Tanner’s Tiger

Chapter 3

At Kennedy I carried Minna from the plane. One of my fellow passengers made cute faces at her; Minna, being asleep, fortunately missed them. “She’s a cutie,” he said. “Out cold, isn’t she?”

“So it seems.”

“Must have had a wonderful time at Expo. The kids all have a ball. You should have seen mine. Stay long?”

“Not very long,” I said.

Minna came awake while I waited for our suitcase. She wanted to know where we were and I told her we were in New York. For a few moments she fell silent. Then she asked, for the first time, why we had not been allowed to go to the fair. Because those men were stupid, I told her, and wouldn’t let us into their country.

“Did we do something bad?”

“No.”

“Is it because I am not really your daughter?”

“No. It’s because I’m me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I hefted the suitcase, which seemed to have gained weight in transit. “You must be exhausted.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost one.”

“The Expo is closed for the night now.”

“Probably.”

She thought this over. “Where are we going now?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“The toilet.”

I waited for her outside the ladies’ room. She reappeared with a thoughtful expression on her face. “I suppose we ought to go home,” she said.

“No.”

“No?”

“We’re going to Canada.”

“But they won’t let us.”

“Well, the hell with them,” I said. “We’ll find a motel near here and… Minna, do you think you could sleep on an airplane?”

“I am not sleepy.”

“Uh-huh. Sure.” I steered her to a chair and told her to wait for me, then found my way to the American Airlines ticket counter. There I learned that we had just missed the last flight to Buffalo, that the first morning flight would leave at 4:55. I got us a pair of one-way tickets on it, checked our suitcase, and went back to Minna. She was sound asleep. She went on sleeping while I drank coffee and read the Times. When they ultimately called our flight, I carried her onto the plane, and she didn’t open her eyes until takeoff, when she sat bolt upright and began talking senselessly in Lithuanian, some gibberish about horses and pigs. I asked her what she was talking about and she closed her eyes and fell back asleep. She awoke again in the Buffalo airport. The sun was up, the early morning air already thick and humid.

The airlines still hadn’t lost our suitcase. I rescued it, and we had breakfast there at the airport and killed time until it was late enough to call people. I took a batch of dimes to the phone booth and started dialing. Two of the people I tried had moved, and four more were already at work, and I was beginning to run out of contacts. I looked up one of my less hopeful prospects in the telephone book and dialed his number, and the man who answered sounded as though he had been drunk for at least eight months.

I said, “Mr. Pryzeshweski?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Jerzy Pryzeshweski?”

“Yeah, thiz Jerry. Whozit?”

I said, “Mr. Pryzeshweski, my name is Evan Tanner. I don’t believe we’ve ever met, but I’m a very good friend of-”

He said, “See ya, friend,” and hung up.

I looked at the phone for a few seconds, then invested another dime and called him again. This time he sounded a little more awake. He told me I was a goddamned sonofabitch and he had to get some sleep.

So I said, in Polish, “Jerzy, comrade, my good friend Taddeusz Orlowicz told me to call you if ever I needed assistance in Buffalo. I am on vital business for the movement, Jerzy, and I am calling you because-”

“Jeez, you a Polack?”

“Yes, I-”

“You know Tad?”

“He is my good friend. I-”

“Well, what do you know!” He laughed loudly into the phone and I pulled it away from my ear. “How is the old drunk broadchaser? I’ll be a son of a bitch, Tad Orlowicz. I thought he was dead.”

“He’s not. He-”

“I didn’t see Tad since, oh, I don’t know how long. He went back to the old country, huh?”

“I saw him last year in Cracow.”

“No kidding. Still drinking the booze, huh? Still chasing the girls?”

I closed my eyes. “Same as ever,” I said.

“Same old Tad!”

“Same old Tad.”

“Well, what do you know. Wha’d you say your name was?”

“Tanner,” I said, “Evan Tanner.”

“Well, what’s it all about, huh?”

“I have to see you. I can’t talk on the phone.”

“No kidding?”

I closed my eyes again. There were, I thought, over a hundred thousand Poles in the city of Buffalo, still more in the surrounding suburbs. With such a large subculture to draw from, it was inconceivable that the Society for a Free Poland didn’t have a more efficient operative in the area. SFP had dozens of activists in and around Buffalo, but the others whose names I was able to remember had not been home.

I thought of hanging up and trying to find someone else or simply going ahead under my own steam. I couldn’t avoid the feeling that Jerzy Pryzeshweski would bungle any task assigned to him.

Still, though, he did seem to know Taddeusz, who was as fond of women and vodka as Jerzy said he was, and who combined a true patriot’s zeal for Polish freedom with irreverent contempt for the Polish people. Taddeusz had saved me from arrest and execution in Cracow and sent me on my way to Lithuania; maybe his chum Jerzy could handle the less burdensome chore of smuggling me into Canada.

So what I said was, “I need your help. Can I come to your home?”

“You in town?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, come by my house. You know how to get here? Where are you, the bus? You got a car?”

“I’ll be right over,” I said.

He lived in a little ranch house in a neat little suburb called Cheektowaga. It was not far from the airport and the cabdriver found it easily. Jerzy was sitting on the front porch when we got there. He was wearing a pair of heavy brown shoes, khaki trousers, and a shiny yellow-green shirt that said Bowl-a-Lot Lanes on the back, Kleinman’s Bakery Products on the front, and Jerry Press on the pocket. He was sitting in an aluminum frame chair with green and yellow webbing, and he was drinking a can of beer, and he weighed close to three hundred pounds.

“You should of told me, I would of come for you,” he said. “Why waste money on a cab? Listen, you want a beer?”

“Sure.”

“How about the kid?”

Minna said beer was fine, and I said it wasn’t and asked if he had any milk, and he didn’t. We settled on a Coke. Jerzy Pryzeshweski – or Jerry Press, if you prefer – drank four cans of beer while I worked on one. I told him that he would be doing tremendous service to the cause of Polish independence by taking Minna and me across the border.

He said, “I don’t get it. Canada?”

“That’s right.”

“Where you going? Toronto?”

“Yes.” Why complicate conversations with the truth?

“So why not just go?” His brow furrowed. “I mean, somebody wants to go to Canada, what he does is he just goes. Get in your car, or if you don’t got a car, well, just get on a bus, or a train, or if you want to take a plane-”

“We tried that,” I cut in.

“So?”

“We were recognized. They deported us.”

“Deported?”

“That’s right.”

“No kidding, deported? From Canada ?”

“Yes, and-”

“You some kind of a Communist or something?”

“Certainly not. We-”

“I mean, the hell, deported from Canada for chris-sake. What did they try and do, send you to Italy?”

It was a tedious conversation. Jerzy’s commitment to the cause of Polish independence seemed highly theoretical. Just as single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints, neither do beery clods in bowling shirts contribute much to the ranks of conspirators. The liberation of Poland was something for him to drink toasts to at Polish weddings, in case they ever ran out of other things to drink to, which probably never happened. The cause, too, was something for which raffles were held and money raised, something to which prospective congressmen pledged undying support if they wanted to carry Cheektowaga, something that everyone favored but evidently no one was ever forced to do anything much about.

So Jerzy drove his bakery truck and plucked his crab-grass from his lawn and drank his beer – you better believe he drank his beer – and, unlike most of his fellows, he actually knew one true-blue revolutionary, Taddeusz by name. But as far as penetrating at once to the core of an action problem, as far as being instantly ready to come to the unquestioning aid of a fellow revolutionary, he was a little slow on the uptake.

I wasn’t getting through to him at all. It was Minna who ultimately made up his mind for him. “If we don’t get to Canada soon,” she whispered urgently to me, “they’ll catch us here.”

“Catch you here?”

“We may have been followed,” I said. “If we’re captured in Buffalo -”

“Followed?”

“Well-”

“Jesus God,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. I don’t know why; all he saw that way was the door of his own house. “One thing I don’t want,” he said, “is to get involved.”

“I don’t know where we can go, really. You’re our last chance.”

He looked over his shoulder again. I wondered if it might be a nervous tic. “I gotta start the bakery route in a couple hours. The customers don’t get their bread and rolls on time, they can make a lot of trouble. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Ah, a spirit filled with revolutionary zeal. “I suppose we could wait here until you’re done-”

“Jesus, that’s all I need. You and the kid getting arrested here, in my house, with a fifteen-year mortgage still on it, that’s just what I need. Listen a minute, I could run you across the Peace Bridge. There’s Fort Erie, Crystal Beach, you could get a bus there.”

“Just so we get across the border.”

He drove us there in a year-old Dodge station wagon. He took the spare tire out of its well and put our suitcase in its place, then filled the station wagon’s luggage compartment with bathing suits and towels. “We tell them we’re going to Crystal Beach,” he said. “Just for the day, just to go swimming, see? We don’t want ’em to see no suitcase. Got it?”

We had it.

“They’ll ask, you know, where you were born. Say Buffalo. I always say Buffalo. Lodz I was born in, you think I’m going to say Lodz when they ask me? I should show ’em proof of naturalization, all that crap? I say Buffalo, I speak good English. You do it the same way. Where were you born, you say Buffalo. Buffalo, New York, even. That’s how you can say it, or just Buffalo. I just say Buffalo most of the time. Don’t matter.”

He drove us through the heart of the city to the Peace Bridge entrance on the lower west side. We crossed the Niagara River, and a Canadian guard asked us where we were born. Jerzy was shaking as if suffering from Parkinson’s Syndrome. We all said that we were born in Buffalo and we were all evidently believed. Jerzy announced that we were going to Crystal Beach and would be back by nightfall. No one even looked in our luggage compartment. We drove on into Canada.

“This here’s Fort Erie,” Jerzy said. “I think you can get a bus from here to Toronto. The downtown’s over this way, I’ll see if we can’t find the bus station and-”

And the tire blew.

Of course the spare was in the garage in Buffalo. I had begun anticipating a blowout the moment he went through his act with tire and suitcase, and had merely hoped the tires would hold until we crossed the bridge. “Wait here,” I told him. “I’ll pick up a tire at the nearest gas station and help you change it. Do you know the tire size offhand? I-”

“No.” He was shaking his big head with great determination. “You just go on,” he said. “You just take the suitcase and go on, you and the kid. I can manage myself with the damn car.”

“But-”

“Listen, all I want is the two of you the hell out of the car and out of the house. Money is one thing, a donation is one thing, but I could lose my job, I could get in all kinds of trouble. You get the suitcase and you keep walking that way and you get a bus.”

He was being ridiculous, but it was his car and his problem and, the border safely crossed, no longer mine. I reached out a hand. “You are a good comrade, a faithful worker,” I began.

“You crazy man, speak English!”

“And Poland thanks you,” I concluded in English. I took the suitcase with one hand and Minna with the other, and we left him there. Downtown Fort Erie was not of sufficiently great size to make the bus station hard to locate. It sat there on the main street. We had to wait three hours for the next Toronto bus, and could make good connections there for Montreal. I bought tickets and sat down next to Minna.

“Why did we need him?” she asked, reasonably.

“He got us across the border.”

“Could we not have walked across?”

“Perhaps. He seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“He was a very nervous man, Evan.”

“Yes. That was a good idea of yours, somebody chasing us.”

“Thank you. I did not know if it was the right thing to say, but I thought it was funny how nervous he was and that perhaps we ought to make him be more nervous.”

Evidently Jerzy’s nervousness was contagious. We were almost monotonously safe by that time, but I couldn’t entirely avoid stiffening automatically every time a policeman entered the bus station. I bought Toronto and Montreal and Buffalo newspapers, partly to read and partly to hide behind. Minna, bless her, closed her blue eyes and slept.