The Yiddish Policemen's Union

34

In the summer of 1897, members of the party of the Italian mountaineer Abruzzi, fresh from their conquest of Mount Saint Elias, inflamed barflies and telegraph operators in the town of Yakutat with a tale of having seen, from the slopes of the second-highest Alaskan peak, a city in the sky. Streets, houses, towers, trees, moving crowds of people, chimneys trailing smoke. A great civilization, in the midst of the clouds. A certain Thornton in the party passed around a photograph; the city captured on Thornton’s blurred plate was afterward identified as Bristol, England, some twenty-five hundred transpolar miles away. Ten years later, the explorer Peary blew a fortune in a bid to strike Crocker Land, a land of lofty peaks that he and his men had glimpsed dangling in the sky on a prior journey north. Fata morgana, the phenomenon was called. A mirror made of weather and light and the imagination of men raised on stories of heaven.

Meyer Landsman sees cows, red-spotted white milk cows milling like angels in a wide green afterlife of grass.

The three policemen drove all the way back down to Peril Strait so that Dick could wow them with this doubtful vision. Crammed for two hours into the cab of Dick’s pickup, they smoked and abused one another, bumping along Tribal Route 2. Back through deep miles of forest. Potholes the size of bathtubs. Rain tossed in vandalistic handfuls at the windshield. Back through the village of Jims, a row of steel roofs along an inlet, houses jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits. Dogs and boys and basketball hoops, an old flatbed embodied by weeds and spiky sprays of crowberry, a chimera of truck and leaf. Just past the portable Assembly of God church the paved tribal route gave way to sand and gravel. Five miles farther, it devolved to a mere slash cut through the ooze. Dick swore and fought the stick as his big GMC surfed the tides of mud and grit. The brake and gas were rigged to suit a man of his stature, and he handled them like Horowitz sailing through a storm of Liszt. Every time they hit a bump, some critical piece of Landsman was crushed by a tumbling slab of Shemets.

When they ran out of mud, they abandoned the truck and hiked down through a dense growth of hemlock. The footing was slippery, the trail a suggestion offered by scraps of yellow police tape stuck to the trees. Now the trail has led, after ten minutes’ squelching and splashing in a dense mist that verged at moments on outright rain, to an electrified fence. Concrete pylons driven deep, wires taut and even. A well-made fence, a stark fence. A brutal gesture for Jews to make on Indian land, and one that has no precedent or license, as far as Landsman knows.

On the other side of the electric fence, the fata morgana shimmers. Grass. Pastureland, rich and glossy. A hundred good-looking freckled cattle with delicate heads.

“Cows,” Landsman says, and the word sounds like a moo of doubtfulness.

“They look like dairy cows,” Berko says.

“They’re Ayrshires,” says Dick. “I snapped some pictures last time I came out here. A professor of agriculture down in Davis, California, ID’d them for me. ‘A Scottish breed.’ ” Dick works his voice up into his nose, mocking that Californian professor. “’Known for its hardiness and ability to thrive in northern latitudes.’ ”

“Cows,” Landsman says again. He can’t shake the eerie sense of dislocation, of mirage, of seeing something that is not there. Something that nonetheless he knows, recognizes, a half-remembered reality out of stories of heaven or his own past. From the days of the “Ickes colleges,” when the Alaskan Development Corporation dispensed tractors and seed and sacks of fertilizer to the fugitive boatloads, Jews of the District have dreamed and despaired of the Jewish farm. “Cows in Alaska.”

The Polar Bear generation suffered two great disappointments. The first and stupidest was due to the total absence, here in the fabled north, of icebergs, polar bears, walruses, penguins, tundra, snow in vast quantities, and, above all, Eskimos. Thousands of Sitka businesses still bear bitter and fanciful names such as Walrus Drug, or Eskimo Wig and Hairpiece, or Nanook’s Tavern.

The second disappointment was celebrated in popular songs of the period, like “A Cage of Green.” Two million Jews got off the boats and found no rolling prairies dotted with buffalo. No feathered Indians on horseback. Only a spine of flooded mountains and fifty thousand Tlingit village-dwellers already in possession of most of the flat and usable land. Nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style of Vilna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior — snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail.

Landsman feels that he’s looking at that dream, lustrous and verdant. A mirage of the old optimism, the hope for the future on which he was raised. That future itself, it seems to him — that was the fata morgana.

“There’s something funny about that one,” Berko says, staring through the binoculars that Dick brought along, and Landsman can hear the tug in his voice, a fish playing at the end of his line.

“Give me,” Landsman says, taking the binoculars and raising them to his face. He tries, but they’re all just cows to him.

“That one. By the two over there, facing the other way.” Berko guides the lenses with a brusque hand, settling them on a cow whose mottled hide is perhaps a richer red than its sisters’, a more dazzling white, its head sturdier, less ladylike. Like avid fingers, its lips tear at the grass.

“There’s something different,” Landsman allows. “But so what?”

“I’m not sure,” Berko says. It sounds slightly less than truthful. “Willie, do you know for sure these cows belong to our mystery Jews?”

“We saw the little buckaroo Jewboys with our own eyes,” Dick says. “The ones from the camp or school or whatever it is. Rounding them up. Driving them that way, toward the campus. They used some kind of bossy Scottish dog to help them. Me and my boys followed them a ways.”

“They didn’t see you?”

“It was getting dark. Anyway, what the fuck do you think, of course they didn’t see us, we’re Indians, God damn it. About half a mile in, there’s a state-of-the-art dairying barn. A couple of silos. It’s a medium-small operation, and it’s definitely all Jew.”

“So what is going on here?” Landsman says. “Is it a rehab center or a dairy farm? Or is it some kind of weird commando training facility pretending to be both?”

“Your commando likes his milk fresh from the cow,” Dick says.

They stand there looking at the cows. Landsman fights an urge to lean on the electric fence. There’s a fool of a devil in him that wants to feel the thrum of current. There’s a current in him that wants to feel the devil in the wire. Something bothers him, nags him, about this vision, this Crocker Land of cows. However real it may be, it’s also impossible. It should not be here; no yid should have been able to swing such a feat of real estate. Landsman has known or had dealings with many of the great and the wicked Jews of his generation, the rich men, the mad utopians, the so-called visionaries, the politicians who turn the law on their lathes. Landsman considers the warlords of the Russian neighborhoods with their stockpiles of weapons and diamonds and sturgeon roe. He runs through his mental docket of smuggler kings and gray-market moguls, gurus of minor cults. Men with influence, connections, unlimited funds. None of them could have pulled off something like this, not even Heskel Shpilman or Anatoly Moskowits the Wild Beast. No matter how powerful, every yid in the District is tethered by the leash of 1948. His kingdom is bound in its nutshell. His sky is a painted dome, his horizon an electrified fence. He has the flight and knows the freedom only of a balloon on a string.

Meanwhile, Berko is jerking on the knot of his neck tie in a way that Landsman has come to associate with the imminent emergence of a theory.

“What is it, Berko?” he says.

“She’s not a white cow with red spots,” Berko says with finality. “She’s a red cow with white spots.”

He sets his hat on the back of his head and purses his lips. He takes several backward steps away from the fence, and hikes up his trouser legs. Slowly at first, he lopes toward the fence. And then, to Landsman’s horror, shock, and mild elation, Berko leaps. His bulk leaves the ground. He sticks out one leg and hooks the other behind him. His trouser cuffs pull back to reveal green socks and pale shins. Then he comes down, with a gust of exhalation, on the other side of the fence. He staggers under his own impact, then plunges forward into the world of cows.

“What the fuck,” Landsman says.

“Technically, I have to arrest him now,” says Dick.

The cows react to the intrusion with complaint and protest but little in the way of emotion. Berko makes straight for the one that’s bothering him, marches right up to it. It shies away, lowing. He holds up his arms, palms outward. He speaks to it in Yiddish, American, Tlingit, Old and Modern Bovine. He circles it slowly, looking it up and down. Landsman sees Berko’s point: This cow is not like the others, in contour or coloration.

The cow submits to Berko’s inspection. He puts a hand on its crop, and it waits, hoofs spread, knock-kneed, head canted at a listening angle. Berko ducks down and peers at its underside. He runs his fingers alone its ribs, up its neck, to the poll of its head, then back along its flank to the tentlike rigging of its hips. There his hand stops, in the middle of a white patch of hide. Berko raises the fingers of his right hand to his mouth, moistens the tips, then rubs in a circular motion against the white patch of the cow’s rump. He takes his fingers away, contemplates them, smiles, frowns. Then he lumbers back across the field and stops at the fence, opposite Landsman.

He holds up his right hand as if in solemn parody of the salute of a cigar-store Indian, and Landsman sees that his fingers are streaked with flakes of white.

“Fake spots,” Berko says.

He backs up and comes at the fence again. Landsman and Dick get out of his way, and he’s up and airborne, and then the ground rings with the impact of him.

“Show-off,” Landsman says.

“Always was,” says Dick.

“So,” says Landsman, “what are you saying? The cow is wearing a disguise?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Somebody painted white spots on a red cow.”

“So it appears.”

“This fact has significance to you.”

“In a sense,” Berko says. “In a certain context. I believe that cow may be a red heifer.”

“Get out of here,” Landsman says. “A red heifer.”

“This is a Jew thing, I take it,” Dick says.

“When the Temple in Jerusalem is restored,” Berko says, “and it’s time to make the traditional sin offering, the Bible says you need a particular kind of cow. A red heifer, without blemish. Pure. I guess they’re pretty scarce, pure red heifers. In fact, I believe there have been only nine of them since the beginning of history. It would be pretty cool to find one. It would be like finding a five-leaf clover.”

“When the Temple is restored,” Landsman says, thinking of Buchbinder the dentist and his mad museum. “That’s after Messiah comes?”

“Some people,” Berko says slowly, beginning to understand what Landsman is beginning to understand, “say Messiah will tarry until the Temple is rebuilt. Until altar worship gets restored. Blood sacrifices, a priesthood, the whole song and dance.”

“So if you got hold of a red heifer, say. And you had all the tools ready, right? And the funny hats and stuff. And you, um, you built the Temple … you could basi cally force Messiah to come?”

“Not that I’m a religious man, God knows,” Dick puts in. “But I feel compelled to point out that the Messiah already came, and you bastards fucking killed the motherfucker.”

They hear a human voice in the distance, amplified through a loudspeaker, speaking that strange desert Hebrew. At the sound, Landsman’s heart turns over, and he takes a step toward the truck.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says. “I have spent some time with these men, and my strong impression is that they are not very nice.”

When they get safely back to the truck, Dick starts the engine but keeps it in neutral with the brake on. They sit there, filling up the cab with cigarette smoke. Landsman bums one of Dick’s black ones and is forced to concede that it’s a fine example of the roller’s craft.

“I’m just going to go ahead and say this now, Willie,” Landsman says after he’s smoked the Nat Sherman halfway down. “And I’d like you to try to deny it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“On the way out here, we were talking, and you alluded to a certain amount of, uh, odorousness coming out of this place.”

“I did.”

“A stink of money, you said.”

“There is money behind these buckaroos, no doubt about that.”

“But from the minute I first heard about this place, something’s been bothering me. Now I figure I’ve seen most of the operation. From the sign on the float plane dock to those cows. And it’s bothering me even more.”

“And what’s that?”

“That is, I’m sorry, I don’t care how much money they throw around. I buy that a member of your tribal council might take a bribe from a Jew every now and then. Business is business, a dollar’s a dollar, and so forth. Who knows, I have heard people argue that the flow of illegal funds back and forth over the Line is the closest that Jews and Indians ever come to peace, love, and understanding.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Obviously, these Jews, whatever it is they’re doing, they don’t want to share the news with other Jews. And the District is like a house with too many people and not enough bedrooms. Everybody knows everybody’s business. Nobody has a secret in Sitka, it’s just a big shtetl. You have a secret, it makes sense to try to hide it out here.”

“But.”

“But odor or not, business or not, secret or not, I’m sorry, there is no way in hell the Tlingit are ever going to let a bunch of Jews come in here, in the heart of the Indianer-Lands, and build all this. I don’t care how much Jewish coin gets thrown around.”

“You’re saying not even us Indians are that gutless and debased. To give our worst enemy that kind or toehold.”

“How about, let’s say, us Jews are the world’s most evil schemers, we run the world from our secret headquarters on the dark side of the moon. But even we have our limitations. Do you like that better?”

“I’m not going to argue the point.”

“The Indians would never allow it unless they were expecting some kind of big payoff. Really big. As big as the District, let’s say.”

“Let’s say,” Dick says, his voice sounding tight.

“I figured the American angle in all this was whatever channel somebody used to get Naomi’s crash file pulled. But no Jew could ever guarantee a payoff like that.”

“Penguin Sweater,” Berko says. “He fixes it so the Indians get the District under Native sovereignty once we’re gone. For that, the Indians help the Verbovers and friends set up their secret dairy farm out here.”

“But what does Penguin Sweater get out of it?”

Landsman says. “What’s in it for the U.S.?”

“You have now arrived at a place of great darkness, Brother Landsman,” Dick says, putting the truck into gear. “Which I fear you will have to enter without Wilfred Dick.”

“I hate to say this, cousin,” Landsman says to Berko, putting a hand on his shoulder. “But I think we have to go down to the Massacre Spot.”

“God fucking damn it,” says Berko in American.