When I was done, there was silence between us for a long time. At last Mr. Sharpton said, “He deserved it. You know that, don’t you?”
And for some reason that did it. The dam burst and I cried like a baby. I must have cried for fifteen minutes or more. Mr. Sharpton put his arm around me and pulled me against his chest and I watered the lapel of his suit. If someone had driven by and seen us that way, they would have thought we were a couple of queers for sure, but nobody did. There was just him and me under the yellow mercury-vapor lamps, there by the Kart Korral. Yippy-ti-yi-yo, get along little shopping cart, Pug used to sing, for yew know Supr Savr will be yer new home. We’d laugh till we cried.
At last I was able to turn off the waterworks. Mr. Sharpton handed me a hanky and I wiped my eyes with it. “How did you know?” I asked. My voice sounded all deep and weird, like a foghorn.
“Once you were spotted, all it took was a little rudimentary detective work.”
“Yeah, but how was I spotted?”
“We have certain people—a dozen or so in all—who look for fellows and gals like you,” he said. “They can actually see fellows and gals like you, Dink, the way certain satellites in space can see nuclear piles and power-plants. You folks show up yellow. Like matchflames is how 235
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this one spotter described it to me.” He shook his head and gave a wry little smile. “I’d like to see something like that just once in my life. Or be able to do what you do. Of course, I’d also like to be given a day—
just one would be fine—when I could paint like Picasso or write like Faulkner.”
I gaped at him. “Is that true? There are people who can see—”
“Yes. They’re our bloodhounds. They crisscross the country—and all the other countries—looking for that bright yellow glow. Looking for matchheads in the darkness. This particular young woman was on Route 90, actually headed for Pittsburgh to catch a plane home—
to grab a little R-and-R—when she saw you. Or sensed you. Or whatever it is they do. The finders don’t really know themselves, any more than you really know what you did to Skipper. Do you?”
“What—”
He raised a hand. “I told you that you wouldn’t get all the answers you’d like—this is something you’ll have to decide on the basis of what you feel, not on what you know—but I can tell you a couple of things. To begin with, Dink, I work for an outfit called the Trans Corporation. Our job is getting rid of the world’s Skipper Brannigans—
the big ones, the ones who do it on a grand scale. We have company headquarters in Chicago and a training center in Peoria . . . where you’ll spend a week, if you agree to my proposal.”
I didn’t say anything then, but I knew already I was going to say yes to his proposal. Whatever it was, I was going to say yes.
“You’re a tranny, my young friend. Better get used to the idea.”
“What is it?”
“A trait. There are folks in our organization who think of what you have . . . what you can do . . . as a talent or an ability or even a kind of glitch, but they’re wrong. Talent and ability are born of trait. Trait is general, talent and ability are specific.”
“You’ll have to simplify that. I’m a high-school dropout, remember.”
“I know,” he said. “I also know that you didn’t drop out because you were stupid; you dropped out because you didn’t fit. In that way, you are like every other tranny I’ve ever met.” He laughed in the sharp way people do when they’re not really amused. “All twenty-one of 236
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them. Now listen to me, and don’t play dumb. Creativity is like a hand at the end of your arm. But a hand has many fingers, doesn’t it?”
“Well, at least five.”
“Think of those fingers as abilities. A creative person may write, paint, sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives them life. And just as all hands are basically the same—form follows function—all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the fingers join.
“Trans is also like a hand. Sometimes its fingers are called precognition, the ability to see the future. Sometimes they’re postcognition, the ability to see the past—we have a guy who knows who killed John F. Kennedy, and it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald; it was, in fact, a woman. There’s telepathy, pyrokinesis, telempathy, and who knows how many others. We don’t know, certainly; this is a new world, and we’ve barely begun to explore its first continent. But trans is different from creativity in one vital way: it’s much rarer. One person in eight hundred is what occupational psychologists call ‘gifted.’ We believe that there may only be one tranny in each eight million people.”
That took my breath away—the idea that you might be one in eight million would take anybody’s breath away, right?
“That’s about a hundred and twenty for every billion ordinary folks,” he said. “We think there may be no more than three thousand so-called trannies in the whole world. We’re finding them, one by one.
It’s slow work. The sensing ability is fairly low-level, but we still only have a dozen or so finders, and each one takes a lot of training. This is a hard calling . . . but it’s also fabulously rewarding. We’re finding trannies and we’re putting them to work. That’s what we want to do with you, Dink: put you to work. We want to help you focus your talent, sharpen it, and use it for the betterment of all mankind. You won’t be able to see any of your old friends again—there’s no security risk on earth like an old friend, we’ve found—and there’s not a whole lot of cash in it, at least to begin with, but there’s a lot of satisfaction, and what I’m going to offer you is only the bottom rung of what may turn out to be a very high ladder.”
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“Don’t forget those fringe benefits,” I said, kind of raising my voice on the last word, turning it into a question, if he wanted to take it that way.
He grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s right,” he said. “Those famous fringe benefits.”
By then I was starting to get excited. My doubts weren’t gone, but they were melting away. “So tell me about it,” I said. My heart was beating hard, but it wasn’t fear. Not anymore. “Make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
And that’s just what he did.
XI
Three weeks later I’m on an airplane for the first time in my life—
and what a way to lose your cherry! The only passenger in a Lear 35, listening to Counting Crows pouring out of quad speakers with a Coke in one hand, watching as the altimeter climbs all the way to forty-two thousand feet. That’s over a mile higher than most commercial jetliners fly, the pilot told me. And a ride as smooth as the seat of a girl’s underpants.
I spent a week in Peoria, and I was homesick. Really homesick. Surprised the shit out of me. There were a couple of nights when I even cried myself to sleep. I’m ashamed to say that, but I’ve been truthful so far, and don’t want to start lying or leaving things out now.
Ma was the least of what I missed. You’d think we would have been close, as it was “us against the world,” in a manner of speaking, but my mother was never much for loving and comforting. She didn’t whip on my head or put out her cigarettes in my armpits or anything like that, but so what? I mean, big whoop. I’ve never had any kids, so I guess I can’t say for sure, but I somehow don’t think being a great parent is about the stuff you didn’t do to your rug monkeys. Ma was always more into her friends than me, and her weekly trip to the beauty shop, and Friday nights out at the Reservation. Her big ambition in life was to win a twenty-number Bingo and drive home 238
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in a brand-new Monte Carlo. I’m not sitting on the pity-pot, either.
I’m just telling you how it was.
Mr. Sharpton called Ma and told her that I’d been chosen to intern in the Trans Corporation’s advanced computer training and placement project, a special deal for non-diploma kids with potential.
The story was actually pretty believable. I was a shitty math student and froze up almost completely in classes like English, where you were supposed to talk, but I was always on good terms with the school computers. In fact, although I don’t like to brag (and I never let any of the faculty in on this little secret), I could program rings around Mr.