Talking Heads

by John Domini

  The magazine held fifteen rounds, but Louie-Louie had brought the pistol across town nearly empty. What rounds remained were still in the magazine, not the firing chamber, and the safety was on besides. The brother said he’d “tested” the thing in the concrete hollows above the Mass Pike extension, the highway trench that bordered the South End. He’d squeezed off shots as the big trucks roared past. Afterwards he’d headed across town with just three cartridges left.

  Nodding, Kit yanked out the four-fifths-empty magazine and shoved it into a pants pocket. He double-checked the chamber, triple-checked, then let the weapon sit—though, setting his elbows on the desktop, he shielded it with his upper body. By now Louie-Louie was rocking head-down, whimpering and rocking, plainly helpless despite how he made the chair shriek beneath him. He repeated he hadn’t been gunning for Kit.

  “Been way crazier than that,” the brother said. “Man, I been thinking I was Superfly.”

  “Where, where did you …”

  “Listen to me, man. Please, please listen.” Louie-Louie pointed out that if he’d wanted to shoot Kit, he’d had plenty of chances earlier.

  Not exactly reassuring. “Louie-Louie, I’m not the guy for this. Think about it.”

  “Just listen, huh? For my Mama, man, for my Mama. You want to do right by her, don’t you?”

  Kit pointed out that there were agencies, like the brother had said. All it took was a phone call.

  “Phone calls just don’t cut it with me any more. Phone calls don’t even touch it. How do you think a phone feels when you’ve got a gun in your pocket?”

  Kit eyed the weapon again, empty beneath him.

  “Today,” Louie-Louie went on, “man, I wound up over to the State House.”

  “What? The State House?”

  “I said it’s been crazy, didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”

  “You went to the State House packing a piece?”

  Grimacing against a fresh burst of tears, Louie-Louie nodded. First he’d done his testing, the brother explained, and then he’d done his walking. “From over by my side of the Mass Pike clear across to the State House. Across half the damn city.” The walk itself had come to feel like another test.

  “Life, life,” Louie-Louie said, “one test after another.”

  It had come to feel like proving something, overcoming something, to make it on foot from the poorest crannies of downtown to the wealthiest slope of Beacon Hill. “What was that you said earlier, man? The dead of winter?”

  Kit snuck in another glance at the gun. From this angle it suggested a different letter, an N.

  “That was what I was up against,” the brother said. Only after Louie-Louie had conquered the wind and the ice would he deserve the golden dome, the marble columns of the State House.

  “End of the line,” he said. “To be the man—you know, the man? I had to get all the way to the end of the line.”

  N for Not again, Not this time.

  Gulping down sobs, wiping his hands on his bright shirt, Louie-Louie explained that by the time he reached Beacon Hill, if he’d had anything clear in his head at all, it had been a picture. “Picture of my brother, man. The photo from the trial, you know, the one they showed on the TV. In his suit, remember?” Kit remembered, he said so—he relented at last to the notion of conversation—and Louie-Louie explained that the photo “wasn’t Junior.” Even the suit wasn’t Junior’s, he said. “Picture like that, it could’ve been anybody up on the TV. Could’ve been some stranger up there.” So Junior’s brother had soldiered his way through the winter, the racist city, with an instrument in his pocket that would blast away all the fakes, the family turned to strangers.

  “Louie-Louie.” Kit put a hand on the brother.

  “I had to blast, man.”

  “Aw, what about your mother? She hasn’t turned into a stranger yet.”

  Louie-Louie shook off his hand and sat up again, still talking. He’d crossed to the State House from the Parker House. He’d heard his weary breathing echo inside the rotunda. Only a room or two farther in, aging white boys sat around giving the okay to every kind of lying and denial.

  “End of the line,” he said.

  “They have security there,” Kit said. “Capitol police.”

  “Man, cops was part of it, don’t you get it? I said I was Superfly, didn’t I? I was everywhere.”

  “But they have the new high-tech stuff, too. The setups you see in airports. Metal detectors.”

  “Metal detectors ain’t right at the door, Viddich.”

  Kit remembered. The State House lobby was Roman style, the Pantheon, with marble as imposing as the piece up on Leo’s desk. A tourist attraction.

  “You can get in,” Louie-Louie said, “if you’re wearing a good shirt.” Talking did seem to relax him: the brother pinched his shirtfront, half-smiling.

  “Did you—did you have a particular target in mind?”

  “Target, huh. Target. Picture off the news in my head, and he asks me did I have a target.”

  Kit suffered a mental flash flood of last Thursday’s craziness. The Monsod on TV isn’t there. Big media have been actively avoiding the truth. Meantime Louie-Louie declared that the bad guys on this story were all the same. “That’s where I was coming from, see. By the time I got to the State House, it was all the same liars and cheaters against me. Hiding the truth everywhere. Got to blast.”

  Kit found himself frightened all over again. He took up the gun—a spot of oil leaked out the open magazine into his palm—and slipped it in a coat pocket.

  “All those suits and ties in the lobby,” Louie-Louie said. “I was everywhere, I was in every face.”

  Kit repeated that he wasn’t the one Louie-Louie should be talking to. There were hotlines, 24-hour …

  “Aw, Viddich. I made it out of there, didn’t I? Made it out of there in one piece. And I made it over here, too, made it to the one man done my family any good in years now.”

  Kit got his elbows back on the desktop.

  “I met a hippie, man. That’s all. I met a hippie.” Louie-Louie shook his head. “Over at the State House, I ran into some kind of hippie, you believe that? And next thing I know I was back out on Beacon Street. Safe, man.”

  Louie-Louie explained that, all told, he couldn’t have spent more than three minutes in the lobby. The capitol police hadn’t even spotted him, the brother believed, before the perfect target appeared. “Perfect, a big tall white guy with a big old white-guy head. You know what I’m talking about, the silver hair and the lips. Fine old white-guy head.”

  Kit reminded Louie-Louie how careful he’d been, coming across town. No rounds in the chamber, the safety off.

  “Well I mean, how long would that take? The guy had to stand in line, you know. He had to go through that, what do you call it, the security screen.”

  Every now and then legislators came out the front door.

  “Cops hadn’t even looked at me, man.”

  Louie-Louie sank over the chair back again. His face, dropping, shrinking, looked for the first time like his dead brother’s.

  “You know the echo in that place, man?” he said. “The echo, with all that marble …”

  Gently, Kit asked about the hippie.

  “Weird echo, man. Like I was everywhere.”

  “Louie-Louie, you’re not that crazy. Think about it. All you needed was a nudge.”

  “Huh, a nudge.”

  “And then you were out of there.”

  Louie-Louie roughed his beard, the hairs crackling. “Well, the guy was high.” The guy was white, a blonde throwback with hair to his armpits, in a fatigue jacket dirtier than Louie-Louie’s. The hippie had taken the brother for a free spirit like himself. “Came tugging on my arm and told me he’d just smoked a joint right there in the State House. Whispering, man. Stupid stoner whispering and giggling, in that echo.”

  “He’d had a joint? He told you?”

  “The ofay thought I might like a taste myself.”
r />   Kit shook his head. Getting high in the state capitol was a good ten years out of date.

  “Fucking burnout.” Talking to the floor. “Fucking total ‘60s burnout.”

  After a moment Louie-Louie went on to say that he thought it was the hippie’s smell which had stopped him. “You know the smell these stoners get, man? Real sweet, you know? Gets in the clothes.” Kit was nodding, though in fact he’d never noticed that these relics had any particular odor. Instead he’d made the connection to the mother’s Catawba Pink.

  “Smell like my Mama these days. Like that Catawba Pink.”

  The brother broke down again. The sobs came with less intensity than before, but the big muscles in his back heaved. Kit bent beside him, his own long sorry body heaving. Everybody’s tired, he said or tried to say, everybody’s tired and battered—recalling irrelevantly that he’d gone the entire day without any Percodan. He frowned and tried harder; he brought up examples of the brother’s better judgment. “Louie-Louie, you’re talking with her minister, right? You’re talking with everyone you can, right? Louie-Louie, I saw those brochures you brought her.”

  Kit bent deep, against the desk corner. He kept talking till the brother’s back went smooth under his hand.

  “Man,” Louie-Louie sighed, sitting up. “I’m crying more than my Mama, these days.”

  Kit, letting go, thought of Bette again. His last embrace.

  “Crying in front of white folks.” Louie-Louie shook his head.

  The clip of bullets in Kit’s pocket bit his thigh. He put his hand back on the desk and brought up the Grand Jury. “That’s how you nail the bad guys, Louie-Louie. That’s how you blast. There’s going to be some indictments, don’t you worry.”

  Louie-Louie had heard about it. Sounding frosty all of a sudden, making up for his tears, he said his mother had told him. The media had really come after her once they learned there was going to be a Grand Jury. “A lot of calls, man.”

  Kit made no response. He was picturing Louie-Louie and his mother over the Globe’s forthcoming story on the Grand Jury. He saw them reading his testimony, reading what he’d done.

  “Where I’m coming from,” the brother said, “I don’t expect much from any Commonwealth of Massachusetts Grand Jury.”

  Kit murmured that he still had to prepare his statement.

  “Ain’t about no statement.” Louie-Louie was sounding like he had when he’d come in. “Man, everybody’s got a statement.”

  Kit was a believer, yes. But what did that mean when it came to telling Louie-Louie and his mother?

  “Viddich, huh, you can make your statement. But then what happens is, the court calls Mr. Super Bad. Court calls Mr. Super Bad and says, hey, my man. What do you have to say about Mr. Viddich’s, uh, allegations?”

  Didn’t it mean he had to let the family know before he went into the Grand Jury? “Louie-Louie,” Kit said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  The phone rang, astonishingly loud.

  “Everything in there’s just allegations,” Louie-Louie said. “Big old white guys talking and talking.”

  Another ring. It was the glass that made it so loud, extra reverberant when the outer office was empty. Kit couldn’t think of a reason not to answer.

  “Kit?” Again the voice was recognizable at once. “I hope I’ve got you at a better time.”

  “Creates confusion, man. Confusion, you dig?”

  Uncle Pete, calling back. The connection sounded clearer than talking to the South End. And the interruption felt like a godsend, the cattleman’s flatness of the uncle’s voice just what the doctor ordered.

  “What’re you grinning about, man?” Louie-Louie asked.

  Aw, how could Kit take time for Pete now? How, with a new question about public record and private conscience looming before him—with the brother back in his tough-guy act, up off his chair and looming before him?

  “You listening to me, Viddich? You hear what I’m telling you about confusion?”

  Kit put a hand on the speaker, stage-whispering Family. He indicated he’d be off in a minute.

  “Everybody here’s just fine,” the uncle was saying. “I don’t want you worrying about anything like that.”

  The uncle had said he could wait, earlier. And Kit was good about calling; this weekend had been an exception.

  “Uncle Pete,” he began, “you know I’m at the office now.”

  “Wellsir, you see, your wife called.”

  “Bette?”

  “She talked to your mother. Talked a long time, Kidder. Seemed like something important.”

  *

  It took Kit a few minutes, while Louie-Louie snooped impatiently around the outer office, to understand that this call in fact had little to do with his wife. It wasn’t about Bette at all, it turned out. Rather, the uncle was getting in touch to let Kit know he was gay.

  “What?”

  “I’m gay, Kit. Homosexual. Time I came out of the closet and let everyone know me for what I am.”

  Kit switched the receiver from ear to ear, then back again. Beyond his glass walls Louie-Louie, frowning, fingered one of Zia’s postcards from beneath her desk cover. The brother had warned Kit that he wasn’t much good at waiting.

  Kit’s uncle sounded insect-sized: “You there, Kidder?”

  The whole phone call had been like this. Pete knew that Bette had called Kit’s mom with big news, something that left the mother shaken. Afterwards “Sister Nina,” as the uncles liked to call her, had gotten on the phone with friends from church. She’d called an emergency meeting of the prayer circle. But the uncle didn’t have any idea what Bette had said. He didn’t know where Bette had called from, either, and Kit wasn’t about to explain why it mattered. The whole conversation had left him tonguetied.

  Now this. “You there?”

  “Here,” Kit said.

  “Mm. For a minute there, wellsir. I was afraid you might hang up on me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

  Then nothing, for a long moment. Cowboy reticence. And when Uncle Pete spoke up again, gamely plowing through Kit’s dumbfoundedness, the man explained that it was in fact this very same reticence which had finally triggered his coming out. He’d been moved to see that the call from Bette had left Kit’s mom upset, tight-voiced, blinking back tears—“but you know her, Kit. She still wouldn’t talk.” Nina gave away nothing, or nothing beyond the basics. “She told Leslie and me that you weren’t hurt. That was it.”

  Pete’s sister reached out instead to the church. “That tore it somehow, Kidder.”

  Silence again. Kit tried to respond, but got no further than a grunt, a croak. Finally Pete asked if their sister had told him and Les the truth. Was Kit all right?

  Aw, Viddich. “Uncle Pete, we’ve all—the whole family’s been playing it pretty close to the chest.”

  “Right up tight against the old chest.”

  “Uncle Pete, I’m sorry. I’m fine, I’m fine, but I didn’t expect this. You’re still half my father, Uncle Pete.”

  “Wellsir. Good to hear.”

  “I’m with you. I’m sorry about being such an asshole.” He knew the man better than to say I love you. “I’m with you on this, Uncle Pete.”

  The uncle may have laughed. His voice light, he said there was no need to apologize. “Our Sister Nina’s kept her business to herself plenty of times before, without me going and doing something like this.” And Pete figured it wasn’t going to get any easier, letting people know. Kit had been the first one off the ranch to hear, partly because he was family of course—but also partly because the uncle had figured he might be more broadminded than the neighbors in Blue Earth county. “Today when you said you were an Easterner, I mean to tell you, I was glad to hear it.”

  “I’m an Easterner, sure. But you raised me, Uncle Pete. That’s still true after this phone call.”

  “Good to hear. But I mean to tell yo
u, I’ve heard all about what’s happening back East. Your mother, you know, she can’t get through the day without Minnesota Public Radio.”

  Kit ran a finger around the rim of his Ve-Ri-Tas mug. “Back East,” he recalled, meant the urban world generally. Not just New York and Boston, but also L.A., San Francisco.

  “The gay revolution?” he asked.

  “We’ve heard all about it. San Francisco, New York. Everybody’s coming out.”

  Kit, interested despite the day’s wear and tear, bent towards the phone. Was Uncle Pete saying that seeing this story so much in the media had helped inspire him to come out?

  “Wellsir. I guess I’d say so, yes.”

  “Because you’ve heard it on the radio.”

  “Not just because I’ve heard it on the radio.”

  “No, no I guess not. But, Uncle Pete, telling everyone you’re homosexual—it’s hard work.”

  “It’s something, all right. A test of character.”

  “I’m serious. When you announce you’re gay, Uncle Pete, when you flat-out announce it , there’s a lot …”

  Oh God, when had Louie-Louie come in? Kit, sitting up from the phone, spotted his visitor just as the big youngster turned away fast. The brother turned and slipped back out into the front workspaces with face averted. From behind he looked less threatening. Above his hips hung babyfat love handles.

  Louie-Louie, the good brother. Kit’s uncle, oblivious, was saying something about Harvey Milk.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are. From Bette to Mom to Pete to Louie-Louie—come out, come out.

  The offices were getting dark. Kit, his eyes still on his visitor, reached for the light switch without standing. He found an unexpected serenity in that, a naturalness in having the switch so close and easy. Today’s blown secrets no longer rattled him. Whatever Bette had said, whatever Louie-Louie had heard, these felt like secondary aggravations. Hadn’t Kit just been thinking, himself, that he needed to start telling friends and family before they read about it in the papers? Hadn’t he just been trying to decide how to do it? His eyes adjusted easily to the fluorescents, and he caught up again on his uncle’s conversation.

  “Now, Christopher,” Pete was saying, “you’re not going to pretend you never knew.”