The news gave up the name of the arresting officer, Officer Ernest Quinlan Anderson, and how easy is it to learn that Officer Anderson works at the First District Station, and Brian Castle can get ahold of pretty much anyone he wants to, and in less than four minutes he gets ahold of Officer Anderson.
“Ernie Anderson,” says Officer Anderson, when he picks up the phone.
Brian Castle, sixty-one and for ten long years a skin cancer survivor, is not a man who wastes time. He wants to speak about the aardvark, where Anderson thinks Wilson got it, but Anderson says he can’t say much other than what the papers have already reported: the aardvark was delivered to Congressman Wilson via FedEx, and he’s been on the phone all morning with FedEx.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me if you found anything,” Brian Castle asks, and Anderson, axe for Wilson still grinding, confesses that he has found little so far because Wilson’s phone, it was totally locked, and all he knows is that the delivery was made to 2486 Asher Place yesterday morning, August 2nd. Although Wilson said it was FedEx, FedEx cannot seem to locate the driver, Anderson says. Nor can they even locate the twelve-digit FedEx number, which is strange—and the package might have been deposited in person at the night drop-off on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, he says, the only FedEx shipping center which allows such large in-person deposits, but it is the shipping center with one of the lowest customer service rankings, and by god if Anderson hasn’t tried to get something, anything, out of the two twenty-two-year-old heroin addicts working the late shift the night before last, the ones who would’ve witnessed the drop-off.
“I’m about to head down there in person,” Anderson says, if Brian Castle would like to come along, to which Brian Castle replies, yep, he sure does.
The two men agree to meet there in under two hours, and this is how forces begin to collide. But you cannot know that forces are colliding as you are waving at cameras, as Toby Castle is waving, as you give Toby a kiss on the cheek and grin as wide as you ever have grinned, still waving, from the front stoop until you hear a high-pitched, near-primordial cry, and look beyond the cameras to the chubby black boy who, moments ago, was dangling upside down on the monkey bars but now, unstable for all his belly weight, has dropped, shoulder-first, to the ground.
The boy has landed sort of sideways. Like, on his head.
The photographers, they all rush to assist him, and seconds later they shout, “Congressman Wilson! Bring him inside!” and now the heat is on for you to bring the dumb fat kid into your house.
You are a professional. Even though you are not generous, you are a professional, one who understands that one must always appear generous, and you have had to work extremely hard all your life to appear as generous, openhearted as you do now, as the photographers lift the boy from the ground and carry him, Christ-like, up your front stoop. “Geez, he isn’t bleeding or anything,” slips out, but the reporters and paparazzi don’t hear you, they are still flashing their bulbs at the boy as he’s hauled through your green front door with the brass lion’s-head knocker on live TV, straight into your living room and onto your canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa, and Toby, she goes to the kitchen and runs a whole bunch of your expensive flour sacks right under the faucet as the boy is writhing on your sofa, howling in pain, and everyone’s freaking out, tending to him like he’s a wounded apostle, looking to see if the mother’s outside, if anyone’s with him, but the mother has let the boy play on the playground alone, and honestly, who even does that anymore?