James Hynes - Next

“Did it work?” Kevin had said, as wide-eyed as a kid. Daddy, tell me about the sixties again.

“God, yes,” said McNulty, almost energetically, and he went into some detail about a bloodlessly pale girl named Judy who had led him through a twisting maze of redbrick houses set close as teeth, each street narrower than the last, the raw night air full of coal smoke, until they came to Judy’s bedsit, where they took off their shoes and crept up the stairs past her landlady. In her tiny, unheated room they grappled silently on her narrow, swaybacked bed while she whispered to him about Althusser and Lukács and E. P. Thompson and he tried to peel off her black turtleneck. She consented at last, not so much out of lust as out of a grim determination to show that she wasn’t bourgeois, but even so she dug her ragged, bitten fingernails painfully into his shoulders whenever she thought the bed was creaking too loudly. She had a point, McNulty told Kevin; the floors were so thin they could hear the landlady snoring directly below them, but once again McNulty made lemonade and turned Mrs. Allenby’s honking to his advantage, murmuring to Judy that as long as her landlady didn’t stop snoring, they were probably all right. Soon McNulty was balling — that was his word for it, balling, Jurassic-era hipster slang — in that lovely, loose-hipped American way the English girls loved (said McNulty).

“But my mind wandered,” McNulty told Kevin, “it always does when I’m balling, I can’t help it.” Propped up on his strong American arms over the self-consciously ardent Judy, he started to think about the names of the streets they’d passed on the way to her bedsit: General Gordon Road, Gallipoli Lane, Sebastopol Row. “Nobody celebrates their own military disasters like the British,” McNulty said, and he told Kevin he’d begun to laugh, right there in the saddle, as it were. Judy looked more puzzled than hurt, perhaps she wasn’t used to laughter during sex, McNulty didn’t know, but he said “Sebastopol” out loud, puzzling her even more, and to make it up to her he began to thrust in a breathless, galloping, Tennysonian rhythm— half a league, half a league, half a league onward, forward the Light Brigade! Judy went stiff as a two-by-four when she came, her eyes wide, her lips a wordless O, and for an awful moment McNulty thought he’d killed her or something, because at the same moment, eight feet below, Mrs. Allenby stopped snoring, and in that instant he seemed to be the only one in the house with a beating pulse. Then Judy melted with a whimper, Mrs. Allenby began to trumpet again, and McNulty collapsed happily in Judy’s pale, undernourished arms. Afterward, she explained Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to him while he stretched out and lit a cigarette and silently recollected how the French called an orgasm le petit mort. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred, thought McNulty, blowing smoke rings at the oppressive floral wallpaper and trying not to laugh.

That’s the coolest story I ever heard, Kevin thinks, and it occurs to him with a pang that he’s older now than McNulty was then. Trudging around the gleaming glass cube of the airport’s newsstand, instinctively ignoring the alarming headlines, Kevin wearily wonders if admiring McNulty has done him any good at all. Back in his twenties, it had never occurred to Kevin to ask what a guy McNulty’s age had been doing working for four dollars an hour in a record shop, where even the manager was fifteen years younger. Kevin cringes at the memory, partly out of pity for McNulty — who knows where he is now, he’d be in his late sixties at least — and partly out of fear that he, Kevin, may not have much more to show at fifty than McNulty did at forty. He has a much better job than McNulty ever did, of course, and a mortgage and a retirement plan, and good friends he’s known since his Big Star days and before. But no kids, no career, really, no overriding passion in his life, and an ex-girlfriend who at long last heaved him over the side to have children with a man younger than Kevin — and certainly no happy memories of balling English Marxists and being the first American in Lincolnshire to read Naked Lunch.

GROUND TRANSPORTATION declares a sign, and a fat arrow points to the left, where Kevin joins a narcoleptic conga line shuffling toward the down escalator. The line is watched by a fierce-looking, heavily armed young woman in camouflage fatigues, another harbinger of Orange Alert. She’s a Hispanic girl with a lot of Indian in her (thinks Kevin), a woman warrior, an Aztec Amazon. She stands with her legs apart, her black jump boots tightly laced, a semi-automatic pistol bulging at her hip. She holds her ugly black automatic rifle diagonally across her chest, the corner of the butt propped on her shoulder, the fierce muzzle pointed at the marble floor. Her fine, inky hair is drawn tight into a bun under her beret, sharpening the raptorish edge of her cheekbones and her nose, making her black-eyed glare even fiercer. While she may be a reservist or a National Guard, this young woman is a real soldier, this woman is no McNulty, she’s no irreverent, Beat-reading shirker, probably no seducer of earnest young Englishwomen (though you never know). No, in work and in play, this young woman is clearly all business; this girl is on the job. This girl would empty a clip into Bertrand Russell without a second thought.

Even for an Ann Arbor liberal like him, Kevin’s glad to see the young woman, especially today. Four days after Buchanan Street — funny how quickly a name becomes iconic and needs no further explanation, like Watergate or Guantánamo — there are no bleeding hearts on public transportation, and he’s grateful for the guard’s sacrifice in that dutiful way mandated by the White House, network anchormen, and country music stars. But even so, Kevin wants to know, is this the best use of her time? Wouldn’t she be more effective patrolling the perimeter of the airport in a jeep, looking for suspicious characters in rented cars, dusky and not-so-dusky guys watching planes take off and land through binoculars? Shouldn’t she be looking for wired-up bottles of shampoo in checked luggage? Mysterious vials of white powder? Stingers in the grass? Not to tell you your job, soldier, I’m just saying, if something’s going to happen, is it really going to happen here, in the terminal? Then the soldier swivels her head and meets Kevin’s gaze, and Kevin jerks his eyes away.

And nearly stumbles getting on the escalator. The corrugated step splits under the soles of his shoes, and he shuffles back and catches himself on the rubbery handrail. But when he glances back, the woman warrior is already watching someone else. Kevin sighs and descends into the cool, gray atrium of baggage claim, into a magnifying, mall-ish echo of voices, an oceanic murmuring. A diffuse crowd mills around the steely hippodrome of a baggage conveyer, and for a moment his heart lifts at the prospect of catching another glance of Joy Luck and her tattoos. But she was already carrying her luggage; she’s long gone by now. Kevin feels like a movie director riding the camera crane down into a crowd scene — he was a film major once, for half a semester — John Ford or William Wyler chewing the stem of his pipe, his feet dangling from his trouser cuffs and showing a pair of tartan socks and a little pale shin. This gives Kevin the momentary illusion of control, the feeling that he could bark at the crowd below and they’d all look up at him as one, waiting for direction. Hey, maybe he’s even some young director, a veteran of hip-hop videos making his first feature, a chunky white kid in a Raiders jersey and a vast pair of cargo shorts and a backward ball cap, watching his milling extras with a critical eye and calling out, “Where’s our star, yo? The fuck’s my leading lady? She in this shot, or what?” Ms. Joy Luck in the role of Lynda — Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing. “She’s in her trailer, Mr. Quinn.” Mister Quinn — Kevin likes the sound of that. “Well, go ask her if she’d like to join us this morning, dog. We’re losing the fucking light.” But as the crane descends, the people below become less and less foreshortened, less and less under Kevin’s control, until with a gentle bump the escalator deposits Kevin sole to sole with his own dim reflection in the dully gleaming floor. Now he’s at eye level with everyone else, just another arriving passenger, just another guy in the crowd, just another extra in somebody else’s movie.