“It’s just you against me now. Everybody will know what’s right.”
“The girl, you know, she told me about when you came making a play for her at the Sons of Columbus. Stoned off your ass. She told me about your wife—”
Kit pulled out the brother’s gun. Leo, openmouthed, mid-sentence, jerked his cash hand to his chest.
In time, Kit became aware of damage. His knuckles had torn against the hem of his pocket. His thinking was broken up by shouts behind his back. And uneasy, unprepared — his feelings hadn’t changed much from when he’d come onto the site, but now with this iron in his hand he was even more off-balance, a big white gooney bird with something in his beak that it would kill him to swallow. Out in the weather like this, Louie-Louie’s.38 didn’t look sleek and Euro. Rather, it appeared more of a piece with the rest of the metal here, another gray slash of naked function. Kit understood he still had the safety on, and neither of the two remaining rounds had been chambered. Yet he couldn’t drop his arm. He couldn’t take back the gesture, make the weapon disappear. Leo spoke up again: Hey, wildman, something. The old man got his hands moving, too. He had no trouble making his own bundle disappear, and when he held up his two open palms there could be no mistaking what he meant. Easy, cool it, something. Such an obvious signal, those two raised hands, sweat-pink against the site’s clay-black. Even the shouting behind Kit’s back relaxed, even the worker rodents got Leo’s message — but what Kit was most aware of was damage. Damage in his least, most fleeting images: the men behind him weren’t rodents.
Leo started talking again, words Kit imagined rather than heard. Hey, where’d you get that?
Words words words. Kit was beyond them, apart from them; he struggled instead with the muscle groups in his arm, with the blood circulation in his ears, even with his sense of smell. The gun had a thick odor, its oils warmed by Kit’s lap. He held it pointed at the shorter man’s mouth, his interior walls graffiti’d with obscenities. Dicksuck. Niggerdick up the ass. Bad damage. There was nothing sexy about the moment, a cold closed moment, the whole world collapsing around the.38. But then again, there was everything sexy about it: the muscles out of control, the mushroom density of the smell, the oil in his hand. Everything was a spasm, an outbreak.
Leo started smiling again. Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the bad guy.
The shouting behind Kit’s back was part of it, part of how standing here with a gun in another man’s face seemed like nothing but reflex and impulse. Yes, the shouting had simmered down, since Leo had raised his hands. When Kit glanced over one shoulder he saw tough guys in unsteady clusters, staring wide-eyed but keeping their distance. Nonetheless, every time one of the hardhats called, it broke up his thinking. It poked through the Expressway rumble, noise more like Garrison’s than like Leo’s, rough stuff and toilet talk. The sound of damage. Kit had heard nothing else since he’d left his testimony on the kitchen table. Then what was he doing here in the middle of it? Here between these familiar outcries, fear and bluster, warning and greed? So he got his first clear thought — from out of left field, wouldn’t you know it. He recalled a conversation somewhere about the Fifth W, the Why, about how the why always came down to the same grubby handful. To fear, bluster, hubris … Kit’s second thought, at least, was more with it: Drop the gun. Drop it. It’s wrong, absolutely the wrong thing to have in your hands in the middle of all this damage.
He was hit as soon as his arm started to fall. Whacked on the nose and then clawed across his gun hand. For a moment he thought he’d lost a finger.
“Stronzo,” Leo said.
Crumpling, his face cradled into his aching, now empty hand, Kit was astonished at the old man. He’d worried about Garrison, about Louie-Louie, never about Zia’s father. Pain rippled out across his face, across last week’s wounds, and Kit had a raw flash of Leo’s hardhat friends rushing down on him in a mob. He turtled away on his knees, directionless.
There was the lip of the lower site’s dam. The corrugated steel. Swaying against it, Kit came to himself, hunched as if in prayer over the edge of the dig. He saw the archaeologists’ grid. A checkerboard of string or twine, a loose net across half the murky floor. A net, but too weak to catch him. One moment the drop looked like six feet, the next closer to sixty.
“Cunt,” Leo was saying, above him. “Rincolo.”
And the hardhats were coming. Their boot steps, coming fast, shuddered the earth under Kit’s knees. He tried to squeeze an idea from his bleeding index finger, his former trigger finger, gashed and stained with oil. He blinked against the fresh ooze from his stitches.
“Talk,” Leo said. “You, your business, it’s nothing but talk. You think you could beat a man who really does something? Really makes something?”
Hey believer, what was that click? That click and then that clunk, just behind your head?
“Didn’t even have a round in the chamber,” Leo said. “Safety was off and you didn’t have nothing in the chamber. What, you going to shoot me with talk?”
Kit didn’t see a ladder, below him. He didn’t hear anything good from the onrushing workers. Leo! Fuckin’ A!
“Whatever happens now, cunt, I call it self defense.” And believer, what’s that against the back of your neck?
“Self defense,” Leo repeated. “How’s that for talk?”
Kit wasn’t about to make any sudden moves. It was all he could do just to master the new bloodrush of his fear, a fresh chill, stinging. Against his neck, Louie-Louie’s.38 was the worm on his back turned to worse. But he found himself starting to talk. “Leo …” Starting to talk: the old man had been right about that. It was what Kit did, talk: his business, his fallback, his last straw. And it had its advantages. It meant, for one, that Kit knew the old man. He wasn’t going to blow up, the old man, and leave a thousand loose ends hanging in the air. He wasn’t that kind of gunslinger, any more than Kit himself. There at the edge of the lower site, as he weathered his blood rush, Kit discovered again this root clarity. Starting to talk. He began even to overcome his soggy remorse over how stupid he’d been, and he may have realized his mistake — realized why all this had happened.
But then the gun came away from Kit’s neck and he took a belt across the back of his head. Once more he was nothing but nerves, shock, body.
Chapter 11
NOTES
[Remember — DON’T READ YOUR NOTES. Talk. Spontaneous.]
Thank you. [wait, applause] Thank you.
Of course I’m happy to accept this award, so weighty with esteem — and so generous with the checkbook! [wait, laughter]
I’m happy to have the Emmy, yes.
[smile, thoughtful] It’s pretty, isn’t it? Very pretty, very clean. [sincere] I always believed in my brave little newspaper; I always believed it might be good enough to get on TV.
[no smile, thoughtful] And now I stand here honored and rich, while the men I exposed as crooks lie ruined and wretched. They’ve been sent to Monsod — Monsod, my God!
LAST SEEN
Dig this: unearthing the future.
How do you tell a tourist? Zia see — if you jump to conclusions, it’s not the fall that kills you. Jump, and what does the damage is all the other dead souls out there.