The Fugitives (9 page)

He had started really messing with her now. He’d rocked behind his desk, his hands gesturing first to one side, then the other, shoulders working beneath the fit of his shirt. This was the voice and cadence, the attitude, that he’d intended his dead column to impart. When he had finished he let his hands drop into his lap, exhaled deeply, gazed at her.

He’d asked, “Do you read the police blotter?”

“Uh.”

“Every day, in Metro, the police blotter. You read it?”

“Not really.”

“Dry as dust. Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. Someone aims a gun at a liquor store owner, pulls the trigger for the hell of it. Someone beats an old lady on her way home from visiting her sister. Someone paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue. The facts take up sixty words or less. Often much less. Metro editor decides. Mike Turowicz decides that’s what we need to know. Mike Turowicz decides because the story doesn’t seem to be
about
anything. Now who the hell is Mike Turowicz? Mike Turowicz walks to the El every night drinking a can of beer out of a paper bag. Mike Turowicz has never read anything
but
the newspaper. He’d be the first one to tell you that. Mike Turowicz’s idea of whether a story is
about
something or not generally centers on the complexion of the characters in that story. But I’ll tell you something. I will tell you something. There is one thing and one thing only that Mike Turowicz and I have in common, other than our employer. Mike Turowicz and I both want the stories we print to be
about
something. Now maybe you want to take a minute, think, and tell me again.”

Another ironic little coded conversation in quotation marks. What were the hints she’d been given here? This was, she knew, the way Nables had of working with his people. It was possibly one of the reasons why he seemed to spend his days steeped in disappointment, although the basic problem probably was systemic: Nables wanted to be the conductor of soaring symphonies and he’d been given a marching kazoo band. He wanted to send people out to find injustice and they brought him county fairs, puppies, and guns. Old men who carved Civil War figurines out of soap. It was the perfect exile for someone like him. Only a very few were born to love the status quo, at least insofar as they were certain that it contained a privileged place for them. Everyone else, accommodating it in all of its arbitrary contradictions, effaced to a certain extent what they’d been branded with at birth. But Nables couldn’t erase the rubbed ebony skin, the full lips, the broad nose with the flaring nostrils, and he was even less capable of erasing the stroke of indignation connecting his every decision to a central motivation. So he messed with his staff. It was a way of actively not waiting for the chimerical story that would force the world to apologize for being itself. He knew Saltino wasn’t a shit story; he knew that his budget was devised to accommodate some travel since the small regional bureaus had been shut down; he knew that overseeing a real story—any real story—had to beat the maddening job of compiling a gazette of AP stuff each day, setting some beery old reporter to the task of making the wire copy conform to the paper’s style sheet. And of course he’d heard all the same rumors everyone else had about plans for folding the Midwest section as a standalone and consolidating it into the main news section. Kat had looked around the little sheet-metal box that held them. No sign of the Pulitzer, either. Maybe you had to surrender it to the publisher, or maybe it was just too shaming to have Ben Franklin’s face smirking down on you in your tuna can cubicle. He’d given her two weeks.

SHE CALLED BECKY
from home that evening while Justin was out. The phone rang and rang, and just as she was about to hang up, a kid answered, too young to be bored by the chore of answering the phone, old enough to be vigilantly territorial.

“Who is it, again?”

“An old friend of your mom’s. Becky’s your mom?”

“Yeah, she’s my mom. I mean what’s your name again?”

“Kat, again. Is Becky there?”

“I’m not sure. You want to talk to her?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Are you from Citicorp Credit?”

“No, I’m a friend.”

“Well, I don’t know you.”

“No,” said Kat. “No, you don’t. I knew your mother before you were born. There in Nebising. Can you check if she’s there for me please?”

Finally the kid put the phone down and went to look for his mother. Put the phone down: was Becky still making do with a phone that had a cord? Maybe even a rotary dial. But don’t be a jerk. She has e-mail, after all. Maybe the kid just liked making everybody take a couple of extra steps.

Oh how well she’d avoided Becky Chasse for ten years. Just didn’t want to go wherever that might lead. People bobbed up all the time, more often than you’d ever dream; she pictured a billion souls spread out across the night, each tapping the names of the lost into a search engine by the light of a single lamp. But happy reunions were for Facebook, a nice smooth interface between you and all the bad habits and ancient disharmonies. Who was waiting for you in the vast digital undertow there? Kat had avoided it.

Calls once in a blue moon. Those stopped because Kat never returned them. A very tense and uncomfortable lunch in Lansing. It kind of would have been that way anyway, but what made it memorably so was that a man had come in and waited for Becky at the bar while they ate, glancing over his shoulder at them from time to time. Becky tried to ignore him but Kat knew that he was keeping tabs on her. Ypsitucky trash, he looked like. Whatever—as long as he didn’t come over to say hello, even though that would have been the humanly normal thing to do. Unconsciously, she shook her head in frustrated disgust, and Becky caught it. “What?” she’d challenged. “What?”

Once, she’d known everything about her. Becky was afraid of ghosts. Becky started smoking cigarettes when she was eleven. Becky and she had cut class one day, after they’d started going to the public school in Leatonville, and Becky had gotten into a car with two town boys and driven away while Kat stood there and watched. Becky loved the Narnia books. Becky’s father sat outside the trailer where he lived, and belched—he did it like you might blow smoke rings, or play a harmonica. An activity. He always kept two beer cans nestled just so in the gravel beneath his chair. One he drank from. One he spat in. Becky’s mother worked as a clerk-typist at the State Farm bureau and started drinking a jug of Gallo chablis as soon as she walked in the door at six thirty. By the end of the night it would always be gone. Becky was lousy at math but she could draw anything. Becky and she had gone wading in a shallow lake and then they’d both gotten some kind of skin infection. Becky was the best baker she’d ever known. Becky figured out how to ride a bike and to tie her shoes before Kat had. Becky also showed her how to masturbate using a pillow between her thighs, but Kat never got the hang of that one. Becky had bet her a hundred dollars that she wouldn’t leave for Ann Arbor. Kat had never collected.

“Yeah?” When she came to the phone, Becky sounded out of breath. Kat wondered if she’d finally put on all the weight her mother and grandmother had carried around.

“Hey. Me.”

“Well Jesus H. Christ.”

“I got your e-mail.”

“So you did. Jesus, it’s weird to hear your voice.”

“It’s good to hear yours,” said Kat.

“What I meant.”

“That’s your kid, huh?”

“Oh yeah. Ten going on thirty-five, that’s Brandon. You met his dad that time.” Neither of them spoke for a moment. “We ain’t together no more.”

So there it was. Kept tabs until the field was sown.

“And you’re back there, huh?”

“Been back five years. Mom’s emphysema got real bad.”

“I’m sorry. Is it under control?”

“Well, in a ways. She got lung cancer and died a couple years ago, ennit.”

“Geezum.”

“Yeah, I’ll say. By the end it was like looking after a puddle. That’s all there was of her. And you know what? She still wanted to drink.”

“Your dad?”

“That fucker a while back got squashed by his van when he was underneath it.”

“Was he working on it?”

“Nah, sleeping it off, I think.” She laughed, and Kat did too. “So, Mrs. Danhoff.”

“I ain’t Mrs. Danhoff no more.” Kat put her hand to her mouth in surprise.

“What’d he, die?”

“No, we split up.”

“Guess I can’t say I’m surprised. Old guy like that. Gave you what you needed though, huh?”

“If he had, we wouldn’t’ve split up,” said Kat.

“But you use Danhoff. The name I mean. How I found you.”

“Yeah. Clips, you know. I wanted it to be consistent.”

“Yeah? Huh. So you married again, or what?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the dude’s name?”

“Justin Lake.”

“Jumps in Lake? Sounds like a step in the wrong direction, girl. Lake. Almost could be an Injun name, you know?”

“I kept Danhoff.”

“Yeah? I guess I know that. I found you. And how’s Jumps in Lake feel about that?”

Kat paused for a second while it occurred to her that she didn’t know. She said, instead, “How’s the rez?”

“Same old shit. Fighting over bread crumbs. Tribal cops running wild.”

“What about the casinos?”

“Yeah, right, the golden goose. I’ll tell you. That thing I wrote you about? Tip of the iceberg, you know? Everybody gets this whatchamacall, balance sheet, every six months? Tells us how all these millions of dollars are coming to us. Two percent kickback, they say. But the school’s still shit. The government houses are still shit. The roads are still shit. The health center’s still shit. Everything’s shit. Where’s that money going, you know?” Kat didn’t. “Anyways,” continued Becky, “that’s kind of why I wrote you. That whole big sell, and it’s
all
a bunch of crooks. Thieves on top of thieves on top of thieves, you know? And then I see the guy who’s stealing from the guys who’s stealing, pretending he’s something he ain’t. Just pissed me off.”

Kat glanced at the clock and then opened her notebook. “How was it you were working up at Manitou Sands if you’ve been back in Nebising for five years?”

“Oh. Yeah, well, it was a guy. Come on up, things’ll be better kind of thing. Didn’t go for Brandon, though. Thought it was like having a dog; you could put him out at night or something. Soon’s he laid a hand on him, we got the fuck out of there.”

Kat began to question her more formally, although she was careful to keep her tone conversational. Who knew what resentments her behaving like a journalist might stir up? In contacting her, Becky had reached up out of the aggrieved tumult of her emotions for the closest thing to an authority figure she had within her grasp. Or so Kat figured. She was a “connection.” On the other hand, with each question the gulf separating them would have to become more and more apparent: that Kat was an educated person, a sophisticated person, a privileged person, a person living in a great city, talking to her from a big apartment, one filled with books and pictures and music and fancy food that was allowed to sit in the fridge until it went bad, while Becky was living at the margin of things, exactly where she’d begun. Bucket of fried chicken on the counter and a framed NASCAR poster over the couch. So she treaded lightly. Becky told her that in the cage transactions were ordinarily recorded the instant that they took place, but the chief cashier had instructions to skim a certain percentage from the receipts. None of this money was on paper or in the system, though it existed in the piles of cash that were under constant video scrutiny. Its existence was referred to as “the ready box,” although there wasn’t actually a physical box. Becky didn’t quite understand the sleight-of-hand, but once a month Saltino would come into the cage with a briefcase. He would open the briefcase and remove some papers. This was just for show. It got kind of ridiculous sometimes. One time he opens the briefcase and takes out a bag of doughnuts and gives them to the cashiers. Not that he was this nice guy or anything. He always knew exactly how much money was supposed to be in the ready box. The chief cashier told Saltino the amount of the previous twenty-four hours’ ready-box receipts each morning. Nothing was on paper. Saltino kept a running tally in his head. And he would know if they were short. And he knew where everyone lived. He would look at you and rattle off your address, the name of your wife, your kids, then smile. It scared the shit out of everyone. They all figured he was Mob. Anyways, he would come in and somehow when the money was getting moved or about to get moved to the vault by the security detail he’d take the ready-box cut and leave with it. No one would see him for a few days. Sometimes he’d take other stuff; the occasional piece of illegally accepted collateral like a Rolex or a diamond ring. On the Tuesday after the Final Four or whatever it is, Saltino had come in with a bigger briefcase. It was a huge amount of money, more than Becky had seen him collect before. $450,000, about. But he took the money in the usual way and so nobody thought anything about it. But soon certain folks started getting twitchy, this guy Argenziano, a first-class ballbuster to begin with, paranoid, had his nose in things quite a bit, everybody got asked weird questions. Nobody told them nothing about what was happening or anything, of course, but word gets around. They find Saltino’s car parked along a dirt road leading to the beach. He never turns up at his house. He doesn’t even stop the paper, they just keep piling up on the step. That’s what everyone said anyways. Anyways, that was the last Becky heard of it because in early April she and Brandon came back to Nebising. And she forgot all about it until she was at a school fair in Leatonville and there standing on the auditorium stage with a big straw hat and a western shirt and this hokey silver belt buckle was this dude telling the one about the snake complaining about his skin being too hot and tight and Nanabozho asking the Great Spirit to give him a break. Becky wasn’t paying too much attention at first, it was the usual dumb thing for people who ate that shit up, with a drum and fake sign-languagey gestures, but then she noticed that there was something wrong with the story. Becky couldn’t explain it. She didn’t buy into spooky Indian horseshit but he just didn’t know the story right. It was like he was making fun of it, almost—although that wasn’t it, either, exactly. More like when a white guy sings a blues song he gets the notes right but it doesn’t sound correct, or real? Anyways, she takes a good look at him then and she realized it was Saltino. She could see how he might be able to pass for an Indian somewhere else, but she couldn’t figure why anyone would come to a town like Leatonville if they were pretending to be something they weren’t. Every other person on the street was Ojibway. The rez was right across the damn road. She got a good look at him and then got out of there because she didn’t want him to recognize her.