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inside the bar you could hear the band singing, Hello, Central, give me no-man’s-land …
    “I guess I’m a little fragile,” I admitted, and searching for a reason: “since I saw the cops maul the garbage collectors. They were marching up Main Street when the cops started clubbing them bloody and dragging them away.”
    She studied me in earnest a moment then smirked. “You’re clearly a sensitive guy.”
    I began to make a case for my political engagement, which she cut short.
    “You embarrassed me in front of my friends.”
    Inclining my head I inquired, “You’re ashamed that you slept with me?”
    “Damn straight—and don’t make it sound like more than it was,” she reminded me. “Sleeping was the extent of it.”
    I felt another sob coming on.
    “Oh for God’s sake,” sighed Rachel. “Would you like me to call your mother?”
    Again I endeavored to rally. “I don’t have a mother,” I told her. “I was raised by wolves in the fastness of the Caucasus Mountains.”
    “I’m going back inside,” she said.
    Desperate to detain her, I changed course. “Do you know when the first Jew came through here?”
    She hesitated despite herself, succumbing to a sudden professional reflex. “There were German Jews in Memphis in the 1840s,” she grudgingly replied. “Goldsmith’s Department Store was founded just after the Civil War.”
    “I’m talking about the first Jew in the Pinch.”
    “I know about the Pinch,” she stated as if I’d challenged her. “I’ve already conducted some oral history interviews with people who lived there.”
    “You mean here. So how did you learn about the Pinch?”
    “You told me.” The admission must have cost her something, as her fidgeting seemed to imply. “After you mentioned it I did some homework,” she continued. “The Pinch was an Irish neighborhood until the Russian Jews started trickling in during the eighteen eighties and nineties. The Irish eventually moved on, and the district was Jewish till after the war.”
    “Did anybody tell you about the earthquake?”
    “What earthquake? People talk about the synagogues, the shops—the Pinch was like every other ethnic urban ghetto. Nobody mentions anything about an earthquake.”
    “It happened; it practically swallowed the neighborhood. The epicenter was in Market Square Park, just over there. I can show you.”
    “You’re batshit.”
    “It’s just a block or two away.”
    She cleared her throat somewhat nervously. “I’d have to get my coat.”
    I was afraid that if she returned to her friends she might never come back. Remarking that she was indeed shivering from the cold, I took off my own overcoat, a worn-to-threads rag with no lining, and draped it over her shoulders. I hoped she would be impressed by the gallantry of the gesture.
    She eyed me with grave suspicion. “This better be quick.”
    On the way I congratulated myself for having once again exploited Rachel’s gullibility; her resistance was not nearly as intractable as she liked to project. The truth was that in all the months I’d spent on North Main Street I’d scarcely noticed the park myself. It was there opposite the old Ellis Auditorium: an acre of unattended crabgrass bordered by a Catholic church, a low-rise housing project, and some empty lots from which the structures had been recently razed: the kind of poky city vacuum that nature can’t abide. As we entered it Rachel asked me, incidentally, what was my name, and I told her Captain Blood, a.k.a. Lenny Sklarew. Hers was Rachel Ostrofsky. Such a doughy Slavic mouthful for such a svelte American girl.
    Of course I knew there would be no sign of the great tree that Muni Pinsker had described, the one that capsized into a hole during the quake. It was clear from the first that the author of The Pinch , however much he drew from actual events, could not be considered a reliable narrator. Still, his version of the past seemed so much truer than the present tenantless