J. Wachowski - In Plain View

“Hi.”

“Look at you. You’ve been growing.”

“Yeah.”

His car was so big, it felt like sitting on top of the world. He told her to buckle up and she did. They started driving and for a long while he didn’t say anything. He only looked at her, quick, and then looked back at the road.

Was she supposed to talk? She bit her fingernail instead.

When they were almost at her house, he started asking her the usual stuff about school and how her fish was doing and if she still liked Scooby-Doo. He kept driving right past her house. Did he forget where she lived?

“Um? You passed it. That was my house.”

She got a weird feeling inside, bad weird. What could she do? She couldn’t think of one good thing. Pretty soon the worried feeling was a fuzzy feeling, almost sleepy. She wiped her hands on her jeans.

“Seen any movies lately?” he asked.

“Where’re we going?”

“You’ll see,” he answered. “I need you to understand something, Jen. Something really important. Something your mother would want you to understand.”

“Okay,” she said. Nobody talked to her about her mother. Quickly, without looking at him, she asked, “Do you think about her ever?”

He pulled over to the side of the road and snapped the stick thing between them into the slot marked P. Jenny stayed very still, wondering if she’d made him mad.

“Do I think about your mom?” Very quietly he said, “All the time.”

Jenny sighed. “Me, too.”

He turned in his seat and stared at her. “Look around. You know where you are?”

They were on the edge of the neighborhood, somewhere. She recognized the fence up the road a ways, that went around the old cemetery. She and Aunt Maddy passed it when they took walks on the Prairie Path last summer. Jenny had never gone in there.

She said yes with a tiny nod.

“You ever say anything to your aunt about me?” he demanded all of a sudden.

“Like what?”

“Like anything.” He said it in a funny tight voice.

“No.” Suddenly, it hurt her throat to say even that one word.

“Good. That’s good. I didn’t want any of this, you know.” He banged one fist against the steering wheel.

Jenny jumped. Her seatbelt got really tight. It was hard to breathe.

“Look at what I got here.” He pulled a shiny silver square out of his pocket. It was one of those medicine things with the pills in little bubbles. “You ever seen these before?”

Jenny nodded. They looked just like the ones that Tonya had for her hurting leg.

“In your house? Where?”

Jenny knew where medicine should be. “The medicine bucket?”

“No. They aren’t there.” He sounded pretty sure about that. “Where else could they be? A whole bunch of them.”

Jenny raised her shoulders up around her ears. She didn’t know. Really.

He threw the medicine in the air and said a bad word. “Okay. This is really important, Jenny. Are you listening? Don’t say anything to your aunt about me and your mother. Do you hear me? Something bad might happen if you do.”

His hand reached out, like he was going to touch her or something, and she squeezed herself against the car door. He leaned across her body to jerk her door latch. Jenny’s fingers fidgeted for her seatbelt button.

“Get out,” he said.

Jenny didn’t argue. She scrambled out, pulling at her jacket where it caught on the seatbelt.

“Take a look around. You know where you are? It’s a dangerous road. Cars everywhere. None of us are safe, Jenny.”

She shook her head yes, yes, yes, but all she could think about was getting out of that car. Her feet crunched on the gravel as she practically fell out the door. There wasn’t any sidewalk. The shoulder of the road was white gravel and weeds. The car pulled onto the road. Jenny took a few giant steps backward and fell into a tangle of bushes, poking, scratching, tearing at her clothes. The car drove away.

Jenny watched him go. She looked down at her feet and saw the packet, the silver square carrying white bubbles of medicine. It must have fallen out of the car when she opened the door.

A car whooshed by. Jenny’s heart jumped.

She picked up the medicine, turned and ran. She didn’t run toward anything. She ran away from the car, away from him. When she was tired and out of breath she stopped, sat down hard and put her head on her knees.

More cars passed. They were loud and windy and scary. Cars could hit you and kill you. They were like dinosaurs or alligators. Big, dangerous, stupid cars. Jenny crawled backward, away from the road until she bumped into a fence. She hid in a cave of branches between two big bushes.

Safe.

4:25:00 p.m.

It was one thing to see Tom Jost’s story begin to make sense. It was another thing entirely to turn what I knew into commercial television. The high that came with understanding made the crash back to WWST reality all the more painful.

“What the hell? No office?”

Barbara squinted at me over the top of her cat-eye glasses. Glasses like hers are the secretarial equivalent of a bleeding-dagger tattoo and a gold front tooth. “You got no call to use that kind of language with me.”

“What kind of language do I need to use to get an office with a fucking phone? French? I have a New York conference call coming in ten minutes. Am I supposed to take that in the lobby?”

Barbara hit the intercom. “I’m not dealing with this, Richard. She’s using the F-word again.”

“Goddamn it!” Gatt shouted in stereo. The sound of his voice came through the intercom and the wall at the same time.

The door to the inner sanctum banged open and Gatt hollered, “Get in here, O’Hara.” He stumped back behind his desk. “This, I do not need today.”

Schmed was in the office lounging in one of the faux-leather chairs. He shot me his signature snarky smile. Unpleasant memories of Saturday night’s conversation came rushing back. It was pretty clear what he and Gatt had been busy discussing. Schmed leaned back, crossing his ankle over one knee. The chair sounded like it was gasping its last fart.

“Say excuse me,” I told him.

“Why? You’re the one interrupting.”

“Quit acting like a couple of juvies,” Gatt said. “We got five minutes to resolve this. You’ve got a conference call, don’t you?”

“As a matter of fact.”

“Okay. Here’s the deal. Jim gives up one of his people’s office spots and you do his story on what-?”

Schmed jumped in right on cue. “Local car dealerships.”

“No way-”

“-I’m thinking something along the lines: The Industry that Saved the West or maybe Rotten Reputation, Respectable Reality. I’ll give you a list of contact names.”

A hairball of disgust formed at the back of my throat. I considered hocking it at Schmed. Instead I asked him, “What kind of car do you drive?”

“Like I’d tell you. You planning on putting sugar in my gas tank, O’Hara?”

Not a bad idea. “No. I’m asking what model. I’ll bet you’re an SUV man.”

“Stay away from my car,” Schmed said.

“I knew it. You and your dealership buddies are going to have to find another way to lure the suckers.” This conversation was not taking me to my happy place. I went for the door. “You’ll never sell that to network.”

“Come on, O’Hara,” Gatt whined. “Don’t bust my balls here.”

“Selling it to network is your job, honey,” Schmed said.

“No way.”

“Phone in your complaints,” he tossed back at me. “Lines are always open.”

Gatt heaved a high-drama sigh even though I didn’t bother to answer. Men with buffed nails have no power in my universe. But his jab pushed a button, and a light came on.