Medical care was one thing our hard-earning little crew truly needed. Besides, all those tablets, capsules, and draughts went great with Firewater. At 7 a.m. each morning, we were up and dressed in our fine white byznys shirts and immaculate pinstriped suits, Bohler in a fresh cassock, prepared for the daily briefing, but every now and then and all at once those dog-hard years under the bolshevik knout would show. Especially the years in the loony bins. We didn’t get goose blotches anymore, now that we drank expensive booze, but the new improved kapitalist vodkas gave us turkey blotches instead. Doctor Hradil’s treatment for that was to bathe us in a laser beam. It helped a little.
With David combining and Micka steering, we managed to nab the strangely popular Gamma Knife. That’s just like today’s folks, Bohler railed, pitchin in all that cash for some space-age knife, then stick some innocent little boy under it, see what it does. Before we put the Gamma Knife back in the warehouse, we all exchanged bone marrow. Bohler groused a bit, but we persuaded him. Afterwards we felt better. But I have to admit I felt sad … a little … from time to time … seeing the fantastic, chivalrous, gallant way Doctor Hradil’s sons treated their sisters … it wrung my heart … watching the little ones play their good wholesome Katholik games … pirates … doctor … the Clan of the Woolly Mammoth … their nerve-racking Mohawk battle cries echoing through the buildings … Doctor Hradil’s sons kicking around the neighborhood … they were good boys … and whenever only the right kind of patients had been buying the Elixir a while, and Doctor Hradil was getting bored, the boys would go dig up some stiffs from the scrap heaps, or the Dump … troll the toxic Moldau … engaging in heavy battle with the scamp gangs along the way … but they showed em a Mohawk trick or two, especially the ones for man-to-man forest combat … and soon the city brats would break into tears and flee at the sight of them … and when Hradil’s boys eventually came up against the real goons, and I’ll say something about them later on … they weren’t afraid to take a little swig of Elixir in the right place at the right time … they took after their dad … and knew how to take risks.
My heavy sorrow and my insane longing for She-Dog were giving me bad circles, worse and worse every day … so I pestered the Miraculous Doctor Hradil, visiting him for checkups: Uh-huh, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, discombobulated joints, run-down cartilage, beat-up ribs, fucked-up skull, quick shoulders, slowish knees, cracked Adam’s apple, buzzing calves, demented heels, profession? Dancer. Aha, ah-hah, well, what else’ve we got: sunken eye sockets, hungry glances, coarse fast hair, clogged pores, old hump, dark malice, yearning, eagerness, mysticism, harsh booze, avarice, gloves, fill in the blank: Actor. Uh-huh, uh-huh, hold on now, we’re almost done, how many times’ve you been committed, hoochmeister? Six, boss, Doctor sir, but that was under the communards. Just the opposite, old rat, those count double, and moving right along, this is going to hurt: Aha and oh my: yellow Slavic blotches, Celtic somnambulist, Germanic dummkopf, Jewish ganef, transitional AIDS, you stud, incipient raw graphomania, insane heavy perpetual adolescence, and good old schizophrenia. Capable of living defect-free. Good luck. Next!
Doctor Hradil’s family pack was a welcome addition, a fabulous diversification. But one day, two of the M.D.’s sixteen-year-old daughters disappeared. They were last seen high on weed, carrying pails down to the cellar to fetch water from the well, laughing that distinctive pealing girlish laugh of theirs. Some of the Laotians saw their torches and heard the girls cranking the winch. Laughing the whole time. Then silence. Desperate, the Doctor’s wife rounded up the Laosters, and armed with boofalo spears, just in case, they combed the entire cellar, but the girls’ footprints were Čapekesque* … they went as far as the well and then vanished.
Even Jesu in all his greatness left no footprints on the lake. He walked across and put his imprint in the suddenly holy sand on the other side. Not the girls. One Laotian, the former shark hunter, dove into the well and scoured the cracked and muddy bottom, ten meters down, but the girls weren’t there. It was odd. It was dark. Bohler paced gloomily around the courtyard while the Doctor’s family pack prayed woefully and sadly and insistently by the fire. The tenants were tucked away in their rooms. Vasil sat under the picture of the Mother of God, where he felt safe, and sobbed.
As the evening shadows thickened, sinking into the courtyard, the Laotians went into their temple and performed a ceremony. The men lit incense, and the women separated the smoke from the fragrance and sent it out to search. Around midnight Bohler’s Laotian lady came to me and touched my forehead. She had ashes on her finger, and something else besides. I didn’t let on how flattered I was that she’d chosen me to pass the message along from tribe to tribe. The smoke had told her something, I could see it in her eyes. Where’re the girls? I asked. Wa’er too’ them. Where? Into we’. I went to tell my tribesmen.
Some of Doctor Hradil’s younger kids began to sob. Micka assured them that everything would turn out all right, plain as day. They bawled even louder. The M.D. showed up and began to pack without a word. There wasn’t much, the children gathered up their winter caps and a scalpel or two here and there, and the Doctor’s family pack abandoned the suddenly strange and inhospitable environment of our buildings for the autopsy lab. Finally a little elbow room, I tried to joke. He’s used to makin em, not losin em, Micka chimed in. David just sat glumly. Hey guys, I don’t mean to bleat, but’ve you noticed anything weird about our street lately? Not a whole lotta cats or dogs, bird or two’s about it, said Bohler. An I’d say we been losin tenants too, not that their petty gelt matters. They’re probly a little freaked out by your buddy Vasil an those screamin meemies of his, Micka retorted. No, it isn’t that … I putter around a lot, talkin with everyone … an there’s somethin strange in that well, or strange about it. I been thinkin. An my guess is it’s somethin that doesn’t work on goons like Vasil. An not on the Laosters either, they’ve seen it all before, in that yellow bolshevism of theirs. Hold on now, David said, are you tryin to tell us there’s somethin here that works on tenants’ little kids an cats an dogs an the old M.D.’s pure virgin daughters … but not on us? I finished for him, and only then did I realize what it was. Aright, okay, said Micka, but we can’t deal with it right now. He was right, but we were too caught up in the whirling merry-go-round of byznys to get around to it later on. As a result, we nearly lost all of our rackets, and all of our worries too.
4
GOLDIE AND HIS PROPOSITIONS. IN CAME SHARKY. THE CONTRACT. BOHLER SHOWS ME THE TOYS. I DO THE CARS. HE BRINGS HER IN, FINGERS THE STRING.
And one smiley day when the sun shone down on the cool city neon as sweet and heavy as grapes from the vineyard of the Lord, Micka brought in Shark Stein. He’d been hinting for some time now that we needed to expand … hey Potok, all of a sudden there’s like thirty thousand Americans here in our hometown, go an find out if they’re all just a buncha half an quarter henry millers, or if any of em also know how to make the metal flow … and I brought in Golden Joe.