Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“You should be. This is the first time I’ve ever been so far from Anchorage.”

“What do you think?”

“Barbarous. Worse than I thought. Will you look at that raging river? I think it’s going to bust its banks and take the bridge out.”

“That’s Crystal Creek,” I said.

“I’m taking my life in my hands. How are the Eskimos around here?”

“Very tame. Gentlemen, in fact.”

“A lot you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, “there you have me. I’m a bumpkin.” I wanted to make him understand. “Because I never took it seriously. The proposition that roughnecks could ever get into any of this. Or that God would take their disengagement seriously either. On my side in this, though why I should assume so I don’t know.”

“God’s opinions?”

“That’s right.”

“ ‘Now, therefore, O Lord our God, impose Thine awe upon all Thy works, and Thy dread upon all that Thou hast created, that all works may fear Thee and all creatures prostrate themselves before Thee.’ ”

“Since,” I said, “there was going to be an Alaskan pipeline anyway, and all the red tape and Title Nines and Tens and whatever were already in place, I thought it was a good time to get out of Jersey, put a stake together, and, if things worked out, maybe trade congregations with you.”

“Out of the question,” Petch said. “No deal. Deal’s off. You aren’t serious. You were never terrified enough. I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for your stake,” he said suddenly. Then, softly, “Someone must stand between us and the Eskimos.”

Though it was humiliating to me, I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little relieved. Here was Petch with his phantom Eskimos and chimerical natural disasters ready to throw himself into the breach, to intercede on man’s behalf for God, or God’s for man’s, whichever came first, like a limited warranty.

“Maybe,” I told him, “I wasn’t terrified enough. Though by any normally terrified guy’s standards I’m pretty terrified.”

“ ‘Let all the inhabitants of the world perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue must swear. Before Thee, O Lord our God, let them bow and fall.’ That’s why … What’s his name, McBride?”

“McBride, yes.”

“That’s why McBride don’t fire you. You ain’t scared enough yet to blow in a whistle, you’re not quite afraid to make a wave. That’s why he’ll probably let you play out your contract.

“Oh,” he said, “by the way, is it true? Were the others like this?” He touched the yad to the godforsaken parchment.

“One contained highlights. One was written out in English.”

“No swastikas but? I heard swastikas.”

The scrolls were covered and placed back in the ark.

“No,” I said, “of course not. You think I would have sat still for swastikas?”

“A bold, stand-up guy like you? Why not?”

We finished the services. Then we shook hands and each heartily wished the other might be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. Everyone did. McBride and the Indians. Jeers and the gentiles.

I walked Petch to the airstrip where his bush pilot was topping off the fuel in the gas tank and listening to music coming in over the plane’s radio on an Anchorage AM frequency.

Next week was Yom Kippur. Petch offered to come up, but I told him there was no need, I’d use the transliterated version.

“Ballsy,” he said.

“Why do you have to go? You don’t have to go. Stay over, go back in the morning.”

He looked up at the calm, perfectly cloudless sky. “Better get out,” he said darkly, “while the getting’s good.”

“Don’t you think you’re imposing a skosh too much awe upon His works? Is it necessary to dread all He created?”

“Sure,” he said, “everything.”

“Safe trip,” I told him.

“Wise guy,” he said and turned to the pilot. “Excuse me, you’re not afraid you’ll wear out the batteries?” He pointed to the plane’s radio, turned high, pushing its tinny music through the headset on the pilot’s seat. Philip also liked to use his radio for purposes for which it was never intended. I recalled how upset I’d been when we were airborne again and he’d tuned in to listen to a Fairbanks station, perhaps the very one that was playing now. Only now I understood what was happening. It was the same instinct that drove them to six-pack the house, that same sporty waste and recklessness lifted to a kind of code. You started with the realization that you only lived once. Then you modified your behavior to spite the bad news. (I had a sudden hunch about the stake all of us were supposed to be putting together up there, that it was a myth, more chimerical and dreamy than any of Petch’s disasters.) Maybe that was what was so unamiable and cynical about the idea of the potlatch. Maybe it was what Petch objected to in me. Life was so difficult, being good, respecting God. Dread and awe, I was thinking, were hard in such an awesome, dreadful world, and I began to pray that Rabbi Petch and his pilot be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, then that Shelley and my daughter Constance were, Spike and Ambest and Krezlow and Anderson and Peachblow and Schindblist and Jeers, and all the names of all the people I could remember meeting up there — the Jacobsons, Dave Piepenbrink, Arn Sternberg, McBride, Deb Grunwald, Howard Ziegler and Milt Abish and Karen Ackerman and Philip, the bush pilot who’d almost gotten both of us killed. Which is just exactly when the song ended and they broke for the news and the announcer came on to say that there’d been a plane crash on a small island in Cook Inlet. His two passengers had survived, but the pilot, Philip Kutchik, a Fairbanks resident and Tinneh Indian who flew for the Alyeska Corporation, had been killed instantly.

I went to Phil’s funeral. A busman’s holiday, you’re thinking, but that’s not it at all. I hadn’t been to the funeral of anyone close in years. Not since my mother’s, not since my father’s. Living in New Jersey, in that queer, Jewless, almost unpeopled town, there’d been no occasion. Shelley and I had only a few friends, and none of them, knock wood, had died. So I went to Philip’s funeral. Though we were hardly friends and I thought him a bit of a jerk, we’d certainly been through a lot together. We’d hacked out a nest together. We’d broken hardtack, shared the last of our jerky, displaced each other’s weight — I’d bite a fingernail, he’d spit out a window. I shouldn’t go to his funeral? My God, we were besieged by bears, found out by the wind-wafted tang of our mutual excrement. We weren’t close. That was only proximity in the plane, but I shouldn’t go to his funeral?

And a good thing, I thought at the laying out. Because except for one or two pilot chums (there, it turned out, as official Alyeskan delegates), and the crash’s two survivors (who stood by the casket — which, to my surprise, was open, Philip’s face having escaped injury, its only wound being in the suddenly paid attention of his expression — and told everyone who came near, myself, representatives of the funeral parlor, who they were and that, but for the grace of God, it could have been them there in that coffin instead of the poor dumb, jargon-spouting son of a bitch with his attitudes and minimums, civil evening twilights, eminences, DF steers, pan pans and A-OKs who lay there now), no one showed up.

I had rented an automobile and drove in the three-car cortege (the hearse, my rental car, a bright yellow Alyeskan truck) out to the cemetery. The two survivors had decided not to come, but the man with the flowers in his beard was outside the funeral parlor when I came out, and he rode with me in the rental car.