John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Kit began to open the sardines, keeping his head down.

“She believes in you, Viddich. Far as Mama’s concerned, you’re the man.”

“Aw, you know better than that.”

The brother lifted his head, exposing feathery chest hair. “Man, all I know is, my Mama’s in a bad way.”

Kit pulled together the food. He must’ve sensed something, taking on such homey activities. The squeak of the sardine tin coming apart, the muffled pop of the mustard cap twisting off — these made an appropriate soundtrack, when a kid began to lay out his family heartache. The brother even smelled like someone who needed to talk: a faint reek of metal and machine oil, as if he’d been walking too long amid parked cars. Kit recalled the Sons of Columbus and what it had meant to Zia. Today the brother had surprised him the same way Zia had back at the Sons.

And it would do him good to listen. Louie-Louie didn’t care, after all, that the man he’d found to talk to was in tatters himself. The kid was too young to pick up the low-level emissions of an overstressed soul. Accepting a sloppy, sardine-heaped Triscuit, Louie-Louie said that since Monday his mother had been taking a bottle to work.

“Ain’t like her,” he said. “She tells me she wants the job, but the way she’s carrying on she’s going to lose it.”

“Anyone at work notice?”

“Notice? Man, that place — they notice and she’s gone.”

Kit suggested that maybe they were seeing something deliberate. A pattern that the mother wanted somebody to recognize.

“Thought of that one already, man. Like, a cry for help.”

“A cry for help. She needs you to step in and be the man of the house.”

“Trying, Viddich. Swear to God I’m trying. I lost half my hours at Sears, lost all my overtime. My paycheck is diddly these days, man. All just so I could be there for her.” But Kit had heard how the mother talked to him. “Talks like I’m a baby, Viddich. How am I supposed to be the man of the house, when she’s all the time saying I’m a baby?”

“She’s trapped in old perceptions,” Kit said.

“Say what?”

“Well, there’s a lot of history between you two. Your mother still perceives you …

Hoo boy, did that feel lame. Kit bit his lips as the brother once more lifted his head.

“Say what?”

Kit should’ve left this kind of thing to Dr. Halsey.

“Psy-cho-analyze.” Louie-Louie’s beard opened again, but it wasn’t a smile. “Seems sometimes like that’s all you white boys know, is how to psychoanalyze.”

Kit went back to the food.

“You white boys all go to college and learn how to psychoanalyze. Man, I’d like to see you try it coming from where I’m coming from.” Louie-Louie jerked his bundled jacket off the chair back and started pawing through it. “I don’t come from no Minnesota, you know? And I’ve already got six credits at Northeastern.”

Kit — with all due disgust for his failure to keep his mouth shut — figured he knew the man now. The good brother, that was Louie-Louie. He’d calm down again soon enough.

“Yeah, and I know about social workers, too. Social workers and agencies and all like that, I gave my Mama the numbers. She won’t make the call. ”

The brother stopped his pawing. He’d gotten hold of something in one of the pockets. His face flexed oddly, a kink in the proud nose, a ripple along the bristling hairline. Fighting down a shiver? Whatever Louie-Louie was trying to get out of his jacket, it was too big for where he’d put it. He wrestled with the olive-green bundle in his lap, the buttons straining on his Filenes Basement shirt. Kit bent once more over his office drawers, tidying things away, giving his visitor what privacy he could. But then the brother’s chair stopped creaking, and close by Kit’s lowered head there was the clunk of metal dropping on the desktop. Kit looked up to find a gun on the scarred wood.

“Seems like that’s all you white boys know,” Louie-Louie said, “is how to psychoanalyze.”

A gun, an automatic. It crowded him; it killed the light. His tall-ceilinged office collapsed like a pocket around the iron, and Kit had forgotten to breathe again. He’d misjudged his man again. Yet by the time he regained his wits, his breath — by the time he’d slapped a hand down over the cold weapon and started to say something ( come on, what , something) — by then, he could see that in fact he still didn’t have to worry about Louie-Louie. The brother didn’t want anything to do with the gun. Not in his condition. Draping his bulk once more over the chair back, this time without even the cushioning of his jacket, Kit’s visitor had begun to cry.

*

It didn’t have quite the heft of GI ordnance, the officer’s.45 that Kit’s father had left behind. Louie-Louie’s piece had Euro-tech contours, like an italic capital L, and there were Japanese characters in the trademark. UN ordnance. And this was where Louie-Louie had gotten his metal-and-oil smell.

Kit began to unload. Once he took up the weapon, he discovered his hands were shaking, the second time today they’d started shaking — holding first the subpoena, now the gun. From bad to worse. Meantime Louie-Louie insisted through his tears that he’d never intended to use the thing on Kit.

“Been crazier than that,” he said, swallowing thickly.

The magazine held fifteen rounds, but Louie-Louie had brought the pistol across town nearly empty. What rounds remained were still in the magazine, not the firing chamber, and the safety was on besides. The brother said he’d “tested” the thing in the concrete hollows above the Mass Pike extension, the highway trench that bordered the South End. He’d squeezed off shots as the big trucks roared past. Afterwards he’d headed across town with just three cartridges left.

Nodding, Kit yanked out the four-fifths-empty magazine and shoved it into a pants pocket. He double-checked the chamber, triple-checked, then let the weapon sit — though, setting his elbows on the desktop, he shielded it with his upper body. By now Louie-Louie was rocking head-down, whimpering and rocking, plainly helpless despite how he made the chair shriek beneath him. He repeated he hadn’t been gunning for Kit.

“Been way crazier than that,” the brother said. “Man, I been thinking I was Superfly.”

“Where, where did you …”

“Listen to me, man. Please, please listen.” Louie-Louie pointed out that if he’d wanted to shoot Kit, he’d had plenty of chances earlier.

Not exactly reassuring. “Louie-Louie, I’m not the guy for this. Think about it.”

“Just listen, huh? For my Mama, man, for my Mama. You want to do right by her, don’t you?”

Kit pointed out that there were agencies, like the brother had said. All it took was a phone call.

“Phone calls just don’t cut it with me any more. Phone calls don’t even touch it. How do you think a phone feels when you’ve got a gun in your pocket?”

Kit eyed the weapon again, empty beneath him.

“Today,” Louie-Louie went on, “man, I wound up over to the State House.”

“What? The State House?”

“I said it’s been crazy, didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”

“You went to the State House packing a piece ?”

Grimacing against a fresh burst of tears, Louie-Louie nodded. First he’d done his testing, the brother explained, and then he’d done his walking. “From over by my side of the Mass Pike clear across to the State House. Across half the damn city.” The walk itself had come to feel like another test.

“Life, life,” Louie-Louie said, “one test after another.”

It had come to feel like proving something, overcoming something, to make it on foot from the poorest crannies of downtown to the wealthiest slope of Beacon Hill. “What was that you said earlier, man? The dead of winter?”