Talking Heads

by John Domini

  “Kit, oh course now, sure. Course.”

  She took another long moment with his face, his bruises.

  “Huh. See now girl, this here’s Kit. Kit. Well listen, Kit, why don’t we have ourselves a drop?”

  “A drop? A drink?” He got his hands back in his pockets. “Mrs. Rebes, what I’ve got to tell you …” Aw, what had he been doing, back there on the stairway, on the MTA? Why didn’t he have more than the faintest notion of what to say?

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” he finished lamely.

  Her smile: a fish-like embittered swallowing that stretched her pouchy lower face into something squarish.

  “A little drop’s just the thing, then,” she said. “Little drop, sure. Be good for those bruises too.”

  She moved away, motioning him in.

  A flimsy person, perhaps forty-five, drifting off in slippers. Kit suffered a chilly recollection of the smoke-ghosts he’d seen from the T. The front room here looked too busy for this tired counterwoman. Busy as a heap of dry kindling. The heart of the space was a drinker’s setup: soundless TV, padded rocker, dusty blanket, dusty lamp, and a half-empty bottle of Catawba Pink. Beyond that, a hip-high radiator hissed and ticked. Its valve was bent, spraying steam. The glow of the standing lamp actually diffracted into an indoor rainbow. A half-crescent of faint yellows and reds shimmered there, above the radiator’s shoulder. Also the curtain in that corner couldn’t keep still. The material was threaded with glitter, like a Hare Krishna wrap, so as the curtain rose and fell it sent sparks through the steam rainbow. Ghosts in every medium.

  Kit, struggling to firm up his thinking, made a silent survey of the stereo equipment. Components from different systems, the stuff was top of the line. The tuner had a good dozen controls. The eight-track player had a toggle for boosting the bass. Now what sort of a violation was that? If a boy goes breaking and entering and the mother lets him keep his swag at home?

  Plus: a fraying plaid sofa and a vinyl beanbag sitter patched with duct tape. A ‘50s-style clock set in a helmsman’s wheel, way too large for the place (looked like it belonged on the Wood’s Hole Ferry). Though meant for the wall, it sat propped in one corner. Not that the mother had neglected the walls. Everywhere hung posters and cards and calendar cut-offs. Like mother, like son: the subjects couldn’t have been more different—Mrs. Rebes went in for religious stuff—but the decoration was every bit as compulsive and garish as in Junior’s closet. Zia Mirini might have wanted a couple of these pieces, like the portrait of Martin Luther King. He had a halo of Memphis motel neon. Kit also found a call for making King’s birthday a holiday.

  Every scrap and stick was dusty, brittle, dry. The whole place could burst into flames at the first wrong-way spark. And extension cords littered the floor. Stringy brown cords from Woolworth’s made clumsy double x’s with whiplike orange models from Roto Rooter. A cord even ran out the room’s farther archway, into the cheese-colored kitchen. Kit couldn’t find the outlet.

  “Thass right, take a good look.”

  Mrs. Rebes waited before him, holding out a drink.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Nothin to apologize for, Missah Viddich. Kit. Ain’t no one else ever cared to take a look.”

  He accepted the glass, a formal stemmed piece.

  “I try to keep it pretty in here, see. All the colors, oh see.” She’d resumed her square smile. “Can’t blame a mama with two boys to raise if she tryin to keep some colors, the place they call home.”

  Two boys. “How’s, ah, how’s the brother taking it, Mrs. Rebes? Does he come by, ever? Does he help out?”

  “Oh.” She drifted back to the Catawba Pink. “Louie-Louie, you know. He still a baby.”

  They drank. Sitting, the mother rocked with head back, murmuring a hymn-like melody that Kit might have recognized.

  “My Junior,” she said, or sang. “Finally found me a man who cares about my Junior.”

  Her eyes were shut but the skin of the lids rippled. Her eyes moved, seeing nonetheless. Kit thought of the psychic in Brookline, the woman Bette had visited.

  “Preacher told me I’d find someone,” she sang. “Preacher told me, there’d come someone see my boy for a hero.”

  “Have you been talking with your preacher?” Kit asked.

  “Oh now. Ain’t today Sunday?”

  “But you’re seeing him, ah, on a regular basis? You’ve got some support?”

  “Got me the best support of all, Kit. Got me the Spirit.”

  “Yes. That’s, that’s good.” He tried to find a comfortable place on the sofa. “But you do have, ah, people to talk to? You do have friends or people at the shop?”

  “At the shop? Hoo, now. Half the time ain’t nobody even over there but those itty-bitty college girls come in all dressed in black.”

  He got a deeper swallow of the sweet liquor. The reminder of his wife, her and her psychic, had only thrown him off that much more. His thinking had half-fallen into the worn grooves of speeches he’d prepared—not for this mother—but for Bette.

  “Missah Viddich, Kit. You know I already got this talkin-to from the preacher. You didn’ come here, now, just to give me this talkin-to?”

  Bette there’s nothing I can do with the paper … nothing with the paper or on TV or in front of some kind of Grand Jury investigation … that’s not going to prove anything Bette … that’s not me .

  *

  He wound up hearing about Junior’s funeral. About the plans, rather. The mother’s church was hard-line, a House of Zion, but the preacher was a true Christian. He’d accept the prodigal into his house. “We got some folks kinda high-tone in the congregation, you know,” the mother said. “Some folks think they superstars. Got Afros on they heads but don’t know they black in their heads.”

  Still, the funeral would have to wait. For now the state couldn’t release Junior’s body.

  “Police.” Sour-faced, she drained her glass. “Police come and told me.”

  “They need his body?”

  “My boy dead, and even that ain’t enough for ‘em. They want his bones too.”

  Kit touched his neck.

  “Oh see, they want an autopsy. They got some kinda investigation goin.”

  “I realize that,” Kit said. “They’ll probably have, ah, I realize there’s going to be …”

  “Investigation, hoo sure. Investigation, my skinny high-yellow butt.” She dolloped herself a fresh glass. “They gonna take my Junior’s bones and they gonna trick ‘em up to look like whatever they want. They gonna make my Junior do they own slick-ass song and dance.”

  “Mrs. Rebes, I’ll be there too. I mean at the investigation, the Grand Jury, whatever. I’ll be part of it.” The wine was so sugary, the sofa so full of dust.

  “Damn right you will. Kit, I thank Jesus you’re here. Thank Jesus I found somebody see my Junior for a hero.”

  “Ah, I don’t know about heroes, Mrs. Rebes.”

  “Oh see. You a hero all by your own self.”

  “No, Mrs. Rebes. No, please. We have to talk.”

  “Well we talkin, ain’t we?” Her eyes were open again. “I’m talkin to you, Kit, I’m not talkin to nobody from the Globe. None of those others.”

  “Yes, thanks, but—”

  “Those others, they keep callin you know, they keep tryin. I won’t talk to a one of em.”

  “That doesn’t matter any more, Mrs. Rebes.” Kit couldn’t seem to sit up straight, in this sofa. “It’s not about my paper getting a scoop on the other papers. Not any more.”

  “Course it ain’t about gettin no silly scoop. It’s about my boy.”

  The mother, Kit noticed then, had a halo. He’d sunk so deep into the sofa that her head appeared framed by the rainbow in the radiator spray behind her. A halo, like Martin on her wall, enhanced by the trembling Hare Krishna curtain.

  “My boy,” she said, “wasn’t no goddamn homo.”

  Kit couldn’t sit up. The sofa lamed him an
d the mother left him even weaker; he hadn’t scratched the surface of understanding her. Mrs. Rebes explained that rumors of Junior’s homosexuality were what really had put off the congregation at the House of Zion. “You remember what he did to that man, I mean what they say he did. To that white man at the robbery, you know what I’m sayin?”

  For some time before the robbery, Mrs. Rebes explained, there’d been talk like that going around. Talk about Junior and other men. “White men specially, oh see.” Kit finished his wine, trying to think, but at once the mother was at his side again, pouring him another. She seemed to be saying—the sickly odor of the Catawba Pink distracted him—that people at the House of Zion could forgive dealing drugs and murder, but never turning tricks with white men.

  “There’s other good boys wound up sellin’ soda,” she said, drifting back to her own drink. “Other children in that congregation, they wound up holding a murder weapon.”

  “I don’t remember any of this in the tapes,” Kit said. “The tapes you gave me, they were about Monsod.”

  “Well I din give you all the tapes.”

  Settling once more under her halo, with her cardigan off her shoulders, the woman seemed suddenly twenty years younger. She must have been exotic once, Vogue-ish.

  “I couldn give you em all.” She must have been a long cool drink of coffee and cream, once, with a loose walk and her son’s triangular face. “Oh no, Kit. I had to stick with my story.”

  “Your story,” Kit said.

  “My boy’s story. He was a hero.”

  Kit choked down more of the wine, working to swallow. Just the fact that the mother had been careful about what she’d shown him, that alone was hard to handle. Kit had to remind himself, as the Catawba Pink scorched his gullet, that everybody with any part in this business had been careful. Himself included. He’d cooked up his amalgam, his “Manny.” But Kit knew who he’d done it for, the readers he’d been trying to impress. He had some idea, too, who Mirini and Croftall had been trying to protect. But who was Mrs. Rebes worried about? Who, with this haloed fussiness about her son’s choice of sex partners?

  He knew one thing anyway—the woman was a believer. She imagined crowds surrounding her, a whole generation in the trenches alongside her. A woman like Mrs. Rebes had been the backbone of every rally for voting rights, every long march against segregation. In the trenches with the SCLC. She kept Martin on the wall, Martin and a hand-lettered poster calling for a day to honor him. The woman had committed herself to something holy, a Movement.

  “I raised my Junior,” she was saying, “in a house that had the Spirit.”

  Was she a dying breed? It was ten years since Martin had gone down, and her Junior seemed like vivid proof of the difference those years had made. Junior might not have read Jean Genet or Eldridge Cleaver, but he knew their scam, the imprisoned genius. His cassettes, the few his mother had let Kit listen to, would never have been so grotesque and thorough if the young con hadn’t carried around some media-enlarged sense of himself. Been to the end of every line there is. If Junior were in his mother’s position, today, he’d have had 60 Minutes there. And the difference had nothing to do with intelligence, or with growing up more in the street. Nothing so simple. Mrs. Rebes knew what kind of a dump she lived in—when she was sober, at least. She probably even knew the words that professors and social workers used to describe her choices, clay-heavy words like urban migration and church constituency. Yet for a woman like her, unlike for her son, all of that was unreal appearance. What mattered most wasn’t whether Junior’s cell was up to code, but whether his heart was pure. What mattered was his place among the saints.

  The rest was nothing but words, words, words, for a woman like Mrs. Rebes. It was the white man’s way of taking far too seriously run-of-the-mill problems like loneliness, improper wiring, or trouble with the law.

  “Plenty of good children,” she repeated, “wind up holding a murder weapon.”

  Kit nodded slowly.

  “The Lord sees the heart,” Mrs. Rebes said.

  “I want to know,” Kit said, “why this happened.”

  “Well, you want to understand about the child, you got to start with the father. Oh, see. You want to find out about Junior’s father, you got to go down to the Triple-X movies.”

  “Mrs. Rebes, please.” Once more Kit struggled to straighten his spine. “I came here because, because …”

  “You goin to tell me about my boy, ain’t you?”

  They blinked at each other, upright in sagging chairs.

  “You got somethin to say about seein my boy, down in Monsod the other day. Ain’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well like I say, Kit. You do like I say before you try to tell me about my own flesh and blood. You take yourself down to those movie houses, you go down the Combat Zone and you watch one of them Triple-X movies. And you find them kinky white bitches hang out round there. Forgive me Jesus for callin them by their name. You go find them bitches my husband liked.”

  He understood her better and better, but it made his heart baggier and baggier. Already Kit could see the miserable intimacy that had claimed her. A Movement woman with fine looks, a covenant woman with an easy walk, of course she’d fallen prey to a man utterly wrong for her. “He was from Cuba, you know, big man from Cuba and he said he couldn never go back. Lord, the evil that comes when a person loses touch with their home.” By the time Junior was learning the alphabet, his father was bringing home whores. Kit saw the bad news coming, saw it clearly way up the track, but it hurt when it hit just the same.

  “The man had them kinky white bitches,” the mother said, “right in my own bed.”

  “Mrs. Rebes—”

  “And he used to make them bitches tell Junior about it, oh see. He needed that, see. You understand what I’m sayin?”

  Kit understood, he got the whole sorry picture—the boy made to sit and listen to whores who told him his old man was a stud, and the out-of-whack father who needed to hear it. “The man paid them to tell my Junior, you understand, Kit. That was how he got himself, you know.”

  Kit had to stand. Underfoot the extension cords scrunched, calling to mind the winter sand on the Cottage beach, more bad news. By then Mrs. Rebes had begun speaking in falsetto. She was mimicking what the hookers used to tell Junior. “Little boy, you know your Daddy’s a superstar? Little boy, your Daddy puts me into outer space.” Kit turned towards the cold windows and found himself surprised by the light behind the glass, the sounds of daytime from the street. The Krishna curtain glowed, and outside children called between the stoops: Yo, Tay-shah. It had felt like way past dark.

  “Louie-Louie just a baby then,” the mother was saying, back in her normal voice. “Jesus, I thank you every day. That devil husband of mine left for Hollywood before he could get his claws into Louie-Louie.”

  “Hollywood?” Kit asked.

  “Where he goin to get himself more kinky white bitches than out there? That devil made for Hollywood.”

  She went for the wine again. Kit, looking down on her now, saw the mechanicality of it. Screw-cap off, bottle up, bottle down, screw-cap on.

  “Mrs. Rebes, please. Take it easy.”

  “Take it easy?” The screw-cap must’ve made each drink seem like the last. “Kit, that man was the one behind everythin evil. What he did was the first beginnin of all the bad news.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No way to tell about him without gettin sick.”

  “Sorry.”

  Kit, shifting his wineglass, put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped as if he’d stabbed her. She came out of the chair, catapulted out, moving with more straightlimbed control than he’d have thought possible. She whipped around to face him, the cardigan flying off her shoulders. Her eyes flared.

  “Don’t you give me no pat on the back,” she said. “Missah. Missah Viddich. You better not be comin here just to give me some little ol pat on the back.”

  Kit drew in his hands
, closing them around his glass. A moment’s silence was all it took to remember gripping the wrench, facing Junior.

  “There been evil in my life, oh see. Evil in my boy’s life, both my boys’ life. Ain’t about no pat on the back.”

  He couldn’t loosen his grip, couldn’t lower his arms.

  “Whatever story you think you gon get from me, it ain’t shit if it ain’t got the evil.”

  *

  Zia see, my basement boys and girls. Zia see what makes the guy a tourist. Our Scandie pseudo. What he was, was back in the ’60s. A believer.

  Makes him a tourist, yeah. Makes him like something out of a wax museum. Because it’s about the ’70s, these days. We prefer a different brand of trouble, in the ’70s. We don’t buy that Movement guff, times they are a-changin’. We don’t believe the believer. When it comes to counterculture, we’ve got a better idea.

  None of that, Viddich. None of that now, and no crying either. Ain’t about no crying. Yesterday on the bus from Woods Hole, he’d still been crying, hiding in the Trailways lavatory, whimpering first Junior’s name and then his wife’s. But today in the mother’s easy-to-burn living room, it was out of the question. The woman was three-quarters drunk, yes, but the rest of her had loaded up on even stronger stuff—on lofty dreams and bloody murder. Back at the coffee shop where she worked, back when Kit had been trying to pump her for information, she’d looked so helpless, string-fingered. Now he was the helpless. Fingers knotted and all eyes.

  Kit went backwards along the stereo units, eyeing the eight-tracks. Commodores, Tavares, Parliaments/Funkadelics. He kept going, slow-footed, around the sofa and back to his seat. The mother circled where she stood, watching. She was still spitting bile. “Whatever story you think you get from me, you better have the father my boy got. Father who got off on havin his own child watch.”

  Those Movement bozos, I mean, talk about living in the demimonde. Did you ever catch their “sins of flesh” act? Did you ever hear them talk about sex? Or try to talk about it, anyway. Whenever they tried to talk S-E-X (couldn’t say the word by its name, oh see), in fact they talked L-I-E-S. L-I-E-S, my boys and girls. They were about as trustworthy as the Father in the confession booth—the one with his hand inside his robe. Old Martin Luther King himself, oh see, he tomcatted around. Preached the brotherhood and chased the sisterhood. Like the Father in the confession booth, breathing heavy and asking about your nastiest secrets.