“Asshole,” Berko says, with less rancor than Landsman might have expected, contemplating his father’s rickety dwelling through the windshield of the Super Sport.

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

Berko turns to his partner with his eyes rolled back as if to search an inner file on Landsman for the record of a question that needed less answering. “Let me ask you this, Meyer. If you were me, when would you have seen him last?”

Landsman parks the Super Sport behind the old man’s Buick Roadmaster, a mud-streaked blue beast with fake wood panels and a bumper sticke advertising, in Yiddish and American, the WORLD FAMOUS SIMONOF MASSACRE SPOT AND GENUINE TLINGIT LONGHOUSE. Although the roadside attraction has been defunct for a while, the bumper sticker is bright and crisp. There are still a dozen cartons of them stacked in the longhouse.

“Give me a hint,” Landsman says.

“Jokes about foreskins.”

“Oh, right.”

“Every single joke about a foreskin ever devised.”

“I had no idea there were so many,” Landsman says. “It was an education.”

“Come on,” Berko says, climbing out of the car. “Let’s get this over with.”

Landsman eyes the hulk of the Genuine Long house, off in the dry thicket of berry vines and devil’s club, a gaudy-painted wreck. In fact, there is nothing genuine about the Longhouse. Hertz Shemets built it with the help of two Indian brothers-in-law, his nephew Meyer, and his son Berko one summer after the boy came to live on Adler Street. He built it for fun, with no thought of turning it into the roadside attraction that he tried and failed to make of it after his ouster. Berko was fifteen that summer, and Landsman twenty. The kid crafted every surface of his personality to conforrn to the curvature of Landsman’s. He devoted two solid months to the task of training himself to operate a Skilsaw, as Landsman did, with a papiros jiggling on his lip and the smoke stinging his eyes. By then Landsman was already set on taking his police exams, and that summer Berko declared his identical ambition, but if Landsman had been talking about becoming a blowfly, Berko would have found a way to learn to love dung.

Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It’s the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he has long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landsman’s heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in brambles of salmonberry and oblivion.

“Berko,” he says as they crunch across the half-frozen mud of the world’s crummiest Indian reservation. He takes his cousin by the elbow. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Berko says. “It’s no your fault.”

“I’m good now. I’m back,” Landsman says, and the words ring true to his own ear in the moment. “I don’ know what did it. The hypothermia, maybe. Or getting into this whole thing with Shpilman. Or, fine, laying off the booze. But I’m back to my old self.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

“Sure.” Berko might be agreeing with a child or a nut. He might not be agreeing at all. “You seem all right.”

“Ringing endorsement.”

“I don’t want to get into it now, tell me, do you mind? I just want to go in there, hit the old man with our questions, and get back home to Ester-Malke and the boys. That okay with you?”

“That’s fine, Berko. Of course.”

“Thank you.”

They tramp through a congealed sludge of mud and patchy gravel, frozen puddles, each one stretched with a thin drumhead of ice. A cartoon stairway, splintered, wigwagging, leads to a weather-gray cedar front door. The door hangs crooked, crudely winterized with thick strips of rubber.

“When you say it’s not my fault,” Landsman begins.

“Man! I need to piss.”

“The implication is, you think I’m crazy. Mentally ill. Not responsible for my actions.”

“I’m knocking on this door now.”

He knocks twice, hard enough to imperil the hinges.

“Not fit to wear a shield,” Landsman says, truly wishing he could let the subject drop. “In other words.”

“Your ex-wife made that call, not me.”

“But you don’t disagree.”

“What do I know about mental illness?” Berko says. “I’m not the one who was arrested for running naked through the woods, three hours from home, after braining a man with an iron bed frame.”

Hertz Shemets comes to the door, the shave on his jowls as fresh as two droplets of blood. He’s wearing a gray flannel suit over a white shirt, with a poppy-red necktie. He smells like vitamin B, spray starch, smoked fish. He’s tinier than ever, jerky as a wooden man on a stick.

“Old boy,” he calls Landsman, breaking a few of the bones in his nephew’s hand.

“Looking good, Uncle Hertz,” Landsman says. Taking a closer look, he sees that the suit is shiny at the elbows and knees. The necktie bears testimony to some past meal of soup and has been knotted through the soft lapels not of a shirt but of a white pajama top jammed hastily into the trousers. But Landsman is hardly one to criticize. He’s wearing his emergency suit, popped loose from its crevice at the back of his trunk and unballed, a black number in viscose and wool blend with gold buttons meant to look like Roman coins. He borrowed it once, for a last-minute funeral he forgot he was planning to attend, from an unlucky gambler named Gluksman. It manages to look both funereal and gaudy, has fierce wrinkles, and smells of Detroit trunk.

“Thanks for the warning,” Uncle Hertz says, letting go of the wreckage of Landsman’s hand.

“That one there was all for surprising you,” Landsman says, nodding toward Berko. “But I knew you’d want to go out and kill something.”

Uncle Hertz puts his palms together and bows. Like a true hermit, he takes his duties as a host very seriously. If the hunting is poor, then he will have dragged something well marbled out of the deep freeze and put it on the stove with some carrots and onions and a crushed handful of the herbs that he grows and hangs up in a shed behind his cabin. He will have seen to it that there is ice for the whiskey and cold beer for the stew. Above all, he will have wanted to shave and put on a tie.

The old man tells Landsman to go into the house, and Landsman obeys him, which leaves Hertz standing there to face his son. Landsman watches, an interested party like all Jewish men from the moment that Abraham got Isaac to lie down on that mountaintop and bare his pulsing rib cage to the sky. The old man reaches out and takes hold of the sleeve of Berko’s lumberjack shirt. He rolls the fabric between his fingers. Berko submits to the examination with a look of genuine pain on his face. It has to be killing him, Landsman knows, to appear before his father wearing anything but his best Italian finery.

“So, where’s the Big Blue Ox?” the old man says at last.

“I don’t know,” Berko says. “But I think he may have your pajama bottoms.”

Berko smooths the pinched place that his father made in his sleeve. He walks past the old man and comes into the house. “Asshole,” he says, under his breath, almost. He excuses himself to use the toilet.

“Slivovitz,” the old man says, going for the bottles, a huddled skyline like a miniature replica of the Shvartsn-Yam on a black enamel tray. “Isn’t that it?”

“Seltzer,” Landsman says. When his uncle arches an eyebrow, he shrugs. “I got a new doctor. Indian fellow. Wants me to grve up booze.”

“And since when do you listen to doctors or Indians?”

“Since never,” Landsman admits.