John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Kit, struggling to firm up his thinking, made a silent survey of the stereo equipment. Components from different systems, the stuff was top of the line. The tuner had a good dozen controls. The eight-track player had a toggle for boosting the bass. Now what sort of a violation was that? If a boy goes breaking and entering and the mother lets him keep his swag at home?

Plus: a fraying plaid sofa and a vinyl beanbag sitter patched with duct tape. A ‘50s-style clock set in a helmsman’s wheel, way too large for the place (looked like it belonged on the Wood’s Hole Ferry). Though meant for the wall, it sat propped in one corner. Not that the mother had neglected the walls. Everywhere hung posters and cards and calendar cut-offs. Like mother, like son: the subjects couldn’t have been more different — Mrs. Rebes went in for religious stuff — but the decoration was every bit as compulsive and garish as in Junior’s closet. Zia Mirini might have wanted a couple of these pieces, like the portrait of Martin Luther King. He had a halo of Memphis motel neon. Kit also found a call for making King’s birthday a holiday.

Every scrap and stick was dusty, brittle, dry. The whole place could burst into flames at the first wrong-way spark. And extension cords littered the floor. Stringy brown cords from Woolworth’s made clumsy double x’s with whiplike orange models from Roto Rooter. A cord even ran out the room’s farther archway, into the cheese-colored kitchen. Kit couldn’t find the outlet.

“Thass right, take a good look.”

Mrs. Rebes waited before him, holding out a drink.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Nothin to apologize for, Missah Viddich. Kit. Ain’t no one else ever cared to take a look.”

He accepted the glass, a formal stemmed piece.

“I try to keep it pretty in here, see. All the colors, oh see.” She’d resumed her square smile. “Can’t blame a mama with two boys to raise if she tryin to keep some colors, the place they call home.”

Two boys. “How’s, ah, how’s the brother taking it, Mrs. Rebes? Does he come by, ever? Does he help out?”

“Oh.” She drifted back to the Catawba Pink. “Louie-Louie, you know. He still a baby.”

They drank. Sitting, the mother rocked with head back, murmuring a hymn-like melody that Kit might have recognized.

“My Junior,” she said, or sang. “Finally found me a man who cares about my Junior.”

Her eyes were shut but the skin of the lids rippled. Her eyes moved, seeing nonetheless. Kit thought of the psychic in Brookline, the woman Bette had visited.

“Preacher told me I’d find someone,” she sang. “Preacher told me, there’d come someone see my boy for a hero.”

“Have you been talking with your preacher?” Kit asked.

“Oh now. Ain’t today Sunday?”

“But you’re seeing him, ah, on a regular basis? You’ve got some support?”

“Got me the best support of all, Kit. Got me the Spirit.”

“Yes. That’s, that’s good.” He tried to find a comfortable place on the sofa. “But you do have, ah, people to talk to? You do have friends or people at the shop?”

“At the shop? Hoo, now. Half the time ain’t nobody even over there but those itty-bitty college girls come in all dressed in black.”

He got a deeper swallow of the sweet liquor. The reminder of his wife, her and her psychic, had only thrown him off that much more. His thinking had half-fallen into the worn grooves of speeches he’d prepared — not for this mother — but for Bette.

“Missah Viddich, Kit. You know I already got this talkin-to from the preacher. You didn’ come here, now, just to give me this talkin-to?”

Bette there’s nothing I can do with the paper … nothing with the paper or on TV or in front of some kind of Grand Jury investigation … that’s not going to prove anything Bette … that’s not me.

*

He wound up hearing about Junior’s funeral. About the plans, rather. The mother’s church was hard-line, a House of Zion, but the preacher was a true Christian. He’d accept the prodigal into his house. “We got some folks kinda high-tone in the congregation, you know,” the mother said. “Some folks think they superstars. Got Afros on they heads but don’t know they black in their heads.”

Still, the funeral would have to wait. For now the state couldn’t release Junior’s body.

“Police.” Sour-faced, she drained her glass. “Police come and told me.”

“They need his body?”

“My boy dead, and even that ain’t enough for ‘em. They want his bones too.”

Kit touched his neck.

“Oh see, they want an autopsy. They got some kinda investigation goin.”

“I realize that,” Kit said. “They’ll probably have, ah, I realize there’s going to be …”

“Investigation, hoo sure. Investigation, my skinny high-yellow butt.” She dolloped herself a fresh glass. “They gonna take my Junior’s bones and they gonna trick ‘em up to look like whatever they want. They gonna make my Junior do they own slick-ass song and dance.”

“Mrs. Rebes, I’ll be there too. I mean at the investigation, the Grand Jury, whatever. I’ll be part of it.” The wine was so sugary, the sofa so full of dust.

“Damn right you will. Kit, I thank Jesus you’re here. Thank Jesus I found somebody see my Junior for a hero.”

“Ah, I don’t know about heroes, Mrs. Rebes.”

“Oh see. You a hero all by your own self.”

“No, Mrs. Rebes. No, please. We have to talk.”

“Well we talkin, ain’t we?” Her eyes were open again. “I’m talkin to you, Kit, I’m not talkin to nobody from the Globe . None of those others.”

“Yes, thanks, but—”

“Those others, they keep callin you know, they keep tryin. I won’t talk to a one of em.”

“That doesn’t matter any more, Mrs. Rebes.” Kit couldn’t seem to sit up straight, in this sofa. “It’s not about my paper getting a scoop on the other papers. Not any more.”

“Course it ain’t about gettin no silly scoop. It’s about my boy.”

The mother, Kit noticed then, had a halo. He’d sunk so deep into the sofa that her head appeared framed by the rainbow in the radiator spray behind her. A halo, like Martin on her wall, enhanced by the trembling Hare Krishna curtain.

“My boy,” she said, “wasn’t no goddamn homo.”

Kit couldn’t sit up. The sofa lamed him and the mother left him even weaker; he hadn’t scratched the surface of understanding her. Mrs. Rebes explained that rumors of Junior’s homosexuality were what really had put off the congregation at the House of Zion. “You remember what he did to that man, I mean what they say he did. To that white man at the robbery, you know what I’m sayin?”

For some time before the robbery, Mrs. Rebes explained, there’d been talk like that going around. Talk about Junior and other men. “White men specially, oh see.” Kit finished his wine, trying to think, but at once the mother was at his side again, pouring him another. She seemed to be saying — the sickly odor of the Catawba Pink distracted him — that people at the House of Zion could forgive dealing drugs and murder, but never turning tricks with white men.

“There’s other good boys wound up sellin’ soda,” she said, drifting back to her own drink. “Other children in that congregation, they wound up holding a murder weapon.”

“I don’t remember any of this in the tapes,” Kit said. “The tapes you gave me, they were about Monsod.”

“Well I din give you all the tapes.”

Settling once more under her halo, with her cardigan off her shoulders, the woman seemed suddenly twenty years younger. She must have been exotic once, Vogue -ish.