“Who are you?” she said, letting her hand drop into the open purse hanging from her right shoulder.
“You bring Little Benny or Big Bertha?” I asked referring to her pistols of choice.
The confusion on her face brought a friendly smile to my lips and eyes.
“I always told you that I didn’t believe in reincarnation, but...” I began the old quote.
“...if it was true, they’d bring you back in the body of a federal felon just to show you how the other half lives,” she said completing the quote. “Ron, it doesn’t look like you. Not even a little bit.”
“Come on in. I’ll make you an egg sandwich.”
I turned my back on her and walked toward the kitchen. Every word I said was calculated to remind her of her dead partner, Ron Tremont. I was him: the big fat white guy who felt that his country, culture, and race were the only things holding back the darkness that the rest of the world represented.
In the kitchen, he had the five-six FBI agent sit on a high stool next to the countertop stove. Bacon was sizzling in a sectioned cast-iron pan while two whole-wheat slices from the refrigerator waited patiently in the toaster.
“I know you like ’em runny,” I said as she stared.
“What name are you going by?” she asked.
“Jack Strong.”
“And how is it that Jack Strong says all the things that my dead partner used to say seven years ago?”
There was tension in her face and eyes. No one but Ron Tremont would have seen it. That, more than anything else so far, convinced me that I was some kind of abomination set loose upon the world for reasons unknown.
I melted butter in the two smaller squares of the skillet and broke eggs into them.
“Did you see the black van parked outside?” I asked.
“They’re watching you?”
I depressed the lever on the toaster and said, “There’s no mustard, but she has mayonnaise. I sliced some onion and tomato, too.”
“Why are they on you?” she replied.
I took that as my cue to tell the story of Jack Strong: how he woke up in a hotel bed with scars and patches, a black man’s ring finger and a woman’s pinky, with memories so broad and far-reaching that he does not believe that he is just one man or woman, or maybe not even wholly human. I left out the part about the slaughter of three thugs in a back room at the Steadman Casino — Anna was a law enforcement official, after all.
Her response was to question me in detail about memories of being Ron Tremont. Foods I liked and transgressions I committed. For a while there, the fat man had a hot and heavy affair with a nineteen-year-old named, of all things, Cherry. He didn’t think that Anna knew about the liaison, but now she disabused him of that notion.
“Tell me the nickname, the real nickname,” she demanded, “that Ron had for Chastity ‘Cherry’ Hirsch.”
The FBI agent, residing somewhere in the folds of our brain, got shy, but that didn’t matter. I knew the name.
I smiled and nodded and said, “Cherry Bomb.”
I handed her the bacon and egg sandwich and she started eating, shaking her head as she did.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“Chastity would explode in that Mongoose Motel room we used.”
“Not that,” my ex-partner said with a wry grin. She never approved of my skull brother’s sexual predilections. “You. I mean you’re sitting here looking like some Vegas hood who’s been doing push-ups out in the prison yard with all the memories of my lizard-brained ex-partner. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Mason Daub was investigating you there that last year,” I said, using my most intimate knowledge.
“Me?”
“I didn’t understand it at the time,” I continued while she chewed. “Now I see that unconsciously he resented a black woman on the team. He found out that you were involved with a group in college that an earlier administration had labeled subversive.”
“What group?” she asked, gazing at him with eyes that even her old friend could not read.
“Sisters of the American Revolution.”
It wasn’t anything, just some foolishness that three black girls at Wesleyan College cooked up to feel political and empowered in a white world. They had little meetings and made plans to take over Corporate America by attaining positions in hiring and placing very capable people of color in key positions while at the same time hiring incompetent white men for similar jobs. That way, they figured, they’d take over from the inside. It was pretty smart, but Anna and her friends were just playing. It didn’t mean a thing.
Too bad that one of the Sisters later took up with a pretty but bent young brother named Filo Drammon. Filo was stealing from a warehouse he worked for in Massachusetts. He’d take a couple of handfuls of computer chips that were in transit, throw them into his pockets, and drive them down to Florida once a month where some enterprising offspring of ex-Sandinistas would smuggle the government-controlled technology down to Cuba.
That made Filo’s crime interstate and international, and so when the search of the innocent woman’s home turned up a diary that mentioned a current day FBI agent, our supervisor, Mason Daub was notified.
In the beginning, Ron Tremont also despised Anna. He had changed his perspective but, for reasons of job security, had not shared this new opinion with his white compatriots. So when Daub approached him, he pulled out a file that a previous supervisor had him compile, implicating Daub in some fairly innocent prostitution ring run by his brother. Daub just passed along money and phone numbers, but it was enough for the main office to send him into early retirement — if they ever found out.
Ron, with my voice, explained all this to Anna.
“So, so you’re some other guy with Ron’s brain?” she asked.
“I wish that was the only voice in my head,” I, Jack Strong, said. “There are a couple of dozen names I could tell you and many more that I haven’t figured out yet. Men and women, and I think there’s a wolf in there, too. I could lift the old 327-pound Ron Tremont over my head and throw him across the room. I can speak more languages than a professional translator could recognize. And there’s that black van following me wherever I go.”
“So you got me mixed up in some kind of science fiction movie?”
“Just like if Corman and Romero went to bed and had the same dream.”
“Ron said that he weighed 290.”
“He lied.”
Anna laughed and I knew we had a deal.
“What do you want me to do, Jack?”
“Not Ron?”
“No. Ron is just a foot soldier in this army.”
I smiled and unraveled a plan that some strategic command at the back of my mind had been hatching while the woman in me made love to Rosetta Jeanette Lawson in the guise of a man.
Rosetta and I picked up her car parked down the block from Tyson’s pub and drove to Phoenix the very next morning. We got a room in a hotel down the street from Phoenix National Trust.
There was love in the room, great quantities of it. That passion wasn’t between us but inside each of us. We could have been entire galaxies passing through each other without touching but still luxuriating in the bath of gravities.
When the landline in the hotel rang, I was on my back feeling as if I was just a solitary man who had just made love for the first time in the history of my race.
“Hello?”
“They just landed at the airport,” Anna said in my ear.
I was looking out of the window at the black van parked across the street.