The Nix(180)

13


FAYE IS EXHAUSTED. She hasn’t slept in more than a day. She’s leaning against the wall with her back to the room and trying to keep it all together and she’s just about crying from the effort.

Help me, she says.

The house spirit sits on the floor outside her metal cage. He picks at his teeth with a fingernail.

I could help you, he says. I could make all this go away. If I felt like it.

Please, Faye says.

Okay. Make me a deal. Make it worth my time. Entertain me.

So Faye promises to be a better person, to help the needy and go to church, but the house spirit only smiles.

What do I care about the needy? he says. What do I care about church?

I’ll give money to charity, Faye says. I’ll volunteer and give money to the poor.

Pbbth, the house spirit says, spit flecking off his lips. You’re gonna have to do better than that. Gonna have to leave some skin on the table.

I’ll go back home, Faye says. Go to junior college for a couple years and come back to Chicago after all this blows over.

A couple years at JuCo? That’s it? Seriously, Faye, that’s not nearly enough penance for how badly you’ve acted.

But what have I done?

Irrelevant. But if you’d like to know? Disobeyed your parents. Felt pride. Coveted. Thought impure thoughts. Plus, weren’t you planning on having out-of-wedlock relations last evening?

Faye hangs her head, says yes, because there is no use lying.

Yes, the answer is yes. Plus you’re high. Right now you are high. Plus you shared a bed with another woman. Do I have to keep going? Do you want to hear more? Do I even need to mention what you did with Henry on the riverbank?

I give up, she says.

The house spirit rubs his chin with a fat hand.

I should forget about this whole thing, she says. Go home and marry Henry.

The house spirit raises an eyebrow. Go on.

I’ll marry Henry and make him happy and forget about college and we’ll be normal, like everyone wants.

The ghost smiles, his teeth ragged and broken, a mouthful of stones.

Go on, he says.





14


NOW OLD CRONKITE is interviewing the mayor, the fatly jowled and thuggish dictator of Chicago. Cronkite is asking him questions live on the air but really the journalist’s mind is elsewhere. He’s barely paying attention. It doesn’t matter. The mayor is as professional as they come. He doesn’t need a journalist’s questions to hold forth on whatever he wants to talk about, which is currently the extraordinary threats to the police and to ordinary Americans and to our democracy itself posed by outside agitators, the out-of-town radicals causing trouble in his law-abiding town. He really seems to want to stress the “out-of-town” stuff. Probably to emphasize to hometown voters that whatever problems his city is currently having are not his fault.

And anyway, even if old Cronkite were concentrating real hard and asking penetrating, difficult questions, the mayor would just perform that politician’s maneuver where he doesn’t answer the question you asked but instead the question he wished you had asked. And if you pursue this too much and insist that he did not answer the question, then you’re the one who looks like a jerk. At least that’s how it plays on TV. Badgering this very charismatic fellow who’s been saying lots of words that at least seem related to the question. This is how it seems to the viewers anyway, who are splitting their attention between Cronkite and children running around and cutting the Salisbury steak at the center of their TV dinners. If you keep pestering the politician, you look like a pest, and America does not tune in to watch pests. It’s a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear.

So he’s ostensibly interviewing the mayor but he knows that his only real job here is to stick a microphone under his mouth so CBS News can seem balanced by providing a counter-narrative to the images of police brutality they’ve been showing for hours. So old Cronkite isn’t really listening. He’s watching, maybe. The way the mayor seems to hold his head as far back on his neck as possible, in the manner of someone avoiding a bad smell, and how this makes the part of his chin that on a rooster would be called a wattle press out and jiggle while he speaks. It is impossible not to stare at this.

So a bit of old Cronkite’s mind is following this, watching the mayor’s Jell-O face wriggle. But mostly he’s thinking about something else: He’s thinking about, of all things, flying. He imagines he’s a bird. Flying over the city. At a height so great that everything is dark and quiet. This is occupying roughly three-quarters of Walter Cronkite’s mind right now. He’s a bird. He’s a nimble flying bird.





15


FAYE IS IN HER DARK BASEMENT CELL cringing in anticipation of another panic attack because the house spirit’s hot breath is right up next to her and he’s holding the chain-link fence and pressing his face against it and his black eyeballs are bugging out and he’s telling her exactly what he’s going to need from her, which is vengeance and retribution.

But retribution for what?

She wishes more than anything that her mother were here to stroke her forehead with a cold washcloth and tell her she’s not dying and hold her till she slept, and Faye would wake up in the morning blanketed and warm, her mother beside her having fallen asleep sometime in the night while watching over her.