Coney by Amram Ducovny Page A

look at its pictures of Joe Louis?
Aba:
No, Heshele, look to your heart’s desire, but know that on the front page Joe Louis is knocked out.

CHAPTER
9
    S TANDING ON THE PEDALS OF HIS BIKE, PUMPING AND ROCKING VIOLENTLY , Harry measured speed by the pain of the cutting wind. He flashed over the grave of Dreamland and skidded onto the sand beneath the boardwalk. Carrying his bike to the ocean’s edge, he eased into a prone position and submerged his face in the lapping residue of once-surly waves. The frigid salt water stung his eyes and pricked his skin. The scourging, he hoped, would unclog his mind and allow it to answer questions that were lodged there.
    Why had he wanted to bury his head in Fifi’s sweating breasts?
    Why had he wanted to bite her pubic hair?
    Why, during his panicked flight from the room, had he cursed himself for the loss of Fifi’s stinking mystery?
    Why, in a world that encompassed many worlds as different from each other as day from night, did freaks, poets, dwarfs, his mother, his father, share a common obsession?
    He remembered a joke he had overheard his father tell:
    The grandmother of a large family dies. The grandfather, who worshipped her, is grief-stricken and dazed. The family, sitting shivah at home, notices that the grandfather has disappeared. Alarmed that in his confused state he may have wandered off and come to harm, they frantically search for him. He is discovered in a bedroom atop the young housemaid.
    â€œZadeh,” the family screams, “how could you?”
    The grandfather replies: “Oy, in such a terrible time, do I know what I’m doing?”
    Harry tried to visualize his grandfather in that position, but couldn’t get his clothes off. He laughed. Another question relieved him of the unanswerable ones:
Was his grandfather crazy and, if so, how did that affect his own sanity?
    Lifting his head from the water, he looked toward the twenty-five-yard-long fishing pier that jutted into the Atlantic from Steeple Chase Amusement Park. There, memory placed his grandfather, whose resemblance to Albert Einstein provoked double takes, standing beside seven-year-old Harry.
    Though twenty feet above the nearest water, Zadeh wore hip-high rubber boots. He was furiously reeling in a line. When the hook breached, it might hold a bait worm, but nothing more. Zadeh had never had caught a fish.
    Harry began a sanity inquiry.
    Zadeh worked as a tanner in a leather factory, a trade he had learned in his native Poland. The profession was temporary, to be endured only until the world recognized his stature as a Talmudic scholar. His approach to fishing was properly Talmudic:
If idiots can catch, surely I can.
The premise was lost on the ignorant fish.
    He escalated the battle, drafting seven-year-old Harry as aide and purchasing sophisticated rods, reels and lures. The fish were unimpressed. He became a nuisance to anyone on the pier with a catch in a bucket.
    â€œWhat bait you use?” he would demand.
    â€œWorms.”
    â€œSpecial?”
    â€œWorms is worms.”
    â€œHow far you cast?”
    â€œWho knows?”
    â€œYou got a favorite spot?”
    â€œWhere they’re biting.”
    Eventually his Talmudic mind informed him that Harry’s baitedhook alongside his presented a choice that confused and immobilized stupid fish. He ordered Harry to withdraw his line, but to stand poised to plunge a gleaming scaling knife into a catch. It was now eight years that Harry had been at the ready but never challenged, for which Harry was thankful, because neither he nor Zadeh had the vaguest idea of how to clean a fish.
    The end of the first nibbleless day set the pattern for all subsequent catchless expeditions. Lifting his eyes to the heavens, Zadeh gloomily conceded by reciting Goethe’s rhymed German: “Man thinks and God laughs.” He then leapt up, brought the heels of his boots together and added: “Sometimes man can laugh at