John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Kit snuck in another glance at the gun. From this angle it suggested a different letter, an N.

“That was what I was up against,” the brother said. Only after Louie-Louie had conquered the wind and the ice would he deserve the golden dome, the marble columns of the State House.

“End of the line,” he said. “To be the man — you know, the man? I had to get all the way to the end of the line.”

N for Not again, Not this time.

Gulping down sobs, wiping his hands on his bright shirt, Louie-Louie explained that by the time he reached Beacon Hill, if he’d had anything clear in his head at all, it had been a picture. “Picture of my brother, man. The photo from the trial, you know, the one they showed on the TV. In his suit, remember?” Kit remembered, he said so — he relented at last to the notion of conversation — and Louie-Louie explained that the photo “wasn’t Junior.” Even the suit wasn’t Junior’s, he said. “Picture like that, it could’ve been anybody up on the TV. Could’ve been some stranger up there.” So Junior’s brother had soldiered his way through the winter, the racist city, with an instrument in his pocket that would blast away all the fakes, the family turned to strangers.

“Louie-Louie.” Kit put a hand on the brother.

“I had to blast, man.”

“Aw, what about your mother? She hasn’t turned into a stranger yet.”

Louie-Louie shook off his hand and sat up again, still talking. He’d crossed to the State House from the Parker House. He’d heard his weary breathing echo inside the rotunda. Only a room or two farther in, aging white boys sat around giving the okay to every kind of lying and denial.

“End of the line,” he said.

“They have security there,” Kit said. “Capitol police.”

“Man, cops was part of it, don’t you get it? I said I was Superfly, didn’t I? I was everywhere.”

“But they have the new high-tech stuff, too. The setups you see in airports. Metal detectors.”

“Metal detectors ain’t right at the door, Viddich.”

Kit remembered. The State House lobby was Roman style, the Pantheon, with marble as imposing as the piece up on Leo’s desk. A tourist attraction.

“You can get in,” Louie-Louie said, “if you’re wearing a good shirt.” Talking did seem to relax him: the brother pinched his shirtfront, half-smiling.

“Did you — did you have a particular target in mind?”

“Target, huh. Target. Picture off the news in my head, and he asks me did I have a target.”

Kit suffered a mental flash flood of last Thursday’s craziness. The Monsod on TV isn’t there. Big media have been actively avoiding the truth . Meantime Louie-Louie declared that the bad guys on this story were all the same. “That’s where I was coming from, see. By the time I got to the State House, it was all the same liars and cheaters against me. Hiding the truth everywhere. Got to blast.”

Kit found himself frightened all over again. He took up the gun — a spot of oil leaked out the open magazine into his palm — and slipped it in a coat pocket.

“All those suits and ties in the lobby,” Louie-Louie said. “I was everywhere, I was in every face.”

Kit repeated that he wasn’t the one Louie-Louie should be talking to. There were hotlines, 24-hour …

“Aw, Viddich. I made it out of there, didn’t I? Made it out of there in one piece. And I made it over here, too, made it to the one man done my family any good in years now.”

Kit got his elbows back on the desktop.

“I met a hippie, man. That’s all. I met a hippie.” Louie-Louie shook his head. “Over at the State House, I ran into some kind of hippie, you believe that? And next thing I know I was back out on Beacon Street. Safe, man.”

Louie-Louie explained that, all told, he couldn’t have spent more than three minutes in the lobby. The capitol police hadn’t even spotted him, the brother believed, before the perfect target appeared. “Perfect, a big tall white guy with a big old white-guy head. You know what I’m talking about, the silver hair and the lips. Fine old white-guy head.”

Kit reminded Louie-Louie how careful he’d been, coming across town. No rounds in the chamber, the safety off.

“Well I mean, how long would that take? The guy had to stand in line, you know. He had to go through that, what do you call it, the security screen.”

Every now and then legislators came out the front door.

“Cops hadn’t even looked at me, man.”

Louie-Louie sank over the chair back again. His face, dropping, shrinking, looked for the first time like his dead brother’s.

“You know the echo in that place, man?” he said. “The echo, with all that marble …”

Gently, Kit asked about the hippie.

“Weird echo, man. Like I was everywhere.”

“Louie-Louie, you’re not that crazy. Think about it. All you needed was a nudge.”

“Huh, a nudge.”

“And then you were out of there.”

Louie-Louie roughed his beard, the hairs crackling. “Well, the guy was high.” The guy was white, a blonde throwback with hair to his armpits, in a fatigue jacket dirtier than Louie-Louie’s. The hippie had taken the brother for a free spirit like himself. “Came tugging on my arm and told me he’d just smoked a joint right there in the State House. Whispering, man. Stupid stoner whispering and giggling, in that echo.”

“He’d had a joint? He told you?”

“The ofay thought I might like a taste myself.”

Kit shook his head. Getting high in the state capitol was a good ten years out of date.

“Fucking burnout.” Talking to the floor. “Fucking total ‘60s burnout.”

After a moment Louie-Louie went on to say that he thought it was the hippie’s smell which had stopped him. “You know the smell these stoners get, man? Real sweet, you know? Gets in the clothes.” Kit was nodding, though in fact he’d never noticed that these relics had any particular odor. Instead he’d made the connection to the mother’s Catawba Pink.

“Smell like my Mama these days. Like that Catawba Pink.”

The brother broke down again. The sobs came with less intensity than before, but the big muscles in his back heaved. Kit bent beside him, his own long sorry body heaving. Everybody’s tired, he said or tried to say, everybody’s tired and battered — recalling irrelevantly that he’d gone the entire day without any Percodan. He frowned and tried harder; he brought up examples of the brother’s better judgment. “Louie-Louie, you’re talking with her minister, right? You’re talking with everyone you can, right? Louie-Louie, I saw those brochures you brought her.”

Kit bent deep, against the desk corner. He kept talking till the brother’s back went smooth under his hand.

“Man,” Louie-Louie sighed, sitting up. “I’m crying more than my Mama, these days.”

Kit, letting go, thought of Bette again. His last embrace.

“Crying in front of white folks.” Louie-Louie shook his head.

The clip of bullets in Kit’s pocket bit his thigh. He put his hand back on the desk and brought up the Grand Jury. “That’s how you nail the bad guys, Louie-Louie. That’s how you blast. There’s going to be some indictments, don’t you worry.”

Louie-Louie had heard about it. Sounding frosty all of a sudden, making up for his tears, he said his mother had told him. The media had really come after her once they learned there was going to be a Grand Jury. “A lot of calls, man.”

Kit made no response. He was picturing Louie-Louie and his mother over the Globe’s forthcoming story on the Grand Jury. He saw them reading his testimony, reading what he’d done.

“Where I’m coming from,” the brother said, “I don’t expect much from any Commonwealth of Massachusetts Grand Jury.”