Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“Call me if you want to cooperate,” she said.

He stuck the card in his breast pocket without looking at it. “Enjoy the rest of your lunch.”

I WOULDknow this dude Salteau was bullshit even if I didn’t remember him from Manitou Sands. He was not like any damn Indian I ever heard of. He didn’t talk right look right or walk right. He messed up these stories I’ve heard a thousand times. I don’t mean he changed them around I mean he wasn’t thinking in the right direction. And he didn’t know anybody at all. Who ever heard of an Indian not knowing anybody? There’s always some cousin around or something.”

From the e-mail Becky Chasse had sent her on Tuesday. A name from so far out of the past that the idea of the woman living, continuing on outside of Kat’s fixed concept of her, thrilled and unsettled her. She’d brought it to Nables to ask if she could take a look.

“Who’s this Becky Chasse? Why’s she writing to you?”

“She probably knows that none of those little local papers can handle a story like that. They probably wouldn’t touch it if they could.”

“No but why’s she writing you ?”

She’d told Nables that she and Becky had gone to the U of M together. He hadn’t seemed to realize that nobody who went to Ann Arbor would go back to a place like Nebising, or go to work in the cage at Manitou Sands for that matter. Michiganders mostly got out of Michigan, if they got the chance. Nables had very limited ideas about what constituted a dead end, though. He’d been made a columnist after he’d brought a Pulitzer home to the long-suffering Mirror for a three-part series on extortionate lending practices on the South Side generally and in Grand Crossing particularly, but despite having been given carte blanche it turned out that there was nothing in the entire world (nominally, his beat) quite as corrupt or done quite so badly as it was in the ghetto at home. His ledes, usually drawing a contrast between some showy boondoggle that benefited the few and the hidden and unrelieved suffering of the many, became notorious for their vitriolic hyperbole, and he’d been kicked upstairs and named midwest editor when his columns, as reflexively indignant as they were, began to irritate even the constituencies he was defending, who had grown tired of being called credulous fools for playing the lottery or enthusing over some costly civic initiative.

Nables had gazed at the e-mail for a long time. He’d manufactured an office for himself by barricading his desk behind tall lateral filing cabinets. Everyone else sat in the bullpen. This cheerless, metal-lined space contained no clue to his character, his personal life, or his vanities. Kat thought of him as an unexceptionally intelligent man with a certain kind of inflexible integrity that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and she didn’t know how she felt about it. She wanted her incorruptible heroes to be genius rogues, and that wasn’t what she had here with Nables.

“Do Native Americans gamble at these casinos?” he’d asked, finally.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because if I’m going to send you to Michigan I want to know who this is ripping off and why I ought to care.”

“I think up there it might be mostly white people.” She’d pushed her hair out of her face, and shrugged. “A lot of people from Chicago have houses on the lakeshore.” She’d shrugged again. “Local interest.”

“Local interest,” said Nables. “Like we couldn’t find ourselves some god damn white man banging a tom-tom and calling himself Geronimo right here in the city of Chicago. If you’re telling me that this is where a lot of rich folks go to spend discretionary income, maybe you ought to think and tell me again.”

Kat hadn’t been sure what her trump was. Story about the hijacking of racial identity?

“You are aware that Michigan is the state that gave us Eminem? I am interested, Kat, in injustice. Not in exasperation. There are no African Americans, and I presume that there are no Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Asian Americans for that matter, who are not exasperated by, who are unaware of, the ways in which we are belittled and stereotyped, mimicked and plagiarized. We are all aware and we have made it our project to make other people, white people, aware . And what have white people done? This is what white people have done. They’ve learned to express regret, to watch what they say in public, to exalt carefully selected public figures, to scrupulously integrate their advertising, and to visibly celebrate a diversity that exists only in that advertising. Meanwhile, the master program continues uninterrupted. Underpay us, siphon money out of our neighborhoods, cheat us out of an education, keep us high, put us in jail. How does pointing out one more time the ways in which insult is added to injury help? See, I don’t think you can answer that except to say that it doesn’t.”

Story about an audacious theft?

“ Audacity is a term I prefer to reserve for the exercise of righteous daring. The word is derived from the Medieval Latin: audacitas, or boldness, derived from Classical Latin, audacis, genitive case of audax, or brave. How we would be degrading this ennobling word, a word describing a way of being that I would like our citizenry, our young people, to aspire to! Theft in all its forms is craven, a hidden act that takes place in the shadows even when those shadows are cast by the collusion of so-called respectable people and institutions. Theft is not worthy of celebration — certainly not in a daily newspaper serving a city renowned for the stunning cupidity of those who purportedly act for the public good. No, a theft is a theft, Kat. A theft is a theft. I do not think that it is in the interests of our readership to glamorize the act because of the means of its accomplishment. In Othello, Shakespeare writes, ‘The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.’ Well, in this case I believe Mr. Shakespeare is dead wrong. Shakespeare is wrong. The robbed that smiles is stealing something more from his own self.”

Story about the Mob’s influence on casino gambling?

“Now, how do we know that this story has to do with the Mob? The Mafia? La Cosa Nostra? Because this old college roommate of yours says so ? This has become another easy shibboleth in a culture addicted to shortcuts. The Mob . Let me tell you a story. Where I grew up, there was a pizza parlor. Little pizza parlor on Forty-seventh Street right where I grew up. And when we went in there, there were these coolers filled with colored fruit drinks. And do you know what we called it, the various colored liquids bubbling in these coolers? ‘Mafia juice.’ And when we saw cigarette machines outside the corner store, or in a cafeteria, or at the pool hall, we called them ‘Mafia cigarettes.’ And when there were those coin-operated mechanical horses they have chained up outside the five-and-ten? We called those ‘Mafia rides.’ You know why we called them that? We were lazy . We knew something was off, yes, we knew something was wrong about those watered-down drinks, about those stale cancer sticks, about those twenty-second rides, but did we look deeply at the reasons why those things were put there, where we were? No, we did not. We did not. If we had, it might have told us something that we didn’t want to think about. We had told ourselves the story we needed. We did not wish to be informed. Well, the purpose of a newspaper is to inform and educate the population, not to cater to its fantasies about the causes and conspiracies underlying everyday facts of life. Mafia. Tell me, Kat. How would it sit with you if I told you that casinos were elements of a Jewish conspiracy? Or, better. Better still. What if I were to say that the Chinese were involved with gambling? Fan-Tan. Pak Kop Piu. Long, long history of gambling in Chinese culture. That is a fact. Hmm, must be the Chinese involved. Not quite so obvious a story now, is it, Kat?”