The Pinch (23 page)

He was halted at a bridge over a powder-dry stream by a pair of militiamen in partial uniform.

“What bidness you got in Mefiss?” asked the apple-cheeked younger, his weapon at the ready.

Pinchas was forthright. “Iss to make a livink, mayn beezniz.”

Said the slovenly older soldier with a sneer, “Seem like livin’ ain’t what folks’re about round here.” He spat. “Cross this bridge, Mister, and you might never come back.”

But since they were posted there to stop the infected from leaving the city, a function they’d shown themselves wholly inadequate to perform, they made no effort to block Pinchas’s progress. He soon wished they had.

The road was flanked by dismal shanties that gave way before long to two-story clapboard facades, decaying plank pavements, and a depraved citizenry. Individuals staggering in the lime-dusted roadway and assemblages spilling out the doors of saloons appeared to be simultaneously involved in acts of celebration and mourning; nor could you determine where one left off and the other began. A drunk with a shock of corn-tassel hair tottered up to Pinchas with a clay jug dangling from his pinky finger, saying, “Used to, the milkman’d shout, ‘Wide awake, all alive!’ Now it’s ‘Bring out your dead!’” He laughed like a loon as he offered the peddler a draft, which Pinchas kindly declined. He forged ahead past some bystanders watching idly as a man with a canary complexion looked to be running in circles while lying in the dirt. They watched until one of the bystanders, removing a tiny pistol from a breast pocket, shot the man like a rabid dog, after which they all moved away. On a stoop a buxom lady lay collapsed in a nest of calico; a preacher with graying temples like the wings on Mercury’s helmet mounted a barrel to declare that the plague was God’s vengeance for the pagan festival of Mardi Gras. In an upstairs window a woman was singing in a plaintive contralto: “Dream, dream, grah mo chree / here on your mama’s knee …,” while the air, riven with a general keening, provided a jarring disharmony.

The groceries and snack houses were largely boarded up—some with yellow cards and black crepe nailed to their doors—but the grog shops were thriving. Their clientele, as they exited, paused to inspect the fresh caskets that a company of kerchiefed Negroes were unloading from a furniture van. The empty caskets were then exchanged for the tenanted ones left on the doorsteps of stricken families. Some of the groggery patrons scrutinized the pine boxes as if shopping for their next berth, while others, pallid and less steady on their pins, looked as if they’d just crawled out of them. One box lay open on the curb as if for viewing: its occupant, marinating in a stew of tar and carbolic acid, was dressed in his full lodge regalia, his black tongue lolling like a slug.

There were drums of boiling creosote stationed along the curbs and burning bedclothes saturated in regurgitation. Asafetida bags tied around the necks of frightened citizens vied with the pungency of decomposing flesh. It was the stench that had preceded the city limits by several furlongs, and was suffocating in its intensity here. Making a mighty effort to place one foot in front of the other, Pinchas steered his cart around a bare-boned mule struggling to climb out of a sinkhole. The hole was the result of an overflowing basement privy, and rats as large as terriers rode the mule.

It was coming on dusk and Pinchas was near to falling down from exhaustion. Having slept these past weeks in haybarns and pastures, he’d looked forward to a night’s lodging under a proper roof, where he could wash off the shmutz from the road and refresh himself. He’d been told that Memphis was a city of cheap rooming houses run by maternal widows, but here the peddler had straggled into a charnel house instead. Then he’d passed out of the ramshackle quarter into a soberer district of Federal-style buildings, fashionable shops, and electric trolley lines. But the street, for all its elegant window displays, was as desolate at this end as it was anarchic at the other. There was no traffic save the clattering coffin wagons and the carts from which ragged men, like devils pitching brimstone, shoveled heaps of disinfectant powder. The only pedestrians were the scurrying gent in a cutaway holding a rosewater pomander to his nose and a pair of nuns dragging the hems of their habits in the greenish dust. Cannons boomed, church bells rang, and Pinchas came to a full stop in order to scratch the angry mosquito bites that stippled his neck and arms.

It was then he was approached from both sides of the avenue by children or midgets: he couldn’t tell which as all were in nightshirts and uniformly short of stature, their faces hidden by red bandannas. About the bandannas Pinchas wasn’t so concerned, since half the population wore masks like ganefs; only these turned out to be ganefs indeed. For in a matter of seconds, before the spent peddler could even react, they had whipped the tarp from his merchandise and gathered up the entirety of his stock-in-trade from the cart. Spiriting away armloads piled as high as their heads with tinware, piece goods, garters, and pewter buttons, the thieves vanished as swiftly as they’d appeared; though one returned to snatch up the canvas tarpaulin and, as an afterthought, the volume of Marx.

Wanting despite his inertia to give chase, Pinchas was stymied by his inability to choose which of their several directions to pursue them in. “A plague befall you!” he called after them reflexively, chilled by his apprehension that the curse may already have been fulfilled. He patted himself to make sure that the roll of bills, his savings, was still pinned to the inside of his dank flannel drawers. Then, as he pondered his empty cart with a sigh like a stab, he was distracted by the sight of a young man choking sobs, lugging a body in a winding sheet down a flight of stone steps. Mechanically Pinchas wheeled his cart toward the curb, and without exchanging a word with the weeping man, took up one end of the body by the feet that protruded from the shroud. They were a woman’s bare, spatulate feet with callused toes. Together Pinchas and the man lifted the corpse onto the cart, and tipping the sweaty rim of his bowler hat, the heartsick peddler continued on his way.

He wandered gaslit sidestreets past tall Italianate houses with turrets and ornate iron gates. Most were completely dark, though in one or two lights flickered like foxfire behind the hooded windows. Some of the more modest abodes had signs at the gate advertising rooms, but their haunted aspect told the peddler that strangers need not apply. Once or twice he sought to inquire of a rare pedestrian, who only quickened his pace at the peddler’s approach. Even though evening had descended, there was no relief from the sticky heat, and Pinchas’s legs, despite their habitual forward motion, were close to giving out. He was staggering before a boxy two-story house that, unlike its neighbors, was brightly lit from within. Watermelon vines spiraled the porch columns and a magnolia stood in the yard, its fragrance cutting somewhat the pervasive stench. On the porch sat a porcine woman in a rocker fanning herself with what looked like a raptor’s wing. She was wearing a flounced silk wrapper and smoking a long-stemmed pipe, her platinum hair piled in a towering pompadour.

“You got maybe a room?” asked the peddler, before his knees buckled under him and he knelt on the broken board paving. He heard the woman bellow, “Dinah! Eulalie! A customer.”

Ladies in rustling skirts, their cologne so acrid it brought tears to his eyes, grabbed Pinchas under the arms. As they dragged him up the front steps and through the front door, he couldn’t tell whether he was being rescued or abducted. He was aware of passing through a furbelowed parlor, complete with pier glass, fainting couch, and the portrait of a naked female attended by putti. He was hauled up a steep, carpeted staircase and taken into a room off a narrow hallway. Unfolded across a brass bed, Pinchas felt cool hands caressing him even as they shoved a mercury thermometer between his lips and took his pulse. They unbuttoned his garments and toiveled his sunken chest with damp cloths. At length one of the ladies—Pinchas could tell she was only a girl despite the heavy rouge—pronounced authoritatively, “He ain’t fevered, just tuckered out.”

One of the girls had fetched a bowl of beef bouillon and begun to spoon-feed him, while another offered him a tot of brandy from a cupping glass. A third, arms folded across her blotchy décolletage, made a considered judgment: “I believe this here is a Jew feller.” At that the two others resumed their clinical attitudes. “How can you tell?” asked the girl with the broth, inclining her sausage-curled head for a closer inspection. “Well,” replied the one across the bed from her, setting aside the brandy, “he has got what you call the map a Jerusalem writ on his face.” But the standing girl with the dappled bosom asserted somewhat listlessly that that wasn’t sufficient proof. “Ain’t but one way to be sure,” she said, which sent the others into a fit of titters, upon which two pairs of hands made for the flies of Pinchas’s underwear.

His energies in some measure restored by their ministrations, the peddler’s first impulse was to protect his modesty and extricate himself from the room. The rabbis of his youth would have been scandalized. On the other hand, Pinchas had as good as abandoned his heritage, Isaiah and Jeremiah having been replaced in his hierarchy of prophets by Proudhon and Kropotkin. In his travels, once he’d neglected to keep the Sabbath, he never bothered to keep it again, nor did he make any effort to observe the dietary laws. Where women were concerned he had resisted temptation only because temptation had been scarce in his experience. And while these daughters of Lilith would be reckoned unclean by every category of the halakhic code, Pinchas realized with a wan smile that he wasn’t picky. He was after all a Narodnik, a freethinker, despite his late commercial proclivities, and the despotic faith of his forefathers could not reach him here.

For all that, he was ashamed of his thoughts, which he might attribute to his weakened condition, though how to explain the rebellious stirring in his loins? Meanwhile the ladies had opened his drawers and uncovered his upstanding organ, which they leered at, having never before beheld the sign of the Covenant. “Thang’s nekkider than nekkid,” observed the girl on the peddler’s left side, damask-cheeked and saucer-eyed. The one at his right, risen to her knees on the mattress, clapped her hands, which jiggled her curls like pendants on a chandelier. “I want a go,” she resolved. “I ain’t never rid one a these.” She was lifting her crinoline when the other girl shoved her roughly out of the way, then positioned herself astride Pinchas’s outstretched legs. A hilarious tussling ensued, during which the spectator girl, her maculate bodice glazed in sweat, began to slide down the wall in a swoon. The two on the bed ceased their frolic to stare at their fallen companion. The one straddling Pinchas looked in perplexity from her fellow on the floor to the peddler’s peeled member. “It ain’t all
that
peculiar,” she reckoned. Then the fallen girl began to convulse, projecting a stream of bile like molten coffee grounds across the valance below the bedstead.

Pinchas watched in horror as the two girls, with amazingly unruffled efficiency, left the bed to attend to their companion slumped against the wall. They pressed a lace hankie to her mouth and watched as a crimson stain slowly spread. Galvanized by the scene and the fetor that made the air in the room unbreathable, Pinchas tucked his wilted manhood back into his long johns and slid from the mattress. Trailing the sheet he’d wrapped carelessly about his person, he shuffled back into the hallway, where he encountered two more painted ladies, who parted to let him pass.

Turning about, the addled peddler asked them, “Where am I?”

“Annie Cook’s,” they said in unison over their shoulders, then commenced to contradict each other, one cheerfully alleging that the establishment was a “bawdy,” the other a “pest” house. Unenlightened, Pinchas proceeded down the corridor, passing closed doors behind which could be heard a medley of moans and shrieks; but whether from amorous exertions or the laments of the infirm, who could say? A door at the end of the hall, however, stood open, and through it Pinchas spied the ladies nursing a chap whose fallow flesh appeared to have been parboiled from the inside out. This house, he concluded, was a kind of sanctuary where the nafkehs doubled as sisters of mercy—and sometimes martyrs. Good on them, he thought, but an upright man such as he (in health if not virtue) had no business here. Woozy though he was, Pinchas had seen enough. He made his way down the back stairs and was in the street again before he realized that, still togaed in the bedsheet, he’d forgotten his clothes.

What’s more, the money he’d pinned to the inside of his union suit was no longer there. “Mutzlekh!” Pinchas congratulated himself. “You got now nothing left to lose.” He trudged on, thinking he might find an officer to accompany him back to the brothel and demand that his funds be returned. But after he’d turned a corner or two without spotting a cop, Pinchas doubted he would even be able to retrace his steps. Besides, he still retained his Old Country distrust of police; and given the state of the infected city, infernal in the light of the fever fires, he figured the police would have better things to do than to retrieve an indigent immigrant’s purloined purse.

He’d found his way back to Main Street, which was desolate as an outpost. One step ahead of the fatigue that was threatening to overtake him again, he plodded on, crossing a street between palisades of rotting cotton and entering a park that overlooked the river’s traveling expanse. A leaden sky marbled with moonlight illumined a cluster of paddle wheelers (perhaps in quarantine) riding at anchor below the levee, their smokestacks contributing to the fouled atmosphere.

Pinchas coveted the few benches that crowned the bluff, but they were already occupied by silhouettes in various stages of tribulation. One hugged himself as he sat rocking furiously back and forth; another recited verses in Latin, and the peddler knew enough of gentile customs to assume the poor soul was administering some type of sacrament to himself. The petrified attitude of another invited an enterprising young thief, employing a hook and line to avoid contamination, to fish in his pockets for spoils. It occurred to Pinchas that, if he were willing to risk the contagion, he might secure a suit of clothes from a stiff, but his main objective at the moment was simply to lie down. His weariness had acquired a nauseous component; his head ached and his stomach had begun to cramp. This was possibly due to the onset of heatstroke, he reasoned, though that affliction did not commonly occur after dark. Still, he felt that his very skin was on fire, even as he’d begun to be racked with chills.