by Tom Kakonis
“Yes.”
Too late. Pulaski was behind them. At the next corner he swung left, drove down a narrow street full of soot-grimed apartment buildings that rose, either side, blotted the sun and seemed to hem them in. Worse, it dead-ended at a rail track. And worst of all, as he shifted into reverse, cursing softly, the Volvo stalled, and a pair of tall, rope-muscled blacks came up leisurely off the stoop of a nearby building and sauntered toward them.
“Lock your door,” Marshall hissed.
“It is.”
He cranked the key in the ignition frantically, succeeded only in grinding the motor. The pair drew nearer, approached his side of the car. They wore T-shirts and those glistening baggy trousers that looked to be almost inflated. Inverted baseball caps perched on their brows. One of them boosted himself onto a front fender; the other bent over and filled the raised window with broad black face, lips stretched back in display of buckled teeth and livid pink gums. “What’s pro’lum here, man? Car won’t go?”
“It’s just a little overheated,” Marshall said, straining to keep his voice level. “It’ll start.”
“Dunno. Don’t sound good to me. What you say, Reggie?”
The one on the fender cupped a hand behind an ear. “Sound bad.”
“Maybe you ought pop the hood,” the face in the window advised. “Step on out here and we all take a look at it. Lady too.”
Lori stiffened. Firm as he could pitch it, Marshall said, “I don’t think so.”
A delighted squawk escaped the lips still parted in menacing facsimile of a smile. “Hear that, Reggie?”
“No. What he say?”
“Say he don’t think he want come out.”
“Shee-it. Why he say that?”
“Gots me.”
“Ax’ him.”
“Why you say that, man?”
Marshall looked into eyes bugged in mock wonder, gazing at him steadily through a thin sheet of glass. “Look,” he said, “I appreciate the offer, but we don’t need any help.”
“What he say now?” Reggie wanted to know.
“Say he don’t need no he’p.”
“Evahbody need he’p.”
“Bet yo black ass. Why else they be down here, fine white genemum and his sweet lady, ’cept for he’p.”
“Maybe lookin’ score some sniff, you thinks?” Reggie volunteered. “That kind he’p?”
“Could be that. Or maybe they just come by scope how the colored folks live. Rap with the boogies. That it, boy?”
In a whispery voice, riddled with terror, Lori said, “Marsh, what are we going to do?”
Questions both sides of him. Out of answers, he replied to neither.
Reggie hopped off the fender, and the one at the window took a shuffling step back and said, “Well, heah we is, couple pure blood darkies, at yo service.” He made a servile bow and, in that posture, reached down and gripped a rock the size of a fist. “Know what we got heah?” he asked Reggie.
“Look like a rock,” said his ready straight man.
“No, suh, ain’t no rock. This what you call a ghetto key. Open up mos’ any aut-mo-bile. Even fancy one like this heah.”
Now Lori shuddered. Marshall felt a thick nausea bubbling up from the lower regions of his viscera. His hands gripped the wheel, trembling, as though the motionless car were in fact zooming down a highway, blinding speed. He looked in the rearview and saw a blue and white vehicle, appearing miraculously at the other end of the street. The two blacks traded glances and took off in a sprint.
An instant later the police car pulled up alongside their Volvo. A thirteenth-hour deliverance. The officer poked his sour bulldog face out the window and demanded, “You people crazy?”
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Marshall sighed, too relieved to take offense.
“You lost?”
“Afraid so.”
“This ain’t your best neighborhood, get lost in.”
“I see that.”
“What’re you lookin’ for?”
“A Cicero address.”
“Which direction you come from?”
“West. Naperville.”
“You overshot. Cicero’s mile or so back.”
“Could you show us a way out of here?”
“Yeah, I can do that. Your car okay?”
“God, I hope so,” Marshall said. He turned the key again, and this time the engine belched, sputtered, finally kicked over.
The officer watched skeptically. “Okay,” he said, “follow me up to Cermak, hang a left, take you into Cicero. I was you, though, I’d keep right on rollin’ back to Naperville. You don’t wanta get stuck around here.”
“We’ll certainly do that,” Marshall assured him, but once he was sure they were inside the Cicero city limits he pulled off at the first gas station, let the engine idle, and took the map from Lori.
“What are you doing, Marsh? Why are we stopped?”
“Looking for that plant.”
“But I thought we were going home.”
“Not till we find it. Not come this far.”
“But you heard that officer. It isn’t safe.”
“Nothing’s safe.”
“I’m sorry I got us lost,” she said, and her eyes began to tear. “I wanted to help.”
“Wasn’t you. Was those damned bridges.”
“It’s so confusing here. So ugly.”
“Ugly or not,” he said sharply, “we’re not going home till we find it.”
Eventually they did. Following his own directions this time, Marshall wound through a grim low-rent district and emerged onto a long street fronting the Norse Aluminum plant. And what he saw was confidence-inspiring not in the least. A high metal fence topped with a glittery frosting of razor wire bounded the entire property. Beyond it was a lake of vehicles, a vast parking lot cleanly split in two by an entrance drive right-angled off the street and leading to a security station squat as a pillbox, its gate forbiddingly lowered. An interior razored fence ran the length of a structure painted a bilious green and sprouting a file of gritty smokestacks and of such immense size it dominated the view, reached to the distant end of the street. A monument to metal. And somewhere inside it, somewhere among those twenty-six hundred employees, was the man who surely would deliver them from all their grief. If he could be located. And if he could be identified. And if he could be made to cooperate. If.
Marshall felt his spirits, already meekened, skidding at the magnitude of the task ahead of him. Nor were they shored up when, approaching the main entrance, he slowed just enough to read a sign that warned “This property protected by closed-circuit TV monitors.” Yet towering above the security building was another sign, much larger, displaying the heroic figure of a Viking, same figure he was convinced now he’d seen miniaturized on the bumper sticker, and his pledge sounded again in his head, a harsh reprimand to himself.
On the drive home he said, “Couple of real pathfinders, we are,” making a little joke of it, something to put into the heavy silence. A stab at apology for his acid temper. And for what he’d almost gotten her into.
No reply.
He tried again. “Well, at least we found it.”
Her eyes shifted from the windshield to him. “Yes,” she said dismally. “But at what cost.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, understanding quite well what she meant.
“Who knows what might have happened back there?”
“Nothing did, though.”
“Not today. What about tomorrow?”
“Who knows about tomorrow?” he said, giving back her own line.
“Don’t you see what this is doing to you, Marsh? This obsession?”
“What I see is that this obsession, as you choose to call it, is getting us closer to finding Jeff. Anything it may or may not be doing to me is worth the price.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”
“Will you do something for me, Marsh?”
“What’s that?”
“Before you go back to that terrible place tomorrow, that plant, will you talk to the police? Please? For me?”
He said flatly, “No,” and she seemed to shrink into herself and that was the end of it.
And now, waiting in the stillness of night, his elbows planted on the desk, chin cradled in his hands, reflecting on the events of the past two days and contemplating those about to come in a few short hours, turning them over and over in his head and then over again, he sensed this strange new life of his possessed its own bizarre, stutter-step momentum, outside his power to control, and he was led to the conclusion the whole experience was nothing more than a test. Just that, a test, though to what end he couldn’t begin to say. Perhaps it was a kind of opaque metaphor (as his wise father would doubtless have put it) for those baffling forces of fate and will and capricious chance slogging blindly through mysteries too dark to ponder. The universal whine: Why me? Once he had believed implicitly that intellect shaped fate, cancelled its authority. Now he was not so sure. Chance, fate’s sidebar of sniggery puns (a wrong turn, say, or the sudden appearance of two fierce, felonious clowns), was itself without meaning except when something turned on it, something urgent, critical, and in the face of it intellect, ingenuity, reason, resolve, could be tossed and scattered like rubble in a swoosh of wind. As he was discovering.
And so he sat there, this studious thinker, this deliberative man, wrestling with unfathomables, incapable of sleep, waiting impatiently for morning.
A morning which broke on an orange blob of sun perched on the horizon, promising another sizzling, sticky day. Waz squinted into it as he gripped the wheel of his Merc and crawled along at the mercy of the back-street traffic, stalled every couple blocks by a goddam light. He was pissed that he was on this street instead of his normal route; that he’d agreed to pick up numbnuts, first place; that it was Monday, day one of five long blistering ass-busting days dead ahead; and most of all, when he thought about it, that he was going to have to find a way to talk to Jimmie Jack, how, he still didn’t have a clue. Generally pissed.
So he was not in a mood for any chin dribble when he spotted Lester standing outside his apartment house, and when he pulled up at the curb and Lester piled in, he was quick to say, “No stories, huh?”
“Wasn’t gonna tell no stories, Wazzie. Just gonna thank you, helpin’ me out.”
“Okay, you done it.”
“What’s matter? You lookin’ trashed already, shift ain’t even started.”
“Monday’s the matter. Fuckin’ heat’s the matter.”
“Wanta bird? Spare you one.”
“Get away from me, your birds.”
Lester shrugged. “Just tryin’ to help.”
“That kinda help I don’t need.”
“I do. Be a real pisser today. Radio said it gonna hit a hundred.”
“Add fifty, in there.”
“Heard a couple guys conked out Saturday, heat.”
“Who tol’ ya that?”
“Vic. He was doin’ o-t, said he seen it.”
“Fuck’s that bean dip know,” Waz said sourly. Just the thing he wanted to hear. Next be somebody croakin’ on the job. Pro’ly him.
“Just tellin’ ya what he tol’ me.”
“You’re fulla good news this morning.”
Lester grinned but, given the condition of his mouth, only slightly. Still smarted some and still bent his speech a little, his sibilants voiced on a hint of a lisp. Not enough to keep him from talking, though, and he said, “Good news better’n no news. Or however that goes.”
“Goes no news is good news, dickwad. An’ how come you still talkin’ weird?”
“Whaddya mean, weird?”
“Like a fag weird.”
“Tol’ ya,” Lester said, warming up his by now standard answer to the question he expected to be fielding all day long. “Bit down on my tongue, other day. Took a real chunk out of it.”
“Y’want tongue, try a deli next time.”
Lester chortled in spite of the hurting mouth. “Hey, that’s a good one, Wazzer. Try a deli. Speakin’ a fags, you hear the one about these two goin’ past a funeral house?”
“Missed that one,” Waz said, regretting instantly he’d bought into this ass gas.
“Wanna hear it? It’s short.”
“Better be.”
“Okay, y’got your two sissy boys floatin’ down the street, right? They come up by a stiff parlor, and the one, he squeaks to the other—oh, yeah, it’s a real hot day too, sorta like this one—anyway, he goes, ‘You wanta stop in for a cold one?’ ”
Lester giggled delightedly, but Waz merely snorted, growled, “What’d I say, ’bout stories?” and they rode the rest of the way in silence.
Came in handy, though, that little fag joke, when, seven hours later, shift damn near done, Waz finally got his balls on and found an excuse to slip out of the tool crib and go searching for Jimmie. Not that he was hard to spot, Mr. King Shit expediter scooting along on the autoette he got to ride around on, looking like a goddam banker on a golf cart. Waz hailed him. The autoette veered over, and Jimmie leaned toward him and said, “Yo, Wazo, what’s up?”
“You hear the one about these two fruits swishin’ by a funeral parlor?” He had to shout over the boom of the hot mill directly behind them, and when he delivered the punch line Jimmie looked at him blankly and shouted back, “Old one?”
“Cold one. Cold. Get it?”
Now Jimmie just looked annoyed. “You call me over here to tell that?”
“Well, somethin’ else too.”
“What’d that be?”
“You got a minute, talk?”
Just then an ingot passed through the mill with a grinding, deafening roar, and a volley of sheared metal scraps came firing into the adjacent dumpster. Jimmie tapped an ear, lifted his scrawny shoulders in a helpless shrug.
“We gotta talk,” Waz bellowed.
“Sure. Get on board. Take it someplace we don’t got to read lips.”
Waz climbed on and off they went.
Jimmie pointed his autoette down the length of the rolling belt, made a series of sharp turns, and came to a stop in a remote wing of the plant. He produced his let’s talk business smile and said, “So, Waz my man, what can I do ya for? Wanta put in an order, one a them Rolies?”
“Ain’t interested in no watch, Jimmie.”
“No? What, then? Don’t tell me you’re into product. Need some poppers, crank?”
“Not that either.”
“So what’s on your mind?” Jimmie asked, still smiling but not so patiently now.
Waz hesitated. Sitting this close, he got a good whiff of him. Brut, f’chrissake, or Old Spice, or one a them colognes, musky and sweet. Leave it to him, come off a day’s work smelling like he just stepped out of the bandbox, or a cathouse. Himself, he had to stink worse’n a jigaboo’s jockstrap, day he put in. Nothin’ fair, this dogshit world.
“I’m waitin’, man. Ain’t like I got all day.”
Waz watched his own work-roughened hands playing with the buckle on his belt. “Kinda hard to put in words,” he mumbled, “what I got to say.”
“Whyn’t you just try spittin’ it out?”
Also wasn’t fair this runt half your size calling all the shots, talking at you like you’re a retard. That’s what all that weight done, all that gelt. That’s just the way it was, though, so Waz said, “You remember that adoptin’ deal we done, back last June?”
“Sure, I remember that. Was glad to help out.”
Waz lifted his gaze off the buckle and drew in a breath before pushing on to the hard part. He looked at him, level as he could, and said, “I gotta ask you, Jimmie. That deal, was it straight up?”
Jimmie let what he had of a jaw drop. “Whaddya sayin’, straight?” he yelped indignantly. “ ’Course it was straight. Your buddy Buck there, he got a bitch, you tell him come see me. Talk for himself.”
“Ain’t him. Not exactly. See, what happen w
as my old lady, she seen one a them missin’-kid posters. Y’know, kind they do when a kid’s been snatched?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, thing is, she thinks it’s maybe the same kid Buck got out to that place in Elgin. Off them people you said you juiced with all that cash a his I passed to you.”
“That’s what she thinks, your old lady?”
“That’s what she says.”
“Well, you better fix her up with a seein’-eye pooch, or a pair binoculars. No way could it be the same kid.”
“So you tellin’ me it’s a mistake she made?”
“Goddam right, mistake,” Jimmie said stoutly.
“Sure hopin’ that’s all it is. So’s Buck.”
“You talk to him about this?”
“Yeah, figured I better say something.”
“An’ what’s he say?”
“He’s kinda shook.”
“Okay,” Jimmie said, looking him square in the eye, voice ringing with sincerity, “listen up here, what I’m tellin’ you. Sure, I do a little tradin’ here in the plant. Ain’t no secret. Pick up a few coins movin’ goods. But nothin’ heavy. Y’know why?”
“Why?”
“ ’Cuz it’s the heavy stuff buys you a ticket to Stateville, one way. Which is a trip I ain’t big on takin’. That’s why. Use your head, Waz. Guy like me in there, my size, gettin’ my asshole reamed by all them stirbirds. Or a shank in the back. Fuck, I’d be crowbait, week into the bid. You think I’d run that risk?”
“S’pose you wouldn’t,” Waz agreed. Made sense to him.
“Fuckin’ A dog, wouldn’t. An’ that’s exactly the kinda jolt you’d get, dealin’ in snatched kids. I may be stupid, but I ain’t crazy. Ain’t enough bills in the world, take that chance.”
“This the straight of it, Jimmie, what you givin’ me here?”
“Hand to fuckin’ God,” Jimmie swore, elevating one in that general direction. “Whole arrangement’s clean, start to finish. You got my word.”
“Okay. That’s all I wanted to hear.”
“So we squared away on this?” Jimmie asked, watching him carefully, hand still in the air.
“Yeah. You better run me back now, before my supe gets case a the chapped ass.”
“You got it.”
“Oh, an’ Jimmie, no offense, huh? Just I had to know. Buck too. You can understand that.”
