Stanley Elkin: The Rabbi of Lud

“He don’t give a shit about germs. It’s in case they shoot him while he’s in my shop. He says he don’t need it on his conscience he’s the one responsible for ruining my towels. Who the hell does he think he is, Anthony Anastasia? Fucking showboat! How do you want it today, Rabbi, the usual?”

“What hard information did you ever give me?”

“Oh, come on,” Sal said, “what more did you need?”

“What hard information?”

“Oh, please,” Sal said.

“No,” I said, “really.”

“What do you want to see, Rabbi, a bill of lading? You want to look in a body bag? Come down to the basement of the business parlor with me. We’ll look in the one Bubbles brought in.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No, no,” Sal said, “we’ll check him out against the death certificate. You’ll see for yourself.”

“What will I see for myself? What are you talking about?”

“No, no,” Sal said, “don’t take my word.”

“Boy,” I said, “who is it this time? Jimmy Hoffa?”

“You already did Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. Some guy who’s connected.”

“He couldn’t have been too connected,” I said.

“They disconnected him.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I seen him, Rov. What they done to him. He looks like Beirut.”

“Watch out, Sal, the goblins’ll get you.”

“Probably,” Sal said. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “they probably will.”

“Come on,” I said, “what’s this? You can’t really be scared. This is more shmooz and hot towels, right?”

“Right.”

“Talc and toilet water.”

“That’s right,” Sal said.

“A little hair oil and stickum.”

“Why do you think they tell me?” Sal demanded suddenly. “Why do you think he showed off in front of you? Why do you think they let us know their business? What’s wrong with you? If they didn’t want to make certain we were going to protect their secrets, why would they let us learn them in the first place? Guys like that? Like him? God damn Tober’s goddamn Edward! God damn his sporty poster kid who can’t tell here from there, up from down, in from out. God damn Shull’s fucking goddamn needs. God damn need itself or whatever else it was stole shit from the gods and brought it to goddamn Lud!”

“Hey, easy,” I said, “easy there, Sal. Easy.”

“Like Beirut. I swear. Like he was in an earthquake. Jesus, Rabbi, he looks like a fucking act of God!”

“Who, Sal? Who does?”

“Who knows who does?” Sal said, and showed me a death certificate. “The guy, the special delivery in the business parlor, but who knows who does? He could have been anybody. They bring them in from all walks of life. Guys behind on their payments. Insider trader guys from Wall Street whose inside information didn’t pan out. He could have been anyone who ever disappointed them.”

“This has a woman’s name on it.”

“So,” Sal said, “I guess they’ll be wanting a closed casket then, hey, Rabbi?”

Our own odd version of the car pool — sillier than ever, I suppose, since Connie would no longer permit her classmates to ride with her — had started up again. She was adamant about the point, even though some of the mothers had begun to call, making overtures, devising schedules, proposing ways to divide the labor. She was too humiliated, she said, and told us that the only reason the kids were willing to start up a car pool with us was her notoriety, that she’d become a character. Nor, for the same reasons, would she agree to ride in the school bus. I tried to reason with her, but she had put her foot down, made up her mind.

“The only one you’re punishing here is your mother,” I said.

“I’ll run away if you make me ride to school with other kids,” Connie said.

“It’s all right,” Shelley said. “I don’t mind driving. Really. Real-la-le-lee.”

“This isn’t fair,” I said. “Do you think this is fair, Connie?”

“Whoever said life is fair?” Connie said.

“No one,” I said.

“I don’t even mind if life isn’t fair,” Shelley said.

“Hey,” Connie said, “no sweat. I’ll run away.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Go ahead and do it.”

“I’ll turn tricks on Forty-second Street for a couple of weeks. What have I got to lose? It’s not as if I still had my cherry or anything.”

“Go ahead,” I agreed, “run away and turn tricks on Forty-second Street. It’s not as if you still had your cherry.”

“Sure,” she said, “I’ll lick some dick for a couple of weeks, put a few bucks together, then come home for a visit.”

So the strange car pool started up again, on the road again in the brand-new season’s one-woman show in that year’s late-model, big new traded-up Buick station wagon, an open door speaking to them for company, an unfastened safety belt, a still-engaged emergency brake, a tank low on gas or an unnecessary light, all the machine’s articulate parts nagging at them for attention. More ridiculous than ever, Shelley more like a chauffeur than ever, Connie more like the poor little rich kid, no matter what they did or where my daughter sat, beside her mother or way behind her, deep in the boondocks of the huge automobile, looking more than ever as if they had already arrived at the end of whatever journey they had been on, even as they were pulling out of the driveway, as if everyone else must already have been dropped off or, peculiarly, as if the car had been hired. It seemed a sort of Air Force One, some company jet, I mean, vaguely conspired, tax loopholed, as if, if you came right down to it, it was no one’s station wagon at all, or a station wagon under some Bahamian or Liberian registry. And though their route no longer required them to make doglegs and detours to pick up anyone else, it seemed as if the car might accumulate mileage by the simple fact of its existence.

Despite what it may sound like, Shelley and I had settled into a sort of truce with each other. As if not just the station wagon but we too had settled beneath some flag of convenience, pulling our testiness, our neutrality a legal fiction. Whatever else, we were each of us relieved to have somehow made it through the summer.

And, whatever else, we had.

I said nothing about Sal. I never mentioned Bubbles.

We went almost directly from summer into Indian summer that year. There was a blustery Labor Day weekend when a sudden, fast-moving front lay down cold, withering, hard-driving rains during the nights like sustained blasts of heavy incoming, and left the days out to dry in a thin, heatless sunlight. This was followed by a week or so of damp, stalled cold weather, bright, freezing days alternating with nighttime cloudbursts and record lows. (Resorts in the Poconos and Cape May and Atlantic City and Greenwood Lake screamed blue murder over their lost profits.) Then, suddenly, a few days after Rosh Hashanah and before Yom Kippur, the front moved out to sea, and New Jersey looked washed, fresh in the new, immaculate weather like God coming out. The foliage flamed on the trees and then some of it began to fall, laying a torn, bruised cover over the yellowing fields, motley as pizza.

I would have come clean too, the troubled tzadik, I would, the muddled chuchm, and went off to Tober’s to burst Bubbles’s bubble. I meant to make it up to Shelley, too, for my infidelity, and balance the books with Connie.

But the boys weren’t in, were off on some errand and, when I got back, Shelley was crying.

“What?”

“Joan Cohen,” she said.

“Shelley, I’m sorry.”

“Elaine Iglauer told me,” she said. “I picked her up after I dropped Connie off. We were going to look at a house in Oakland.” She spoke — and wept — in griefless tones of shock in some register beyond outrage.