Cruz put her hands, in fists, on her hips, her face a hard clutch of anger: “Why the hell . . .”
“Because I couldn’t wait,” Cohn said. “That’s why.”
“Brute . . .”
“Y’all get out of here, back in an hour,” Cohn said, “or we’re all gonna be pretty embarrassed.”
They shuffled out, Cruz running her hands through her short hair in exasperation, and Cohn said, “Better make it two hours.”
SATURDAY ON THE sloping front lawn of the state Capitol, in St. Paul.
Letty strolled through the crowd, protesters, rubberneckers, street people, vendors, cops, taking it all in. She was a teenager, one toe in senior high, but for two years she’d worked unofficially for Channel Three, an unpaid intern. She was sponsored there by one of Lucas’s ex-girlfriends—a girlfriend with whom he’d had a daughter, who now lived with her mother and her mother’s new family.
Letty occasionally thought about how tangled it all was—women having children with two different men, men having children with several different women, and she was about to become the official daughter of the only husband and wife who’d ever behaved like parents with her . . .
Letty had been born in the bleakest part of northwest Minnesota, the daughter of an alcoholic mother; her father took off when she was a child, and she hadn’t seen him since. They’d lived in an old farmhouse outside a small country town, so she hadn’t even had the benefit of close-by neighbors. They had no satellite TV, so there’d been only two weak over-the-air TV channels, and she’d grown up as a county library patron, and a reader.
When she got into school, she’d encountered a man who made his living wandering through the local marshlands in the late fall and winter, trapping fur. He’d taught her how to do it—not much to learn, you could get most of it in a few days of observation—and she’d become a trapper, taking muskrats out of the marshes and raccoons out of the county landfill. That had gone on for most of her elementary school days; she’d taught herself to drive at the same time, and how to avoid the local highway patrolmen. The money from the trapping had become the family’s main source of income.
A tough kid.
A series of murders had torn up her life: had resulted in her mother’s death, and had brought Lucas Davenport and Del Capslock into town. She and Lucas had hit it off almost immediately, and he’d brought her home as his legal ward.
Cinderella.
Her job with Channel Three was more than decorative. Lucas’s cop pals kept her well-stocked with tips, and since they were always reported by other producers and reporters, her favored reporters did very well with her.
A woman with a baby, sitting outside a tiny orange nylon tent, smiled at her and Letty smiled back and said, “Hello, there.”
“You can’t really be a TV person,” the woman said, looking at the credential tags around Letty’s neck.
“But I am,” Letty said happily.
Across the park, in the street, a white van cruised by, the side door open, and a man in a wheelchair looking out at the park—and at her, Letty thought. Just a spark, an impression, their eyes clicking, and then he was gone.
“How old are you?” the woman asked.
“Almost fifteen.”
“And you work for a TV station?” She was both amused and skeptical.
“I’ve got an in,” Letty said. “See, my dad had a baby with this woman . . .”
LUCAS WORE faded jeans and a khaki military-style shirt rolled up to the elbows. He had a plastic credentials case strung around his neck like a baggage tag, one side with a yellow Session 1 Limited Access tag, the other side with a BCA identification card. Though he was still self-conscious about the camera resting against his chest, and the second one hanging off his shoulder, and the beat-up Domke bag, nobody was giving him a second look. He took a couple of crowd shots, trying to look bored.
And he was bored. The convention was the biggest single cop-action in the Twin Cities’ history, and he was out of it, part of the crowd, and the crowd wasn’t doing much. Letty was supposed to be around here somewhere . . .
“HEY, DAD! DAD!”
Letty was there, under a spreading elm tree, waving. He smiled and headed over. She had a couple of credentials hung on an elastic string around her neck, like his. She was standing next to an orange nylon tent, where a young woman in a tired blue blouse and blue-jean shorts sat on a blanket next to a baby in a papoose sling.
The woman went straight for his liver: “Are you a cop?”
He tried for a wry smile: “Do I look like a cop?”
“Yup.” She wrinkled her nose, being funny about it, but the question was serious. Letty broke it up with, “Did you see John and Jeff? They were going to give me a ride over to the convention center.”
“What are they doing here?” Lucas asked.
“Just looking around. They got a car . . .”
“Letty . . .”
“I know, I know. They’re okay,” she said.
“I know exactly what they’re like, because they’re exactly like I was,” Lucas said.
“Dad, I can handle them, all right?” Fists on her hips.
“All right. Be careful,” he said. He looked around. “Wasn’t a march supposed to go off five minutes ago? I need some street stuff.”
The woman with the baby now had bought the cameras. She said, “Nothing is on time. These people couldn’t organize a phone call. My husband said he’d be back in five minutes and he’s been gone two hours.”
“Yeah? He’s a marcher?” Lucas asked.
“Anarchist,” she said. “Or anti-Christ. One of the two. I can’t keep them straight.”
Letty laughed and said, “I gotta get a camera in here . . . Hey, there they are.” She waved across the hillside at two gangling teenage boys, brothers, both with braces on their teeth. One of them, the older one, was a wicked street basketball player, and had nearly taken it to Lucas at the hoop mounted on Lucas’s own garage. Lucas generally approved of them, but they were looking. He knew it, and they knew he knew it, and so were careful. “Take it easy,” he said.
“Yeah . . . could I get ten dollars?” Letty asked.
“I suppose . . .”
She said quickly, “Twenty would be better.”
He gave her a twenty and she was gone.
“Nice girl,” said the woman with the baby.
“That sun is nasty,” Lucas said. “Is the kid okay?”
“The kid’s fine, but he’s sucking the life out of me,” she said. “I desperately need a cheeseburger and Mark’s got the money.”
“I could float you a cheeseburger loan,” Lucas offered.
She stood up and dusted off the seat of her shorts: “I accept. I’m really starving. Who do you shoot for . . . ?”
“BCA,” he said, and she nodded, and Lucas asked, “Too quiet. I’d like to see a little life in the crowd.”
“Too hot,” she said. Speaking as an old riot professional: “Basic rule of riots: you don’t have riots when it’s too hot. People get all pukey. Gotta wait until the evening, when things cool off. The best riots are when you have a long summer day, with a long evening where it cools off a little.”
“I don’t know all that technical stuff,” Lucas said with a smile.
They stepped around legs and bikes and clumps of people with signs and got to a street grill—the woman and the kid were convenient cover—and he bought her a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke, and got a Diet Coke for himself, and twiddled his fingers at the baby, and then took the baby while the woman, whose name was Lucy, ate the cheeseburger and they walked back to the tent. The baby had quiet blue eyes, observant and contained, and seemed interested in Lucas’s nose.
A passing stoner, with a sun-bleached ponytail, hazy blue eyes, and a lute in his hand, looked at Lucy, and then Lucas and the baby, and said, “Got that May and December shit going, huh? Good one.”
Lucy said, “Well, the sex is terrific.”
Lucas sa
id, “More like May and August.”
The stoner tapped Lucas on the chest and said, “Good one, man. I mean, you know? Keep it going, you know? Long as you can.”
“It’s hard, man, you know, sometimes, with a woman like this,” Lucas said. “They want too much, sometimes.”
The stoner bobbed his head: “I know that for sure, man. Life is hard, and then you fuckin’, you know . . . die.” Sobered by the thought, he wandered away.
“WE’RE GONNA build a new egalitarian culture, man,” Lucy said to Lucas, as she sat down on her blanket, chewing on the cheeseburger. “To each, according to his needs, from each, according to his ability. Which means that the insurance agents can keep on selling insurance for sixty hours a week and that stoner can keep getting wrecked every day.”
“Just a guy,” Lucas said. “A lost soul.”
“I’m getting tired of it,” Lucy said. She squinted up through the tree leaves, and the sun sliding down to the west. Equinox coming in three weeks, and then winter. “Think I’m going home to Massachusetts. Get my dad to send me to grad school.”
“Think he’ll do it?”
“My dad will do anything I want him to,” she said. “Like you and your daughter.”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah . . . What about your husband?”
“Why wasn’t he here to buy me a cheeseburger when I needed it?” she asked. She took a few fries. “Fuck the revolution.”
A group of ten protesters in black began a chant: “No War but the Class War! No War but the Class War!” and people in the park began drifting that way, and a couple of cops idled along with them.
Lucas and Lucy chatted for a while—Lucy had been living in Iowa, where she and her husband were summer visitors at a drama commune, which gave revolutionary plays to local farm communities, and her husband was working on a screenplay—and then Lucas got up to leave. “Say hi when you see me around,” he said.
“Thanks for the food,” she said. “I was starting to hurt.”
BACK IN the HomTel, Lindy screeched, in a high-climbing soprano, “Goddamnitttttt . . . Brutus . . .”
Brutus had turned her every way but loose, faceup, facedown, upside down, and when he was all done, he lay sweating and naked and red on the bed, and said, worn out, “You really are the best piece of ass on the North American continent.”
“Not including Europe?” She was sitting on a towel, because she didn’t want to leak on the bed. She must be in her mid-thirties, now, Cohn thought, and still had small curved breasts with pink nipples and freckles.
“I don’t know about Europe,” Cohn said. “You hear stories about the French women. But hell, they’re in France. It’s like that song: ‘She ain’t Rose, but Rose ain’t here.’”
Lindy pouted: “I’m better than anybody in France.”
“Probably,” Cohn agreed. “I sorta haven’t tested those waters.”
“Better not, either,” she said.
“You fuck anybody while I was gone?” he asked.
“Well, sure, a couple,” she said. “It was two years, Brute. What was I supposed to do, scratch?”
“I hope to hell you didn’t catch anything,” he said.
She slapped his leg: “I didn’t. I’m careful. They were married men—I was saving my good stuff for you.”
“They pay you?”
“They bought me some stuff,” she admitted.
“Expensive stuff?”
“Well, Richard, there was this guy Richard Blanding in Birmingham, he paid my rent and bought me a car.”
“That’s something,” Cohn said.
“A Pontiac Solstice. Bright yellow. Not exactly a Ferrari.”
Cohn closed his eyes and sighed, and sank into the softness of the memory foam, and let all his bones relax. She started to hum, like she did when she was getting bored. He thought, Fuck her.
He’d lied to her about being the best piece of ass in North America. Lindy was a good old country girl, but more the Pontiac Solstice of pussy, rather than the Ferrari. Richard Blanding, whoever he was, had known precisely what he was getting.
LINDY, FOR HER PART, humming, rubbing at the polish on her toe-nails, thinking that she needed another pedicure, took a long careful look at the naked man beside her. She’d met him when she was sixteen, and he was in his mid-twenties. He’d been a wild one, who liked it all: money, women, gambling, cocaine and reefer and Saturday night fights in the gravel parking lots outside country road-houses, with the frogs croaking from the roadside ditches and the fireflies blinking out over the farm fields.
He’d grown up with a middle-class family, and if he’d done what they’d wanted him to do, he’d have gone to college and might have had his own construction business now, building out the suburbs of Atlanta or Birmingham. Might even be rich: but he wouldn’t have had any fun.
His fun—the women, gambling, cocaine and reefer—took cash money, and didn’t leave much time for actual work. The solution to the problem was obvious: take the money from people who already had it. He did it for a few years, finally got caught and sent to prison, where he got his graduate education and had time to think it all over.
He’d decided not to go straight, but simply to get better at his job.
He had.
That’s when they met, Cohn flush after an armored car holdup, and now here they were, almost twenty years later, in another motel. Cohn’s face had developed some harsh lines on both sides of his mouth—smile lines, but frown lines, too—and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. His hair was still thick and curly, and he had the great teeth. Still thin and tough: but getting older. Gray in his chest hair . . .
Getting older, like she was, she thought. Not many more years when she could count on being taken care of because she was nice to somebody . . .
COHN REACHED OVER and stroked her leg: “Can’t tell you how much I like seeing you,” he said.
“Me too,” she said.
RANDY WHITCOMB had red hair precisely the same shade as Cohn’s, but never had Cohn’s potential. Whitcomb had been caught up in the early days of gangsta music, riveted to MTV when he should have been in school. Unlike most people, he believed the words. And though he lived in a ticky-tacky St. Paul white-bread suburb where the biggest public facility was a hockey arena, Whitcomb was naturally a gangsta, even with his bony white face and improbable thatch of hair. When he finally got kicked out of high school, he moved to north Minneapolis, a modest but occasionally violent black ghetto, where he picked up the language and sold dope on the street and eventually started running two or three whores that nobody else wanted.
Those were the big days of the crack wars, when everybody was buying the stores out of baking soda and everybody was cooking up the crack in the kitchen, twelve-year-olds were walking the streets with nines and bad attitudes. The cops were going crazy, and nobody really paid much attention to a small-time white guy living off marijuana and a short chain of low-rent women.
But Whitcomb was living the gangsta life, with paisley shirts and wide-wale corduroy pants and green-dyed lizard-skin cowboy boots. Then one day he found out that one of his whores was talking to a cop about who was doing what, who was selling what, who might be getting what package from El Paso through UPS or FedEx, or what guy might be coming in from Chicago with a big suitcase, riding in on the ’dog . . . well, Whitcomb, with one too many gangsta musicals banging in his head, went for the pimp punishment: found her and cut her face up with a church key.
The thing is, she’d been talking to Davenport.
Davenport got him in the back of a bar and beat him like a big bass drum.
Later Whitcomb had gotten accidentally involved with a guy who was a serial killer—really was an accident, in that street way, where all kinds of people bump into each other—had gotten involved in a shootout, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. That ended his sex life, but hadn’t changed his head that much. Davenport had been responsible for the shootout, in Whitcomb’s eyes; had been responsible for ev
erything that had gone wrong in his life, including two stretches behind bars . . .
He sat in the van and watched the cops and the protesters streaming up and down the hill, another guy in a wheelchair, one of those happy dildos you see around who don’t even seem to realize how fucked-up they are, and he tracked Letty through the park, as she talked to a woman at a tent, and then to a tall guy who looked like Davenport, but didn’t dress right, and then hooked up with two kids, boys, the kind whom Whitcomb hated, good-looking athletes who probably got good grades and had money and ate peanut butter sandwiches with Mom and Wally and the Beav . . .
Briar sat behind the wheel, watching the crowd, until Whitcomb said, “There she goes. They’re going someplace. Get going that way . . . that way, dummy. Hurry . . .”
LETTY LEFT Lucas in the park and went off with John and Jeff, taking the front passenger seat in John’s car. John would have to concentrate on his driving—he’d only had his license for a month—and Jeff was safely stuffed in the back. No hands to deal with.
She was going to have to start thinking about sex pretty soon, she knew, but now was too soon. When she really got back to school, maybe. A friend of hers, a month younger than she was, was already being thoroughly mauled by her boyfriend, bra up, pants down, and though there hadn’t yet been any actual intercourse, that wasn’t far off. She’d be giving it up during football season, unless something happened to the relationship, Letty thought. The girl was in love and that made it all a lot more complicated.
Still, the whole thing made her uneasy. She’d get around to it, but . . . later. Not with John. He was too old, a senior. Jeff was in her grade, and had a shot, when he got rid of the braces. And she was still a little flat-chested. That bothered her a bit, that a boy might go in looking for a mountain and find a molehill.
Weather had told her not to worry: “I know you can’t not worry about it—but, don’t worry about it. You’re not the big-boobed kind, and believe me, that’s better. The boys are going to like you fine. More than fine. You’re going to have to fight them off with a baseball bat.”
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