John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

He didn’t see the truck. He’d grown up with trucks, blockhead pickups only a hair more comfortable than a tractor. One or two might have been fancy enough to carry a Philco in the dash. But Kit didn’t see any truck like that today. Garrison’s rig was something from Star Wars .

The slate morning sky left the reflectors dark, out of luck, but they made quite a collection nonetheless. Reflector mud flaps: Yosemite Sam barking “Back off!” with teeth bared and guns drawn. Reflector pinstriping, black and silver. Reflector stick-ons that bore the CB handle and call numbers. Even the interior, once Kit had climbed into the high cab, seemed designed to glitter. Garrison had gone with creamy black Naugahyde. He had no rear window, the rig was a sleeper, and behind the seats hung black velvet curtains. The gauges had disco-purple needles and digits, and the twin gearshifts were webbed with stainless-steel diagrams.

The CB hung in mid-ceiling. Bristling with dials and hookups, to Kit the squawk box called to mind something from out of left field, a couple thousand years’ worth. He put the CB together with Leo Mirini’s dirty white block from the Coliseum. Another weight over his head. Then he and Garrison were out of the parking space, heat blasting.

“Unbelievable,” Kit said.

“Check out the sound system.”

The guard gestured, more or less indicating the sunroof, then touched a button on the 8-track. Music erupted as if from between Kit’s vertebra. A witless AOR boogie, Grand Funk Railroad. Railroad-loud, and crisp to the least tap of a tambourine.

“Quadrophonics,” Garrison shouted. “The Japs.”

“Unbelievable. You can take the high tech to the woods.”

Garrison eyed him sideways, hands high on the wheel.

“The woods are incidental,” Kit shouted. “The woods are just the backdrop.”

“Whoa. You don’t know, Viddich.” Garrison fingered down the volume. “You don’t know. I go up the Kankamangus Highway there all the time. I’m in the woods all the time.”

“I’m sure you are, Garrison. I’m sure you have lots of fun out there.”

“What are you, still a tough guy? Grand Jury don’t care if I take my baby here to the woods.”

“Take my baby to the woods. Hoo, boy.”

“What are you talking about? Like, ecology?”

“Garrison, I’m talking about perception. Talking about how you perceive.” Already Kit could see they were going by way of the city’s central artery, Memorial Drive, Storrow Drive. They were going to creep along nose to fender with a million others pushing nine o’clock. The errand boy wasn’t taking any shortcuts.

*

The woods, Kit explained, used to mean actual wilderness. “The wild, Garrison. The opposite of technology.”

But in a rig like this, he went on, the wilderness was only a pretty backdrop. Only one backdrop among many, really. “You can take your baby to the woods one weekend, then take her to the seashore the next. It’s the same easy access, same comforts. You’re not in the woods, Garrison, you’re in the technology. You’re at a party.”

The guard slowed for a yellow light, while two cars on Kit’s side accelerated through the intersection.

“I don’t get you,” Garrison said. “There something wrong with a party in the woods?”

“I’m talking about perception, about messing with perception. In my line of work, Garrison — think about it. Perception’s key. The whole job’s predicated on knowing what’s happening and where.”

“Predicated?”

Kit eased back in his bucket seat, his Nutshell Library shifting against his thigh. Stay cool, believer.

“Predicated. Pre-di-cated.” The guard made a show of checking his gauges, his heat vents. He switched off the Album-Oriented garbage.

“You get out to the woods much yourself, Viddich?”

Kit took a moment, in the quiet. “I used to,” he said. “Where I came from, Garrison, it was hard core. We had an Indian guide.”

“You’re shitting me. An Indian guide?”

Kit shrugged. “Men like that, in the woods all the time, they’re usually the outcasts. The kind that never fit in. They’re happy to find steady work.”

“Your own private Tonto. Hard core in Minnesota. Your guide have a name, Viddich?”

Actually the old man had had a whole array of names, though Kit wasn’t about to share any of them with Garrison. A tiny Ojibwa, a man who said the AA prayer every night, he was Claude at the highway turnoff. By first camp, however, he’d revert to his tribal name, Poyi Buss. Then sometimes he’d translate that as Bone Place, sometimes as Death Challenge. The range wasn’t uncommon, among Western natives. “Let me tell you something, Garrison. When I got my first buck, he put his fingers in the blood and painted stripes on my face.”

“Whoa. Hard core. ”

“He made me do it too. He made me put a stripe on his face. And then he made me drink the blood.”

Kit’s driver went on making a fuss.

“Give me a break, Garrison. It was another world.”

The guard chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know. Seen what they go in for at them punk-rock clubs?”

Kit eyed the Charles River, outside. The truck had pulled onto Storrow Drive now, poking along between tie-ups. The river was stormy, spiked waves tearing up an oily surface. Or maybe it was Garrison who was oily. In Kit’s window the man’s reflection rode like scum on the water, while at last he brought up the Grand Jury.

“In there, Viddich, you got no idea what you’re going to have to deal with. You think Monsod was rough?”

The guard wasn’t even pretending to keep up with traffic, his eyes off the road. “In there you’re going to go through Monsod all over again. Every last dirty thing you did, Viddich. Inch by fucking inch.”

At least the roomy curtained cab allowed Kit to turn around smoothly, unruffled.

“You know anything about a Grand Jury, Viddich? You ever do any research like—”

“I know about a Grand Jury.”

“Meat grinder, man. Meat grinder. Don’t go by no rules like a court of law.”

“I know about a Grand Jury.”

“Oh yeah?” Garrison glanced out over Storrow again, easing ahead a car length or two. “Way I heard it, you’ve been acting kind of nutty lately.”

And here came the real heat, a closeness as if the guard had punched the controls into the red. Kit raised a hand to his window, taking in cold through his fingertips. Wearily he told Garrison to make his pitch.

“You been hiding out a lot lately, Viddich. Hiding out, no phone. Mixing booze and painkillers too.”

Kit flexed his back; the Naugahyde squeaked. Secrets, he reminded himself — secrets hurt.

“And now there’s some shit where, you’re closing the paper but you’re not? You ask me, Viddich, that’s nutty.”

“Garrison.” He frowned, putting a clamp on his surprise, his sore spots. “Aren’t you going to tell me that you have friends on the Grand Jury?”

“Whoa, tough guy.”

“Isn’t that what this is about ? You’ve got friends who can do me a favor?”

“Yeah, I got friends. People like me and Leo, we got lots of friends. Sometimes, our friends are your friends.”

Now the heat was even in Kit’s fingers.

“Friends we got on that Grand Jury, they’re the tough guys. They’re men , Viddich. You ever work with men?”

“Hmm. You mean like, men who lock a convict in a closet and feed him drugs to keep him quiet?”

The guard seemed to age, his face growing longer. “Wiseass.”

“You mean like men who run a so-called public inspection and never even look at the real problem? We never even looked at those overhead pipes, Garrison.”