John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

“I couldn give you em all.” She must have been a long cool drink of coffee and cream, once, with a loose walk and her son’s triangular face. “Oh no, Kit. I had to stick with my story.”

“Your story,” Kit said.

“My boy’s story. He was a hero.”

Kit choked down more of the wine, working to swallow. Just the fact that the mother had been careful about what she’d shown him, that alone was hard to handle. Kit had to remind himself, as the Catawba Pink scorched his gullet, that everybody with any part in this business had been careful. Himself included. He’d cooked up his amalgam, his “Manny.” But Kit knew who he’d done it for, the readers he’d been trying to impress. He had some idea, too, who Mirini and Croftall had been trying to protect. But who was Mrs. Rebes worried about? Who, with this haloed fussiness about her son’s choice of sex partners?

He knew one thing anyway — the woman was a believer. She imagined crowds surrounding her, a whole generation in the trenches alongside her. A woman like Mrs. Rebes had been the backbone of every rally for voting rights, every long march against segregation. In the trenches with the SCLC. She kept Martin on the wall, Martin and a hand-lettered poster calling for a day to honor him. The woman had committed herself to something holy, a Movement.

“I raised my Junior,” she was saying, “in a house that had the Spirit.”

Was she a dying breed? It was ten years since Martin had gone down, and her Junior seemed like vivid proof of the difference those years had made. Junior might not have read Jean Genet or Eldridge Cleaver, but he knew their scam, the imprisoned genius. His cassettes, the few his mother had let Kit listen to, would never have been so grotesque and thorough if the young con hadn’t carried around some media-enlarged sense of himself. Been to the end of every line there is . If Junior were in his mother’s position, today, he’d have had 60 Minutes there. And the difference had nothing to do with intelligence, or with growing up more in the street. Nothing so simple. Mrs. Rebes knew what kind of a dump she lived in — when she was sober, at least. She probably even knew the words that professors and social workers used to describe her choices, clay-heavy words like urban migration and church constituency . Yet for a woman like her, unlike for her son, all of that was unreal appearance. What mattered most wasn’t whether Junior’s cell was up to code, but whether his heart was pure. What mattered was his place among the saints.

The rest was nothing but words, words, words, for a woman like Mrs. Rebes. It was the white man’s way of taking far too seriously run-of-the-mill problems like loneliness, improper wiring, or trouble with the law.

“Plenty of good children,” she repeated, “wind up holding a murder weapon.”

Kit nodded slowly.

“The Lord sees the heart,” Mrs. Rebes said.

“I want to know,” Kit said, “why this happened.”

“Well, you want to understand about the child, you got to start with the father. Oh, see. You want to find out about Junior’s father, you got to go down to the Triple-X movies.”

“Mrs. Rebes, please.” Once more Kit struggled to straighten his spine. “I came here because, because …”

“You goin to tell me about my boy, ain’t you?”

They blinked at each other, upright in sagging chairs.

“You got somethin to say about seein my boy, down in Monsod the other day. Ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well like I say, Kit. You do like I say before you try to tell me about my own flesh and blood. You take yourself down to those movie houses, you go down the Combat Zone and you watch one of them Triple-X movies. And you find them kinky white bitches hang out round there. Forgive me Jesus for callin them by their name. You go find them bitches my husband liked.”

He understood her better and better, but it made his heart baggier and baggier. Already Kit could see the miserable intimacy that had claimed her. A Movement woman with fine looks, a covenant woman with an easy walk, of course she’d fallen prey to a man utterly wrong for her. “He was from Cuba, you know, big man from Cuba and he said he couldn never go back. Lord, the evil that comes when a person loses touch with their home.” By the time Junior was learning the alphabet, his father was bringing home whores. Kit saw the bad news coming, saw it clearly way up the track, but it hurt when it hit just the same.

“The man had them kinky white bitches,” the mother said, “right in my own bed.”

“Mrs. Rebes—”

“And he used to make them bitches tell Junior about it, oh see. He needed that, see. You understand what I’m sayin?”

Kit understood, he got the whole sorry picture — the boy made to sit and listen to whores who told him his old man was a stud, and the out-of-whack father who needed to hear it. “The man paid them to tell my Junior, you understand, Kit. That was how he got himself, you know.”

Kit had to stand. Underfoot the extension cords scrunched, calling to mind the winter sand on the Cottage beach, more bad news. By then Mrs. Rebes had begun speaking in falsetto. She was mimicking what the hookers used to tell Junior. “Little boy, you know your Daddy’s a superstar? Little boy, your Daddy puts me into outer space. ” Kit turned towards the cold windows and found himself surprised by the light behind the glass, the sounds of daytime from the street. The Krishna curtain glowed, and outside children called between the stoops: Yo, Tay-shah . It had felt like way past dark.

“Louie-Louie just a baby then,” the mother was saying, back in her normal voice. “Jesus, I thank you every day. That devil husband of mine left for Hollywood before he could get his claws into Louie-Louie.”

“Hollywood?” Kit asked.

“Where he goin to get himself more kinky white bitches than out there? That devil made for Hollywood.”

She went for the wine again. Kit, looking down on her now, saw the mechanicality of it. Screw-cap off, bottle up, bottle down, screw-cap on.

“Mrs. Rebes, please. Take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” The screw-cap must’ve made each drink seem like the last. “Kit, that man was the one behind everythin evil. What he did was the first beginnin of all the bad news.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No way to tell about him without gettin sick.”

“Sorry.”

Kit, shifting his wineglass, put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped as if he’d stabbed her. She came out of the chair, catapulted out, moving with more straightlimbed control than he’d have thought possible. She whipped around to face him, the cardigan flying off her shoulders. Her eyes flared.

“Don’t you give me no pat on the back,” she said. “ Missah . Missah Viddich. You better not be comin here just to give me some little ol pat on the back.”

Kit drew in his hands, closing them around his glass. A moment’s silence was all it took to remember gripping the wrench, facing Junior.

“There been evil in my life, oh see. Evil in my boy’s life, both my boys’ life. Ain’t about no pat on the back.”

He couldn’t loosen his grip, couldn’t lower his arms.

“Whatever story you think you gon get from me, it ain’t shit if it ain’t got the evil. ”

*

Zia see, my basement boys and girls. Zia see what makes the guy a tourist. Our Scandie pseudo. What he was, was back in the ’ 60s . A believer.

Makes him a tourist, yeah. Makes him like something out of a wax museum. Because it’s about the ’70s, these days. We prefer a different brand of trouble, in the ’70s. We don’t buy that Movement guff, times they are a-changin’. We don’t believe the believer. When it comes to counterculture, we’ve got a better idea.