End of the Jews Read Online Free Page B

the kids afterward, pacing back and forth before the dinner table with the hospital release form rolled in his hand like a diploma.
From now on, I expect all you kids to be more careful.
    Harlem slides by outside the dirty windows, block after block of artful brownstones, snatches of angry noise and melody, dark liquid silhouettes. Albert taps his hands against the flat top of the drum case on his lap, reprising the rhythm of the set’s last tune.
    â€œSo can you dance?” he asks.
    â€œNo, but I can eat.” The cab pulls up to a four-story building on a leafy residential street, a block down from the bright commercial strip. The third-floor windows are a shadow theater of backlit bodies, and as he steps from the cab, Tristan can already hear a thump piano, the clamor of conversation.
    Between the two of them, he and Albert manage to haul the trap set up the bald-carpeted stairs. A man with shoulder muscles that must earn him his living greets them at the top of the third landing. The sleeves of his white crewneck are pushed to the elbows, and one of his leather suspender straps keeps slipping down his arm. He holds a floppy newsboy hat in one hand, a wax-paper cup swishing with some kind of liquor in the other. “Al Van!” he says, draining the cup and donning the hat. “Our prayers have been answered!” He relieves Albert of his burdens, leads the way inside.
    Tristan follows, lugging the snare and the leather cymbal bag, and finds himself in a small living room dense with people. An L-shaped sofa beneath the front windows is crammed tight with couples leaning forward to talk over the notes and voices. Two tired-looking women, one old and one young, bookend the couch, fanning themselves against the rising body heat. The old woman uses her hat, the young one her hand.
    Plates, drinks, and the ghosts of drinks litter the coffee table, and everything jumps when the portly, sweat-soaked man sitting at the piano by the opposite wall, a personal cemetery of crushed paper cups and empty plates around his own feet, digs in and starts swinging fast and loose and the dancing picks up. Young men in their shirtsleeves stand close to women, whether dancing or just talking, and everyone is shouting and drinking and half-hearing one another. Gumbo and bottled beer and cayenne pepper and fried chicken and whiskey and gin and cologne and sweat and almond cake and cigarette smoke funky up the hot air but the smell is good.
    A big woman is jitterbugging to the music as Tristan struggles through the room, toward the alcove where Albert is unpacking the drums. “Uh-oh,” and “Watch out,” people exclaim, stepping back as much as they can to make room as the heavy dame and the pianist lock eyes and he ratchets the tempo skyward. Tristan has never seen such a large woman move so well. There are plenty of them in his neighborhood, his mother being one, but they all walk arthritically and act as if they went to grade school with Methuselah, and he can’t picture any of them cutting loose.
    Tristan mutters a stream of
excuse me
s as he walks, but after the first few fellows hear him, an awareness ripples through the crowd and folks clear a path, smiling and nodding and lifting their drinks as he passes, saying, “Right this way” and “All right, now.”
    Tristan smiles back. Beneath the fear and excitement of being here—alone, alive, half-drunk, useful, unique—there lies, in the pit of his stomach, an unprovable suspicion that these people are like him, or like he wants to be. He feels a wrenching lust for a life like theirs, a life lived in the present moment, an American life. The Bronx shadows Tristan, staggering like a golem, a motley amalgam of old customs, new realities, the bargains and concessions forged between the two. The people here stand with both feet in the here and now—for horrible reasons, to be sure, but it is brave and wonderful. Or perhaps, Tristan