to believe he could simply waltz out of Naftali’s orbit scot-free. Nobody just walked away. For one thing, he knew too much about Naf the Sport’s organization to be allowed such an uncurbed liberty. Though assured as he was that one could never turn his back on the rackets, turn his back was precisely what Ruby did, as he began again to board the train. That was the cue for Naf’s senior cat’s-paws to haul out their heaters from the holstered concealment of their armpits. Almost simultaneously Yehezkel and Yigdal dredged their pockets to produce weapons of their own, waving Mausers that held the Browning semiautomatics in a stalemate of silent respect. In the ensuing standoff Ruby felt a twinge of fellowship, even gratitude toward his uncles for backing him up, a feeling that just as quickly dissipated. Then, allowing his cardigan to slip from his shoulders onto the concrete dock, Kid Karp was once again prey to eruptive reflexes. Seeing his nostrils flare and the vein throb at his temple, Shtrudel Louie and Turtletaub, who recognized the symptoms, lowered their pistols and took a step backward, then seeking the better part of valor turned about and reluctantly quit the field. Left to their own bewildered devices, Little Lhulki and the fledgling goons also fumbled for their sidearms, but Ruby was on them before they had a chance to draw. In his rage he began to feel a familiar rapture that was as short-lived as his gratitude had been; there was finally no pleasure in throttling his enemies, no pleasure to be had by any means, a realization that slowed his battling limbs not at all.
As they watched their nephew’s one-man juggernaut, the twins exchanged sidelong glances, Yigdal raising his left eyebrow in an approving gesture complemented by the raised right brow of his brother.
THE TRAIN WAS already in motion, the station bulls blowing their whistles as they charged down the platform toward the scuffle, and Ruby, disengaging himself from his flagging opponents, dove into the reefer car. He peeked out to see the hoodlums dispersing at a stumble in their several directions (the twins had already vanished), then slid closed the heavy boxcar door. If he’d been listening, as the train nosed under the Hudson and resurfaced in the industrial wasteland on the other side, Ruby might have heard what sounded like the belated echo of that slamming door—but was in fact the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Not that the noise would have meant much to Kid Karp, for whom the party was already over. Without checking to see if the door would open again from the inside, he had pulled on his dead papa’s sheep’s pelt and hunkered down with his back against the rotting casket. The dense air machines moaned as they circulated a polar draft tinged with the stink of ethyl chloride from the bunkers at either end of the car, while Ruby huddled in the pitch dark, shivering on the wood-sheathed floor. Already a numbness had begun to infect his extremities, a corollary to the numbness that gripped his brain. Never once during the journey was he tempted to get up and inspect the cargo the casket contained; neither did he relieve himself in the bucket his uncles had provided for that purpose behind a rack of cold pork shoulders and butts, so bound up were his insides with frost. His limbs became rigid, eyelids stuck at half-mast, ice riming the sparse stubble of his beard, and his lips were aniline blue. Transporting the rumor of a man trapped in a block of ice, he was himself becoming solid ice in the shape of a man.
The rhythm of the rails with its half-absorbed incantation—meshuguneh meshuguneh a shreklekeh zach—worked to seal Ruby’s trance, leaving him a passive witness to memories of the bones he’d broken, ladies degraded, gents humiliated on a whim in the backstreets and cellar clubs. He reviewed them like a succession of shades left over from another incarnation, one that had no bearing on the present rattling mortification of this life after life. He had no sense of the passage of time, of whether he was awake or dreaming; if he froze to death it would be an anticlimax, and insofar as he could think at all, Ruby thought he might remove his papa’s parka to help facilitate that end. But that would be letting himself off too easily, and besides he wasn’t sure he could lift his arms.