FINISHED

AS HE SEARCHED FOR THE JEWELS, AS HE MAINTAINED both focus and hope, Abraham heard Eva leave. He heard her fleeing footsteps and the baby’s cries (Eva had tried and failed to shush the child) and he imagined that she would run in search of help. He had the vague understanding that his wife was running from him, though he still couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t wanted her to see him like this and it gave him some relief to feel so much shame. Because he was ashamed, but he’d also never been so afraid. It was this fear that had made him suddenly furious until he was fiddling with the matches in his pockets and thinking lucidly of burning the house to the ground before letting Doña Cuca have it.

Evidently the house—or so Doña Cuca had explained last night, while Antonio held the famous knife to Abraham’s throat—was not going to cover what he owed. The jewels were his last chance. When he’d left town he had taken the box, but once he’d opened it (in the middle of the night, on top of a mesa) it became abundantly clear that he had underestimated his wife. She had anticipated his very worst behavior and for this she’d been rewarded.

He had planned on slipping inside the house quietly this morning; he had planned on finding the jewels and leaving. What he hadn’t counted on was that the doors would be bolted, or, even more pointedly, that anyone else would be there. It hadn’t occurred to him that there was a baby—his?—that demanded attention or that he’d feel so sick at the sight of it and so goddamn weak he’d thought he would cry like a baby himself. Or that—for Christssakes—Theo’s wife and maid would be there, too.

Here was one of his many problems: He never pictured all the elements.

When he’d met his wife, his initial impression was that she was simple, but he knew now just how deeply he was wrong about people. Eva, as it turned out, understood him very well. She had hid those jewels (when had he stopped checking on them?) and they could be anywhere: in Beatrice Spiegelman’s own jewelry box, or even buried deep down in the red-brown earth of Bishop Lagrande’s famous garden.

There had been an outpost in the Organ Mountains where no one knew his name. There were tents and girls, liquor and silver, and he’d stayed until a Polish merchant came through, until that Pole saw his face and called out Shein! and he’d known it was time to go. He’d imagined he still had one last chance to get out of his debts, but as he left his mare tied to a fencepost now and looked toward the house for what he knew was the last time, as he inched his way toward the plaza, sipping the last dregs of whiskey from a skin, as his pants chafed where his muscle and girth had once been, he couldn’t put together just what that last chance might be.

He walked the periphery of the plaza. Every man looked familiar, had at least one gun and every gun had a bullet meant for him. This was a small town and he was marked; he’d be surprised if he lived long enough to find out the child’s name. He found himself wondering if he might not be strung up to hang from the tallest tree along the alameda, where he had stood in years past, a free and arrogant man among free and arrogant men—cheering the vagrant’s, the criminal’s, the son-of-a-bitch’s death along with everyone else. He looked up at the branches, at their sinister curves, and prayed for a bullet instead. When he’d gone into the mountains, he’d pictured working hard, mining silver, and finding a path toward gold, striking out to find real fortune. But there was nothing in these places but a path to the grave.

He had thought of Eva but never for long. He was presumptuous enough to assume that he had ruined her life. Although sometimes he allowed himself the small luxury of thinking that it was she who was bad luck. That she’d married him only to flee some kind of curse and it was this curse that had pursued her clear across the sea, ultimately settling on him.

Women selling corn and berries set their wares on the reddish ground. Abraham glimpsed how they briefly recoiled at the sight of him and he was faced with the fact that he looked exactly that bad; even poor, dark women desperate to sell now shrank from him instinctively. It didn’t stop them, however, from calling out to him with their highest prices. Their voices reminded him that this was America and so, early in the day, the possibilities here were wide-open; poor women could highball a desperate foul-smelling man. A brother—any brother—could ask for help.

         

THE STORE WAS RUNNING SMOOTHLY. LEVI EHRENBERG WAS BARKING orders out front to a team of workers, and Abraham ignored him, progressing quickly inside. A few new items—Oriental rug, carved rosewood bed—immediately caught his eye, and it irritated him that he should notice, that he should be capable of coveting anything other than life itself. As he worked his way toward the storeroom, the workers busied themselves to a suspicious degree; not one of them so much as nodded a greeting or even looked up when he knocked over a stack of crates. When no one stepped forward to offer help, he rearranged the crates, scrambling like the most doomed of stock boys.

“What happened?” called Meyer to his workers, from behind the storeroom door. Abraham was surprised that he hadn’t come running in a frenzy, but when Abraham made his way into the back office and saw his brother, he immediately understood why.

Meyer’s head was bandaged and both of his eyes were bruised. His nose was so swollen that he was nearly difficult to recognize; there were cuts healing on his cheek and his brow, and his arm was in a muslin sling. “Good Lord,” whispered Abraham, “I’ll kill whoever did this.”

“Please,” he said, “save your heroics for somebody else.” He turned stiffly toward a stack of papers and began counting under his breath.

“When did this happen?” Abe, ready to strategize, ready to help, pulled over a chair beside him. “Because—”

“Do not think of sitting down, Abraham.”

“Oh,” he said, taken off guard. “Of course.” He stood silently in the shadows of the room for what seemed like minutes as he felt a mounting need to take a piss, but he couldn’t excuse himself, not just then, not when Meyer continued to count as if he were counting out the hours left on his brother’s life, and as if such counting were simply another chore, another task to perform before locking these doors and going home to his family at sundown. “Who did this?” Abraham couldn’t help but repeat.

Hunched over his desk, without turning to face his brother, Meyer finally spoke: “To ask me this question—” Meyer cut himself off, before lowering his voice. “Are you really this stupid, Abraham? Because I didn’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think stupidity drives you. At this point I can only wish this were the case.”

“I only want—”

“Doña Cuca,” he said throatily. “Do you remember how I told you not to go there, not to see her, that very first night you were in town?”

“Meyer, I—”

“You fucking idiot!” he exploded, with unprecedented venom, with spit forming in the corners of his swollen mouth; he winced at what had to be chronic pain. “Who else do you think would do this? They seemed to think I could give them your share of the business. But you have no share of the business. Do you understand?”

Abraham nodded, but he couldn’t let it go. “If you only gave me—”

“Gave you what?” he spat. “Time? Money? Faith? I gave you everything.”

“I wasn’t charity,” he couldn’t help saying.

“Not always, no.”

“I built this business with you.”

“Abraham”—his brother looked at him until Abe was forced to see the extent of his injuries, the fact that there was blood in the whites of one eye, that he might never recover his health—“that is simply not true.” He started coughing then, wet storms of coughing, so violent a sound that Abe found it difficult to remain in the room. But he did stay; of course he stayed, until nothing was left of the cacophony besides a terrible wheezing. A clock ticked itself into the next terrible hour. A skinny cat slinked around the room, pacing back and forth. “I paid Cuca for you.”

“You did what?”

“I paid about half of your debts.”

And all he could do, all Abraham Shein could do, was shake his head, as if this action in itself might stop it all, stop everything he’d done since he’d brought Eva Shein to America, stop what he knew would be his own tears falling onto his dirty, unbloodied face while Meyer continued speaking.

“And you are dead to me now. Do you understand? I do not ever want to see you again.”

“I—” Abraham started, but Meyer stopped him with a flick of his hand. After the room grew warmer, after more voices could be heard in the front of the store as a counterpoint to their silence, Abe began to walk away.

“Abraham,” Meyer said softly, and Abe nearly kept walking; it was preferable to having to face him again. But he stopped and turned and Meyer threw him a one-hundred-dollar note.

He kneeled on the floor to pick it up, and, as if his back had seized and he was forced to stay in that position, he stayed there a moment. “Why are you at work in this condition?” he found himself asking, almost in passing, as if now that it was all over, they might just talk as friends.

“I cannot stand to have my family see me. My children are afraid of me. My wife, she does nothing but cry.” He lit, with much difficulty, a thin cigar. “I cannot bear to see that woman cry.”

Abe stood up and brushed off his filthy trousers. “It will heal,” he said. “It will.” Because it would, it would, it had to.

Meyer blew smoke away from both of them; even now, even as he looked like death, his brother was still careful. “Of course it will.”

“I am—please Meyer—I am wretched—”

“Goodbye,” Meyer said softly. And then, louder: “Sell your house.”

Abraham Shein imagined that he was already outside, beyond these thick, dark walls. He could picture the sun shining over low-lying clouds, over piñon trees, the plaza, and the still-unchanged cathedral, and he understood that he was more familiar with this sight than with the stony street where he was born, where his earliest memories were colored by the piano—such useless, lofty music—waltzing and ponderous and now stuck in his head, as if his mother’s preludes and nocturnes were haunting him back through the years, back and back and long before his brother said, Sell your house, and he answered: “I already did.”