Gabe starts to slide out of the booth, but Flynn grabs hold of his arm.
“You’re sca-sca-scaring me here.”
“Good. Perfect. That’s what I want. You stay scared, Gabe. You stay fucking petrified—”
“I gotta ga-ga-go.”
“’Cause I made up a picture where none of us were ever scared and that was bullshit. And I made up a picture of Hazel where she was always grateful and always needed me. And I think tonight I’ve got to clear up all these misconceptions. I want to stop lying to myself, you know, Gabe. I made up this myth. I’m such a mother of a salesman. I sold myself. Like I plunked myself down into my imported leather customer chair and gave myself a Class A spiel. Top-shelf hustle. I should bronze my freaking tongue. And I bought into it. Completely. Whole package. I was signing the check before the last pieces were in place. That’s the funniest part, okay, that’s the rim shot, right there. I was as good a customer as I was salesman. I climbed into the palm of my own hand.”
“Pa-please,” Gabe says, straining to get free, but Flynn has both his wrists pinned down on the tabletop.
“I’d made it up. It was a simple goddamn lie. Well, not simple. Complicated. Really intricate. Lots of pieces, all fit together, from a lot of different directions. That’s a myth, right? That’s what I did. That’s what I’m trained to do. What I’ve practiced at all these years. I sell people the myth of security. Talk to me. Talk with Flynn. Or let Flynn talk to you. You pay me and your world cannot fall apart. It’s in the contract. Guaranteed. Like that Cajun chef says, you know. I guarantee. See, son, Daddy bought long on the myth of the family. Myth of belonging. Myth of the clan. I took all these random stories and put them together. Like train cars. Linked them up, car after car, one long line, all coupled together.”
Gabe suddenly stops struggling. Instead he gives a long, bored sigh and says, “Sta-sta-stories?”
Flynn wobbles a bit in his seat and loosens his grip.
“Yeah. Absolutely. You got your story of Flynn meeting Wallace Browning. Little kid meets this fascinating character. And he’s a dwarf, okay, could it get more perfect, straight out of a fable, you know. And the dwarf has got a secret. Enter and sign in, please. And the dwarf will share the secret with the boy. Show him how big it is. A whole world. The jammer’s world. And the dwarf teaches the kid, right, you got the apprentice story there. The kid is chosen so the craft gets passed on. Down the line. Like the train cars.”
He lets go of Gabe’s wrists and sinks back in the booth. They stare at each other. Flynn clears his throat and waits to see if the boy will run. But Gabe just continues to stare at him, so he lowers his voice and continues.
“So, time comes, roles start to change, Flynn has to pick a kid. Continue the line. Keep the story going. And he doesn’t have a kid of his own. So, one night he meets Hazel. And bang — the story rolls on.”
He lifts up his glass to his mouth, then realizes it’s empty and puts it down.
“But here’s where the story twists. Where the surprise ending starts to explode. Ready? Flynn has one of those satoris. An epiphany. One of those instant enlightenments. It happens just when all the train cars start to uncouple and the fucking thing is ready to derail.”
Gabe stares at him, waiting for the story to finish.
“He figures out, too late, there’s the irony, he figures out that the craft never really mattered to him. It was immaterial. Moot point. The jamming was just a by-product, just this excuse. The politics behind it were meaningless to him. The philosophy behind it. He just loved the connection. The binding. Just wanted the feel.”
Gabe slides out of the booth, stands in front of the table rubbing his wrists, and seems to look past Flynn.
“I’m the original idiot, Gabe. Took me over twenty years to figure out something that simple.”
In a bored voice, Gabe says, “There are a lot of ways to have a fa-family, Flynn.”
Flynn closes his eyes and gives a small laugh. “Jesus, did Hazel train you. Made you into a big free-will man, huh? Will it hurt too much if I tell you Hazel’s a deluded little bitch?”
“Fa-fa-fuck you,” Gabe says, without much force behind it. “I never should have ca-come here tonight.”
He turns and starts for the exit, but Flynn keeps talking after him.
“You fall into things. They take hold of you,” he starts to yell after the boy. “Things take hold of you, Gabe. Things come after you.”
The last words are a whiny rasp and Flynn brings a hand up to cover his face, then at once he brings his hand down, picks up the bourbon bottle and pulls a long draw from the mouth. He turns his head and looks for a long time at the radio mounted at the end of the table against the brick wall. He stares hard, trying not to blink, as if sooner or later he’ll notice something about the machine that he’s never seen before.
He puts his hand on top of it, then reaches to the side knob and turns on the power. A dull yellowish glow lights from behind the dials and band selector. It’s a soothing light, dim but warm. He keeps the volume low and starts to turn through the AM frequencies until he comes to WQSG.
There’s a moment of static, but he’s neither disappointed nor worried. He puts his hand back on top of the radio and waits.
Then the static starts to cut in and out, to splice itself with flashes of dead air and then with flashes of high-pitched squeal. And then the brothers start to speak to him:
Showtime, brothers and sisters. And in the beginning was the word. And the word was made into electro-magnetic signals that could fly through the air. And the word was brought to live in the box. And the word was interrupted by a message from your sponsor.
We’re back for one last curtain call, friends. As you probably know by now, things haven’t exactly worked out as we had hoped. Live and learn, right? It just takes some of us quite a while to figure out the simplest lessons. Like old Saint Ti Jean’s role model used to say — You can’t go home again. I don’t know why that is exactly, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, don’t try to screw with a modern proverb. This is brother John O’Zebedee broadcasting a little mission of mercy. As everyone in earshot knows, a lot of big dominoes fell tonight. The karmic wheel was busy as a Benzedrine beaver, and the O’Z boys aren’t real enthused about the slot she came to rest in. But that’s the thing about the wheel and where she stops. You can’t buy her off with money or good intentions or human sacrifice.
You know, gang, about five years back, Jimbo and I got a little bored one night and took a shot at a radio-play production of Rebel Without a License. Neither one of us does a very good Dean, but we did learn a hell of a lot about the medium. The biggest thing we learned was that there was a pretty good-sized group of individuals out there that for one reason or another felt very left out. And they seemed to tune into us by instant instinct. And just that act of listening to us, all at the same time, linked them up a little, made them part of something bigger than themselves. And there’s a real charge in that idea, a real flash, a real feeling of union and maybe even transcendence.
But this life doesn’t like transcendence a whole goddamn lot. And five fucking years can be a long goddamn time when you’re living in a car in the Mexican desert and the nights get colder than a well digger’s ass, excuse me, Mr. Waits. From where I sit now, everything that happened five years ago seems like some undertaker’s bad dream.
Shit and onions, boys and girls, and about ten tons of it appears ready to hit the industrial fan tonight. We understand things didn’t work out quite as planned for our gal Hazel. And I guess my brother and I have a little disagreement over her plight. See, I say what Ms. H wanted to do was just another round of infantile violence that changes nothing but our capacity for humor. But James says that there’s always a little blood shed and bone shred and metal bent during the course of a revolution, that more than one redcoat took a farmer’s musket blast so that you and I could live free in the land of the brave.