“Hey,” the clerk explained, “it’s red tape but we have to have it. Otherwise these clowns would crash-land in just any old snowbank and loll around in the midnight sun building the old D-and-H to the tune of five bucks a day till their rations was gone and they had to lift off again.”
“Five dollars a day? Why would anyone do something like that for just five dollars a day?”
“Hey,” said the clerk, “you kidding me, Padre? Because it’s an angle. Because it’s another angle, and life up here is lived as if it was ge-fucking-ometry.”
The clerk turned out to be right in a way, but missed the real point, I think. (This isn’t my rabbi mode now — I had, when I was in Alaska, little occasion, as you will see, to fall back upon my rabbi mode — so much as my apocalyptic one. — Ice. The world will not end in fire — you can see fire; darkness was the mode here — but in ice.) Which wasn’t angles, not entirely angles anyway, so much as a sense the men — we — shared of being stuck along some infinite loop, embraced in the stifling bear hug of a closed system. What that clerk called angles were only the sharpish edges with which they meant to nick the system, to let a little light bleed through. If they often seemed frantic as children, on liquor, on pot, if they engaged, on days off or at times when it was impossible to work, in endless tournaments of round-robin poker, gambling for table stakes higher than any ever seen in Vegas or my beloved New Jersey, it was because they — we — were so caught up in our terrible doomsday cynicism. The impressions I’d had in Anchorage, of wartime, of gridlock, of the sky’s-the-limit life, and which Philip had explained to me up in our little wooden nest egg while we waited for the weather to warm up so the lake could freeze over, as the general Alaskan scam, were not only reinforced from the moment we touched down on the Prospect Creek landing strip (and had to sit in the plane while the gas tank was refilled, at a dozen bucks a gallon), they were raised from impressions to rules, the forced, improbable etiquette of the North.
When I finished at Personnel the clerk handed me a map of the Atco units, circled the useful addresses like the girl behind the rental car counter at the airport (my quarters, Personnel, the Assignment office, the dining hall, the chapel, the infirmary, the card room, the club, the camp theater), and instructed me to report to the Assignment trailer after I’d eaten. There were, I understood as I made my way along the corridors and modules — it was a little like strolling through a troop train — essentially two basic models the company had drawn upon here — the Army, and the Starship Enterprise. After I unpacked and had my meal — the food was marvelous, thick steak, wine, lobster, and everything served on table linen the texture of men’s old white-on-white shirts — I reported to the Assignment office.
It was McBride himself who invited me to enter.
I’d seen him only once, at the motel in Anchorage the week before, and we couldn’t have exchanged two dozen words, but it was like, I swear it, coming upon one of my oldest and dearest friends. Maybe it was the suit and tie, except for Petch’s the last I’d seen since going down in Philip’s airplane, or the voice, not only uninfected but smooth, without twang or accent, a reassuring sound of the civil. It could even, God help me, have been his briefcase, a signal of routine, of a world where men went to business each day and returned each night, late for supper if they’d been held up by traffic. The only discordant note in the ensemble was the yellow hard hat he wore, but even this could have been ceremonial as his suit or symbolic as his briefcase, a reminder to the men that, please, let’s never forget it’s still Alaska up here, we’ll be blasting, working with heavy equipment, there could be avalanches, I love you guys, let’s be careful out there. And he’d signed my motel chit (and reminded the men that it was like when the family had taken their trip cross the country). I’m no, God forbid, Eddy Tober but, no offense to Flowerface, a fella needs a father figure he can rely on once in a while.
So, as you can imagine, I was more than a little excited to see him.
“Mr. McBride,” I greeted him, “how are you! I guess you heard about the trouble we had. It was touch and go there for a while, but Philip kept his head on him — he’s a good man, Philip is — and we had a couple of very lucky breaks there, which I’ll tell you the truth I figure we had coming in view of the near-tragic stuff we went through. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and here I am, a week late but rarin’ to go. Oh,” I said, “which reminds me. Did Rodendhendrey ever show up? Did Cralus? Did Fiske?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your rabbi, Mr. McBride. I’m Rabbi Goldkorn, sir. We met at the Travelodge? In Anchorage? I have to laugh. You didn’t know me then either. You thought I might be Fiske. Or Rodenhendrey. Or maybe Cralus. It’s just that I’d never been taken for a Rodenhendrey or Fiske before. I suppose a Cralus. Cralus is one of those names that could be anything really, but Rodenhendrey? Fiske? No way. That’s why I have to laugh. Though I want you to know I’m reassured you don’t have these preconceptions. It makes me more comfortable, it puts me at ease.”
“You’re at ease?”
“Well,” I said, “we’ve been through some rough circumstances, the pilot and me. There were times we both had to wonder whether we’d make it. I guess I’m just relieved, maybe a little nervous.”
“You’re my rabbi? Sure,” he said, “now I remember. You arrived a day early.” You were flying up the next day with the Hebrew supplies.”
“That’s right.”
“Sure,” he said. “I remember. I recognize you from your ID tag.”
“I wasn’t wearing an ID tag. I didn’t have one then.”
“No,” he said, “of course not.” He was looking at my shirt, and I suddenly realized he was the sort of man who never forgot an ID. What people looked like on their driver’s licenses and passport photos. It was his business, I guess. When he saw me in Anchorage, he didn’t so much see me as my picture, reduced and laminated, what I’d look like behind plastic. “Hey,” McBride said, as if he were reading my thoughts, “it’s a good likeness.”
“Thank you.”
“And the supplies? You have what you need?”
“The supplies? Oh, you mean the Hebrew supplies. Yes,” I said, “they’re fine. I locked them in my room in the duffel. They’ll be all right there, won’t they, till I find a safer place to store them?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “why not? You’ll find that people don’t so much steal up here as get into the more violent crimes. There’s lots of cheating at cards, so naturally there’s a certain amount of killings and beatings and stabbings. Crimes of passion, too, of course, because even though there’s ladies on our crews, there’s not nearly enough to go round. That’s why we try to keep it a lot like downtown Saigon.”
Of course. Downtown Saigon. Not war so much as the behind-the-lines life, the R&R one. Which would explain my Anchorage impressions, my instincts here since we landed. Which would explain the thickness of the steaks, the wine and lobster, the drawn butter, rich and yellow as the yolk of an egg, and understood at once that anything goes, that probably everything did, and knew — and feared — that my work was cut out for me, that there’d be, good Lord-of-All-Worlds, Jews to save! (Resisting, kicking and screaming in my head: Hold it, hold on there, I’m Rabbi of Lud, only some offshore ordained justice of the peace, really. What did I know of sin, what did I know of evil?) Of half a mind to protest to McBride right then, right there, that I didn’t bargain for this, that, like everyone else, I was there for the history of the thing, the visionary once-in-a-lifetime opportunities of boom. That, oh, yes, if some welder’s, or blaster’s, or heavy-equipment operator’s kid suddenly wanted bar mitzvah’ing, I was prepared to handle it, or even a shotgun wedding, say, and certainly I could pronounce a nice eulogy at a moment’s notice over the body of some poor unfortunate come to a bad end in an avalanche, but that, well, what I didn’t know about heroin and dirty needles, cocaine and prostitution, high crimes and misdemeanors, could fill a book, and that perhaps he really ought to get somebody else — a priest, say, and that I would understand. Of course I held my tongue.