John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Off in the corner leaned the man himself, still trying to chant away his time.

The overhead bulb played tricks on his skin. His bare feet were the pink and brown of funeral makeup, and the scabs on his fingertips glistened. If Junior hadn’t been proven correct so often, Kit would have doubted anything he had to say. Wiry and long-stemmed, the man sagged over gum-soft extended legs, singing to himself. His handclaps were so limp the palms popped, and his broad eyelids never opened. Whatever syllables he was speaking went on unbroken.

Kit noted: “?Drugs? Downs?”

The words were helpless. The ink skipped on the greasy paper. Kit sagged against the low doorjamb, rocked by the utter silliness of the hard-nosed muckraker. What was he doing? What, dragging another two-bit legal hassle into this naked indifference, this listless offering up of every filthy little secret the con had? Here every passing day was another stick nude exposed in a cage, and every wall showed him another unembarrassed tidbit straight from the yearning crotch. AC, DC, lazy greedy lying whatever. Here a former live wire lay preferring the back of the brain, caving happily inward. Should Kit burst in shouting Drugs! , shouting Corruption! , Junior would roll his languid eyes and say: No shit, college boy. He’d say: “Hey, I’m trying to jerk off in here.” And Kit’s white lie about the man — his sin of ambition — hadn’t even begun to approach the fuck-happy venality in the bodies and faces and boxes that swarmed over Junior’s cell. Compared to this, what were all Kit’s words, words, words? What exactly were they supposed to haul back to sea level?

*

The hatch for the crawlspace was a circular plate in the floor. The crawlspace, the reason they’d come in. Garrison had already undone the locks on the restraining bar. The big rod the guard had brought in was a lever for the hatch, an oversized tire iron. Now Ad worked the lever while Garrison folded the cot against the wall, out of the way. The bed chain’s bolts trembled as the cot slammed to.

“Jesus,” Kit said.

He’d retreated under the stairs. The hatch lay open and the inspectors stood again, unbuckling their belts.

“You knew the layout when you came here.” Garrison was glaring. “We’re not showing you anything you didn’t already put in the papers.”

Kit shook his head, bumping it lightly on the low ceiling.

“Isn’t anyone on the outside who doesn’t already—”

The guard’s phone cut on, a repeating alarm whoop.

The walls went on ringing after Garrison hit the switch. He whispered code numbers at the speaker, and the stink of the crawlspace began to cling.

I mean, our scene’s attracting tourists, these days. They love it, the lames. They love the whole dank show, AC, DC, lazy greedy lying whatever. They want to get their dirty little thrills seeing it out there on the dance floor — but no way they’re going to dance themselves. No way . Fuckin’ tourists.

Kit was pulling his face back together, under the low ceiling. Garrison’s whisper wasn’t so loud, he realized. It was just that Junior had stopped his babble. And everybody was suffering nerves by now. Amby, for instance, was holding the tool belt wrong. A pair of pliers was about to slip out of its holster.

“I am the ranking officer!” the guard said.

The pliers dropped. A kid’s clatter.

Garrison signed out and turned to Junior. The officer’s upper body bulged again as he squatted over the young stick. Now Kit couldn’t catch the whisper, and Garrison’s sweat-blotched back prevented anyone from seeing what he was doing with his hands — what he was doing to make Junior’s bare feet jerk round that way. But Kit understood, there was trouble somewhere. Trouble, violence, somewhere on another level. Somewhere else. He knew the word for it, “ Disturbance. ” Write it with a double underline, keep it at a distance.

The guard lifted his prisoner. He had Junior’s arms behind him, the wrists high up his back, and swiftly he cuffed the young con to one of the bed chains.

“Hey.” But whatever Kit had to say wasn’t there, a husk of a thought. The handcuffs clicked and someone grunted.

“Don’t you give me any grief about brutality, either.”

Kit brought his head up too fast, whacking it harder than before. Garrison’s head was huge, looming.

“If I left you down here and this dicksuck had his hands free,” the guard said, “then you’d see some brutality.”

Left him down here? “Charley …” Kit gripped his notepad in both hands. “Look, I know what’s going on.”

“We know what’s going on, Charley,” Amby said.

“Get us out of here,” Ad said. “Get us out of here now.”

“Let me, let me just say a couple things.” This end of the closet was too tightly packed. When Garrison turned to the inspectors, he touched an elbow to Kit’s gut. “Up there it might not be too bad — I mean, it might not. But the safest place for you guys is down here . I’m telling you. I’ve left people from the outside down on E before.”

The guard wouldn’t look at Kit, and Kit wouldn’t look at anyone else.

“Get us out of here,” Ad said.

“Oh Christ. Guys, this’s nothing. Just stick with the program here, that’s all I’m saying. You got a job to do.” He had Leo’s macho, yes. He repeated that down here was the safest place in Monsod. “The animals are all locked in their cages, down here.”

The inspectors peered back out the closet door, slackfaced.

“This’s nothing . Guys, nothing. Christ, we had one of them punk-rock bands in for a concert, you shoulda seen it then. Musicians wanted to meet the cons, whoa. Shoulda seen it. Only way you could tell ‘em apart was, musicians wore the makeup.”

Kit couldn’t believe it: the inspectors grinned.

“Let a buncha faggots like that in here, I mean. Then you’d see some trouble.”

Amby actually laughed. Ad wasn’t quite up to that yet, but his stance relaxed and his smile grew.

“So I know how to handle this,” the guard said. “Believe me. Let me go handle this, and you stay down here where it’s safe. And you , smart boy—” his face was back in Kit’s—“you’re going to stay away from Junior, there.”

Kit grunted, boxed in, sweating. The noise was too close to the last sound out of Junior.

“Hey,” Ad was asking, “who is this Junior anyway?”

“Yeah Charley. Who’s this Junior?”

“You guys,” Garrison said.

Kit was made to put on the tool belt. Both inspectors would have to go down in the crawlspace, and Garrison didn’t want any blunt objects lying around. “I don’t want ‘em anywhere near this animal.”

Kit raised his arms when he was told to. Garrison, having trouble with Kit’s coat, at first couldn’t cinch the belt. While the guard worked at his waist, Kit could at last look at Junior. The con was able to sit against his bedchains. But his upper body nodded from his irons and he didn’t move below the neck. Unresisting, spread-eagled, he might have been part of the smut sketched above his head. And Junior had started to babble again. Kit tried mouthing those noises, beginning to make sense of the words. “Save my strength,” went the chant, “I got to save my strength.”

When the guard backed off, Kit couldn’t look any longer.

The tapes Kit had heard weren’t the work of someone so impaired, so out of touch. Junior’s information had been the McCoy. After an hour transcribing the cassettes, Kit had begun to see slime on his own floor. But then it was hard to believe, as well, that this poor soggy stick had done what he was in here for to begin with.