THE
LAST JEW
STANDING
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It
was considered that schooling in letters was an essential
factor in reformative work in that it aided in preventing
the inmates from degenerating in mental power, during
confinement; and aside from this, was of great value
because it aided them to take a more elevated station
in life, upon their release.
—Hand
Book of the New York State Reformatory at Elmira. 1916.
Fred C. Allen
Pax
Berelman met with a regrettable incident involving a
hotel room in Elmira, New York, a piece of exhaust pipe,
and his trachea. Whether it was an accident or suicide,
or a simple misassessment of the laws of biology, is
a total crapshoot, owing to Pax’s rumored general
dizziness and his habits regarding hallucinatory drugs.
He was known to be a garbagehead, that is, someone who
will get high using anything he can get his hands on—grass,
meth, cleaning products— but while his chemical
habits may have contributed indirectly to his early
death, they had little to do with the exhaust pipe itself.
Investigators at the site considered but dismissed theories
that he may have been employing said pipe to create
a more direct route for intoxicants to travel to his
stomach or lungs. Moreover, his drug use proved unrelated
to the loss of his vehicle, a jet black Buick LeSabre
with racing trim, to the hands of a driver not known
to him, barrelling down Highway 15 in a southerly direction
toward the Pennsylvania border. The loss of the vehicle
in question occurred several days subsequent to Pax’s
demise, and was therefore unlikely to create the heartbreak
which might cause him to fall or thrust himself upon
the rusty 18-inch fragment of exhaust pipe, now lodged
longitudinally in his gullet.
What
makes this a subject of further inquiry is how Pax’s
unfortunate accident resulted in a chain of occurrences
leading to me, four days later and two thousand miles
away, pinned in the front seat of my cool blue Chevy
Caprice, which faced north on the six-lane Congress
Avenue bridge in Austin, Texas, at four AM as a big
black Lincoln rammed into its driver’s side door.
The blow thrust my Caprice sideways and tore its tires
as my vehicle skidded on its rims, up the curb and onto
the walkway, while Mora, who had been standing by the
passenger door, ran for cover. As I tried to break loose,
the Lincoln backed up in a screeching curve across the
six lanes, pulled forward and then backed up hard, again
pummelling my driver’s side. It crushed the door
inward as far as the steering wheel and rammed my Chevy
against the guardrail, barricading the passenger door
and me inside. I struggled to roll down the passenger
window and jump, when the Lincoln burned rubber and
rolled ass-first, hitting the Chevy a third time, now
decimating the driver’s side and pushing it up
into the air so the two-foot guardrail, instead of protecting
me from a fall, served as the fulcrum I’d be tipped
over when the Lincoln made the inevitable final strike
and knocked me over the rail, trapped between the battered
doors, toppling into the cold, dark water below.
One
could argue this event was only one part of the inevitable
cascade of events set off days earlier by Pax Berelman’s
untimely death, or even decades earlier with my family’s
first involvement in certain circles. But considering
the issues at hand, the story really began when it walked
in on my otherwise manageable life just two nights before.
December 21, 1995
The
first thump jarred me from the most peaceful sleep I’d
had in months. The second made me open my eyes, blink,
scan the unfamiliar room in the light from the clock
radio, and zero in on the bedroom door. I pinned the
third thump as the sound of Josh’s small hand
on the door. The red digits on the clock told me it
wasn’t 11:30 PM yet, on our first night in the
new house. We’d been asleep less than an hour.
Rachel
groaned, “Oh, God.”
“I’ll
get it.”
“Good
luck.”
I
slipped my shorts on and opened the door. Josh stood
on the carpet in his dinosaur pajamas, rubbing his nose
and eyes. “Mommy?” Standing just over three
and a half feet, Josh bore the same brown hair his mother
did (a shade or two lighter than mine), to go with his
mother’s low forehead and dark blue eyes, turned
up slightly at the outer corners. His nose hadn’t
yet developed in bulk but measured Mediterranean length,
just what my nose looked like before puberty and multiple
breaks gave it its “character.” Josh’s
prominent proboscis seemed to be a dominant trait, inherited
from his one Jewish grandparent.
I
closed the door behind me. “She’s asleep.
What’s up?”
“I
want Mommy.”
“You’ll
outgrow it.”
The
door opened on Rachel in a black silk robe which, like
Rachel, had seen better days. “It’s okay,”
she said without commitment, and reached down to hoist
him up with a groan. As he clamped his limbs around
her, she managed to pull a Bic lighter and a pack of
Marlboro Light 100s from her robe’s pocket and
light one, completing the maneuver one-handed before
she’d taken three full steps toward the living
room, all the while dodging the cardboard boxes positioned
around the floor.
“Ow!
God damn it!” she yelled. She untangled his hand
from the hair at the nape of her neck.
“I’m
sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“It’s
okay,” she said, eyes on me and trying to reverse
the sudden Jekyll and Hyde change, the type I’d
asked her to avoid in front of Josh. “It’s
okay. It’s Mommy’s fault.”
Josh
had turned four in August and in spite of the recent
development of a regular income, a full refrigerator
and a house to live in, he hadn’t loosed his grip
on his mother any. If anything he tightened it in the
face of a new threat, another man. That the man was
his father, so people said, was of no interest to Josh.
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