The Fugitives (19 page)

“Why is Chicago interested?”

“Local color. Fun-in-the-sun-type fluff. We’ll do a sidebar on Salteau, dust off our annual piece about the Cherry Festival, the lakeshore, the hang-gliding-and-ice-cream-sundae-making competition. We start the legwork now, and around May, when Chicagolanders come out of hibernation and begin thinking about escaping that oven of a city, the reps’ll start trying to sell ads to airlines and hotels and car rental agencies, we can start running our summer recreational coverage, and maybe we’ll all live to see another day.”

“Why you went to J-school, I’m guessing.”

She smiled. “How long have you known him?”

“Salteau? Since he started over at the library in the fall, I guess. A few months, now.”

“And why did you start going to see him there? What interested you?”

He leaned back and began talking again about being a writer, about the cutthroat environment in New York, about the innocent joy of Salteau’s kind of storytelling. He kept saying, “I’m
serious,
” and then continuing. She wrote down SERIOUS VERY SERIOUS SERIOUS ABOUT TALKING SERIOUS TALKER SERIOUSLY INTO THE SOUND OF HIS OWN VOICE SERIOUS? SERIOUSLY I MEAN IT SERIOUS.

He summed up: “That’s why I felt like I had to leave.”

“So you did leave. I’m way ahead of you.”

He blushed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s embarrassing. I don’t mean to turn the conversation to myself, not every time.”

She smiled thinly. “No need to beat yourself up.”

“Anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that what I like about him has to do with the way he breaks the rules. He’s not worried about what’s possible, or plausible, not interested in lessons endorsed by the social sciences. Just in making order.”

“It’s primitive.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Authentic, then. Where did
that
face come from?” He’d assumed the same sour expression he had when she’d asked about his mother.

“What does ‘authentic’ have to do with telling stories? Who cares?”

“Well. I do, I guess.”

“If you’re bidding on a painting at Sotheby’s, OK. But fiction?”

“Don’t you think it matters that an authentic Indian should be telling authentic Indian legends?”

“Does it matter when some guy from Cambridge translates
The Odyssey
?”

“The culture wars, entering the top of the nine hundred fifty-sixth inning, still no score.”

He laughed. “These are the things that bring out the crackpot in all of us.”

“Some of us.”

“Granted, certain things make me a little crazy. But I can speak very poetically about other things.”

“Well, when are you going to start? I thought you weren’t going to be quotable at least in an
interesting
way.”

He looked down at the ruins of his lunch, bleeding out in the plastic lattice basket. He sighed. A crackpot, a charmer, a delusional con man, a victim of mood swings, a faker of hurt feelings: who knew? Actually, he
was
sort of interesting, but like most of the interesting things that confronted her in the course of an average plug-in-and-spectate day, he was turning out to be an irrelevant hindrance.

“OK. Here’s what I think,” he said. He held up his hands palms out, a hold-everything gesture. “For real. I think he’s got a real commitment to inventiveness. Believe it or not, I don’t see that a lot in my line of work. What I see a lot of is people trying to keep their names out there. It’s the opposite of invention. They take brave stands from somewhere midpoint in the herd. They might even win a medal from time to time.”

“What’s your brave stand?”

“Divorce, it turned out. I took a stand in favor of divorce.”

“Did you win any medals?”

“I didn’t want any medals.”

“You wanted a divorce.”

“Yeah, though apparently what I really wanted was to tear a huge gash in the moral fiber of my community.”

“So you retreat to the provincial values of the small-town midwest?”

He shrugged. “Anyway, I found Salteau here. And here we are.”

The refractive conversational habits of some people. Mulligan kept bending the conversation toward himself and then bending it away again. Kat felt her interest being piqued by the sad (though undoubtedly banal) story of his divorce (which evidently he’d initiated) and then her faint sense of disappointment when it was snatched away was instantly replaced by anticipation when he pushed Salteau back into view. She flipped the page in her notebook, a sort of official down-to-business gesture, and noticed that look cross his face, as if it wasn’t merely that the subject was being changed but that he himself was being left behind, detained within the unrelated drama of his past.

“Where’s he come from?”

“Who?”

“John Salteau.”

“Horton Bay, he told me.”

“What tribal band does he belong to?”

“He mentioned it, but I don’t hang on to those kinds of names. Whatever’s up there, I guess.”

“How long has he been performing?”

“That one I don’t really know for sure.”

“Do you know what he did before he started performing?”

“You know, I think he told me he worked at one of the casinos.”

Kat held her breath. Go slow, she thought. “A casino,” she said, writing it down. “You know which one?”

“That one up here, I think,” he said. “Manitou Sands?”

She exhaled. “Any other jobs?”

Mulligan leaned back, made a steeple with his fingers, looked up at the ceiling. “Construction worker, maybe he was in the army, you know.”

Kat thought for a moment. “No dark past or anything, though?” She giggled as if at the ridiculousness of the question. “You know, the more interesting I can make him, the more ink we get.”

“Right,” said Mulligan. “But I don’t know. I guess he’s as mysterious as anyone.”

He didn’t know: OK. “OK,” she said. “You ever see him with any friends, girlfriends?”

“Not that I remember, no.”

“OK,” she said. She capped her pen. “I can’t believe I let you sucker me into having lunch with you.” Mulligan looked stricken. “I’m just kidding,” she said. She patted his hand. “Mr. Sensitive.”

“I’m more of a literary consultant,” said Mulligan, recovering. “You could always ask him about these sorts of things yourself.”

“I’m going to. Now. I sure could use a coffee, how about you?”

He seemed pleased to oblige. She considered the pertinent information he’d given her. It was amazing that Saltino would mention that he’d worked at the casino, but it was also amazing that he was anywhere within a thousand miles of Manitou Sands. When Mulligan returned he was ready to change the subject, and he started asking her questions about herself, which flattered her and made her uncomfortable at the same time. It was a game she was familiar with. Let’s play I’m the interviewer and you’re the subject. Let’s play enough about me. Let’s play I’m a savvy person and I know how to manipulate the media to my advantage. Kat was no dummy, she went along with him as far as she was willing, but she was more willing than she might have expected. He asked her about her background and education, her hopes and dreams, and she was, like everyone else, a sucker for the hypnotic draw of her own hopes and dreams, and she was, like anyone who’s benefited from a certain amount of luck and apparent self-knowledge, a sucker for the opportunity to appear unregretful about the ones she’d given up on. And she was lucky, right? She might have ended up exactly where Becky had if she’d become some psycho tweaker’s old lady, parking her ever-wider duff on the back of a bike for ten straight years. And she was self-aware, right? Right? But also she was dissatisfied, with her marriage and with her job; and she was scared, of losing either or both of them; and while she was going to draw the line at discussing her marriage it was sensible to openly discuss her job because the death of print was always a lively topic and here was a fellow mourner, after all. What was up with the
Mirror
was pretty garden-variety, anyway. Circulation and display advertising way down, reliable revenue streams like the classifieds evaporated into nothing by Craigslist. The website apparently was too dense and too static to hold readers’ attention, and thus had the high bounce rate that scared off advertisers. Layoffs were scattered, disguised as attrition; as if two people in classifieds and three in books and arts had abruptly retired, or dropped dead, on the same Friday. Midwest Entertainment Holdings, the parent company, was liquidating properties, or just giving them away: Mirror Books, an imprint devoted to the glorification of all things Chicagoland, was quietly folded, its inventory remaindered or pulped. Six neighborhood weeklies that were published in various parts of Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties were sold in a highly leveraged deal that allowed MEH to carry the receivable on its books as anticipated revenue, although it was almost certain that the undercapitalized group that had acquired the papers would default. Minority interests in regional broadcasters had been sold off, as well as a small stake in the Cleveland Indians. Although there was still nominally a Mirror Building on Michigan Avenue, the place had long ago been sold to developers and the paper had leased its offices elsewhere in the Loop for twenty years. All this was of little concern to Kat, who knew next to nothing about the paper’s heyday and whose instinctive resistance to joining anything kept her at a complete remove from something so trite as workplace spirit. She was scared of losing her job, not of Chicago’s losing a piece of its history it couldn’t have cared less about. Those kinds of abstractions generally didn’t bother her: cities, and times, were supposed to change. The Thunder of the Presses was the title of some black-and-white movie on TCM, that’s all. Still, as she unburdened herself to Alexander Mulligan, it surprised her that she had anything at all to unburden herself of. What were her hopes and dreams, anyway? She’d always wanted to “do something” that endowed her every aspect with a kind of prestige and self-assured presence, a juvenile aspiration to be sure but as real and resonant as the admiration she still felt for those confident people she encountered sometimes at parties or dinners who appeared so evidently at ease in the mess of living that you couldn’t help envying them, whatever it was they did and whoever it was they were. She’d been scrupulously studying these people since she was a little girl, cribbing from them whether she found them on TV or at the Speedway, filling up their cars as they passed through between one place and another.

She looked at her watch; was startled to see how much time had passed since they’d sat down. Mulligan, reading her, had rocked back in his seat and was inserting his arms in the sleeves of the parka draped over the back of his chair, contorting himself like a little kid. She made her excuses and stood, eager suddenly to end the interview. His coat got caught on his chair as he tried to rise to say goodbye.

In the end, she was surprised to discover that she felt she’d experienced a personality with some genuine force to it, an oddball authority that appealed, that put off, that attracted, that ultimately spooked her out of her chair and out onto the main street to regard again the fudge, the shoes, the leather handbags, all gleaming through the glass onto sidewalks buried under snow. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the one thing that she’d missed in her life—in high school, in college, throughout each of those formative passages that people seemed to hold close—had been the life-changing friend and companion whose bright light shined on all the dull edges of the everyday. Had she resisted that kind of force? Becky had force and persuasiveness, but it had been the force and persuasiveness of a pack of cigarettes, a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. Various men had excited her, but she had always conspired with them to ruin things, by blending the pleasure of mutual iconoclasm with the easier intimacy of sex, which generally turned out to be more of an outright exchange than a blending: suddenly the singular soul mate would disappear, transformed into just another boyfriend who demanded that she punch in and punch out and not do weird things with her hair, and that never lasted long.

ON THE SIDEWALK
outside was a signboard displaying a shopper’s guide to downtown, and she scanned it for what she sought. The store, Ambit Books, was a few blocks farther along Front Street. It was a big, airy place—bigger, really, than demand appeared to necessitate. Most of the activity was in a coffee bar that took up about a quarter of the floor space, where two baristas served a half dozen customers; the hiss of the espresso machine and the rhythmic thunk of sodden coffee grounds being knocked out of the filter basket filled the store. The clerk up front was idle, arms folded across the top of her cash terminal. Kat found the fiction section toward the back, and there were paperback copies of Alexander Mulligan III’s three books: two novels,
Fallen Sparks
and
A More Removed Ground,
and a collection of short stories,
The Proposition, the Tautology, and the Contradiction
.

Kat enjoyed looking at books, the fussy business of jacket copy and blurbs, review quotes and author bios, acknowledgments and dedications. She sedulously examined all such matter on any book, even one she fully intended to read, before alighting on the text itself. These were new-looking editions, designed to complement one another, and she was slightly disappointed because the bio, with its serene list of the cumulative honors and accomplishments achieved over nearly fifteen years, was identical in each title. Mulligan lived in New York City with his family, where he was at work on a new novel: this intelligence was obsolete, apparently. None of the books included an author photo. Each acknowledged the help of the usual foundations, editors, agents, and other individuals providing aid and comfort. The short stories had appeared in magazines she had heard of and in obscure-sounding journals. The review quotations were typically hyperbolic. She flipped through the books, hoping to become duly excited, but she didn’t. It was not inviting stuff, in her opinion. She knew that she wasn’t quite sure how to be impressed by a book, specifically by
fiction,
and she’d long ago determined not to feel guilty over failing to respond to art for which claims had been made that weren’t supported by her experience of it, but it was disappointing anyway. It was because she’d met him and had found him engaging and interesting enough as a human being that she’d hoped that his books would be even more so.