Mark Costello - Big If

Gretchen signed off. It was seven fifty-five. She dug through the pockets of her overcoat, looking for her cell phone. Every morning on the road, Gretchen called her son in Maryland. It didn’t sound like much in the mothering department — a phone call, what was that? Pathetic — especially with Tev at such an awkward age and with all the trash out there, drugs and gangs and thievery and evil on CD, computer, television, movies, drops of poison in the well. She tried to protect him from the poison in the well. When she was home, she took him to the movies at the mall. She let him pick which one, PG, PG-17, she’d even do an R. She knew that movies got R ratings for sex, violence, or explicit language. Explicit language didn’t worry her; kids heard worse in schoolyards. The violence scared her, but the sex scenes were the worst — damn embarrassing to sit through with your kid right next to you. She let him pick the movie because he wouldn’t go to any movie she had picked, and wasn’t that the purpose of the cineplex, the batting cage, the sneaker store, Tevon-time, son-and-mother bonding, all of that? Tevon liked cop movies, so they saw a lot of them. Often she was so worn out from the road that she fell asleep before the first burst of small-arms fire and missed the scene, somewhere toward the middle of the movie, where the cop rivals became buddies, and she woke up to explosions at the climax, throwing herself on the person sitting next to her, screaming in the dark, Tashmo, Felker, gun gun gun! The ushers would hustle down the aisle and eject them and Tev would be so angry and embarrassed, riding home.

Gretechen knew her morning phone calls weren’t a substitute for mothering. She could only hope that Tevon understood that it was a major pain in her ass to line up five private minutes at exactly seven fifty-five each day. The jogs, generally scheduled for eight, were small invasions to bring off; she couldn’t really stop the show to call her house and tell her son to get out of bed. Seven fifty-five was an awkward time for Gretchen, but she was stuck with it. If she called before that time, Tev would be in REM sleep and a SWAT team couldn’t rouse him. There was no point in trying to do battle with her son’s biological clock. Tev’s clock was more like a biological Stonehenge, mute boulder, enduring and immovable, slow cycle of the seasons, spring planting and the harvest, Tev wakes and lies there for a time and slowly, very slowly does he reach to scratch his buttcrack. If she called much past that time, Tev would be awake and still in bed, but already behind schedule, not yet showered, much less dressed. The school bus left at half past eight and Tev would have to go through at least four outfits, careful self-inspections in the mirror, before he was ready for his cereal and the daily hunt for the missing backpack, which contained the undone homework and a certain crucial comic book he’d be needing if they sent him to detention. Her phone call set it all in motion — shower, dressing, breakfast, the dead run to the bus — and if she called at eight, say, or five minutes past, Tevon’s morning went to hell from there. She told him what a pain it was to call on his schedule, not to make him feel guilty, but to let him know that he was fully worth it.

The vans pushed through traffic. Gretchen got her mother first. Mildred Williams was her usual fount of small complaints involving joints and poor digestion. Gretchen asked her to get Tevon— it’s late, Mother, for chrissakes put him on.

Tev picked up in his bedroom. “Hello, Moms.”

Gretchen said, “It’s late — you should be in the shower.”

But Tevon was relaxing like a pasha in his undies. “So how’s the P machine?” he asked.

The what? Then Gretchen remembered the lie she had told him in the driveway Sunday afternoon, the secret weapon of Protection, the two-three-one-two-three-six-P, the ring of energy around her in the crowds, the reason why he didn’t have to be afraid for her.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s great. They’re getting it off the truck right now.”

Tevon said that he had been thinking about the P machine. He’d figured out that it was a lie.

“Like Santa Claus,” he laughed.

Gretchen said, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m looking at the P machine right now, pal. They’ve got the extension cord out and everything. Come on, Tev, it’s late. Get your butt into the shower.”

Tevon said that he had been talking to Carlton Imbry in L.A. — just talking, no big deal, they were having some good talks.

“You can’t stop me, Moms,” Tevon said. “I can talk to my father if I want.”

Gretchen felt tired and afraid, hearing this — Tevon plunging into the uncertainty of fathers and of love.

She said, “I can stop you, son. You don’t think I can? Wait’ll I get home — we’ll see who can’t stop what.”

Tev said nothing. It wasn’t a long call.

She said, “Take a shower, Mr. Man. Let’s try and make the bus today.”

The vans were out of traffic, coming up a hill. She looked out at the neighborhoods. Typical and scenic, she thought bitterly. She was starting to have fundamental doubts about herself. Not about her job, her methods as lead agent, the way she drove her people. The whole team had heard her ream out Tashmo and most of them understood traffic plans well enough to know that the bungled roadblocks were not Tashmo’s fault. Tashmo wasn’t beloved by the other agents. They saw him for the selfish civil service schemer that he was, but they also knew that when you gave him an assignment, it usually got handled (usually by Elias — Tashmo had Elias wrapped around his finger). If Tashmo handled it, he handled it on Tashmo-time, complaining the whole way, but in the end the thing got done. The agents knew that Gretchen wasn’t in the right, blasting Tashmo for the roadblocks, and they probably chalked it up to She’s a bitch.

Gretchen didn’t want to be a bitch. She wanted to be an asshole, a bastard, a ball-buster, but she had to admit that she was sometimes bitchy too. She knew that every slipup, every lapse, could lead to Tevon in his room watching an assassination on TV. This was another thing she had lived through as a kid (Dr. King in Memphis, Robert Kennedy in L.A. — blood looked black on the black-and-white TV her mother had in ’68, when the country went to hell). Tevon was her country now, the only country Gretchen knew, and he wouldn’t see the VP die on television, not while she was chief-of-detail. She drove her agents to protect her son, and if they didn’t like it, well, they could fuck themselves and go back to Crim, in more or less that order. This was Gretchen’s way, maybe not the best way, but she didn’t doubt that it had to be her way. Riding in the van, she was doubting something else. Was she a good mother? She thought of Tevon searching for himself in cyberspace. She saw him at the terminal, typing the same lonely search, Tevon Williams, T. J. Williams, Tevon Joseph Williams, trying it all-caps to see if this picked up some hits — it broke her heart. The search had led him to back to L.A. and to Carlton Imbry, and now they were talking, son and father, though she had forbidden it. She couldn’t let Tevon come to know his father because Carlton Imbry was one of those handsome, talented, weak men who hurt you in the end, and she couldn’t watch her son get hurt. She also didn’t want him to grow into that kind of man — she couldn’t watch that either. She had built a Dome named Gretchen Williams all around her son, his promise and his future, but she was tired and she couldn’t stand the fighting, or the silence on the phone, or the locked doors at the house, and maybe it was time to let it go.

The motorcade took the last corner like a centipede, in segments, van after van, arriving at the top of the jog route only twenty minutes behind schedule. On Gretchen’s order, the rotary was sealed by flashing cruisers. Traffic started backing up in three directions. Some commuters, running late already, tried to go around, following the side streets, which were also blocked. The VP and his party stretched on the shoulder. Gretchen watched them stretch, cell phone in her hand. Through the trees she saw the river, a blue police boat midstream, frogmen jumping backwards off the deck.