“Seems like that’s all you white boys know,” Louie-Louie said, “is how to psychoanalyze.”
A gun, an automatic. It crowded him; it killed the light. His tall-ceilinged office collapsed like a pocket around the iron, and Kit had forgotten to breathe again. He’d misjudged his man again. Yet by the time he regained his wits, his breath — by the time he’d slapped a hand down over the cold weapon and started to say something (come on, what, something) — by then, he could see that in fact he still didn’t have to worry about Louie-Louie. The brother didn’t want anything to do with the gun. Not in his condition. Draping his bulk once more over the chair back, this time without even the cushioning of his jacket, Kit’s visitor had begun to cry.
*
It didn’t have quite the heft of GI ordnance, the officer’s.45 that Kit’s father had left behind. Louie-Louie’s piece had Euro-tech contours, like an italic capital L, and there were Japanese characters in the trademark. UN ordnance. And this was where Louie-Louie had gotten his metal-and-oil smell.
Kit began to unload. Once he took up the weapon, he discovered his hands were shaking, the second time today they’d started shaking — holding first the subpoena, now the gun. From bad to worse. Meantime Louie-Louie insisted through his tears that he’d never intended to use the thing on Kit.
“Been crazier than that,” he said, swallowing thickly.
The magazine held fifteen rounds, but Louie-Louie had brought the pistol across town nearly empty. What rounds remained were still in the magazine, not the firing chamber, and the safety was on besides. The brother said he’d “tested” the thing in the concrete hollows above the Mass Pike extension, the highway trench that bordered the South End. He’d squeezed off shots as the big trucks roared past. Afterwards he’d headed across town with just three cartridges left.
Nodding, Kit yanked out the four-fifths-empty magazine and shoved it into a pants pocket. He double-checked the chamber, triple-checked, then let the weapon sit — though, setting his elbows on the desktop, he shielded it with his upper body. By now Louie-Louie was rocking head-down, whimpering and rocking, plainly helpless despite how he made the chair shriek beneath him. He repeated he hadn’t been gunning for Kit.
“Been way crazier than that,” the brother said. “Man, I been thinking I was Superfly.”
“Where, where did you …”
“Listen to me, man. Please, please listen.” Louie-Louie pointed out that if he’d wanted to shoot Kit, he’d had plenty of chances earlier.
Not exactly reassuring. “Louie-Louie, I’m not the guy for this. Think about it.”
“Just listen, huh? For my Mama, man, for my Mama. You want to do right by her, don’t you?”
Kit pointed out that there were agencies, like the brother had said. All it took was a phone call.
“Phone calls just don’t cut it with me any more. Phone calls don’t even touch it. How do you think a phone feels when you’ve got a gun in your pocket?”
Kit eyed the weapon again, empty beneath him.
“Today,” Louie-Louie went on, “man, I wound up over to the State House.”
“What? The State House?”
“I said it’s been crazy, didn’t I? Didn’t I say that?”
“You went to the State House packing a piece?”
Grimacing against a fresh burst of tears, Louie-Louie nodded. First he’d done his testing, the brother explained, and then he’d done his walking. “From over by my side of the Mass Pike clear across to the State House. Across half the damn city.” The walk itself had come to feel like another test.
“Life, life,” Louie-Louie said, “one test after another.”
It had come to feel like proving something, overcoming something, to make it on foot from the poorest crannies of downtown to the wealthiest slope of Beacon Hill. “What was that you said earlier, man? The dead of winter?”
Kit snuck in another glance at the gun. From this angle it suggested a different letter, an N.
“That was what I was up against,” the brother said. Only after Louie-Louie had conquered the wind and the ice would he deserve the golden dome, the marble columns of the State House.
“End of the line,” he said. “To be the man — you know, the man? I had to get all the way to the end of the line.”
N for Not again, Not this time.
Gulping down sobs, wiping his hands on his bright shirt, Louie-Louie explained that by the time he reached Beacon Hill, if he’d had anything clear in his head at all, it had been a picture. “Picture of my brother, man. The photo from the trial, you know, the one they showed on the TV. In his suit, remember?” Kit remembered, he said so — he relented at last to the notion of conversation — and Louie-Louie explained that the photo “wasn’t Junior.” Even the suit wasn’t Junior’s, he said. “Picture like that, it could’ve been anybody up on the TV. Could’ve been some stranger up there.” So Junior’s brother had soldiered his way through the winter, the racist city, with an instrument in his pocket that would blast away all the fakes, the family turned to strangers.
“Louie-Louie.” Kit put a hand on the brother.
“I had to blast, man.”
“Aw, what about your mother? She hasn’t turned into a stranger yet.”
Louie-Louie shook off his hand and sat up again, still talking. He’d crossed to the State House from the Parker House. He’d heard his weary breathing echo inside the rotunda. Only a room or two farther in, aging white boys sat around giving the okay to every kind of lying and denial.
“End of the line,” he said.
“They have security there,” Kit said. “Capitol police.”
“Man, cops was part of it, don’t you get it? I said I was Superfly, didn’t I? I was everywhere.”
“But they have the new high-tech stuff, too. The setups you see in airports. Metal detectors.”
“Metal detectors ain’t right at the door, Viddich.”
Kit remembered. The State House lobby was Roman style, the Pantheon, with marble as imposing as the piece up on Leo’s desk. A tourist attraction.
“You can get in,” Louie-Louie said, “if you’re wearing a good shirt.” Talking did seem to relax him: the brother pinched his shirtfront, half-smiling.
“Did you — did you have a particular target in mind?”
“Target, huh. Target. Picture off the news in my head, and he asks me did I have a target.”
Kit suffered a mental flash flood of last Thursday’s craziness. The Monsod on TV isn’t there. Big media have been actively avoiding the truth. Meantime Louie-Louie declared that the bad guys on this story were all the same. “That’s where I was coming from, see. By the time I got to the State House, it was all the same liars and cheaters against me. Hiding the truth everywhere. Got to blast.”
Kit found himself frightened all over again. He took up the gun — a spot of oil leaked out the open magazine into his palm — and slipped it in a coat pocket.
“All those suits and ties in the lobby,” Louie-Louie said. “I was everywhere, I was in every face.”
Kit repeated that he wasn’t the one Louie-Louie should be talking to. There were hotlines, 24-hour …
“Aw, Viddich. I made it out of there, didn’t I? Made it out of there in one piece. And I made it over here, too, made it to the one man done my family any good in years now.”
Kit got his elbows back on the desktop.
“I met a hippie, man. That’s all. I met a hippie.” Louie-Louie shook his head. “Over at the State House, I ran into some kind of hippie, you believe that? And next thing I know I was back out on Beacon Street. Safe, man.”