“There’ll be one child left to carry on,” I said.
“Unfortunately there are twenty or thirty children left to carry on. All of them with junior high school girls for mothers, and no father.”
“Did he die young?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But he’s not around for those children.”
“They were a stay against confusion,” I said.
“A continuation, a kind of self,” she said, “that would survive him when the world he lived in overwhelmed him.”
“And he never identified with the three out of four that don’t die violently in youth,” I said.
“No. The life’s too hard for that kind of optimism.”
“Seventy-five percent is good odds in blackjack,” I said. “But for dying, it would not seem a source of much comfort.”
“Where I work,” she said, “there is no source of much comfort.”
“Except maybe you,” I said.
She smiled a little and sipped a little more whiskey.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “a literate ex-nun.”
“Anything’s possible,” she said.
CHAPTER 20
“Are you going to do anything about them setting the fires?” Jackie said.
Hawk shook his head. We were back in the Double Deuce quadrangle looking at nothing.
“Why not?” Jackie said.
“Trivial,” Hawk said.
“But it’s a challenge, isn’t it?”
“Not if we not challenged,” Hawk said.
We were quiet. Nothing moved in Double Deuce. The sun was steady. There was no wind and the temperature was in the sixties.
Jackie sighed.
“Are you familiar with the word enigmatic?” she said.
“Un huh,” Hawk said. He was looking at the empty courtyard just as if there were something to see.
“How about the word uncommunicative?” Hawk grinned and didn’t speak.
“Hawk, I’m not just asking to be nosy. I’m a reporter, I’m trying to work.”
He nodded and turned his head to look at her. She was in the front seat beside him.
“What would you like to know?” he said.
“Everything,” she said. “Including answers to questions I don’t know enough to ask.”
“That’s a lot,” Hawk said.
“Between strangers, yes,” Jackie said. “Among casual acquaintances, even friends, yes. But I am under the impression that we are more than that.”
“Un huh,” Hawk said.
I was in the backseat, sitting crosswise with my legs stretched out as much as you can stretch legs out in the backseat of a Jaguar sedan. I had found a way to sit so that my gun didn’t dig into my back, and I was at peace.
“Is that impression accurate?” Jackie said.
“Yes,” Hawk said.
“Then for Christ sake why don’t you, goddamn it, talk?”
“Jackie,” Hawk said, “you think there’s a plan. You’d have a plan. Probably do. So you ask questions like there was some plan at work. In the kind of work I do, there is no plan. Reason we so good at this work is we know it.”
When he said “we” he moved his head slightly in my direction so she’d know who “we” was.
“So how do you decide?” Jackie said. “Like now, how do you decide that you won’t respond to the trash fires?”
“Same way I decided that you and I be more than friends,” Hawk said. “Seem like the right thing to do.”
“I had something to do with deciding that,” Jackie said.
“Sure,” Hawk said.
“So you have a feeling that it’s best to let the trash fires slide?” Jackie said.
Hawk looked at me.
“Jump in anytime you like,” he said.
“I was just congratulating myself on not being in on this,” I said.
Jackie turned in her seat. Her lipstick was very bright, and she had on a carmine blouse open at the throat. She looked like about twenty-two million dollars. More than friends, I thought. Hawk, you devil.
“You too?” she said. “What’s wrong with you people, don’t you talk?”
“Most people are grateful,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.”
Hawk and I were silent for a moment.
“It’s not willful,” I said. “It’s that very often we don’t know how to explain what we know. We tend to think from the inside out. We tend to feel our way along. And because of the way we live it is more important usually to know what to do than to know how we know it.”
“God-I thought that was the woman’s rap,” Jackie said. “Creatures of feeling. I thought men were supposed to be reasonable.”
“I wouldn’t generalize about men and women,” I said. “But I don’t think Hawk or I are operating on emotional whim. It’s just the way we experience things sometimes needs to get translated sort of promptly into a, ah, course of action. So we have tended to bypass the meditative circuit.”
“Wow,” Hawk said.
I nodded. “I kind of like that myself,” I said. “And going back afterwards and filling in feels like kind of a waste of time.”
“Because the consequences of your actions will prove if you were right,” Jackie said.
“Ya,” I said.
Hawk nodded. He smiled happily.
“Is it intuition?” Jackie said.
“No, it’s the sort of automatic compilation of data without thinking about it, and comparing it with other data previously recorded,” I said. “Most of it sort of volition-less.”
“The thing with these kids,” Hawk said, “they want to see what I do, or Major does, and he seems to be the one calls the plays, because they want to know who we are and what we’re like.”
“Because of you,” Jackie said.
“Un huh. And if they can get us to chase around after them for a misdemeanor like setting trash fires we going to look like fools. What do we do about it? Do we shoot them? For torching trash barrels? Do we slap them around? How do we know who did it?”
“So you let them get away with it?”
“Sure,” Hawk said. “We ignore it. We’re above it.”
“You know those junior high school principals,” I said, “who suspend students for stuff like wearing Bart Simpson T-shirts?”
“Yes,” Jackie said. “They make themselves look like jerks.”
I nodded. Hawk nodded. Jackie smiled. And she nodded.
“I get it,” she said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
Hawk and I were both silent for a moment. “We didn’t know it,” Hawk said, “in the first place.”
CHAPTER 21
Jackie and Hawk and I were savoring some chicken fajita subs that Hawk had bought us on Huntington Ave., when Marge Eagen rolled up in a NewsCenter 3 van with her driver, her secretary, a soundwoman, and a cameraman. Two Housing Authority cops parked their car behind the van. A car from the Boston Housing Authority with three civilians in it parked behind the cops.
“Marge always likes to make a site visit,” Jackie said to us. “She’s very thorough.”
“Inconspicuous, too,” I said.
The Housing Authority cops got out and looked around. The civilians got out and grouped near the van. The driver got out and opened the van doors. The secretary got out of the back. The cameraman and the soundwoman got out of the front. And then Marge Eagen stepped out into the sunlight. The civilians stood a little straighter. The cops looked at her. One of them said something under his breath to the other one. They both looked like they wanted to laugh, but knew they shouldn’t. Marge stopped with one foot on the ground and one foot still in the van. A lot of her leg showed. The cameraman took her picture.