Coral

***Coral turned back to his walk, the sweat on his brow cooling his skin despite the 102 degree heat.  "I'm sorry you don't have any more time for me to help you deepen that understanding," his smile was one of satisfaction.  It was the easy smile of a peace corps outreach officer who hadn't fixed the world, but who had helped, perhaps, to raise the wall of a home for an uncivilized tribesman in need of outside help.  As he walked his footsteps fell in time with the sound of the shovels; one splitting the dry and sun stiffened Earth, the other splitting bone and flesh.  "At least now we understand each other."***










"What sort of person do you believe that makes me?" Coral's question fell with the simplicity of a white tarp over a hard edged sculpture before a public gallery opening. Christian was already privileged to be at the press showing. He already knew what was under the rustling plastic, but the dry and blood cracked skin of his lips crushed tighter together and turned inward and clung to his teeth like criminals to their whipping posts, mid lashing. "The thought must have crossed your mind at some point over the last 12 hours. Perhaps a little voice in your ear that you were able to ignore for some time through the various inconveniences you've imposed on me must now be both asking and answering this question in various ways, or am I mistaken?" Christian's jaw worked like the driving pistons on a train slipping backward with too much to tow and not nearly enough weight or steam to motivate it all forward. "I really would like to hear it from that mouth. It would entertain me just a little bit as I've had a fairly stiff evening, and on your account."

Coral's hands were not those of a butcher, but were the thick palmed hands of a man who never backed down from a handshake. They were the knotted hands of a man whose idea of a peach rubber stress relieving squeeze doll was a black leather heavy bag and canvas knuckle tape. They were the kind of hands that were as comfortable laying his looping signature into the dotted lines of an aerospace contract as they were laying that same scrawl into the lines of gaming agreements that were never meant for public eyes. He brought his fingertips and thumbs together into a triangle, like a small bull horn, in front of his mouth, but did not raise his voice. "You had so much to say to my partners, not long ago. My associates and I were beginning to grow almost fond of your voice, and you should know you really do sound excellent over the wires. You would make a good radio man," a snorting chuckle came from the sharp tuxedoed, but tieless, man who sat at Coral's right elbow.

Christian's consciousness was swimming in thick oil and he could not understand if the snort had more to do with the fine sand that kicked intermittently or if it was an internal joke. "So, come on. I will not relieve or excuse you from this wonderful place until I get an answer," Coral leaned his narrow shoulders forward and rested his elbows on his knees, the thick and studded gold ring on one of his middle fingers glinting in the brilliance of the noon day light. His thick eye brows rested easy, shading into dusk his deep set large muddy jade eyes.

"I think his tongue is fallen out from the whisk over here," Lolly Boy offered in the bits of sand scratched silence. He crossed his arms, the square and junk food puffed features of his face skewing sourly around the corners of his wide and thin mouth. "We shouldn't have strapped him to the hood when we had so far as a ways to ride out to this dump," he said with more huff and hiss as he glanced to their left where the black pencil of Coral's limousine stood wavering in the hot, stripped down, air. He uncrossed his arms and wiped his sweating palms on the black and finely creased knees of his tuxedo before rising to his feet. "Can we just pop him already? I'm sweating like a bald vagina at an S&M festival," he rested his hand on the metal seat back of his folding chair before snatching it back, more disgusted than embarrassed.

"No, no wait. I think he's about to say something," Coral held a single quieting finger up to Lolly Boy and drew himself up to the very edge of his seat. Christian leaned his head back to relieve the sticking sweat between his chin and neck and to breath a little easier. Lolly Boy hadn't laid a finger on him, but his patience was thinning and his 1911 harness was beginning to itch. Christian's eyes opened into the sun and then closed again. He fought to remember the last twenty hours.

"You've got to shop this thing," Doug laughed. "For Christ's sake would you think about it for a minute? The man own's 49 percent of the private land holdings available for airfields. Officially. Unofficially he owns something like 90 percent and you mean to tell me that someone, from his office, is willing to give you that information plus fixing the gaming laws and interstate exemptions and you are not going to shop this story?" Christian had to hold the phone away from his ear as the speaker crackled at it's guffawing limits.

"Look, I don't even know where I would start. The guy said he came to me because I'm someone he could trust and-"

"That means he knows you're a nobody, Christian. Of course he's not going to contact Julie Dureese or Eric Doles. The story would be front page in no time and, whoever he is, he'd be outed in days, maybe weeks. That's how things run around here in Anneslow."

"This could really be it then?"

"Your big break?"

"My big break," he couldn't help smiling his hard toothed smile when he smelt a real story looming. Normally the manager would route him off of the big ones or the chief would take his content and hand it over to someone with more savvy, but every couple of years he stumbled on one with not a feathered cap in sight and it was his to break or burn up trying.

"This is as big as it gets. Take it to some other papers and see what they'd be willing to give you for exclusive content as whoever that douche is brings it to you. And then," there was a pause as Doug chewed and swallowed something crunchy, "and then if they don't give you what you want you take their offer straight to Anneslow Development Consortium and you say 'hey D Con, I want what I want or it's game over for you and your buddies' right?"

"Sounds like a plan," Christian laughed. Fourteen years as a junior writer and field journalist were about to pay off big. "Tell you what, when I get this done, I'm going out and I'm buying a round for the entire junior staff."

"So, what? You, me, Gordy, and Fischer?"

"Hell yes."

"Big spender," they both laughed.

Christian coughed hard, the force of the air splitting his dry lips like bread knives through a napkin. The blood dried almost instantly. He could still feel the misalignment of his upper most ribs where his kicked in apartment door connected with his body and sent him sliding across his carpet so fast it burned the skin where his hip hit the floor first. Four men, dressed as casually as if they were on their way to a pick up ball game, crowded through the gaping space in a clump of humanity that seemed to divide into four separate entities right before his spinning vision. They were all shouting for something, for some reason, but his ears were still ringing even as several more sharper attired men entered and paid him nothing more than a passing glance before heading off to various rooms in his apartment. Their mouths were silent and gaping black holes still even as the first Maglite came across his nose and the world rinsed away into darkness.

"He's not saying a thing Danny. Can we stop with this time wasting already? I've been up for twenty two hours at this nonsense," Lolly Boy jostled Coral's shoulder in earnest, but he still held up his single finger for a moment's silence, still focusing intently on Christians crushed paper mouth. "I got my gun right here, Danny. Won't take but a second and we can get on with business and the business of the business we do," he flipped the black bodied hand gun from inside his tuxedo jacket and waggled it's butt in Coral's peripheral vision.

"What sort of a man does that make me, Christian?" His voice was at a whisper. "Does that make me the sort of man who takes something like a suggestion as crude as yours as a deeply personal threat?" Lolly Boy hissed a sigh of frustration before jamming the pistol back in it's holster. He walked a short circle, his hands knotted atop his sand mussed hair before he turned and, with a jerking movement that almost sent him to his seat, kicked his folding chair end over end a yard or two away.

"We have been out here on this lake bed for twenty minutes in the middest piece of the worst August I can think of, Danny! It took to get up here four hours of driving in a line straighter than an OCD coke head's hobby. Four," he held up four thin fingers and wiggled them like a chorus of puppets. "He gets it! Can we tune up this ego business for a minute or five and turn on the rest of our lives." He fumbled through his pockets, his loose shirt coming looser with sweat stains, before yanking a cellular phone free. "I got no bars, Danny. None. Do you know who I'm missing calls from? My fucking art dealer, Danny. And my fucking drug dealer. And I can't trust either of them to shoot straight without me guiding them. So fuck this boy and let's move it on, okay?" Coral didn't move an inch.

"For Christ's sake," Lolly Boy turned hard on his heal and walked stiffly, hands deep in his pockets, against the gusting wind and high sun toward the slithering black limousine and the stubby sedan parked behind it.

"Mr. Coral," a pair of broad shouldered men in yellow polo shirts and jeans walked casually within earshot several moments later, shovels on their shoulders. One of the men picked up Lolly Boy's upturned chair and folded it neatly before laying it flat on the ground. "Mr. Coral, you've got a teleconference coming up this evening. You should be getting back so you've got some time to look your best," the other man handed Coral a pearlescent casing. Coral took it, his lip sneering slightly as he stared into and through the man crumbling in the chair opposite him.

"Thank you, Steven. I appreciate the reminder." He opened the case, withdrew a pair of broad sunglass as dark as his own eyes and set them on the bridge of his cliff cut nose. He rose to his feet and dusted himself off in a few slick movements before buttoning his coat at his waist. He took a single long stride toward his limousine where the thin dark dash of Lolly Boy now stood like a peg in a long dark slab of drifting wood, before he turned back to the two polo shirted men and Christian and said, "perhaps all you wanted was to go and play reporter. Perhaps that makes me a petty man, but it's the man petty enough to tend to each and every dial and lever and unseen wheel of Anneslow that keeps this city purring. Not just for me, but for you and the news service and little Timmy at his cash register and little Jinny at the strip bar in the Wide Brim Casino and everybody else in between."

Coral turned back to his walk, the sweat on his brow cooling his skin despite the 102 degree heat. "I'm sorry you don't have any more time for me to help you deepen that understanding," his smile was one of satisfaction. It was the easy smile of a peace corps outreach officer who hadn't fixed the world, but who had helped, perhaps, to raise the wall of a home for an uncivilized tribesman in need of outside help. As he walked his footsteps fell in time with the sound of the shovels; one splitting the dry and sun stiffened Earth, the other splitting bone and flesh. "At least now we understand each other."