He turned to look at her, his gaze deep with affection. Its obvious and deeply felt sincerity made her uncomfortable. She was, she admitted, very confused about sentiment, about feelings. She had trusted feelings and they had betrayed her. She wondered if gratitude was a feeling that could be trusted. It would be a long time, she decided, before she could ever again trust affection. And never again love. Never that. She wanted to tell him this, but held back, even when he took her hand from his face and kissed her palm. She let him, then gently, almost surreptitiously, removed her hand from his.
“We’ll stay here for a while,” he said, leaning his head back on the car seat. She did the same, looking up at the rotting rafters of the old barn, wondering if there were bats up there hanging upside down. Again the movie image, she thought wryly. She had never seen a live bat.
“Do you know where we are?” she asked.
“Vaguely,” he said. “I was really following the arc of the sun. Swan Lake is west of here.” Suddenly he patted his pocket as if he remembered something.
“What is it?”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and brought out the twenty dollar bill that Anastasia had given him.
“This is it, Mutzie. All we have between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
He shook his head and shrugged.
“I’ll never forgive myself,” Mutzie said. “I’ve ruined everything for you, for myself.”
“Sometimes you can’t predict, Mutzie. Like Noah said when it started to rain, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have washed the ark this morning.’”
“This is really serious, Mickey,” Mutzie said.
“Tell me.”
She searched her mind for other alternatives. There was only one. “Maybe if I went back.” He looked at her and frowned. Their eyes met, but he did not respond. “I’m not worth it, Mickey. You mustn’t throw your life away for me.”
“I love it when people look at the bright side,” Mickey said.
“No more lying to myself, Mickey.”
“Mutzie,” he admonished. “The only way out for us is to get them before they get us. Sure, they’re bastards, vicious killers. They wanted to turn you into a prostitute. And they nearly killed my father. And if they get their hands on us, don’t think about it.”
“Get them? We haven’t got a chance,” she said. “They’re too strong, too powerful. It’s a crazy idea, Mickey. Who will believe us? We’re nobodies. They’re powerful. They control things. They kill people who stand in their way.”
“We’ll see,” Mickey mused.
She studied his face.
“Now it’s you starring in a movie. Who are you? Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper?” she asked.
He smiled and his eyes flickered.
“Buck Jones,” he said. “He wears a big white hat.”
“I don’t like cowboy pictures,” she said, realizing that he was all but foreclosing on her objections.
“I do. The good guy always gets the girl.” He giggled nervously as if the words had been said without permission.
She felt herself flush.
“Not if he’s dead,” she murmured, thinking … the girl as well.
“In the movies, the hero doesn’t die,” Mickey said after giving the matter some thought.
“It’s not a movie, Mickey,” Mutzie said. She would have to continue to remind herself about that.
“That’s the point,” Mickey said. He seemed to become dead serious, more serious than she had ever seen him. They remained silent for a long time, each lost in their own thoughts.
“They’ll find us, Mickey,” she sighed.
“Not if we use our tuchas.” He tapped his head.
“But if we see them do that to Gagie, and we tell what we saw, there would be no going back. They’ll hunt us forever.”
“Not if the law stops them.”
“What law? They own the law.”
She searched his eyes for some sign of wavering, found none, then sighed.
“It’ll never happen. Who are we? Pishers,” she said. It was harsh, she knew, but suddenly it became important to say it. He smiled.
“To me, you’re not a pisher,” Mickey said.
“Then you’re blind. I’m soiled goods now,” she said, remembering her mother’s sermonizing about keeping herself pure.
“So call me Procter & Gamble,” Mickey said.
She lay her head back on the seat. “I think you’ve lost your mind,” she whispered.
“Actually, I’m a split personality. My psychiatrist sends me two bills.”
“I wish I could laugh, Mickey. But I want to cry.”
“Don’t,” Mickey said. “You need clear eyes to see what we’ve got to see.”
Mutzie slept in the back seat and he slept in the front. They awoke at first light, hungry and uncomfortable. Her sleep had been dreamless, for which she was thankful. Then reality crowded in on her. She felt suddenly drained.
“You okay?” Mickey asked.
“Tell you later,” she whispered, dreading the day. She got into the front seat and looked at herself in the rearview mirror.
“Doesn’t do you justice,” Mickey quipped.
“I don’t need justice. I need mercy.”
She knew what he was doing. Maybe he had a point. When in doubt, try laughter. He had taught her punchlines. She turned to him and smiled.
“Hey, Mickey, you have your shoes on the wrong feet.”
“Hey, these are the only feet I have.”
“What did the mother turkey says to her playboy son?”
“If your father saw you now he would turn over in his gravy.”
“Feel better?” Mickey asked, starting up the motor.
She searched for a comeback line, but couldn’t find any. “Getting there,” she lied, dreading what they had before them.
They got back on the main road and searched for a store. After a few miles, they saw a general store with a single gas pump.
“Better gas up and get some food for later,” Mickey said, parking the car next to the pump. And old man came out to pump the gas.
“Come on,” he said to Mutzie and they got out of the car and went into the general store. A gray-haired woman wearing a flowered dress, scuffed high shoes and dirty anklets, squinted at them from behind the counter.
The woman got them milk, white bread and cut them a pound of American cheese and some baloney.
“Don’t forget mustard,” Mutzie said.
The woman behind the counter turned to face her. “She’s a girl,” the woman said.
“A girl?” Mickey said.
The woman studied them both impassively, not breaking a smile.
“Lots a funny stuff going round here these days,” the woman growled. She turned her back on them, obviously removing a purse from a hiding place in her brassiere. Opening the purse she counted out one five and four singles and change. The woman looked after them as they left.
“Can you direct me to Bernstein’s Orchard?” Mickey asked the man who had filled his tank.
“Bout ten miles up.” He pointed with his chin. “Sign says where to turn.”
The man was just putting up the nozzle. Mickey gave him a dollar for the ten gallons the man had put in the tank.
“Used to be only white people here,” the man grunted.
“I know,” Mickey said. “It really pissed off the Indians.”
“I was meaning them Jews,” the man grunted.
“Better keep that fly buttoned,” Mickey said, looking at the man’s crotch. “They’re comin around to kosher your dick.”
The man’s jaw dropped. Mickey gunned the motor and left the man in a puff of exhaust.
“That was awful,” Mutzie snickered.
“Pissed me off. He should have said those Jews instead of them Jews.”
They found a spot in a stand of evergreens, made sandwiches and drank the milk.
“We were a good team,” Mickey said suddenly.
Mutzie nodded. “I loved making people laugh.”
“Nothing more satisifying,” Mickey said. “For me, it has always been a kind of calling. Ever since I was a little kid.”
“A born tumler.”
“I think so. When you make people laugh, it’s like you’re giving them a gift.” He paused. “Considering all the bad things, the things that make people cry. Laughter takes away the pain. At least for a little while.” She felt him studying her. “We could be a team, Mutz. Like George and Gracie.”
“Coulda shoulda,” Mutzie said, thinking how awful their future looked at that moment. “From here, the life I lived in Brownsville seemed pretty good.”
The entrance to Bernstein’s Orchard had a faded sign stuck in the ground next to a narrow dirt road. They followed the rutted road past rows of apple trees heavy with half-ripe fruit. The afternoon sun had begun to elongate tree shadows on the ground.
About a half mile down the road, the apple trees ended, but the road continued in the direction of the lake, rising sharply into a high rocky plateau jutting out over the water. The road finally ended about fifty feet from the edge of the cliff. They stopped the
car and got out, walking to the edge. Directly below them the lake was dark and seemed deep. Mickey picked up a heavy stone and dropped it, watching it disappear with a gurgling plunk beneath the inky surface.
“Bastards know their business,” Mickey said, looking around him.
“How awful,” Mutzie said, shivering, her lips chattering. She stepped back from the edge and started back to the car.
“Take a picture of it in your mind,” he said. “And try to take in all the details.”
She wondered suddenly if he was cold-blooded like all the rest of them. Did all men have this cruel streak in them?
Mickey drove the car back down the road, hiding it behind some trees at the edge of the orchard. It was growing dark swiftly now and the stars were beginning to sparkle out of the clear, dark, moonless night. With the sun down, a chill had begun and he put his arm around her shoulders as they sat in the car.
“I’m scared, too,” he whispered.
“What will happen to us?” she asked.
He sighed. “Depends if we’re bees or donkeys,” Mickey said.
“Meaning what?” Mutzie said, nestling deeper into the crook of his arm.
“One gets the honey, the other gets the wacks.”
She smiled and continued to watch the stars proliferate. He was right about humor. It soothed and chased pain, at least for a moment. With his free hand he fished in the back for the Milky Ways and gave her one while he took the other. They ate and it tasted good. Eating Milky Ways under the stars. She found it impossible to believe that something as terrible as murder was soon to happen.
“A long way from Brownsville,” she said, thinking of her mother and father and their perpetual war. For her mother, life was stripped of all illusion, while her father found hope in his beloved socialism. She was certain that both of them would be ashamed of her now, as ashamed as she was of herself. Maybe this act of retribution that Mickey had concocted would redeem her, at least to herself. She wasn’t sure. Condoning murder for a higher good was a troubling idea. Like a noble war. Her thoughts surprised her. She seemed changed, especially to herself, as if recent events had given her an entirely different persona and all the earlier illusions had vanished.
She must have dozed, then suddenly she was conscious of being shaken awake.
“Now,” Mickey whispered. The moved out of the car. The only sounds were the usual country symphony of crickets. The air seemed to have grown less chilly, felt soft and smelled faintly of apples.
Hand in hand, they moved through the orchard until they reached the road that bisected it and followed it upward to the flat clearing at the top of the promontory. She let Mickey lead her to a thick stand of young evergreens, through which they could get a good view of area at the edge of the cliff.
Mickey made a soft bed of fallen pine needles and then they lay supine on their stomachs, watching the area like soldiers on lookout.
The sound reached them first as a distant irregular buzz, like a saw cutting through an unruly piece of pine, hitting an occasional knot, then smooth sailing until it hit a knot again. She tensed and was instantly alert, although assailed by the illusion that her heartbeat spread its sound over the orchard like a drummer on parade.
Beside her, Mickey lay on his forearms, like a predator waiting for its oncoming prey. She assumed his position, lifting her head and peering in the direction of the sound. In the distance, she could see the glow of the car’s headlights as it bounced along the washboard ribbon of road.
Only then did she realize that she hadn’t really expected it to happen, that it was simply one more expectation to be exploded by reality, Mickey’s romantic fantasy, somehow intertwined by visions of heroism and adventure.
But now it came, shattering the improbable fiction, making what had gone before at Gorlick’s the real illusion. Looking back on what had happened to her seemed completely without any relationship to real life, like a bizarre nightmare.
The car rounded a bend, briefly bathing them in light. They put their heads down until it washed over them as if they were prisoners on the run, to avoid being frozen in the searching beams. But the light quickly passed and their heads were up again as the car pulled up on the flat clearing a few yards from the precipice. She did not recognize the car, which suggested that it was stolen. Like their own.
The lights clicked off and the men got out of the car. The person in the driver’s seat she recognized as Irish.
“Wait here, schmuck,” she heard Pep say.
“Ya say it’s buried aroun heah?” It was Gagie’s voice, high pitched, anxious and exaggerated.
“Yeah, aroun heah.”
It was Pep’s voice now and she could see him clearly a few yards from where she lay, dressed improbably in one of his pin-stripe suits and wearing his pearl gray hat. Then she saw Abie Reles step out on the running board carrying a shovel.
“Ya say Lepke tole ya this?” Gagie said.
“He drawed me a map, like I tole ya,” Pep said. From experience, she knew by the pitch of his voice that he was irritated.
“Crazy place to put a bag a stones,” Gagie said.
“Ten grand wortha stones,” Pep said. As he said it, Gagie was watching Reles come toward them with the shovel until he faced both Pep and Gagie.
“Okay so we heah,” Gagie said.
“Ovah dere,” Reles said, and when Gagie turned, he swung the shovel and banged it with all his strength across one of his knees. The impact of metal against bone made a muffled ringing sound. Mutzie gasped and started to lurch backward. Mickey reached out and held her tight with one arm. Gagie dropped howling to the ground, clutching his knee.