by Unknown
“Joe,” Leslie said quietly, “Can you tell me about… your… mom?”
“Uh, okay… Her name was Lisa. Uh, you’d have liked her, she was real nice.” Joe rubbed his right temple with his left hand. “She worked at an insurance place three days a week, and she kept all the books for the extermination business. Uh… lessee… she sang in the church chorus, had a really nice voice. I remember…” He scratched his face, lost in thought.
Kate turned to him, and her face softened. “You talk like she’s not around any more.”
“Yeah,” Joe said slowly. “She got breast cancer when I was sixteen and… uh… didn’t last very long after that.”
They were all quiet.
“That must have been terrible,” Leslie said, looking at Joe intently.
“Well, it wasn’t a trip to the circus, I’ll tell y’ that.” He looked up and said “So… that other round?”
Kate waved down a waitress and they requested refills with their dinners.
“Actually,” Joe said when their server walked away “I sort of walked out on my dad that night I met you, Fred. We had kind of a fight.”
“No shit? Huh. Who’da figured he had a temper?” Fred winced as Kate elbowed him in the ribs.
“When we saw you at the hotel, I thought it might be something like that,” Leslie said. “This isn’t really an easy situation.”
“You can say that again,” Joe said.
“This isn’t really an easy situation,” Fred repeated. Joe laughed a little, but not very well.
When their meals arrived, they all tucked in silently for a while. After several forkfulls, Joe glanced at Kate.
“So, uh, Kate,” he said hesitantly. “I was wondering… something.”
“Well, ask away.”
He chewed, swallowed, opened his mouth, then said “Naw, forget it. It’s not important.”
“Is it about being black?”
Joe reached for his beer.
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I suppose you could say that’s, really, it.”
She drummed her nails on the table, twisted her mouth to the side and said “Well? What do you want to know?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Joe said defensively. “I mean… just forget it. Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“Only one of my grandparents was ‘black-black.’ That’s the phrase we used for people who were visibly, obviously black. He married a white woman, and their only son did the same thing. I married white again, so you’re one eighth black. Though I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since you’re light enough to pass, right?”
Joe just looked confused, but he was thinking –“Most of the time, yeah.”
“Jeez Kate, don’t you think you’re being a little hard on ‘im?” Fred asked. “I mean, fine, he’s ignorant of his black heritage. But don’t you think he’s got a pretty good excuse? Given all the circumstances and all. I mean—no offense, Joe—this doesn’t look like the most diverse or, like, cosmopolitan town in the world.”
Kate sighed and sat back in her chair.
“I guess… I’m sorry Joe, it’s just… Well, it’s frustrating.” She took another sip of her martini. “I mean, I guess part of me thinks it shouldn’t be a big deal. Wishes it wasn’t a big deal. But at the same time, I know it’s a huge deal. You’re not prepared to be black, you didn’t grow up knowing what it’s all about, but… I mean… you’re black.”
“My best friend’s black,” Joe said.
The Mundys were nonplussed.
“It’s not… I mean, it was never a big deal. I mean, we knew, but it wasn’t like this thing,” Joe said, guiding the glass to his mouth one more time. “And there aren’t a whole lot of black people in this particular town, you’re right about that. So Luther got dumped on by the shitheads growing up, but I mean, they’re just shitheads, right? They dumped on everyone. One reason was as good as another. So… I guess… if someone’s gonna shit on me ‘cause I’m ‘black’… well, he’s just a shithead who’d find some other reason if it wasn’t that one. So what’s the big deal?”
“Ever told a joke about jungle bunnies, Joe?”
Joe flushed. “Well, y’know…”
“That’s the terrible thing. It’s not just shitheads. The world is full of fine, upstanding people who don’t even realize they’re doing it when they’re doing it. There are people who don’t think they’re racist, even while they’re doing and saying things that cripple black communities because it’s not in their back yards…”
“Uh, Kate?” Fred put his hand on hers. She glared and yanked it away.
“What? You got something to say?”
“Not as much as you, seems like.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think he means that this may be a little much, for Joe, to take in all at once,” Leslie said.
“What are you now, my interpreter?” Fred asked.
“Maybe if you just said what’s on your mind, she wouldn’t need to interpret you,” Kate said, overlapping Fred as he told Leslie “You’re a fine one to talk about giving people too much to handle.”
“Okay,” Fred said, squinting at Kate. “I think it’s time we got back on task here.”
“On task?”
“Yeah, setting up a happy family reunion,” Leslie said bitterly. She turned to Joe. “Aren’t you excited about your brand new parents?”
Joe looked down uncomfortably.
“Uh, maybe I should go.”
“Nice going, Fred,” Kate said, glaring at her ex-husband.
“No Joe, stick around, look, we’re sorry, we won’t fight any more…”
“It’s just, I got a lot to think about, you know? I mean, I don’t hold it against you. I don’t. But I mean, yeah, this is a lot to take in. You ain’t gonna be mad, are you?” He was starting to stand up.
“Joe, please stay,” Kate said.
“Uh…” He looked pained. “I don’t think… I mean, is that a good idea? How about I see you tomorrow?”
“Breakfast? At that diner across from the motel?”
“Yeah sure,” Joe said.
“Ten o’clock a good time?”
“Uh… well, I was planning on going back to my dad. You know, we have work to do…”
“How about eight? Is eight okay?”
“…Yeah,” Joe said reluctantly. “I’ll see you then, I guess.” With that, he took off through the dim room.
“Nice going, Malcolm X,” Fred said.
“Hey, he asked.” Kate responded.
“Sure, blame the victim. Nice to see you picked something up from your years married to the honky oppressor.”
“Oh, now you want to blame your skin color for the divorce?”
Neither one of them noticed when Leslie left the table and followed Joe outside.
* * *
The Freak’s apartment was part home, part doctor’s office. It had gotten the idea long ago, watching the movie “Dead Ringers.” Having an attached clean room was extremely convenient for the Freak, even though it rarely brought patients (or other clients) to its residence.
For this job, it decided on plain clothes, thinking it would wear plain bodies to match. One set of sexy women’s clothes got thrown in with the jeans and flannel shirts—one never knew. In the same spirit, the Freak packed a handgun. Even though it was a lousy shot and couldn’t think of many circumstances in which a gun would be more useful than its native abilities, it had learned over many painful years that its ability to anticipate trouble was not sufficient. No one’s was.
It was a six hour drive to the nowhere town that this “Joe Kimble” called home. An all night haul would put it in town at three in the morning. As it wadded panties and boxers into its gym bag, the Freak frowned, wondering if it should wait and make a fresh start of it in the morning. No, it decided, better to get down there as quickly as possible before things got too hectic.
It briefly considered using magick to maintain its alertness on the trip,
but decided against it. Best to conserve its power. Caffeine tabs should do just as well.
Toothbrush, deodorant, scalpels, disinfectants, a police band scanner, tampons (the Freak’s cycles were erratic, to say the least), bandages, cash—It figured $10,000 should be enough, then decided to double it—its traveling gear looked pretty complete, and anything else it could pick up in town.
The Freak bit its lip, impatient to be on its way, but decided to play it safe and build up a charge before it left. Curing deadly illness was always exacting, and the Freak did not want to push its luck by facing two TNI assassins low on juice. It scrubbed up and put on a rubber glove.
In its doctor’s office, the Freak had a custom-built chair with powerful restraints on the armrests. For a while, it had made do with leather straps, until it had made itself strong enough to stretch them when it flinched involuntarily. Now the seat had padded steel manacles.
The Freak sat and latched down its left arm. Then, with calm and professional movements, it wiped the arm down with disinfectants and injected itself with Novocain. Next, it took a scalpel and made a three inch incision through the dermis and epidermis, gently pulling the skin aside to reveal the muscles beneath. It clamped the blood vessels and applied a little suction, then slowly probed between the short and long radial extensor muscles. It flexed its wrist slightly, watching the revealed muscles contract and expand. They were far denser and stronger than the muscles it had been born with—the Freak had spent decades on itself, improving on nature. Similarly, its bones were harder and stronger than those of an ordinary person.
As it probed, the Freak thought the special thoughts that gave it power. The thoughts that paid for its abilities to coldly manipulate the cells of its own body and the bodies of others. It thought about those mysterious, invisibly tiny cells being somehow a part of itself, of its body being like a city or a nation, made of uncounted tiny animals that were, together, something more than the sum of their parts.
“This is me,” it thought, staring, but knowing that there was more to itself than this.
The cells. Intensely personal and profoundly distant. Alien and familiar at once. Poised on that contradiction, the Freak was open to the power, the power to resolve the paradox, to control the legions of cells with nothing but the essence of its personality.
It held the contradictions, strangled in its mind with an unbreakable grasp. Like all mystic adepts, the Freak was very good at thinking in contradictions.
When it felt the power come, the Freak smiled slightly. It set the scalpel aside and sutured up its arm, carefully blotting the blood away. That would do, for now.
When its arm was well bandaged, the Freak picked up its suitcase and left.
* * *
Leslie caught up with Joe as he was hanging up the phone in the lobby, pouting slightly and annoyed.
“Need a ride?” she asked. They’d all driven together in the Honda. He shrugged.
“I could phone my dad,” he said. “I mean… Ralph. Shit, you know who I’m talking about.”
“Ralph’s your dad, and I’ll call Fred my dad. It’ll just be a whole lot simpler.”
“Okay, my dad then. I could call him.”
“You don’t want to, do you?”
“What makes you say that?”
Leslie shrugged. “I dunno. You just don’t seem too eager to do it. Who’d you call first?”
“Luther. That’s the friend I was talking about. But I got his machine. He’s probably at the movies.”
“So, you didn’t call your dad first?”
Joe shook his head. “I… well, I was sorta in the army for a while. And I washed out. Anyhow. My dad’s been kind of riding me about how he’s been bailing me out. You know?”
“Not really. A couple times I’ve had to bail Fred out.”
Joe couldn’t imagine what it would be like, having his father depend on him.
“Huh,” he said at last.
“Look, if you and your old man have been fighting, you don’t want to give him leverage by calling for help, right? So why don’t you let me drive you back to the hotel.”
“What about… you know, Kate and Fred?”
“Well, they’ll either fight, make up or get loaded. I’ll come back and get them after I drop you off. Hopefully they’ll be done by then.”
“Shit.”
Leslie nodded. They started walking towards the parking lot.
“So, did they always fight that much?”
“I don’t know… I just don’t think they’re a very good match. In some ways, I think they’re too much the same? But they’re from different backgrounds, so it’s hard for them. And I think each one of them reminds the other of their own flaws. Does that make sense?”
“It makes as much sense as anything else has lately.”
They got into the car. Joe slammed the door shut behind himself, then turned and said “Leslie?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you a boy or a girl? I mean, not to be rude or anything… but the birth certificate said male, but here you are dressed up like a woman. I mean, I’m not prejudiced or nothin’. I just…”
“Just want to know?” Leslie laughed. “Okay, you got me. I’m cross dressing today.” It didn’t escape Leslie’s notice that Joe edged towards the door. But she gave him credit for trying to spare her feelings by doing it subtly. Maybe it was even involuntary. She started the engine.
“It’s not a big deal, I guess,” she said. “I’m not going to hit on you, if that’s what’s on your mind.”
“Well. You know,” Joe said.
“I knew this one gay guy who went through this with his straight room mate. The roommate asked him, like, if he was attracted to him. And the gay guy goes ‘Look, I have enough trouble getting dates without mooning over somebody I know is going to turn me down.’”
Joe gave a weak little laugh.
“It doesn’t bother me, I guess,” Joe said nervously.
“That’s sweet of you to say. Maybe it’ll be the truth some day. But really, there’s a lot more to me than just… you know, cross dressing. It’s just a thing. It’s not like you see on Ricky Lake, you know.”
“Huh. Well, whatever,” Joe said.
“So you never had any inclination to…?”
“No!”
“Just asking. I didn’t think so, but you never can tell.” Leslie smiled, a little sly. “You big butch army stud, you.”
Joe grinned weakly back. “What ever happened to ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’?”
“Some people can tell even if no one asks. Haven’t you ever heard of ‘gaydar’?”
“Huh?”
“Some gay guys claim they can spot other gays—even the ones who are so far back in the closet they smell like mothballs. Even the machos, you know? And they call it gaydar.”
Joe frowned.
“Well, whatever,” he said.
“Don’t believe in it?”
“I don’t know,” he said warily.
Leslie laughed.
“Look, I’m not going to jump down your throat like mom did, all right?”
“Yeah, what was up with that?”
“Eh, mom’s just sensitive. I think it kind of hurts, you know?” Leslie glanced over at Joe. It was clear from his face that he didn’t know. She sighed, trying to blow the alcohol fuzz out of her brain.
“Well, when you’re white there’s whites and there’s blacks, right? But when you’re black, there’s all different kinds of blacks.”
“What, you mean like, uh, the Hutus and the Zulus or what?”
“No no. A lot of people don’t even know where in Africa their ancestors came from at all. No, it’s like, how dark are you? Are you black-black, or just kind of black? Like Tyra Banks, or Vanessa Williams. They’re blue eyed blacks—not so black as Tracy Chapman, say.”
“People care about that?”
“I’m afraid so. I mean, you grow up with nothing but whites on TV and sometimes it’s hard to feel
anything except ‘black is bad’—and the blacker you are, the worse. But then in the sixties you had these radicalized blacks, and the whole ‘sweeter the juice’ thing, and now if you’re a light skinned black they don’t trust you as much. It’s particularly bad, or it can be, if you can pass. The easier you can pass, the more you have to prove.”
“Jesus. And two days ago my biggest problem was I didn’t like working for my dad. Now I’ve got politicized negroes—hey, is it ‘negro’ or ‘black’ or ‘African-American’ or what?”
“Depends on who you talk to.”
They pulled in to the hotel.
“Well thanks, I guess.”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” Leslie said. She hesitated, then added “Look, take it easy on Mom and Dad. I’m not sure, but I kind of think they’ve had it worse than your folks did. I mean, I don’t know? But… well, there’s issues. Give ‘em some slack?”
Joe shrugged. “Sure, I guess.” He went into the hotel.
* * *
When Leslie got back to John’s Tiki Room, her parents were sitting on the curb, arms crossed, not looking at one another.
“Thanks for coming back,” Fred said, his voice hard with anger and sloppy from alcohol.
“I thought one of us should look out for Joe Kimble,” Leslie said, and immediately regretted it.
“I am looking out for him. Don’t forget he’s my actual son,” Fred said, glaring at Leslie as he stood to get into the car.
“You bastard!” Kate said, and punched him in the shoulder, hard.
Fred turned and grabbed her, flinging her up against the car door. His face was inches from hers and he hissed, “Don’t ever hit me. Do you understand?”
Leslie leaped out of the car and started to run around to the other side, where her “father” had her “mother” pinned with his body, one hand holding her purse shut and the other on her throat.
Kate didn’t fight, and for the first time ever she was afraid of Fred Mundy.
“I’m sorry, Fred,” she whispered, and she meant it in more ways than one.
Leslie arrived just as Fred let go and slumped down on the curb again, face in his hands. Kate’s hand went to her throat, and the other to her purse, but she didn’t even think of pulling the gun. Fred was crying in earnest now, making no attempt to hold back.
