, L’Avram, L’Benjamin, too…come on down’s the idea, the digestion’s fine — the flow tasting like antiseptic, thousandflushed with a tinkle of blue chemical toilet deodorizer, potpourri sprinkle, faint hints of moldy potato peel, onion-skin, and low notes of musky piss vintaged last week; it washes past, and with it the hunk of pork flows down whole to gag swallowed, without bitten chew; it would’ve snuck up again and out if not for a slap, quick and feely from Leeds leaning over.