Talking Heads (30 page)

“Garrison,” he tried, “think about it. You shouldn't even be talking with me.”

The guard shrugged. Kit recalled what he'd seen in the paper: the Grand Jury had called prison security.

“Hoo boy,” he said. “Now who's playing the tough guy?”

“Viddich, I mean, you're not the only one's got a lawyer.”

Got a lawyer, check. In spite of himself Kit began to think of the logistics: he looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. Leo was all the way down at the new waterfront station—the work site where they'd turned up the Colonial artifacts and the Shawmut pieces. Mirinex must have landed the contract. Only a cab could make Kit's rounds, he figured, before the appointment with Popkin. A cab plus serious cash.

“Eight-thirty,” Garrison said, his own sleeve shoved back. “You know I been standing out here a half-hour?”

Kit remained head-down, over the big knob of his wrist. He found himself making a connection to something Uncle Pete had said last night, the man's idea of evil: secrets in too small a place. Secrets ingrown and festering. If anything other than sheer astonishment had kept Kit out in the cold talking to this guy, perhaps it had been that, the need to break open his own small place. To talk, to tell. If anything would take him across town to confront Leo, perhaps it would be that.

Garrison stood so low, down off the stoop, that Kit hardly had to raise his eyes. “You realize that anything you tell me, it's going to go straight to my lawyer?”

The guard grinned, catching on at once. “Lawyers, that's their job. Got to hear what everybody's telling everybody.”

An ambulance went shrieking by, the windchill made audible. Kit had a final consideration: “Garrison, listen. Last time I talked with Leo, he told me he wasn't the Mafia.”

Again the Irish pout. “Come on. You asking what I think you're asking?”

Kit, straightening, recrossed his arms.

“Viddich. I'm not even supposed to be talking to you. You think I'd do anything to
hurt
you?”

Kit left him waiting. Left the big dogged errand boy down on the sidewalk wondering what Kit would do, while back in the warmth of his kitchen he pulled on his coat. The single noteworthy event of his few moments up there was the thump of the gun in his pocket. The whump of it swinging into place against his thigh. Kit would have to wait till lunch to stop at the police station. He couldn't leave it here, not when there was a chance Bette might come back again. If he wanted her to find anything—if he had anything remotely resembling a strategy—it was his testimony. Kit tossed the
Globe
into the trash and squared the blue-specked legal paper in the center of the table. Ghosts and all, his draft went right where she'd left him the printout. Darling, here's mine.

Still the gun nagged him, as Kit returned to Garrison and started towards his truck. The density got to him, the full pack jabbing and rejabbing his thigh. Out of nowhere, Kit recalled something from childhood, a square set of miniature books. Maurice Sendak: The Nutshell Library.

The Nutshell Library. When in fact this weight in his pocket was an unregistered weapon, and he was about to take a ride with a crooked cop. To meet a crooked money man. Kit never broke stride, there beside Garrison, but his face lengthened, sobered. He didn't at first see the truck. He was eyeing the street. The walls of the Cambridgeport duplexes and triple-deckers were all straight lines, clapboard and shingle and aluminum siding, but at this time of year those lines were smudged with caked-on filth. A ruined geometry. And the brick sidewalks humped and wallowed, nowhere reliable.

He didn't see the truck. He'd grown up with trucks, blockhead pickups only a hair more comfortable than a tractor. One or two might have been fancy enough to carry a Philco in the dash. But Kit didn't see any truck like that today. Garrison's rig was something from
Star Wars
.

The slate morning sky left the reflectors dark, out of luck, but they made quite a collection nonetheless. Reflector mud flaps: Yosemite Sam barking “Back off!” with teeth bared and guns drawn. Reflector pinstriping, black and silver. Reflector stick-ons that bore the CB handle and call numbers. Even the interior, once Kit had climbed into the high cab, seemed designed to glitter. Garrison had gone with creamy black Naugahyde. He had no rear window, the rig was a sleeper, and behind the seats hung black velvet curtains. The gauges had disco-purple needles and digits, and the twin gearshifts were webbed with stainless-steel diagrams.

The CB hung in mid-ceiling. Bristling with dials and hookups, to Kit the squawk box called to mind something from out of left field, a couple thousand years' worth. He put the CB together with Leo Mirini's dirty white block from the Coliseum. Another weight over his head. Then he and Garrison were out of the parking space, heat blasting.

“Unbelievable,” Kit said.

“Check out the sound system.”

The guard gestured, more or less indicating the sunroof, then touched a button on the 8-track. Music erupted as if from between Kit's vertebra. A witless AOR boogie, Grand Funk Railroad. Railroad-loud, and crisp to the least tap of a tambourine.

“Quadrophonics,” Garrison shouted. “The Japs.”

“Unbelievable. You can take the high tech to the woods.”

Garrison eyed him sideways, hands high on the wheel.

“The woods are incidental,” Kit shouted. “The woods are just the backdrop.”

“Whoa. You don't know, Viddich.” Garrison fingered down the volume. “You don't know. I go up the Kankamangus Highway there all the time. I'm in the woods all the time.”

“I'm sure you are, Garrison. I'm sure you have lots of fun out there.”

“What are you, still a tough guy? Grand Jury don't care if I take my baby here to the woods.”

“Take my baby to the woods. Hoo, boy.”

“What are you talking about? Like, ecology?”

“Garrison, I'm talking about perception. Talking about how you perceive.” Already Kit could see they were going by way of the city's central artery, Memorial Drive, Storrow Drive. They were going to creep along nose to fender with a million others pushing nine o'clock. The errand boy wasn't taking any shortcuts.

*

The woods, Kit explained, used to mean actual wilderness. “The wild, Garrison. The opposite of technology.”

But in a rig like this, he went on, the wilderness was only a pretty backdrop. Only one backdrop among many, really. “You can take your baby to the woods one weekend, then take her to the seashore the next. It's the same easy access, same comforts. You're not in the woods, Garrison, you're in the technology. You're at a party.”

The guard slowed for a yellow light, while two cars on Kit's side accelerated through the intersection.

“I don't get you,” Garrison said. “There something wrong with a party in the woods?”

“I'm talking about perception, about messing with perception. In my line of work, Garrison—think about it. Perception's key. The whole job's predicated on knowing what's happening and where.”

“Predicated?”

Kit eased back in his bucket seat, his Nutshell Library shifting against his thigh. Stay cool, believer.

“Predicated. Pre-di-cated.” The guard made a show of checking his gauges, his heat vents. He switched off the Album-Oriented garbage.

“You get out to the woods much yourself, Viddich?”

Kit took a moment, in the quiet. “I used to,” he said. “Where I came from, Garrison, it was hard core. We had an Indian guide.”

“You're shitting me. An Indian guide?”

Kit shrugged. “Men like that, in the woods all the time, they're usually the outcasts. The kind that never fit in. They're happy to find steady work.”

“Your own private Tonto. Hard core in Minnesota. Your guide have a name, Viddich?”

Actually the old man had had a whole array of names, though Kit wasn't about to share any of them with Garrison. A tiny Ojibwa, a man who said the AA prayer every night, he was Claude at the highway turnoff. By first camp, however, he'd revert to his tribal name, Poyi Buss. Then sometimes he'd translate that as Bone Place, sometimes as Death Challenge. The range wasn't uncommon, among Western natives. “Let me tell you something, Garrison. When I got my first buck, he put his fingers in the blood and painted stripes on my face.”

“Whoa. Hard
core.
”

“He made me do it too. He made me put a stripe on his face. And then he made me drink the blood.”

Kit's driver went on making a fuss.

“Give me a break, Garrison. It was another world.”

The guard chuckled. “Oh, I don't know. Seen what they go in for at them punk-rock clubs?”

Kit eyed the Charles River, outside. The truck had pulled onto Storrow Drive now, poking along between tie-ups. The river was stormy, spiked waves tearing up an oily surface. Or maybe it was Garrison who was oily. In Kit's window the man's reflection rode like scum on the water, while at last he brought up the Grand Jury.

“In there, Viddich, you got no idea what you're going to have to deal with. You think Monsod was rough?”

The guard wasn't even pretending to keep up with traffic, his eyes off the road. “In there you're going to go through Monsod all over again. Every last dirty thing you did, Viddich. Inch by fucking inch.”

At least the roomy curtained cab allowed Kit to turn around smoothly, unruffled.

“You know anything about a Grand Jury, Viddich? You ever do any research like—”

“I know about a Grand Jury.”

“Meat grinder, man. Meat grinder. Don't go by no rules like a court of law.”

“I know about a Grand Jury.”

“Oh yeah?” Garrison glanced out over Storrow again, easing ahead a car length or two. “Way I heard it, you've been acting kind of
nutty
lately.”

And here came the real heat, a closeness as if the guard had punched the controls into the red. Kit raised a hand to his window, taking in cold through his fingertips. Wearily he told Garrison to make his pitch.

“You been hiding out a lot lately, Viddich. Hiding out, no phone. Mixing booze and painkillers too.”

Kit flexed his back; the Naugahyde squeaked. Secrets, he reminded himself—secrets hurt.

“And now there's some shit where, you're closing the paper but you're not? You ask me, Viddich, that's nutty.”

“Garrison.” He frowned, putting a clamp on his surprise, his sore spots. “Aren't you going to tell me that you have friends on the Grand Jury?”

“Whoa, tough guy.”

“Isn't that what this is
about
? You've got friends who can do me a favor?”

“Yeah, I got friends. People like me and Leo, we got lots of friends. Sometimes, our friends are your friends.”

Now the heat was even in Kit's fingers.

“Friends we got on that Grand Jury, they're the tough guys. They're
men
, Viddich. You ever work with men?”

“Hmm. You mean like, men who lock a convict in a closet and feed him drugs to keep him quiet?”

The guard seemed to age, his face growing longer. “Wiseass.”

“You mean like men who run a so-called public inspection and never even look at the real problem? We never even looked at those overhead pipes, Garrison.”

“Oughta kick your ass for being such a wiseass.”

Heat in his fingers, heat in his bruises. For a moment Kit could see it happen: the two of them shoving and punching in the gadget-filled space, the high cab rocking amid stalled traffic. Deliberately he exhaled.

“That's what I'm telling the Grand Jury,” he said.

Didn't sound too bad. After a moment, after his jaw relaxed, Kit added that once he got his paper away from Leo he was going to put the Monsod story in there as well.

“In your paper?” Garrison's looks were turning pudgy again. “Man, nutty. Really. You think you're ever going to put out a paper again in this town?”

Kit swiveled back to the window—and got his worst shock of the morning at the nudge of his tucked-away gun. A shock erupting through the otherwise silly image of him and Garrison in a scuffle. He spread a palm against the Plexiglass. Carefully he explained that it didn't matter just how the story got before the public. “It won't be news anymore,” he said, “but this isn't about news. I'm the only witness.”

“Only surviving witness.”

Kit rolled his eyes. He distracted himself with math, trying to figure the sticker price of the truck, the cost of a gofer like Garrison.

“Whoa,” the guard was saying, “I really jabbed you there, didn't I? Really jabbed and twisted. I'm sorry, man.”

“The story belongs before the public,” Kit said.

“I'm sorry, really. No call for that. I think it's this traffic, you know, the old stall-n-crawl.”

Back to the diplomat?

“Gets everybody hot, you know? Traffic.” Back to the pout, the Irish Elvis. “I mean, Viddich, you yourself. Don't you think like, you're taking this story awfully
personal
?”

“Personal?”

Garrison had his eyes on the road, his rig out of first gear. He said he knew enough about the news business to know reporters weren't supposed to get emotionally involved in their work. “It's unprofessional. Right? What goes in the paper, that's strictly business.”

“Journalistic distance.” Just like that, Kit found himself grinning. Looking forward to this round.

“Distance. That's right. You're with the media, you keep your distance. Otherwise you can't work.”

“
Sea Level
isn't a forum for me and my whining.”

“That's right. Just look at the name, hey?
Sea Level
. That right there, that says everything's like, balanced. Everything's in its place.”

“Aw, Garrison.” Kit couldn't hide his grinning. “Garrison, man, you're out of date. You're history.”