Tours of the Black Clock

41

I MAKE A FATEFUL and entirely conscious decision right at the beginning. This decision is to put across the top of my stories the name Banning Jainlight. I know that this has got to catch up with me, I can read the papers. The Philly papers have run a couple things, and Philadelphia just isn’t that far away. They’ve heard of Banning Jainlight there. Maybe I’m just not willing to be a tourist anymore. Maybe I’m not visiting anymore. The name goes where I go, bad or good. Maybe I keep it in defiance of Oral and Henry in that hut, Alice and my father thrashing on the ground beyond the licks of the flaming house, maybe I keep it to defy my mother who disappeared into the night, when she should have disappeared sixteen years before and taken me with her. Then I wouldn’t have been Banning Jainlight at all.

Sooner or later someone’s going to come. Little man, big man, whoever. I remember them already, actually. They’re still about twenty months into the future but I already remember them coming out of the night, down the street: “You know someone named Jainlight?” they say to me out of the dark. Little man. Big man. I turn and run. I hear their footsteps running after me, rounding the last corner of 1936.

But now in the spring of 1935 after I’ve been working for Doggie almost a year, I’m at the club one night early before the crowd has come in. Not much is going on, Doggie’s just strolling up the aisles and Billy’s with him, and Billy’s thinking very hard, hard enough to practically launch his head from his shoulders. When they’re close to me Billy says out of the blue, but so that Hanks will hear it, “So: Jainlight.” Just like that. First time he’s ever used my name, and I know it’s come to mean something to him.

I’m leaning in the door reading a paper. News all over the front about Germans. I don’t even look at Billy.

Billy’s eating a toothpick and talking around it. “Heard they’re looking for someone named Jainlight in the Pittsburgh area: that’s what I heard. A big redhead kid about six foot somethin’. Went on a rampage one night wiped out his whole friggin’ family.” He gazes off for a moment even though there’s nothing of interest in his line of vision except a bourbon glass on the bar that’s empty anyway. Doggie looks at him in confusion and then at me.

I look up from my paper now. “The news is fascinating these days,” I say, “take these fucking Germans for instance. I was under the impression we taught them what’s what around the time I was being born. Anyway, I can barely tear my attention away from it.”

“A big redhead kid named Banning Jainlight,” says Billy.

“Banning Jainlight is my alias,” I say, “must have been the real Banning Jainlight you heard about.”

Billy turns his gaze in my direction; now he appears a bit befuddled. “The real Banning Jainlight?”

Doggie’s looking at me, then at Billy. “You heard him,” he says to Billy, “the real Banning Jainlight. In parts of Pennsylvania there are probably several.”

“I know sixteen or seventeen myself,” I say.

Billy can’t believe it. He looks at Hanks and then at me and scowls; his nostrils actually begin to flare.

“Say, why don’t you take a walk,” Hanks says, putting his hand on Billy’s shoulder. Then he turns and pulls me by the arm toward the cloakroom. All the way I’m looking over my shoulder at Billy and Billy’s looking over his shoulder at me.

Leona’s been waiting in the cloakroom to ambush me, she has my coat halfway off my body before she sees the boss. She flushes and tries to sputter something ridiculous. “Give us a few minutes, OK, sugar?” Doggie says. When she scampers out he takes a long time looking at me. We’re in the dark and about all we see of each other are our eyes. For a moment I think I’m going to see fear, for a moment I actually think he’s going to be afraid of me. I guess he sees something too. “The whole family?” he finally says.

I don’t want to sound like I’m justifying anything. “I think,” I’m whispering, “I think we might more accurately say part of the family.”

“Oh,” says Doggie. In the dark I see him nodding. “Only part.” He nods.

Over and over in my hands I’m rolling a picture of the chancellor of Germany. “My mother wasn’t even my mother,” I blurt.

“OK,” he finally says, and now I definitely think he’s a little afraid. He doesn’t entirely comprehend but he’s managing his doubts into shapes he can live with. He turns around and, leaving me there, walks out, and I wait awhile in the dark of the cloakroom thinking about everything. Leona comes in and throws her arms around my neck, I shrug her off. I go out into the club, I want to find Billy and say, I’m your Banning Jainlight and always will be; but he isn’t there.