B.u.g. Big Ugly Guy (9781101593523) (10 page)

Back in the closet once again, he set to work on the golem. Its arms turned out to be a technical challenge. Everything to this point had been built up. Only the arms hung down. Sammy worried about gravity and so he brought his desk chair and a stool into the closet to let the arms rest on until they dried. That helped him while he worked on the elbows.

“Though why God thought elbows necessary . . .” he said aloud. After all, James Lee couldn't elbow him in the gut if he didn't have any.
Elbows, that is, not guts.
“Well, actually, I
don't
have any guts,” he told himself, “or I'd stick up for myself.” Though somehow he could—occasionally—stick up for someone else.

“Ergo, the golem!” He loved the word
ergo
, meaning something like behold! Or therefore! Or look at this!

Sammy made sure the wet clay was good and sticky as he worked, and afterward—with the help of the chair—there was no gravitationally induced stretching or dismemberments or things that were dropping off the golem, all in all a good thing.

In the middle of the day, when his father was in the studio working on a big order for an upscale catalog company, and his mother was out in the garden weeding the vegetables, he made a copy of the English part of the rabbi's book on their office's small copying machine. He was ready in case his parents asked him what it was he was doing. A school assignment, of course. But no one saw him and so no one asked.

The
colossus
kept growing. Monday it was time for Sammy to make the head.

But first, it was time to drive to Carston for another Hebrew lesson, which might be a bit scary, if the rabbi asked him anything about the missing book. But maybe, Sammy thought, he could get more pointers about the golem as long as he was careful. Learn some important Hebrew words in case the golem only spoke Hebrew.
Whale, dog, slug, alefbet
were not going to cut it.

And
if pushed,
he could always return the book now that he had the important parts copied.

It was a quiet ride to the temple without Skink in the car. Sammy's dad drummed his fingers on the wheel most of the way.

Suddenly Sammy began to worry about the golem book. Was that really why Rabbi Chaim had called? Or might the rabbi—maybe—applaud Sammy's inventiveness. He had the book in his backpack just in case.

Sammy looked out the window and fretted, watching cornfields zipping by, seeing the occasional farmstead breaking the green blur with a flash of white house and outbuildings.

Sammy thought about the clay colossus stuffed in the back of his closet, wondering if he could really turn it into a walking protector, a bully against bullying. It had been an interesting project, sure. But real? He shook his head.
This is the US of A, not Neverland, idiot!

“
Shalom aleichem,
Samson,” Rabbi Chaim said as Sammy and his dad came in.

“
Aleichem shalom,
Rabbi Chaim,” Sammy replied.

“Reb Chaim will do. Think of it as a kind of rabbinical nickname,” Chaim said with a wink.

Sammy's dad nodded absently.

“Mr. Greenburg,” Reb Chaim said, “why don't you leave Samson and me on our own today. We have a lot to talk about. And if you'll pardon the cliché, there's a coffee shop at the end of the block . . .” He waved vaguely in that direction. “. . . and it has some lovely bagels. I don't know whether they always carried them, or only started when the temple went up, but they're almost as good as a New York deli. Go get yourself one and a cup of coffee, if you partake. Come back in an hour.” He looked at his watch. “Five fifteen to be precise.”

His dad nodded again.
Like one of those bobblehead dolls,
Sammy thought. He wasn't used to his dad being so compliant, but figured he was just thinking about a design in clay. Then his dad left, giving Sammy a pat on the back before going out the door, leaving Sammy alone with the rabbi.

Once again, Sammy was struck by Chaim's ceaseless energy. The thin man paced as he spoke, his hands, arms—even his eyebrows danced with every word.

Still pacing, Reb Chaim motioned for Sammy to take a chair. Sammy almost missed it in the flurry of Chaim's other random motions. Then Chaim took a chair himself, tapping his foot till Sammy sat. Then he was suddenly still as stone, one finger placed by the side of his nose.

“Looks as if your father has a lot on his mind, Samson.” He raised one eyebrow at Sammy. “I imagine you do, as well?”

He knows!
Sammy tried to show nothing on his face, but he guessed it was turning bright red. Forcing himself to nod, he said, “Tough week at school.”

Chaim stared at Sammy for ten tics and then stood and began pacing again.

“Samson,” he said, “when young men come to me, it is not my job to teach them Hebrew, or their Torah portion, or perform any of the duties required at their bar mitzvah.”

Sammy frowned. “But—”

Reb Chaim shook his head, and went on. “I do all of those things, of course, but that is not my
real
job. They are just the means to an end. And they are not why your father, or any father, leaves his son in my care, or in the care of any rabbi, not for thousands of years.”

“Rabbi . . . er, Reb Chaim,” Sammy said, “I have no idea what you're talking about.” But he did.
He's talking about the book, and he's going to kick me out of Hebrew class. Then he'll call the police and I'll go to jail and my father will disown me and . . . and then they'll find the mess in my closet and I'll be committed and . . .

Reb Chaim laughed and sat back down. “Of course not, Samson. They teach us to be opaque in rabbi school.”

Despite his near panic, Sammy thought,
A new word!
and leaned forward. “What's opaque?”

“Opaque can mean something that is not transparent, but more often it means someone who is hard to understand or who speaks in riddles or stories that have more than one meaning. Because it is important that people think about the stories or riddles, and wrestle with their meanings.”

“Could you spell it?”

Reb Chaim laughed. “A word guy! I
knew
I liked you. It's O-P-A-Q-U-E.”

Sammy repeated the word and the spelling. It wasn't just that he was a word guy, though. If the rabbi was being opaque, Sammy knew he was being diverting. Keeping the rabbi off dangerous ground. And it seemed to be working.

And the more Reb Chaim talked, the more Sammy calmed down.
Maybe he
doesn't
know. Maybe I'm simply obsessing. Maybe I'm in the clear. And besides, I've just learned a new word.

“So, Samson,” Reb Chaim said, leaning forward and slapping the desk in front of him lightly. “Why are you here?”

“To learn Hebrew?” Sammy asked.

“Is that an answer or a question?”

“Maybe both?” He wondered if he, not the rabbi, was being opaque.

Reb Chaim shook his head. “I already told you that's
not
why you've come to me.”

Frowning, Sammy said, “Then I suppose it's not to learn my Torah portion either.”

Reb Chaim grinned. “What is your bar mitzvah for? What happens on that day?”

“It's the day I become a man.”

“Do you honestly believe you will become a man on that day?”

Samson hadn't thought about that before. “Um . . . yes?”

Reb Chaim said nothing for a moment, just raised an eyebrow at Sammy and tapped the side of his nose idly. “If that actually happened, Samson, you would be the first boy ever to do so.” He placed both his hands palms down on his desk and stared hard into Sammy's eyes. “There is no mystical moment, no instant in time that you can point to and say, ‘There! That is when I became a man.' We pick a time because we must. It helps us make a transition. But it's a transition, not an immediate change. And my job—my real job—is to help you start to make that transition from boy to man.”

Sammy was almost sure that if Reb Chaim had noticed that the book was gone he would have mentioned it by now. His breathing slowed and it felt like his face was a normal color now. “And how do you do that?”

Reb Chaim laughed and was back on his feet and moving again. “By doing what we Jews do best.” He grinned at Sammy. “Talking. So, what's on your mind, Samson? What's got your father so preoccupied? And what do you need to know to become a man in your family?”

He doesn't even
suspect
the book is gone.
Sammy sat silently for a moment more, now only thinking about becoming a man.
What do I need to know? I need to know how to fight James Lee. I need to know how to fire two hundred pounds of human-shaped clay that's stuck in my closet. And I need to know . . .

He looked up at Reb Chaim. “I need to know how to write the Hebrew word for God.”

12.

The Word for God

On the road home, both Sammy and his father were quiet. Soft rock was playing on the car radio, but neither of them leaned forward to turn the music off.

Sammy had no idea what his father was thinking about. Could be about some new pot he was making or about Skink, or about the bullying at school. Maybe it was only about the weather or the condition of the road they were on, still full of potholes from last year's tough winter.

But Sammy knew what was running through his own brain. The strange Hebrew letters that made up the word
Adonai
. God. Reb Chaim had shown them to him and made a first copy for him to trace without even asking why he wanted to know. Sammy had that first copy and all his own attempts on slips of paper in his pocket. He sat with his hand over his pocket to keep them safe. Those slips were all precious. Though he hadn't told Reb Chaim why he wanted to learn to write the name of God, he knew from the stolen book that one of the two ways to make the golem live—
animate
was the word the book's author used—was to place the Hebrew name of God on a slip of paper under the monster's tongue.

Animate
. It had nothing to do with cartoons. Sammy had looked it up when he'd read the book the first time. It meant “to bring to life.”
Funny word though,
he'd thought then.
Like animal
.
But without a mate.

The other way was to write the name of God on the golem's forehead.
A sort of early Jewish tattoo,
he thought with a smile. But his Hebrew was too wobbly yet for that.
And what if I make a slip? A slip of the letters. Not a slip of paper.
And then he realized that anyone at school would be able to see letters on the golem's forehead: a dead giveaway.
Or a live one
. He giggled out loud. The slip of paper under the tongue would have to do.

“Sammy—you okay?”

He patted his pocket. “Fine, Dad, fine.” He turned to look out the side window, his mind already back on the golem and the golem's tongue.

Of course, he had to make the head first.

And the tongue.

He stuck out his own tongue out, tried to look down and see it, but it didn't stick far enough out. So he pulled open the small mirror in the sun visor and stuck out his tongue again.

“Sammy, what
are
you doing? Feeling sick?”

What could he say—
Dad I wanted to see how a tongue is constructed
? That would lead to a conversation he definitely did
not
want to have.

“Maybe,” he said, and smiled to himself.
This opaque stuff is really useful.

“Then I'll get you home as soon as possible, and let your mother take your temperature.” His father's foot slammed down on the gas pedal and Sammy lay back, eyes closed, as if this time he really was sick. Or tired.

He promptly fell asleep.

Sammy was awake for barely enough time to get from the car to the house and then went to his room and slept some more. Visions of the strange glyphs that made up
Adonai
danced through his dreams, turning into monstrous beasts with James Lee's face, and then morphing into dancing mermaid tattoos that all looked like Julia Nathanson. When the dream changed again, he was Dr. Frankenstein leaning over the monster, shouting, “He's alive! Alive!” Only when the monster sat up, he looked like Sammy's twin.

Sammy woke in time for dinner with his sheets drenched in sweat and his mother standing over him, concern written all over her face.

She felt his forehead before popping the thermometer in his mouth. Sammy lay still and waited for the thin beep. He didn't have to hear the verdict; he could tell by the worry lines on his mother's forehead what it was.

“Oh,” he groaned, “now I really
am
sick.”

His mother nodded, frowned, and patted him lightly on the head. “I'll make you some chicken soup for supper.”

“Thanks, Mom.” He almost slipped up and called her
Mommy
.

Fevers always make me feel four years old.

Then sighing, he rolled over and buried his face in the pillow so he wouldn't have to see the room spin . . .

And woke up three hours later to a thermometer in his mouth and a cold bowl of soup on his nightstand.

“Ugh,” he said. Then, “Erg.”

“I agree,” his mother said, and checked the beeping thermometer. “Holding steady at one hundred and two.”

“Ew.”

“Guess you get some more time off from school.”

“Hooray.”

His mother smiled a little in the half-light of his table lamp. “Be careful what you wish for, Sammy.” She handed him two ibuprofen tablets and a glass of water.

Sammy shrugged. It made his neck hurt. In fact, his whole body ached from the fever. “I guess.”

“Get some more rest. Hopefully your fever will break overnight.”

“Yeah. Hopefully.”
It doesn't feel like it's going to be breaking anything but my spirit for a while,
he thought. But he drifted back to sleep thinking about the word
hopefully
and wondering what it looked like in Hebrew.

The alarm, which he'd forgotten to turn off, sounded promptly at one a.m., dragging Sammy out of a fever-induced dream where a headless clay god—that somehow still sported a long white beard—chased him through the school hallways. He tried to shake off the troubling image, but it just set his head pounding.

“The head!”

He had to make the head.

Eventually he'd get well and eventually have to go back to school. He needed the golem ready when that happened or he was dead meat. And Skink along with him.

Stumbling out of bed, his pajamas soaked from fever sweat, Sammy lurched to the closet and uncovered the golem. It loomed over him, five and a half feet of molded clay lacking only a head to make it whole and the name of God to make it live. In his fevered state, Sammy really believed it was going to work. But in his fevered state, he was nearly incapable of dragging a new block of clay from the closet to the bed. So he unwrapped the block on the floor of the closet, at the feet of the golem, and started to work right there. Spreading his tools around him, he began chopping and shaving, molding and smoothing, until he had an egg-shaped sphere.

“Hair?” he muttered. Then made a feverish decision: “Too much trouble.” So he kept the top of the egg smooth, and concentrated on making eyes. After a few false starts he had a convincing pair of peepers. They were quite large, but so was the head. And the body.

“Golem, why are your eyes so big?” Sammy said in a high-pitched voice. He answered himself in a low growl. “The better to see James Lee coming, my dear.”

Wow! I
am
delirious!
he thought. Then mentally scolded himself:
Less talk. More clay.

He added thick browridges to shade the big eyes and made the pupils more crescent than round, in the hopes that the similarity to cat's eyes would let the golem see well in the dark. “Darwin, do your work!” he whispered.

The nose insisted on being broad and flat, like a tribesman's, the ears slightly cauliflowered like Sammy had seen on the school's wrestling team coach.

He carved away some of the clay to make sharp cheekbones and a chin, first adding and then smoothing out a chin dimple made famous by a family of old actors. Then changing his mind, he put the chin dimple back in. He shaped the ears separately, and then stuck them on—he went with detached lobes—before finally coming around to the mouth.

Stumbling into the bathroom, he checked out his tongue again. Noticed the strange flap where it attached to the bottom of his mouth. Noticed that the tongue looked smooth at a distance, but up close it was a random, pitted landscape as pocked as the moon and bumpy as alligator skin. He studied it again and again before finally returning to his room and getting back to work again, figuring that if under the tongue was where the name of God went, then he'd better get the details right.

His fever was still raging as he starting digging into the head to make the open mouth. His eyes watered with hot fever tears that made the air seem to shimmer, which in turn made the golem's head seem to move. Its eyes appeared to follow his hands' movements, and he swore the golem's body was leaning farther over his left shoulder to get a better look at what he was doing.

How can it see over my shoulder when I have its head at my feet?
In his fevered state, that seemed a reasonable question.
How can it move before I've had the chance to animate it?
Another good question. All of it he put down to his fever.

Sammy ignored the heat in his cheeks and went on hollowing out the mouth, forming a uvula at the back of what was now definitely a throat. He made teeth from scraps of clay—thirty-two in all. Luckily they'd studied the human body last year at his other school and the number of teeth had been on the final exam.

“The better to eat you with, my dear!” He chuckled softly.

After that was done, Sammy went over and over the tongue, taking a lot of breaks to stumble back to the bathroom mirror and stare at himself with his own tongue stuck way out, until he felt he had a reasonable copy of it in clay only proportionally larger. As he picked the finished tongue up to set it in the golem's gaping mouth, he shivered. And it wasn't just from the fever.

“Wow, a tongue sure is a huge, ugly thing!” He remembered his uncle Gerry who liked to eat tongue sandwiches.
Cow tongues must be humongous!
The thought made his stomach turn over, and for a moment he was afraid he was going to throw up.

“Golem won't like being decorated with puke!” he scolded himself.

Sitting for a moment more, he got control of his stomach, his thoughts, his sweaty hands. Then he smoothed the tongue into place inside the now toothy mouth, making sure there was room for the slip of paper that had to go there.

For a few anxious moments, he struggled to set the sizable noggin onto the golem's body. He had to wet some extra clay, then balance—rather dizzily—on a footstool while smoothing the wet clay to the creature's neck and shoulders to help hold everything in place. Luckily, the strokes formed natural-looking neck muscles and ligaments, and Sammy found himself wondering if that was how God had formed Adam's neck.

Then he started wondering that if he—as a Jew—didn't believe God's son was a carpenter, could he believe that God Himself was a potter?

And what
—he asked himself—
would Darwin say?
The thought made him giggle.

“Your golem is totally un-evolved, son,” he said aloud in a low voice, which occasioned another giggling fit.

Suddenly he realized how tired and sick he must be, with his mind leaping about, his hands shaking.
Maybe I should wait till tomorrow to take the final step.
But no, it was time, because the golem's neck was smooth and the head firmly in place, and the mouth was open with the tongue upturned, and all that was left was to write the name of God.

Adonai.

His hands shook so much that he knew he wouldn't be able to print the Hebrew word clearly. Still, he had the slips of paper.

But where are they?

Then he remembered—in his pants pocket.

But where are the pants?

Afraid his mother had already washed the pants—she was fast that way, washed glasses before you finished drinking, washed plates before you'd finished eating—he rooted around in the clothes hamper but only found two pairs of dirty underpants and two T-shirts.

Then where . .
 .
?

He turned and saw his pants at the foot of his bed.

Thanks goodness Mom has been too busy to do the laundry!

Fishing out the papers from the pocket, he smoothed them with his clay-pocked hands.

In the dim light from the closet he saw how wobbly his own Hebrew letters were compared to Reb Chaim's. He didn't dare chance the poor writing. Taking Reb Chaim's slip of paper, he placed it carefully under the golem's tongue. The huge, ugly, uplifted tongue.