The Fugitives (10 page)

Kat had questions: Did the casino call the police? How did the cashier tell him the tally every single day if he was sometimes gone for days at a time? Where would he usually go after he’d picked up the money? Who is Argenziano? Did Saltino actually work at the casino? What was his title? Could she tell her a little more about operations inside the cage? What made her certain it was Saltino at the fair? But Becky had started to get a little hazy, digressive. She slurred a bit, as if she’d been drinking steadily throughout the conversation.

“So why’d you come to me with this?” Kat asked.

“Well, for one I just got sick to death of the bullshit. Thieves on thieves on thieves on thieves. And you’re a reporter. I figured on you still being at the
Free Press,
but that’s OK. Maybe if Chicago ain’t interested you can pass it on to one of your old friends down in Detroit. And for another I kind of thought you’d be into it. I figured you of all people would be real curious about why anyone’d want to be an Indian.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just messing with you.”

“It doesn’t mess with me,” said Kat. “I know what you think, what you’ve always thought. It’s not true. I just have a different kind of life.”

This was something Becky had always tweaked her about, another reason Kat had fallen out of touch. It wasn’t Kat’s fault. She hadn’t done anything to promote misconceptions about her identity. The opportunity to “confess” never came up. People made assumptions and who were you to correct them? If you did, half the time it meant answering dumb questions and confronting the weirdest of notions, the most ridiculous of which had to do with your familiarity with electricity, running water, eating utensils, etc.; the most innocuous of which had to do with spirit names, ghost winds blowing across the prairie, totems appearing, glowing, from out of the virgin dark of another new midnight deep in the forest primeval; and the most repulsive of which were simply repulsive. At the U of M she’d avoided the Native American Student Association like the plague; two reps turned up at her dorm room in South Quad and she told them no thanks. People got the idea that she was maybe Filipina, or Vietnamese, or Chinese, sometimes Latina, nobody asked point-blank, some people probably knew or guessed but never said anything; it was all fine with her either way. Then she left school and entered the zone of adulthood, jarring-enough transition; instant intimacy sheared away and replaced by endless prolonged acquaintanceship, people asked what she did and where’s the copier toner and have you seen that movie; she dyed her hair blond for eight months on a whim and so she was white, an olive-skinned white, maybe one of those Puerto Rican girls who smell of peroxide; then she dyed it back to her normal color and the guessing game began all over again—Asian? South Asian? North African?—but somewhere along the line the Indian had been washed away, and if the subject never came up, she wasn’t going to raise it, wouldn’t apologize for not having hair down to her ass or Sacheen Littlefeather braids, for not wearing denim and buckskin everything, for not being overtly spiritual, for not having huge gaudy enameled silver jewelry and beaded belts, for not cashing her welfare checks at the liquor store and for not having stood in line for free cheese.

“You went off the reservation, that’s for sure,” said Becky.

LATER, KAT SAT
in the living room breathing hard. There was a good reason she wasn’t in touch with Becky: it upset her. She thought about what had come out of her mouth, unsummoned: I ain’t Mrs. Danhoff no more. When’s the last time she used a construction like that? Was that “Indian”? Or just bad English? Or something else entirely?

8

A
FTER
meeting Argenziano, Kat spent the night in Cherry City at a motel near the airport. She ate food from Chili’s out of an insulated foam box. These boxes invariably held out a promise, a promise that was never broken, of a gelid and congealed unappetizingness, a promise that seemed inherent in their awkward unbalanced heft, their spongy texture. The room smelled strongly of barbecue sauce. She closed the lid. The perforated lip that fitted over the tab had broken and the lid kept springing back up. She tried to get it to stay shut. The box wasn’t quite strong enough to support the weight of the Bible she placed on it to hold it shut. She thought about testing objects of varying weight, different combinations of them, but the idea brought her back to the essential unimportance of the task. It was just a way she had of thinking about her surroundings to comfort herself. For instance, she thought like this when she and Justin argued: thought, then, of straightening pictures and evening the spines of the books on the shelves; of centering objects on the coffee table. She was still kind of listening to Justin, kind of, but it was someplace else to be, something else to be doing other than being jammed at the end of the couch or on a corner of the bed, pinned down in whatever position she’d occupied when he decided to strike. Some people, no doubt, thought of a distant beach or a favorite city, slipped away to some Old Quarter of the mind, but she wasn’t interested in a complete removal, only in vaulting back into the everyday. She wanted to be sipping wine while holding a bitter nicotine lozenge in her mouth, reviewing the copy she’d written that day, futzing with it, one hand lazily typing in minor corrections, the fingers of the other loosely gripping the stem of her glass. She wanted to be attacking the unremovable stain on the front right burner. Evening those spines, pulling the books flush against the edge of the shelf, Justin going on and on about whatever she’d done lately that had disappointed and upset him. They were everyday tasks, built up out of nothing and into the world of routine.

She was done eating this stuff and wanted to drink her second bottle of beer, but she knew he’d call soon and she wanted to save it to relax with, after. He would relax as they talked, thawing whatever stanchion of icy tension had formed in him over the course of his day. She might have called him, but she didn’t feel like it. She pushed the box aside (the lid bouncing) and placed her computer before her on the table. Within fifteen minutes she understood that while
transfer pricing
ordinarily was something she’d probably have to ask one of the financial reporters about, in this case it seemed very likely that the strict definition of the term did not apply to the joint practices of South Richmond Consultants and the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians. If she had correctly interpreted Argenziano’s off-the-record hypothetical, Saltino was a bagman, just as Becky had told her.

The phone rang and she talked to Justin by the light from the bathroom, sitting on the floor next to the bed. The room seemed no more strange to her in semidarkness than it did fully lighted. She heard the muffled voices of people in neighboring rooms, water rushing through pipes, the engines of late-arriving jets falling toward the runway. The mean, scarred carpet underfoot felt as if it had been laid directly over poured concrete. She could still taste and smell barbecue sauce. She fixed the full bottle of beer, unopened and beaded with sweat, with her gaze. Justin talked.

“I get the edits back and he says you didn’t talk about the décor.
Day core?
I’m writing about food, I thought. He’s, they want to know where they’re eating, you’re sending them out to the West Loop, bla bla bla. I’m all, this is Chicago. We’re talking about people who at least
want
to be hip enough to not worry if there are red leather banquettes like at the fucking Pump Room. Come on please. They know they’re not on Rush Street. He says Rob Itzik writes about the
day core
. Rob Itzik.” Rob Itzik wrote the restaurant column for the
Sun-Times
. “Rob Itzik writes like a fucking used-car salesman. And I don’t know shit about
day core
. Just
food
. It’s the
food
section. You want someone to write about
day core,
put it in the
day core
section. So he says, the condescending hack, he, he, he gives me tips. Tips. These are just some words you can use, he says. He says, storefront. He says, homespun. He says, cozy. He says, romantic. Homespun. What does this even mean? A shawl? How does this correspond to what’s on the plate? And then. Then the piece de resistance. We finally get past the fucking
furniture
and he goes, so why did you write about
these
dishes? Why didn’t you write about the country ribs? That’s the specialty. And I’m, everybody’s written about the country ribs. The country ribs were practically on the cover of
Time
. Hello! This is the mind of a guy who says
homespun
. I honestly don’t know if I can do this anymore. I honestly don’t.”

A weird panic came over him sometimes, cohering, always, around a dream of flight. It was never a plan, it was a stab. He’d stabbed at her one day, fleeing from something else. That was how they’d come together. It struck her as stupidly inevitable that she’d ended up with a man like him—the one guy, among the half dozen who’d gone gaga for her after she’d left Danhoff, to whom she’d said, exhausted, OK. She surrendered. It struck her as stupidly inevitable that she would have proven to be a disappointment to him. He was like a child. His passion for her turned out to be a child’s infatuation. His loyalty to her turned out to be a child’s possessiveness. She could watch him self-confidently manipulate camera equipment or order some sophisticated restaurant food or place Werner Herzog in context without ever forgetting that this was the convincing disguise behind which the child hid. The child was always ready to run. She couldn’t bear sitting there in bed trying to do something humanly normal like watch TV, with him lying next to her calling out asking prices and square footage from
realtor.com
, shoving the computer at her so she could look at some Victorian a thousand miles away. Look, a butler’s pantry. Did he really think this kind of amenity could shield him from anything? Look, a separate studio out back. It was impossible to remember if this had ever been fun. Now it was a lancing indictment against their lives. The indictment came in like waves—which never cared what they were eroding. Just kept coming. She knew that if he got an eyeful of Cherry City, of the handsome old houses, the wide tree-lined streets paved with red bricks, the amenity-laden but not completely homogenized main drag, he’d stab at it just as he stabbed at everything else. The mere names of certain towns had a transporting effect on him: Hudson NY, Brattleboro VT, North Adams MA, Marfa TX, Bozeman MT; each brilliant with the meaningless beauty of a distant star.

SHE WAS BACK
in the office the next day at ten, dragging her suitcase behind her. Someone had taped a long paper tongue to Justin’s mouth in the photo on her desk and placed a speech balloon in the blank space above his left shoulder: “RRRIBBIT!” The running joke about Justin’s froglike appearance had long been established here. One of the old reporters, Mitch Ville, routinely asked her how the Frog Prince was doing. She wasn’t sure who had first drawn the connection between Justin’s pale, slightly protuberant eyes, his bad skin, and his wide, lipless mouth and the attributes of a frog. It was OK. She’d worked in offices long enough to know that husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, all were fair game for the most casually cruel treatment. These unseen beings were the one great extension of your artificial and limited view of one another; phantoms familiar from the coffeetime stories, rounded out by the sullen mornings, schedule shifts, terse phone calls, family emergencies; the framed summery snapshots of groups of radiant vacationers, brightly garbed strangers among whose faces you searched for that sober and accustomed colleague in the off-the-rack suit.