by John Domini
Yet here she was two mornings later, en route to her husband’s worksite. It hadn’t escaped Barbara’s notice, either, that the Jaybird had traveled with an armed guard these last couple of mornings. His helmet-ck-vest shared the same car. Plus what did it tell her when their NATO liaison suggested that the mother and the kids wait a couple of hours after the father left, before they headed to the camp themselves? Nevertheless here she sat, ignoring the itch between her legs, more of her husband’s recklessness. She sat there and allowed the kids to ride out past the gate to Hades.
If she intended to destroy this family, she had to make the trip. She had to get a whiff of the air outside their cliff-top bubble.
But how was Barbara going to clear her head here at the Refugee Center? At this a lake of rippling nylon, spread across one of the broader hollows in the landscape—nylon or some other faded synthetic, all of it rippling from the neediness beneath the fabric? Again a crowd greeted the van. Again the gang gathered with hands in the air, waving, seeking, and one or two thumped the vehicle’s windows and panels. There were shouts, too, rough open syllables, vaguely Italian. Barb couldn’t pick out the words at first. Faced with a crowd like this, it took an effort just to realize that no one held up any bits or pieces for Paul to bless. No one carried church bric-a-brac. Yet the terremotati filled the parking lot, a patch of flattened grass. From there the tent city ran down-slope, here and there revealing a nylon cord or an aluminum pole, or a scrap of ground the color of driftwood, or—something else again—a flutter of laundry in party colors. Barbara thought of the old-city warrens in which she’d spent her mornings, this past week. From an occasional tent-corner there trailed a few bright ribbons, as colorful as the laundry. The mother even spotted something like one of the prayer ojetti, perhaps halfway downhill. This appeared to be a group photograph, a collage in an ornate frame, under a corrugated plastic rain cover of dirty turquoise.
Also here and there played shadows, children still intent on their games. The ones who’d climbed into the sunlight, the flat space surrounding the van, tended to be the parents or grandparents. Their crumpled faces came in a dozen shades of black, under unkempt Afros or wobbly dreadlocks.
The mother had a question. “These are mostly illegals, right?” She looked to Kahlberg. “I’m saying, do they even have a work visa?”
The officer went on checking the crowd. “The epicenter was outside the city, in the periphery. That’s where you get the more transient population.”
“And the—the radicals? On the hunger strike?”
The liaison shot her a glance. “One has to expect,” he said slowly, “a certain amount of political tension in marginalized populations. One has to consider, as well, that many of these people arrive on these shores with criminal intent. Their sole purpose for being in Italy is to generate as much income as they can. Chris, big shooter. You know what the old Silk-man’s talking about, don’t you?”
The shifts of tone sounded doubly spooky under the blurred shouts from outside.
“Libya used to be an Italian colony,” Chris said. “Ethiopia too.”
“And Ethiopia—” Barbara began.
“See,” Chris said. “Mussolini was all fired up about a new Roman Empire.”
“Chris, Ethiopia is starving.” Barbara tried not to glare.
“A seriously depressed economy, big shooter, over a disturbingly long term.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” She concentrated on the Lieutenant-Major. “So far as the folks outside are concerned, Naples is the land of milk and honey.”
Kahlberg stared back mildly.
“You know,” John Junior said, “when Mom was a kid, she couldn’t tell the difference between the pictures of Jesus and the pictures of Che Guevara.”
“Stop it, stop it.” Barbara whipped around; the teens were grinning, slapping hands. “If I hear one more stupid sarky remark—”
“There’s Papa!” shouted Sylvia. “Papa, right there!”
Right there. Jay changed the whole shape of the scene beyond the windows. The man had his vice-president’s swagger even here, and as he approached the Humvee you could see he was bigger than nine tenths of the brown crowd around him. Plus he wore a chef’s baggy dress whites and a white long-visored cap, an outfit more bright and bleached and complete than anything among the faded dashikis and tourist T-shirts surrounding him. The terremotati appeared happy to see the Jaybird, including a few lighter-skinned folk Barb spotted now. Italians, these might have been, but more likely they’d drifted here out of the jigsaw nationalities across the Adriatic. A face or two out there looked Arab, as well. In any case everyone smiled as they made way for the capo. One of the blackest of the refugees, a man whose seamy face called to mind the folds in Father Cesare’s robe, mouthed what must’ve been some sort of wisecrack. His eyes, though they were hardly more than glints in a cracked rock, glowed with obvious warmth. Barb’s husband matched joke for joke, meantime. He shot a smirk one way and, glancing the other direction, tapped the peeling brim of a baseball cap. This was a person who would do nothing rash, a person with no hard feelings.
Barbara on the other hand was startled just to see her husband slide open the van’s door. She hadn’t known they were unlocked.
“Hey,” Jay said. “Have I been looking forward to this.”
“Papa,” Dora said, “you look so sharp!”
“Well I feel sharp. Feel real good, baby doll. Feel good all the time, because I know I’m helping people.”
The father tugged the long bill of his cap. Barbara looked over the bandage by his ear. Jay’s bruise had faded, the scar had shrunk, but he was careful about keeping the spot protected. Now he found her eyes.
“We’re helping a lot of kids here, too,” he said. “A lot of these boys and girls, without us they’d have no chance.”
Around his gleaming bulk came the smell of the crowd, unwashed and sun-blasted. The family stepped out into chock-full air, as much as into the flap of tenting, the creak of plank pathways, or the singing of the aluminum poles each time the breeze picked up. Jay led the group down through the jumble to his central tent-offices, stopping several times for introductions and more banter. He took into account, as well, how the NATO guardsmen affected the refugees. The poveri hadn’t even had time to grow accustomed to his own armed tagalong, and now the family had arrived with two more. The campers who were made the most nervous appeared to be the most African, with tribal scarring and brimless sequined caps. Their steep-cheeked faces fell, when these men and women spotted the extra brace of gunslingers, both of them blonde and pale to boot, down from the European North. The tent-dwellers from the deepest South gave the troopers the widest berth, backing into the mud that bordered the plank byways, never mind that they were barefoot or, at best, in plastic flip-flops. Everyone in camp, really, backed away from the pair in uniform. The mother was grateful that the soldiers had slipped off their padded bulletproofing, and grateful too that Jay adjusted his patter. The man started to sound like a schoolteacher. He made it clear that he would never have brought his family to the camp if he believed there were any possibility of trouble.
“The heavy artillery,” he said, “that wasn’t my idea.”
As they went, Barbara and the kids also learned about the camp’s layout, a wider semi-circle that sloped down to a smaller one. It was an amphitheater, and down at the stage lay the important setups, including jay’s beloved kitchens. Papa directed a staff of twenty-plus, something else the wife hadn’t realized. Besides that, the Jaybird was the lone worker from the U.S. He had his Coordinator’s work cut out for him, needing to communicate across several varieties of anti-American resentment. Barb thought of the electronic misunderstandings that JJ and Chris got into over the internet.
Yet she alone seemed to understand the difficulty, and to see through the upbeat charade. Barbara alone, the half-out-the-door wife, seemed to be the only one who worried for the capo, even as he struck poses that implied he was everybody’s friend. But how co
uld these poveri connect finally with this transplanted food-industry exec? Most of them spoke a mangled Italian, and more than once she heard them break down into pidgin French or a sub-Saharan patter. From underfoot, meanwhile, came the suck and pop of the walkway boards in pockets of mud. Not that it had rained, out here; the water was the run-off from the hose-and-coat-hanger showers—if not from some less sanitary facility. Plus chalky clouds of pesticide would waft across the family’s path every now and then. Lice powder, Jay explained. The Site had a doctor come in and dispense a fresh dose every week. But for Barbara the acid-flavored dust only reinforced her unhappy take on the place, as bad as that first day down in the original city, a reeking underworld in which you could barely speak with the ghosts.
After the group reached the center of the camp, the mother tried twice to point the way back to the parking area. Wrong each time. The Jaybird corrected her, stepping in front of her and thrusting out his chest.
“Listen,” Barb said, “I’m not sure the kids can—”
“Kids,” Jay said, “I’ll tell you what to look for. If you’re ever lost in here, just look for your family.”
He pointed at something closer by. At the corner of a broad tent hung a wide and ornately framed photograph, another group shot, a rough match to the one up by the parking area. The portrait itself, now that Barbara looked at it, held several heads in the surreal fixity of the Sears Roebuck studio. One of those heads however was impossibly enlarged, some kind of trick with the copier. For this was a copy, a doctored full-color scan of a shot Barb had seen before. This was her and the children, in a free portrait she’d won at a church raffle a year ago. The enlarged head was her own, mushrooming above the kids’ as if she were the family Vesuvius.
“I don’t ask this guy about the technology,” Jay announced, waving a hand at Silky Kahlberg. “I don’t want to know.”
“No,” the Lieutenant-Major said. “You don’t want to know.”
He was fluttering his lapels, getting some air under his pretty jacket. Not that you could see what he might have in the armpit.
Jay went on with the story. A number of the refugee families, he explained, had arrived at the site with, of all things, a hefty self-portrait. “Hey,” the father said, “everybody wants a picture of themselves. Think about it, it’s like I.D.” In the camp, however, the ungainly squares and ovals took up space in tents already crowded. In a couple of cases, the odd item of salvage made the neighbors jealous. So after a few days of getting to know his site, The Boss had hit on a plan for community building.
“It was time,” Jay said, “we had some signage.”
Circulating with his least-busy staff members, he’d labeled and cataloged all the larger, more garish frames—and Barb for one realized what that part of the process was about, community building among his colleagues, tunneling through their built-up suspicions when it came to Americans. Jay had insisted, too, that the records be kept in English, Italian, and French. Then he’d rounded up volunteers from around the camp.
“Oh,” Barbara said, “I get it. You—”
“Now this next part,” Kahlberg said, “this is the miracle part, if you ask me.”
Jay’s volunteer homeless had gone around collecting the catalogued pieces. The families had let Barbara’s smiling but still-unknown husband remove their family photos and take the fittings, though often it was their sole possession of any value. The Center took them away peaceably, with nothing but a piece of paper in return.
“I just figured,” Jay said, “the Site could be a city and a nation. A nation, it says somewhere, is just the same people living in the same place.”
Again, Barb understood better. She could appreciate how the Americano’s fair business practices had mattered less to the people in camp than the picture of his family. At the same time as he’d asked for their frames, he’d shown them what he had at stake, in Naples: his own little band of runaways, smiling and airbrushed. He’d shown them what he’d given up.
The mother tried to explain. “These clandestini, for them it’s probably been years since they saw anything like this.”
“That’s just technology,” Jay said. “Silky does it in the NATO shop.”
“No, I’m saying, the way we look, it must’ve seemed like we come from—”
“The liaison officer,” Silky said, “has access to all document functions.”
He went on smiling, between the tips of his hair, tucked back and poking from under his ears. Meanwhile, Jay pointed towards the reshaped portrait overhead. Even the NATO guards looked up at it, letting their rifles hang slack.
“Signage,” Jay said. “Now everybody’s got an address.”
The light through the blue plastic visor made the mother’s mushroomed head all the stranger. Barb recalled that she’d been a nervous wreck on the day of the shot, still been trying to make a go of it with Maria Elena, their Mexican ward. At least she’d known better than to spring that girl on the folks at the photo studio.
“We-ird,” Sylvia said. “It’s like the stuff Chris shows us on the web.”
“But that’s so we can find it,” Dora said. “Right Papa? If we’re lost, we just look for the weird stuff.”
“Hey, you got it,” Jay said. “Smart girls. You got it.” Then as he gave the photo another look, did Barbara see him shake off a chill?
The way Jay put it was, so long as he had the extra hands, he was going to put them to work. Kitchen duties for the girls, carpentry assignments for the boys. But when Barb asked where she fit in, her husband dropped his eyes. Wherever you like, he said, scrubbing his forehead with a calloused palm. The wife, aware she was under NATO scrutiny, briskly declared she’d make herself useful in the camp chapel.
Good thing, too. Best to look busy when, it turns out, the family’s Public Relations Department has arranged for the media. The reporters joined them after the Lulucitas moved into the community kitchen. Cooking took place in an open-sided tent, where standing fans whirred between the ropes, but even so a patch of heat-fog lay between the broad steel stoves. Jay handed out smocks and gloves, and the girls fitted on each other’s hairnets, refusing Mama’s help. Then the air got closer still. Along one open wall gathered another knot of visitors, white folks.
“Well, meno male,” said Silky. “Meno male.”
Chris was the first to translate: “less bad,” acceptable. Among the new arrivals, a couple of the men were getting out notepads, and the lone woman clicked on her video-camera. Five reporters, altogether, everyone wearing the Southern Italian version of business casual, a lightweight dress shirt. They all knew Silky and seemed comfortable with his Dixiefied Italian. Indeed as the liaison made the introductions, including the names of the newspapers and the TV stations, he might’ve laid on the compone more thickly than usual. Might’ve played to the stereotype, keeping the press comfortable.
Not that the refugees trusted the man, whatever his accent. Barbara, checking around the kitchen, realized that the campers tended to allow Kahlberg the same space as they gave his gunmen. But the poveri at once proved great fans of the press, especially the two with cameras. Several crowded in behind the reporters, and beyond the kitchen’s floor-fans, outside, you saw fresh clusters of naked feet. Inside, the posing quickly turned shameless, the Africans even popping their eyes. The most animated cluster gathered around the woman, a young woman, good-looking. She was new at TV work, if her gloves were any indication. Fingerless thoroughbred leather protected the girl’s hands, and she kept adjusting her grip.
Barb, for her part, hid her face. She fussed with her hairnet. Anyway the NATO liaison was directing the media elsewhere, towards “il famoso Paul.”
Here amid the stainless steel, however, Mr. Paul didn’t appear particularly famous. Jay had made the boy strap on a carpenter’s tool belt, breaking up his stark color scheme, and the work-gloves muted his hands. As he nodded under the cameras, he seemed merely young and clumsy. The belt’s hammer-holster hung to his knee. Barbara gat
hered herself and stepped in beside him, deflecting the reporters’ attention. The eleven-year-old put a gloved hand on her back.
Then the mother found herself fielding a question from out of left field: “How many years are you married?”
“Twenty years,” she said, working up a smile.
“It will be twenty years this September,” Jay said.
This reporter was a man, his shirt-cuffs folded back from the wrist Italian-style. He looked from wife to husband. “How much time do you stay in Naples?”
“Uh, all right,” Barbara began. “The kids start school again—”
“We’re in it for the long haul,” Jay said. “The long haul, capisce? Today, hey. You’ll see. This is my family.”
The husband kept up the stage business even when he put his back to the reporters. As he gave the children their assignments, he loudly threw in additional tidbits, anything the press might find useful. He reiterated what he’d done with the frames and photos—a thumbnail version, meno male. He mentioned the camp’s specialty meals based on country of origin. Barb had caught the act before, after all she’d married a salesman, but today the pitch wasn’t just Jay. This was Jay morphed, Jay after he’d learned a few things about the “printing facility” from Lieutenant-Major Kahlberg. She couldn’t see a decent way to stop it. When her husband asked if she wanted to say anything about what she might do in the chapel, Barbara only shook her head.
He continued quietly. “Church work, guys. You know. It’s private. My Barbara, she’s always done church work.”
Catching her reflection in a steel stovetop, she tried not to scowl. But in another minute, give the man credit, the Jaybird again diverted the reporters’ attention. He had them taking pictures. First group shots, sentimental as Sears Roebuck, and then the photographers singled out Dora and Sylvia and put them together with the kitchen crew. Peach-fleshed blond schoolgirls with rope-sinewed black laborers.
The Africans spoiled the effect somewhat, saying cheese. Seeing their gap-toothed smiles, one with a fat gold insert, Barbara again wondered at how little fuss these clandestini were making over Paul. When the family had pulled into the parking lot, the refugees had acted the same as they would have for any drop-ins from the white world. They’d come to say hello, they’d given the van a rap or two, but they’d acted like the middle child was just another well-meaning ofay. This when they must’ve heard of the boy. The communications network that began down in the centro storico, the exclusive Neapolitan wireless network, surely had a relay station up in this Centro. Besides, here and there among the tents, you caught the blather of radio or TV But these musclemen in the kitchen would rather pose with the girls, and Barbara began to think that, here under the doctored photos, the faithful prayed to another miracle-man—not the son, but the father. Jay had named the roads, Jay provided the manna. Even to the Catholics in camp, then, the Band-Aid on the capo’s temple might be just one more piece of proof that he was extraordinary. Just, the rich get richer.