"I don't look."
"She doesn't look," Lorna informed Maisie, giggling.
"But, like, what if you had to tell someone your weight?" Maisie persisted. "What would you say? Like, if a cop stopped you and wanted to know if you fit the description of some crazy woman who was killing a bunch of people, and she was, like, two hundred pounds?"
"I'd tell him to lift me over his head and make his best guess."
Maisie and Lorna stared at Tess, unsure if this was a joke. With their curveless bodies and fluffy hair, they always reminded her of the not-quite-human girls in some Dr. Seuss stories, Cindy Lou Who carving the roast beast for the Grinch. Tess reminded them of their parents. Al though she had done the math for them several times, they refused to believe she was only nine years older. To them, twenty-nine was Almost Thirty, which was Awfully Close to forty, which meant she was almost their parents' age, for God's sake.
Luckily, Poe White Trash crashed into its opening number just then, so Tess could pretend absolute absorption in the music and ignore Lorna and Maisie. It was not unlike exchanging nails on a chalkboard for longer nails on a chalkboard. Despite Crow's sweet, true tenor, or perhaps because of it, Poe White Trash was determinedly anti-melodic, chaotic, assaultive. They were loud. Maisie and Lorna couldn't quite make Tess feel old, but putting that adjective in front of music did the trick.
When she'd first started going with Crow, she had tried hard to pretend an interest in his musical ambitions, had even trotted out the little intelligence she had gleaned from the city's almost-progressive radio station, WHFS. Crow had laughed, convincing her she could never keep up, so she might as well fall behind. She wished he would sing just one standard, one ballad, for her. Sid Vicious had sung "My Way." No one did "So in Love" better than k.d. lang. Certainly Crow could assay "All the Things You Are." Or "My Heart Stood Still." Just once, just for her.
A stray lyric became audible, probably the result of a malfunctioning sound system, "tongue-kissing the black dog." Inspired by Esskay? At any rate, it was as close as she would get to a ballad tonight.
She leaned back against the wall, sending little flakes of lead paint into the air, and took a long drag on her drink. No alcohol was allowed at the Floating Opera, only LSD and various new synthetic potions, so Tess had settled on one of those ubiquitous iced teas that seemed more religion than beverage. Behind her closed eyes, she imagined young people running down a beach, hand in hand, deliriously happy because they had raspberry-flavored iced tea. The boy looked like Crow. The girl was skinny and short. Unlikely as it seemed, she dozed off. It was morning when she opened her eyes again, or some time of day that passed for morning, and Crow's band was taking a final bow. Time for breakfast.
Jimmy's had just opened its doors by the time they returned to Fells Point. Tess was feeling much older than the twenty-nine years Lorna and Maisie found so fascinating. For once, she was glad the waitresses at Jimmy's automatically served her the same thing, even when she didn't want it. Today, their presumption saved her from the effort of forming words. Her bagels were on the griddle the second she crossed the doorstep, along with toast for Crow's egg-and-hash browns plate. Her coffee reached the table before they did. Tess thought of asking for decaf, then decided against it. If she fell asleep now, it would only screw her body up more. Might as well push on through the day and go to bed a little early. Say, at 6 P.M.
Crow was quiet in the morning, especially after a gig. He chewed ice, drank tea with honey, and skimmed the soft sections of the Beacon-Light while Tess pretended to read the New York Times. Well-kept secret of the news business: Sunday papers were comfortingly soporific, devoid of any real news. The usual words swam before her groggy eyes, as familiar and sweet as lullabies, so familiar as to be meaningless. Bosnia . Pact. GOP. Dow. Future. Remains to be seen.
Crow crunched a large piece of ice, inhaled it by accident, and started choking. "Sweet shit Jesus," he said, after coughing it out.
Tess, who knew that many things could prompt such a response in Crow-an interesting fact about wool-gathering in China, for example-did not react immediately. The soothing gray of the Times had begun to resemble one of those hidden 3-D pictures. The copy swam in front of her eyes so she couldn't make out the words, only shapes. She was seeing the paper the way Dorie Starnes and Howard Nieman did. Computer coding. Black stuff on white stuff. Big boxes and little boxes.
"Jesus fuckin' Christ," Crow said, shoving the front page of the Blight toward her. Tess had no problem making words from the bold black lines she saw there.
WINK WYNKOWSKI FOUND DEAD, APPARENT SUICIDE;
BEACON-LIGHT HAD UNCOVERED SECRET PAST
By Kevin V. Feeney
and Rosita Ruiz
Beacon-Light staff writers
Gerald "Wink" Wynkowski was found dead last night, an apparent suicide victim discovered just hours after he had learned the Beacon-Light planned to publish a story about his role in the death of a West Side shopkeeper almost thirty-one years ago.
Wynkowski was discovered in his running '65 Mustang about 10:30 in his closed and locked garage. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No note was found, but a Bruce Springsteen song, " Thunder Road," was playing on the car stereo when police arrived.
Although Wynkowski had always acknowledged his time at the Montrose School for juvenile offenders, he had characterized his crimes as "one notch up from Andy Hardy-a little vandalism, a little larceny." Sealed juvenile records had made it impossible to contradict this account before now.
But a former Baltimore man now living in Georgia told the Beacon-Light this week that Wynkowski had bragged about causing a man's death while incarcerated at Montrose. The man-who passed a polygraph test, but asked that his name not be revealed because his own delinquency is not widely known among his associates in Georgia-said Wynkowski claimed to have beaten the man to death during a hold-up.
A source familiar with the state's juvenile justice system yesterday confirmed that Wynkowski was sent to Montrose on a manslaughter charge, although the circumstances were slightly different. Nathaniel Paige, a shopkeeper on Gold Street, was pistol-whipped during a hold-up there in the summer of 1969, but the official cause of death was a heart attack. Under Maryland law, Wink, who had been involved in several minor crimes before this, was charged with manslaughter.
Contacted yesterday for comment, Wynkowski said he wanted to speak to his lawyer and would have no statement until Sunday morning. He was found dead 12 hours later, and his lawyer, Michael Ellenham, said he had not been in contact with his client all day.
Tess skimmed through the rest of the story, but most of its length was devoted to the Georgia interview and a rehashing of what the paper had already reported. She tried to work out the timing in her mind. If police had been called at 10:30, Feeney couldn't have arrived at the scene before 11-just enough time to call in two paragraphs to the night rewrite, who had done a pretty good job blending the new information into the existing story. Under the circumstances, the Beacon-Light had been lucky to get the story at all.
"What would you want to be listening to as you die?" asked Crow, for whom all news tended to be abstract, impersonal. "I don't think I'd pick Springsteen. Yet it would be unseemly to die with Poe White Trash playing. Everyone would assume I did it because I was a failure at my music. The blues would be too obvious, opera too pretentious. Hey, maybe that Chet Baker album you're always playing. ‘It Could Happen to You.'"