Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

“Did they say what they wanted?”

“I don’t think,” he answers slowly, “it was a family visit,” which is a little funny, I guess, because it turns out in a way that’s exactly what it is.

“What did you tell them?”

“I had to tell them something,” he says, “so I did the best—”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you worked at John Hanks’ Top Dog.” He pauses to see how I take it, to see if I’m going to break his neck. When I don’t react he seizes the opportunity to spit out a rationale. “Well I figured you weren’t working there anymore and it was better than giving them your address and if I didn’t tell them something or if I tried to tell them something untrue they would have found out and come back and—”

“And broken your neck,” I nod. But he’s right, after all. It’s my situation and he isn’t responsible for it. “You owe me some money on the last piece,” I say, “we agreed on fifty and your accounting office coughed up forty.” He’s happy to pay me the ten, he’d probably pay me a hundred right now if I asked for it. “If they come back,” I say on my way out, “you don’t know anything else. Remember? And you sure haven’t seen me recently.”

“Goodbye, Banning,” he says, almost inaudibly.

I’M WALKING ACROSS TOWN. I think about taking the train or a cab but the fact is, well, there’s this havoc in my feet, this havoc’s back in my heart again. All in the course of twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours everything’s begun to change, in the way things do: Kronehelm’s leaving, and someone’s looking for me; and I have to adjust to the havoc of the times. But I haven’t figured yet if the havoc of the times and the havoc in me are the same.

I’m thinking as fast as I can, as I make my way across town.

It’s dark by the time I get to my street. The streetlights are on and from the windows I smell food, I hear the radios and people talking around their kitchen tables. Nobody’s out on the street except two guys hanging around the front of my building.

Little man, big man.

I barely register them at first, but as I come down the long street I realize they’re not moving, they’re waiting, and I start to slow down. I start to slow down and then they’re looking at me, and I’ve almost come to a stop in the middle of the street, with no sound but the sloshing of the gutters, the radios and voices seeming to die away, and then their steps coming back to me out of the night. They stop where they are and wait for me to make a move, and it’s when I don’t that the small one says, “You know someone named Jainlight?”

All my life. We’re inseparable.

And as fast as I’m thinking, it can barely keep up with as fast as I’m moving. I’m running wildly, and they’re right behind my wildness, for one block after another. I’m frantically trying to think of somewhere I can lose them, maybe the park, if I can run that far and fast. It’s hard to measure how far and fast they’ll stay behind me, dogging me to the end. And then this makes me think of something else, and I don’t especially like the idea but it’s the only thing that comes to mind, and I need a favor now.

Seven blocks away from my place I reach the brownstone and head for the top, taking the stairs instead of the lift. Little man big man have no choice but to follow, if they take the lift I’ll lose them. I get up to the club and the doorman who got my job actually isn’t sure he remembers me or not; Doggie doesn’t brag to the customers about how smart this one is. The two men show up right behind me and I just bull my way in. The doorman yells something and then he’s got the other two to deal with. The bigger of them is almost my size.

The commotion attracts a lot of attention. I don’t like this ruckus because I know Hanks won’t like it, I don’t like it that I’ve run straight to him like a kid who got into trouble the first time he left home, when he thought he was so smart and on top of everything. At first I don’t see Hanks, only Billy and I’m not interested in smart repartee with Billy right now. Then Doggie comes to us out of the smoke from the ivory and silver cigarette holder of the blonde next to him. Other people standing around the club are wondering what it’s all about, and as I figured the boss isn’t happy. “What’s up kid,” he says. He’s looking at me and at the two guys over my shoulder. “I was on my way over,” I pant, “then these two get on my tail and won’t step off.” I point to the little man and the big man, all three of us breathing hard. It’s obvious we’ve been running.

“So you thought you’d bring them here with you,” Hanks says. He’s annoyed. “You used to dress better when you worked for me, kid,” he says, fingering my shirt; in the light of the bar big circles of sweat underline my arms. The little man’s pouring it off his face while the bigger one makes sounds through his nose. “You can’t,” asks Hanks, “take care of a couple of jackasses like these?” Billy’s going through their jackets now, and I get lucky: he comes up with a gun on the smaller one. This immediately makes my situation look more legitimately desperate. Still, it never occurred to me they had guns. I don’t know why I ran. Hanks is right, I dealt with characters before when I was riding the rails from Pittsburgh, but this time I ran without giving it a second thought.

It was that no stranger has ever called me by my name before.

I find myself studying the big guy. Meanwhile the little one’s talking. He introduces himself as Johnson and the big one as Blaine. Johnson has a red bushy mustache and a pocketwatch that hangs from a chain. They’re local investigators hired by an out-of-state client to find and take me back. “What’s the matter with you,” Hanks says to them, “can’t you see this is just a kid? ‘Take him back.’ Where’s there to take him back to?” And Johnson says home. “You got the wrong guy,” says Doggie, “I’ve known this kid forever.”

“The fact is,” Johnson says, shifting his feet, “the fact is this man is Banning Jainlight from outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he left three years ago.”

Hanks slaps his hands together. “Well there’s your error,” he says, almost jubilantly. “This kid isn’t Banning Jainlight, Banning Jainlight is only his alias .” Now he slaps me on the back at the joke. “It’s a common mistake though,” he reassures Johnson. I’m still studying the big guy Blaine, and behind him I catch a glimpse of Leona, who disappears back into the coats. I feel badly for her, because I know now that this Johnson and Blaine must have come after talking to my editor at the magazine, and Leona tipped them. At first I assumed it was Billy, he’s standing by the bar with another toothpick in his mouth. But it takes all of three seconds to see Leona lost in her hate for me and for herself; for the first time, at this moment, she understands we’ll never be together again, and for the first time I understand what it means to her. And now the big guy Blaine happens to turn his head and look over his shoulder to see what I’m looking at, and when he turns back there’s no expression on his face at all. The mere sight of him and his blank face makes the havoc in me go all crazy, moving around to every part of me until it settles somewhere in my mouth.

Johnson’s steady and composed, given the hostile circumstances. “We’re not here to share a moment of humor with you, Mr. Hanks,” he says, “one way or another Mr. Jainlight will be going back to his father in Pennsylvania. We can take him back privately or we can go to the police and have him arrested and extradited.”

“Maybe his father should come get him himself,” Hanks says.