John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

“So many new papers,” Bette said.

She’d been staring out over the crossing. She might’ve been explicating the murk, describing shapes no one else could see. Now, however, she firmed her mouth, that delicate hamper, and her eyes returned to Kit. One look and he knew. One unforgiving scowl, with her mouth shrunk and her hair ratted, and he could tell that this had nothing to do with wine.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t make me go.”

This wasn’t about wine, nor nerves either.

“So tell me, Kit,” she asked, “what have you been doing lately, before the bright lights of history?”

“Please. You know there was nothing between me and Zia.”

“What sort of shadow have you been casting? What kind of a man am I married to?”

Boston was no longer a city. Its signature brick and stone, all the more durable-looking during a leaden Sunday in January, in fact only fronted for crackling runaway outbreaks of fire. Fire was chewing up the neighborhoods from within, behind walls, under floorboards. Overhead pipes were feeding the fire too, hiding the fire and also feeding the fire, overhead pipes as bad as anything out in Monsod. Kit saw the trouble happening all over town. He didn’t see the fire, but he saw the smoke. The elevated stretches on the MBTA showed him a winter-drab cityscape dotted everywhere with smoke. Around the misshapen blocks of Cambridgeport, the smoke flexed darkly out of chimneys; in the brown and beaten South End it leaked away disguised as condensation, blurring unfastenable windows. The arson wave had turned supernatural. It had turned into a citywide haunting, with some ghosts the color of flame and some the color of smoke. Yet it was always the same ghost. The same dead young man, a napalm flash behind stately New England fronts. The same dead young man, a gray shred in heavy sea air.

Likewise, the Globe wasn’t a newspaper. And this name “Viddich” in the weekend stories about Monsod, that too was only a convenience, a pass-through. Another spirit had gone to work in the name — the same spirit as hid crackling behind the walls, eviscerating Boston even as it scattered in gray from windows and chimney tops. The same dead young man reborn. Junior Rebes was in the smoke, and he was in the paper. He’d taken over every medium.

Including Kit himself. Saturday evening Kit had struggled through hours and hours of making connections, slogging from boat to bus to trolley on his way up from the island — yet by Sunday afternoon here he was, back on the public transportation. He was heading to Junior’s. In Kit’s kitchen, the mother had sounded as static-swamped and faraway as she had in the office. But she was out of church, alone, free to talk. Junior’s brother wasn’t home.

Her building opened at Kit’s touch. Within the street door’s lock housing something clicked haplessly, and then, with a squeal of half-frozen wood, the lobby stood open. That was a violation right there. Also the dinners starting off the hallways reeked of grime and carbon buildup, fire hazards even when the burners were off. Kit touched his neck. He needed to be taking notes, gathering better “deep background.” He needed to be working out what he was going to say to the mother — what he was doing here at all. But even in this way-under-code stairwell, Kit’s thinking remained mostly full of flashes from his own kitchen.

He’d been unable to finish even a single Globe story about Monsod. He couldn’t stomach more than three bites of an English muffin. He’d kept unplugging and replugging the phone, shaken first by the message-slips that still covered his kitchen table, then shaken all over again by the hope that Bette might have a change of heart. But first he’d gotten a crank call, a pervert so needy that he’d stayed on the line, breathing heavy, a second or two after Kit said hello. After that, a Globe freelancer. It was the same eager beaver, in fact, who’d gotten to Kit with the news from the Building Commission on Monday morning. The last man Kit wanted to hear from.

Kit had clung to the frayed and dangling ends of his Editor-in-Chief rigging. No comment. Legal considerations. No comment. The next time he’d replugged the phone he’d called Junior’s mother.

Now Kit went up her stairway with one arm extended, glove-tips brushing the wall. Exposed wiring, check. Weak rails and loose floorboards, check. Walkups like this, he forced himself to recall, were in most cases a legacy of the Curley years. That was James Michael Curley, four times the mayor, a grandmaster of grease. You could still find traces of Curley in the Kennedys and Tip O’Neill, in their winking and liquorish grandstanding. Curley had inspired … now what was that book? The Last Hurrah. The Last Hurrah , first a bestseller and then a movie starring Spencer Tracy. Well, why didn’t they try showing the flick in Mrs. Rebes’s hallway? The projector might provide some decent heat in here. And the place was dark enough.

Cue:Hoo, boy. Are we proud? Ayy:Curley signed off on the whole sick scheme. He was a homegrown Hitler. Torchlight rallies, election fraud, even his own Gestapo. Louisiana had Huey Long and Boston had Curley. Cue:And Hollywood had them both. Don’t tell me you never saw All the King’s Men . Ayy:This isn’t just about images. There are lives at stake. Cue:Oh there are? Lives at stake, right now, upstairs? Is that why you’re here? Ayy:( eyeing me, thin-lipped, black-gloved: his own Gestapo ) Cue:Is that why you’re here? Ayy:Look, I’ll tell you a movie l never saw. l never saw that movie about a Boston alternative newspaper. Cue:Don’t be so sure, man.

*

The mother was some time answering his knock. She wore a house robe and sweater, no church getup, and he couldn’t get a decent grip on her viny hand.

“Why you frownin so, Missah Viddich? Ain’t you happy, be seein my home?”

Her sweater was a cardigan, roped at the neck with plastic beads. She had the same Native American touches as her son, the model’s cheekbones and lemon-wedge eyes.

“Missah Viddich, oh see. I’m glad I got all that frownin on my side.”

She noticed the frowning but not the bruises.

“I’m happy to be here,” Kit told her. “I am, really.”

“It’s a house of the Spirit, Missah Viddich. I got me the Spirit, in this house.”

“Please, Mrs. Rebes — I’m not a mister, okay? I’m just Kit.”

“Kit, oh course now, sure. Course.”

She took another long moment with his face, his bruises.

“Huh. See now girl, this here’s Kit. Kit. Well listen, Kit, why don’t we have ourselves a drop?”

“A drop? A drink?” He got his hands back in his pockets. “Mrs. Rebes, what I’ve got to tell you …” Aw, what had he been doing, back there on the stairway, on the MTA? Why didn’t he have more than the faintest notion of what to say?

“This isn’t going to be easy,” he finished lamely.

Her smile: a fish-like embittered swallowing that stretched her pouchy lower face into something squarish.

“A little drop’s just the thing, then,” she said. “Little drop, sure. Be good for those bruises too.”

She moved away, motioning him in.

A flimsy person, perhaps forty-five, drifting off in slippers. Kit suffered a chilly recollection of the smoke-ghosts he’d seen from the T. The front room here looked too busy for this tired counterwoman. Busy as a heap of dry kindling. The heart of the space was a drinker’s setup: soundless TV, padded rocker, dusty blanket, dusty lamp, and a half-empty bottle of Catawba Pink. Beyond that, a hip-high radiator hissed and ticked. Its valve was bent, spraying steam. The glow of the standing lamp actually diffracted into an indoor rainbow. A half-crescent of faint yellows and reds shimmered there, above the radiator’s shoulder. Also the curtain in that corner couldn’t keep still. The material was threaded with glitter, like a Hare Krishna wrap, so as the curtain rose and fell it sent sparks through the steam rainbow. Ghosts in every medium.