Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  I admit that none of these perceptions of mine necessarily counted for much: in private she may have outlaid fearsome energies on amending Jacko. It was simply that her public demeanour in bars and in restaurants, or when you visited their own home as she cooked with Jacko, or as she emerged ill-rested from their bedroom to greet you for breakfast on a Sunday morning after one of Jacko’s all night Soho adventures, never showed the faintest trace of bitterness.

  There might, at such a time, be small blue triangles under her clear eyes. Too many cigarettes had put them there – she came of a generation of Australian schoolgirls who nearly all smoked, even though only a fragment of the boys did. Sometimes we’d discussed what that fact meant about Australia and boys and girls. I had for example been writing something for the New York Times Color Magazine on the question of whether Australia’s reputation as a South Africa for women was well founded. I tried to encompass anecdotal material from my own daughter’s history and from Lucy Emptor’s related experience. And I thought of other Australian women, of the great barefooted matriarch of Burren Waters, Chloe Emptor, dam of Jacko whose sire was Stammer Jack. It was an invidious situation, of course, writing such a piece: I was like a German trying to prove I liked Jews; an Israeli trying to prove that Palestinians were often treated with every courtesy.

  But that’s another story.

  Mrs Jacko – Lucy Emptor – was rarely seen to have had enough sleep or enough oxygen, but she was of an age where it didn’t make a dent in her splendour. This wife who – according to Jacko’s confiding word – harried him in secret, smiled girlishly in bars at midnight and said, A cherrypicker. That’s the go.

  In a way that made the heart turn over.

  I couldn’t see any of it as wifely tyranny, but was always assured by Jacko that it was.

  Jacko and the despised cameraman helped themselves to more of Bob Sondquist’s coffee. After the cold ordeal of their rise to the fourteenth floor, it was very sweet. They took the coffee back to the living room, for Jacko wanted more gesturing room for when they went live again. Bob Sondquist followed them indirectly, having gone away to collect the framed picture he now carried in his right hand. He made as if to show the picture to Jacko, but Jacko was cinema verité incarnate and told him to hang onto it until they were on.

  —Jesus, mate, this is ripper coffee.

  Jacko noticed Bob Sondquist turned his daughter’s framed picture in his hands, as if any given inch of the frame were too hot to touch for more than an instant.

  When – at Fartfeatures’ command and at Durkin’s voice in his ear – Jacko was back on, he said, Okay Mr Sondquist, show us all this face of your daughter’s which is beneath the attention of more reputable networks.

  The photograph Bob Sondquist displayed to the camera that morning was of an oval-faced, athletic looking girl of eighteen years or so. Her status as a lost woman caused the photograph to make its own demands on Jacko at the spot and on me at the Broadway corner of East Fourth. The fact she was long gone meant she couldn’t be written off as an average visage.

  In part her father’s daughter, she carried her father’s face but in a different form. It seemed full of an edgy goodwill. You could not imagine her at any age greeting the dawn cherrypicker with the composure her father had shown at his window. She looked competent somehow, like a child who ironed her own clothes. Jacko thought of that face as good at softball, which he had, in the past, gingered up his viewers by calling a neutered version of cricket. All in all, if you didn’t have honest Bob Sondquist’s word, you wouldn’t have thought it the credible face of a lost woman.

  Bob Sondquist said in his monotone, straight into the lens, Has anybody seen my daughter?

  Hearing this simple, electronically burred appeal, what Jacko thought of as a strange rash of compassion prickled his flesh and caused him to shiver inside his overcoat. For there was a lingering reflex, a frontier side to his nature, the side he exploited for the sake of hooking an audience yet which he believed falsely he had grown out of. His body was taken now, at the sight of Sunny Sondquist, by a biochemical impulse to send out horsemen searching, to use the mustering helicopter flown by Stammer Jack’s mad friend, the American named Boomer, who had once flown with Air America and who could fly for miles at barely ten feet of altitude above Burren Waters’ pasturage. A brief image of Sunny Sondquist lost out amongst the grey sand, grevillea, rubberbush, perishing for water, seized the screens at the forefront of his brain, his own rebel television.

  He expunged this useless impulse though, the desire to call on stockmen and Wodjiri tribespeople to go searching. The canyons where this face had lost itself were not readable in the same way as the water courses west of Burren Waters.

  Jacko said, She’s a lovely girl, Bob.

  —Went missing about five years ago. Then she turns up with some guy at her elbow while I’m in Veterans Hospital. That was six weeks ago. On my back and without a voice. She just said, Hello and that this was her fiance and she was happy and that she had to go. She looked scrawny and I wanted an address. So I got a note pad and pushed it at her. Even threw it after her when she started to go. But she just went.

  There was as much of a glitter of tears in Bob Sondquist’s eye as Dannie, and Durkin back at Vixen Six, could have desired of a tough confused old man.

  —She wasn’t under any threat from this man? asked Jacko softly, and Durkin said in his ear, Lovely mate.

  —She seemed a bit far off, and she wouldn’t say anything much when the nurses came along. Thinner. A lot thinner than this picture. But the same face.

  Bob Sondquist buffed the glass so that millions of viewers would more clearly see the face. Jacko did him one better, taking the framed photograph from him and putting it close up against the camera.

  —Let’s get this focused, he told the cameraman in a sort of genial vengeance. Come on, we got that focused? You have to excuse the cameraman, ladies and gentlemen. A New Zealander. His mind’s on the ewes.

  This was a running joke he had with his audience. But he did not enjoy it. He was still full of what he thought of as a rootless concern. Sunny Sondquist’s homely face put all his morning clowning out of key.

  At Durkin’s instruction he went into the if-anyone-recognizes-this-girl sequence … call us at …

  Fartfeatures was signalling him Dannie’s windup, and Durkin was saying, Studio cross, Jacko. Throw to Maloney. See you in the Perugia.

  —Well, it’s goodbye for now to Bob Sondquist our host, solid citizen and good maker of coffee. Everyone hopes you see your daughter again soon, Bob.

  The astringent desire to find her had passed now from Jacko’s imagination.

  —Yes, Bob interrupted in his quacking, electronic voice. It’s been good to see you Jacko. A real upper.

  —Okay, boomed Jacko. And if you’re out there, Sunny, contact your old man eh love? Well, I don’t think me and the New Zealand cameraman want to try the cherrypicker again. I think we’ll take the lift, which you blokes cunningly call the elevator. But listen one and all. Let this be a lesson eh. Just because you live above the tenth floor, it doesn’t mean you’re beyond the reach of Jackoman.

  Then, with a flourish, he said, Back to you in the studio, Phil.

  2

  As much as he could manage it, Jacko Emptor stayed away from the studios and offices of Vixen Six. The air Maloney the anchorman exuded, of being a refugee from a better class of broadcasting, ran counter to the energy and peculiar vision of Morning Manhattan’s executive producer, Ed Durkin; counter too to the serious foolery of talking one’s way into people’s homes, and bringing a camera crew with you to document the encounter.

  In Jacko’s eyes, by affecting the gravitas of a serious commentator, Maloney managed only to make himself look silly, like some failed viceroy who wears a bicorne hat and braid, missing the point in a mad colony whose rhythms and colours he cannot see. But one of Basil Sutherland’s executives had given him a big three-year contract, and so Durkin had to use
him.

  In Jacko’s persistent absence from the studios, a secretary answered mail and telephone enquiries from Jacko’s admirers, and if he needed to see Durkin, they met at the Perugia Bar, Durkin’s office-away-from-the-office where he spent most of the day, across the road from Vixen Six headquarters. Durkin organized his evening show, Live Wire, from a bank of telephones at the Perugia Bar. Segment producers and research assistants kept in touch with him by these means, or else ran material to him from across the street.

  After producing Morning Manhattan at what Jacko called sparrow’s fart, Durkin was usually in the Perugia by nine-thirty, smoking and taking his first beer of the day. Imported: Becks or Dos Equis or Swan Lager. American beer, he said, was like making love in a canoe: fucking close to water.

  Here Jacko would meet him at about a quarter to ten to discuss the tasks Jacko would perform for Live Wire over the weekend. For although Jacko had escaped the cattle station, he had not escaped cattlemen’s hours.

  Today, though, Jacko did not visit the Perugia first. He surprised the office staff of Vixen Six by appearing amongst them. The young researchers and production people, brisk, dark, pretty women with glittering eyes, cried out in genial mockery.

  —Grab him before he vanishes, ladies and gentlemen! The first sighting of the Great White Australian Marsupial! Who let in the Australian Pope? Et cetera.

  Jacko’s routine fan mail was, some of it, surpassing strange. Jacko once showed me a letter which began, My name is Delores and I am a beautiful, loving and free of drug woman from Bensonhurst, NY. I would like to meet you because I think you are boyish and free, and I am girlish and free with two lovely children …

  The secretary herself was a single mother who came in every day on the train from Brewster. She felt – despite all the evidence of Jacko’s leniency – that she could not risk calling Jacko Jacko for fear it might take bread and milk from her children’s mouths.

  —Mr Emptor, she cried as he walked in. The switchboard has taken nearly four hundred calls about that girl …

  He had long since given up the battle to get her to call him by his first name.

  —Call me Jacko, he had frequently cried. I’m not a bloody lawyer, love, eh. Well I was, but I recovered.

  For Jacko had gone straight from law school into radio. Not serious radio, he insisted, but mayhem radio.

  Or else he’d yell at her, Can you see ghosts, love? Mr Emptor was my grandfather. He died in Dun Rootin’ in Alice Springs eight years ago.

  Four hundred calls. Four hundred people who wanted Jacko’s approval, who would see phantoms for him and try to please him – if they lacked any truth to utter – with lies.

  The single-mother secretary said that she had put his calls into two piles, little sheaves of paper. A big one was of calls that seemed to lack substance. A very small one gave concrete information. He surprised her by taking both wedges of messages into his hands and taking them through into the cubicle he rarely used, and sitting at the desk he sat at for perhaps thirty-seven minutes per annum.

  She had done a ripper job of sorting out the messages, he told her.

  In the big pile, he encountered For enlightenment see John VII, 5, 6-7. Then, Ms Horowitz, 203-456-1757, wants help tracing her niece. Or Francoise Lachapelle: saw Mr Sondquist’s daughter in a dream, Called out to her: the name of Pixley Falls State Forest, Upstate New York. Yes, Francoise in the forest with a camera crew: a whole morning-show of fame as Francoise frowned and farted round and said that the aura was strong in one place and dimmer in another, but the girl was definitely here somewhere amongst the trees. Mind you, it showed Francoise gave the medium of television its proper weight. Australians took television casually, as a recreation. Americans knew it was life itself, that it defined reality, it was the generating light of God’s countenance turned to you. Without its smile, its nod, its sanctifying grace, its infinite mercy for the obscure and the unlovable, there was no existence.

  Mr Chester Blaze, 11723 Avenue B, Apt 822 says tell you on camera location of Sondquist girl. From Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Baltimore, Maryland, such squalid offers had arrived by the dozen. All of them desired Jacko to turn up on their doorstep with a cameraman and a truck with a microwave dish. Australians would tell you these things if you promised not to invade their hearths! Australians simply weren’t serious subscribers to Andy Warhol’s dictum about fifteen-minute fame.

  Jacko would not be human, however, if he had not somehow been flattered by the demented love these messages represented. Chloe Emptor herself would never have sent him messages of quite such seamless adoration.

  However, they were useless for poor, squawking, possibly moribund Bob Sondquist’s quest for his daughter.

  There were three messages the single mother had graded as of any value. One was from a woman in New Haven who said that her son had gone out for a year with the Sondquist girl, and that she and her son were willing to help in any way. There was simply a chaste number attached, no demand for morning glory.

  A second message was from the secretary of an organization called PAW – Protect Abducted Women. Thousands of women were disappearing, she said. The statistics exceeded by far the numbers for breast cancer. PAW could provide figures and case histories.

  The third was from a man in Montcalm, New Jersey. He said that he had recently spent time in California with his daughter, who lived in a trailer park off the Riverside Freeway near San Bernardino. He had seen what he was sure was the Sondquist girl jogging around the caravan park at regular hours. The tail of the message gave it a kind of authenticity. Tell her father she looks a lot thinner than in photograph.

  Jacko went into the outer office, put the wedge of her discards down on the desk in front of the secretary, boomed out some further praise at her – in which adjectives like bonzer and ripper recurred to a degree some Australians thought strained – and put the three messages she had winnowed out into his breast pocket.

  Durkin was a dark-complexioned, wiry man. He claimed to be the descendant of Irish tinkers who came to Australia with a circus. It was very likely the truth.

  Jacko found him, as expected, at the Perugia, a two-thirds expended glass of beer streaked with froth at his right hand. Durkin talked on one of the bar telephones and wrote notes to himself on a page of a little yellow pad. When he hung up, he ripped the note he had just written off the pad and stuck it to the surface of the bar. Sometimes these little squares of yellow adhesive paper patterned the bar all through the lunch hour. Beer, cocktails and wine were served amongst them, and lunchers who worked in less frenetic businesses than Durkin’s were foolish enough to accept them as part of the Perugia’s colour.

  —Jesus, mate, Durkin cried. The cherrypicker! Great bloody idea.

  Durkin was always too busy with the overall production of Morning Manhattan to enquire beforehand into the tactics to be used in any particular instance of what they both chastely called, like a couple of Mormon missionaries or like pollsters, doorknocks. Jacko liked to surprise him.

  —Got to be honest, said Jacko. I put up the idea of some alternative form of getting into places. I was thinking more of rappelling by rope down from the roof, and I thought I might call the Marines and get them to teach me eh. Dannie came up with the cherrypicker on the ground that she didn’t want to see me as the world’s biggest dollop of strawberry bloody jam. So we’re putting off the rappelling till later. Although, in the event, we might make it a bloody big sturdy bosun’s chair instead of just a rope.

  Even that of course would be terrifying, though we, his public and friends, had been reassured a little by the ease, very nearly the grace, with which he had been able to move out of the cherrypicker and into Bob Sondquist’s living room. There would not, however, always be a muscular cancer sufferer to lift him in over the window sill.

  —Fucking fantastic idea anyhow, said Durkin.

  He was dialling again. In between talking with a Live Wire segment producer, he kept an ear pitched to Jacko’s
plans for the coming weekend’s filming.

  Jacko said, That poor old bugger with the squawk box … It’d be great to make him happy. Look, you and I have both had problems getting along with women …

  Durkin was in fact contemplating a third marriage.

  —Now maybe Sunny ran away but I don’t believe it. I reckon you can bet this kid Sunny’s been abducted. She might’ve visited Bob in hospital, but she had a bloke with her – in my opinion, a captor. All right. The argument is that taking a woman off the street and using her and keeping her a prisoner and maybe killing her is just the acting-out of the way all us bloody old patriarchs really feel … You know, that the fellers who make women disappear are just acting out the usual male figures of speech …

  —Yeah, said Durkin. But that’s all bulldust.

  —Exactly. We are not the killers. We’re not saints, but not killers. Some of the people who hide behind respectable language, maybe they’re the killers.

  —What are you talking about? asked Durkin.

  —There are women, young women, going missing all over the country. Why don’t we concentrate on one of them eh? This bloke Sondquist’s daughter. I’ve got this crowd called PAW who’re fighting the battle. We could talk to them. Then I’ve got a kid who dated her. And I’ve got a bloke who claims to have seen her. No, I’ve got half a thousand buggers who claim to have seen her. But I’ve got a feller who rings true. So what if we took this one missing woman? Dying father, regretful boyfriend, last sighter. And we try to find out what in the name of God happened to her eh? Something we could get passionate about, mate, and the passion would shine out. We can tell people we’re going to shake the tree over this one. We’re going to find out what in the hell happened to one woman.