Talking Heads (11 page)
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shadow loomed in the rusty air. Kit glanced up, startled, and Junior caught him hard across the face.
“Mothafuck,” he said.
“Hey, is that you?” Garrison called.
Junior whacked him again, backhand and off-balance but a dead hit on the original sore spot. “Nothin but talk.”
“Is that you?”
“
I got him
!” Kit screamed.
The last slap had left him stooped. With one red glare he fixed Junior's positionâthose lemon-wedge eyes sunk in shadow, those prideful cheekbonesâand whipped the wrench up into his face. Kit swung from the gut. Something gave at the end of the clout, a breakage that sent a tremor up the iron. A shiver up the elongated tool and right to the ends of Kit's nerves, so that while Junior's head was still lifted by the first blow, Kit jerked his weapon back down. From the gut, putting his back into it, Kit yanked the handle like a pulley-rope so the head's fat metal Gshape caught Junior a second time between the eyes. A second hit. The follow-through carried Kit's shoulder forward into the kid's chest. Junior's cuffed hands dropped into the center of Kit's back.
His touch was something else in the middle of this. Light fingers, gently spreadâan embrace, in the middle of this. Together they fell into the nearest wall, rolled up so tight that Kit might have caught a vague heartbeat. But when he and Junior hit the wall the wind went out of them both.
When Kit got a breath, he tasted no gas, only Junior's stink. Also there was some sort of warm drool down the back of his neck. Kit wrung himself over, facing up from within Junior's limp hold. At his first glimpse of the kid's face and he was bucked free and got to his feet.
He discovered the wrench in his hand and dropped it.
Come on, look. Even a tourist can look. From this angle, Junior appeared merely sleepy and out of it again. Saving his strength, clap clap. But the gas had gotten to the other cells, the bitter industrial air. Even the guard and the inspectors couldn't get away from it, choking and spitting as they struggled with the jammed closet door. Even a tourist couldn't pretend it had never happened. Junior might have been bleeding from the eyes, from the inner corners of the eyes. His face was enlarged but hard to read, a carnival balloon that had started to deflate, a pocked and smudged documentary face whorly and gray with bad reception. Then a shudder passed under the undone prison uniform, a chest-lifting flinch, and for a moment there Kit was watching a different kind of documentary, Junior Rebes in the hundred-yard dash, the kid in slo-mo trying to steal an extra fraction of a second at the wire. He would have made a good man in the dash.
Then Junior's chest heaved, and some mess swilled up between his parted front teeth, a winy pulp. It swilled up and Kit went downâdown again while his legs still ached from getting up, his white-boy desk-job legs. Junior's last spasm had left his neck arched, his chin in the air. Most of what came out of his mouth ran towards his hairline. Under the seepage his looks disappeared.
How could he breathe? Kit pawed through the sticky shirt, squeezing up a double-handful of hairless unmoving chest. How could Junior breathe?
The guard had hold of his tool belt.
| WHITE NOISE | ZIA SEE |
Boston Media Cleans Up Monsod | Dilettantes in the Demi-Monde: Mr. Right's Got It Wrong |
| The Monsod on TV isn't there. It's a fairy tale. Thursday's violence at the state's largest prison facility was the worst yet, resulting in at least one death. Coverage by the Boston mainstream media has proven woefully off the markâeven deliberately misleading. Television, radio, and the Globe have avoided the real story. | How can you tell a tourist? I mean, no question, already our scene |
The MBTA ran nearly empty at this hour. Past drivetime, well into dinnertime, Kit rode a car that held at most a half-dozen others. Students, swing-shifters. And these people kept their distance. Kit clung to one of the seats for the handicapped, his elbow hooked round the vertical pole. A bandage sawed off one corner of his forehead. Under that his ear and temple bulged, purple, and across his long jacket exploded uncertain new colors: graveyard-red, trowel-black. When Kit blinked his whole upper body shivered.
The emptier the car, the worse the sway and rattle. People kept their distance.
The trolley's racket got through Kit's painkillers. Back at Massachusetts General, over an untouched cafeteria lunch, he'd taken only half the prescribed dose. In the Law Library he'd gone pretty much cold turkey. Cold turkey, he'd kept the hours he'd assigned himself.
He'd done his research cross-legged on the floor, on the neoprened concrete between the stacks. Down there, he could tell when someone was coming. Even when his eyesight turned murky and his ears filled with moans, so long as he stayed on the floor he could feel the approaching footsteps.
After finishing at the Law Library, Kit had hobbled back to the “T” station in Harvard Square. He'd ignored the turnoff towards his own apartment. He'd headed downtown.
Yet he hadn't been able to get to the office either. He'd come near, the end of the block. Then for an hour or so Kit had struggled through the wind tunnels of the financial district, the high sheer urban development. What few storefronts he came across staggered him. He got lost in the glare of a record store, the checkerboard of new LPs.
In time, he'd allowed himself alcohol. The bar was as murky as the Law Library, with Happy Hour chili. He'd gulped another half a painkiller. He'd decided to climb back into the “T”. But Kit still wasn't heading home, to Cambridge, to Bette. He was riding the other way, out of town, towards the ethnic-pride suburbs beyond Dorchester. Zia should be there, at the Sons of Columbus.
Big media has been actively avoiding telling the truth. When it comes to Monsod, they can't face the truth. Instead, Boston's primary news outlets have fallen back on quick and easy notions of crime and punishment. On Hollywood. They won't run any story too complicated for a thirty-second plug. Once again, it's up to the alternative press to set the record straight. This reporter caught Thursday's early-evening news on a TV at a downtown tavern. Even in these first reports, the major media distorted the facts. Editors had no idea what they were up against. | You know the kind of lames our scene's starting to attract. The ones who dream all week about slumming on Saturday night. Dream about waking up hip. My basement boys and girls, to these lames our scene amounts to nothing more than a fairy tale. It's Sleeping fucking Beautyâone kiss and she's hip. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by a fairy tale. But when you encounter a tourist, down in our dankâhow can you tell? Clothes, hair? An uninformed line of talk? Ah, it goes deeper. Zia see, boys and girls. Zia see. |
At the Sons of Columbus, he'd find Zia and he'd break the news about the next issue. A special issue, a double issue, devoted exclusively to the scandal of Massachusetts building contracts. Kit would include the Monsod story, of course.
Sea Level
would tell the real story, not the kind of pap they ran on TV. Kit would tell the whole truth. He'd figure out whatever was going on with those overhead pipes, that uncertain buzz. Seepage, drugs, violent deathâthe whole truth. Of course.
But this issue had more to it than that. More than today's trouble.
It goes deeper
, Kit thought.
Or possibly he said it aloud: “It goes deeper.” With the rocking and screeching of the trolley car, it was hard to tell when he was talking to himself. Also, the line hooked south through Roxbury, the ghetto. For a few stops Kit's was the only white face in the car, so he couldn't be sure what the other riders were staring at.
Editors have no idea. One station actually ran the Monsod story second. Apparently some deep thinker at Channel 3 believes that a prison riot matters less than a visit from Ronald Reagan. Ronald Then there were No way. Hollywood. The workshop is three stories | Zia see. What makes a tourist a tourist, Zia see. Thursday. I'm talking two white males, aged 25-30, cruising the downtown. Cruising that dubious urban cornerâpart financial district, part Boston Garden hardhat spilloverâand part Dilettantes in the demimonde. Visitors at the zoo. Thursday night, these two were trying to pass as blue boys. You know, blue boys. S&M, swat & moan. One fellow wore some sort of uniformâcould that have been a prison guard's uniform, Teresa? Santa Teresa, a security uni from a Massachusetts And I mean, bruises was just the |
The worst distortions appeared on⦠this reporter didn't get the channel⦠it was on one of the networks, anyway. One of the networks had an interview with one of the extra security, called in for the emergency. And they wrapped this interview up neat as the last fade on Q: You say A: | But enough about me Hmm. There were their outfits, for starters. That guard's uniform had potential, granted, and the name patch was a nice touch ( |
Kit's head rested against the trolley window. For some moments now he'd been sitting this way, with his back to the car's center aisle, watching the reflection of his own eyes floating over the concrete and cable of the T's underground walls. Now suddenly that reflection began gliding over exteriors. Landscapes. Through his own dim-mirrored eyes, Kit saw duplexes and three-stories in scrappy garden blocks. He saw aluminum siding, sheeny as polyester.
The ethnic-pride suburbs. The Sons of Columbus.
The Sons, Leo called it. The club was just the place for
Sea Level
to begin dragging demons out into the light. Just the perfect irony. Six months ago, Kit had arranged the details of the contract at the Sons. His first visit, he'd met Zia. Later he'd returned for the final signatures, under a studio portrait of Leo and his two boys. And now here Kit was, once more meeting Zia at the Sonsâin this business, you knew where your writers were. But this time he was coming to tell her she was off the paper.
She was off Volume One, Numbers Two & Three. No room for entertainment reporting in the kind of issue Kit had in mind. No room for fluff when you're telling the whole truth.
Zia needed to hear it right away, face to face. She needed to understand, also, that she had a conflict of interest. Her father's products had turned up in the crawlspace under E Level. Mirinex products. Pipe fittings.
Kit had spotted the stuff as soon as the Building Commission inspectors came out of the utility closet. He couldn't miss it, reallyâ
Mirinex, Inc
., embossed on the familiar U-joints and right angles. The inspectors carried them in their fists, in their Baggies. The two state employees had forgotten all about not making waves. They'd come out screaming, kicking, hacking up tear gas. And what else was Kit going to look at, if not the evidence in the inspectors' hands? What, when under his own hands Junior's face was disappearing?
Q: A: Q: A: Q A: Q A: | Their outfits were part of the giveaway, no question. Part of how you could tell these were tourists. I mean, the name patch on the “prison guard” was a nice touch. But I mean, stains don't fool me. I mean, I saw his pants. I meanâpermanent press! |
Channel Whatever's interview Junior Rebes died, in short, for reasons that go way beyond the grasp of a rent-a-cop and a talking head. His killing won't fit into what the TV-news folks like to call “information units.” It can't come down from the satellite feed in a single simple bite. When Channel Whatever finished its interview, who should come on the screen but Farrah Fawcett-Majors, the Girl of the Moment, utter hollow hypeâand yet her face alone seemed more honest than the so-called “news.” | Their outfits were part of the giveaway, sure. And uhhâ¦the “Garrison” fellow? The beef in the uni? He uhh, he uhh⦠he came and went. Rather a ghostly Garrison. One moment the guard and the gangly Scandie would be deep in conversation, gesturing over fistfuls of red scotchâand the next, Mr. Uni would disappear. Blink and he'd be gone. Quick as a Ramones song. Scandie would be left like his homeboy forefather Hamlet: with th'incorporal air holding discourse. Strange stuff, yeah. Garrison's hard. He's the part I never quite put in place. But our beaten-up Scandie, he went on proving himself out of touch. He never felt my eyes on him. And whenever Garrison's signal faded (don't ask me), the blonde poser watched the TV news. I mean, he watched the network newsâhe Those painkillers he was taking didn't fool me either. |
Her face. Infinitely honest. The hair out of whack, the mouth intricate. A face like a hamper in a haystack. This reporter. Why did Junior Rebes This reporter was doing important work, sitting in a bar watching TV. Every sip of Johnny Walker was a blow for social responsibility. After all, the security guard in the network interview wasn't even on the scene when Rebes died. He wasn't even there. Junior had stopped breathingâhis chest had gone still, under this reporter's handâlong before any backup security arrived. | So he looked like a tourist, yeah. He acted like a tourist. But for the real proofâdeep, dream-deepâwe need the angels on my shoulders. The angels Cue and Ayy. Cue: Ayy: Cue: Ayy: Cue: Ayy: Cue: |
Big media. It could turn Christ himself into an idol, a graven image. You know the network showed a photo of Junior Rebes, too? And you know the murdered convict actually looked a little like Farrah Fawcett-Majors? The womanly lips, the wedge-like eyes⦠after a moment, this reporter couldn't stand to look. This reporter had believed in that face. Believed. Behind Junior's face lay a mess, sure, but this mess nonetheless constituted a soul. In there, dream-deep, waited a secret worth knowing. A secret so powerful it would single-handedly replace all the world's lies⦠Or so this reporter had thought, till he saw even the face of his Monsod source turning to sheer screen, sheer blonde hype, blonde on bone ⦠and then Farrah herself came on, and she'd been astonishing, Whatever she was about, this Girl of the Moment, this hamper in a haystack, she was true to it, haunting and true . . and this reporter . . and this reporter. | Ayy: Cue: Ayy: Cue: Ayy: Cue: Ayy: Cue: Ayy: ( |