SHE WAS BACK in the office the next day at ten, dragging her suitcase behind her. Someone had taped a long paper tongue to Justin’s mouth in the photo on her desk and placed a speech balloon in the blank space above his left shoulder: “RRRIBBIT!” The running joke about Justin’s froglike appearance had long been established here. One of the old reporters, Mitch Ville, routinely asked her how the Frog Prince was doing. She wasn’t sure who had first drawn the connection between Justin’s pale, slightly protuberant eyes, his bad skin, and his wide, lipless mouth and the attributes of a frog. It was OK. She’d worked in offices long enough to know that husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, all were fair game for the most casually cruel treatment. These unseen beings were the one great extension of your artificial and limited view of one another; phantoms familiar from the coffeetime stories, rounded out by the sullen mornings, schedule shifts, terse phone calls, family emergencies; the framed summery snapshots of groups of radiant vacationers, brightly garbed strangers among whose faces you searched for that sober and accustomed colleague in the off-the-rack suit.
She sat and gazed at the defaced photo, holding her purse on her lap. She exhibited neither anger nor amusement. The vandal worked with careful stealth, although it might have been anyone. (Nables was the only person in the office Kat had written off as a suspect: she was pretty certain he would be intent on protecting a man’s right to be ugly.) She reached out and peeled the paper tongue from the picture, exposing the featureless line of Justin’s mouth, curled into a smirk. The speech balloon she left alone. She felt that this might illustrate the proper limits of the joke. Then she went to work.
She had three photos to begin with. One had been taken at the time of Jackie Saltino’s arrest after he’d beaten up Henry I. Baumann, the unfortunately stingy delivery recipient. His unformed face might have belonged to any one of a thousand kids living in Bay Ridge or Carroll Gardens: half boy, half calzone. He wore an expression of querulous impatience. The next was from Saltino’s Michigan driver’s license. In imprinting itself on his face, middle age had taken care to correct the indistinctness of youth. Creases worn into his skin framed his mouth, minute pouches drooped from either side of his chin. His hairline was up. Bags had formed under his eyes. Acne had left ruts and craters in his cheeks. The expression had softened considerably. Now he seemed about to ask a deferential question of the photographer.
The third photo was of the storyteller, Salteau, and was printed on a program from the Northport Lighthouse and Maritime Festival. The man wore a white straw hat, a white-and-black buckskin vest embroidered with red diamonds over a pale blue polo shirt, and jeans. The graying hair was tightly braided on both sides, each braid tapering to a neat point that just touched his collarbone. He had on sunglasses and was standing in three-quarter view, holding a ceremonial drum. It was hard to tell from the photos if Salteau and Saltino were the same man; if the resemblance was unmistakable or simply propped up by her hopes. Still, how important context was. You might want to say, this couldn’t be Saltino because it just isn’t Saltino: I just can’t imagine it. Lack of imagination was a predictable quality among reporters, cops, and lovers. To them, habit equaled fate. To erase yourself completely was commonly thought to be the most difficult of feats. Most people’s identities were important to them, something they wouldn’t shed. It was proud, it was timid, it was laudable, it was stupid. It stuck people with dumb friends and crummy marriages. Trapped them in dead towns and murderous neighborhoods. It manufactured tradition from the uninterrupted drudgery of successive generations. It transformed ignorant belief into folklore, and ignorance itself into defiance. Identity was a trap. Kat decided at that moment that Salteau and Saltino were the same man. She knew somehow that Saltino was perverse enough to pull this off; not to run home to Brooklyn, where his seventy-six-year-old mother still lived on Third Avenue, not to wash up in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, not to do anything except stash the money in his shoe and find the least likely persona to inhabit while hiding in plain sight. It fit him. He must have been preparing for this for years, learning how to bide time while he learned how to do time. The old violence aside, Saltino had not become a flashy or intemperate man. In fact, he’d become exactly the sort of person you’d routinely trust with a satchel of cash, too reliable to do anything but handle it as instructed. Kat could imagine an operator like Argenziano, with his Vegas Gentry voice, patronizing a Saltino, making fun of him behind his back, occasionally deigning to feel sorry for his bad breaks and fractured ambitions. Saltino had been shedding who he was all along, right under their noses, waiting for the right moment. The same man who’d beaten Henry I. Baumann with a bicycle pump had each month uneventfully driven a Ford with tens of thousands of dollars in it to Staten Island and then turned around and driven back. If he was in the habit of stopping for the night on the way east, then it would be a full day before anybody even thought about wondering where he was. With twenty-four hours’ head start, he could drive maybe a thousand miles. Or so they’d think. Had he been amused by the plan he’d come up with?
The program read:
JOHN SALTEAU has presented Native American stories, songs, and dances at the Cherry City Cherry Festival, the Cultural Awareness Celebration in Cheboygan, Native Tradition Days in Saginaw, the Sleeping Bear Folklore Fair in Glen Arbor, and at Interlochen’s Summer Arts for Kids Festival, and he performs regularly in libraries, schools, and other educational and cultural settings. A full-blooded Ojibway Indian, Salteau has worked as a lumberjack, a construction worker, a long-distance trucker, and a short order cook. He recently returned to Northwest Michigan after an absence of twenty years.
Nice little foxhole there to climb into. Twenty years, and you know the way Indians died off, pickling themselves with hair tonic and smoking their lungs black with tax-free cigarettes and stuffing their arteries with trans fats. Who’d be left to remember who had been where? She liked, too, the Boy’s Book litany of romantic occupations, the sorts of jobs that she could see a predelinquent Saltino thrilling to in his cot in Darkest Brooklyn. There had to be a thousand of these storytellers plying their trade around the Great Lakes, each with some mythically gritty background, like you couldn’t strum a guitar or shake a rattle if you programmed computers or adjusted insurance claims. Not all of them pretended to be Indians, though that wasn’t unheard of either. It was just another of the hustles that Indian culture had been reduced to. Blankets, pots, storytelling, casino gambling. It amused her that it was the last that struck so many people as being particularly profane. She looked at the picture of Salteau, banging that drum with the palm of his hand. There were the acne scars. She straightened three fingers and, joining them, rapidly drummed them against her open mouth: woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo!