In the end the matter was decided by the arrival of a handsome invitation from the Talcott Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps a few days out of the city would help her make up her mind.
J catches up with Dave Brown in the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge. The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought. J. nods at Dave, who is suited up in his bulging khaki jacket. Dave starts, “I think that in all my years of freelancing, I have never been to West Virginia. I’ve been all through Europe, South America. I saw Ali take out Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila — remind me to tell you about that sometime — I was one of the first people to interview Vaclav Havel — we talked about Lou Reed. The U.S.S.R., former U.S.S.R., Brazil, whatever. But I don’t think I’ve ever been to West Virginia.”
“Clear night,” J. says.
“Clear now,” Dave responds. “But that’s weather for you.”
“What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
They turn to see Tiny and Frenchie, two fellow mercenaries in their covert war against the literate of America. Hail, hail. They encounter each other on the newsstands, they chafe against one another in the contributors’ notes of glossy magazines, but primarily they meet like this, on the eve of war, hungry, sniffing comps and gratis, these things like smoke from a freebie battlefield on the other side of morning. At stake: the primal American right of free speech, the freedom, without fear of censor, to beguile, confuse and otherwise distract the people into plodding obeisance of pop. Their ideals: the holy inviolability of the receipt, two dollars a word, travel expenses. The jun-keteers are soldiers, and they hail each other. “What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
“I hope you don’t mind that I told Tiny about your streak,” Dave says. “I ran into him at the ice machine earlier.”
J. shrugs. He appraises his comrades. “Tiny, Frenchie. Good to see you.”
The law of nicknames: contradictory or supremely apt, born of accidents and sticking for life or arbitrary and annoying. Tiny of course, is not; he earned his nickname by not being so. At three hundred pounds, the man is hunger, gorging and grazing at the free spreads of life. If any person deserves to be on the List, it is Tiny, a creature who has evolved into the perfect mooching machine, leaving no glass undrained or napkin unstained by chicken skewer residue. He sucks up freebies in a banquet room like a baleen whale inhaling colonies of hapless plankton, swooping primeval and perfect, eyelids blinking slowly in the unlit fathoms of media. The dirigible prowls the food and travel magazine circuit; as a party trick he has been known to throw darts at a map of the world and name a princely dish native to that region, belching up its flavor on command, an archival gust from deep in his belly. Not to mention his thoroughly unwholesome fascination with curry.
Frenchie, for his part, retains an accent from his internment at a French boarding school during his adolescence. His parents were world-traveling sophisticates who unloaded their offspring with paid attendants half the year; the migrant’s ways are in his blood. Tall and slender, proud owner of a shiny black mane, this lipless wonder has cultivated a satisfied Parisian air that serves him well while playing footsie with the editors of women’s fashion magazines. For the world of international fashion is Frenchie’s specialty, he knows where to buy rice cakes and had been linked in the gossip pages to that new Italian runway model before she discovered her bisexuality. She appeared to evaporate with every step and was perceived to be the marvelous avatar of a current brand of beauty. Frenchie took his expulsion from the empyrean badly; he had ascended from reporter-of to reported-upon, his name inflated in bold type among the gossip ledgers, and now he is back in the trenches. The other junketeers saw it coming; those they write about are not their kind, and mixing with them can only lead to heartbreak.
“No sign of the van?” Frenchie asks. He looks down at his suit and, distressed, returns the tips of his shirt collar to the outside of his jacket, where they sit like the wings of a shiny red bird.
“Should be here any minute,” Dave says.
They are joined in the parking lot by a lithe young woman who is clearly not from around here; it is in her walk, a rapid skitter that places her from New York City. J. has found himself trying to slow down ever since he arrived at Yeager Airport, to get into the groove and pace of the state as a sign of openness to a different culture. The woman looks down the driveway and lights a cigarette. Waiting, like them, but no reporter. J. and his fellow jun-keteers are in Talcott (or just outside it, he doesn’t know) because they have committed to a lifestyle: their lifestyle pays air freight and they board planes. But why is she here? She wears faded jeans, a yellow blouse with a flower embroidered over her heart. She shifts in her boots, stamps out half a cigarette and lights another while the junketeers shoot the shit and catch up.
“It’s not here yet?” Lawrence fumes, emerging from the office with a cell phone limp in his hand, no doubt making comparisons between the publicity apparatus here and in New York and L.A. They don’t know how to do things here. “The van was supposed to be here ten minutes ago.”
“Patience, Lawrence,” Dave says.
Lawrence presses a few numbers into his phone, to beeps.
“We used to read the story of John Henry in kindergarten,” Tiny says. “The school board told the teachers they couldn’t teach Little Black Sambo anymore, so they switched over to this picture book of John Henry’s competition. Positive imagery.”
“You sound disappointed,” J. says, glancing quickly at the woman for her reaction.
“I was, a little. I don’t mean to be un-p.c,” Tiny says. He is the kind of man who says, “I don’t mean to be un-p.c.” a lot. “But I liked Little Black Sambo. My mother used to read me Little Black Sambo when she tucked me into bed at night. It’s a cute story underneath.”
“You were undisturbed by the eyeholes cut out of the pillow you lay your little head on.”
“They were different times, J.”
“Did you hear I got a new job?”
“What?”
“It’s at the department of no one gives a shit and you’re my first client.”
“Here it comes now,” Frenchie says.
The battered blue van pulls up, New River Gorge Taxi stenciled on its side. It looks like it has been tossed by tornadoes. Workhorse of the robust fleet, J. says to himself. The driver, a ruddy-faced chap from the nabe, rolls down the window and asks, “You all going to the Millhouse Inn?” His brown, glinting hair is tucked precariously behind his tiny ears.
“All hacks in the back,” Tiny says, already steering his body into the back row. Frenchie climbs in next to him, makes a joke about there not being enough room in the seat for him. J. is pressed between Dave and the young woman. She’s coming with them. Now he isn’t the only black person. J. is grateful. If anything goes down in this cannibal region, he thinks, she will send word, and the story of J.’s martyrdom will live on in black fable.
“You’re not coming?” Dave asks Lawrence, his hand on the door.