Southern Cross (6 page)

“You finished the Mono Lisa yet?”

“You got paint on your jeans.”

“Whoa, doesn’t look like paint to me. You been bleeding, man?”

“Uh uh,” Weed lied.

Mrs. Grannis’s eyes got darker as she looked at him and his jeans. He could see a question mark in a little balloon over her head. Weed had nothing to say.

“Everybody ready to read what you wrote about your symbols?” She returned her attention to the class.

“Groan.”

“I can’t figure out what mine means.”

“No one said we had to
write.”

“Let’s take a minute to talk about symbols.” Mrs. Grannis hushed them. “What is a symbol? Matthew?”

“Something that means something else.”

“And where do we find them? Joan?”

“In pyramids. And jewelry.”

“Annie?”

“In the catacombs, so the Christians could express themselves in secret.”

“Weed? Where else might we find symbols?” Mrs. Grannis’s face got soft with concern as she looked at him.

“Doodles and what I play in the band,” Weed said.

• • •

Brazil was at his desk, drawing designs on a legal pad, trying to come up with a newsletter logotype as the chairman of the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Crime Commission drove him crazy over the speakerphone.

“I think it is a dread-filled miscalculation,” Lelia Ehrhart’s emphatic, haughty voice sounded.

Brazil turned down the volume.

“To even suggest much less implicate we might have a gang here is to cause one,” she proclaimed.

The logo was for the website and needed to attract attention, and since it was agreed that CPR was out the window, Brazil had to start over. He hated newsletters, but Hammer had been insistent.

“And not every children are little mobsters. Many of them are misguided and misled astray, mistreated and abusive and need our help, Officer Brazil. To dwell on those few bad, especially those to band together in little groups you call gangs, is to give the public a very wrong, untrue and false view. My committee is completely all about prevention and doing that first before the other. That’s what the governor has mandated to tell us to do it.”

“The last governor,” Brazil politely reminded her.

“What is relevant about that and how does it matter?” retorted Ehrhart, who had been raised in Vienna and Yugoslavia and did not speak English well.

“It matters because Governor Feuer hasn’t gotten around to appointing a new commission yet. I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be making assumptions about his policies and mandates, Mrs. Ehrhart.”

There was a high-pitched, outraged pause.

“Are you implicating that he might dissolute my commission and undo it? That he and I may be a problem in my relationship?” said Ehrhart.

Brazil knew that a good nameplate should attract attention without overdoing it. Perhaps because they were on the subject of gangs, Brazil suddenly scrawled
Richmond P.D.
graffiti-style.

“Wow,” he muttered in excitement.

“Wow which?” Ehrhart’s angry voice filled the office.

“I’m sorry.” Brazil came to. “What were you saying?”

“I demand you tell me when you were saying
wow
about just there,” she demanded.

Chief Hammer filled the doorway. Brazil rolled his eyes and put his finger to his lips.

“I think you were became impertinent!” Ehrhart went on.

“No, ma’am. I wasn’t saying
wow
about anything that has to do with you,” Brazil honestly answered.

“Oh really? And did
that
supposedly mean what?”

“I’m working on something here, and was saying
wow
about it.”

“Oh, I see. Here I am taken my costly time to call your phone, and you’re working on something else in addition to our conversing while I’m talking to you?”

“Yes, ma’am. But I’m listening.” Brazil tried not to laugh as he looked at Hammer, who was never amused by Ehrhart.

West walked in.

“What . . . ?” she started to say.

Hammer motioned for her to be silent. Brazil clamped his pencil between his teeth and crossed his eyes.

“The upshoot, Officer Brazil, is I simple will not allow to permit you a commission quote for whatever your next column might be about in terms of so-called gangs.
You’re hanging out by a thread on a limb all alone on this one!”

Brazil snatched the pencil out of his mouth and wrote down the quote. West scowled. Hammer shook her head in disgust.

“We members on the Blue Ribbon Crime Commission are children pro-advocates, not bounty hunting,” she preached on. “Even if children do formulate little groups, what by the when is perfect and normal, certainly all of us had our little clichés where we were in school and to start labels them as
gangs
is like all this millions of misspoken facts about well-meaning mens who play Santa Claus at Christmas all being children molesters, or that clowns are, or that the Internet becomes that. And this is how there things all get their inception. Because of the power of
suggesting that the media has. Don’t you view how you’ve opened a flooded gate? So I’m asking you reasonable to square a peg in that round hole right now.”

Brazil was biting his hand. He cleared his throat several times.

“I understand what you’re . . . ” His voice went up an octave and cracked.

He cleared his throat again, tears in his eyes, face bright red as he held back laughter that was fast becoming hysterical. Hammer looked like she wanted to break Lelia Ehrhart’s neck, as usual. West’s expression pretty much mirrored her boss’s.

“Then am I to happily assumption that we won’t hear no more about this gang paraphernalia?” said Ehrhart, who was famous for her creativity with self-expression.

Brazil simply could not speak.

“Are you where?”

Brazil mashed several buttons on the phone at the same time to give the impression there was trouble on the line. He quietly depressed the hang-up button and returned the receiver to its cradle.

“Gang paraphernalia!”
He was weak with laughter.

“Oh great,” West said. “Now she’ll call us. Way to go, Andy. Every time you get with her on the fucking phone, this happens. Then she calls the chief or me. Thanks a hell of a lot.”

“We have things to discuss,” Hammer announced, coming inside the office. “We’ll leave Lelia for later. She takes up far too much of our time as is.”

“Why can’t you say something to Governor Feuer,” Brazil said as he took a deep breath and wiped his eyes.

“I will if he asks me,” Hammer replied. “We need a very simple user’s manual for COMSTAT. We’ve got to get this computer business straight. We’re what? Three months into this? A fourth of our year is up. And they still can’t use the computer? Both of you see how bad that is?”

“Yes.” Brazil got serious. “I do. If we don’t leave that much with them, I guess we’ve failed.”

“I’m sorry to heap more on you.” Hammer began pacing. “But we need the manual ASAP.”

“How soon is
as soon as possible?”
West suspiciously asked.

“Two weeks from today, at the outside.”

“Jeez.” West sat down on the small couch. “I’m already working days and riding with patrol, detectives, inspectors, you name it.”

“Me, too,” Brazil said. “Plus I’ve got this website stuff.”

“I know, I know.” Hammer stopped to look out the window at the downtown skyline. “I have my computer at home. I’ll add my thoughts, too. We’re all in this together. I think the thing to do is give each of us our own responsibility. Andy, you’re more into programming, commands and all that. You can handle the how-to technical part of it, and Virginia, you can help put it in very basic, black-and-white terms, nuts and bolts, that the cops will be able to follow.”

West wasn’t sure if she’d been insulted or not.

“I’ll try to add the concepts, philosophies, put it all in context,” Hammer said. “Then—Andy, you’re the writer—you can compile the whole thing.”

“I agree this has to be done,” West said, “but if you ask me, the only thing that’s going to really turn the guys on to COMSTAT is if they see it works.”

“They aren’t going to see if it works if they can’t work it,” Hammer logically replied.

Hammer walked out of the office. Brazil and West looked at each other.

“Shit,” West said. “Look what you’ve gotten us into.”

“Me!” Brazil exclaimed.

“Yes, you.”

“She suggested the user’s manual, not me.”

“She wouldn’t have suggested one if you weren’t a writer.” West saw the holes in her logic but would not back down.

“Oh, I see. So now everything’s my fault just because I know how to do something in general that I’ve been told to do specifically and that you’ve been asked to help with, sort of.”

West had to unravel this for a moment.

“What do you mean,
sort of?”
she asked. “It sounds to me like my involvement is more than a sort of.”

Brazil’s phone rang.

“Brazil. Oh, hi.” His voice softened and he paused as the other person talked. “You’re so thoughtful,” Brazil said, listening again. “The usual place is fine,” he said as the voice chattered on. “I’ll look forward to it,” Brazil said. “I’ve got to go.

“Sorry,” he said to West.

“Do you have any idea how much I’m going to hate writing computer instructions?” she asked in an uneven, strained voice as she imagined Brazil’s wealthy, beautiful landlady. “And you’re not supposed to make personal calls at work!”

“I didn’t make it. She called me. And you’re not the one who has to do the writing. I am,” Brazil replied.

“Well, writing, after all is said and done, is the easy part.”

Brazil’s anger mounted.

“You don’t have any right to say it’s easy,” he said.

“I can say anything I want,” she replied.

“No you can’t.”

“Yes I can,” she asserted.

“Then you write it.”

“Fuck no,” she answered. “I’ve got enough to do.”

“Excuse me,” a voice behind them spoke up.

Fling was holding his schedule book, standing outside the door, afraid to walk in. West and Brazil stopped their bickering and stared at him.

“I’m out of here.” West left.

“Officer Brazil,” Fling said, “I just wanted to remind you of your 1:56 appointment at Godwin High School. I believe you’re speaking in the auditorium to all the students?”

“Dammit,” Brazil muttered as he checked the time. “Do you know how to get there from here?”

“No,” Fling said. “I didn’t go there.”

“Huh?” Brazil’s mind was racing.

“I went to Hermitage,” Fling said.

“Wait.” Brazil popped up from his desk. “Virginia, come back here!”

“On Hungary Springs Road.” Fling was warmed by the memories. “You know, Godwin isn’t the only good school around.”

West walked back into the office, defiant in a khaki suit that complemented the darkness of her eyes and deep red of her hair. Her body was far finer than she deserved for as little as she did to help it along.

“What?” she impatiently asked.

“You ought to go out to Hermitage, too. Talk with the students there, you know,” Fling was going on and on. “That’s the thing about doing one school. What about the others?”

“In case you’ve forgotten,” Brazil said to West as he tightened the laces of his Rocky boots, “you’re supposed to go with me to Godwin.”

“Shit,” she said.

M
USKRAT
’
S
A
UTO
R
ESCUE
was Bubba’s home away from home, and today especially, he was grateful. It didn’t matter that Officer Budget had let Bubba go with only a warning. Bubba was traumatized. The cop had called Bubba names. The cop had brought back old injuries and humiliations and then had been so unfair and ugly as to accuse Bubba of being the one with prejudices.

Muskrat’s shop was behind his brick rancher on several junk-scattered acres off Clopton Street, between Midlothian and Hull. The fence bordering Muskrat’s garage and its outbuildings was built of old railroad ties piled like Lincoln Logs. Transmissions littered the hard-packed dirt, tail housings covered with plastic quart oil bottles to keep out the rain. Cars, vans, pickups, a tractor trailer and an old fire truck used each year in the Azalea Parade were parked wherever Muskrat had left them last. Bubba pulled up to the shop’s open bay door, cut the engine and climbed out.

He was momentarily cheered by Muskrat’s automotive kingdom, which could very well have passed for a chop shop were most of the parts not rusty and from an earlier stage of vehicle evolution. Bubba stepped around an ancient air jack and a bearing press. He made his way
through miscellaneous flowerpots, coils of garden hoses, fenders, headlights, hoods, bumpers, car seats, stacks of split firewood and fifty-five-gallon drums overflowing with junk parts.

Bubba was convinced, although he spoke of it rarely, that there was a Bermuda Triangle for vehicles. He believed cars and trucks swept up in floods and tornadoes, or perhaps gone and believed stolen, ended up in places like Muskrat’s shop, where they would be cared for and used to help humans continue their journeys through this life. Bubba intended to write this insight to Click and Clack’s Car Talk on the Internet or perhaps to his favorite, Miss Lonely Parts, a syndicated columnist who was really a man.

“Hey Scrat!” Bubba called out.

He walked inside the garage, where an old furnace burned a mixture of dirty motor oil and firewood.

“Scrat? Where the hell are ya?” Bubba tried again.

Muskrat wasn’t always easy to locate within the jumbles of heater cores, batteries, oil pans, grease guns, chains, tow ropes, bungee straps, gas lines, vacuum hoses, homemade jumper cables, stands made of old Ford wheels, clutches. Pressure plates were stacked like doughnuts on sections of exhaust pipes. There were grinders, a chain horse to lift out engines, and hundreds of American and metric wrenches, ratchets, pliers, chisels, awls, vises, presses, springs, drill bits, spark plugs, dead blow mallets and brass hammers.

“How come you got the heat on, Scrat?”

“To keep my joints from aching. What’dya try to fix this time?” Muskrat’s voice was muffled under a jacked-up 1996 Mercury Cougar.

“Who
tried to fix?” Bubba accused.

Muskrat was flat on his back on a creeper. He rolled out from underneath the car, suddenly there, a wizard in a mechanic’s blue work pants and shirt and a NAPA Auto Parts cap.

“What do you mean, I tried?” asked Muskrat, who was at least seventy, with hands rough and hard like horn.

“Windshield’s leaking again,” Bubba let him know. “You fixed it last, Scrat.”

“Uh huh,” Muskrat blandly said as he snatched toilet paper from an industrial roll overhead and began cleaning his glasses. “Well, drive her on in here, Bubba. I’ll take a look but I keep telling you to get the boys at Harding Glass to put in a new windshield. Or dump the damn thing altogether and get something that don’t break down every other minute.”

Bubba walked out of the garage, not listening. He got into his Jeep and cranked the engine as anger pecked at him. He could not and would not believe that his buddy Smudge had cheated him. It couldn’t be that Smudge had sold him a piece of shit. The possibility of it resurrected other injustices as Bubba parked inside the garage, in the bay next to the Cougar, and climbed out.

“I got to tell you right now, Scrat, there’s police brutality in this city,” Bubba announced.

“Oh yeah?” Muskrat mumbled as he started looking at the windshield.

“I think something’s telling me to do something about it.”

“Bubba, something’s always telling you something.”

“There’re reasons too complicated to go into that the new chief, that new woman who just moved here, needs my help, Scrat.”

“And you always got complicated reasons, Bubba. I’d stay out of it if I were you.”

Bubba could not stop thinking about Chief Hammer. He had heard her name on his cell phone this morning. There was a reason for this; it was not random.

“It’s time we mobilize, Scrat.”

“Who’s
we?”

“Citizens like us,” Bubba said. “We gotta get involved.”

“I can’t find your leak,” Muskrat said.

“Right here.” Bubba pointed to the top of the windshield, near the rearview mirror. “The water drips in from this spot here. Want a cigarette?”

Bubba pulled out a pack.

“You need to cut back, boy,” Muskrat said. “Chew gum. That’s what I do to kill the craving when I’m around gasoline and what all.”

“You forget I got TMJ. My jaws are killing me.” Bubba clicked them side to side.

“I told you not to get all those damn crowns,” Muskrat said as he retrieved a Windex spray bottle full of water and uncoiled an air hose. “You’d probably be better off if he just yanked all of ’em out and fixed you up with a pair of clackers like I got.”

Muskrat grinned, showing off his dentures.

“I’ll get on the inside with the hose, and when I tell you to, you start spraying,” said Muskrat.

“Same thing we did last time,” Bubba said. “And a lot of good it did.”

“It’s like fixing those crowns of yours,” Muskrat wouldn’t let up as he sat in the driver’s seat. “All you do is go to the dentist. I’d get new ones that don’t look like piano keys if I were you. And you sure as hell ought to replace this windshield. The car’s been wrecked.” Muskrat had told him this before. “That’s why everything keeps going wrong with it, that and the fact that you’re always trying to fix it yourself, Bubba.”

“It ain’t been wrecked, good buddy,” Bubba said.

“It sure as hell has. Where you think all that Bondo came from, the factory?”

“I won’t have you talking about Smudge that way,” Bubba told him.

“I didn’t say a word about Smudge.”

“Smudge has been my good buddy since we were in Sunday school together, way back.”

“Way back when you used to go to church and listen to your daddy,” Muskrat reminded him. “Don’t forget, you was the preacher’s kid.”

Bubba was shocked by another memory of name-calling.
The flucking preacher’s kid.
He had forgotten all about it. For a moment, he couldn’t speak. His bowels came alive.

“I’m just pointing out, for your own good, Bubba, that it
didn’t hurt Smudge one bit to be on the preacher’s good side. Not everybody has as high opinion of Smudge as you do.”

Muskrat had heard every tale there was about everybody in the city who had ever owned a car that needed fixing, including the Dodge Dart belonging to Miss Prum, who happened to be the director of Christian education at the historic downtown Second Presbyterian Church, where Dr. But Fluck had been the senior minister.

“Look, it’s already six-thirty and I gotta start my shift early tonight, as if my day hasn’t been bad enough. So I guess we’d better get this leak taken care of,” Bubba said as an Escort drove up and parked outside the shop.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Muskrat said.

He peeled the Jeep’s headliner and its cardboard away from the ceiling and examined the rubbery black polyurethane in the pitch well.

“Least you didn’t try to fix this one yourself,” Muskrat observed.

“Didn’t have time,” Bubba said.

“Good thing, since you’re always screwing up things worse,” Muskrat candidly said.

They did not see the clean-cut kid walk in until he was so close he startled them.

“Hi,” the kid said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Don’t go sneaking up on people like that, son,” Muskrat said.

“I got a stuck window,” the kid told him.

“Well, you just stand on back and hold your horses,” Muskrat said. “I’ll get with you as soon as I wind up here.”

Bubba hadn’t finished arguing yet.

“I did my own pigtail wiring on my trailer hitch,” he said.

“And you got the turn signal lights backwards,” Muskrat countered.

“So what, big deal.”

“Well, I’ll remind you of a
big deal.
Remember the serpentine belt?” Muskrat talked on.

“The directions weren’t clear,” Bubba answered.

“Well, you fought it out with that one for five hours and still put it on wrong—ribbed against smooth instead of ribbed against ribbed and smooth against smooth, and next thing you’ve lost the alternator, power steering, water pump. You’re just lucky you didn’t lock up the engine and have to get a new one. Bubba, you can start spraying.”

“Excuse me?” the kid politely said. “You know how long you’ll be?”

“You’ll have to hold off for just a minute,” Muskrat told him.

Bubba worked the Windex bottle along the top of the windshield, spraying water near the rearview mirror while Muskrat blasted compressed air at the seal from the inside.

“Before that,” Muskrat picked up where he’d left off, “you replaced the mercury switch in the trunk and did that wrong, too. So the trunk light stayed on all the time and your battery kept going dead. Before that it was replacing your brakes and putting the pad in backwards, and the time before that, you left out the antirattle spring, the horseshoe clip in the emergency brake, and the lever fell into the drum.”

Bubba winked at the kid as if to imply that Muskrat was exaggerating. Muskrat walked over to a workbench, where the heater box was warming up several tubes of SikaTack Ultrafast polyurethane. He picked up a caulking gun and dropped a tube inside it.

“Remember the time you forgot the cotter pin and the tire rod fell off and both wheels went out spread-eagle?” Muskrat kept on.

“He can tell a story,” Bubba said to the kid.

Water trickled down the inside of the glass. Muskrat ran a thick bead of black polyurethane, licking his finger and pressing it flat. He stepped out of the car and ran a thin bead on the outside of the glass.

“We need to wait about fifteen minutes to test it again,” he said. “Truth is, none of the seals in this thing are tight. Bet you get a lot of wind noise.”

Bubba wasn’t going to admit it. Muskrat walked over to the solvent bin and dipped his hands in the murky fluid.

“What’cha need?” Muskrat finally said to the kid.

“My left rear power window won’t work.” The young man was courteous, but his eyes were hard.

“The motor’s probably gone bad,” volunteered Bubba the ace mechanic. “But you’re gonna have to wait. I was here first.”

“We got a few minutes,” Muskrat told Bubba. “Let me go on and take care of him.”

Muskrat dried his hands and walked outside to the Escort. He opened the back door and popped the panel off as the young man scanned his surroundings.

“Bubba, how ’bout bringing me the wire strippers,” Muskrat said. “You’re lucky,” he told his young customer. “It ain’t the switch or the motor. You got a broke wire between the door and the jamb. All I gotta do is splice it. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Smoke.”

“Now that’s a new one,” Muskrat commented.

“What everybody calls me.” Smoke shrugged. “Hope you get your problem taken care of,” he then said to Bubba. “I’m new around here. People seem really nice.”

“It’s the South,” Bubba bragged.

“I guess you’re from here.”

“Couldn’t be from anyplace else. In fact, I’m even more southern than I used to be.”

“How so?” Smoke asked with a smile that might have been interpreted as a faint sneer had Bubba paid attention.

“Born on Northside and moved to Southside.”

“Oh yeah? Where ’bouts?”

“Forest Hills. Over on Clarence,” said Bubba, who was flattered by the boy’s interest and his respectful way of addressing him. “Can’t miss my house. The one with the coon dog in the pen. Half Shell. She barks nonstop and wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

“Not much of a watchdog if she barks all the time,” Smoke said.

“You got that right.”

“You hunt with her?”

“Big into that,” Bubba said.

“Seems all us southern guys are big on guns.”

“You bet.”

Muskrat twisted the wires he’d stripped and was done.

“When I was your age,” Bubba said to Smoke, “I started fixing things like this myself.”

“I’m not very mechanically inclined,” Smoke said.

“You can work on it, son.” Bubba beamed. “Go out and get the proper tools, some books, and it’s trial and error. Same with things around the house. You build your own deck and fix your own roof—hell, just the other day I bought a new garage door at Sears. Installed it myself.”