But to call the incident a gang shooting overcomplicated the arbitrariness
of the killing. It implied the boys involved were sophisticated enough
to have meaningful social and business alliances. The boys fired small
caliber semiautomatic pistols wildly at each other at close range until
by some fluke one had been hit. Witnesses said the 17-year-old made it
one block on adrenaline, leaking everything he had ever seen or done.
For some reason he stumbled east from the park, toward the river, even
though he did not live in that direction. He died less than a block from
the polymer shore of the always swiftly flowing Mississippi River.
McInnes had interviewed
one of the shooters post-arrest and post-bail. This boy had shown him
a flesh wound on his ankle, a bullet graze that charred the darkie skin
even darker. In comparison the internal tissue looked florescent.
No fucking reception!
I need a new cell phone, Kasaka is announcing, frowning at the glowing
display on her phone, reflecting, weighing her true need. I need a chrome
cell phone! Web access! Customized ring tones! She taps the digital camera
in her lap. And I need a model who will let me take nude shots. And the
pot's alright.
McInnes looks at
her. He looks at her profile, her jawline, her blouse tucked tight into
her skirt, her legs, shoes off, bare feet together and tucked to the side.
She being lighter
than him and both of them not wearing seatbelts, she would be the first
to go through the windshield, he thinks. Depending on the angle of the
impact, like if they flew off the shoulder of the road instead of head-onning
another car, she might hit the passenger window first - leaving a spiderweb
crack and a tuft of hair with dyed highlights - before opening the windshield.
Beyond Kasaka,
McInnes thinks, somewhere beyond the passenger window and the dark, forested
bluffs, through the drizzle, east, lies the big river. The Mississippi,
snakelike and sloppy and eternal and utterly indifferent to all this dust.
He says, The night
before Deidre left, I asked her what she would do if I cancelled the wedding.
Do you consider
yourself a happy person?
Ecstatic.
So what's with
the pills?
I take pills because
when my father dies, there will be no one left, McInnes thinks. He says
nothing. I take pills because I remember the way Deirdre looked at me,
with pity and horror, when she left. Because when I see lions feeding
on the savannah on Discovery Channel documentaries, their whiskers matted
with gore, my mouth fills with the taste of nickels.
You have to look
at the bright side, he tells her. You have to consider the cup half full.
What do you mean?
You're seven-eighths
not darkie.
Loser, she says.
Listen, you like being a reporter, don't you?
Why lie? Not particularly,
he says.
Why not? she asks.
You have the knack.
The montage of
car accidents flips through his head again like a deck of cards shuffling.
Without meaning to, he selects one.
The seventeen car
pileup on I-70 east of Kansas City, when he worked for the Examiner. That
was one.
They shut down
all six lanes of the interstate for that. Maybe he would tell her about
that one. Traffic backed up for miles, to the horizon in both directions.
Even all the secondary roads were clogged, from drivers trying to be clever
and avoid it. In the crash zone, after the Life Flight helos had leapt
away, there was a dead calm. He circulated through the debris unmolested
by the state troopers and paramedics, awestruck like a tourist visiting
some great battlefield, the last survivor at Armageddon.
He remembers the
McDonald's fountain soda, the plastic top somehow still secured, only
drips escaping out the straw onto the accordioned Subaru with the fleshy
mass twisted like by some great power drill that turned out to be the
little girl and her babysitter. Somehow, he thought, the insides of us
should look more important than that. Then the one state trooper walked
over to see what he was gawking at and got sick. Then another appeared
to sprinkle a white powder on the fluids.
After the article
had been published, a woman called to complain that he had identified
the deceased as a member of her family. At first he thought she meant
he had reported the name of the babysitter incorrectly. No, it was some
family drama. The woman was calling because she felt slighted that the
dead driver's full name had been printed without the woman's consent,
identifying her as a member of a family which did not claim her. McInnes
stared at the receiver for a while. Hullo? Hullo? Hey, you there? the
voice snapped. He hung up on her. She called the publisher and complained.
A disciplinary statement was added to his personnel file.
Forget that, he
tells himself. Should I tell Kasaka about Jake Lereau? That story got
picked up by the Associated Press.
A cheerleader-turned-mom
runs into a Mr. Goodcents for a drink, leaving her keys in the ignition,
her toddler in the safety seat in the back. She returns just in time to
see the darkie carjacker about to put the car in gear. She dives for the
door, opens it, and has Jake in the safety seat halfway out when the nigger
punches the accelerator. The boy was dragged behind the car for two miles.
Literally two miles. The asphalt erased his face, the skin, musculature,
everything.
Pretty blond Mrs.
Lereau in the premature twilight of her beauty and with her husband appeared
on all the talk shows afterwards.
Should I tell Kasaka
about the last body I saw pulled from the Mississippi? This girl, he remembers,
the water had washed away all her clothes. With the leaves in her hair,
she looked like some fairy princess. Full, teardrop tits and an untrimmed
bush. At first, she looked like she could have been sleeping, then you
saw the frogbelly paleness then how the mouth and nails were filled with
black river detritus. Then the Water Patrol divers rolled her over and
there were the fat leeches.
McInnes says nothing.
He knows better.
Kasaka would point
out nobody put a gun to his head and forced him to be a reporter.
Of course nobody
had, but he had been bored crying shitless at every other job.
The truth, the
shameful truth was all those sights made him feel alive. Small but alive.
Probably the governor's wreckage would do the same.
Deal with it, Kasaka
would have said. That was one of her things.
Shut up.
I'm just trying
to like conversate with you, she says, voice reaching the warble. You've
been so dark lately.
He thinks of the
jumper. The fairy princess. Seeing her offloaded from the johnboat in
the black bodybag unzipped like a porno. The family identified her then
the bag was slid efficiently into the coroner's white station wagon. McInnes
watched the station wagon drive away and suddenly felt like he had been
on the bridge with her. Took that last pull of McCormick's not Osco vodka
with her, burning all the way down then becoming a warmth spreading. He
heard the music in her head, the manic harpsichord of an old-time carousel.
Saw her picturing her friends saying, We didn't think she'd actually jump!
Felt the air rushing against her face like fingers through her hair. Saw
the river blowing up until it encompassed everything then the impact then
all the nerves dead and the limp flesh lolling. But she was beyond it
all by then.
One of her people
loitering at the shore said it must have been an accident. But how could
she not have known?
God what a trailer
park beauty she was, McInnes thinks. She must have made all the boys in
her clique so wanting. Left them tripping over themselves for want of
her affections. In her world she must have been a star. So what had made
her do that? No history of mental illness. Toxicology showed no drugs.
Had she seen the sum of all her possible futures - indebted to payday
loan franchises, slapped around and pregnant by Cletus - and rejected
it?
God maybe it was
the river. The Mississippi with its high cliffs and petroleum waters practically
invited you to suicide. It was somewhat miraculous her body had been discovered
so close, he thinks. It was not uncommon for the jumpers here to disappear
and wash ashore weeks later five hundred miles south outside New Orleans.
McInnes drives
in silence for a while and decides he both sort of envies and pities Fairy
Princess.
You better not
be smoking the whole thing, he tells Kasaka without looking at her.
Madonna's kids
are going to grow up to be monsters, Kasaka announces, subdued. Monsters.
Like spores off the alien mother.
Lightning licks
across the sky. They watch the charge fade, cooling like a lightbulb filament.
Minutes before
Governor Carnahan died and taking the Phil Collins lyric too seriously,
McInnes had killed a black centipede on his kitchen floor. He had watched
it walk for a while on the linoleum before he killed it. Not to stalk
it. Just to watch a thing in its special last moments of life.
He had chopped
his hand down in front of it twice. The centipede oscillated its antennae
but barely changed its path. Either it was blind to or unfazed by its
imminent death. McInnes watched its many legs advance like some hypnotist's
mechanism over the linoleum.
Because he did
not want to touch it, he crushed the centipede inside an 8.5 by 11 sheet
of printer paper folded into quadrants. It bled black like ink, not blood
like a mosquito. He killed it because one should kill bugs in your house.
Maybe that had been Mengele's philosophy.
Before killing
the centipede, he had played Goldeneye on the Nintendo-64 for two hours
straight, ever since he had walked in the door from work. He played it
sitting in the middle of the carpet, oxford shirt untucked, surrounded
by the few things he owned and which did not make him happy. While he
played, his greyhound dog circled and trembled. He watched the countless
winter-camouflaged commandos advancing into the bursts from his AK-47,
the bullets impacting with wet, synthesized slaps, sending the men down.
Their bodies disappeared after a moment of death throes.
It gave him a Nintendo
blister on his finger.
After the centipede,
he had switched on the television then and had seen it. The governor's
plane down. He called the managing editor at home to confirm he should
grab a photographer and go.
Driving north on
Interstate 55, he rests his hand on the top of the steering wheel and
picks at the blister, pretending it had never happened.
Continued
on Page 3
