The Frozen Rabbi - By Steve Stern Page 0,166

seated in a plastic chair at the rickety table across from the murderer, who was holding in either hand a red shoe, Lou Ella struggled to maintain her self-control. They were the ugliest shoes she had ever seen, a travesty of ruby slippers, bits of sequin sewn unevenly onto their heels and toes like the scales of a radioactive fish, globs of glue seeping between the counters and rubber soles. Though she judged herself a pretty tough cookie, the overnight trip across the state in a crowded bus (along with the burden of Sue Lily, who was no lightweight), the shakedown of her purse and then her person, and the shock of the dismal gray prison itself had taken their toll on Lou. Then, presented with the bogus old buzzard in his jailhouse getup, the beanie and outsize denims more foolish than stripes, she was suddenly overcome by fatigue, and the tears began to flow.

The rabbi caused the shoes into which he’d stuck his hands to tapdance on the tabletop. “What are you crying?” he wondered throatily. “How comes it everybody that they see me they got to shpritz tears?” he seemed to ask of the fluorescent lights.

She blew her nose in the pinafore of the unwieldy baby sister she was bouncing on her knee. “You tell me,” she challenged, summoning a hostility she thought suitable to the occasion.

“For your dead lover you weep?” suggested the rabbi, sounding almost hopeful. Despite his ashen skin and runny eyes, the sulfury tangle of his beard, he looked none the worse for wear from his confinement; in fact, his moist eyes seemed almost to shine with a kind of crazed sympathy.

Lou Ella narrowed her eyes and stiffened, then snickered until the snot ran and she had to blow her nose again. “He wadn’t never my lover. He wadn’t but a crush.” The vehemence of her outburst shocked her, though even more surprising was that the old dude actually looked hurt by her pronouncement. He nudged the tacky shoes tentatively in her direction.

“I made you,” he offered, explaining that he’d begun to pursue a new hobby in prison.

A rogue impulse to apologize for having brought him nothing in return invaded her consciousness before she banished it, appalled. Then she inquired pointblank: “Why did you off him?” For there was no reason to postpone the question, having come all this way to ask it. But though she’d rehearsed it in her head innumerable times, it now sounded somehow misplaced.

But if not for this question, to which the rabbi (looking sheepish) had yet to respond, what was she doing in this godawful place? She seemed to be waiting for the old man to tell her, which wasn’t logical; it was tantamount to having made the journey in order to find out why she’d made the journey. Lou ran a hand through her cropped magenta hair. Meanwhile the pitched voices in the Visiting Room, sweltering despite the seagreen film obscuring the windows, were so distracting that she could barely think. The room itself, with its sentinel vending machines and signs warning against inappropriate contact, defied any type of intimacy. At the adjoining table an obese woman in a flowered muumuu the size of a haymow leaned across to slap her son the convict silly after he’d attempted to sing her a yodeled rendition of “Mama Tried.” At another table an inmate photographer snapped a Polaroid of a heavily medicated prisoner shackled to a restraint chair, next to which was parked a moribund old lady in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube up her nose. Infants swarming over the rails of their allotted play area had to be tossed back into their pen by patrolling officers in dress blues, while Sue Lily herself, ordinarily so passive, had begun to squirm and fidget in Lou Ella’s lap.

“Boykh,” she said in a nearly unprecedented ejaculation, becoming so unwieldy that Lou had to excuse herself and deposit the child in the turbulent playpen along with the others; and there she stood gripping the rail, a hair ribbon drooping over an unblinking eye, making ineffable noises that evoked a double-take from her big sister. When Lou Ella turned back to the rabbi, his simpering expression reinforced her conclusion that she’d made a grave mistake in coming here.

After all, Bernie Karp had been dead and buried these past two years and she was getting on with her life without him, wasn’t she? A year out of high school already and although she’d been

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