Kit began to say he understood, he agreed. Boston …
“Man, tell me something. Tell me something, okay?” Louie-Louie turned to face him, and Kit knew what he’d ask: Did you kill my brother?
“Tell me, man,” he said. “How could you come to my house and tell my Mama what a sweet old time your Daddy had with a racist Red Sox like Ted Williams?”
Kit touched his neck.
“What kind of a crazy white boy are you, telling my Mama something like that?”
He hadn’t expected to get insulted, either. “Aw, Louie-Louie. I hope that’s not the burning question that brought you all the way over here in the dead of winter.”
The younger man’s beard changed shape. He might have been smiling; the window glare left his face largely invisible.
“She gets to you, doesn’t she?” the brother said. “My Mama. She gets to your head.”
Kit managed a small grin himself. He gestured at his bruises and repeated that he’d been in bad shape when he’d come by their house. And with that a more reasonable motive for today’s visit occurred to him. “You know,” he said, “I also told your mom I’ve got no ownership of this story. No legal claim or anything.”
The younger man at last reached for a seat.
“Louie-Louie, this is your story. Yours and your mom’s.”
The brother moved with less noise. He turned the chair around before sitting and settled with his chest against the struts of the back.
“You can do what you want with it,” Kit said. “You don’t need my permission.”
Still he didn’t seem to have a handle on this big little brother, this guerilla suddenly gone soft. Almost in a whisper, Louie-Louie said he wasn’t looking for Kit’s permission.
“You know there’s a black-owned paper in town,” Kit kept on. “There’s the South End Community News, too.”
The more the merrier, he figured. Or the more the moral-er. After the Grand Jury, Sea Level’s precious scoop would be history — and who knew who Bette might be telling, out wherever she’d gone.
“Aw, that South End paper,” the brother said, “that’s mostly a gay thing, you know.”
Kit found himself looking over his desk, wondering if he didn’t have some crackers in a drawer somewhere. A bite to eat would help them both. He continued to search while Louie-Louie said that his mother called the Community News an abomination before the Spirit. “Mama, she’s old-timey,” Louie-Louie said. “But she’s sharper than what you might think. She didn’t used to be so spacey either.” Nodding, Kit found a box of Triscuits down beside his office Johnnie Walker, and a shrink-wrapped gift packet of mustard and sardines from the publication party. Wow, was he actually going to put together a meal? Grain, oil, protein, spices?
Kit spread the goodies on his desktop, then fished his jackknife from a coat pocket. Meantime the brother bundled up his fatigue jacket and laid the bundle on top of the chair back; he used it as a pillow. If he was Castro, he was a worn-out and dispirited Castro, hunched over with an ear to the chest of a fallen comrade.
“Mama didn’t used to be so down in the bottle either,” Louie-Louie said.
“Yesterday she was worse than I’d seen her before,” Kit said. “Worse by a long shot.”
“Yesterday was one of her better days.” Louie-Louie kept trying to get comfortable on his bundled jacket, shifting his baggy body. “One of her best days this week, I’d say. Viddich, man, you’re good for her.”
What? Kit picked at his food’s wrapping. Five minutes ago Louie-Louie had all but called him a racist.
“See,” the brother went on, “where my Mama’s coming from, yesterday just proved she was right going to you. Where she’s coming from, when you started in to crying that meant she could trust you.”
Kit began to open the sardines, keeping his head down.
“She believes in you, Viddich. Far as Mama’s concerned, you’re the man.”
“Aw, you know better than that.”
The brother lifted his head, exposing feathery chest hair. “Man, all I know is, my Mama’s in a bad way.”
Kit pulled together the food. He must’ve sensed something, taking on such homey activities. The squeak of the sardine tin coming apart, the muffled pop of the mustard cap twisting off — these made an appropriate soundtrack, when a kid began to lay out his family heartache. The brother even smelled like someone who needed to talk: a faint reek of metal and machine oil, as if he’d been walking too long amid parked cars. Kit recalled the Sons of Columbus and what it had meant to Zia. Today the brother had surprised him the same way Zia had back at the Sons.
And it would do him good to listen. Louie-Louie didn’t care, after all, that the man he’d found to talk to was in tatters himself. The kid was too young to pick up the low-level emissions of an overstressed soul. Accepting a sloppy, sardine-heaped Triscuit, Louie-Louie said that since Monday his mother had been taking a bottle to work.
“Ain’t like her,” he said. “She tells me she wants the job, but the way she’s carrying on she’s going to lose it.”
“Anyone at work notice?”
“Notice? Man, that place — they notice and she’s gone.”
Kit suggested that maybe they were seeing something deliberate. A pattern that the mother wanted somebody to recognize.
“Thought of that one already, man. Like, a cry for help.”
“A cry for help. She needs you to step in and be the man of the house.”
“Trying, Viddich. Swear to God I’m trying. I lost half my hours at Sears, lost all my overtime. My paycheck is diddly these days, man. All just so I could be there for her.” But Kit had heard how the mother talked to him. “Talks like I’m a baby, Viddich. How am I supposed to be the man of the house, when she’s all the time saying I’m a baby?”
“She’s trapped in old perceptions,” Kit said.
“Say what?”
“Well, there’s a lot of history between you two. Your mother still perceives you …
Hoo boy, did that feel lame. Kit bit his lips as the brother once more lifted his head.
“Say what?”
Kit should’ve left this kind of thing to Dr. Halsey.
“Psy-cho-analyze.” Louie-Louie’s beard opened again, but it wasn’t a smile. “Seems sometimes like that’s all you white boys know, is how to psychoanalyze.”
Kit went back to the food.
“You white boys all go to college and learn how to psychoanalyze. Man, I’d like to see you try it coming from where I’m coming from.” Louie-Louie jerked his bundled jacket off the chair back and started pawing through it. “I don’t come from no Minnesota, you know? And I’ve already got six credits at Northeastern.”
Kit — with all due disgust for his failure to keep his mouth shut — figured he knew the man now. The good brother, that was Louie-Louie. He’d calm down again soon enough.
“Yeah, and I know about social workers, too. Social workers and agencies and all like that, I gave my Mama the numbers. She won’t make the call.”
The brother stopped his pawing. He’d gotten hold of something in one of the pockets. His face flexed oddly, a kink in the proud nose, a ripple along the bristling hairline. Fighting down a shiver? Whatever Louie-Louie was trying to get out of his jacket, it was too big for where he’d put it. He wrestled with the olive-green bundle in his lap, the buttons straining on his Filenes Basement shirt. Kit bent once more over his office drawers, tidying things away, giving his visitor what privacy he could. But then the brother’s chair stopped creaking, and close by Kit’s lowered head there was the clunk of metal dropping on the desktop. Kit looked up to find a gun on the scarred wood.