“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?