Settling behind the wheel and closing the car door, George asked, “What book is it?”
Matt exhaled quietly through his teeth. Oh. Christ, he thought, oh, well, in for a friggin’ penny . . .
“I’ll show you,” he said, “but you gotta promise me something first.”
“And what might that be?”
“Don’t make me talk about it. Okay? No comments, no questions.”
“Odd. But easy enough.”
Matt held the cover of the book up and put it down quickly, as if it were a flash card. If the book meant anything to George, he gave away none of it on his face.
“Ah,” he said, noncommittally, and Matt considered that a deeper act of friendship than George could possibly know.
They had parked their car across the street and half a block away from the drugstore. From this vantage point, they would conduct their surveillance, affording them a parallax view of the store facade. As for viewing the inside: There was a small remote television for that, on the seat between them, prepared to receive a program not even the best cable service could provide. Next to that was the walkie-talkie, which would connect them with Paul Bearer, the young rookie.
And now they would watch and wait. Mostly wait. Until they got the signal.
“Listen, ahhh,” Matt said uncomfortably, “do you mind if I’m not great company for a while?” He somewhat guiltily indicated his book. “I’d rather not make conversation. I’m kind of into this.”
“Nothing would make me happier than that you continue,” George replied seriously, again, in such a way that Matt could draw no conclusions other than that his partner was willing to be solicitous. Or was he? For after he said it, George folded his arms and stared fixedly front, through the windshield.
Matt sighed, started to put his book away. “Well, if you’re gonna be that way about it, make me feel like I’m abandoning you . . .”
With a look of surprise, George turned back toward Matthew. “Oh, no, no, I did not mean to convey that impression. I was just, as I’ve heard my eldest daughter say, getting myself into Zen à la mode. Concentrating.”
“That’s ‘Zen mode,’ George. Concentrating on what?”
“A fascinating game I’ve discovered in the puzzle pages of the Sunday paper. I’ve become rather taken with the pun-and-anagram crosswords. I can’t say I’m as proficient at them as I’d like to be. So many of the answers hew to colloquialisms that don’t come naturally to me yet—‘Zen mode,’ I suppose, being an example of one such—but I’ve found that there are anagrams everywhere. On storefronts, awnings, passing cars, billboards, posters. And in moments when there is nothing to do but sit and wait, the game of anagrams is one I find useful and amusing. It relaxes and entertains the mind while keeping it active.”
“Uh-huh . . .” Matt commented. And then, after a moment, because he knew he’d only pay for his ignorance later, “What the hell’s an anagram?”
“I’m sorry, Matthew,” George said with self-effacing charm, as if Matt’s lack of knowledge were somehow his fault. “An anagram is the rearrangement of letters from a word, or group of words, to form another word, or group of words.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of them,” Matt said, relieved because he actually had.
“For example,” George continued, “using the letters of your own name, Matthew Sikes, one could get ‘Skis met wheat.’ ”
“ ‘Skis met wheat’. . .” Dryly.
“Or ‘Skim a stew,’ provided you drop one of the T’s”
“Got it.”
“Or, perhaps best of all, ‘The Wet Kiss Ma.’ ”
“You can stop now, George.”
“The title of your book there—Black Like Me—might be rearranged to produce, ‘Lick ’em, Elba.’ ”
“Makes no sense. Elba’s a place, not a person.”
“Then how about ‘Lickable me’?”
“Why, you little filth-monger, you. I didn’t know your mind worked that way.”
“The salacious ones are the most fun.”
“Well, now you’re talkin’. Can you find any others?”
Furrowing a bemused brow, George scanned the street. “In fact,” he said, “there is a terribly suggestive anagram hidden within the name See Gurd Nurras. Only one would have to rearrange the Tenctonese letters, rather than the phonetic English spelling, and then translate.”
“To arrive at—?”
George paused a moment, then shook his head slightly. “No, it’s too dirty.”
“Trust me, George, I can take it.”
“No, no, I really can’t. It would distract you from your book.”
“George—”
“I insist, Matthew. See to the expansion of your mind. Don’t worry about me and my frivolities. What you want to do is so much more important.”
George faced forward anew, having once again betrayed no hidden agenda. But Matt was certain now, certain, that he had just been the victim of a subtle vengeance, and that if one were to look into the mind of George Francisco, one would find mischievous self-satisfaction.
In the face of which, what was there to do but read his book . . . ?
The remarkable, sobering, and deeply troubling thing about the odyssey of John Howard Griffin is that it never read as if it were a sociological treatise. Matt found it to be an emotional roller coaster with a novelistic power that tore at the soul, precisely because it wasn’t a fiction.
The further Matt read, as Griffin’s journey took him deeper and deeper into the South, the more often he kept flipping back to the passage at the front of the book that haunted him most of all. He’d read it so many times he very nearly had it memorized—and still it possessed him.
Griffin had planned on maintaining a cool journalistic objectivity about the task he’d undertaken. But that had been blasted away the moment he’d seen himself in the mirror, a white man utterly transformed into a black man.
“I had expected to see myself disguised,” he wrote, “but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. Even the senses underwent a change so profound it filled me with distress. I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. Suddenly, almost with no mental preparation, no advance hint, it became clear and permeated my whole being. My inclination was to fight against it. I had gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won’t rub off. The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me.”
Matt wondered if Fancy, upon looking at her transformation for the first time, had experienced the same feeling in reverse. Over and above all the things she’d have to sacrifice, had she felt . . .
Control . . .?
Power over her own life . . .?
Permission to roam freely among the owners of the world . . . ?
Had she liked herself better, simply for knowing that now she would be liked by others, liked not in spite of being a Newcomer, but liked without label or qualification?
Yesterday, Matt had taken Fancy’s side against George by saying that she’d “made a mistake” . . . but who the hell was he to determine that, any more than George had been to decide that she was irredeemably vile?
Every now and again, Matt found himself pulling back from the book a little, when it referred to the whites only restrooms and the back-of-the-bus indignities of the past. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore, he would think. And then he would remember . . . sure it did. Of course it did. But like everything else in this new age of technology and reason, it was just subtler.
And so all-pervasive it could send you off the deep end.
Literally . . .
They got word about the jumper at exactly 2:37 on a Thursday afternoon. Matt remembered it clearly because Tuggle had been behind the wheel, and Matt had been the one to log it in on the clipboard, the better to reference it easily come time to fill out the paperwork. He had to be especially meticulous about writing it too, because Tug had just popped the bubble onto the roof of their unmarked car, hit the siren, and stepped on the gas, the sudden acceleration making Matt’s hand shaky.
The destination to which they were racing was the Markell Tower, a skyscraper hotel in downtown L.A.
The crowd had gathered, of course. Guy wants to leap, you’re gonna get a crowd. All types in the crowd, too, which was par for the course: concerned citizens, curiosity hounds, and that all-time fave—you know ’em, you love ’em, you can’t live without ’em—the Cheerleaders.
“Jump!” they shouted. “Jump!”
Cheerleaders yer ass. Effin’ Death Squad, if you asked Sikes, which nobody did. Idiots to boot. They thought it was like the movies: guy jumps, does his fall, dog-paddling through the air, screaming, hitting the pavement (damn, that smarts), cops and coroners and chalk outlines on the street. Telly Savalas sucking on a lollipop, asking hard questions; Danny Travanti, if you fantasized a cop from a younger, hipper generation, gritty and soulful, just like on the Hill.
What they didn’t know, morons, was that unless you really dove when you took your dive—positioned yourself to slice through the air like a knife blade—the fall was a graceless thing, resistance from the air molecules causing the body in motion to cartwheel rather frighteningly, gravity pulling it back toward the building, against which it would bounce along the way. And as far the chalk outline . . . figure a humanoid body is, what, ninety percent water, something like that? Held in place by a particularly fragile surround of skin. Basic physics, folks. Ever see a water-balloon hit the pavement? You may get your chalk outline, but there’s not a helluva lotta hope it’ll come out lookin’ too much like a thing that was once a person.
Sikes always wanted to rub this information into their drooling yahoo faces, but there was never time, not in a situation like this. He was always too busy trying to get upstairs before the jumper came down. This fella was very damn high up, too, thirty-second floor.
He and Tuggle waited very impatiently for the elevator, but when it came, at least hotel management had been smart enough to send a guy with a special key, allowing the elevator to pass all interim stops between L and 32.
When the elevator doors slid open, the hotel manager was there, Denis Markell himself, forty-eight, goatee, thinning hair line, subtle French accent.
“Are you les gendarmes?”
Tug, who had a reflexive need to lampoon pretension, strode out of the elevator a split second before Matt, saying, in his best black basso: “Dat be us.”
“Avec moi, s’il vous plaît,” Markell commanded, too high up on his personal food chain to give much of a merde about irony from a public servant, and spurs on his heels with characteristic French primness, setting a long-legged quick-march pace which they followed.
“Ze man is a Newcomair,” Markell informed them as they walked. “His name is Carl Orff, he paid cash for an overnight stay in our least expensive type room, and he brought wiz him a child.”
As if there wasn’t enough to keep them perky.
“A child?” Matt blurted.
“Oui. It is hard to know wiz Newcomairs, zey are so, well, new, but ze desk man informs me zat ze child looked to be about ten years old. I have not seen ze boy myself.”
“Not much mystery about the young’uns,” Tug said. “If he looked about ten, he was about ten.”
They stopped at room 3206. A chambermaid was poised and ready with a key; a few other staff members gathered around also, waiting to help in ways they couldn’t fathom and trying to control interference from onlookers as more and more guests stepped out of their rooms to observe.
From inside they could hear the wails of a young boy.
“Dahh-DEE. Please, DONNN’T! Dahh-DEE!!!”
And, more faintly, an adult voice:
“I just want you to see, that’s all. Chuck, I just want you to see what your mother has done to me! And then you can tell her!” (The voice was fainter, not because it was any less intense, but because it was coming from outside, half its volume being whipped away by the breeze.)
It kept going on like that and had clearly been thus for quite a while. Every now and again the exchange would shift into Tenctonese, but there was no translation needed. Desperation made the same noises in any tongue.
The chambermaid, a young college student, unusually articulate and to-the-point for one in her job (sometimes God gave you a break in the detail work), said, “Every time I try to enter, even if it’s only to comfort the boy, he threatens to jump. I don’t dare call his bluff. He says he’ll speak to cops, though.”
“Sounds like he’s willing to negotiate, then,” Sikes commented, looking at Tuggle.
“I don’t know,” said the chambermaid. “Whatever his wife did to him, he’s very bitter. He says he wants a cop to witness this because he knows it’s a cop’s job to get the facts right. A cop will deliver the message to her.”
Tuggle frowned. “So what does he need the kid for?”
“To deliver the pain.”
Matt ran a hand through his hair. “Mama Mia,” he said. And then, “Hey, Tug, I fucked up Slag Psychology but good in PACT class. You wanna take this guy, I’ll handle the kid?”
“Don’t know ’bout no ‘wanna,’ ” Tug replied. “But I’ll do it.”
He took the key from the chambermaid, knocked lightly on the door, started to open it.
“I’m warning you!” they heard from outside. “I’m warning you!”
“Stay away!” came the smaller voice from closer in. “Don’t make my daddy jump!”
The door was open only a crack; Tuggle held it there, spoke through the narrow opening. “Son, we’re two police officers. Tell your dad it’s the police. He asked for us. Remind him that he asked for us.”
They waited as the message was whimperingly conveyed. A minute later, Tug felt the doorknob moving within his grasp. He let it go, and the young boy. Chuck Orff, opened it.
“He says you can come in. Nobody else.”
The boy wore a striped shirt, ripped Levis, ratty sneakers, and an expression of emotional devastation too deep for any ten-year-old to have to bear. Sikes knelt to his level, said, “C’mere,” and the boy practically fell into his arms. Sikes held little Chuck tight, and Chuck returned the grip to match, as if Matt were a lifeline.
The room was, as Markell had said, a no-frills jobbie: twin beds, dresser drawers, a little side table, a chair, small bathroom to the right as you walked in, GE television with remote, and a phone. And, of course—now—an open window. Big one, pivot hinges, so it swung in like a revolving door.
Tuggle crossed to it, stuck his head out, looked left, obviously spotting his man on the ledge, said, “Carl, I’m a cop, my name is Bi—”
And that was as far as he got before Carl’s voice roared back from the ledge, “Not you! Not you! I don’t want to speak to you! You’re brown! I want one of the pink ones! I can only speak to one of the pink ones! Get away or I jump!”
A little spooked, Tuggle said, “ ’Kay, man, chill, chill,” and backed the hell off. He turned toward Matt, with a look of dumb astonishment on his face.
“You believe this shit?” he said. “A bigot Newcomer.”
Little Chuck lifted his head from Sikes’s shoulder, turned to face Tuggle.
“It’s because you look like my other daddy,” he said.
“Your other—” Tug began, and Matt interrupted.
“Wait a minute,” he said, the tone of his voice implying that he was on to something. He cupped Chuck’s chin in his hand and said, “Did your mommy leave your first daddy?”
The boy, ashamed of it, nodded silently.
“And . . .” Matt continued, “did her ne
w boyfriend look like my partner? Brown, like that?”
Again, a nod. Sniffles.
“Hey, listen. None of this is your fault. None of it, you hear me? Now, let me ask you—”
“What’s going on in there???” came Carl’s voice from outside. “Chuck?”
“Hang in, Carl, pink one’s on the way!” Tuggle called.
“You have to answer me quick. Chuck, so I can save your dad,” Sikes said.
Sniff, sniff. “You promise?”
“Yeah, I promise,” Matt vowed. Like a schmuck. And added, “Did your mommy take you to live with your new daddy?”
A nod.
“What’s your mommy’s name?”
“Bea.”
“Does she know you’re with your daddy?”
“Daddy said so.”
“Said so when?”
“When he came to pick me up at school.”
“Does he usually do that?”
“Nuh-uh. I go home on the school bus.”
Great. Carl had kidnapped his kid, in addition to everything else.
“Chuck? Can I give you over to my partner? He’s a really cool guy, he’ll take care of you.”
Chuck Orff, helpless among the bewildering world of grown-ups, nodded, and Matt handed the boy off to his partner.
Then he took a deep breath, trying not to freeze.
Tuggle creased his brow at Matt. His expression saying, You got to do this, man. Chuck’s expression saying. You promised!
Matt squared his shoulders and crossed to the window, trying not to think about it too much. Just do it.
He stuck his head out, looked down. Yeah, you bet: long way. Too high up to hear the Cheerleaders, though. Their unamplified yells were snatched up by the breeze long before they could make the tall trip to floor thirty-two. And he could see that the emergency service trucks had arrived. Soon someone would be up here with a harness—for the cop, not the jumper; some rescues had actually been carried out by catching a leaper just as he started his fall—and down there they’d be pulling out a giant air mattress. Maybe. If it seemed worth it or practical, which Matt doubted. Pretty big gamble, calculating the angle of descent from this high. And no guarantee that if he landed where he was supposed to, he wouldn’t break his neck anyway.
Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy Page 15