The Rabbi of Lud (18 page)

“They think we’re a bird?”

“Do they think they can take us is what. Listen,” Philip said, “Jerry, I’ve heard about this. Some clowns like to hunt out of airplanes. Hang a rifle out the window and potshoot anything that moves. Wild West antics. Like standing on the observation platform and offing the buffalos. Strictly illegal, of course, and a bush pilot would lose his license if he ever got caught, but it happens.”

“Did you do this?”

“What, shoot? Hell no, I don’t even fish.”

“Fly the plane,” I said. “For the hunter.”

“Do you know what it was like up here before the pipeline? Oh, sure,” he said, “now it’s all boom town and gold rush days, but you come back in a few years, after it’s done, and they’ll have invented the Rough ’n’ Tough industry. There’ll be roustabout museums wherever you look. Nostalgia cakes. Maybe there’ll even be a Bush Pilot Hall of Fame. And except for maybe something a little less than a tiny handful of World Canned Salmon Corporate Headquarters down in Anchorage, there won’t be nothing else here. It’ll be like it was before the pipeline. Because this country won’t
ever
be civilized. I’ve got nothing to apologize for. I’m a bona fide pioneer. Pioneers do things. They’d do other things if they could, but they don’t always have the choice.”

This, it seemed to me, was inappropriate, improbable conversation to conduct while seated inside an airplane mounted on a heap of logs actively mistaken for a giant pterodactyl-sized bird by fierce bears in open country, but Philip, either propelled by guilt or driven by some idée fixé, had evidently hit upon his theme and was apparently content to explain himself to me at even greater length. Always while he spoke the notion never left my head that at any given moment he might become so exercised that the bears would mistake his passion for some loose atavistic theme that turned on the smell of rage and apoplexy and that then, out of simple, time-honored principles of self-defense and self-preservation, they would storm the plane and kill us. He continued.

“So don’t charge
me
with breaching the codes or violating the folklore. The most they can get me for is unsportsmanlike conduct. What I did they don’t even throw you in jail for. They can suspend your license, hit you up for a fine, but we’re still talking the thin end of evil. I don’t even
own
a rifle. Tops, I was an accessory. All I did was drive the getaway car. Do you know what it was like up here before the pipeline? Like some frozen fucking Appalachia, that’s what.”

“Hey, easy,” I said, alarmed by his excitement.

“You want a statistic? That could give you the idea? Do you? Listen to this. In the fifteen years since they’ve been keeping records, you know how much money has been made from shoveling snow up here? I’m not talking about the highway department or the department of streets. You know how much? Clearing off snow? Counting kids, counting guys out of work? None. Zip. Not a nickel. They’re an independent people. They shovel their own walks, put in their electric, their plumbing. You’d think there’d be odd jobs, that it’d be the odd-job capital of the world up here. The hell you say. Nothing doing. You got a plane, you do what they tell you. If either one of those mothers think I’m responsible that their relatives were turned into carpet or a trophy for the game room, let the record show I ain’t the only one. There’s plenty could be tarred with
that
brush!”

“Please,” I said, “you’re giving off frenzy. If I smell chemicals on you, what do you suppose those bears make of you?”

“I don’t care,” Philip said, “death’s death. They’re shot from a plane, they’re picked off by some mug in the snow. Tell me the difference again.

“Anyway,” he said, “I ain’t any Lucky Lindy. I ain’t no Red Baron. I couldn’t pick and choose my jobs and ways. Not everyone gets to fly the medical supplies into the village or make the dramatic drop on the pack ice, the radio equipment, the flares and toilet paper. Even if I’d been a better pilot I could never get in with the right people, the environment monkeys and wilderness teamsters that run this place. It’s enough they let you hang around to do the dirty work and odd jobs.”

“You said there weren’t any odd jobs.”

“What odd jobs there were.”

“What odd jobs were there?”

“What do you think?” he said. “I smuggled snow.”

And this conversation improbable too, yet suddenly flashed back to the halcyon days when we were cozed comrades, the sedated collegiality of those predawn hours before it was over the top. While we were still boys in the treehouse chatting up the mysteries.

“Because there really ain’t any economy,” Philip said. “Not in any ‘Hey, patch your roof for you, mister?’ sense there ain’t. Not in any ‘Who’ll take these caribou steaks off my hands for me?’ one. Not even in any underground sense—stolen goods and tips and money passed under the table. The cash crop up here is wilderness itself.”

“Tourism?”

“I’m not talking about tourism. I’m talking about climate, I’m talking about distance. It’s a cold culture. I already told you,” he said, “I smuggled snow. I was a snow smuggler.”

“I don’t know
what
you’re talking about,” I said impatiently.

“Rabbi, the morning I picked you up, did you have breakfast at the motel?”

“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”

“Can you remember what it cost you?”

“It was expensive,” I said, “twelve or thirteen dollars.”

“What we do here,” he said, “—you, me, Alyeska, the cab drivers on their dogsleds and snowmobiles, the blue-collar help that flies in every day from the Outside, all them wilderness teamsters—is factor cost into the price of soup, jimmy profit and inflation into the price of doing business. We’re
all
smugglers.”

“The bears,” I said, “one of the bears …”

“Don’t make eye contact with the bastard. They see everything. They read lips. Nothing gets by them. Nobody can show them a poker face good enough. Let’s just continue our chat.”

“Tell me,” I asked nervously, “you said you’d heard about this. Has it happened before?”

“What? You mean to me?”

“Yes.”

“The silly gringo son of a bitch I was with, he had me fly in low so he could get a better shot. He mowed one down like it was Dillinger.”

“With a rifle?”

“With a machine gun.” Philip shuddered.

“What?”

“There were two bears. One got away. The Tlingits say bears hold grudges, that all animals do. That they pass their wrongs on in some deep, blood-feud way. I was just thinking,” he said, “that what if what drew these two was revenge? That, I don’t know, maybe they caught a whiff of 10w-20 up their muzzle and think they’re on to us.”

I glanced at this fellow with whom I’d been sharing the close quarters of the cabin for almost a week. We would probably die together. It hadn’t occurred to me you could die with people you didn’t much like. Clearly you could, however. One of the beasts, the one who’d been nosing around in my cold feces, began to swing its long head like a signal in the direction of the cockpit, pointing us out to its companion in some sidelong, ursine “Get this.” As instructed, I bobbed and weaved out of range, refusing eye contact. “Is there anything else we can do?” I asked breathlessly.

“Like what,” Philip said, “crouch down under our desks with our heads covered? Everything that can be done is being done.”

Oddly, I was relieved to hear it, and, when I dared look again, the bears were gone. So now I’m convinced there’s a certain amount of truth in what Philip told me. There’s magic in lying doggo. And if this is a conclusion of ostriches and doesn’t always work—there was difficulty, recall, when we resorted to it as a principle in warding off the Nazis—sometimes it does. As with most magic you have to pick your occasions. And know the beast you deal with, too, of course. But I was relieved as much by Philip’s bravery as by anything else. On which I complimented him.

“Hell,” he said, “if you can’t be a wise man, you might as well be a brave one.”

“Maybe you’re a wise one too,” I said. “You seemed to know your onions with those bears.”

“Nah,” he said, “wise men don’t get into things.”

“Like what? This little setback with the airplane? You’ll get us out of it. I’ve every confidence. Sooner or later someone has got to pick up one of those radio messages you’ve been sending. We’re as good as rescued.”

“What? From this?” He spoke into the microphone attached to his headset. “Calling all cars, calling all cars. Be on the lookout for a blue Cessna 250 crash-landed somewhere in Alaska and mounted in pine trees like an egg. Shit, Rabbi,” he said, “the damn thing’s been on the fritz ever since before we even got into trouble.”

“The radio? What’s wrong with the radio?”

“Busted,” Philip said. “Out cold. It runs on the power generated by the engine.”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s a question.”

It was a blow against optimism.

“I’m a believer,” he told me suddenly.

“You?” I said. “You’re Jewish?”

“No,” he said, “not Jewish. A believer. In God. In the services and ceremonies. In you guys. In, you know, middlemen. Men of the cloth. In your special relationships. In, no disrespect, the mumbo jumbo. In, forgive me, the voodoo, in smoke from the campfires. Like, you know, how one minute you can be knocking off a piece for yourself, all tied up in sin and on the road to hell, say, and how the next the preacher says ‘Do you take this woman, do you take this man?’ and everything’s copacetic in Kansas City and the eyes of God too, and you can begin the countdown to your first anniversary. A believer. A couple drops of water spritzed in the cradle cap and—bingo!—you’re baptized, your sins are washed clean and some baby’s a brand-new citizen of God. With the right words you can exorcise a ghost or turn a wafer and a sip of wine into God Himself. Hey, you can bless bread, or people’s pets, or the whole damn commercial fishing fleet if you wanted. You probably know the words to special prayers,” he said,
“that could fix our radio and get us out of here right now!”

Well, I thought, say what you will about old Phil, he’s going to die with his faith on.

“Particularly,” he said, “now we got all this special Jewish equipment I was able to pick up for you before we left.”

“What special Jewish equipment?”

“In the duffel,” he said, indicating the bag with his chin much as the bear had indicated us. “Man,” he said, “the miracles you ought to be able to work with
that
stuff.”

“What is this? What have you got there?”

He picked up the duffel and set it across his lap. “Let’s see,” he said, undoing its flimsy fasteners, “it should all be here.” He looked hurriedly through the big duffel. “Yep,” he said, “it seems to be. I think so. Wait a minute, where’s the cutlery, the, what-do-you-call-’em, ‘yads’?”

“What? What have you got there?”

He spilled the contents of the canvas bag into my lap.

There were three Torahs in parochets, their decorated velvet mantles. I recited a startled, quick, automatic Sh’ma.

“There you go,” the pilot said. “You think she’s fixed now?”

“You fool, what are you talking about?”

“Hey,” Philip said, “Mister Rabbi, if it takes you more time to fix the radio, then it takes you more time to fix the radio. I’m not looking for miracles. Just don’t go jumping down my throat is all. Or maybe you’re hunting up that gold candlestick. It’s there, I seen it. See, there it is.”

He reached down and drew an elaborate menorah from the pile. He pulled a paper from his pocket and began, rapidly and audibly, to scan it. It was a page Xeroxed from the Old Testament. Exodus, chapter 25, verses 31 to 40. God’s commandments to Moses like a page of specs. “Let’s see,” he said. “ ‘And thou shalt make … candlestick … pure gold … beaten work … its shaft … its cups, its knops … its flowers … six branches … three branches of the candlestick … three cups … and three cups made like almond-blossoms in the other branch, a knop and a flower … four cups … the knops thereof, and the flowers thereof. And a knop under two branches … and a knop under two branches of one piece with it … Their knops and their branches shall be of one piece with it… And thou shalt make … lamps thereof, seven … And the tongs thereof … snuff-dishes … a talent of pure gold … after their pattern …’ That’s got her, I think,” Philip said, “right down to the last cup and knop. Perfecto.”

“Incredible.”

“Oh, and look, there’s them yads.” He picked up three solid silver pointers used under the tight Hebrew text.

“Astonishing.”

“Right, and you still got you an ark of shittim wood, two-and-a-half by one-and-a-half by one-and-a-half cubits, overlaid with pure gold coming to you if you and God ever figure a way to get us out of there and over to a proper Atco unit where you can set it up.”

“Stupefying.”

“I hope to tell you.”

“What’s an Atco unit?”

“Well, the men live in Atco units. They’re these big metal trailers. All connected together. You’ll probably have one for your church.”

“Synagogue.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said.

“Where did you
get
all this?” Philip, pleased as punch, smiled widely. Not having had a congregation of my own, I’d never had access to my own Torah before. Suddenly I was in charge of three of them.

“Didn’t McBride tell you I’d be bringing supplies?”

“I thought yarmulkes. I thought Passover Haggadahs. I thought maybe a tallith to throw over the shoulders of my parka.”

“I’m just the delivery boy,” Philip said.

“No, no,” I said, “I’m not criticizing. I’m overwhelmed. I know how expensive this all is.”

“Tell me about it. A hundred-forty-five thousand dollars for the one in Sephardic script, two hundred thousand for the Ashkenazic. The little reconditioned Sephardic was only ninety grand, but we’re still talking almost a half million bucks’ worth of Pentateuch.”

“Half a million? Half a
million?”

“We got the thirty-inch rollers.”

“Listen,” I said, “Philip, I’m no expert, but unless these Torahs are the work of historically important scribes, they couldn’t cost more than—what?—fifteen or twenty thousand dollars
together.”