Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“In about thirty seconds I’m going to make a determination that you’re publicly intoxicated. Class A misdemeanor.”

“Determine away. I’ll sleep it off and talk to Earl in the morning.”

“Sleep? That’s what you think. I guess you didn’t hear the fucking Polack nightingale in there.” He paused. “So,” he said finally, “is there something you wanted to tell me?”

Ernest hadn’t been anticipating this kind of hard time, and he was just nonplussed enough to dig in his heels a little. But he’d begun to feel profoundly tired sitting here, and the prospect of a night in the drunk tank held no appeal for him.

“I have information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Information concerning the whereabouts of a certain missing person. Very high profile.”

“Who would this person be?”

“The Galton girl.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Let me just say that my training and experience have led me to be skeptical of such claims.”

Ernest’s eye flitted to the diploma. The elenchus of Shippensburg. “You know,” said Ernest. “I’ve got some pretty high-level government contacts from covert operations I’ve been involved with, and I could have taken this information directly to them.” He raised a finger and wagged it at the policeman.

Bricca rolled his eyes. “Oh, dear sweet bleeding Jesus. Not one of these people. Why is it everybody with the high-level contacts somehow ends up sitting in my office three sheets to the wind in the dead of night wearing a dirty shirt? Please, the suspense is killing me, this is something you found out about from a fortune cookie? Spacemen transmitting radio waves into your morning glass of Tang? God talking to your internal organs? I should just leave you for St. Earl to deal with.”

Ernest tried staring him down.

Oddly, Bricca slackened, with a high, soughing exhalation, as if all the tension had left his body.

“Where’s she supposed to be?”

“South Canaan.”

“Well, I suppose that’s not too farfetched. You could hide the fucking Statue of Liberty in South Canaan if you wanted to, though so far nobody has. Where exactly in South Canaan?”

“A farm. I don’t know the address. But I could find it.”

“And how did you happen to see the young lady?”

“I never did.”

“Ah. You never saw her at a place you don’t exactly know where it is.”

“My brother put her up there. He told me.”

“And who is your brother?”

“A god damned Communist.”

“That’s a tough way to make a buck. I was just reading about the Red Chinese in Time . Their standard of living isn’t due to approach ours until the year 2000. But I meant who, not what.”

“Guy Mock.”

“Well, Brother Mock, what’s his connection to all this?”

“I said already, he’s a radical. Lives out there in Berkeley, all that. He knows these type of people. Gets all buddy-buddy with them.” Suddenly he sounded ridiculous to himself. He should have just gone for the 4 a.m. eggs. “Look, it’s not just her. It’s the other two too. The Shepards.”

“And they’re all up there right now?”

“No, they left about three months ago. But I’m telling you you can find them. You can track them down. Somebody’s seen them. You can question my brother. He’s got to know where they are. He’s trying to write a god damned book about them.”

Bricca thrust out his right arm dramatically, addressing his appeal to the diploma on the wall. “Do I take this sfatcheem seriously? Or do I just go out the back door and keep going until I wander into a hobo jungle somewhere and allow myself to be murdered for my Thorn McAn’s?”

“I’m the one, smart-ass. I could walk now.”

“No, you couldn’t. You could’ve. But like a good three-in-the-morning lush you had to speak right up. So now you have to sit. See, usually I get to go home soon to my empty little apartment and unwind sitting on my empty little couch waiting for the empty little test pattern to go away. But you just had to come in here and bend someone’s ear with this fucking story of yours. I only wish it had been your good pal Captain America. But he’ll be here soon enough, bright and early and shaven clean and happy-happy to be awake in the daylight like a normal citizen. Until he sees you. And then of course”—Bricca consulted a list of telephone numbers trapped beneath the rectangle of glass on his desk—“he’ll have the FBI up his ass too. Because if you really want to talk about this, you’re going to talk about it with the FBI.”

“Yeah, I want to talk.”

“Here’s the number right here. Scranton Resident Agency of the FBI. If you’re fucking around, now’s the time to quit. Say, count of three?”

“He tried to involve my parents.”

“One, two, two and a half, two and three-quarters. OK, three. Here we go.”

“I already look like a fucking idiot.”

“Yeah, well, you won’t get any argument from me there.” Bricca picked up the phone and dialed, squinting at the number under the glass on his desk.

ROGER DRIVES TO THE Bay Area, listening to a special radio broadcast, The Kidnapping of Alice Galton: A Year Passes.

“Where is Alice?” the announcer intones. “The FBI doesn’t know but believes you may be the person who will telephone them someday and say the young woman with the mole on the right side of her face below her mouth is Alice — your neighbor or a salesperson at a neighborhood store.”

Even at this hour there is a slight slowing, the sense of a queue forming, as he approaches the Carquinez Bridge. Bridges make him consider all the things we take on faith. That this old relic won’t simply fall into the strait below, for instance. An earthquake measuring exactly what point what on the Richter scale would shake this thing to pieces? He glances over at the bridge’s twin, tries to remember which of the two is newer, is touted as being stronger, safer, more soundly constructed.

“Parents in well-to-do suburbs are asking themselves: ‘Are my children too sheltered? Have I given them too much and made their lives too easy?’”

His tires whine on the roadway grid high above the dark and churning water. The car drifts slightly to the right, and he corrects generously, overcorrects, recorrects. A series of corrections, brain handling these NASA-like calculations with dazzling speed, and all in the service of an old Chevy with crappy alignment, shimmying the vehicle back into the center of its lane. High above dark water.

The car dips suddenly, and he has crossed over onto solid ground, safe for another day. Cheers! Just ahead, another car’s blinker pulses once, twice, before it slips into his lane, and he drops back, calm and unruffled, happy to be over the span. A new program begins on the radio.

“The caveman was all right in his day. He squatted beside the fire, snatched his lump of meat, pulled it apart with his hands and teeth. If he saw anything he wanted, he grabbed it. If someone was in his way, he knocked him down.”

Right on. Kind of the way he feels. The evening ended with the four of them — he and Tania, Teko and Yolanda — sprawled on the front room floor around a pot of rice Yolanda had (grudgingly) made. The pot was scorched on its sides and bottom and missing one of its two Bakelite handles, and it looked forlorn and out of place on the shivered floorboards, a photo from a Life expose of urban poverty. They ate in sullen silence. Well, look at the time. Got to head back down to Oakland.

She walked him outside, stood on the porch with him in the cold evening air. Trucks rattled by on the overpass. He hugged her, drawing her slight body close, surprised by how exhausted he suddenly felt. But he resisted the dubious appeal of his customary bivouac on the front room floor. It’d been a difficult day; there was bickering, a splintered atmosphere from the moment Teko and Yolanda walked in. Tania seemed to shrug it off easily enough; she was used to it, and soon there would be a second safe house, paid for with the money obtained from the “bakery,” their coded term for the bank.