Benjamin wanders amid this incomprehensible humus until, there’s a noise: that weapon again, discharging its last, a strafe to empty, without warning this time — no longer a bird’s death, but a dog’s bark, the report of a howl; echo and echoed talking at the same time, to each other. He falls to the ground amid the stockpiles of worldly denial, this seasonal abnegation, or potluck — it’s a laughingly rumbling, regretful quake; the sky, slit, split, falls from the trees, lands on His head, needles to pierce Him laid splayed.
An approach sounds on the snow, loud and coldly damn it let them know what’s coming.
Benjamin raises His head, crawls on His back, His stomach, slowly makes forward.
A stump stands inside the fence.
A walking stump, a wanderous wondrous stump, astride the altar, decked with hat and gun.
Benjamin goes to put his hands up, way up, then realizes that if He does He’ll fall on His face again as He’s crawling.
I gave at the office! the thing talks, too, I toll you once I done toll you a thousand times — I gave at the office, goddamnit…the goy’s not quite a log hollowed out, but he’s wearing one, held up over his skinny with rawhide suspenders. His beard’s to his knees, bristled with thorns, streaked with berries suspended in the puke induced upon their careless ingestion. On his head’s a helmet, Kaiser Wilhelm style, an apple impaled on its spike. He nudges the muzzle of his gun to target Him — this here’s a Palesteinmade Mwhatever the hell, it’ll hole you right up…Benjamin half bows into a pond, dripping rims the fenceside altar on allfours still, rises.
You ain’t a dog, is you? the goy asks, lowers his gun, then sets it down against the altar’s fence, squints an eye, the other’s patched with the pad of a waterlily. I ain’t going to say it again, he says. Stand up. Stay. And so Benjamin heels, straightens out, cracks His back. I want you to take off your skins, slowly now, you’re already halfway. And so Benjamin begins to strip, easylike: disrobes His clothes, first shoes and socks, then plural pants, the goy stares, everything, he says, so He gets Himself nude out of the fruity underwear, and the pressed pinned shirts of His father, lays all in a wrinkling heap — throw it over…and the goy slips Him a slop pail on a pulley slid along a downed powerline. Not folding ever, He stuffs His clothes down into the pail, which the goy in the log reels in over the fence, then shimmies up a tree inside, logged torso and legs smoldering trunk, he descends with the clothes he heaps at the rear of the altar. He leans over, strikes a match from his mouth on himself and fires the pile, whistling through oozy gums he blows on it to burn through the soak — puny smoke, the flames gutter: this offering refused, Benjamin’s pants emerge only singed.
The goy lifts his lily, squints what’s his one good eye at Him and asks, what’re you doing here? To stick a twig in one ear, stick out the other. You lost? Got a name?
I’m fleeing.
He scratches at himself, raising splinters — they after you, too?
Benjamin thinking, who isn’t?
He peeks past the goy into the fence’s interior, nudging up on His tiptoes and around the altar between them: the growth seems to clear, comes sparser, unnaturally nude; resembling nothing but a risen scalp, a barren balding from haphazard uprooting, use, trod upon, paced gleamingly naked if not purely white, coldbleached leaves and needles giving way to a covering of only a small stubble of saltgrass up from under the snow — a skinned head, rimmed around to the west by an armband of brackish river, flowing toward the east and its trees, the dogs, the Parkway then the Atlantic, there the water refreshed of its frozen clarity, clouded and heavied with salt; this and its compound — apparently, a vast wall — hidden by the forbiddingness of this altar’s late treyf, pilings secreting all access.
