Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “How do you manage to get a signal in this place? I’ve been trying all morning, it seems like.”

“You dang city slickers,” he said. “They got one of them there telephone booths at the general store.”

She shook her head. “No offense. You just get used to reception one hundred percent of the time, and then — bloop! It’s gone.”

His earnest, round, American face broke into a smile. Then he started talking: “Relax. What do I look like, the chamber of commerce? Don’t worry, I don’t have any interest in the esteemed reputation of our local cell service. If you ask me — which you’re not, of course, but here we are — I think this country needs one guaranteed dead zone per county. Preserve the uncellular space! That’s the bumper sticker I’m going to have printed up as soon as I succeed in my nationwide grassroots movement to have bumpers brought back instead of those plastic things they have now. If this is indeed Unabomber, Michigan, then tell me where I sign up for my forty acres and a mule. Digital zero. Streets named after trees and presidents and pioneers, and good old-fashioned directions like north, south, center, up, down. Welcome and Get Lost! You saw it on the billboard on your way in, right?”

He shrugged, turned, and trudged toward the library entrance. She followed, waiting a moment to allow him to get well ahead of her.

She spotted him inside, sitting in a baby chair among a bunch of little kids. She took care to position herself on the other side of the room, although the guy looked harmless enough. If he hadn’t said a word to her she might have thought — spotting him here, sitting hunched forward on the ludicrously low chair with his knees together and his hands thrust into the tight gap between his thighs — that he was retarded, but his awesomely weird monologue proved him to be more exotic than that. She gazed at him with wary interest. Leave it to her to attract the town nut. Something about her made strangers wander up and raise the lid on whatever was bubbling inside their skulls.

Kat forgot about him when Salteau arrived. She took out her phone and discreetly took several pictures of him. Despite Becky’s colorful description, and the photo she’d seen that seemed to bear it out, he was dressed in a Carhartt jacket and a baseball cap, not in any special way that connoted I N D I A N, although the buckles, braids, beadwork, and embroidery generally had been regarded with distaste, even suspicion, by the working men and women she’d grown up around. He certainly made no attempt to “sound” Indian, either in accent or in phraseology, except for a throwaway joke about the weather being a result of the wrath of the Great Spirit over Cherry City High’s basketball team losing to Gaylord the previous afternoon. He could be an Indian. He could be an Italian, or a Jew, or an Arab, or an Armenian, for all she knew. She shrugged, put away the phone, and took out her notebook. His true identity may have been the story’s hook, but it wasn’t the point. The point, she reminded herself, was the money, the theft, the crime. People hid for all sorts of reasons that nobody cared about. People hid and nobody came looking. People walked right out of their high school nicknames and goofy hairstyles and into jobs of rickety dignity at IT firms and real estate offices in Toledo and Pittsburgh, where nobody would ever think of searching for either star or stoner. They joined the marines and got good posture. They gained weight and lost their hair scanning groceries at Kroger’s. They earned doctorates in classics and comp lit and, really: if it were even possible to locate him, what would you say to the guy whose most salient trait had been his habit of carrying a skateboard from class to class once it turned out that he could read dead languages? Why would you want or need this new definition of someone locked in amber? Not the point. This was different. Saltino was a fugitive, of a kind, operating under an alias. The point was the past not worn away into unrecognizability but amputated. He began to speak.

She walked out immediately after he finished. Her review: so-so. She kind of saw what Becky had meant about his being a little off. This too was not the point. She tried to remain focused on the point, but was basically excited. He was surely who she thought he had to be. She went outside and began trying to upload the photos to Becky. When the man from before came and stood next to her, she ignored him for as long as she could.

“What?”

“How’s your hip?”

“Oh,” she said, “OK, I guess. I’ll find out when I wake up at four a.m. in the throes of pain.”

“Put ice on it.”

“The country doctor speaks.”

“Scotch helps too. It’s long experience speaking. I have a bad back,” he said. He pursed his lips. “So, you’re writing about John Salteau?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I saw you taking notes. You don’t have a kid with you.”

“Not bad,” she said.

“What paper?”

“Who says it’s a newspaper? Maybe I’m a blogger.”

“Ah. A blogger.” He formed a cross with his index fingers and aimed it at her.

“Welcome to the digital frontier.”

“No. You forget, I’m the one trying to escape.”

“Then you’ll be relieved. I’m strictly old media. The Chicago Mirror . I feel like I have to identify myself because my boss would not be amused for one second by my impersonating a blogger.”

“Feels like his world is vanishing, huh?”

“It is vanishing. Blogs are like the good old days. It’s Twitter we have to worry about now.”

“What’s ‘Twitter’?”

“Never mind. Just aim that cross somewhere else.”

“Long as you’re not a blogger.”

“When in doubt, blame the bloggers.”

“It’s all their fault.”

“And so where’s your kids?” she asked.

“Brooklyn.”

“You mean like, Brooklyn Brooklyn.”

“Over the famous bridge.”

“I thought you seemed out of place.”

“Back. In place, I mean. I’m from the midwest originally.”

“Imagine that.” Kat checked to see if the pictures were uploading. The guy muttered something; can’t believe you found him or thought nobody would find him or something like that. She looked up sharply. “What?”

“I said, I guess Cherry City is about to lose John Salteau to the big time.”

“You’ve got a funny idea what the big time wants.”

“Oh, that’s not true. I watch a lot of television. There’s an endless supply of celebrity out there. A crisis of overproduction. Celebrity fry cooks, celebrity closet organizers, celebrity grocery store clerks. There’s a shoe salesman on the Foot Channel who was on the cover of US Weekly .”

“No,” she said, “there wasn’t.” She giggled, shaking her head. He was probably right. She glanced at her phone.

“You wouldn’t want to grab a bite, would you?”

“You’re kidding, right? You’re coming on to me at story hour?”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to huff Krylon behind the hardware store Dumpster or anything. Maybe I just want to compare notes.”

“Oh, you’re writing about Salteau, too.” She laughed again.

“I’m his number one fan. You could quote me.”

“Oh, you’re quotable all right. Local color.”

“I’ll buy.”

“I can expense my meals.”

“Come on. I’ll tell you everything I know about John. Deep background.”

“You know him.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

S HOULDI have heard of you?” she said.

“The dreaded question. Do I say, yes, you should have and you’re hopelessly ignorant if you haven’t, or do I say no, don’t worry, I’m completely insignificant.”