The Rabbi of Lud

five

LEAVE Lud? Leave Lud? What were they, crazy? I’m Rabbi of Lud! It’s like being Rabbi of Walden.

Anyway, I’d done it. I’d done it already. In ’74. I was Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline from March 1974 to April 1975. The plan was, I was to take care of the spiritual needs of the Jewish construction workers, conduct Friday night services for the Orthodox back-hoers and forklift truck and heavy earth-moving equipment operators, and lead all those frum pipe fitters, drillers, welders, hod carriers, riveters, riggers, roughnecks and roustabouts through the long arctic Shabbes. When the pipeline was finished I was supposed to send for Shelley and the kid and try to get on at this shul in Anchorage.

Wasn’t that a time!

With all the federal money and government contracts that were involved, the construction companies weren’t taking any chances. Men and women were hired on from all over. All races and religions, all sexes, creeds, colors and appetites. There were Filipinos, boat people, wetbacks from Mexico. There was a rumor, and I believe it, that some Russians had managed to cross the Bering Strait from Siberia and that two or three of them, legendary in cold, in snow and ice, were actually promoted to gang foremen before they were discovered and repatriated back over the ice to Russia. I ask you, only in America or only in America?

But the scale of the thing! All that stir and drudge, all that hubbub and hustle! The sheer damn monumentality, I mean. Really, it was like we were building these pyramids of the latter-day.

Which didn’t make me Moses.

I arrived in Alaska on March 27, 1974, ten years to the day exactly since the great earthquake that nearly destroyed Anchorage, moved the entire Chugach mountain range five feet to the west and sent Valdez and much of southern Alaska tumbling into the Gulf of Alaska. And I tell you that even in March’s soapy, sluggish light I’d never had such an impression of distances. It was as if a mile were more profound than a mile, like those last few meters, say, compounding beneath the summits of great altitudes for mountain climbers. I’d not been the only passenger to gasp when I looked out the little porthole window of the plane as we came in over Anchorage to land and seen all that vastness and stretched space. (And it was the same on the ground, as if, in those steep, boggling latitudes, the fun-house principles took your senses, the near pushed farther off, middle distances moved to the horizon, and the horizon had somehow been pulled over its own edge and was already sliding down another side of the world.) “Mother of God, will you!” proclaimed one fellow, and “Sheesh!” another. And these weren’t tourists, mind you, signed up for the sights, the points of interest. To tell you the truth, they scared me a little. I had been too long in Lud maybe, good, comfortable old Lud, too long among disturbed, distressed and distracted people, but Jewish disturbed, distressed and distracted people. These folks were like echt goyim, or no, not goyim, echt or otherwise, not anything religious at all finally, so much as just your off-on-a-tear, boys-will-be-boys, wild-oat-sowing, salad-day drunks, brawlers and killers. Like me, most of them had answered the Alyeska company ads in the paper to get here, but not half a dozen among them seemed to have left actual houses. They seemed like men airlifted off oil platforms. They came down from watchtowers in forests, a lighthouse’s tight, spiral stairs. Sleeping in scaffolding, gantry, snug cement cubbies along the infrastructure of municipal industry — car barns, little rooms behind steel doors in subway tunnels. They lived on houseboats, or maybe in tents. They lived on sleds by sidings on railroad tracks, in converted buses, near mine shafts, in the wide cabs of trucks, and long trailers near high wooden fences on the rough, muddy, broken-glass-littered ground of construction sites.

“Boy,” I told the guy sitting in the window seat when the hostess brought our lunch, “if I had a nickel for every tattoo.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well,” I said, “I’d be a lot richer.”

“What about it?”

“And maybe I wouldn’t itch so much. Yours don’t itch?”

But I was wrong to be afraid of them.

Though the plane had landed just after five, it was almost seven in the evening by the time I checked into the Travelodge. Anchorage wasn’t much, not the city it is today, but the airport was a sort of no-frills O’Hare, booming, busy, unadorned as a discount department store and everywhere still under construction. Getting a cab was murder. Or rather getting out of the airport’s two narrow, crowded lanes and into open traffic was. Virtually every four-wheeled vehicle in town had been pressed into service as a taxi. (I had to share a ride into downtown Anchorage with a fellow in some guy’s metered wrecker, my two suitcases stuffed into the back with his duffel bag by the pulleys and chains, the big iron hook heavy as an anchor.) It was a kind of Marne, some Dunkirk of heroic gridlock.

I tried to call Shelley, couldn’t get through to the desk, went, in my robe and pajamas, out to the lobby to a pay phone I’d seen when I checked in, but the line, which in the tiny motel lobby looked more like a milling mob — or even the deadlocked traffic in the streets — than anything as procedural as a line, was too much to deal with and I started back to my room.

“What’s your name, honey?” a man asked who saw me in my bathrobe.

“Leave it alone, Spike,” another man told him. “You forget it’s Alaska? You ain’t never heard of the high cost of living? Wait till you put some of that pipeline graft into your pockets before you try to make out with the hookers.”

“Ah, shit,” the first man said, “what’s money for?”

It was already after nine o’clock and too late to try to call Shelley in New Jersey. There was no room-service menu, the desk was still busy, and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to get a table in the dining room, so I ate only what I was able to choose from the candy and soft-drink machines and went to bed with a sort of false satiety. This combined with the strange racket I heard in the streets — sounds of traffic, punches, the raucous camaraderie of drunks — and reminded me again of the Marne and Dunkirk impressions I’d had earlier. It really was like wartime. Like being in some sleazy R&R town away from the fighting. Also, there’d been that ribbing I’d taken in the lobby. It had been good-humored enough, but that’s not why I was wrong to be afraid of them. Some were just kids — it was the beginning of the post-hippie era — intent on an adventure, out to pick up a trade, earn a few bucks and smoke some good dope under the aurora borealis, but that’s not why I was wrong to be afraid of them either.

In the coffee shop the next morning it gave me a kick to see reindeer steak on the menu and I seriously considered having some with my eggs, but then I thought, Putz, you’re in Anchorage, a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, maybe two thousand from the North Pole. It wouldn’t be fresh. And I laughed out loud, the joke being that it was on there strictly for the tourists, a tourist item, like all the Wisconsin cheese they tried to sell you as soon you crossed the state line from Illinois when I was a kid, or pecans the minute you hit Georgia, or Key lime pie as soon as you put your toe in Florida. And the cans of beer for two bucks a pop that they dispensed from the vending machines outside my room and from which I’d bought my dinner last night, the pony bottles of booze at five dollars apiece, and even the outrageous prices themselves, that was tourist stuff, too, local color, and it was actually reassuring, in the sense that I was on familiar ground, to realize that Anchorage was a tourist trap. It cheers you to get the lowdown on a place. It cheers you to be able to shift into the rabbi mode in unfamiliar parts of the world. But neither is that why I was wrong to be afraid of them.

After breakfast I went back into the lobby to phone Shelley and tell her I was all right. There was a line but nothing like the night before and, when I put my call through, I sat down to wait for the cab I’d called after I’d told Shelley good-bye. The guy who’d kibitzed me about my robe was there, though he didn’t recognize or even notice me. And some kick-ass, shtarker types I’d seen on the flight coming in. They wore T-shirts and blue jeans, most of them, and looked in their colorless, climateless clothes rather like sailors. They were speaking a sort of quiet shop-talk that I suddenly, even unexpectedly, recognized as conversation and, without understanding why, I was moved and had to lift my handkerchief to my eyes to conceal the fact that they’d filled with tears. Maybe it had something to do with their jargon. As a rabbi, I’m a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferances and lenities — all their official, documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters’ knacks, the oilers’ and operators’ known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.

Was there a broche for laborers?

God spare these men, I prayed. Protect them from frostbite and snow blindness, don’t let them fall through holes in the ice and keep their feet from stumbling into treacherous crevasses.

And where did I get off, I wondered, praying such prayers instead of pouring it on like any ordinary Jew with his customary mash notes and love letters?

“Uh-oh,” said this guy from the night before, the one who’d reminded his pal about the cost of living in Alaska, “ain’t that a company bus just pulled into the drive?”

“Big yellow mother?”

“I’d fucking say so.”

“Who’s the asshole coming off?”

“Honcho holding on to his faggot briefcase like a schoolgirl?”

“Cocksucker with the mincy-ass wiggle-waggle?”

“Guy looks like he’s walking on his pinkie fingers?”

“Oooh, he thinks he’s gorgeous. Doesn’t he think he’s gorgeous?”

“Spike thinks anyone in a suit and tie is gorgeous.”

Spike smashed his left fist into his right palm. “Guy dressed like that is just asking for it. Like handing out an engraved invitation to the old bunghole investigation. This is what I believe.”

The door opened and a well-dressed man with a briefcase came into the lobby of the Travelodge. The men snuffed out their cigarettes. Spike removed his dark woolen watch cap.

“I’m McBride,” McBride said in an uninflected, middle-level executive voice, and took a paper from the pocket of his overcoat. “Acknowledge who you are when I call your name. — Ambest?” he said.

“Here.”

“Anderson?”

“Yo.”

“Jeers?”

“Present.”

“James Krezlow.”

“I’m your man.”

McBride looked up from his list. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you just keep the Here’s, Yo’s, Present’s and I’m-your-man’s to yourselves? A simple ‘yes’ will save all of us time. — Peachblow.”

“Yes.”

“That’s right, Peachblow. Schindblist. Is that right? Schindblist?”

“That’s right,” the cost-of-living man said.

“You’re Schindblist?”

“That’s right.”

“Yes,” Spike spoke up for him. “Yes, sir, he is.”

McBride looked at Spike, whose real name turned out to be Jack Nicholson, the same as the actor’s, then called out the rest of the names on his list. When he was done three people were unaccounted for and there was some difficulty about Jeers’s credentials.

“We haven’t got time to train you,” McBride said. “Either you’re checked out in jackhammer or you’re not checked out in jackhammer.”

“Ain’t there a letter in there from my union rep?” Jeers said. “Geez, he told me he’d send it. Probably with how the mails are these days it might have been held up, but he sure said he’d send one, sir. He gimme his word.”

“The union doesn’t certify you,” McBride said, “the company does.”

“I been working in Alabama, Mr. McBride. I think it’s a different statute in Alabama.”

“You get on that bus you have to qualify. We’ll give you a test at the camp but if you don’t pass you have to get back here on your own. Plus you’ll owe Alyeska for a bus ride.”

“Could you just tell me what that test covers?”

“It covers jackhammer,” McBride said. A few of the men giggled.

“Because I don’t think it’s fair to be checked out on a machine in one state and then have to be checked out on it all over again in another,” Jeers whined.

“It’s better than five hours to camp,” McBride said. “Anyone has to go potty, he’d better make his arrangements now while I take care of the bill for the rooms. How do you like this, Peachblow?” he said. “Just like when we took that trip crosscountry with the folks when we were kids. All right,” he said, “America needs its oil. If I called your name and we understand each other you can board the bus.”

McBride stepped to the desk and some of the men went toward the men’s room while a few others started past me on their way to the bus.

“That is one hard-assed wonkie,” Jack Nicholson muttered.

“Lord Fauntleroy? He’s fucking Kitty Litter.”

“He’s catfood.”

“He’s pussy meat.”

But they’d turned meek as lambs, sheep in blue collars, these drunks and scufflers of the night before. Why, I could have been their rabbi for them! I’d been out of the world, holed up in Lud, the familiar to too many mourners, their tamed rage and creped huff, and forgotten how many affronted hearts there are, the fat census of the peeved. If you took away their right to kibitz reality, what did you leave them? Jeers’s makeshift injuries and whiney griefs were real, however inexpert he may have been with a jackhammer. He’d been led to expect. Never mind what he’d been led to expect, never mind who had led him to expect it. So I’d been wrong to be afraid of them because my fear made theirs redundant. This is what I believe.

Through the big plate-glass window I watched the men climb onto the Alyeska bus, its yellow oddly crusted and used up in March’s dishwatery morning light. They looked vulnerable against the Travelodge logo — a teddy bear in a nightcap and nightshirt holding a candle in a saucer.

McBride turned from the desk and noticed me for the first time. “Are you—” He referred to the sheet he’d been reading from. “Just a minute. Are you Rodenhendrey or Cralus? Is your name Fiske?”

I shook my head.

They swaggered out of the men’s room.

“Hold on,” McBride said, put his hand into his pocket and took out a second sheet of paper. “Rabbi Goldkorn?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You don’t go up today,” he said. “You fly out tomorrow with the bush pilot who’s bringing in the Hebrew supplies.”

“No, I know,” I said. “I came a day early.”

“You’re a rabbi?” a man asked me who’d remarked McBride descend from the bus earlier.

“I am,” I said, “yes.”

“It’s how guys talk,” he whispered. “We don’t mean nothing, Father,” he said, and left to board the bus with the others.

This time the cab looked as if it might have been a bread truck in another life, a floral telegraph delivery. Like strangers everywhere I referred to the scrap of paper in my hand and pronounced the address to my driver like a question, as if we both knew such a place couldn’t exist, that I’d given him the scam numbers and cross-streets of vote fraud. All he did, though, was simply nod, shift his truck into gear, and move it into the street. Cab drivers are wonderful, the tight tabs they keep on their communities.

After we left downtown where neon flared boldly against the ground-level windows of the bars and restaurants like bright shelving paper in a kitchen cabinet, Anchorage became a little less visible in the dusty light and began to look vague, muffled, some wood-frame, firetrap town.

The only totem poles I’d seen had been logos, their power drained out of them, like the sun or a mountain on a license plate, an explorer on a stamp. It had already occurred to me — the snap of reindeer steak sizzling on the grill, the sixteen-bit beers in the vending machines — that our forty-ninth state knew how to hype itself, and I’d begun to doubt it. To suspicion the neither-here-nor-there quality — it was March 28, we were only barely, only technically out of winter — of the light and temperature — it was colder in Lud — and to suspect that highest summer’s midnight sun would, when it finally shone, turn out to be just another pale metaphor. Just as the Dangerous Dan McGrew types I’d seen in the Travelodge and had heard stumbling and singing their way out of the various Yukon and Klondike and Malamute saloons last night had turned out to be actors. Though, who knows? You can’t argue with wreckers and bread trucks changed into taxicabs, or with men in suits springing for eleven-hundred-dollar motel tabs without turning a hair. There was this gushered and gold-rushed, ship-come-in and struck-it-rich feel to things. Something was stirring, some new bonanza shining through the chazzerei.

Rabbi Petch lived in a neighborhood that was familiar to me, though I couldn’t think why. There was something mill-town to the texture of things, something peculiarly, even tragically, “American” about it. Then I realized why it seemed so familiar. It was the kind of place I’d seen flooded out on the news, the kind of place tornados touch down, or that gets evacuated in the dangerous wake of overturned freight cars from which clouds of poison gas are escaping. The irony, of course, was that the earthquake which had destroyed so much of Anchorage had left this neighborhood unscathed.

The houses weren’t shabby so much as vaguely exposed, their pores open to the weather, the paint chipping and the metal chairs on the porches rusting out. It was a bungalow sort of neighborhood, raw and rugged, though I was under no illusion about what such places cost. Rabbi Petch had written me about the immense construction costs in Alaska, the high price of land. You could pick up a thousand acres in the wilderness for less money than you’d pay for a good used car, but it might cost you fifty to sixty thousand dollars for a small lot in a city like Anchorage where the sewers and electric and phone lines were already in.

And just who was this changed, charged-up guy, myself, I wondered, already worrying overhead, list price, living expenses, the price of beans — I’d rubbernecked the big red numbers in the windows of the supermarkets, chalked on the blackboards outside the gas stations, and tried to read how much the price of a ticket would set me back off the little sign in the cashier’s cubicle of the movie theaters — just who was this new economic being, me, Spiritual Man figuring, comparison shopping, getting his estimates, counting his chickens? I hadn’t had to think about this stuff since moving to Lud. Who was I kidding? I’d never had to think about this stuff. And why, I wondered, was I so perky? What was so awfully terrific about real life?

“Rabbi Petch? It’s me, Jerry Goldkorn,” I chippered at the man who came to the door and peered through the blinds at me.

“We don’t need any,” he said, and turned away.

“I’ve come thousands of miles. Rabbi Petch? Rabbi Petch?”

“Who wants to know?”

“It’s me, Jerry Goldkorn. Rabbi Goldkorn? From Lud, New Jersey? We’ve corresponded.”

He opened the door a ways, studied me for a minute, then stepped aside so I could enter. I put three fingers to my lips, kissed them, and touched them to the mezuzah on the door frame, seeing too late that it was a thermometer.

He stared at me. “Boy,” he said, “are you religious! Never mind, it’s an honest mistake in this country. Come in, hurry, come in, you’ll let in the iceberg.” He shut the door behind me. “Did you hear a weather report? Is it supposed to snow?”

“I haven’t seen a paper, I didn’t watch the news. But it seems pretty nice out, fairly clear, not very cold.”

“Nice out,” he said, “clear. Not very cold. Oh, boy, have you got a lot to learn! Don’t stand there! What’s wrong with you? Quick,” he said, “go to the southwest corner of the living room!”

“The southwest—?”

“Where all the furniture is.”

It was true. All the furniture in the rabbi’s small parlor seemed to have been stuffed into a single corner. Even his books. It looked as if he were waiting for movers to come and put it all on a truck.

“I don’t even bother taping sheets of plastic to the windows anymore, tacking felt strips to the threshold.”

“You don’t?”

“Nah,” Rabbi Petch said. “What, are you kidding me? Insulate this place? Ol’ Hawk want to come through, you think he let some itty piece of felt stop him? A dinky piece of plastic? Don’t make me laugh. Shit! He huff and he puff and he blow the house down.”

I gathered the rabbi was hipped on weather. He seemed to read my mind.

“I think about it more than I do about God,” he said. “I reflect on it!”

“On weather?”

“What then?” he said. “Of course weather, certainly weather. You have to. You see anything else around here? You want to stay alive in this climate you have to.”

“Actually, it’s rather pleasant out.”

“It can turn on you like that,” Rabbi Petch said. “Storms blow up in a minute. A tempest, a blizzard. Gales, cloudbursts, the avalanche. Hoarfrost and rime. Lightning and thunder. All the inclements. There’s no telling what could happen. The northern lights could melt your frostbite, take off your toes. A glacier could fall on your foot, sandstorms from Araby put out your eyes.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” Petch said, “absolutely. Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes! Hey,” he said, “you want a cup of tea?”

“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“What trouble, I’m glad of the company. Go to the southwest corner of the room and sit down. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll put on the kettle. No,” he said, “push the piano out of the way. Try to squeeze your behind past the desk and sofa. Watch out for your knees, that wooden bench is murder. I think you’d be more comfortable in the La-Z-Boy. Just don’t lean back.”

I could hear him humming to himself in the kitchen, apparently as free of worry as any happy-go-lucky kid who’d never even heard the word “meteorology.”

As I had reminded the rabbi, we’d been corresponding. He was listed under Alaska in Who’s Who in the Rabbinate, and I’d first written him a week or so after I’d answered Alyeska’s little classified in the Times. He hadn’t mentioned weather in those letters and now I thought I understood why. He didn’t want to scare me off. It was supposed to be a tradeoff. If things worked out. A good word from him to his board, a good word from me to Tober and Shull. (Who would have snapped him up, who even back then, in the seventies, weren’t besieged by rabbis who wanted any part of their job — my job — who’d had to replace me with a kid still in yeshiva and, in return for my promise to return to Lud after a year, had permitted Shelley and the baby to stay on in that company house in that company town.) He’d been the one to introduce the possibility of my staying in Anchorage in the event I liked it up here. He’d made Alaska’s frontiersmen Jews sound fascinating, hunters, fishermen, firemen, farmers — all busted stereotype, exotic, say, as black cowboys. In one letter he’d written that gentiles controlled the garment and jewelry store industries, that if you wanted to buy your wife a mink coat for your anniversary or have a nice cocktail ring made up for her birthday you went to guys named Norton or Adams or Jones to get one wholesale. It made perfect sense, he said. It had to do with the East India and Hudson’s Bay companies. It had to do with the L.L. Bean catalogue and the deep, goyishe roots working the frozen soils of the mercantile.

“So,” Petch bubbled when he came back with our tea, threading the obstacle course of his cornered furniture without ever spilling a drop, “so.” He eased himself onto the piano bench, set his burden down on the desk and, despite the fact that he’d drawn his legs as far back as he reasonably could, crushed his knees against the sofa. “So,” he said again. “Cozy.”

“Very cozy,” I agreed.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s hard sometimes to tell the difference between what’s genuinely cozy and what’s only cabin fever. That’s why I won’t wear the sort of shirt you’ve got on.”

It was a red-and-black checked wool Pendleton I had on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“That lumberjackie stuff. You look like a wood chopper. It gives me cabin fever just to look at you. Brr. I’ve got the chills. Brr. My teeth are chattering. I can smell your long Johns.”

“They wear these shirts up here.”

“More folks die of cabin fever in this state than they do of cancer, than they do of the heart attack, shoveling snow. It’s why I wear a suit, it’s why I wear a tie. It’s why I go around the house like it was Yom Kippur downtown. When they find me I’ll look like I put up a fight.”

“Really,” I said, “it’s not that bad out.”

“I know what I know,” the rabbi said darkly.

“What do you do about services?”

“I call off services.”

“They don’t object to that?”

“I tell them it’s a snow day, we’ll make it up later.”

“They stand still for this? Does everyone have cabin fever?”

“Everyone.”

“Rabbi Petch,” I said, “I’m drinking your tea, I’m eating your biscuits. It’s not my place to quarrel with you, but I’ve got to believe you’re having me on. That maybe this is something you do up here. Some initiation thing, to see can I take it, do I have the right stuff, as if I’d crossed the equator for the first time, or passed the international date line. To tell the truth, you’re mixing me up. In your letters you made it sound attractive. Now it’s as if you were trying to spook me. It’s not necessary. We had no deal. I’m not moving in on you. The people in New Jersey don’t even know about you. They don’t know my intentions. I have no intentions. I told you what the position is, what my situation entails. That this was just supposed to be a break for me, to see how I worked out in the parishes, to see could I handle the pastoral parts.”

“The pastoral parts,” he said. “That’s nothing. That’s the least of it, the pastoral parts. Even the weather, that’s nothing too. Even the cabin fever. What you’ve got to look out for are the Russian Orthodox. You’re looking at me as if I was nuts. Russians discovered this place. They battled the natives years, some hearts-and-minds thing. Then they converted them. They did. The Russian Orthodox church is very popular with the natives. All those onion-shaped domes that you see. You do. You see them everywhere. In Sitka. In Juneau, the Aleutians. Up and down the Kenai Peninsula. Kodiak. Even right here in Anchorage. (You know there are scholars who believe the igloo is a serendipity? That some native was trying to build a little Russian Orthodox church out of blocks of ice and snow? Monkey see, monkey do. Who knows?) Anyway, watch out for them. You see any Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers come roaring in on their dogsleds, waving their whips over their heads, hollering ‘Mush!’ and thinking whatever the word for ‘pogrom’ is in Eskimo, in Ice, get out of their way because they’re looking to beat the living shit out of you. Hey,” he said, “they learned from the best. Free Soviet Jewry, yes, Rabbi? So that’s another reason I don’t go out, why I declare so many snow days.”

“Mush?”

I swear I knew what he was going to say. I swear it.

“Ice for ‘Jews.’ It eggs on the dogs.”

And let them pass, Petch’s pensées. Only the distraction of the rabbi’s high-grade cabin fever. Some distraction. Some only.

One of the disadvantages of being without a wife in company is that when it’s time to vamoose there’s no one with whom you can make eye contact. Your body language falls on deaf ears. One of you can’t signal to the other of you that it’s time for the baby-sitter line to be offered up, the tomorrow’s-a-working-day one. I was on my own. There should be no hurt feelings. He means no harm. Be polite with this all-cabin-fevered-out colleague. I shifted my weight, I cleared my throat, I tamped at the corners of my lips with my napkin, Ice for “be seeing you,” for getting the hell out of there.

“The deal’s off then?” Petch said.

“What deal? We had no deal.”

“You know,” he said. “I can’t come to New Jersey? We can’t trade? The prince and the pauper?”

“Rabbi Petch,” I said.

“Listen,” he interrupted, “I make a bad first impression. I know that. I do. I’m paranoid. Hey,” he said, “if Jews had priests and bishops I’d be on the first boat out. They’d hang me out to dry in the diocese’s designated hospital.”

“Please, Rabbi.”

“No, please, come on. The way I talk? A learned man? Listen,” he said, and lowered his voice. Close as we were, I had to lean forward to hear him. “Listen,” he said, “they don’t know what to do with me. The congregation wants to be fair. They come over. Machers and shakers. Boiling mad. Determined. Minds made up. Once-and-for-all written all over their faces. But you know? They’re stunned when they see. Humbled. All of a sudden the cat’s got their tongue, they don’t know what to say. They’re thunderstruck in the southwest corner. They can’t do enough for me. However they were feeling, whatever was on their minds, on the tip of their tongues, it’s forgotten. All is forgiven. And I know what was on their minds, the tip of their tongues. I could say it for them. You know something? Once I did. I really did. I spoke their piece for them. From the tip of my tongue to the tip of their tongue.

“ ‘Rabbi Petch,’ I said, ‘how are you today? Cold all better? Good, excellent, alevay! We were worried. As a matter of fact, Rabbi, now that you’re feeling so much better, it might be a good time to tell you something that’s been on our minds, on the tip of our tongues. Some of the board members have noticed that you don’t quite seem to be feeling your good old self of late. Not precisely a hundred percent, not specifically par value. Well, it’s this winter, Sidney. It’s been a terrible winter this winter. It’s taken its toll from the best of us. Dan Cohen, for example. A shtarker like Dan. Heck, Rebbe, weather like this, unrelenting, you’d be a shvontz not to get shpilkes. We’re all shlepping. Anyway, we had a meeting, we put our heads together, we had a discussion.’

“ ‘Loz im gayn. It’s been a hell of a winter, he’s starving for light.’

“ ‘Loz im gayn? Loz im gayn? Loz im gayn where? Sid’s a widower. His brothers are dead, his sisters. All the mishpocheh got eaten up and picked clean in the Holocaust.’

“Someone said no, someone said yes. Someone said no again. Someone looked it up.

“ ‘Sidney. Sid. Kid. The long and the short. We made up a collection, we collected your airfare. We dipped into capital. We collected something extra. You’ll be home for Xmas, Rabbi. Come April, alevay, you’ll be searching for leaven, licking a hard-boiled egg, sucking parsley and charoses from between your teeth and having Pesach with your Aunt Ida in Arkansas hiding the afikomen from the pickaninnies. Next year in Little Rock, this is your life!’

“They never had the nerve. Even after I said it for them they never had the nerve. They went off biting their tongues, kicking themselves in the behind. So New Jersey was my idea. I can do what you’re doing. Bury people, say a few words. They’d put up with me in New Jersey, with my ways. In New Jersey I wouldn’t even have ways. Only here I have ways.

“I’m a spiritual, God-fearing guy. God-fearing? He scares the bejeesus out of me. I’m very impressed. Well, He makes an impression. All the ice and that darkness, the disproportionate strength of a bear. The whiteness of whales.

“Listen,” he said, “go in good health, but promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“You’ll keep an open mind.”

“Certainly,” I said. “I will. I promise. But now,” I said, “if I could just use your phone. I’ll call a cab. I have to get going.”

He nodded in the direction of the telephone.

“You’ll write me?” he said when I’d made my call.

“Write you?”

“From the pipeline. You’ll let me know how things are?”

“Sure. I’ll drop you a line. Well,” I said, carefully making my way through Petch’s obstacle course, “thanks for the tea. And thank you for seeing me.” But he wasn’t listening. He was peering out the window, looking hard at whatever it was he thought he could see in the gloom, March’s short daylight already shutting down.

“Is it my taxi?” I asked him.

“What?”

“Is it my taxi? Has my taxicab come?”

“What?” he said. “No. I don’t like the looks of it out there. Something’s up. If I were you I wouldn’t even try to go out this month.”

Remarkable. Wait. This is remarkable. What happened. Just remarkable. Maybe I should tell you — the guy? That I shared the ride with? In the wrecker? He turned out to be my bush pilot. Same guy. The law of no loose ends. What goes around comes around. The law of the return.

Well. We didn’t have such smooth sailing. To Moose Lip. Or Bear Claw. Or Seal Shit. Or Caribou Dick. Or Wolf Tit. Or whatever other made-in-its-own-image totemics the municipalities, settlements, campgrounds and wickiups went by in those cold arrondissements along that booming Ice Belt.

We came down in trees. Sergeant Preston and the Rabbi.

“I want you to know,” Skyking said, “I take complete responsibility for this disaster.”

“You do.”

“Complete responsibility. The FAA won’t have to come up with any black boxes on this one.”

“They won’t.”

“Pilot error pure and simple.”

“You’re some up-front guy,” I said, shivering, jumping about, blowing on my mittens and pounding my hands together now we were clear of the plane.

“Mea culpa, Rabbi.”

“Nobody’s perfect, my son,” I said, larky, in extremis the wiseacre.

“I just can’t for the life of me figure what happened,” he said, and launched into a song and dance I couldn’t follow.

“We were never higher than five or so angels,” he said. “Our attitude was always righteous and the artificial horizon might have been turned off for all the pitching and banking it displayed. We weren’t below, and I never busted, minimums. We enjoyed CAVU weather straight up in the civil evening twilight. There wasn’t any clear-air turbulence to speak of, and I never had to crab. I could have used some cultural features certainly, but what’s a fellow to do, make them up? Heck,” he said, “we even had eminence. And no use for a DF steer even if there’d been an FSS on our right wing. I didn’t have to lean and seemed to be greasing it on. My Pop Teases Fat Girls. Everything going so smooth we could have joined the mile-high club if either of us had felt the need or been better looking. We were never close to issuing a pan pan pan let alone a mayday, and if we were even close to coming out of the envelope I never heard about it. I didn’t red line or run scud or catch any lint in my transponder. I topped off in Anchorage so that wasn’t it, and if we didn’t get any pireps, airmets or sigmets, it’s because there just weren’t any weather conditions. True Virgins Make Dull Company? Perfect, A-OK. I wouldn’t have said boo to them over the Unicom frequencies even if I’d had the chance. Hell, my V speeds were good, to say nothing of that nice VASI light effect I was catching from the ice. Red over white, pilot’s delight. I never even needed VOR, and you were with me during the walk around. I’ve got good paperwork, Padre. I can’t for the life of me figure what could have gone wrong. If anything even did. It’s against all odds.”

“Maybe we didn’t crash,” I said. He knew too many acronyms and mnemonics, a chap too talky for the stereotype I’d have welcomed. A man in his position, in charge of machinery that can kill you, owes it to the customers to be taciturn, reserved, to play everything close to the chest. To tell you the truth, I don’t even like it when the first officer on a big commercial jet chats up the scenery. His eyes should be on the instrument panel or looking out for traffic. This guy, Philip, took me too much into his confidence altogether. Even while we were going down Philip was hollering information at me.

“Uh oh,” he shouted as the plane swung out of control and lost altitude, “something terrible’s happening! If I don’t get a handle on this situation we’re going to crash and die! The skin of this aircraft’s too thin, it won’t stand up to a real impact. I’ve got to get her nose up over those razor pines. See, in these temperatures the needles on the trees are like swords. All we have to do is just brush against them gently and they’ll slash shit out of our gas tanks. Then it’s Pow! Bam! Fuck! I’ll lay you dollars to donuts we explode! We won’t even get the opportunity to crash! Goodnight, Nurse, will you just look at the glare on that ice? It’s curtains for sure now. It’s too thin. Oh, it’d hold a couple of good-sized boys and girls on sleds and skates, but never the weight of a crashing, runaway airplane. The way I see it, we’ve got this last-minute, split-second decision to make. It’s a question of whether we want to impact in the razor pines, explode, catch fire and die, or go for the ice and drown. Those are the alternatives, but we have to make our minds up quick.”

“The ice!” I screamed. “The ice!”

And even though we came down in the trees, it was good to know that I wasn’t bad at the nick-of-time, last-minute, split-second stuff. And terrified that what had occurred to me hadn’t to Philip. That the ice may not have been as thin as he thought, and that even if it were there might still have been time for us to scramble out of the plane to safety.

“Wow,” Philip said, as we were set down, the plane’s right wing and tail cradled, resting, hung like a hammock in perfect, miraculous balance between the heavy branches of two razor pines, “did you feel that? A thermal! A save-ass, opportune, eleventh-hour thermal!”

“God is a mensch.”

“Tell me about it,” the pilot said, “we were going down for the count. Of course I was putting on the back pressure trying to get the nose up, but that updraft came out of nowhere, caught us and set us down again gentle as Mother.”

“He’s a baleboss.”

“A thermal!” he said. “In Alaska! At this time of year! We’re sitting pretty in the trees. As if we were held in so many palms.” He started to laugh. “In Alaska!. Palm trees!”

“He got de whole worl’ in he han’.”

Now, an hour or so into the aftermath, we were still cozy. We could have been soldiers before an attack, talking things over, our sweethearts back home, our plans for the chicken farm once the war was over. We could have been brothers sharing a bedroom, boys in a treehouse discussing the mysteries. We could have been crash victims. We could have been warmer.

The plan was to stay in the plane until it was light enough to see. Then, carefully as we could, we would try to extricate ourselves from the cabin, one of us looking out for the other and displacing his weight like a fellow leaning back out over the sea in a boat race.

What Philip had forgotten, and what I hadn’t known, was that though we were only three or four hundred miles north of Anchorage, the threaded latitudes and longitudes of earth were already drawing together, coming to a point, light tightening, geography’s diminished lattices and trellises, actually closing in on themselves, its patchwork weave of time and distance drawing together toward the perfect gathered pucker of the Pole. It was the old deceptive business of altered space I’d first noticed when we were landing at the Anchorage airport. Something happened up here. Time and space confounded each other. Tricks were played. At any rate, first light didn’t break until around noon. We’d been caught in the trees at about six o’clock the night before, stuck in the small plane for maybe eighteen hours, peeing in thermos bottles, jars of instant coffee, pots and pans, like vandals pissing up a storm in your kitchen. And whenever the cramp in our bodies got too great and one of us had to move, the other watched him in the great concentrated dark and compensated for his movements, contracting as he stretched, shifting in mirror image. We were like people crossing a tightrope together.

“I’m yawning on three,” said Philip.

“Go ahead,” I said, “I’ll swallow and cover for you.”

Which stood us in good stead when it finally got light. And we saw just how precarious our purchase really was.

“Christ,” I said.

“Jesus,” said Philip.

We hung by a thread.

“The thing of it is,” Philip said, “we don’t want to go make any sudden movements that would tend to tumble this aircraft out of its tree.” He was whispering. “The thing of it is, we’ll be wanting to wait for a hard solid freeze to come up, then push the son of a bitch while it’s still in one piece out onto the lake ice — see,” he said, “it’s just water — so’s we can take off again someday.”

“Where are we?”

“God,” Philip said, “I don’t know where we are. I’m all turned around. Lots of this country ain’t ever been mapped. For all I know we discovered this place.”

Making use of all we’d learned in the dark about each other, our close-order drill valences and physics (though neither of us mentioned it — we weren’t the same height; I was taller, he was heavier — I could have told you Philip’s weight to within half a pound; he could have told you mine), it still took us almost two hours to climb down out of the plane. He had lain an open toolbox on the seat and spread out various tools between us like a complicated run of cards. From these we chose iron chunks of ballast to stuff into the pockets of our parkas. Now we moved stiff as figures on a big Swiss clock. He opened his door. I reached for the hammer. He moved his head like a pitcher shaking off a sign. I picked up a wrench and leaned my head against my window. He raised his left leg and swung it slowly toward the open door. I put a hammer and jar of nails into my coat. I opened my door and turned both knees toward it. He reached back and took a pliers and screwdriver into his hand. I drew a file, he drew an ax handle. I picked up a knife. He picked up a chisel and a planing tool. “Can you reach your arm back behind your seat and get my duffel bag?” he said. “Watch it, it’s heavy.”

“Jesus, it is.” I felt the plane rock.

“Wait,” Philip said, “let me help.” Together we brought the big duffel up over the seat and maneuvered it between us. We were practically back-to-back now, poised at our open doors. “All right,” he said, “is that your briefcase back there?”

“About five or six pounds,” I told him.

“Empty it,” Philip said.

I pressed the buttons that released the hasps, overturned the briefcase and let its contents spill out. I handed Philip the empty case.

“Can you get my duffel?”

“I already have.”

“That’s gin then!” Philip declared, and both of us dropped out our opened doorways and fell the ten or so feet to the ground below.

Which is when he went into his rant about angels and attitudes and minimums that remained unbusted. His rap about crab, eminence, and the civil evening twilight. The old Alphabet Soup Rag — all CAVU, DF steers and V speeds. When he didn’t red line or run scud and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Pireps, airmets and sigmets—that old black magic. Essentially good news his disacclamation of responsibility. Essentially music to my ears this music to my ears. I knew that by laying our mishap at the feet of magic, he was indicating we might just get out of this yet.

Though I barely heard him, was scarcely listening. Too taken with where I was. (I didn’t know where I was.) Studying what I would probably be able to see for only another hour or hour and a half. The queer, mysterious, hidden sun not so much shining as somehow manifest behind a scrim of sky, its light like the stretched-out color of water in a cup. The endlessly repeated shape of the almost colorless trees that seemed, across the lake, to follow the steep curve of the otherwise featureless earth. I had thought of wilderness as a profusion of texture and color and life, some extravagant display, but this, this was what wilderness really was. I couldn’t conceive of such emptiness. Did God know about this place? Maybe Philip was right. Maybe we discovered it. How could it be mapped? It was unmarked. No birds, I was sure, dwelt in its trees. Did fish swim in its greasy, unannealed water? Nothing lived here. Strike the earth anywhere here, with a pick, with an ax, and you’d crack soil permanently frozen, make a sound faintly brazen, some shrill chip of noise. God worked with the political, with the cantons and cities and principalities. With the nations and kingdoms. He needed a side to be on. Someplace populated enough to support a franchise. He’s this through-and-through City-Kid God and never took hold in wilderness. Which is why, counting pit stops in Sinai, it took the Jews forty years to cover the hundred and fifty or hundred and sixty miles from Cairo to Canaan.

Dear Rabbi Petch, I thought in my letter. How are you? I am fine. Who owns the North Pole? The whiteness of whales indeed! Yours truly, Jerry Goldkorn.

“Hey,” Philip said, “we’ve got to figure some way to get that plane down from out of them trees before some big wind comes up and does it for us. Did you ever use an ax?”

I explained how certain classes of men contracted heart attacks just mowing their lawns.

“Oh,” Philip said.

“Not me,” I said. “I don’t mean me. Did you think I meant me? Give me a break. I’ve split kindling and made little balls out of newspaper. I’ve built fires in fireplaces.”

We chopped at branches and felled trees until full dark when it became too dangerous to continue. That night we lay together under the branches and pine needles for warmth.

And worked until dark again the next day and slept once more under our wooden blanket, developing in those odd, four-hour daytimes a curious, exhausting jet lag, time flip-flopped, bringing me awake at one and two in the morning with a terrible urgency to crap in half-dozen-ounce increments the twelve-ounce-per-person provisions it was actually state law in those days that pilots carry aboard their planes in the event of just such emergencies. Philip was different. He felt the urge as soon as it got dark at three-thirty in the afternoon.

And were at it again at the crack of noon on the fourth day too. Chopping until we had enough wood to make a six-foot wooden hill beneath the airplane and enough left over to build a blanket.

Then, close work this, we filed and sliced at the trees in which our plane was cradled, cutting away at boles and projecting branches like butchers trimming fat.

With long levers we carefully poked and pried the plane loose from out of the smoothly forked branches we had molded for it, and lowered it gently onto its new wooden base.

Somehow it struck me as a very biblical and oddly satisfactory solution.

Now, kept from the wind, we could sleep in the plane. Though I must be frank and tell you it wasn’t easy that first night. We dozed on and off. We were, of course, both of us gamy. But that wasn’t it. Though perhaps, in a way, it was.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m talking here of some dark, masculine nostalgia. My sense that night of my own and Philip’s rough stubble and all the soured perfumes of our decay. Each other’s proximity a vouchsafe of the mortal. Oh, oh, this is hard. I’m looking for the clay equivalencies, some queer mix of broken exhalation and busted wind at close quarters on a haimish plane. The knowledge between us of our seasoned, salty flies and marked underwear. Never all night to be without the strange assurance that all men are fleishik and stand contrary to the principles of such a clean, inhospitable geography of raw phenomena, human finger-food in all that ice and in all that darkness against the disproportionate strength of the bears. Suddenly realizing the wind hadn’t blown once during those four nights when we required calmness to keep the plane slung snug and orderly as a hammock in its trees. Yea, oh yea, I thought, grateful to a God Who answers the rough rabbinics of even unasked prayer, and wondered: Hard? Hard? What’s so hard? There are no difficult davens. Ain’t it just like I told Philip? Don’t he do too got de whole worl’ in he han’? Forgetting for the moment to remember where we were, where we were really, unconscious of all those raw, difficult, powerful phenomena — the tundra and temperature and true magnetic north. Out of my rabbi mode and chatting away with Philip, who couldn’t sleep either. In the fetid cabin of the grounded airplane recruited yet once more into the sedated collegiality we’d shared after the initial excitement of the crash, Philip just beginning to tell me something about his duffel bag when both of us noticed that other wonder — the crack of the noonday dawn. To see — talk of mortality — that we’d been caught with our pants down.

The wind hadn’t blown. It had remained calm, had it? Yes? God answers even unasked prayers, does He?

Two huge black bears, drawn great distances through the crystal neutrality of the calm, windless air, by our poor scat, stooped to sniff where we’d squatted on either side of the airplane; then, standing upright, looked up at the machine in which we were sitting and made a face.

“Oh, Jesus,” Philip murmured. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“Surely,” I whispered, “they’ve seen airplanes before.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“They must have.”

“Sure,” Philip said, “lots of times. Maybe what interests the sons of bitches is that they ain’t never before seen one that could throw down one or two dozen razor pines, saw them up into manageable logs, knock them into a roost, then fling its shit out of the nest after it was done with it.”

“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.”

“It’s like everything else. The price of Torahs is higher in Alaska. It’s like what it costs for your breakfast.”

“And the menorah?”

“What about it?” he said. “You know what a knop, a cup, and a flower sets you back these days? Beaten gold?”

“Come on, Philip. What’s going on here?”

“Or shittim wood by the cubit and half-cubit?”

“In that ark I’ve got coming.”

“That’s right,” he said softly, slyly. “In that ark you’ve got coming.”

“How do you do it? How is it done?”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s nothing. There’s nothing to it. It’s no big deal. It’s not important like the kind of thing you do. It’s only money. It’s no big deal. It’s like a value-added tax. We’re a community. Everyone belongs. Whoever handles an item, whoever orders it, or makes it, or stocks or modifies or services it, or, like me, maybe just only even picks it up and delivers it, gets to goose up its price a tick. It’s, I don’t know, like a chain letter or the pyramid club. You know that sooner or later it’s got to come crashing down around your ears, but in the meantime, so long as the balls are all up in the air and you make sure that the last to sign on is somebody else, it works. Or seems to anyway. Alaska is a scam, man.”

“I don’t understand your system,” I told him.

“If I told you it’s tied up with grants and subsidies and government dough and oil depletion shit and blind-siding the taxpayer, would it be any clearer to you?”

“No.”

“That’s because you’re spiritual,” Philip said, beaming. “I knew I’d thrown in with the right guy. I knew I wasn’t making any mistake when I pitched my tent next to yours.”

I stared at the small biblical fortune the madman had strewn in my lap.

“Go on,” he said, “why don’t you give her a lick? I can see you’re just itching to try.”

“Give her a lick? Itching to try?”

“Why don’t you up and pray us the hell out of here? Use your powers! Rub that old God bag! Come on, I’ll help you!” He picked up a Torah in a blue velvet parochet and began to spin between his palms one of the wooden handles around which the scroll was wound. “I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight!”

“Hey,” I shouted at him, knocking his hands away, “hey, hey you! What is this? What do you think you’re doing? What do you think this is?”

“Who’s that?” Philip asked suddenly. He nodded toward my side of the airplane.

Standing just where one of the black bears had stood half an hour earlier, there was an old man.

He looks so cold, I thought. Where, I wondered, were his shtreimel, his kopote? What had he done with his kittel? Why was he outdoors without his gartel, his tallit katan? What was the reason his payes had been shorn? And why was he snowbound, abandoned in wilderness like some lost, Jewish Lear?

(Because I recognized him at once. Here was Shelley’s leathered, dreamboat Jew, her fringed, blue-banded, prayer-shawled Prince. And I hadn’t even seen his face yet. In our steep pine roost, settled in our mounting like some bizarre cocktail ring, we were above him looking down.)

“Far out. Who’s he supposed to be,” Philip whispered, touching the Torah, “the genie from out of this bottle?”

“Hello,” I said, the ordinary greeting as odd-sounding and queer to me under the circumstances as if I’d pronounced it “halloo,” abrupt and vaguely frantic as someone in Shakespeare. As if to say “How now, my lord,” or “Ho, by your leave!” or “Good morrow, cousin.” Or thought to say, “Who’s there? Stand and unfold yourself. I charge thee speak!”

“Welcome,” he said. (And still hadn’t seen his face or risen above my perception of his chill despite the knit cap he wore under his hooded parka, his insulated boots, ski gloves and scarf, his padded thermal bearing. Maybe it was just his being so isolated. So lone a figure in such stripped, lone elements might have looked chilled in desert too.)

Then he leaned back to look at us.

There’s something wrong with the Plexiglas, I thought. There was a glare, a distortion. Some phenomenon of the thin, freak air, an anomaly of the light, like sunshine lasered in a magnifying glass. I shaded my eyes but failed to reduce the glare. “It’s bright,” I said.

“It is,” Philip said.

“Wait,” the old man said, and placed an arm across his forehead, shielding his eyes as a shadow covered the Plexiglas and things became visible again beyond the hard, clear glass.

And he wasn’t old. His features seemed those of someone vigorously middle-aged, though there was something shrugged and bent about his stance, a sort of drawn, willful hunger (despite the well-fed aura of his arctic outerwear) in the way he arranged himself on the world, like the fierce, opinionated sufferings of an anchorite, some wandered-Jew quality to his ideas perhaps, even though I didn’t know his ideas, even though I … I don’t know. Maybe he was fifty. Maybe the length and fullness of his beard had given me an impression of age. (Though how could I have seen his beard before I’d seen his face?) Perhaps the sense I had of his singleness. Listen, look, I don’t know. I’m in even deeper than my rabbi mode, or anyone’s mode, rabbi or otherwise. Because what we’re talking about now, the area we’re into here, are spiritual sightings, the UFO condition. Two steady, responsible guys, one a family man, an official, out-and-out rabbi, the other a pilot, accredited, licensed to fly the more exotic air lanes, above the caribou herds and musk ox and seals. (And the sky is not cloudy all day.) Somewhere over the reindeer. People you’d trust with your credulity. Though one, granted, was an odds-on crackpot. (But religious. Hadn’t he proclaimed himself a believer, and wasn’t all his pilot’s mumbo jumbo about angels and attitude, busted minimums, turbulence, eminence and the civil evening twilight, a sort of prayer?)

Listen, look, I told you I don’t know. I told you this was different, and that I’m in even deeper and way past the ordinary rabbi mode altogether. All right, okay, listen. I’m backing and filling, I’m vamping till ready. I haven’t told you about his beard yet!

It was made out of miniature flowers.

He was an old Jew with a beard made out of flowers.

A tight bouquet of daisies and irises, jonquils, lilacs, orchids and lilies. Poppies, roses, dahlias and dandelions drawn through a long green salad and lattice of stem. There was foxglove. Buttercups were in it, tulips, white baby’s breath, blue bachelor’s buttons, gladiolas, peonies, columbine. Flowers like rubies, like diamonds, like opals and sapphires. There were bright vermilions and blooms like a yellowed ivory the color of sunshine on snow. Pink carnations were mixed in, lavender freesias, sweet peas, nasturtiums, chrysanthemums, phlox. A gold-and-purple, red-and-emerald beard. A black-and-orange, brown-and-violet one.

(And I hadn’t even seen it yet, not face to face, was still in the plane, kept from it by the Plexiglas, separated from it by the Plexiglas the way glass mitigates and intervenes vision in a jeweler’s showcase. Still thinking, if you must know, of what Philip had been telling me about the cumulative, downhill-rolling snowball accretion of value in Alaska, wondering what an arrangement like that must have set the old boy back; speculating on the worth of such a nosegay of out-of-season, greenhouse-and-hothouse-grown posies which not only had have had to be shipped in from wherever in the lower forty-eight they’d been originally nurtured and then reshipped in Alaska to whatever lost latitude this odd old Jew had given them as an address, but had have had to have been packed and repacked each time in special protective, insulated, crushproof safety papers, and then carefully fitted by hand to his cheeks and chin by maybe the specially trained Japanese flower arranger and face-dresser who probably came with them. Adding the cost, too, of the extra blossoms, the ones that had made the trip only as a safeguard, the fail-safe flowers of sudden freeze and contingency, to say nothing of the hidden costs: what it would take to keep a first-rate, top-drawer high-priced Japanese flower arranger and face-dresser like this one would have had to have been, out of commission for a few days, to pick up the tab for his hard-to-imagine, special breakfast, luncheon and dinner appetites, what you must have had to have paid to send the plane back empty, first from the lost latitude, then from the found one, but quickly, no time lost, not at his prices, because at his prices you could go broke just forcing a plane to hang around an airport waiting on Nature for the fog to lift. So rounding it off at — what? we’ll be conservative here — thirty or forty thousand dollars for him to do his devoirs, make his morning toilette. And I still hadn’t really seen it yet.)

“Can’t you hurry?” I hissed at Philip.

“Can’t you?” he hissed back. “Grandma was slow, but she was ninety!”

Because we were both busy trying to cram the menorah, Torahs and silver yads back into Philip’s big duffel before the wandered old Jew guy noticed something amiss. Noticed, I mean, that we were in possession of such things. So we locked once more into our old choreographed cooperation, bobbing and weaving, pecking like pigeons, doing our close-order-drill physics and valences, those practiced displacements and compensations and overcompensations.

“What are you birds up to in there?”

“Just catching up on our housekeeping,” Philip said.

“Just tidying up is all. There,” I said, “that’s got her,” and opened my door, swung my legs around and dropped down. Philip, on his side, did the same. Once I was out of the plane again I leaned over to rub my thighs and work out the kinks. “Boy,” I said, “thank God you showed up. Hey, Philip,” I said, “we’re saved.”

Philip, walking unsteadily over the loosely piled timber, came round to my side of the airplane. He looked down skeptically at the man in the pricey FTD beard. “You know a lot about the engines in these things, do you, old-timer?” he asked.

“No no,” he said, “nothing.”

“But you’re not lost,” I said, offering the punch line of the old joke.

“No,” he said. “I’m not lost.”

And looked up at me. Which is when I saw that they weren’t really flowers, blooms, nothing vegetable at all in fact, no lush, tight-strung festoon, no garland like some actual hat or chaplet at a girl’s head, but something deep and indigenous in his whiskers and hung across his chin like a fragrant tattoo.

“Did you see any bears?” asked Philip.

“Yes,” he said mildly, “two great grizzlies, wide as passenger cars. They passed by me in the woods.”

“He has,” I insisted, “he’s come to save us.”

“They passed by you?” Philip said. “They let you alone?”

“Why not?” he said. “Why would they want to hurt me?”

“He’s right,” I whispered to Philip, “why would they? They need him for honey. We’re saved. We’re saved. We’re money in the bank.”

“I was drawn,” he said, the wandered Jew guy, “by the almost human odor of your bowels.”

“What kind of a crack is that?” Philip said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I looked at the pilot and thought to myself, Boy, some people: Here’s this Philip, a fellow who claims a certain standing for himself in the mystical community, who professes a belief in God’s servants’ services, in their mumbo jumbo and the smoke from their campfires, who doesn’t recognize a spiritual power player, and maybe even the downright wandering Jewish miracle rabbi himself, when he not only runs right smack dab into one in what, since he didn’t know where he was, he couldn’t even call the middle of the wilderness, but has to crash-land a plane safely in the branches of evergreens and work out the most delicate, mysterious rapport with his total-stranger passenger, when it came down to gravity, wind shear, force vectors and the like, that they could almost have, the two of them, taken their act on the road, provided they were lucky enough ever to get even close to a road again, and not only that, but had had to withstand a siege by wild bears, wide, by the wandering Jewish miracle rabbi’s own dispassionate testimony, who without incident had passed by them in woods and thus had had no need to lie, as passenger cars, sedans or maybe even limousines perhaps, he didn’t specify, and who, at least momentarily, would have had to have stood right there before them with the produce and proceeds of what might well have been a to-scale, ordinary English garden, right down to the odd bit of crabgrass, wrapped around his chin and cheeks!

Only what made me so sure he was even Jewish? Not his accent. He might have been a disk jockey on some easy-listening FM station. And the fact of the matter was, I still hadn’t had a really good look at him. What I’ve said here, all I’ve put down, I’ve said and put down as a kind of eyewitness. The details are there but are only impressions, the sort of things I might have told to an interested police artist. I will stand by them. Later, indeed, I confirmed them. I even have a Polaroid, although it was snapped months later, in October’s weak light, when the season in Alaska was lowering like a shade, and the bouquet (which tended, he said, to fade in the late months, to shine in the early, seemed dead as flowers pressed in a book), frankly, looks blurred in the picture, all the remaining dull, calico colors run together, compromising the sharp, discrete blooms of my first bright impression. (But I, a rabbi, was never such a hot photographer anyway.)

All right. Not only hadn’t (had a really good look at him), wouldn’t!

Wouldn’t look at his beard, avoiding it not as if it were some blight or handicap, a port wine stain along his face, say, or something not there at all, the missing tip of a finger or an absent limb; not finical, fastidious, or out of any ordinary, gracious civil deference, not shy I mean, unless we mean God-shy, or the way a kid primed to address his Santa Claus, to climb right up there onto his lap and tell him right to his face in the middle of the department store’s toy department, with all the other kids waiting right there in line behind him and possibly flanked too by his, the jolly old man’s, elves and helpers, will turn shy, either forget what he has to say or rather die than say it, let the cat get his tongue, humiliate himself, break down, cry. That’s why I hadn’t had my really good look yet.

Well, what do you expect? A guy tells you he was drawn by the almost human stink of your shit. This could be someone important. This could be … All right, this could be the Messiah. Or, for this little Rabbi of Lud at least, maybe just a big-deal, big-time genuine mystical religious experience. Anyway. Even if I wasn’t absolutely convinced. That this was the man. I’m going to let some fourth- or fifth-rate pilot, who makes his living hustling Torahs and letting drunken cowboys from Texas strafe holes in the bears as he does bombing runs at them or circles over their heads in holding patterns, pass remarks and dish out shots to such a person?

So I looked him in the face. Stared him right in his beard. All first impressions confirmed. This was him. As far as I was concerned. And made a little welcoming curtsy in his direction, losing my footing, almost dislodging the pines, only at the last minute recovering myself, running in place on the logs like a lumberjack.

“I was wondering,” said the great teacher when I had my balance again, “do you think there might be room for me in your airplane? I’m not looking for something for nothing and would make it worth your while. A wealthy man I’m not, but I’m willing to pay.”

(“I’ve heard about this character,” Philip told me. “There are legends about him from Valdez to the Pribilofs. From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe. He scares the shit out of the natives. Everywhere he goes there’s trouble.”) He turned to the man. “Oh, sure,” Philip said, “that’s how we do it. We collect our party as we go along like Dorothy loose in Oz. What do we look like, mister, a taxi rank?”

“Philip,” I cautioned him, and thought, My God, a fellow like this, with heightened, sky-high senses that can not only pick up men’s scents but evidently rehabilitate them out of the very air right back into the compost for his beard, this is somebody to whom you give lip? “I am Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn of New Jersey,” I said, wiping my hand off on my parka, extending it. “I am honored to meet you, sir.”

“I’ve been meditating for almost an entire winter solstice now. From ice field to ice floe. From glacier to iceberg. I’m getting a little antsy — may Shaper-of-the-World, Blessed-Be-He, take it in His Head to forgive me — waiting for spring to come on.” (So, I’m thinking, who is this guy? He seems to have ruled out Shaper-of-the-World, Blessed-Be-He. Maybe he ain’t God either. And ha ha, I’m joking, relieved, because as I always say, I/Thou or no I/Thou, you don’t want to go one on one with Him.) “Too much darkness just isn’t good for you,” he said. “Let there be light. Know what I mean?”

“And what’s all this ‘almost human odor’ of our crap crap? He still hasn’t said.”

(“Philip,” I said, “please.”)

“No, no,” Philip said, “I mean it. I don’t have to take this kind of garbage from a hitchhiker. Boy,” he said, “you run into these guys every time you set your plane down in this country. I don’t know where they come from. You could be lost, you could be behind the beyond, wherever, and there they are. Waiting for you. Cadging rides. Oh,” he said, even more agitated now than when he’d lost control of the plane and we were about to crash, “always hair-trigger and up-front with their worth-your-while’s and willing-to-pay’s. But drop the fare off on his turf and you find out quick enough just what their worth-your-while is worth.”

(“Philip, please, did you see his beard?”)

“A fad.”

(“Philip, his whiskers are flowers!”)

“So? A passing fancy. Once crew cuts were in, then it was sideburns down to your lips.”

“No,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers, speaking as if he hadn’t heard a word of Philip’s pouted rant, my own whispered admonitions. As if they’d never happened. “So much dark … After a while you forget why you’re out there. On the ice, on the glaciers, ice fields, ice floes and icebergs. Why you came in the first place. Exercising the fancy-shmancies, holy adaptations and dreamy propitiaries that it takes to live. The kill-only-what-you-eat commandments, practicing, I mean, all the waste-not/want-nots and wearing your food for fur and leather too. Doing the live-off-the-land economies — feathering your nest with the rare sea-bird’s jewelry, the ptarmigan’s, the jaeger’s, the eider’s cushy down. At one with the seal and musk ox, with otter and bear and whale modalities, recycling very calcium itself to scratch a scrimshaw into teeth, into shell and bone. Habituating yourself to all the conservationist’s far-fetched recommended daily allowances, the cosmetics of environment, giving yourself over, I mean, to the elements — the flavors of air and temperature, the shading of salmon and the bushel-per-acre yield of the tundra.”

“These are among my favorite things,” Philip said.

(Philip!)

“But it wears you out,” he said. “Concentration breaks down, breaks up in the dark. (The dark! Not some proper, heroic blackness you could rub yourself against like braille.) You can’t remember color. You’re too busy yogi-ing over your bloodstream and rearranging your metabolics so you can see what it feels like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few inches a day with the wind in your face. Isn’t this so, Rabbi?”

“Well, I …”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s so. I stake my reputation it’s so. So, when I caught that first, unmistakable whiff of what was almost certainly ka-ka and quite possibly human ka-ka, I perked up pretty quick, I’m here to tell you.”

“Yeah, well,” Philip said uncomfortably, making the first shuffled, awkward cues of leave-taking, the preliminary gutturals and throat-clearings of departure, though clearly there was nowhere to go in that wilderness.

“I started out three days ago,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers.

“Three days ago. You’ve been tracking our scent for three days? That’s some discriminating whiffer you’ve got.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m anxious to get back to civilization.”

“Oh,” Philip said, “civilization. Sorry. We’re not headed in that direction.”

“Because,” he said, “I’d had enough of darkness now, and of found frozen shelters carved right out of the very bottom of wind and temperature. Of my fur and leather ways and deprivations and being perched in such high-up altitudes of the world like a stylite on a column. So naturally when I first smelled your feces, Rabbi Goldkorn”—he pointed to the side of the plane where I’d been relieving myself—“and yours, Philip”—he pointed to the pilot’s little mound—“I asked myself: ‘Human? Is it human? Could it be human? It smells human.’ Oh, there were trace elements of digested fish and game, of course, but you’d expect that up here. So I broke camp and started out. I followed your trail and, sure enough, the closer I came the stronger the spoor, until I thought I could make out the freeze-dried vegetables, cashew mix, dried, high-energy fruits, beef jerky and chocolate of your emergency, survivalist meals. And, what do you know?” he said. “Here we are!”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“Tell me,” he said, “Rabbi, you observe kashruth?”

“No,” I said, “why?”

“Nothing. The Checkerboard Square’s all right, but most other survival chow’s trayf.”

“We don’t keep kosher even in New Jersey.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re consistent. It’s a point in your favor.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“It depends,” he said. “It’s also a point against you.”

“Are you,” I asked, “are you kosher?”

“Oh, me,” he said, “I keep house on an iceberg. Well,” he said, “fellas, I’m looking forward to getting back. What’s with the airplane?”

“We crashed in the trees,” Philip said. “The engine won’t turn over.”

“Maybe the battery’s dead.”

Philip rolled his eyes.

“Give it a while. Maybe the engine’s flooded.”

“Sure,” said the pilot, “and maybe it got all bent out of shape when we crashed. Here,” he said, “look,” and raised the cowl to reveal the bashed, stricken metal underneath. “That lake ice isn’t firm enough to hold us anyway.”

“Well,” said the fellow in the flowers, “I won’t say I’m not disappointed, but now there’s three of us. When you’re looking forward to civilization again, three at least is a beginning.”

We were back in the plane. It was night and the man with the flowered beard was talking. Loading us up on Alaska, her legends and lore. (Without once alluding to the mystery right there on his jaw. That filled the cabin with fragrance, actual individual pulses of scent that flashed on and off like some code of the botanical. Freesia, rose, chrysanthemum, fern. Lilac, carnation, orchid and iris. Peony, jonquil, spearmint. How, I wondered, had he ever tracked us? Distinguished between the rival claims offered up beneath his nose?)

He told us of a night so cold fire froze. The flames, he said, were like icicles, you could break them off. And of a summer when the light was so intense that a little of it continued to brighten the night sky into the dead of winter. He related a story about a muskeg swamp he once came upon in the tundra country above the Arctic Circle where the moss was so thick whole herds of caribou and reindeer were drawn to it, entered it and remained there, unable to move in the deep, soft muskeg (now effectively a sort of quicksand), feeding in place until they died. And spoke of bonanzas you don’t hear about — the great salmon, king crab, fur, timber, musk ox (for its qiviut, its remarkable underfur, four times warmer than wool but a quarter wool’s weight), seal, scrimshaw, whale and totem-pole rushes. There were tales of the Indian tribes: the seafaring Tlingits who had amassed not only a fishing fleet but a navy as well, who had first smoked salmon and discovered lox, the Haida Indians of Prince of Wales Island, and of the Athapaskans, and of a tribe whose men speak one language and the women another. He spoke of the Aleut Eskimos and of their great bush pilots who, as a matter of pride, not only refuse to use the radios, radar equipment, and other navigational aids the FAA requires they carry in their planes, but won’t even refer to their compasses, or even to the stars, to guide them, relying, to find their way, on the simple fact that they are natives, that they were there first.

“Yeah, well, that’s bullshit about the Eskimo bush pilots,” Philip said sourly. “It’s right up there with the crap you hear about igloos. I’ve been in lots of them and never found a warm one yet.”

Which led to a discussion of Alaskan architecture, Philip speaking of his preferences, the Quonset hut, the trailer, even the sod house. “Something solid,” he said, “more substantial. That you know it ain’t going to melt on you the first sign of spring.”

“I don’t know,” said the man in the flowered beard, “would you really want to be tied down like that?” And began to tell of his travels: of the summer he spent among millions of brood seals on a beach in the Pribilofs, and of another summer, on Little Diomede Island in the Bering strait, not two miles from the international date line, contemplating time. He’d been to regions where you could see blue glacier bears clinging to the ice, wide and spread as rugs, embracing the sides of the ice mountains with their powerful claws. And to great potlatch feasts and ceremonials all along the Inside Passage and up the high Yukon where the host provided great quantities of grizzly and musk ox and moose meat.

“Tons,” he said, “literally. All you could eat.”

“Is that stuff kosher?” I asked. “Bear meat, musk ox?”

“Go know,” he said.

And told of one spectacular potlatch to end all potlatches.

“It’s the custom, as you know, that at the end of these feasts the host gives valuable gifts to his guests, and sometimes actually destroys his property just to show he can afford to. It’s a lot like the beautiful, graven chopped-liver swans you see at some of our affairs. Well,” he said, “but what do Indians really have? Their artifacts, of course, their gorgeous, custom duds and decorated furs. The whale’s carved-up bones and etched ivories. Their blankets, certainly. Well, John Lookout, the founder of the feast I’m speaking of, was a particularly rich man. He even had, don’t laugh, a refrigerator. (You’ve heard the saying—‘It’s like trying to sell a Frigidaire to an Eskimo.’ As far north as I’m speaking of, Indians too.) Though the village where he lived had no electricity.

“Well, let me tell you, Father Lookout decided to go all out on this one. And we all knew it, too. Just to give you an idea, the potlatch took place on a day that commemorated nothing, absolutely nothing. Not the opening of the canneries, or the liberation of the Indian slaves — oh, yes, the Indians kept slaves; for that matter so did the Eskimos — or some battle, defeat or victory, in the Russian and Indian wars of the early nineteenth century. It was no one’s birthday. None of the Lookouts had made a rite of passage. He’d had an ordinary year, neither fat nor lean. Ordinary. The potlatch was neither to celebrate nor propitiate the gods of hunting or fishing. You couldn’t even say it was a celebration of ostentation itself, because John didn’t even bother to invite more than one or two people to come to it. Maybe it was the incense from his fires that drew us. The burning polar bears and king caribou, the greasy lava flow of shlepped blubber. Or the overnight skyline of the bright, patiently carved but hurriedly planted totem poles out there on his lawn like so many decorative flamingos or jockey hitching posts. Maybe just rumor.

“The food was like nothing anyone had seen before. The sheer amounts of it, I mean. Oh, what a spread! It could have kept entire villages well fed for a winter. And the drink! Not just the ordinary Black Label Scotches, imported beers and French champagnes, but sparkling reindeer blood, horned sheep ales and moose liqueurs, fermented lichens, spruce wines, and the cedar sherries.

“Oh, and that thermostated, G.E. frost-free, fresh-fruit-and-vegetable-crispered, makes-its-own-ice-, butter-trayed and egg-nesting icebox of his had been filled up with packaged white bread. (A great delicacy among the Indians, he was going to serve them toast for dessert.)

“So there we were, seated politely, our hands folded in our laps, mouths salivating, stomachs rumbling with hunger, our very noses watering from the delicious sights and wondrous smells of all that fabulous food, all the guests waiting for John to rise and make his toast so the feast could begin. He never made a move, and we might be sitting there still if some wise old man from a different village altogether hadn’t somehow suddenly divined the point, risen, flip-topped a beer, and offered, offhandedly as he could—‘To Nothing at All!’

“That was the open sesame, all right. It was as if some movie director had called out ‘Action!’ All of a sudden the wines and boozes were flowing, and the platters of meats and fowl and tureens of soup were being passed around the tables as fast as the white men — yes, white men — John Lookout had hired could serve them. (Though it occurred to me that that village elder could have said anything, and the same thing would have happened. He could have said ‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ or ‘Permafrost Forever!’ or ‘So’s your old man.’ Anything. I could have started it myself with a bo-ray p’ree ha-gaw-fen. Then I thought it wouldn’t even have taken that much, that it wouldn’t have taken anything at all, maybe just one of the guests getting up from where he sat at the table, strolling over to the icebox and tearing open a package of Wonder Bread and pulling out a slice. Now I know it needn’t have been a guest at all. One of the white hired help could have done it.)

“It was something, let me tell you. It was really something. It really was. There was ox bacon, there were bear chops, there were caribou roasts. There were great Kodiak porterhouses and sheep feet and walrus shoulders. There was smoked lemming and barbecued musk ox liver. And the drinking? Like there was no tomorrow! Well, you know — they’re goyim. They’re Indians but they’re goyim. Do I have to tell you? Goyim is goyim.

“They were so sated and drunk by this time you’d have thought he wouldn’t have had the energy for what happened next. It’s what often happens. They fall asleep with their faces in their plates and when they wake up the next day their heads hurt so bad they’re no longer interested in even the gift-giving part, to say nothing of the host’s destroying his property for them — even if he still had enough left in him to do it. The taste in his mouth alone is enough to make him wish he was dead.

“But I’d been watching him, John Lookout, the host. And they’d been watching him too. He hadn’t touched a thing. Practically. He’d picked at his food. And though I won’t say he was on the wagon, he’d been abstemious, and seemed, well, to have drunk only out of politeness, a sort of social drinker, to make his guests comfortable. And that’s what kept them interested, I think, helped preserve that last bit of alertness in them. Gave them their second wind. Kept their peckers up.

“So they really didn’t know what to expect. Even after he rose and proposed that toast we had all been waiting for and thought he was going to rise and propose at the beginning.

“ ‘I thank you all for coming, and drink,’ he said, ‘to your healths, and ask, as a favor to me, that you accept a few lousy tokens of my appreciation.’

“Whereupon he began to give away the store. You know, the artifacts I was telling you about? His beads and his blankets, his scrimshaw and tsatskes. But big stuff too, the stuff they use to live by, the tools that earn their bread. The harpoons, nets, rafts and kayaks. The paddles. The very machinery, I mean, that made the potlatch possible, and not only that but his down parkas, the qiviut wools that kept his family warm, the oil that burned in his lamps during the long dark year.

“Then forced whatever the Indian equivalent is of the doggy bag on them, pressing them with food that had not yet been eaten, then with food that had not yet even been prepared.

“His generosity was shameless, and John’s guests, both the one or two who had been formally invited, and those of us who, like myself, had merely been attracted — it was us, incidentally, who walked off with the biggest prizes; he was scrupulous about this — were beginning to feel more than a little uncomfortable. That kind of pride and ostentation went beyond tradition and custom and was starting to seem, well, destructive. Yet to refuse a gift was not only rude, it was taboo, a little higher than incest on the scale of things you don’t do.

“When he had given away all the gifts he had to give, and disposed of all his food, he seemed physically to slump, somehow to collapse in the face as though he’d been rendered suddenly toothless, all expression fled from him. He seemed — we all felt it, I think — not only to have used up all his worldly goods and chattels, but all his ideas as well, all the hope he might ever have had for a future. This is important. I must make myself clear. Understand that he did not suddenly appear bereft or deprived. He did not seem desolated or stripped. No grief was in it. Nothing was in it. As if all the wise old man from the different village altogether who’d brought the potlatch to life by rising and proposing his toast to nothing at all had to do to see the toast bear fruit right before his eyes, was just stay awake long enough to see John Lookout’s face at that moment. It was the empty, vacant, neutral face of someone not very interesting in pre-REM sleep.

“But just then, quick as it had emptied out, quick, that is, as a tire blown on the highway, it filled up again. Lookout jumped up, smacked himself in the head, ran out, and was back in a minute with an unopened case of French champagne. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said. ‘I’m all farblondjhet tonight. There’s still some champagne left. Who needs a refill? How about it? How about it, Nanook?’ Nanook, who looked as if he was going to throw up, groaned and covered his lips with his fingers as you might cover your glass with your palm to decline wine. ‘You? Charley Feathers? No? How about you, Patricia Whale-water? No one? You’re sure? No takers? You’re sure? All right, it’s going going gone then, everybody,’ he said, and started to smash the bottles of champagne. He threw them against the walls of his house, he threw them on the floor. With all his might he threw them through his closed windows. He uncorked the last two bottles and emptied their contents over two handsome woven rugs he had apparently forgotten to give away.

“In the silence that followed we were not only too embarrassed to look at John, we were too embarrassed to look at anyone else either. I suppose that’s why we never knew who the guest was that finally spoke, who broke the silence and pierced that tight ring of eyewitness shame we all feel when someone fails to bridle an enthusiasm that has passed beyond mere enthusiasm and spilled over into the red zones of lost control and flagrant zealotry.

“ ‘That is a fine icebox someone has sold you, John Lookout,’ the guest said. To alter the mood. To save the party.

“ ‘Oh, do you think so?’ John asked. Then he opened the door of his G.E. frost-free refrigerator and ripped it off. He removed its blue plastic crisper, set it on the floor and jumped up and down on it until it was in pieces. He did the same with the butter tray, tore out the wire shelves, destroyed the icemaker, and then went to work on the motor itself, being careful to spare, out of respect and courtesy to his guests, only those parts where the freon was stored.

“A strange thing happened.

“The mood altered once more. The zealotry retrograded back into enthusiasm again, and the enthusiasm re-metamorphosed into that ostentatious generosity which is the impulse and impetus of a potlatch in the first place.

“There was a frenzy of generosity. One Indian was so moved he gave away the lead dog of the dogsled team that had fetched him. The man he gave it to was so moved he shot the dog.

“Desperately they tried to part with the gifts they’d been given, and, when they couldn’t, they destroyed them. And when they ran out of things to destroy that John Lookout had given them, they turned on their own property and destroyed that. Mukluks went, parkas. Snowshoes, canoes, curved ulu blades for gutting fish. Everything, everything! All were caught up in the spirit of the celebration. After a time, when there really was no more property left toward which they could demonstrate their indifference, they seized upon their own families. Braves beat their squaws, squaws hit their papooses, papooses scratched at their mosquito bites until they became infected. Even then that terrible nexus of generosity cum enthusiasm cum ostentation cum zealotry wasn’t finished. When you thought it was over, something else would happen. Someone rose, for example, stuck his finger down his throat, and regurgitated the entire feast he had consumed just hours before. It was awful,” he said, remembering, “awful. You couldn’t know how they would ever manage to end it.

“It was the major trope of that particular potlatch, and the source of an important new Indian stereotype — the Indian-taker.” He paused. “It was a sort of Black Thursday for them, you see, and effectively destroyed the Indian economy in that part of the high Yukon for years.”

“How did they?” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“How did they manage? To end it.”

“Oh,” he said. “When I took out my ulu and started to shave off my beard.”

It was stuffy in the cabin and I cracked open one of the plane’s Plexiglas windows, surprised to feel the air, soft and dark and balmy as the sweetest spring. It was even a little warm, in fact, and Philip and I removed our outer garments. Flowerbeard seemed oblivious to the weather, and not only didn’t take his parka off but hadn’t even lowered its hood, which still covered his knit woolen watch cap. Indeed, he was talking again, launched, I supposed, into another tale, as oblivious to his audience as he was to the temperature.

He was speaking of the alienated Tinneh Indians, who are not only tribeless and clanless, but are without families, too. He was telling us how generation after generation of Tinnehs break away from each other, how parents divorce and children are placed in orphanages or live for a while with a mother or a father and then run off. (Identical twins, he told us, everywhere else handcuffed together by the genetic code, will, among the Tinneh, over time, burst their mutual bonds, drift apart, fall away, dissipate affinity, annihilate connection, disfigure resemblance, climb down some great, ever-attenuating chain of relation, and move from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.) And how at one time they probably outnumbered the Tlingit, Haida and Athapaska tribes combined but were now reduced to perhaps a handful of individuals, rare in the general Alaskan population as Frenchmen. It was actually pretty fascinating. I know I was interested, and even Philip seemed to have lost, maybe even forgotten, his odd hostility to this man who was now clearly become our guest — I felt my host’s role and offered to share the last of my portion of our survival biscuits with this queer Elijah of a fellow — and was concentrating on what he was saying as hard as I could. When suddenly he broke off. “Oh, look,” he said, “the sun’s up. Now we can work the plane down off these logs and get out of here.”

“Oh,” said Philip, fixing his hostility in place again, “and once that’s done, how do you propose we take off? Seeing, I mean, as how the lake is all melted and more suitable for a toddler with a pail and shovel than for some bush pilot stuck in an airplane without a pontoon to its name?”

“Isn’t it frozen?” said the wandered Jew. “Maybe it’s frozen. I think it’s frozen.”

“What, are you kidding,” scoffed Philip, “in weather like this? Like Opening Day in the horse latitudes?”

“I’ll go check,” the flower-bedecked man said and, limber as someone a third his age, was past my knees, had the cabin door open, was out of the plane and onto its wooden perch and dancing down the thick jigsaw of logs as if they were stairs. The next we knew he was leaping up and down on the surface of the frozen lake. “It’s solid,” he called, jumping. “It’s frozen through. If it holds me it can hold the plane. I weigh thousands of pounds.”

“I hate a showoff,” Philip muttered.

“Shh,” I cautioned.

“Yeah, yeah,” Philip said, “nevertheless.”

And before we could accommodate to the queer disparity of temperature between where we were situated in the plane and where, not fifty yards off, the lake existed in a different climate altogether, he had come back, shrugged out of his heavy outerwear (more, I guessed, for our benefit than his own), had signaled us out of the cabin and, clever as a moving man, was directing us in the this-goes-here/that-goes-there displacements and arrangements, furiously pulling the timbers away as if they hid children covered in a cave-in.

Maybe because there were three of us now. Or that one was a man with flowers in his beard. At any rate, we finished just as the sun was going down and were rolling the airplane out onto the ice when Philip offered his objection. (And me silently pleading with him: No, Philip, please. Not, Don’t bother. Because that wasn’t the point. The bother, the wasted energy. But because I was a theologian, even if only of the offshore sort. Because I was a theologian and knew that when you’re sitting in the wilderness rubbing on a Torah’s wooden handles and hocus pocus, lo and behold, who should appear but some stranger that he’s got something as out of the ordinary as chin whiskers on him that look as if they might have been cultivated by the very folks who brought you the Garden of Eden, let alone trimmed at and mowed on by magic Jap floral arrangers, and the newcomer mentions he weighs thousands of pounds though he’s light enough on his feet to jump up and down on water, you don’t whimper and whine at him or make nag-nag at your human condition.) But the last thing this Phil is is shy. Something’s on his mind, he lets you know. “I suppose,” Phil says, “you have some special way of starting up a dead, battered-up engine that’s seen its last days.”

“Turn the key in the ignition.”

“Right,” Philip said, and we got in the plane. Before you could say abracadabra it was full dark, the engine coughed and turned over, and we were roaring down the ice to a blind, treacherous liftoff, Philip not knowing if he could risk pulling her nose up now or whether he still had some room left to muscle her a bit and maybe gain a little more speed and momentum before crashing into the razor pines on the opposite shore of the little lake, when at the last minute the northern lights came on like the bombs bursting in air and it was suddenly bright enough for him to see what to do.

“So,” Flowerbeard says once we’re at cruising speed and Philip’s established radio contact again, “be it ever so humble there’s no place like home. Even the sky seems familiar. It’s good to be back. You know?”

And I’m thinking: Sure, if you live in the sky. If you live in the sky and your house is on fire. Because that old aurora borealis was blazing away in front of our eyes like a forest fire. The primary colors at kindling point. At green’s ground zero, at yellow’s, blue’s, red’s. (It was like being in the center of the midway at a state fair among the garish, glaring, glancing illuminations and kindled neon of the rides, the blazing calliopedic centripetals and centrifugals of light, in altered gravity’s dizzied sphere, hard by the game booths bright as stages. Or like hobnobbing among all the invoked wraiths of light and color like some Periodic Table of the Sun, the conjured avatars and possibilities of its bright erogenous zones and all the heightened decibels of heat, silent banging bursts of fireworks exploding like bouquets of semiprecious stone, amethyst, sapphire, topaz, garnet — the gem boutonnieres. Commanding the spicy savories of hot solstice and, oddly, remembering wicker, recalling bamboo, mindful of, of all things, summer’s swaying, loose and ropy hammock style, the interlocking lanyard of the deck chair and chaise like a furniture woven by sailors, recollecting — most queer at this altitude — the littered life outdoors, stepping on candy wrappers, condoms, the sports pages like a dry flora and everywhere setting off the sounds of localized fire like a kindled shmutz, or the explosion of all our oils and fats and greasy glitter like stored fuel.)

Or, like flying directly into his beard.

“Well,” I said, “bright enough for you?” And winced, frightened by my pointless nerve.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “you start to look forward, you really do. Gone so long, in all that cold and dark, wearing the same mittens and snowshoes weeks on end, you forget what it’s like. Civilization. The comforts and mod cons. And begin to believe God’s all there is, and that all He ever made was weather, conditions to test your mettle, ice to suffer by and humiliate your character. But now spring’s come and I remember all I’ve been missing — the amenities that make all the difference. Sterno, for example, simmering beneath good old-fashioned home cooking.”

Philip confessed he was a news junkie himself, and told us that in his position, Bloombeard’s, it was current events he’d have missed most, and that though he hadn’t mentioned it while we were still technically crash victims, when 10:00 P.M. rolled around and the Eyewitness News came on TV, he couldn’t help but wonder who had been raped, who had been murdered, whose house had burned down, who had been lost in natural disasters. He took some comfort, he said, from the fact that when we were out of radio contact with civilization, and he couldn’t get the engine to turn over, we were something of a current event ourselves.

“Oh, current events,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers dismissively. “The Four famous Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Mr. War, Mr. Famine, Messieurs Pestilence and Death. I’ve never been much connected with novelty myself.”

Oh? I thought. Look me in the beard and say that. “But, Tzadik,” I said instead in the rabbi mode, “isn’t it important, particularly in these times of tribulation between ourselves and our Arab cousins in the Holy Land, in Eretz Yisro’el, for us to be informed and keep abreast of the developments? To search for peace? To seek, I mean, some equitable solution to our problems?”

He looked at me for a long while before he answered.

“You’re one of these ‘root causes of terrorism’ guys, ain’t you?” he said.

“Well …” I said.

“No,” he said, “I can see it. You are.”

To tell you the truth, I was a little troubled by some things the Israelis had been doing. The world was a complicated place. There were no open-and-shut cases. There was enough guilt to go around. Of course it was outrageous that the Syrians took pot shots at us from their vantage point on the Golan Heights, or that the PLO could lob shells into the kibbutzim along our northern borders wounding and killing our children, or that they planted bombs in buses and on supermarket shelves in boxes of detergent or mixed in with the oranges in the produce department. Certainly it was wrong to hijack airplanes and harm innocent civilians. But they had their grievances. There was no denying it. The Israelis were on the West Bank now, laying foundations, making it over, turning it into the new Miami. And the camps! For generations now the Palestinians had been crammed into rat-infested quarters open to the sky, forced to live out in the weather like a city for Lears. How different were these “camps” with their running sewers from the favellas of the hopelessly impoverished or even from the ghettos of our own people?

“Yes,” he said. “I can see it all over you. You want to be fair.”

“Well, it’s their homeland, too. And, strictly speaking, they were there first, you know.”

“Fuck them,” he said.

“Please, Tzadik,” I said, “this is not an argument.”

“And finders/keepers is? Let me tell you something, kiddo. There are higher principles than finders and keepers.”

“Hey,” said Philip, “I think I’m getting a Fairbanks AM station.”

“Because you don’t kill someone over finders/keepers. A homeland? A homeland they want? What,” he said, “they’re imprinted to deserts, allergic to ice? Let them live on the glaciers. Let them have a go at making the icebergs bloom.”

This was some rebbe we had here. Suddenly I was telling him all about myself, what I did in New Jersey.

“A rabbi is not a thoracic surgeon,” I said. “He is not a proctologist or an ob-gyn man. He doesn’t set your bones or flush out your ears. But all I do is say prayers over dead strangers. Tell me, Khokhem, is it right for me to specialize like that?”

“No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. It doesn’t make a difference if they’re strangers. Or that you don’t feel a genuine anguish for their loved ones. Grief is only a form, a kind of a courtesy. It’s something we have to do. It’s a sacrament. Not like sitting shiva or saying Kaddish or putting pennies on their eyes. Just grief. Grief itself. If you’re properly shocked when you hear bad news. If you’ve got”—he waved his arms about at the invisible mountains of ice beneath and all around us—“sand.”

And then, while Philip tapped his toes to the music coming in on his headphones from the Fairbanks radio station, Flowerface launched into the wisdoms. He told us how God did too create evil. “And you know something?” he said. “It’s a good thing He did.”

“It is?” I asked, surprised.

“Sure,” he said, “it shapes our taste.”

I lifted a headphone away from Philip’s head, bobbing to the rhythms of Fairbanks radio. “What?” he said.

“Cut out the dreaming and listen to him. This ain’t no sock hop. He’s telling us worthwhile stuff. Go on, please, Macher.”

He looked hurt, Philip. I regretted what I’d said and fumbled with his earpiece, trying to replace it, when Petalpuss stayed my hand and began to draw it toward his beard, guiding it into that luxuriant garden. “Be careful,” he whispered, “of the thorns and thistles.” I jerked my hand away as if it had been scalded. (Though I swear he let go first, his reflexes beating my reflexes.) Then he turned to Philip and apologized for me. “It’s not what you think. He’s a rabbi and has faith in lessons, the vicariousness of the heart’s bright ideas. Incidentally, what was that song you were listening to just now?” Philip told him and he nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “Sometimes, when the weather let up and it got warm enough to whistle, I’d whistle that one myself.”

“Really?” Philip said.

“Oh, yes,” said the man with the flowers in his beard. “It’s a very catchy tune. It perks a man up who’s been praying while the midnight sun goes down if there’s a cheery tune to turn to.”

“Really?”

“I just said so,” he said. “But I have to tell you, it doesn’t let you off the hook that we share the same taste in music. That’s coincidence, not character, and don’t redound to anyone’s credit. Jerry was right finally to pull the headphone off your head. I’m only sorry he didn’t catch your ear in his fist.”

“Oh,” I said, “no. I only meant …”

“You did your duty. It don’t make no difference what you meant.”

“He’s right,” said Philip.

“He is,” I agreed. I turned back to the man with the flowers in his beard. “What else?” I asked him. Because, though I still had no idea where we were — Philip, when he’d discovered our coordinates, had passed them on to us but they hadn’t meant anything — I didn’t care. It was all wisdom now — how he’d spoken to Philip, to me, what he’d been saying. I knew there was plenty more where that came from and never wanted the ride to be over. Why, I was like a kid, staring out the window of a Pullman car berth, lulled by the mysterious geography of the night, seduced by the steel percussion of tons.

He spoke to us, instructed us, taught us, even Philip into it now, rapt, engaged as someone counting. Old Posypuss (because I didn’t know his name, because he never said it, because I never asked) wising us up, even in English his voice cadenced as an uncle’s aliyahs, like broches lilted as lullabies. One time he paused to ask if either of us had a cigarette we could spare and it seemed so out of character I questioned whether I’d heard him correctly.

“You smoke, Khokhem?”

“I butter my bread.”

“Beg pardon, Tzadik?”

“What, I’m going to be killed by an omelet? French toast? A Carlton, a Vantage, a Lucky, a Now? They want me that bad, let the pikers come get me.”

“Beautiful,” I told him.

“Ah,” said Philip.

“Sure,” said the man with the flower-strewn beard, “a parable in every box. Philip, please,” he said. “Watch the road. Look where you’re going.”

We landed at Prospect Creek camp by the Jim River, thirty or so miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was full daylight and Philip took me over to Personnel, where I was photographed and issued an identification tag while he filled out Emergency Landing and Distress forms required by the company if he was to claim Distress and Hazard reimbursement, and which I, as his passenger, had to witness and sign.

“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.

Though I hadn’t forgotten I was in the Assignment office, and looked at McBride waiting for him to tell me what to do. He didn’t speak, and looked at me as if I had him stymied, this fellow who never forgot a face on an ID.

“Well,” I said finally, “if you could give me some idea of my duties …”

“Your duties?”

“It’s a long pipeline,” I offered by way of a joke.

“Oh,” McBride said, pulling open a drawer in his desk and referring to a sheet of paper he took from it. “It’s not Rosh Hashanah, is it?”

“No.”

“Yom Kippur?”

“No, of course not.”

“Succoth? Shemini Atzereth? Simchas Torah?”

“No.”

“Is it coming on Chanuka?”

“Not till Christmas.”

“Chamish’ Osor b’Shvat? Purim? Pesach? Lag b’Omer?”

“Chamish’ Osor b’Shvat? Lag b’Omer?”

“Shavuoth then, Tisha b’Av.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Hey,” he said, “smoke if you got ’em.”

So, on the principle that we’d once been in the same motel lobby for a few minutes back in Anchorage, and were all in this together, I asked about Spike. I asked after Ambest and Anderson, and about old Jimmy Krezlow. I wanted to know what had happened to Peachblow and tried to find out how Schindblist was getting on.

“Did Jeers ever qualify?”

“Jeers?”

“Guy said he was checked out in jackhammer but didn’t have the certification to prove it.”

“Yeah,” McBride said, stroking his jaw, remembering, “yeah, Jeers. No,” he said, “we gave him a test. He flunked. We let him wash dishes and work the grease trap till he earned the fare back to Alabama.”

I’m next, I thought, thinking of the half-million-bucks’ worth of Pentateuch back in my room under canvas and hasp. I’m next, I thought, thinking of that small biblical fortune in sterling silver yads and eighty-seven-thousand-karat beaten-gold menorahs and the shittim-wood arks.

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes. Well, no. I mean, well, what am I supposed to, you know, do?”

“You’re the rabbi. You’re on call. You sit in the rabbi trailer and chat up the Jews.”

Sure enough. There it was. Right on the map. With my other useful addresses. However could I have missed it? If it’d been a snake it would’ve bit me. The rabbi trailer. To which, once I’d settled in, I repaired.

I posted regular office hours and, at least for the better part of the first two or three weeks, scrupulously observed them, almost as if they — the hours — were themselves a claim of conscience and comprised a set of canonical hours I solitarily kept, a squeezed matins and lauds, a concentrated prime and terce and sext and nones, the vespers and compline of contractual duty. (More often than not reminded of the flower-faced man, whom Philip had flown off with the next day, depositing him, so I was told, in Fairbanks, from which town he meant to make his way to Anchorage, perhaps by glacier, moving at the glacier’s pace, a few fast inches a day with the wind in his face.) No one came.

I had the use of Alyeska’s secretarial services and duplicating machines, and had notices posted on the bulletin boards announcing my presence at Prospect Creek camp. No one came.

And, after first reserving them with the authorities to be sure the Atco units that served as the club for Prospect Creek camp would be available when I needed them, I put other notices up — for dances, for get-togethers, inventing affairs, making the coffee-and-Danish arrangements, inviting our singles to come together in Jewish sock hop — high times for one and all. Again, of course, nobody came.

If, I figured, the mountain won’t come to Mohammed … And visited the sick in the infirmary. All I accomplished was to make those who were well enough nervous, and those who weren’t, terrified.

And it wasn’t as if there were no Jews at Prospect Creek. There weren’t a lot, but there were some, Jews of a different color, as the Catholics and Prots and even the Eskimos and Indians there were of a different color, order. Pipeline, they were pipeline Jews, there to make a wonder of the world. No back seat to God, they seemed to say. Oil or nothing! Valdez or bust! And proceeded to live some specially dispensated, tall-story life of the body and mind, their attention focused somewhere around the speed of sound, the speed of light, richocheted, caromed off the forces and their unleashed, hopped-up pagan energies.

I’m telling you, pally, like goyim they were.

So here’s what happened.

Piecemeal, I stopped being so scrupulous about office hours and came later and later to open up and sit inside my rabbi trailer. And closed shop earlier and earlier, too. Some days neglecting to drop by even to check the mail (letters from Shelley were delivered to my quarters), Alyeska’s endless series of internal memos, bulletins, clippings, pledge cards (for blood drives, for the Prospect Creek branch of the United Way), newsletters, notices, press releases, announcements (“Commencing the first of the month the laundry’s new hours will be from …”) — all that purple correspondence, as I came to think of the company’s impersonal, one-size-fits-all mimeography. And stayed indoors (as I came to think of the Atco unit where I lived), watching, in those old, pre-dish days, two- and three-day delayed editions of the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett.

In all fairness, what else could be expected of me?

In all fairness, nothing at all, but I knew that what I’d undertaken, to serve a sort of sabbatical year (to pick up extra bucks, to shop around for a congregation, to see how, or if, Alaska would suit, and send for Shelley and the tyke if I discovered it did), was become, for me, a time of trial. Prospect Creek, rather than the week or so I’d lived with Philip and Poseypuss in the crashed airplane, was quickly becoming my time in the wilderness. In Lud the dead were my congregation. I cheered for them and rooted them on the way St. Francis was said to do for the birds and the animals. Here, on the pipeline, I had no one at all.

You want to know something? You want to know what the Rabbi of Lud started to do with his hands now that he had so much time on them? That’s right. A grown man. A rabbi. Playing with himself like a bar mitzvah boy. True to Shelley at first, but getting out on the town more, at least in my head, gawking the cleavages and pupiks, underthighs, calves and asses on Carson’s, Griffin’s and Cavett’s guests on three-day delay, old Goldkorn placing shlong to palm for a little shvontz tug and putz pull.

It was an effort even to go to meals.

So I pulled myself together.

I went to meals. I went to meals and spoke when I was spoken to. I went to meals, spoke when I was spoken to, and passed the salt. I went to meals, spoke when I was spoken to, passed the salt and offered the bread basket. Piecemeal, I’m saying, in fits and starts, I fell in with them.

You have no idea what money was like in those days, what it meant, I mean. How easy it was to come by, how difficult it was to save. Generosity became a way of life. A way of life? A competition, an Olympic event. (Don’t think I wasn’t put in mind of the man with the flowers in his beard, of the tale he told us of John Lookout’s spectacular potlatch, of the competition among his guests to outshine, outspend and just generally outright outdo Lookout’s incredible example.)

One of the reasons, I think, the pipeline took so long to complete as it did, is that we fell victim to each other’s parties. We were beneficiaries and legatees, and went surety for one another’s benders and hangovers and lost weekends. We strung each other out, I mean, and put each other on the nod on the arm. Wasting and blazing our brothers and sisters. (We? Absolutely we.) There was a custom in those high-kicking, freewheeling, last-of-the-go-to-hell-goddammit days, for someone to come into a saloon and “six-pack the house,” by which was meant that one withdrew three hundred dollars or so from his billfold, laid it down on the bar (not slapped, laid, set down, though it must have started with slapped, started, that is, with noise and showbiz and only gradually, or maybe not so gradually, slipped into a quieter though even more ostentatious — reminded this time that there’s nothing new under the sun, reminded, I mean, of the flashy discretion and noisy circumspection of my bar mitzvah days, when people slipped money into my hand and into open places in my clothing — mode), and purchased half a dozen beers for everyone in the tavern. (It may have been a sign of the season’s excessiveness when the three hundred dollars became four and five hundred dollars, or even more, because the sports were offering not just six beers this time, but six actual mixed drinks. And it was certainly a sign when the four or five hundred dollars was no longer even laid on the bar, when the six-packer was entirely unknown to his devisees and annuitants, and all you needed to know that a treat was in store, was the sound of a phone ringing behind the bar, the sight of the saloon man answering it, the look on his face as he agreed and nodded into the telephone. And surely the final sign was that not one dollar, not one, was ever lost by a barkeep for his willingness not only to extend credit over the phone, but to extend it to someone who because there wouldn’t be any credit in it for him — in the generosity sweepstakes, in those great give-and-let-give games — if his name ever got out, not only refused to give it but often wasn’t even asked!) It was like when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and found the Jews trying it on with the Golden Calf!

You want to know how bad it got? Would you believe me if I told you? Probably not. They never do. I’ll tell you anyway. All right. Here goes.

I was on fabled Alaskan Air Flight 265, Fairbanks to Juneau, the night that word got out that someone — his name isn’t just lost to history, it was never known to it — was going to six-pack the entire plane.

When I heard that I knew it was time to get right with God.

And, unfastening my seat belt, I rose at my seat and, raising my arm and extending my glass, toasted first class, toasted economy class, toasted smoking and nonsmoking, toasted the crew, the folks in the lavs. Thinking: the look, the look, the proprietary smirk. Hold that look. Whatever it was that platformed the heart and smugged the senses and leant to a guy his surveyor’s instincts, like a fellow on horseback, something at once possessive and hospitable. Something father-of-the-bride, say, founder-of-the-feast, chairman-of-the-board, leader-of-the-band. Something maitre d’, master-of-ceremonies. Something patrician, the long, deep bloodlines of first families and old dough. And something underneath, something villainous and wicked, something You’ll-Get-Yours!

As if to say to them: You see? You see how hard-core the greed is behind this, behind all the joke anonymity — Look who says he’s anonymous — and grab-bag glee. And might have brought it off, right then right there have ended all the big-shot posturing (which was already beginning to spill over, which was already beginning to spill over and leave mere just money behind holding the bag, which had already, I mean, started to cost actual lives — in mad heroics, in throwing sound bodies after broken ones, good lives after bad, in all the leap-before-you-look strategics of futile, crazy kamikaze), and might have brought it off. Closed down the bidding right then, right there. If at that moment the stewardess hadn’t come up to me and within the hearing of at least nine or ten passengers told me she was grateful I’d identified myself because there’d been a mistake, that Alaskan Air apologized for the delay but the ground crew in Fairbanks somehow hadn’t gotten the word and had failed to lay on the requisite additional liquor they would have needed for me to six-pack a sold-out 747. She said she’d notified the captain and he’d made arrangements with the tower in Anchorage to set down and take on supplies though she was afraid there’d be a several-hundred-dollar landing fee that I’d have to pay and that after I gave her the green light she’d have to clear it with the rest of the passengers anyway.

Too late it occurred that I hadn’t thought all this through but had engaged in some pretty fair leap-before-looking kamikazics of my own. Too late it occurred that the real founder of the feast may have been on board, sitting back, watching me, waiting on my green light before springing through his. To jolt my Hebrew ass. But then I realized that spurious mercies was what it was all about in the first place, and took my chances.

“Folks,” I said, collecting their attention, “folks?” And cupped my hands to shout our situation to them through. Concluding, “FAA regulations require a community decision on this one. Who wants to divert to Anchorage? May I see hands?”

Relying, you see, on the kindness of strangers. On their generosity ransoming my generosity. Which, of course, in those flush times, it not only had to do but did. The nays had it, and forty minutes later the pilot turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign and was about to illuminate the No Smoking one in preparation for our landing in Juneau when the real six-packer stood up and identified himself. “Go back,” he demanded, “go back to Anchorage. Turn this fucker around and let’s go get that liquor! What say, fellows,” and, pointing at me, said, “my friend here is thirsty!”

And this time the ayes had it. Because of the fuel situation. Because we just might not have had enough to make it back to Anchorage, and risk and foolhardiness were generosity too, a sort of princely largesse and lavish bounty when what you’re giving is your life!

Never mind my humiliation. My humiliation wasn’t even in it. Not at these prices. Not for those stakes.

In all fairness, did I say, what else could be expected of me? In all fairness, did I answer, nothing, nothing at all?

What could I do?

Well, I could become a missionary.

I became a missionary.

Taking advantage of my company plane privileges, and sending my posters and announcements on before me, the purple mail I didn’t bother to go in for myself when it turned up in the rabbi trailer, I began to fly to the other crew camps. I flew to the camps at Prudhoe Bay and Toolik, Galbraith Lake and Happy Valley. I flew to Dietrich and Coldfoot camps, to 5 Mile and Fairbanks. And though I was gone from it now more often than I was there, Prospect Creek continued to serve as the base camp for Mother Church. Except for the topography (and even the topography was more or less the same, the guiding principle of the pipeline geologists being, I suppose, to lay as straight and low a line as possible Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, sea level to sea level), the camps could have been gas, food and lodging stops just off an interstate.

Preceded, as I say, by my purple mail campaign, that one-sided indigo correspondence based on all those already failed, in-house missives I had for model — the memos, bulletins and announcements I insisted (as those I myself received, and which I not only ignored but, if I saw them at all, regarded merely as a kind of neutral fallout, like dead leaves in a gutter, say, dry and past their color, are a neutral fallout, looking on such sad-ass stuff as mere second-per-second hype, insisted they would mine) would change, though I didn’t even know them yet and only had their names off Alyeska’s Address-o-graph machine, their lives. Borrowing (though I don’t believe I knew this) from my Christian friends the mystic possibilities, coming on strong with joy for joy, arms opened wide in forgiveness. Ahead of my time in the forgive-and-forget department, wiping their slates of incest and child abuse, fornication, drunkenness, wife bashing and all the rest of the seven deadlys, inventing customized, Jewish, no-fault sin.

Signed Jerome Goldkorn, Chief Rabbi, Alaska Pipeline.

And climbed down from my airplane at Prudhoe, at Toolik, Happy Valley and Galbraith Lake, at Dietrich, at Coldfoot, at 5 Mile, at Fairbanks, not only ahead of my time but out in front of theirs, too. Or what would have been theirs if there’d been enough Jews waiting out on the tarmac for me or in the presecured Atco units, the card rooms and chapels, dining halls, clubs and theaters to constitute a them. It was all right, I told myself, Rome wasn’t built in a day either, and went off to look for them in the infirmary, tracked them down in their trailers, or out on site where they worked. If you’re going to judge only by — what? — the sock hoppers I managed to sign up or got to agree to go on retreat or come to services, I don’t suppose I was much of a success (although Alyeska had no cause for complaint and, I’ll say this much for them, they never did, and this much for myself — I worked my ass off), but I was planting the seed, laying the groundwork, showing the flag, and when I returned, dropping like Santa out of the sky, I had food for them, the recipes for which Shelley gave me over the phone and which I passed on to Alyeska’s bakers and chefs.

“Here,” I would say, dispensing mandel bread, dispensing kugel, dispensing kishke, kasha and varnishkes, holding putchah out to them (a sort of jellied calves’ hoof), thermoses of full-fledged chicken soup, gefilte fish made from arctic char and salmon, dispensing macaroons, “from the kitchens of Prospect Creek! Enjoy, enjoy! Will we be seeing you come Chol Hamod? Can we count on you this Lag b’Omer?”

If anyone had actually liked this stuff I guess it would have constituted a kind of vote fraud.

But, as I say, I wasn’t much into corruption. I had taken (because I couldn’t afford not to up there) a Christian’s view of things, forgiving their debts as they forgave their debtors, and willing to go them, the Christians, one better, forgiving even the sin of final despair. Though who asked me?

To tell the truth, no one. Asked or was expected to. It wasn’t my job. No, my job was organizing the picnics and volleyball games, the Jewish retreats and Jewish discussion groups (where we would talk about what we always talked about—“The State of Israel,” “The Palestinian Problem” [there was none], “Anti-Semitism” [rife, it existed everywhere, under the bed, out in the hall, wherever people gathered, wherever grown men strolled by themselves down country lanes, everywhere], “Hebrew Education,” “Cross Marriage,” “Marriage and the Family,” “Judaism: Race or Religion?”). But they knew me now. And if I accomplished nothing else I’d accomplished that at least. I taught them, that is, their rabbi’s name.

I made a nuisance of myself. Hey, no problem. It pays to advertise.

Because by now, even if they weren’t showing up for actual services, I’d begun to put together a small cadre of kapos, little Hebrew helpers, Jewish or not, you see them everywhere, dressed to the nines in stockings and heels behind their aprons, female or not, volunteer minutemen, male or not, smoothers of the way, chipper chippers-in and general all-round good sports who not only supervised the music, lettered the signs, put up the crepe-paper decorations, prepared the eats and mixed the punch, but stayed on afterward to return the records to their jackets and, hunching the state of the treasury, lay by money and string to turn economies right and left, taking the crepe paper down and folding it, pouring the punch out of the bowl and into a jar and, waste not, want not, making up doggy bags from the uneaten scraps. Then, God bless them, they went over the signs and erased the words and dates they deemed it unlikely we would be using again.

I had Karen Ackerman, I had Milton Abish. I had Bill and Miriam Jacobson, Debbie Grunwald and David Piepenbrink. Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler from the motor pool were with me. These were my good Jewish sports from the early days. These were the folks who knew me when.

It was time.

I’d had my second brainstorm — my personal Marshall Plan, the food giveaway, was my first — and it was time. (It was obvious, really. If it had taken the kindness of strangers to get me off my duff in the first place, that infectious, killer generosity that I took to be the hitch and hinder, blemish, chink and defect that flawed their characters and made seconds of their souls, why hadn’t I also seen that if epic profligacy was what got you into trouble, wasn’t it only poetic justice then that what ought to get you out of it again was more of the same? A taste of their own medicine. A hair of the dog. Which was when I stopped the flow of just ordinary purple mail, all those announcements for parties and invitations to kick the Jewish issues around, and started to send out barefaced pledge cards, requests for money, pleas for bucks, your outright give-till-it-hurts pressures and appeals. The money poured in.)

So it was time.

I gathered my prayer books together — I don’t understand it, but for a people of the Book we Jews use our Torah less cost-effectively than any religion I know of uses its own scriptures; strictly speaking, it’s not required at all, really, save on Monday and Thursday mornings, on Shabbes and on the holidays — and flew to Coldfoot where I conducted Friday night services for those by this time good old boys Arnie Sternberg, Dave Piepenbrink, Karen Ackerman, Debbie Grunwald and Milton Abish, among my kapos only Howard Ziegler and Bill and Miriam Jacobson no-shows and holdouts. I knew, however, that when next we met (in Prudhoe Bay the following week), I would have not only Ziegler and the Jacobsons in the congregation but a considerable portion of the Alaska pipeline Jewish population as well.

Because it was easy now. Because it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Because it was Prudhoe Bay, the farthest north of Alyeska’s camps, and they would have to inconvenience themselves, put out money, and charter a plane to get there (and it had been a difficult spring, the weather foul that year, powerful storms, high winds, low ceilings, lousy visibility).

Even more successful than that. More successful than I had any right to expect. Because once the word got out, and the non-Jews learned that the Jewish Jews had found a whole new way to six-pack the house and dispose of money, the gentiles dropped by too. And actually even volunteered a collection when they saw I was not going to take one up myself!

“No,” I objected. “No, no,” I protested, “you don’t understand. I’m quite well paid. The company pays me. Alyeska does. I’ve a quite good rating. As high if not higher than the most highly skilled laborers among you.”

And when they overrode my objections and insisted I keep it anyway I told them, well, oh, all right, if they wouldn’t take no for an answer, I’d hold on to it and donate it in their honor to the Trees for Israel Fund.

“What,” someone shouted, “there’s a Trees for Israel Fund?!” and wrote out a check right then and there for two hundred dollars. It was Jack Nicholson, the man I’d seen in the motel that first day, the one they called Spike. Peachblow was there too, and Ambest. The money poured in.

“Building the tip,” I think they call it. Building the tip. Whatever you do to create interest, demand. The dancing girls in their scanties in promissory, there’s-plenty-more-where-this-comes-from undulation outside the tent. The you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yets. The no-obligation-examine-in-your-own-home-for-ten-days-frees. All that primed-pump, water-cast bread that gets the juices rolling. Free sample. Words to the wise.

I was building the tip. That’s all those Friday night services were to me. Who had this hunch (not even articulated) that real Judaism consists not of the ingrained and the daily, the taken-for-granted, steady-state ritual attentions one pays to God, but comes in jolts of enthusiasm, in fits and starts, in great waves of stored-up sanctity and the piecemeal pious. In feelings released — released? escaped, exploded; I hadn’t been a burier of the dead all these years for nothing — on great occasions. Not just on any ordinary Sabbath like a magazine you get once a week in the mail, but on our most sacred holidays, our movable feast days and festivals.

I would have come before them heavy-laden, burdened as a priest, a doctor, blackly bagged, making a house call. I would have brought them, I mean, the jeweled tools of my trade, the branched candelabra with all its official, thou-shalt-made cups and knops, set up my shittim-wood ark like some holy swing set knocked together, and hidden — wrapped like a mystery in the velvet, masculine mantle with its great, rampant, applique lions and weighty crowns — the Torah there, and spread my heavy cloth before them on the bema, the sterling silver yad like the major piece in a place setting. Above the ark I would have burned whale oil for them in eternal lamps.

So it’s a Shavuoth I’m shooting for, a Pesach, a Purim, my Friday nights only God’s little loss leaders, as Mother’s or Father’s Day, say, are only your jerry-built festivities of the historically lackluster months. And what I’d really like to have given them was something spectacular, honored the creation of the world, say. (The reason, I think, Christianity has the numbers — though I’d be the first to tell you it’s not numbers alone that make a great religion, ideas have something to say about it too — is that Christianity has heavier holidays. Real concept occasions. What’s Christmas but your birth of God, Easter week but those seven action-packed days from the time he first pulled into town to the time he got killed and resurrected? Succoth, which is only a harvest festival, pales in comparison. Chanuka, our famous festival of the lights, which commemorates a victory of the Maccabees over the Syrians, does.) There are marvelous untouched holidays there for the plucking. I myself could have come up with a dozen new reasons to praise God. We might have celebrated heart bypass operations, Chinese take-out, record-setting Wall Street rallies. The Festival of the Cruise we could have. The Feast of the Successful Children. Yes, and heartbreakers too, heavy and solemn as anything Christians put on — The Fasts of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen. The Festival of the Holocaust, say.

It was Shavuoth. Now Shavuoth is a fairly important holiday. It commemorates both the revelation of the Law up on Mount Sinai and the celebration of an ancient wheat festival. Something for everyone, Shavuoth is. That year it fell on June 6, so I picked up D-Day too.

It wasn’t as if I was surprised at the turnout. The factors were all there. They were in place, I mean. Well, I’d been building the tip. And there was the money thing. (Did I say how I was reminded of the engraved-invitation revolution back in the forties? The construction of the pipeline was a little like that.) And then, of course, when you weren’t actually working there wasn’t a whole lot to do. So church — I speak generically — became your entertainment. As lots of other things did. (I remember reading, for example, that in the seven major Alyeska camps the men pumped over a million dollars a month into the pinball machines. Of course, that was at Alaskan prices. A game was a dollar, a free game cost you fifty cents.)

So of course I wasn’t surprised. The other way round, really. I would have been surprised if they hadn’t shown up, if all those Tshimian and Athapaskan Indians, if all those hunters and fishermen and totem-pole carvers and ivory scratchers from King and Little Diomede islands hadn’t shown up. If all those blasters, heavy equipment operators, jackhammerers and acetyle-nists hadn’t. What, and miss Shavuoth? Frankly, I’d have been less surprised if Karen Ackerman, Milton Abish, Debbie Grunwald, Dave Piepenbrink, Arnie Sternberg, Howard Ziegler or the Jacobsons failed to show. But that’s a figure of speech. Of course they were there. Dave Piepenbrink met my plane. He was waiting for me out on the 5 Mile camp landing strip. (The different camps had begun to submit sealed bids to see who would host the services, proceeds to the Trees for Israel Fund. You have to understand something, none of this was my idea.)

“Good yontif, Rabbi.”

“David.”

“You had a pleasant trip?”

“Very nice, thank you, David.”

“Thank God! Alevay! Kayn aynhoreh!”

“Could you lend me a hand? The makings for the ark are still in the plane, the Torah and accessories.”

“The Torah? You brought a Torah on the flight with you? Oh, let me carry it. Please, Rabbi, please. I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your trees if you do.”

“Enough with the trees already, David.”

“You said trees,” Piepenbrink protested. “Trees for Israel was your idea. I never thought trees was a hot idea. Trees is just another place for Arab snipers to hide themselves and take potshots at us. So tell me, Rabbi, if not into trees, where then should we put our money? You’re the rabbi, you tell me.”

“Nowhere. It was a bad idea. But everyone’s so hipped up here on throwing their money around. On being a good sport. I shouldn’t have to charge people to get them to help me out. I’m not selling indulgences. Of course you can carry the Torah. It’s in the duffel.”

I took the smaller duffel, into which I’d transferred a Torah out of Philip’s duffel before I left Prospect Creek camp that morning, and held it out to Piepenbrink. He’d lost his enthusiasm. Oh, he carried it, but now that it wasn’t costing him anything all sense of ceremony had gone out of it for him, even decorum. He practically brushed it along the ground.

“Hey,” I said, “watch what you’re doing. That’s a Torah in there. You don’t shlep it along like it was a bowling ball.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and hiked his burden up a few inches. “I’ll bet you’re one of those guys who thinks he can get a ticket for flying a torn flag.”

It was true. I did think I could.

Karen Ackerman, Abish, the Jacobsons, Debbie Grunwald, Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler were already setting up the chairs for services the next morning.

“I don’t know,” Debbie Grunwald said, stepping back, considering. “You think it’ll be enough?”

“Oh, sure,” Milton Abish said. “Hey, there’s three hundred chairs here. For Shavuoth? Three hundred chairs? Sure it’s enough. What, are you kidding me?”

“I don’t know,” Bill Jacobson said, “we were out at the airstrip earlier and there was an unusual amount of traffic landing for a Monday morning. Isn’t that right, Miriam? Didn’t you think so?”

“I sure did, Bill.”

“We could always put more out if we need them,” Arnie Sternberg said.

“Absolutely,” Howard Ziegler agreed.

“Well, I’ll bet we do need them,” Debbie said.

“I’ll take that bet,” said Miriam Jacobson.

“All right, big shot,” Debbie said, “what are the stakes?”

“For every chair we need over three hundred I donate ten dollars to Trees for Israel. For every chair under three hundred you donate ten dollars.”

“You’re on,” Debbie Grunwald said. “Who holds the money?”

“Why don’t we just put it down on the ground here where it can blow away?” Miriam Jacobson asked triumphantly, as Debbie Grunwald, knowing she’d been both set up and out-sported, blanched.

As it turned out, Debbie Grunwald would have had to pay Trees for Israel a hundred and twenty dollars if I hadn’t disallowed the bet.

It was just the sort of thing I was up against, the point of my missionary’s message to them. It was sin. Such pride and vainglorious strut and vaunt and bluster. Put brag by, friends, I would have told them. Put by swagger and swank and grandiloquence. Knock it off with all swelled-head big britchery, all that high and mighty of the soul and hot air of the heart. You don’t six-pack God, smarty-boots, I would have told them. I would have. In my sermon. If I’d gotten that far.

Because I wasn’t surprised. It was Shavuoth. I wasn’t surprised. I practically almost expected not only that just about a third of those two hundred and eighty-eight seats would be filled with Athapaskans, Tshimians and other assorted fisherfolk, hunter-gatherer and totem-pole types, and that ordinary blue-collar Baptist, Methodist, Adventist and Mormon drillers, drivers and sappers would take up still another third or so — it was Shavuoth, after all; it was Shavuoth, come one, come all — leaving another ninety-six for the outright Jews in attendance. I wasn’t surprised. I counted on it. It was those Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers up on dogsleds with whips I hadn’t figured!

Because this was June, for God’s sake. D-Day. (Could they, I wondered, be opening up some second front?) There wasn’t even any damned snow on the ground! Yet there they were. In full fur. Mukluk to parka in the June heat. Tricked out with their harpoons and ulus by their sides, the sharp, curving knives the women used to gut fish. The dogs, sprawling on the ground in their complicated harness, seemed at some lazy, ceremonial equivalent of parade rest, but at a signal from their masters, some tug of the reins, I suppose, which rolled along their gear like a wave, they rose to a sort of attention. I made some announcements, called out the preliminary blessings (thanking God for restoring the body, for dressing the naked, for opening the eyes of the blind, for freeing the captives, for giving the rooster the intelligence to distinguish between the day and the night, and for making me — I couldn’t keep my eyes off those Eskimos — an Israelite), and began the service.

I’d just finished the Akdamut, the ninety-verse alphabetical acrostic praising the greatness of God and the excellence of Torah (and concealing the name — Meir bar Rabbi Yitzchak — of the poem’s author and father) you recite on Shavuoth before you open the Torah.

I went toward the ark. I proclaimed the Sh’ma. “Hear O Israel,” I announced, “the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” opened the ark, withdrew the Torah, took the silver crowns off its wooden handles, undid the soft, fine cords that bound it, removed the velvet parochet that covered it, and laid it down on the bema. Since this was a Torah that had never been used, all its slack was taken up. The scrolls were set at the beginning, like a rental cassette from a video store. I would need someone to help me roll them to the portion for Shavuoth, and I beckoned David Piepenbrink to come up beside me.

“What?” he said.

“This is a virgin Torah,” I told him from the side of my mouth. “I’m laying a very high power aliyah on you here. You hold on tight to the left side while I roll up the right. It should be about a third of the way through.” He started to say something. “Don’t,” I warned, “don’t you dare mention money.”

“The dogs,” he said.

“What?”

“The dogs!”

The huskies, urged on by their Cossack Orthodox Russian Eskimo masters, were pulling the heavily laden sleds over the dry, stony ground. “Quick,” I told Piepenbrink, “take up the slack. The slack! We’ve got to save the Torah from them. Quick, Piepenbrink, this is an even higher honor than that first one I gave you.”

“What,” he said, “protect this? It’s a crib, a trot. It’s a pony.” He was speaking conversationally now, all the nervous, customary stage inaudibles, the directions and quiet, cryptic promptings that flow back and forth between a rabbi and a bar mitzvah boy, say, and which ordinarily aren’t heard in even the first row — why is this, I wonder, what special physics protects our grit-teeth, iron-jaw arrangements? — his voice normal, audible, clear, punched up as a broche.

“What do you mean, a crib?” (And my voice normal too, as clear as Piepenbrink’s.) But I saw what he meant. I’m such a lousy rabbi. When I’d chosen the Torah in the black velvet mantle to bring with me to 5 Mile, I didn’t even look at it first. It wasn’t Hebrew but a phonetic transcription of Hebrew, a transliteration in English. It was Wolfblock’s work. It was old Rabbi Wolfblock’s work, the man who’d written out my tiny haphtarah passage in English for me when I was bar mitzvah, the shortest of the year. I’d have recognized his printing anywhere.

And all they ever meant, the Eskimo Russian Cossack Orthodox momzers, was just to come closer, and the dogs too very likely, who were probably called, someone suggested later, when I sang out that Sh’ma!

I went out again, on Tish’a b’Av. McBride was there, but not an Eskimo, who were gentlemen, was to be seen.

Tish’a b’Av commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples, and also the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The year I’m speaking of it fell on Thursday, August first, and I’d chosen Toolik camp, maybe two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, as the venue for our services. The Jacobsons had dropped out, Dave Piepenbrink of course, Arnie Sternberg, maybe a quarter of the Jews. Of course Tish’a b’Av was never your most popular holiday anyway. What’s it got going for it? All negatives. Two acts of high vandalism and the blackballing of an entire people from a major country. That’s Tish’a b’Av. What’s to celebrate? To tell the truth, I think it should be taken out of the canon altogether. Too defeatist. Why, it’s like celebrating the date the first Jew wasn’t admitted to a country club, or the first time his name showed up in an ethnic joke. And the destruction of those temples? Commemorate swastikas painted on the walls, why don’t you? Crosses burning on your lawn. Also, it always falls in the hottest part of the summer. People are out of town.

It was a packed house anyway. Gentiles and Indians made up for the defection of the Jews and Eskimos. And Deb Grunwald was there. Shlepping chairs, offering her optimistic body counts.

“You’ll see, Rabbi,” she told me the night before the services, “there’ll be an even bigger turnout than last time.”

“Sure. They’re coming to see how I’ll screw up.”

“No,” she said, “really. They never heard such davening. Once you found your place, you whizzed along like a champ.”

“I read from a crib, Deb.”

“Who knew?”

“After Piepenbrink stepped down? Half the congregation.”

“It was beautiful.”

“Well, you’re kind,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Tell me,” she said, pointing in the direction of the ark, “did you happen to get a chance to look over …” The question trailed off.

I’d chosen the blue-mantled, hundred-forty-five-thousand-dollar Sephardic job, I recall Philip pointing out, but no, I hadn’t looked at it, hadn’t rolled it yet to the appropriate portion, hadn’t even removed its crowns or undone those tasseled ornamental cornsilk cords that loosely bound its twin cylinders. (Because I was working on the theory that it was Fate, God’s hand, that it was up to Him, that if He still wanted me chastised and publicly shamed practically a quarter of a century to the day after some overripe Chicago bar mitzvah pisher went head-to-head with Him over something as insignificant — to a child, remember, a little kid — as the thickness and shape of the letters in what was apparently the Father Tongue, if He, that is, could hold a grudge — or should I say Grudge, your Majesty? — every last second of every damned minute of every single one of those twenty-five years, just because I happened to be learning-disadvantaged in the Hebrew department, if all that His vaunted Mysterious Ways came down to was moving Jerry Goldkorn by way of Lud, New Jersey, all the way past the Arctic Circle so he could make asshole/asshole before a bunch of folks who weren’t too nuts about His Chosen People in the first place, then who was Jerry Goldkorn to sneak a peek, or look up the parchment skirts of some multimulti-K Torah?)

“No, Deborah,” I told her sweetly, “I didn’t happen to find an opportunity.”

As I said, and as Debbie predicted, the house was packed. Standing room only. I delivered my announcements to the bare quorum of Jews and approving goyim and unsmiling redskins, giving all of them the times for the next Jewish Singles’ Happy Hour (Alaskan corned beef, Juneau pastrami, rye bread flown in from magnetic north), and began the morning prayers. I thanked Him for redressing grievances, for being a Settling Scores kind of God, finished the prayers, told the congregation that we would read the Torah portion, declared the Sh’ma, and summoned Deborah Grunwald beside me to join me on the bema. Together we went toward the ark.

“Not,” I told her, speaking in my normal voice now too, in that customary pitch of conversation which, if it wasn’t audible in the first rows, was a proof of God’s existence that just by raising the volume a few ticks it was clear as a bell in Heaven, “because, counting Shavuoth and all those Friday night services, you must have set up the better part of a couple of thousand chairs for me by this time, and I owe you. Not even because”—our backs to the congregation as we moved toward the precious shittim-wood cabinet that contained the scrolls, I wasn’t even ad-even addressing her out of the side of my mouth, but was speaking flagrantly, profile to profile, like people in public seen from behind—“you’re a special favorite of mine, Rabbi’s pet, say, or something, well, lurid. I’ll tell you the truth, Miss Grunwald, lurid ain’t on my palette. I know how it goes in the world, how some-times it’s the priest gets the girl just because he is the priest. Not just the celibacy thing but because he has God’s ear, a line on the mysteries. That’s impressive to girls. Look, break in anytime if I’m out of line here, because, well, chances are I could be out of line and not even know it. See, I’m this Garden State rabbi and as much at a loss when it comes to the mysteries as everyone else. I mean, I’m impressionable too. Innocent beyond my years and trade. A rabbi who never had a proper congregation, who just says words over dead people for living people who don’t have the hang of or calling for it themselves. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you I’m the kind of shaman ladies don’t usually take a shine to. I regard myself as eligible and red-blooded as the next guy, but you’ve got to admit, the death of the next-of-kin doesn’t normally put someone in the mood. Widows never fell all over me, I guess I’m trying to say. So of course I never had much opportunity to fall all over them back. So it isn’t because of the likelihood of either of us having a crush on the other. It’s because I need a witness and you happened to ask the question is why!”

We opened the ark and took out the Torah. We removed the silver crowns and stripped the mantle from the loosely bound parchments. We were unrolling, separating the scrolls.

It was a little like waiting for a strip of leader to play out on film or recording tape. And at first, not distracted by the thick, black Hebrew letters, which always look, with their diminished, left-leaning hooks and finials like the spiky flourish on custard, as if no one not right-handed could ever have made them, it was easy to imagine that the hundred-forty-five-thousand dollars Alyeska was said to have paid for it may in fact have been its actual price.

The story of Creation came up, Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Miriam, the Tower of Babel, Moses and the Exodus, Joseph and his coat of many colors, the Ten Commandments. The Sh’ma, the Mi Hamocha with its apostrophe to God—“Who is like Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like Thee, Glorious and Holiness, awe-inspiring in renown, doing wonders?”

And then its gorgeous parchment, the true, smoothly shaven, lime-buttered, chalk-rubbed skin of a sheep, abruptly ended, went the blank, vague, smudged and ancient ivory of a window shade.

“We missed it. Quick,” I told her, “roll it back, take it up. We missed it.” I fed her slack off my spool. Mi Hamocha went by, the Sh’ma. The Ten Commandments, Joseph, Moses, Babel. Miriam. Isaac and Abraham. Eve and Adam. Creation spun by and was furiously swept away back into blankness, the thick yellow light of the empty parchment. “It’s not here,” I told her, “it’s gone. Tish’a b’Av dropped out.” I looked at Deborah as if she might have taken it herself, like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Then we rolled it carefully in the opposite direction, the Torah bound on its wooden poles like newspapers in a European coffee shop. It was the same thing. The dietary laws were gone, the Korh Rebellion. It had all dropped out.

“Do you read Hebrew, Miss Grunwald?” McBride, some of the Indians leaned forward. I think they could hear me now, as if, with my question to Deborah, I had started the services up again, resumed the prayers. As, in a way, I had. “Do you know what we have here? Do you know what this is?” Deborah shook her head. So I gave them fragments from the story of Adam and Eve, selections from Exodus, a piece from the Tower of Babel, a bit from the Flood, throwing in all I could remember, whatever I had by heart, of the story of poor old God-bedeviled Job.

I assume the gentiles never noticed, nor the Indians. Maybe even some of the Jews.

Because what it was, what we had here on that authentic, lime-buttered, chalk-rubbed, hundred-forty-five-K sheepskin I was so taken with, were the Old Testament’s Greatest Hits!

The next, the last time, it was blank.

It was Rosh Hashanah. Deborah was gone too now. Which I might have expected. Which I did expect. What I hadn’t expected was that Howard Ziegler, Karen Ackerman and Milton Abish, on whom I counted to be there, if only out of the same goodwill and curiosity they shared with Arnie Sternberg, Dave Piepenbrink and the Jacobsons before their defections, didn’t show up either. I set up my own chairs, but I didn’t care about that. That was all right. I didn’t mind that part. What I minded was the other thing, the sense I had of having actually lost souls.

It doesn’t require much telling, this shouldn’t take long.

McBride was there again. I recognized Spike and recognized Ambest. I spotted Anderson, I spotted Jim Krezlow. And picked out others whom I’d first seen in Anchorage. Peachblow and Schindblist. Jeers, who had failed to qualify in the jackham-mer and been flown back to Alabama, had evidently come up to snuff and was being given a second chance. (Or perhaps not, maybe he was just there to see me.) There were Indians who looked familiar, and others from earlier fiascos. There were almost no Jews at all.

Rabbi Petch, with whom I had thought to trade jobs, was there. At the Jewish New Year’s solemn beginning — it was early October; we were at Crystal Creek camp; at this latitude the fierce fall had already begun to drain the light, suck at its sparkle and leach its golds and yellows, tamping it flat, white, thin and dull as skimmed milk — he sat dressed in the hot woolen suit he’d been wearing when I’d last seen him, at the dead center of the congregation, not its southwest corner, but in its actual bull’s-eyed nub and nucleus. I was certain he huddled there for protection, as though maybe there were two neutral corners in the natural world, one for indoors and another for out.

Well.

This was the little reconditioned one, the short-handled, twenty-four-inch, ninety-thousand-dollar Sephardic. Or which would have been Sephardic if it hadn’t been blank. Which could be — who knew? — Sephardic yet, if all we needed was to get some specialist, someone checked out in the Sephardic hand the way old Jeers was checked out in jackhammer to go to work on it and copy down Pentateuch (which, considering the losses so far sustained, and providing the new guy was willing to work for nothing, would still come to something just over a hundred thousand bucks a teuch). Or could be if we didn’t have to fly in some extra-holy type first (the flower-bearded fellow, say) to re-deconsecrate the hoaxed-up sheepskin, reconsecrate it again and just set the scribe loose.

But that was something that would have to wait.

First I had to get through Rosh Hashanah.

I began by asking the Four Questions.

“Wherefore,” I chanted on this brisk Alaskan autumn morning six or so months after the Passover in the only Hebrew, with the exception of my haphtarah passage, a handful of broches and poems, and a few prayers for the dead, I had ever memorized, “is this night different from all other nights?

“On all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread; on this night why only unleavened bread?

“On all other nights we eat any species of herbs; on this night why only bitter herbs?

“On all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once; on this night why do we dip them twice?

“On all other nights we eat our meals in any manner; on this night why do we sit around the table together in a reclining position?”

When I finished I looked up from the empty parchment, looked down again quickly, and hurriedly started to recite my haphtarah passage before the remaining Jews, McBride, the other gentiles, the redskins, and the Anchorage Seven.

I might have gotten through it, too, the first Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline ever publicly to re-bar mitzvah himself, when I felt someone beside me. It was Petch.

He took over for me, going through the service without a single mistake. Though why anyone should take my word for this I can’t say. He even had a shofar with him and sounded it, the dark, mottled, polished ram’s horn, glazed as tortoiseshell, summoning the New Year through its harsh, amplified winds like a sort of spittled Jewish weather, brusque, gruff as phlegm. He finished the morning part of the Rosh Hashanah services and started up again in the afternoon. Then again at sundown. From the Torah that never was. I stood beside him on the platform and, properly cued, even participated by chanting the broches, reading them off the blank parchment by following the silver yad that Rabbi Petch moved along the missing Hebrew.

Through the long, prayer-filled day we carried on one of those mysterious conversations inaudible to the congregation.

“I heard about you,” he said.

“I guess everyone has.”

“Is that what you want? To be famous?”

“No. Of course not.”

“ ‘Thou, O Lord, art mighty for ever. Thou quickenest the dead. Thou art mighty to save.’ ”

“I’m sorry about all this,” I said.

“You should be. This is the first time I’ve ever been so far from Anchorage.”

“What do you think?”

“Barbarous. Worse than I thought. Will you look at that raging river? I think it’s going to bust its banks and take the bridge out.”

“That’s Crystal Creek,” I said.

“I’m taking my life in my hands. How are the Eskimos around here?”

“Very tame. Gentlemen, in fact.”

“A lot you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, “there you have me. I’m a bumpkin.” I wanted to make him understand. “Because I never took it seriously. The proposition that roughnecks could ever get into any of this. Or that God would take their disengagement seriously either. On my side in this, though why I should assume so I don’t know.”

“God’s opinions?”

“That’s right.”

“ ‘Now, therefore, O Lord our God, impose Thine awe upon all Thy works, and Thy dread upon all that Thou hast created, that all works may fear Thee and all creatures prostrate themselves before Thee.’ ”

“Since,” I said, “there was going to be an Alaskan pipeline anyway, and all the red tape and Title Nines and Tens and whatever were already in place, I thought it was a good time to get out of Jersey, put a stake together, and, if things worked out, maybe trade congregations with you.”

“Out of the question,” Petch said. “No deal. Deal’s off. You aren’t serious. You were never terrified enough. I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for your stake,” he said suddenly. Then, softly, “Someone must stand between us and the Eskimos.”

Though it was humiliating to me, I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little relieved. Here was Petch with his phantom Eskimos and chimerical natural disasters ready to throw himself into the breach, to intercede on man’s behalf for God, or God’s for man’s, whichever came first, like a limited warranty.

“Maybe,” I told him, “I wasn’t terrified enough. Though by any normally terrified guy’s standards I’m pretty terrified.”

“ ‘Let all the inhabitants of the world perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue must swear. Before Thee, O Lord our God, let them bow and fall.’ That’s why … What’s his name, McBride?”

“McBride, yes.”

“That’s why McBride don’t fire you. You ain’t scared enough yet to blow in a whistle, you’re not quite afraid to make a wave. That’s why he’ll probably let you play out your contract.

“Oh,” he said, “by the way, is it true? Were the others like this?” He touched the yad to the godforsaken parchment.

“One contained highlights. One was written out in English.”

“No swastikas but? I heard swastikas.”

The scrolls were covered and placed back in the ark.

“No,” I said, “of course not. You think I would have sat still for swastikas?”

“A bold, stand-up guy like you? Why not?”

We finished the services. Then we shook hands and each heartily wished the other might be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. Everyone did. McBride and the Indians. Jeers and the gentiles.

I walked Petch to the airstrip where his bush pilot was topping off the fuel in the gas tank and listening to music coming in over the plane’s radio on an Anchorage AM frequency.

Next week was Yom Kippur. Petch offered to come up, but I told him there was no need, I’d use the transliterated version.

“Ballsy,” he said.

“Why do you have to go? You don’t have to go. Stay over, go back in the morning.”

He looked up at the calm, perfectly cloudless sky. “Better get out,” he said darkly, “while the getting’s good.”

“Don’t you think you’re imposing a skosh too much awe upon His works? Is it necessary to dread all He created?”

“Sure,” he said, “everything.”

“Safe trip,” I told him.

“Wise guy,” he said and turned to the pilot. “Excuse me, you’re not afraid you’ll wear out the batteries?” He pointed to the plane’s radio, turned high, pushing its tinny music through the headset on the pilot’s seat. Philip also liked to use his radio for purposes for which it was never intended. I recalled how upset I’d been when we were airborne again and he’d tuned in to listen to a Fairbanks station, perhaps the very one that was playing now. Only now I understood what was happening. It was the same instinct that drove them to six-pack the house, that same sporty waste and recklessness lifted to a kind of code. You started with the realization that you only lived once. Then you modified your behavior to spite the bad news. (I had a sudden hunch about the stake all of us were supposed to be putting together up there, that it was a myth, more chimerical and dreamy than any of Petch’s disasters.) Maybe that was what was so unamiable and cynical about the idea of the potlatch. Maybe it was what Petch objected to in me. Life was so difficult, being good, respecting God. Dread and awe, I was thinking, were hard in such an awesome, dreadful world, and I began to pray that Rabbi Petch and his pilot be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, then that Shelley and my daughter Constance were, Spike and Ambest and Krezlow and Anderson and Peachblow and Schindblist and Jeers, and all the names of all the people I could remember meeting up there — the Jacobsons, Dave Piepenbrink, Arn Sternberg, McBride, Deb Grunwald, Howard Ziegler and Milt Abish and Karen Ackerman and Philip, the bush pilot who’d almost gotten both of us killed. Which is just exactly when the song ended and they broke for the news and the announcer came on to say that there’d been a plane crash on a small island in Cook Inlet. His two passengers had survived, but the pilot, Philip Kutchik, a Fairbanks resident and Tinneh Indian who flew for the Alyeska Corporation, had been killed instantly.

I went to Phil’s funeral. A busman’s holiday, you’re thinking, but that’s not it at all. I hadn’t been to the funeral of anyone close in years. Not since my mother’s, not since my father’s. Living in New Jersey, in that queer, Jewless, almost unpeopled town, there’d been no occasion. Shelley and I had only a few friends, and none of them, knock wood, had died. So I went to Philip’s funeral. Though we were hardly friends and I thought him a bit of a jerk, we’d certainly been through a lot together. We’d hacked out a nest together. We’d broken hardtack, shared the last of our jerky, displaced each other’s weight — I’d bite a fingernail, he’d spit out a window. I shouldn’t go to his funeral? My God, we were besieged by bears, found out by the wind-wafted tang of our mutual excrement. We weren’t close. That was only proximity in the plane, but I shouldn’t go to his funeral?

And a good thing, I thought at the laying out. Because except for one or two pilot chums (there, it turned out, as official Alyeskan delegates), and the crash’s two survivors (who stood by the casket — which, to my surprise, was open, Philip’s face having escaped injury, its only wound being in the suddenly paid attention of his expression — and told everyone who came near, myself, representatives of the funeral parlor, who they were and that, but for the grace of God, it could have been them there in that coffin instead of the poor dumb, jargon-spouting son of a bitch with his attitudes and minimums, civil evening twilights, eminences, DF steers, pan pans and A-OKs who lay there now), no one showed up.

I had rented an automobile and drove in the three-car cortege (the hearse, my rental car, a bright yellow Alyeskan truck) out to the cemetery. The two survivors had decided not to come, but the man with the flowers in his beard was outside the funeral parlor when I came out, and he rode with me in the rental car.

“They seem a little faded, Khokem,” I said. I think it was the first time I ever referred to his beard to his face.

“Yeah, well,” he said, stroking it lightly, “you know. October. The last leaf, same old story.”

“It’s good to see you.”

“Next time it should be a better occasion.”

“Well, of course,” I said, shamed and chastened as I always am whenever anyone pulls this line on me. “It’s awful about Philip. Just awful.”

“Terrible.”

“I felt I had to come,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Though we were hardly friends and, to be perfectly frank, sometimes I thought he was a bit of a jerk, we went through a lot together.”

“Certainly,” he said. “I understand.”

“That plane crash. All the time we spent living in that airplane. Remember that nest that we hacked out of pine trees?”

“I do.”

“We lived out of survival tins and broke hardtack together. We shared dried jerky.”

“I had some myself.”

“That’s right,” I said, “you did.”

“Sure.”

“We learned each other’s weights and measures. I bit my nails, he spit out the window. He tutored me in the intricate Alaskan economy. My God,” I said, “we were besieged by bears!”

“I remember that.”

“I shouldn’t come to his funeral? I shouldn’t come? He was like a brother to me.”

“To me too,” he said.

“I know,” I said, “I know, Tzadik,” and wiped my nose with my handkerchief. “ ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . Any man’s death diminishes me, I am involved in mankind.’ ”

“No, no,” said Flowerface, “you miss my meaning. He was my brother.”

“Phil was your brother?”

“We were identical twins. Here,” he said, “look,” and removing an old black-and-white photograph from his wallet, he pushed the snapshot toward me. In the photo a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth, who bore a substantial but, considering the face I’d seen in the open casket, fallen-away resemblance to the Phil he had become, stood next to someone who might have been his mirror image. Both boys were beardless and, near their left temples, where, back in the plane in March, their heads had been covered by parka hoods, each had a tiny birthmark like a corporal’s chevrons. I saw the tzadik’s where he tapped at his temple. “Hmn,” he said, “hah? Hmn?”

“He was your brother? Phil?”

The falling away had occurred on both their parts, as if Phil had come to resemble a distant, younger cousin who would always look youthful, while old Posypuss, tricked out in his now fading flowers, was an actor, well cast but unrelated, carefully prepared by Hollywood makeup artists, to look like a relative, an uncle, say, even a grandfather, of the kids in the photograph.

“We were Tinnehs,” he said. “It’s the way with Tinnehs.”

“Beg pardon, Khokem?”

“Tinnehs. Tinneh Indians? I told you. In the plane? How the Tinnehs are tribeless, clanless. How they — we — break away from each other. Generation after generation. Highest divorce rate in Alaska. Alaska? The world. How the children are placed in orphan asylums when the parents run off? That picture was taken in the orphanage. Don’t you remember? Why don’t you listen? You think I talk for my health? Identical twins, I told you how even identical twins drift apart.”

He had mentioned identical twins. Phrases came back to me. They would, he’d said, “dissipate affinity, annihilate connection.” They moved, “down some chain of relation from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.” And remembered his saying how once the Tinnehs outnumbered all the other tribes put together but were now “rare in the Alaskan population as Frenchmen.”

Now I recalled how interested I’d been, and the moment when the sun came up and he couldn’t finish his story because we had to take off.

We were back in Fairbanks, parked in front of the hotel where he was staying. I had to drop off my rental car at the airport before my flight, I told him.

“Well,” he said, “it was good seeing you.”

“Next time,” I said carefully, “on a better occasion.”

“Yeah,” he said, and put his hand out to open the door. For the first time I noticed the mourner’s band on the right sleeve of his coat.

“Listen,” I said, and touched him on the shoulder, “I’m sorry about Phil. I can’t tell you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But you know something?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sloughing off my condolence, “we like drifted apart.”

Then he opened the door and got out. I started to turn the key in the ignition, but the man with the flowers in his beard was rapping on the window for my attention. I leaned across to roll the window down on his side and he pushed his big head into the car.

Up close, straight on, the beard seemed lopsided, lifeless. I caught the pinched, stale scent of mold. “Ain’t no murracles,” old Posypuss said, “I dud wished dey would was, but dey ain’t.”

As Petch had predicted, McBride let me play out my contract. As a matter of fact, he wouldn’t let me resign and made me play it out. I guess he thought I was pretty well seasoned by the time of those Rosh Hashanah services and didn’t figure even Alyeska could afford another greenhorn rabbi until the fiscal year ran out on the one they already had.

He never mentioned the Torahs. McBride, like the Eskimos, was a gentleman too.

Which isn’t to say I could ever stop thinking of Flowerface out there in the dark. Out on that iceberg, in that proper, heroic blackness he rubbed against like braille, yogi-ing his bloodstream and rearranging his metabolics and contemplating not the ways of God or even Man, but figuring red tape, the long odds of Corporate Life, how the Feds would probably require affirmative action, Prots and Mackerel — snappers and even Jews demanding rabbis, Torahs, the works, and what all this could mean to him at Alaskan prices, till he saw what it felt like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few fast feet a day with the wind in his face.