by John Domini
“Now myself—” he chuckled, straining to come across—“I’m taken, you know. I have a wife.”
The doctor knocked twice, careful to get an invitation before he put his face in. And Halsey kept his tone neutral. Only once did his voice possibly betray something, a hint of a joke when he said, Looks like you two had a nice quiet time in here. Kit wouldn’t blame Arturo if he sneered at that. But in fact Kit wasn’t paying much attention to the man. Rather it had come home to him again how unlike Monsod this was. No banging, no bellowing every time somebody opened a door. Here, instead, it felt like the last minutes before his wedding. Then too he’d sat alone in a small room with a boy, an unmarried friend from his hunting days, until a soft-spoken older gentleman came in and said that it was time.
Here too there were women in tears. Corinna sidled in behind the doctor, pinching the corners of her purse, and in the moment before Arturo went skipping into her arms, Kit could see that the mother had been crying. He could see that and a lot more, a look as complicated as the one she’d shown him back in Halsey’s office, before he’d gone off with her son. Pleading, angry, at a loss—and still willing to try.
Chapter 8
MUSEO OF THE SAINTS
A Guide for Tourists.
Diorama #21—St. Hardnose of the Bricks
The scening depicts blesséd Snigr. Hardnose late on a day, deep in masturbation over telefono and random papers.
It is to notice the overcoat. Although stained with stains from many millions of other times, overcoat must cover Snigr. Hardnose even nevertheless in his glass offizzio, which very hot place with the sun coming all over the window. It is to signify awareness of the miserable Hell Clown which is Man.
Where else was Kit going to go? As Happy Hour came on, January’s dark-already Happy Hour, he was back behind his desk calendar and table teepees. He was explaining what he’d decided to do about the paper to remaining interested parties. There was the woman who handled his layout and pasteup. There were the printers over in Somerville.
What else was he going to do? Winning back Corinna’s trust had felt terrific, sure. The young mother had been so touched that, on the way from the counselor’s, again her accent deepened. Kit you a goo man, really a goo man. You like Jimmy Carter, like ol JC on the TV—you a goo’ man and you don even know. Corinna agreed to stay with the paper at three-quarters time, temporarily. She would take a smaller paycheck, temporarily. Felt terrific. Arturito wasn’t the only boy getting therapy today. Likewise, when Kit poked Corinna’s child goodbye, a poke in the belly goodbye, the kid was quick to grab Kit’s finger but careful not to hurt it. The most loving touch he’d felt since his tumble with Bette down at the Cottage.
Nonetheless, two minutes after saying goodbye, Kit stood gulping down a soft pretzel from a vendor in the Government Center T station. He was waiting by the tracks for the trains downtown. Where else, what else? The worm was on his back. Already he could think of a hundred more useful ways he might have spent the last hour.
He had to come up with the money. He had to stop wasting time running around having emotions. Or sitting at his desk lost in the streaks of reflection along the glass.
To notice coat belt undone with tip on the floor, this is to think of the naked flesh we have hair to, and hapenis which drags on the ground beneath all.
It is to notice as well cowpoke decoration, the “tabletop Indian dwelling,” which is caked to fronting glass. The scening depicts cowpoking of mistical critter, “jackalhope.” It is to signify the critters we who are all Hell Clowns must strive forever to poke.
On the first issue, Kit himself had pitched in with Sea Level’s layout and pasteup. He’d spent a couple of hours over the T-square, the blue pencils. Today, the contractor was willing to cancel her next appointment without charging a fee. The printers, however, had already turned down work in order to keep their machines free for Number Two. Kit, sighing into the phone, tried to get the shop owner to cut him some slack.
“You know,” he tried, “my wife tells me that pretty soon we’ll do all this on computer. Layout, printing—”
The printer cut in: “These days even the wife don’t work for free.”
The wife. Kit suffered a brief, grim image of what he’d be doing if he’d gone home. Mooning from room to room, having emotions. And when he roughed up a budget that included the printer’s cancellation charge, he didn’t seem to have cash left for Corinna’s February paycheck.
Did Kit still have a paper or not? A paper and, at the same time, his conscience?
It is to notice the black telefono and the white papers, instruments of dooty. The black one stands up firm and three-dimmental over the soft cumly white one laying two-dimmental with its angle showing. In other words, we have the cunjuntin of two happisits. Two happisits, and one inside the other. This is to signify how in the struggle of everyday toilet we must be brought off as often as potent.
Mistical union of happisits rejaculates the essence of the blesséd Snigr’s theologizmo. We are hair not solely to naked butt as well to jackalhope. To this Snigr. Hardnose was consummated, the moaning when flesh and grace collide in a hole. The hole truth!
Then there was Louie-Louie Rebes, mammoth and colorful. Louie-Louie, glowering over Kit’s front wall.
The brother spoke first: “Where’s everybody at?”
Louie-Louie, and he must have made a racket coming in.
“Hey man,” he said, “you there?”
Come back, Shane. At least exhale.
The brother circled the glass towards Kit’s office. The clomp of his biker boots echoed in the American Empire spaces, and the glass rattled, the floorboards whined. Kit couldn’t believe it. When Leo Mirini went by in the hall, Kit never failed to notice. The first words he managed were by rote: “Come in, sit down. I’m sorry.” Louie-Louie’s voice, on the other hand, was as hard on the rickety office as his boots. “You come to my place, man, I come to yours. And where’s the, where’s the secretary and shit?
“Man.” Louie-Louie turned in the doorway, frowning. “Is this place really a newspaper?”
“The secretary and shit have the afternoon off,” Kit surprised himself by saying. “It’s a paper, Louie-Louie.”
As the brother had come closer, he’d appeared less intimidating. Louie-Louie took up most of Kit’s office, no question, and his outfit was the same ruckus as yesterday. A fatigue jacket over disco threads. But he’d changed the shirt, going instead for a formal look, starched white and better fitting. More than that, the man looked like he was wrestling with trouble of his own. Twisting the kinky ends of his beard, Louie-Louie wouldn’t sit. He wouldn’t take off his jacket. Now Kit was the only one talking, filling space with an abbreviated version of why Sea Level wasn’t such a crazy idea. The Phoenix, you know, had probably started with less.
Another rote. It allowed Kit to try and recall what Mrs. Rebes had told him about her younger boy. The father had left, she’d said, before he could hurt Louie-Louie. He was still a baby, she’d said.
“You know something?” the brother said suddenly. “One team I always hated was the Boston Red Sox.”
Kit blinked. “The Sox?”
“Always hated those Red Sox.”
“Well, the pitching’s weak. They need a stopper.”
“Ain’t talking about no pitching, man. Ain’t talking about no Louie Tiant. You got a Harvard mug on the desk there, you oughta know what I’m talking about. It’s racism. Man, the Red Sox’re the most lily-white organization in baseball. Always nine white guys and a big nigger with a bat. Racist team.”
Kit checked the urge to apologize. “True enough.”
“And the Celtics ain’t any better.”
“Aw, come on. The Celts were the first team to draft a black player. They made Bill Russell—”
“Man, I don’t care what they did a hundred years ago. It’s practically the ‘80s now, man.” The brother was facing the street windows, the bulgy brownstones across the way. “Pr
actically the ‘80s, and here you got a professional ball club with white guys getting all the minutes.”
Louie-Louie had turned towards the windows, Kit realized, before he’d said “nigger.”
“White boys,” the brother went on, “that’s what brings in the money in this town. In Boston you need white boys.”
Kit exhaled slowly. In his mind’s eye was the famous Globe photo from ‘76, four or five white teens assaulting a black man on the steps of the city courthouse. They were bashing the man’s face in with a flagpole they’d grabbed off its stand.
“Boston,” Louie-Louie said.
In the photo, the white kids were using the stolen pole like a lance, thrusting the eagle at its tip into the falling man’s face. And the American flag hung rippling from their grip, filling a corner of the shot. 1976, the Bicentennial. The photo had been all over the media.
Kit began to say he understood, he agreed. Boston …
“Man, tell me something. Tell me something, okay?” Louie-Louie turned to face him, and Kit knew what he’d ask: Did you kill my brother?
“Tell me, man,” he said. “How could you come to my house and tell my Mama what a sweet old time your Daddy had with a racist Red Sox like Ted Williams?”
Kit touched his neck.
“What kind of a crazy white boy are you, telling my Mama something like that?”
He hadn’t expected to get insulted, either. “Aw, Louie-Louie. I hope that’s not the burning question that brought you all the way over here in the dead of winter.”
The younger man’s beard changed shape. He might have been smiling; the window glare left his face largely invisible.
“She gets to you, doesn’t she?” the brother said. “My Mama. She gets to your head.”
Kit managed a small grin himself. He gestured at his bruises and repeated that he’d been in bad shape when he’d come by their house. And with that a more reasonable motive for today’s visit occurred to him. “You know,” he said, “I also told your mom I’ve got no ownership of this story. No legal claim or anything.”
The younger man at last reached for a seat.
“Louie-Louie, this is your story. Yours and your mom’s.”
The brother moved with less noise. He turned the chair around before sitting and settled with his chest against the struts of the back.
“You can do what you want with it,” Kit said. “You don’t need my permission.”
Still he didn’t seem to have a handle on this big little brother, this guerilla suddenly gone soft. Almost in a whisper, Louie-Louie said he wasn’t looking for Kit’s permission.
“You know there’s a black-owned paper in town,” Kit kept on. “There’s the South End Community News, too.”
The more the merrier, he figured. Or the more the moral-er. After the Grand Jury, Sea Level’s precious scoop would be history—and who knew who Bette might be telling, out wherever she’d gone.
“Aw, that South End paper,” the brother said, “that’s mostly a gay thing, you know.”
Kit found himself looking over his desk, wondering if he didn’t have some crackers in a drawer somewhere. A bite to eat would help them both. He continued to search while Louie-Louie said that his mother called the Community News an abomination before the Spirit. “Mama, she’s old-timey,” Louie-Louie said. “But she’s sharper than what you might think. She didn’t used to be so spacey either.” Nodding, Kit found a box of Triscuits down beside his office Johnnie Walker, and a shrink-wrapped gift packet of mustard and sardines from the publication party. Wow, was he actually going to put together a meal? Grain, oil, protein, spices?
Kit spread the goodies on his desktop, then fished his jackknife from a coat pocket. Meantime the brother bundled up his fatigue jacket and laid the bundle on top of the chair back; he used it as a pillow. If he was Castro, he was a worn-out and dispirited Castro, hunched over with an ear to the chest of a fallen comrade.
“Mama didn’t used to be so down in the bottle either,” Louie-Louie said.
“Yesterday she was worse than I’d seen her before,” Kit said. “Worse by a long shot.”
“Yesterday was one of her better days.” Louie-Louie kept trying to get comfortable on his bundled jacket, shifting his baggy body. “One of her best days this week, I’d say. Viddich, man, you’re good for her.”
What? Kit picked at his food’s wrapping. Five minutes ago Louie-Louie had all but called him a racist.
“See,” the brother went on, “where my Mama’s coming from, yesterday just proved she was right going to you. Where she’s coming from, when you started in to crying that meant she could trust you.”
Kit began to open the sardines, keeping his head down.
“She believes in you, Viddich. Far as Mama’s concerned, you’re the man.”
“Aw, you know better than that.”
The brother lifted his head, exposing feathery chest hair. “Man, all I know is, my Mama’s in a bad way.”
Kit pulled together the food. He must’ve sensed something, taking on such homey activities. The squeak of the sardine tin coming apart, the muffled pop of the mustard cap twisting off—these made an appropriate soundtrack, when a kid began to lay out his family heartache. The brother even smelled like someone who needed to talk: a faint reek of metal and machine oil, as if he’d been walking too long amid parked cars. Kit recalled the Sons of Columbus and what it had meant to Zia. Today the brother had surprised him the same way Zia had back at the Sons.
And it would do him good to listen. Louie-Louie didn’t care, after all, that the man he’d found to talk to was in tatters himself. The kid was too young to pick up the low-level emissions of an overstressed soul. Accepting a sloppy, sardine-heaped Triscuit, Louie-Louie said that since Monday his mother had been taking a bottle to work.
“Ain’t like her,” he said. “She tells me she wants the job, but the way she’s carrying on she’s going to lose it.”
“Anyone at work notice?”
“Notice? Man, that place—they notice and she’s gone.”
Kit suggested that maybe they were seeing something deliberate. A pattern that the mother wanted somebody to recognize.
“Thought of that one already, man. Like, a cry for help.”
“A cry for help. She needs you to step in and be the man of the house.”
“Trying, Viddich. Swear to God I’m trying. I lost half my hours at Sears, lost all my overtime. My paycheck is diddly these days, man. All just so I could be there for her.” But Kit had heard how the mother talked to him. “Talks like I’m a baby, Viddich. How am I supposed to be the man of the house, when she’s all the time saying I’m a baby?”
“She’s trapped in old perceptions,” Kit said.
“Say what?”
“Well, there’s a lot of history between you two. Your mother still perceives you …
Hoo boy, did that feel lame. Kit bit his lips as the brother once more lifted his head.
“Say what?”
Kit should’ve left this kind of thing to Dr. Halsey.
“Psy-cho-analyze.” Louie-Louie’s beard opened again, but it wasn’t a smile. “Seems sometimes like that’s all you white boys know, is how to psychoanalyze.”
Kit went back to the food.
“You white boys all go to college and learn how to psychoanalyze. Man, I’d like to see you try it coming from where I’m coming from.” Louie-Louie jerked his bundled jacket off the chair back and started pawing through it. “I don’t come from no Minnesota, you know? And I’ve already got six credits at Northeastern.”
Kit—with all due disgust for his failure to keep his mouth shut—figured he knew the man now. The good brother, that was Louie-Louie. He’d calm down again soon enough.
“Yeah, and I know about social workers, too. Social workers and agencies and all like that, I gave my Mama the numbers. She won’t make the call.”
The brother stopped his pawing. He’d gotten hold of something in one of the pockets. His face flexe
d oddly, a kink in the proud nose, a ripple along the bristling hairline. Fighting down a shiver? Whatever Louie-Louie was trying to get out of his jacket, it was too big for where he’d put it. He wrestled with the olive-green bundle in his lap, the buttons straining on his Filenes Basement shirt. Kit bent once more over his office drawers, tidying things away, giving his visitor what privacy he could. But then the brother’s chair stopped creaking, and close by Kit’s lowered head there was the clunk of metal dropping on the desktop. Kit looked up to find a gun on the scarred wood.
“Seems like that’s all you white boys know,” Louie-Louie said, “is how to psychoanalyze.”
A gun, an automatic. It crowded him; it killed the light. His tall-ceilinged office collapsed like a pocket around the iron, and Kit had forgotten to breathe again. He’d misjudged his man again. Yet by the time he regained his wits, his breath—by the time he’d slapped a hand down over the cold weapon and started to say something (come on, what, something)—by then, he could see that in fact he still didn’t have to worry about Louie-Louie. The brother didn’t want anything to do with the gun. Not in his condition. Draping his bulk once more over the chair back, this time without even the cushioning of his jacket, Kit’s visitor had begun to cry.
*
It didn’t have quite the heft of GI ordnance, the officer’s .45 that Kit’s father had left behind. Louie-Louie’s piece had Euro-tech contours, like an italic capital L, and there were Japanese characters in the trademark. UN ordnance. And this was where Louie-Louie had gotten his metal-and-oil smell.
Kit began to unload. Once he took up the weapon, he discovered his hands were shaking, the second time today they’d started shaking—holding first the subpoena, now the gun. From bad to worse. Meantime Louie-Louie insisted through his tears that he’d never intended to use the thing on Kit.
“Been crazier than that,” he said, swallowing thickly.