John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Mrs. Rebes herself seemed to expect nothing. Today she told Kit she’d read the piece, she’d shown it around the coffee shop, and to hear her you’d think that Sea Level’s few smudgy columns were the best her boy could have hoped for.

Kit had seen her shop. On the Goodwill Industries side of the South End, its floor tiles had long since run to yellow. There he’d made himself sleepless with caffeine, listening. Mrs. Rebes had revealed at last that she could show him something “a lot better than plain old letters.” She’d told him she had “the actual, real cassettes. ” The tapes Junior had sent from prison. After that Kit had done most of the talking. The hopped-up flow of his words however had felt unreal, intrusive, hypocritical, and it’d come to Kit that he needed to work the same transformations on himself as on this string-fingered, unhappy woman. He needed to trust his own asking. He had to know that he was beyond sheer nickel-plated ambition.

Mrs. Rebes could stare for minutes on end between question and answer. Just sit there staring in cap and apron, a still-young woman worn to shreds.

Today Kit remained close to the phone. “There’s a certain kinda way,” the mother was saying, “it’s even better you didn’t use our real name. It’s better in the paper I mean, for someone else readin’ it.”

“I’m glad you think so, Mrs. Rebes.”

“It opens their eyes, in a certain kinda way. When you say the name isn’t real, they see it could be anybody.”

“Well … that’s the idea.”

Fine talk. To hear him you’d think a man put together a story out of nothing but angelhair and the Ten Commandments. Kit’s using an alias for Junior, however, had been as much a matter of protecting his back as anything more noble. Globe editors lurked in the bushes. And Sea Level might have suffered worse, with a single-source story. Public Relations at Monsod had stonewalled him when Kit called for confirmation. Refused to confirm or deny. A couple of the other convicts’ families had provided corroboration here and there, but for more than one crucial passage Kit was going entirely on Junior’s cassettes. Junior was the only one who could describe the closet. So Kit had created a straw man, “Manny.” He’d declared up front that the name was an amalgam, a fiction.

You had to do something. There were stories like that, top-page possibilities soft in a couple of spots. Kit however had never done it before, cooked up an amalgam.

“Yeah,” the mother told him now. “But it’s not just any reporter woulda done what you done.”

“Well … thank you.”

“Not just any reporter look out for my boy.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Rebes.”

Kit began to think he knew why the mother had called. She needed bucking up; she’d developed a dependence. How’s that feel on the conscience, Viddich?

“I’m working on a follow-up, Mrs. Rebes.” The constructive tone didn’t ring unredeemably false, at least. “Maybe next time we can meet at your place.”

“Uh-huh well now you mention it Missah Viddich, you know that’s kind of why I called. About the, the follow-up.”

“Don’t worry. Please. Nothing’s going to happen until you and I get a chance to talk.”

“I hear that. But see and cause like, see, now there’s another newspaper call me.”

The phone-static rose and fell, surf and undertow.

“Was the Globe . Somebody from the Globe call me.”

Kit checked the outer office. The workspaces remained quiet, the women head-down at their desks. Junior’s mother assured him she hadn’t told the other reporter anything. Missah Viddich be the only one look out for her boy till now, she not about to start trustin somebody else.

He couldn’t just go on saying thank you. But what Kit came up with—“You have to do what you think is best for you.”—tasted even flatter.

“Uh-huh well see, I ain’t talkin’ to somebody else, don’t fret. Oh see. Somebody else just lookin’ out for themself. ”

Kit continued to labor toward clear thinking, ripping through the papier-mâché of the last couple of days. He asked the mother if she’d gotten the Globe reporter’s name. Mrs. Rebes recalled a syllable or two, maybe the first initial, but she hadn’t thought to make a note. Kit cut her off when she started to apologize: “Don’t, don’t … ”

Too loud. The glass walls echoed.

Lowering his voice, loosening his grip on the receiver, he told her there was no harm done. “If you told them you won’t talk,” he assured her, “they shouldn’t pester you.” Meantime he faced up to the news — bad news but hardly unexpected. Sea Level had never been more than a couple of phone calls ahead of the pack. Sooner or later somebody else had been bound to find Junior’s mother. All things considered, it was better to hear it from her, the source, with her smoker’s squeak and nervous honesty. Better Mrs. Rebes than reading it in tomorrow’s paper.

“I told em,” she was saying. “Told em. Oh see, I was thinkin the whole time, ain nobody been good to me like Missah Kit Viddich.”

“That’s … thank you.”

“You done some good for me, good like in the Gospel. My boy was dead and you made him live.”

“Thank you.”

Afterwards Kit sat back from the silent phone. For the first time in a while he noticed the things he’d taped to the glass rather than the glass itself.

He’d put up a couple of table-teepees, goofy stuff he’d found in restaurants out West. One came from Wyoming, some hole in the wall where every booth had a photo of “The World-Famous Jackalope.” The shot was almost as overdone as Zia’s postcards. A cowboy in two-hundred-dollar chaps lifted a saddle onto a huge horned rabbit. They’re tough to handle , the logo read, but you won’t find any animal faster .

A gunslinger saint, riding on a fantasy. Yet now Kit sat there with a hard-to-figure new energy. He was suddenly hands-on around the workspace. He touched the table-teepee before him — and, astonishing himself, chuckled at the joke. He touched the card from Senator Croftall’s aide.

He was on his feet, his back to the workspace, looking out over Sea Level’s home block. Across the way, the turn-of-the-century brownstones had bowed window-settings that bulged on either side of their central doors. Like dark children with mumps. Like brown forearms stitched down the middle with a needle’s track. The city had its diseases, certainly. But who said Sea Level couldn’t cure one or two of those diseases? Kit felt the constriction of the Boston winter, the weight of church bells a hundred years old tolling eleven. But who said he had to keep his head down under the gray, the clockworks? With or without the Building Commission, he still had a story. With or without Leo Mirini’s ambiguous support, he still had a paper.

It did cross his mind, by the time he headed out to Corinna’s desk, that this morning’s energy might look just as foolish as Monday’s.

“Who haven’t we tried yet?” he asked her.

She blinked. Gently, editor.

“That freelancer who called me Monday,” Kit said. “That stringer with the Spotlight Team. Let’s find out who he knows.”

“You got a number for him?”

“Sure. And come to think of it there’s another Globe number I want you to try. Somebody from over there just called my source on Monsod.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Don’t worry.” Kit assured her that Mrs. Rebes wouldn’t talk. “But think about it, Corinna. It’s time I talked to that editor that came to the party. Rachel, remember?”

“You’re going to ask someone at the Globe for help?”