INSIDE THE CHURCH men made of themselves forgotten icons: standing at each side of the hull of the church, up on cobbled ramparts, mounted weapons poked through bashed out glass, moonlight dripping in. And three men lapping the improvised corridor they made from the church down to the fire station.
Maggie had never been in a church in her life, but she gambled the Lead Beard had, and would be some percent more honest now that they walked an aisle.
He walked her beyond the altar, to stone steps down into a gloom.
This is the rectory. Come on. He said.
I've never been in a church.
His eyes darker than the dark, his thin wispy eyebrows furrowing under a moonbeam. She came closer looking for the rest of his face, and he bumped into her as he pulled back on the door, and opened it.
THE TUNNEL they entered, strung with white Christmas lights.
Not in a church. Is this the undercroft?
Says it's a rectory on the wall.
MEN WERE ABOUT, playing cards at long wooden benches, napping on cots. It was a pleasant smell down here, like split firewood; flowered tarragon hung and drying from baling wire nailed into the ceiling at each side of the hall.
Men nodded at the Lead Beard. And smiled at her.
They ducked in under another doorway into what was the pantry: two long tables were walled in by twin colannades of stacked cans. Gooey pastas and beets, scavenged over time.
He plucked up two cans with one hand, and sat down with them. Popped them open, and pushed one in front of her. He pulled ravioli with his fingers.
Eat. He said.
What's your name?
He smiled. Got up. Back over to his cans.
You look like a Lance. Sven?
He showed her baby bottles of vodka.
Jim. He said.
She felt courageous and in charge, getting his name, and so reached into her coat, and got a stick of dope. She made to light it, and looked over for his reaction.
He was gulping booze this Jim. A fox-eyed, red-bearded Jim.
My Daddy says booze is for smart people looking to get dumb, and dope is for dumb people looking to get smart. He said.
Your Daddy sounds like a rube.
A doctor. And a drunk.
She put the marijuana away. Picked a ravioli like a dead jellyfish, and chewed on it. She unscrewed her vodka bottle, and swigged it down. It should have been with the beets.
The walk. Just got to do what my guys tell you, and we'll get you there. They'll wait until your business is done, and walk you back. Sound good?
What is this business to be done?
My job's walking you.
Jim watched her hands. His eyes went lazy again.
Why did you come here? She asked him. What is this to you?
What?
All of this.
It's work to me.
Tell me something real. Come on, Jim.
No thanks. Not more than I said already.
So tell me why Roger lied to me about being with you on Saucy J.
He found another baby booze in his coat pocket: Ain't like he told you he ran the job; just wanted you to see him as man enough to stand with who did. It ain't that bad a lie. Roger's an okay dude, it just wouldn't have happened -- It's like this right here: up at the park those outfits stand guard, they ain't walking down here because down here their advantages fall away. These bugs down here in the garbage are clever. We don't walk south-east-north popping rounds off, yelling and cussing -- we walk a careful path. We don't fight south of this church. Those boys come down and start it all up again in the hive with these bugs, the shit is going awry, and they'll have to call up the hill, and then they'll be in trouble, because, as is, the bugs let them dump the garbage, so the Army leaves them alone, the ones that live in the shit. They swat the ones get too close to the park and where y'all live up there, but they don't want to stroll down here less they're in a dumptruck. Bugs that live in shit get shit-smart; they like it. You know who dozes the garbage? The bugs. Smell it down here. That's advantage number one: they like the smell -- so, "come on then, give us that garbage" -- that's fortification, and we're building it for them. They own it. Now you take Henny; he goes straight away to it, now he's down a year and what else, and they're funneling him supplies, but they CAN'T check in on him, cuz they can't climb the dunghill without starting it up with the real bugs. Our bugs up here, they're passive how they hate us: they protect Saucy, shit like this, but they ain't gonna fight - they chuck a frag in a window once in awhile, what have you, but they still living Uptown, they're tuned in to Skillet economy, like the noodle Japs; down at the dump they hump a different stroke. And that's why High Office is looking a new way to Henny, and that's why they asked us to walk -- We know the path. You and the Roger-types sit uptown, and chew your noodles, and think you're real sweet rebels. Shit. Henny is surrounded by a mountain range of garbage, and the kind of sickos that can live in it. So they want a meeting, and for whatever reason you got picked for the role. What else can they do? Drop a bomb because they got conned by Hollywood Henny? The answer is Roger and them got no experience with the south-east-north. Stick with guard duty; let us squat and buffer.
WITHIN THE HOUR Jim introduced her to her guides, another six handsome beards, very polite boys -- younger than her, these. Weapons loaded and lined, they didn't exit from a secret passage through the undercroft, just walked back out the front, and down the road. Stopped where the camp lights finally failed to reach, and there these boys had their cigarettes.
AN HOUR after this they were single-file and crouched along a path of rubble that ascended up into the second story of what was once a banking center; they got in under the lean-to of the cracked wall of the building, crossing under steel columns and exposed rebar like collapsed spinage, bones exposed from flesh rot. And while half the building teetered above them, like a poorly wedged oak tree, the boys nested in the cleft of what had been loan offices, looked east, and pointed Maggie to the backdrop that rose up over the grid: even where much of the city was destroyed, the imprint of buildings remained like squatting patricians at market, a scimitar'round the twinned totems of the garbage dump and that last standing tower.
The pyre of garbage was taller than anything around it save that tower behind it, so that it looked to be sprouting, the one from the other. It rolled out so wide in circumference that they had to have pushed it in over the surviving buildings that had once been there, as if an under-city might passage still beneath the mushroom cap. Landfill, hidden in the old days, now the lone wonder of this world. And truthfully it didn't smell bad, not from here, not to her: the boys were balaclava'd, pinching their noses, but to her the smell how it came over the miles to them smelled sweetly of mixed media, a cram of used-to-bes with little left to rot; it smelled like too many things at once to smell foul: aged pig dung in hay, pine needles, trapped river water, diesel burning off painted wood, and it was such a mix of strange smells she knew from places that should not occur here that it came to her as sensual, natural, and excited the night around her.
Let's go, Maggie. One of them said through his mask.
IT WAS MIDNIGHT, and the boys were her halo through the eastern pockets of the lower city, along the outer perimeter of the dump, along the cow pasture roads, the eldest vestures of the old city. Stubborn huddled brick ghettos papered with light rummage down off the dump in the breezes.
They were creeps in the starlight. None had spoke since the Savings and Loan. Maggie looked around at them; they all watched the road. They were now south of the tower, and here was revealed a trick unseen from uptown: the entire south side of the tower was lit in electricity base to roof; a new face: from Uptown the tower looked like a black splinter, a grade stake in the garbage, but from the south, a majestic scepter silvery and pinstriped with pirated juice.
Then a strange plinking sound strange to her and familiar and close. Her ring tone!
The Little Beards all dropped to knees, and one grabbed her, and tugged her off the road; even as she reached in her coat for the phone, this kid took her to the ground on a clean fragment of sidewalk concrete. He went into her coat, and fast had the phone shut off. He held her there on her stomach. She saw Little Beards fall back into the murk, melt into hiding slots up the road. And they all waited.
How long they waited before the bug came out impossible to know. She didn't know where he came from, it just happened that he was there, a blue torso walking up the center of the road toward them. A light blue coat she could see. Then the long hair wild and filthy springing out all over. Walking very slowly, dragging it's left leg along like it had healed improperly from some injury. And then the bug whistled, a clear walkabout whistle while you work, and once he whistled a Little Beard came jogging up behind him, and cut his throat. The Bug dead dropped like a comedian; on the ground he hacked on blood, and it came out on his blue collar. The Little Beard held him down with a knee on the sternum. Then these methodical Beards were all out from their hide, and dragging the bug away between buildings. And the kid straddling her got off, and let her up. The kid pulled down the balaclava from his mouth, and spit on the road. And rubbed his nostrils.
What are you an idiot? He said in an odd gentle whisper. She was shaking, and he saw it. Go on and smoke your dope. He said. Just a hit.
She did.
Soon enough the others came back. They crouched to memorized positions triangulated around her. And they waited.
When they moved again it was a man a minute, up out of the crouch and down the road slow, then the next, and so as caravanners they made of their old halo a half-mile crucifix, she a lone jewel at it's intersection.
NEAR DAWN, (blue window, not yellow window), came down, they crept through the gates of an old stable house, and ducked into what had once been a horse stall, and their, huddled in around Maggie, the boys had a new round of cigarettes. Then one crept across the yard to the door of the manor. And went inside.
Three cigarettes per man it took for the other to reappear from the house, and jog back over. He reached a hand out to her: Come on then.
He escorted her to the house, and at the door let her go. Here's where we'll wait for you, Maggie. Go on upstairs.
He's here?
Not him.
He clapped her on the arm, and nodded.
Three floors of house above her, and all the windows covered over.
She pulled the door open, and stepped in.
She heard the Little Beard say again, Upstairs.
A LANTERN above her at the turn in a stairwell, glowing. Low ceiling, and a pentagram of shut doors around that stairwell. The lantern was dull metal cupping the glass cylinder, and heavy for being so small. The first three steps she took beyond where the lantern was left, and then Maggie no longer wanted to do this; felt the sudden bubbling up of fear; fear that was honest, was maybe instinct, that a thing waited above to hurt her. She thought of that short period of her adulthood prior to her father's sickness, when he would beg her to visit him at the highway bar that was his home. It was a sanctuary for him: the slobs inside too busy with their own hiding to sniff around, and ask why a braggart who replied to drink requests in four languages, seen constantly writing in sharp little black notebooks -- why a proud licentiate was sweating into old age passing beers and sweeping crud. When she did visit him, walking into the too cold air conditioning, and the fecal smell of old drunks sitting too long, ran her up with dread; when she saw the ruddy ferret the father had turned into, (such a wiry little man he was), she felt fear for other people that had tangled with him. This was the dread she now felt walking up the stairs of the stable house.
SHE STEPPED off the stair on the second floor. Five more doors. Two left. Two right. One down the middle, open and lamplight inside. She could see part of a bed inside that center room, and as she walked that way she saw a person was in the bed. Lamplight made a cacao glow of the brown sheets. It was the largest man Maggie had ever seen. He watched her come to the doorway; he had pale colorless eyes. He was an old man with hair and beard like thick white fur; strange to see a man so grand, so old. He might have been seven feet tall -- and broad: the sheets, (they were several), could not cover him up; great dirty feet hung out under them, slung one over the other, and off the edge of the bed. He raised two fingers as a wave.
You're this Maggie the boys talk about?
What boys? She whispered.
The scouts. Ones we send. I had a daughter as pretty as you.
Yes. She said, and did not know what she meant after she said it.
I had a daughter. You had a father. And we're all brothers. I'm your brother.
His voice was high. Boyish. He was touching small flowers in his left hand, and still motioning to her with his right.
All brothers. All sisters. I wanted to see you before you go. Get a look at you.
Go?
To the tower.
Why am I going there?
Why? Why climb so high? Why answer with a sigh? You're needed. For a right nasty job.
Henny Newton.
Exactly.
What job?
Not sure.
What's your name?
Oliver.
I don't believe you don't know the job, Oliver.
What can I say. Fine. Henny's no junior officer. He's a senior motherfuck. Get with him, you'll see London; you'll see France --
And?
And what?
And I'll see his --
Let's not talk about that! And he laughed. Maggie. I am meant to walk you up the tower, but, as you see, I am ill. I don't have another trip in me. But I will tell you a story that will be better protection to you than even me -- even when I was young. Come and sit. Let me see you closer..
His eyes were filmy, and fixed so dispassionately upon the flowers in his hand that she knew she should not.
No. I don't think so.
I was a man. Do you know? A man beyond the concept. A man before men ruined the meaning of the word. While the word-coiners crawled, I walked. I strode. I had a daughter, Maggie.
Yes.
I had a daughter, and Henny Newton loved her. That can never be forgiven.
Why?
Tragedy is his meat. Where he can't smell it out, he fabricates. Will you sit and listen to my story?
I will.
You're brave. My daughter was brave.
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