There was no telling how much time had passed — another day and night? — when suddenly in the gusty late afternoon the line went slack. With the cessation of tension the blacksmith fell backward into the sludge, along with the handful of neighbors still tugging at him from behind: the fish must have slipped the hook. But standing on the bank in back of them were Oyzer’s initial observers, volunteering a different conclusion. The pink-eyed one said, “Thang’s done turned around,” and the lantern-jawed other, “Git up now and wind your reel like a scalded devil.” Because the lunker had apparently doubled back and was swimming straight toward them, the broad V of its wake ruckling the surface of the coffee-colored water. Muddled and covered in slime but not quite defeated, Oyzer hauled himself to his feet and began to crank the previously unyielding handle. He cranked with a galloping alacrity that caused smoke to emanate through the vents of the aluminum reel and the braided line to smolder from the friction. He cranked until his shoulder was practically thrown out of joint and another circuit of the handle seemed beyond his powers of endurance. At that point the line grew abruptly rigid again, and calling on some reserve fund of strength (donated in part by the chronicler Muni Pinsker in his description), Oyzer locked the reel and heaved the rod upward. Crying “Gottenyu!” he thrust it into the air until the titanic fish hung suspended from a slender bamboo wand as curled as a shepherd’s crook. Seeing how he wobbled so unsteadily, nearly impaled by the hilt of the rod wedged against his gut, others came to the blacksmith’s assistance.
He hadn’t set out to catch a mythical monster, but there it hung: awesome and shuddering, a dreadnought of an aquatic vertebrate, oily water pouring from its massive silver flanks. It was risen only partway out of the bayou, the great saw-toothed fan of its dorsal fin only half exposed, its thrashing tail concealed beneath the churning surface, gills puffing in and out like the bellows in Oyzer’s forge. The diminished crowd of onlookers was swiftly reconstituted, the hardier pitching in to help uphold the rod as if rallying to raise some mammoth primeval standard. But as they held it aloft, the monster, its eyes dull as old chrome, opened its jaw to show a double row of needle-sharp teeth before sliding back into the turbulence. In its place was another fish, smaller but still monumental, its torpedo-shaped flanks louvered with breathing tiger stripes. Then that one also opened its mouth and slid back into the cove, leaving a lesser giant still on the line. Lifted high enough above the water to reveal its cankered underbelly, its forked tail slapping the air, that fish too slipped back into its element, leaving behind it young Hershel Tarnopol hanging by his collar from the rusty hook. He was grinning around the piece of paper clenched between his crooked teeth, his legs cycling slowly in his baggy plus fours; in his hands he held a large round loaf of baked challah bread.
Several of the men rushed forward to help disengage him from the hook. As they lowered him, Hershel shifted the bread to his left hand in order to dip his right into the breast pocket of one of his assistants. When they set him down in front of the blacksmith, whose body was still heaving from its Homeric exertion, the boy’s feet (both of them shod) made squelching sounds in the mud. Removing from his mouth the biblical passage with which Oyzer had baited the shoe, he said sheepishly, “Straight from the hearth, Papa,” as he offered his father the golden loaf. Then, with the wisdom he’d acquired during his confinement in the fish, Hershel began to read the Hebrew script in a stentorian voice.
“‘Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you fill his skin with harpoons, or his head with fishing spears? Lay hands on him; remember the battle — but never do it again!’ Job forty-one, one.” And assuming a dignity he had not previously been known to possess, the son enjoined his father the fisher-smith to “Ess gezunterhait, Papa. Eat in good health.”
With a sigh that rocked his entire frame and admitted a seepage of tears, Oyzer took a bite of the warm challah baked in the heat of a monster’s bowels. It had a cottony texture that tasted of sweet divinity and ashes, and melted in his mouth before he could swallow. In that moment the blacksmith forgave his son for having forgiven him. Then the stationer Seymour Lipow, noticing that his breast pocket was empty of his seven-jewel Swiss, shouted that he’d been robbed, and Hershel took off at a sprint. His bandy-legged father gave chase, roaring after him: “Marinated imbecile! When I catch you I throw you back!”
Somewhere there was a war. There was also a mass jailbreak from the county clink at Auction and Front Street and a surefire cure for pellagra concocted in a basement on Beale; there was an evening when Rose and Morris Padauer took along their proxy son, Benjy, to dinner and a show on the roof of the Peabody Hotel. They might have chosen a venue more suitable for children — a circus or a zoo — but the old rebbe had assured them that the roof garden cabaret specialized in family entertainment. So, despite their desolatation over the plain truth that their child was not their child, they took the old man’s advice. Of course, if they were honest they would have had to admit to experiencing as well a measure of relief: for the unsightly specimen they’d nurtured these several years had not, it seemed, sprung from their own loins. In the interim, however, they’d lavished so much fondness on the wizened little chap that, regardless of Benjy’s tenuous relation to humanity, it was too late now to withdraw their affection.
To save money — since Mama Rose’s pillaged piggy bank had disbursed only a pittance — they spared themselves the trolley fare by walking the dozen blocks to the hotel at Main and Monroe. Crossing the unmarked border between North Main and Main Street proper, they realized yet another instance of relief. Because once they’d begun to stroll beyond the neighborhood, the world reverted blessedly to three dimensions, as opposed to the dizzying multitude observable in the Pinch. The last to find out what everyone else already seemed to know, the Padauers felt like strangers in their own community, and so breathed easier at having left it for a turn.
“Mama,” said Morris, admitting a roguish smile as he swung one of Benjy’s horny hands in his own, “I feel like we keepin’ company.”
“Fresh!” chided Rose, flushing vermilion while squeezing their creature’s other hand.
On the Peabody roof they were seated by a maître d’ with a permanently arched brow at one of the farthest tables from the stage, below a parapet hung with paper lanterns. The air was pervaded by the caustic scent of citronella from the candles on every table; the potted palms stood about like discreet chaperones. Looking around, the Padauers tried to quell the sense that the other patrons were of an altogether better class than they; they were further disturbed to find no children in evidence at all. They consoled themselves that it was in any case a warm summer night, the stars low-hanging fruit above their heads.
They would have liked to order, say, a plate of mamaliga or noodle pudding but were served instead the singularly unkosher entrée — chicken-fried steak and pinto beans stewed with ham — that came with the bill of fare. (The haughty waiter in his waist-length jacket advised them there were no substitutions.) Unaccustomed to worldly pleasures as they were, the Padauers were nevertheless determined to enjoy their evening out. So they sipped their sweet tea, into which a neighboring couple were pouring something from a brown paper bag, and speculated on the ingredients of a menu item called shoofly pie. They rubbed the sparse thatch atop Benjy’s outsize head and solicited his assurance that he was having a good time. (“I’m havink a ball,” he croaked, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.) Then they applauded enthusiastically when the penthouse curtain parted and the New Pygmy Minstrels pranced onto the low stage.