“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.