The Nix(182)

17


FAYE HAS BEEN PRAYING all night for a rescue, but now that a rescuer has come she hears herself telling him no.

“What do you mean no?” Sebastian says. He’s crouching on the floor with his hands holding her shoulders like at any minute he’s going to shake some sense into her.

“I don’t want to go.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” she says. Her brain feels fuzzy and swollen. She tries to remember what the house spirit had told her, but already it’s fading. She can remember the sensation of talking to the ghost, but she can no longer remember what he sounds like.

She looks at Sebastian, at his worried face. She remembers they were supposed to have a date last night.

“I’m sorry I stood you up,” she says, and Sebastian laughs.

“Another time,” he says.

The clenching in her chest is releasing, her shoulders loosening, the bile in her stomach seeping away. It’s as if her whole body is a spring after it’s sprung. She’s relaxing—this is what it feels like to relax.

“What was I doing when you came in?” she says.

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Was I talking to someone? Who was I talking to?”

“Faye,” he says, putting his palm gently on her cheek. “You were sleeping.”





18


ERNIE BANKS PROBABLY FEELS SOMETHING ELSE, too, whenever he hits a home run. Along with the sense of professional mastery, there’s probably this other, uglier feeling—what would you call it? Payback? Retaliation? Because isn’t one reason men are moved to greatness partly the need to respond in a grand way to the people who cut them most deeply? For Ernie Banks, it was the older and bigger boys who said he was too skinny. Or the white boys who wouldn’t let him play. The girls who left him for smarter guys, bigger guys, guys with more money. Or the parents who told him to do something better with his life. The teachers who said he wouldn’t amount to nothing. The beat cops who were leery of him. And because Ernie couldn’t defend himself then, he defends himself now: Each home run is his retort, each sprinting impossible center-field catch part of his ongoing vindication. When he swings his bat and feels that delicious thwack, he must feel a powerful sense of professional satisfaction, yes, but he must also think: I proved you f*ckers wrong again.

So that’s an essential part of it, too. That’s what’s going on in Officer Brown’s head right now. This is, in some ways, a reprisal. This is righteous.

And he thinks of those nights with Alice, those encounters in the backseat of his police cruiser, and how she wanted him to be violent with her, to shove her around and choke her and grab her roughly and leave marks. And how he felt bashful about it, demure, shy. He didn’t want to do it. Felt himself incapable of it, actually. Felt like it required a different kind of man altogether: someone unthinking and brutal.

And yet here he is now, clunking hippies on the head. It turns out he had deep reserves of brutality that were, up till now, unprospected.

In a way, this makes him happy. He’s a fuller and more complicated man than he thought he was. He imagines himself in dialogue with Alice right now. Didn’t think I could do it, did you? he says as he clobbers another hippie. You said you wanted me to be rough, well, here you go.

And he imagines that for Ernie Banks the best home run is the one when the girls who broke his heart are in the stands to see it. Brown imagines Alice is here watching him, right now, somewhere in the fray, observing his new vitality and strength and brute masculine dominance. She’s impressed. Or she will be, as soon as she sees him and sees that he’s changed, that he’s exactly what she needs him to be now: Of course she’d take him back.

He clunks a hippie on the jaw, hears that pregnant crunching sound, and there’s screaming all around him and hippies running terrified and one of the other cops grabs Brown by the shoulder and says “Hey buddy, settle down a little” and Officer Brown sees that his own hands are trembling. They’re quaking, actually, and he waves them in the air like they’re wet. He feels ashamed of this and hopes that if Alice is indeed watching him right now she did not see that.

He thinks: I am Ernie Banks rounding the bases—the very picture of calm, serene delight.





19


IT IS REMARKABLE how quickly extraordinary things turn ordinary. By now the patrons of the Haymarket Bar do not even flinch when some thrown projectile strikes the plate-glass windows. Stones, chunks of concrete, even billiard balls—all have made their way through the air, over the heads of the assembled police line, and whacked against the windows of the bar. People inside have stopped noting them. Or if they do note them, they do so condescendingly: “The Cubs could use an arm like that.”

The cops are generally good at holding the line, but occasionally a wedge of protestors breaks through and a couple of kids get beaten up right in front of the Haymarket windows and dragged to a paddy wagon. This has now happened so many times that the folks in the bar have completely stopped watching it. They ignore it in that strained way they walk by homeless men on the street.

On the television, the mayor is back with old Cronkite and the latter appears as penitent as ever.

“I can tell you this,” the journalist says, “you have a lot of supporters around the country.” And the mayor nods like a Roman emperor ordering an execution.