“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.