Having found at the end of his odyssey only a paint-splattered shmegegi instead of the bruited miracle street, the survivor couldn’t conceal his disappointment. “Dos iz efsher der Pinch?” he asked, incredulous. Where was the book that Tyrone had quoted from chapter and verse, the one he’d cited as history, atlas, and gazetteer, which had assumed a Grail-like aura for Avrom? He pressed the artist for clues to its whereabouts and was met with abstracted unconcern. Led so far by figments and sick fancy, the survivor experienced a mounting anger, directed as much at himself as Tyrone; he became possessed of a determination to retrieve some tangible keepsake for his trouble. At length he proceeded to bully the redheaded mooncalf into an instant of clarity, which vanished as quickly as it arrived, but not before Avrom had been enlightened. Alone by starlight he dug a hole beside a neglected sapling that showed little promise of ever growing taller. The sapling stood in an otherwise treeless plot of ground that had once been a park, where Tyrone had buried Muni’s manuscript like an outworn Torah scroll before leaving for the war.
Around that time the Rosens’ deli went belly-up, as had so many other North Main Street businesses. Families that owned their run-down buildings survived by renting rooms to the transient poor; they became landlords and hoped the sacrifices they’d made on behalf of their children hadn’t been futile, while their children seemed to be waiting for the excuse of another war to leave the Pinch. (Impatient, they made trial excursions as far as the Pig-N-Whistle to sample pork barbecue, the Dreamland Gardens to drink Purple Jesuses.) Tenants rather than proprietors, the Rosens were evicted from their premises and reduced to living on a picayune pension in two rooms above Futterman’s Bail Bonds on Monroe. Bereft of their hospitality and judged non compos mentis by his neighbors, Tyrone Pin was deemed a neighborhood liability: an agency was contacted and papers signed, committing him to the state asylum at Bolivar. Having pursued the artist from an inferno to his fool’s paradise (and having cleared no end of bureaucratic hurdles along the way), the refugee Avrom Slutsky lacked any compelling reason to stick around. Neither did he have a reason to move on. A scholar and dreamer during the time that had preceded the great interruption, he leased a commercial space with an option to purchase on a shoestring loan from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. There he began the unprofitable operation of buying and selling used books.
He sat at a desk in the midst of his cluttered shop, where his moodiness tended to discourage the occasional browser, and commenced a task even more thankless than his chosen trade. He began to translate the crossbred language of Muni’s exhumed manuscript — worm-eaten despite the gunny sack it was buried in — into a negotiable English, his own becoming less rusty in the process. It took him five years. Then willing a functional dexterity into his shaky hand, he made a fair copy of the yet untitled book, which he called (what else?) The Pinch. He gave it the albeit tongue-in-cheek subtitle A History and oversaw its printing at his own expense at a local press. It was also Avrom’s idea, frankly an afterthought, to include as illustrations reproductions of the pictures the unhinged GI had painted with a holy vengeance on his return from overseas.
The general belief was that the bookseller had been scrupulously faithful in his redaction of The Pinch, but there were those who later suggested he took liberties with the original text. They argued that, frustrated with an inability to wring from Muni’s manuscript his fascination on first hearing its contents in the lager, he invented bits for his own amusement. He tampered and perhaps even perversely inserted himself and his assistant as characters. Avrom would of course have vehemently denied the allegation: it was shtuterai, patently ridiculous. The passages foretelling his own arrival in Memphis — along with so many other prophecies — had after all come as no surprise to him, who had lost the capacity to be surprised: “For me,” he might have said, “the future came already and went.” And as for the intrusion into those pages of the feckless kid who came to work in his shop: that one, he would have had you to know, existed in the book’s printed edition long before he’d turned up in the flesh at the Book Asylum. Regarding that issue the bookseller had responded with typical insouciance even to the inquiries of the employee himself: “It’s the gilgul, stupid.”
“The gilgul?”
Then Avrom had wearily explained the mystical process of the transmigration of souls, a concept he naturally had no truck with; on the other hand, he allowed for the necessity of some spiritual recycling in this day and age, when the availability of Yiddishe souls was severely depleted.
The employee, one Lenny Sklarew, had sighed in bewilderment, then gone back to alphabetizing the shelves.
When he’d delivered The Pinch to Shendeldecker the printer, who ran off the job on his greasy old six-cylinder rotary press, Avrom was glad to wash his hands of the thing. The labor of preparing the book for print had left him exhausted — a klippah, a husk. Why, he wondered, had he taken on the project in the first place? Why, for that matter, had he come to this Bluff City, America? If he experienced any gratification in having rendered Muni’s folly accessible to the common reader, he never located it in any part of his being. He made no effort to publicize the undertaking for all its pains, or even to acknowledge its existence, and had a customer decided on some stray impulse to buy the thing, he would have sold it for a song. When the volume was in fact discovered in a random stack by his employee, he disclaimed any personal connection to it, the completion of his self-assigned task having absolved Avrom of his commitment to The Pinch for good and all. Though his employee, confounded by his own appearance in its pages, thought he detected otherwise.
Lenny believed that his boss took a measure of pride in his possession of the book, just as he did in his ownership of the shop and all it contained. It was a proprietariness that extended as well to his sometime assistant, over whose fly-by-night progress Avrom maintained a paternal (if cranky) interest. An interest that went beyond his curiosity, no doubt already satisfied, concerning the character of the kid in the book — the one who swallowed the pills that made his brain swell like a hypertrophied heart and fell out of moving vehicles.
He came around on a ward in St. Joseph’s Hospital at about the time that Avrom, his organs failing, throat percolating blood on another ward in the same facility, passed out of this world. Lenny himself had sustained an impressive array of injuries — cracked ribs and skull, shattered knee, internal bleeding, et cetera — that kept him confined in bed tethered to tubes, ropes, and pulleys and moored to a catheter for better than a week. The injuries would have lingering aftereffects that served to get him declared 4-F by the local draft board. It was a deferral that the late Elder Lincoln would have advised him was undeserved: an arbitrary decision on the part of a committee that had an ample pool of black youth to draw from for its steady supply of cannon fodder. But Elder was no longer around to stoke Lenny’s guilt. Nor, as it turned out, was Avrom, whom Lenny — garbed in an open-backed hospital gown and escorted by a portable pole with its dangling saline drip, surrounded by an aluminum walker — had gone looking for as soon as he was able. But on the wing where he’d previously visited him, the former employee was informed that his choleric old boss was already departed, carted away and buried in an East Memphis memorial park at taxpayers’ expense. Lenny would plan, then postpone, pilgrimages to his gravesite ever after.