It had turned bitterly cold outside, the delft-blue sky retreating from an onslaught of dark clouds. I caught a glimpse out the window of a scarecrow in a stubble of cornstalks, just as Rachel reached across the seat to squeeze my hand. My breath caught: the gesture seemed to effectively erase our previous intimacy — the night that never happened — and replace it with something more durable. I knew enough to stay mute, since any blurted declaration from me might undo the moment. A few seconds passed and she removed her hand anyway, having perhaps thought better of it. But the reason turned out to be purely practical, because it had started to snow, great saucer-sized flakes of a kind rarely seen in Tennessee. The fallow pastures and tilted silos were turned almost instantly into features out of Currier and Ives, an absurdly precious landscape that neither of us, hazardous driving conditions aside, were of a mind to disparage.
I told Avrom we’d visited the madman and he asked me what did I want, a Good Samaritan medal? But it was one of his talkative days and, after his habit of doling out information in short rations, he let it be known that Tyrone had been among the troops who liberated the camps.
“How do you know?” I asked, expecting the usual bull.
“Because I was in it, the lager.”
I assumed that his reply was intended as a conversation stopper; any reference to that place usually was. But I had acquired, at least provisionally, a girlfriend and so considered myself a man of some substance, and on the strength of that credential pressed him to elaborate. To my astonishment he made a terse admission: as he lay fevered and anemic in the camp, he was the captive audience of a meshuggeh GI who hunkered beside his cot and hokked him a tscheinik; told him a tale no one who could walk away would have listened to. It had to do with a fabled place called the Pinch, which became entangled in the survivor’s delirium, and when he recovered he (the survivor) conceived the desire to make the journey to see for himself.
“I came, I saw,” said Avrom, picking a nit from his beard and flicking it; then a shrug conveying volumes of disenchantment. “I’m still here. Sitzfleish it’s called.”
I felt privileged to have received the disclosure but was damned if I’d let him know it.
Outside the shop the strikers were marching from Beale Street to city hall and from city hall back to Beale again, tramping through the slush left over from the deepest snowfall the city had known. All the world’s woes had slept for a day under a white counterpane then woke the next morning to sunshine and took back the streets. Beyond Main there was a war on: place-names like Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu were dropped as commonly into conversation as one might say Electric Kool-Aid. I hadn’t heard from Rachel in days, though how could I? I had no phone. Of course she might have called Avrom’s shop or dropped by the 348, and I might have sought her out at the Folklore Center in its mossy mansion on Peabody Avenue. But for the time being I liked recollecting her in tranquility, isolating her constituent parts — the curl the size of a finger ring at the nape of her neck, her calves as slender as bowling pins, her occasionally envenomed tongue. I was also reading The Pinch at a page or two every night, advancing hesitantly the way you’d enter a cavern whose sunlit mouth you’re afraid to lose sight of.
My besotted affection for Rachel somehow contributed to the intensity of my reading, or vice versa. Whatever the case, when I shut the book I was still flocked about by its contents; merchants, thieves, and errant souls continued to divert me from my own historical moment. I remained anchored to the past by the weight of the washbasins, lard presses, and canister mills in Pin’s General Merchandise, which I dragged about in my mind like the clanking strongboxes that trailed Marley’s ghost. Avrom would remove his dentures and clack them at me to get my attention; Lamar would poke a finger at my chest, exhorting me to raise the price of cannabis; he was apparently in some kind of trouble. Sometimes I was afraid my transported involvement in the book put Rachel out of reach as well, and I would try and resist reading further. I’d try to get back to the familiar desolation of North Main Street, leave the apartment and run downstairs as I did this morning, only to find myself waist-deep in a morass of floating sundries like Alice in her pool of tears.
6 Afterglow
“You shouldn’t take it so personal,” argued Jenny with respect to the havoc the quake had unleashed. She was dusting herself off at the edge of the crevasse they had just hauled themselves out of, inspecting her various contusions. So casually did she examine herself that you’d have thought she’d only taken a minor pratfall rather than dropped out of the sky into an abyss. But Muni, bruised, abraded, and shaken to the core, couldn’t help but believe that their treetop liaison had touched off the calamitous consequences.
“We should have first to been married,” he proclaimed.
Jenny gaped at him in disbelief. “From where did you get such a big head?” she asked him sharply, while beyond her their panicked neighbors scurried here and there in the altered landscape. “You think it matters to God what you did?”
“But Jenny—” he began, and was silenced by the disappointment he read in her face. When he found his tongue again he submitted glumly, “Your question that the rabbis have debated it for centuries.” Then instantly he was sorry for his betrayal; he was ashamed that the event, its earthshaking proportions notwithstanding, had supplanted the unfathomable delight he’d experienced in their intimacy. Still he couldn’t let go of the guilt he felt for having set the planet awry. Having done so, were they now supposed to bask in some dewy-eyed postcoital glow? Scarcely able to control the trembling of his hand, Muni attempted to dab with his shirttail the sickle-shaped scar on Jenny’s chin, then gave it up. “How can I join with you in the fraylikheit, the gladness, after what we just been through?”
For the oak, in toppling, had not fallen onto level ground. Had that happened, its limbs might have absorbed the shock and the couple, still suspended in its branches, climbed down handily. Instead the entire tree, at the end of its long decline, had pitched top foremost into the chasm that opened beneath it and had caused it to fall over in the first place. Market Square Park had shifted like the head of an awakening colossus and yawned, its acorn-strewn turf developing jaws that gobbled up the oak in all its leafy luxuriance. Then with such gathered velocity had the tree tipped groaning into the hole that it was virtually upended; its broad limbs, thus inverted, were stuffed into the maw of the gaping cavity so that its unearthed roots now protruded above the ground. They approximated in their height and breadth, those tangled roots, the original tree. And perched among them were a company of improbable creatures who, uncomfortable with their sudden exposure, leaped onto the grass and scattered in their various directions.
Muni and Jenny had managed to hold on, riding the bough they clung to all the way down into its subterranean berth. Dazed and disoriented after the tree had come to its jolting rest — wedged upside down in the crevasse — they were amazed to find themselves still in one piece. Then came the task of climbing out of a stygian shaft that may have had no bottom, a chill sepulchral breeze wafting out of its depths. Clambering up the downed tree proved much harder than mounting the oak when it stood erect. The climb was especially difficult for Muni, who lacked Jenny’s agility in the first place and was moreover in shock. But the girl, apparently as skillful at spelunking as at scaling heights, endeavored despite her bum leg to aid her young man at each stage of their ascent. She grabbed him by the wrist, hauled him by the shirt collar and the seat of his pants, even as the earth continued to hiccup and rumble, threatening to dislodge them from every hard-earned purchase. In this way they were able to grapple by degrees along the knotty trunk, sometimes squeezing between the branches and the bedrock laid bare by the eruption. Surfacing at last into an ocher-red evening, they discovered the park transformed, its previously horizontal lawn bunched like a rug. Hysterical neighbors tottered over the rolling paths while dogs stood frozen in their tracks. But instead of the exhilaration the couple might have shared at having survived their ordeal, they exchanged cross words. Then before Muni could speak again and add further fuel to the fire, Jenny put a finger to his lips, took his arm, and led him out of the park.