Talking Heads

by John Domini

  “Surinam.” The old man had never quite lost his smile, and now it came on strong again. “The scams I can play off that Surinam. It’s as good as Pozzuoli after the war.”

  “Don’t change the subject. Don’t try to trick me. The cash is for right here in Boston, isn’t it.”

  It was a child’s smile, Little Leo knows a secret. The man flipped and caught his money clip.

  “I’m sure Forbes Croftall gets his share, for instance.”

  “Ahh, Croftall.” He waved the money as if shooing a fly. “That guy never needed me to help him find trouble.”

  Kit had been bracing for hardball. In one coat pocket he’d made a fist and in the other—since the gun was in the way—he’d gotten a grip on the stock and trigger.

  “You’re, you’re not denying you’ve done business with Senator Croftall?”

  Leo snorted. “Kit, kid. If you’re going to finger me in front of that Grand Jury, don’t do it just because I know Croftall and I carry a lot of cash. I mean, at least get me for something juicy.”

  Kit had his hands out of his pockets, clasping and unclasping them against the cold.

  “At least Kit, huh. Let’s think about your home, there.”

  “My home?”

  “It’s a nice little place, I hear. Nice Cambridge place for you and the wife. Nice wood.”

  Kit couldn’t be sure of the singing in his ears. Nerves? Or the wind along the lip of the dark lower site?

  “Nice old wood,” Leo went on. “Old, old, dry wood.”

  Now it was nerves. “What?”

  “Place like that, wood can get very dry. Downcellar out of the weather, it gets dry like a newspaper. Just like one of your old newspapers, Kit.”

  The old man changed the angle of his chin. “That old wood.”

  “Leo, I don’t believe this.”

  “And that’s everything you own, there, right? Everything you care about’s up on the second story, there.”

  “You know,” Kit said, “generally speaking, people don’t try frighten other people unless they’re—”

  “Frighten you? Frighten you, I’m trying to help you.” Leo tapped his cash against Kit’s tightened chest. “Kit, stay with me here. Remember what I’m trying to tell you, here. I’m saying, you’re going to go after me in that Grand Jury, at least get me for something juicy.”

  Kit backed away from the tapping, the grinning. He stumbled on the corrugated lip of the lower site’s dam; he tried to get Leo to admit he’d been talking about arson.

  “Hey. You think it’s that simple, Kit? Just one word, the right word? One word, and you’ve got the old man at last?”

  Kit steadied himself. “Skip it. I said what I came here to say.”

  “If I were you, Kit, I’d be worried about this. About how nutty you’ve been, trying to get the old man.”

  “Keep your money, Leo. I’ll find my own way out.”

  “Bullshit. Bullshit, asshole. You’re going nowhere.”

  Across the work site, the hardhats didn’t look quite human. Faceless over the heavy equipment, rodent-like amid plumbing and cable, they whispered together.

  “You’re going nowhere till I say so, and same with the Grand Jury. That Grand Jury, ayy. You’re going to walk into a room where everybody knows your worst secret.”

  Turning from the workmen, frowning down into the dig, Kit was aware of the heat in his hands. In his fists, in his pockets.

  “Kit, I already gave them the note from yesterday. The note where you asked for the money.”

  “Leo—no more tricks. I’m going to stop you.”

  “You’re going to stop me?” The old man’s smile was his worst yet. “What’re you talking, the Crimefighter’s Code?”

  “That note I left, it doesn’t matter. What you know about Sea Level, that doesn’t matter.”

  “Kit, I know it all. Got my daughter right down there under my desk all this time, her and you and her junkie bitch friends across the hall too. Nothing I don’t know, Kit.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Leo, when it’s just you against me, people will know the difference.”

  “Got her right down there. Protecting my investment.”

  “It’s just you against me now. Everybody will know what’s right.”

  “The girl, you know, she told me about when you came making a play for her at the Sons of Columbus. Stoned off your ass. She told me about your wife—”

  Kit pulled out the brother’s gun. Leo, openmouthed, mid-sentence, jerked his cash hand to his chest.

  In time, Kit became aware of damage. His knuckles had torn against the hem of his pocket. His thinking was broken up by shouts behind his back. And uneasy, unprepared—his feelings hadn’t changed much from when he’d come onto the site, but now with this iron in his hand he was even more off-balance, a big white gooney bird with something in his beak that it would kill him to swallow. Out in the weather like this, Louie-Louie’s .38 didn’t look sleek and Euro. Rather, it appeared more of a piece with the rest of the metal here, another gray slash of naked function. Kit understood he still had the safety on, and neither of the two remaining rounds had been chambered. Yet he couldn’t drop his arm. He couldn’t take back the gesture, make the weapon disappear. Leo spoke up again: Hey, wildman, something. The old man got his hands moving, too. He had no trouble making his own bundle disappear, and when he held up his two open palms there could be no mistaking what he meant. Easy, cool it, something. Such an obvious signal, those two raised hands, sweat-pink against the site’s clay-black. Even the shouting behind Kit’s back relaxed, even the worker rodents got Leo’s message—but what Kit was most aware of was damage. Damage in his least, most fleeting images: the men behind him weren’t rodents.

  Leo started talking again, words Kit imagined rather than heard. Hey, where’d you get that?

  Words words words. Kit was beyond them, apart from them; he struggled instead with the muscle groups in his arm, with the blood circulation in his ears, even with his sense of smell. The gun had a thick odor, its oils warmed by Kit’s lap. He held it pointed at the shorter man’s mouth, his interior walls graffiti’d with obscenities. Dicksuck. Niggerdick up the ass. Bad damage. There was nothing sexy about the moment, a cold closed moment, the whole world collapsing around the .38. But then again, there was everything sexy about it: the muscles out of control, the mushroom density of the smell, the oil in his hand. Everything was a spasm, an outbreak.

  Leo started smiling again. Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the bad guy.

  The shouting behind Kit’s back was part of it, part of how standing here with a gun in another man’s face seemed like nothing but reflex and impulse. Yes, the shouting had simmered down, since Leo had raised his hands. When Kit glanced over one shoulder he saw tough guys in unsteady clusters, staring wide-eyed but keeping their distance. Nonetheless, every time one of the hardhats called, it broke up his thinking. It poked through the Expressway rumble, noise more like Garrison’s than like Leo’s, rough stuff and toilet talk. The sound of damage. Kit had heard nothing else since he’d left his testimony on the kitchen table. Then what was he doing here in the middle of it? Here between these familiar outcries, fear and bluster, warning and greed? So he got his first clear thought—from out of left field, wouldn’t you know it. He recalled a conversation somewhere about the Fifth W, the Why, about how the why always came down to the same grubby handful. To fear, bluster, hubris … Kit’s second thought, at least, was more with it: Drop the gun. Drop it. It’s wrong, absolutely the wrong thing to have in your hands in the middle of all this damage.

  He was hit as soon as his arm started to fall. Whacked on the nose and then clawed across his gun hand. For a moment he thought he’d lost a finger.

  “Stronzo,” Leo said.

  Crumpling, his face cradled into his aching, now empty hand, Kit was astonished at the old man. He’d worried about Garrison, about Louie-Louie, never about Zia’s father. Pain rippled out across his face, across last week’s
wounds, and Kit had a raw flash of Leo’s hardhat friends rushing down on him in a mob. He turtled away on his knees, directionless.

  There was the lip of the lower site’s dam. The corrugated steel. Swaying against it, Kit came to himself, hunched as if in prayer over the edge of the dig. He saw the archaeologists’ grid. A checkerboard of string or twine, a loose net across half the murky floor. A net, but too weak to catch him. One moment the drop looked like six feet, the next closer to sixty.

  “Cunt,” Leo was saying, above him. “Rincolo.”

  And the hardhats were coming. Their boot steps, coming fast, shuddered the earth under Kit’s knees. He tried to squeeze an idea from his bleeding index finger, his former trigger finger, gashed and stained with oil. He blinked against the fresh ooze from his stitches.

  “Talk,” Leo said. “You, your business, it’s nothing but talk. You think you could beat a man who really does something? Really makes something?”

  Hey believer, what was that click? That click and then that clunk, just behind your head?

  “Didn’t even have a round in the chamber,” Leo said. “Safety was off and you didn’t have nothing in the chamber. What, you going to shoot me with talk?”

  Kit didn’t see a ladder, below him. He didn’t hear anything good from the onrushing workers. Leo! Fuckin’ A!

  “Whatever happens now, cunt, I call it self defense.” And believer, what’s that against the back of your neck?

  “Self defense,” Leo repeated. “How’s that for talk?”

  Kit wasn’t about to make any sudden moves. It was all he could do just to master the new bloodrush of his fear, a fresh chill, stinging. Against his neck, Louie-Louie’s .38 was the worm on his back turned to worse. But he found himself starting to talk. “Leo …” Starting to talk: the old man had been right about that. It was what Kit did, talk: his business, his fallback, his last straw. And it had its advantages. It meant, for one, that Kit knew the old man. He wasn’t going to blow up, the old man, and leave a thousand loose ends hanging in the air. He wasn’t that kind of gunslinger, any more than Kit himself. There at the edge of the lower site, as he weathered his blood rush, Kit discovered again this root clarity. Starting to talk. He began even to overcome his soggy remorse over how stupid he’d been, and he may have realized his mistake—realized why all this had happened.

  But then the gun came away from Kit’s neck and he took a belt across the back of his head. Once more he was nothing but nerves, shock, body.

  Chapter 11

  NOTES

  [Remember—DON’T READ YOUR NOTES. Talk. Spontaneous.]

  Thank you. [wait, applause] Thank you.

  Of course I’m happy to accept this award, so weighty with esteem—and so generous with the checkbook! [wait, laughter]

  I’m happy to have the Emmy, yes.

  [smile, thoughtful] It’s pretty, isn’t it? Very pretty, very clean. [sincere] I always believed in my brave little newspaper; I always believed it might be good enough to get on TV.

  [no smile, thoughtful] And now I stand here honored and rich, while the men I exposed as crooks lie ruined and wretched. They’ve been sent to Monsod—Monsod, my God!

  LAST SEEN

  Dig this: unearthing the future.

  How do you tell a tourist? Zia see—if you jump to conclusions, it’s not the fall that kills you. Jump, and what does the damage is all the other dead souls out there.

  This one’s a spooky one, my basementals. Spooky scary Kult Klassic. I’ve been in some undergrounds in my time; I’ve seen my share of more dead than alive. A punk’s night out is nothing if not Nosferatu in 3-D. The lips all too real and the skin hardly there. But today my Show & Tell is just the opposite. Today, it’s not the deathy revelry of the sick and abandoned, my usual hang (o, these fragments I have shored against my ruin). Instead, I’ve got the desiccated fossil of a person who should still be alive.

  Justice! [wave award] Justice! [wait, applause]

  And great ratings, too. [wait, laughter]

  The story was a natural, wasn’t it? A public building scandal in Massachusetts—fascinating. Heroic stuff, [pause, reflect] Do you remember the scene where the bad guys had me down in the mud, tangled in twine? Do you remember? I was down and shivering and they stood up there, pointing a gun.

  [pause, suspense]

  A fearful moment, yes. Fearful—and heroic. [pause]

  My point—aside from bragging on myself—[wait, laughter] is that we in this room understand, as professionals, the power of story. We know High Concept and how to fit it on the small screen. [smile] But outside this room [gesture, doors] remain the unprofessional. The proles—outside the media. And when I was down in that muck, tangled and exposed and scared, then I too was outside the media.

  An actual long-dead, my Sandinistas. The lips turned to tree bark and the clothes hardly there. And yet the corpse is contemporary. The fossil is us.

  The cutting edge, in this case, cuts backward: it’s archaeologists who’ve been hep. Dig-sters, get it? They found the guy down in the soon-to-be T, the station under excavation. Only, some Head Guy somewhere declared the find, uh, sensitive. Uh, requires further study. Uh, needs protection from public scrutiny.

  Ah, but they didn’t count on our kind, did they, my compañeros? Cellars by starlight means celestial navigation, and a little razor wire and security can’t hold back the likes of us. I was in a hot minute after nightfall. Into the “lower site,” hee hee. And as for the stranger on the floor—barkeep, I’ll have whatever he had.

  I could have been anybody, tangled and exposed and scared. I couldn’t have been further from a hero. [wave award]

  But now [lean into mike, intimate] I’m in. I’m up here.

  [pause for emphasis, & CHECK TRUSTEES. okay to keep talking?]

  Now what made the difference, you ask? I went from a naked nobody in the muck to a one-man judge and jury in a silver suit. [smile] What did it? [wait] Well, my colleagues—I had to get arrested, [wait, laughter]

  The police had to come and cuff me, yes. They had to hold me—actually put me in a cell. [gesture, bars] You all remember the scene, I’m sure. My heroic call to my lawyer, you remember, [gesture, telephone]

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nonetheless, this one’s a weird one. It’s this year’s model, and also the last millennium’s fossil. It’s our leather, also leather-y. Like, what sort of a story have we got here? Like, a historical novel about the present?

  Chapter One: In the Grid. Why, what’s that strange grid, down there? That grid or graph or sumpin, laid over the stinking earth? Why, it is a graph! A sorta 3-D graph, sticks and string! And good Lord, what’s that under square A-3 …

  Chapter Two: Criticism/Self-criticism. Man, oh man, what am I doing here?

  Chapter Three: All Alone by the Skele-tone. Judging from the dimensions of the pelvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the .

  Popkin had, as before, his own vocabulary. When Kit at last reached him from the phone in the police station: “Finding other counsel seems indicated.” And when Kit explained why he’d missed their appointment: “Not a useful development, certainly.”

  I had to get arrested, yes. I had to make that humiliating call to my attorney. That’s what it took to become a hero.

  [CHECK TRUSTEES—if no okay to go on, cut to last graphs]

  Or that’s part of it, at least. [IF okay TO GO ON:]

  You see, all I knew was verbal. [head down] That was my problem, before I joined the media. Everything was verbal. I was muttering, I was dreamy.

  I was a loser. [wait, laughter] In order to join the winners, [smile, ESP. AT TRUSTEES] to break the grip of my word-based mucking around—word-based and low-paid [wait, laughter]—well I needed more than my lawyer. I needed the cold, stony city itself. Only when I got back out into the city did I at last realize that, nowadays, winners don’t bother with words.

  [no joke, no smile]

  Chapter Three: All Alone by the Skele-tone. Judging from the dimensions of the pe
lvis (squares H-2 through H-5), and the proportions of shoulders to head (3:1, see illustration), as well as the overall size of the remains (est. height, alive: 6’ 2”; est. weight: 180), we would conclude that the subject was a mature male of Scandinavian type, not yet 30 at the time of death. The ID we found helps too.

  Chapter Four: He Died With His Boots On. L.L. Beans, in fact.

  Chapter Five: He Died With His Boots On, Part II. Look there! The pockets of his disgusting coat are bulging! Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain a variety of materiél, such as sammiches and weaponry and folding cash, and these yield an illuminating fossil record.

  The attorney arranged to have a paralegal run over to the waterfront station. Popkin himself had no time till after five. Kit, nursing fresh aches and pains, a deep new remorse—Kit was just as happy to put off seeing the man.

  I needed this cold stony city. I needed the city to show me—nowadays words get in the way, if you want to be a winner.

  [no joke, no smile]

  I was heading for the MTA, for my office. [upright at mike, a talking head] I had a list of the Monsod contractors in my office, a list my lawyer needed to see. And I had other reasons for heading that way, instead of for instance heading home, but I won’t go into them here.

  [shake head, smile] If I went into every last little reason I did anything, you see, I’d go back to being a loser. If I wasted my time with every last shadow of motive and personality, I’d still be caught up in words words words.

  [shake head] No, never mind my grubby little handful of motives. What matters is—then I saw the record store.

  Your coat pocket of today is constructed so as to contain even sammiches, hero sammiches. It yields an illuminating fossil record. Why, look there—a stupid Press card! “Alternative” Press! And there—a worm on his back! Not your ordinary worm, either, just a-lookin’ for a home; rather a creature far more insidious—the worm of doubt! Good Lord, I know who this is.