An emergency meeting of the North Main Street Improvement Committee was convened to address the issue of the boy’s delinquency. Leon Shapiro proposed they send a delegatz to Tarnopol’s forge to register their grievances concerning his son: who knew but they might even discover their plundered goods stashed there in plain sight. But no one was willing to risk provoking the blacksmith’s wrath. Neither, interestingly, did a single member of the committee recommend contacting the police.
One morning Hershel appeared in Pin’s Merchandise with the bill of his jockey’s cap pulled to the bridge of his nose, deceiving no one. Then demonstrating a remarkable lack of prudence, he lifted from its shelf an unwieldy Dandee clothes wringer with a reversible water board, and lumbered away with it in full sight of the proprietor and his menial. Muni looked to Pinchas, who merely shrugged: the kid was an occupational hazard. But in the face of such a flagrant offense to his uncle’s place of business, Muni was seized by a righteous impulse, and flinging off his apron he chased the culprit out the door. In the street Hershel had not made much progress: he’d managed to lug the heavy appliance under the Rosens’ striped awning and just past the soaped show window of Dlugach’s Secondhand, when Muni emerged from the store. At the rate the ganef was plodding, Muni would easily overtake him — and then what? He would teach the boy a lesson. What lesson? Hadn’t he just spent years in a place where your best chance of survival was commensurate with your skill at theft? But here things were different; here there was right and wrong.
Muni was already at Hershel’s heels and about to grab hold of his collar, when the boy, looking back, dropped the wringer and neatly leaped over it. Not so Muni, whose foot snagged between the twin rollers, sending him sprawling headlong onto the sidewalk in front of Elster’s Discount Furniture. This got a chuckle from Mr. Elster, seated in his doorway in a rotary-back veneer-seat rocker, priced $4.25. There the pursuit might have ended; the goods recovered, the employee could return triumphant to Pin’s. But Muni was still dissatisfied, and having added to his incentive the need to save face, he was doubly determined to apprehend the blacksmith’s son. He yanked the wringer like a sprung trap from his shoe, examined his torn trousers and the bruised knee beneath, and raised himself again to his feet.
Unburdened of his spoils, Hershel had accelerated his lath-legged pace. Already he was beyond the display racks outside Shapiro’s Dry Goods and the alley that led to the livery stables behind which stood the blacksmith’s forge; he’d passed Blen’s Pharmacy, Schloss’s Greengrocery, and Makowsky’s Butcher Shop, picking up speed. Far outdistanced, Muni nevertheless stirred his limbs into motion. Heads turned as he sprinted across Commerce Avenue past the old auction block that served now as a wagon yard; he crossed Jackson Avenue where the trolley line veered east toward the car barn. He was beginning to enjoy the chase for the sheer sport of it, feeling somehow as if he were outrunning the weariness that had dogged him for so long — the weariness falling away like a splint no longer needed to mend sore bones.
The blacktop along North Main gave way to the old paving stones underneath; the stones petered out into gravel then earth as the track crossed the desolate stretch that separated civilization from Catfish Bayou. It was a blustery morning: liver-brown leaves from a few withered elms skittering across the barren ground, a chevron-shaped skein of geese honking overhead. Having increased his breakneck stride, Hershel Tarnopol sped down the slope toward the bloated pond; he raced across the crunching shingle and launched himself, legs still cycling, in an arc above the wind-riffled water. Arrived at the brow of the slope, Muni was just in time to see the mammoth pewter-gray fish leap out of the bayou, its whiskers waving like ganglia, its jaws stretched to a cavernous width to receive the boy. As Hershel dropped into its mouth feet first and was swallowed whole, the fish dove back beneath the oily surface with a splash and was gone.
Almost as astonishing to Muni as the event itself was the lack of surprise his tale of Hershel’s fate generated in the community. Sightings of the big fish had already been reported: it was, as Rabbi ben Yahya’s followers described it, a prodigy grown fat on the iniquities of the Jewish people. Nearly as large as Leviathan, the fish was an unmistakable harbinger of the coming of Messiah, et cetera. As for Hershel Tarnopol, it was fitting that the scourge of North Main Street should have come to such a biblical reckoning as to be swallowed by a whale.
“Was a catfish,” Muni assured them, proud of his growing ability to recognize local fauna.
“Nifter shmifter,” they replied. “A fish is a fish.”
“Don’t split hairs with these clowns,” his uncle Pinchas cautioned him. “You’ll end up meshuggeh as they are.” Pinchas was squeamish whenever the rebbe’s disciples milled about his store inspecting items they could never use. They fingered catchers’ mitts and razor strops like connoisseurs, argued over the kosherness of an ink pen or hot water bottle, but seldom bought anything. When they did make a purchase, Pinchas would bite their coins to ensure their legitimacy. Where did their money come from anyway, since none of them had ever been seen to engage in work? Rumor had it they received remittances from the godforsaken Lithuanian village they hailed from, its inhabitants happy to pay them to stay away. But Pinchas wouldn’t have put it past them to mint their own currency.
The only person appropriately disturbed by the disappearance of the neighborhood scapegrace was Hershel’s father, Oyzer, who had since allowed his livelihood to languish. The blacksmith (the wags called him Oyzer Destroyser, though never to his face) had surrendered his mad fits of temper to an ominous brooding, and could be seen early each morning shambling with the rod and reel he’d purchased at Pin’s in the direction of Catfish Bayou. There he would sit on the bank until sundown.
Then there was enough of a nip in the late autumn air to remind Muni Pinsker of the ravening winds that had blown him to this river city, and he knew he ought to count his blessings. But he was restless, possessed of contradictory emotions that he’d thought were forever defunct; and he was haunted by the girl he continued to evade. The visceral charge he’d experienced during his heated pursuit of the thief, to say nothing of its stupendous conclusion, had yet to dissipate. In chasing Hershel, Muni had felt strangely as if he were chasing some renegade piece of himself just out of reach; his inability to apprehend the boy — or to save him from his impetuous plunge — had left the immigrant lastingly frustrated. For all his gratitude toward his uncle, he’d begun to feel constrained in Pinchas’s employ, no longer satisfied with sorting merchandise, taking inventory, and performing odd jobs. In the midst of stacking flour sifters or pricing jars of disappearing cream, Muni might find himself frozen in place, trying to recall some elusive version of the youth he’d once been. He might emerge from his trance to observe that the clock had advanced perhaps a quarter of an hour — fifteen lost and irretrievable minutes.