John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Kit had his hands out of his pockets, clasping and unclasping them against the cold.

“At least Kit, huh. Let’s think about your home, there.”

“My home?”

“It’s a nice little place, I hear. Nice Cambridge place for you and the wife. Nice wood.”

Kit couldn’t be sure of the singing in his ears. Nerves? Or the wind along the lip of the dark lower site?

“Nice old wood,” Leo went on. “Old, old, dry wood.”

Now it was nerves. “What?”

“Place like that, wood can get very dry. Downcellar out of the weather, it gets dry like a newspaper. Just like one of your old newspapers, Kit.”

The old man changed the angle of his chin. “That old wood.”

“Leo, I don’t believe this.”

“And that’s everything you own, there, right? Everything you care about’s up on the second story, there.”

“You know,” Kit said, “generally speaking, people don’t try frighten other people unless they’re—”

“Frighten you? Frighten you, I’m trying to help you.” Leo tapped his cash against Kit’s tightened chest. “Kit, stay with me here. Remember what I’m trying to tell you, here. I’m saying, you’re going to go after me in that Grand Jury, at least get me for something juicy.”

Kit backed away from the tapping, the grinning. He stumbled on the corrugated lip of the lower site’s dam; he tried to get Leo to admit he’d been talking about arson.

“Hey. You think it’s that simple, Kit? Just one word, the right word? One word, and you’ve got the old man at last?”

Kit steadied himself. “Skip it. I said what I came here to say.”

“If I were you, Kit, I’d be worried about this. About how nutty you’ve been, trying to get the old man.”

“Keep your money, Leo. I’ll find my own way out.”

“Bullshit. Bullshit , asshole. You’re going nowhere.”

Across the work site, the hardhats didn’t look quite human. Faceless over the heavy equipment, rodent-like amid plumbing and cable, they whispered together.

“You’re going nowhere till I say so, and same with the Grand Jury. That Grand Jury, ayy. You’re going to walk into a room where everybody knows your worst secret.”

Turning from the workmen, frowning down into the dig, Kit was aware of the heat in his hands. In his fists, in his pockets.

“Kit, I already gave them the note from yesterday. The note where you asked for the money.”

“Leo — no more tricks. I’m going to stop you.”

“You’re going to stop me?” The old man’s smile was his worst yet. “What’re you talking, the Crimefighter’s Code?”

“That note I left, it doesn’t matter. What you know about Sea Level , that doesn’t matter.”

“Kit, I know it all. Got my daughter right down there under my desk all this time, her and you and her junkie bitch friends across the hall too. Nothing I don’t know, Kit.”

“It doesn’t matter . Leo, when it’s just you against me, people will know the difference.”

“Got her right down there. Protecting my investment.”

“It’s just you against me now. Everybody will know what’s right.”

“The girl, you know, she told me about when you came making a play for her at the Sons of Columbus. Stoned off your ass . She told me about your wife— ”

Kit pulled out the brother’s gun. Leo, openmouthed, mid-sentence, jerked his cash hand to his chest.

In time, Kit became aware of damage. His knuckles had torn against the hem of his pocket. His thinking was broken up by shouts behind his back. And uneasy, unprepared — his feelings hadn’t changed much from when he’d come onto the site, but now with this iron in his hand he was even more off-balance, a big white gooney bird with something in his beak that it would kill him to swallow. Out in the weather like this, Louie-Louie’s.38 didn’t look sleek and Euro. Rather, it appeared more of a piece with the rest of the metal here, another gray slash of naked function. Kit understood he still had the safety on, and neither of the two remaining rounds had been chambered. Yet he couldn’t drop his arm. He couldn’t take back the gesture, make the weapon disappear. Leo spoke up again: Hey, wildman , something. The old man got his hands moving, too. He had no trouble making his own bundle disappear, and when he held up his two open palms there could be no mistaking what he meant. Easy, cool it , something. Such an obvious signal, those two raised hands, sweat-pink against the site’s clay-black. Even the shouting behind Kit’s back relaxed, even the worker rodents got Leo’s message — but what Kit was most aware of was damage. Damage in his least, most fleeting images: the men behind him weren’t rodents.

Leo started talking again, words Kit imagined rather than heard. Hey, where’d you get that?

Words words words. Kit was beyond them, apart from them; he struggled instead with the muscle groups in his arm, with the blood circulation in his ears, even with his sense of smell. The gun had a thick odor, its oils warmed by Kit’s lap. He held it pointed at the shorter man’s mouth, his interior walls graffiti’d with obscenities. Dicksuck. Niggerdick up the ass . Bad damage. There was nothing sexy about the moment, a cold closed moment, the whole world collapsing around the.38. But then again, there was everything sexy about it: the muscles out of control, the mushroom density of the smell, the oil in his hand. Everything was a spasm, an outbreak.

Leo started smiling again. Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the bad guy.

The shouting behind Kit’s back was part of it, part of how standing here with a gun in another man’s face seemed like nothing but reflex and impulse. Yes, the shouting had simmered down, since Leo had raised his hands. When Kit glanced over one shoulder he saw tough guys in unsteady clusters, staring wide-eyed but keeping their distance. Nonetheless, every time one of the hardhats called, it broke up his thinking. It poked through the Expressway rumble, noise more like Garrison’s than like Leo’s, rough stuff and toilet talk. The sound of damage. Kit had heard nothing else since he’d left his testimony on the kitchen table. Then what was he doing here in the middle of it? Here between these familiar outcries, fear and bluster, warning and greed? So he got his first clear thought — from out of left field, wouldn’t you know it. He recalled a conversation somewhere about the Fifth W, the Why , about how the why always came down to the same grubby handful. To fear, bluster, hubris … Kit’s second thought, at least, was more with it: Drop the gun. Drop it. It’s wrong, absolutely the wrong thing to have in your hands in the middle of all this damage.

He was hit as soon as his arm started to fall. Whacked on the nose and then clawed across his gun hand. For a moment he thought he’d lost a finger.

“ Stronzo, ” Leo said.

Crumpling, his face cradled into his aching, now empty hand, Kit was astonished at the old man. He’d worried about Garrison, about Louie-Louie, never about Zia’s father. Pain rippled out across his face, across last week’s wounds, and Kit had a raw flash of Leo’s hardhat friends rushing down on him in a mob. He turtled away on his knees, directionless.

There was the lip of the lower site’s dam. The corrugated steel. Swaying against it, Kit came to himself, hunched as if in prayer over the edge of the dig. He saw the archaeologists’ grid. A checkerboard of string or twine, a loose net across half the murky floor. A net, but too weak to catch him. One moment the drop looked like six feet, the next closer to sixty.

“Cunt,” Leo was saying, above him. “ Rincolo. ”

And the hardhats were coming. Their boot steps, coming fast, shuddered the earth under Kit’s knees. He tried to squeeze an idea from his bleeding index finger, his former trigger finger, gashed and stained with oil. He blinked against the fresh ooze from his stitches.