She thought her life was a careful plan. The UDC post one more step up the ladder.
6.THIS WAS BEFORE SHE KNEW HERSELF
Now her plan was Roger Kent; when his service ended going somewhere quiet and being for him. He talked about a farm, he talked about selling trucks, he talked. Now he was gone, and she felt bitterly unanchored to this dreaming they had shared. She was his road woman, up out of this place her worth to him had been one phone call. Where was he? Alan was right: Roger hadn't asked her to go with him, and he could have. She finally let the thought: He might not come back. Boys get on bikes and go off with boys, and promises seem far away and silly.
+SHE LIVED on West 38th, State Res, protected by cops and military, GuvHaus, the helipad kids in her building called it. These whiz kids, who worked the State landing site at the park, stopped inviting her to the roof to smoke after Roger came around. They'd wine and dope, and watch humvees, and put bets on how long the lights would stay on, and on the nights the neighborhood power went down, they would lay against the rough tar of the roof and wait for the stars to color in as light realigned to old bearings. They would chant as if Indians out of the island's biography corresponded to visible stars.
+THE ONE time Roger went to the roof was the night the 88s caught Saucy J. The 88s worked Hudson Street. Roger admired them. Rare for soldiers to respect PMC units. The 88s were tough, nearly honest, and obsessed with Saucy J, the biggest name on the street before Henny Penny touched down.
The story was Saucy J killed girls before the change had come, a tabloid legend in the old days. When all what happened happened, his story was trucked away with the bricks. No reason to read up on sicko victim to victim killers when people burned in the streets. Until the first cop got cashiered dirty, left out front of St. Bernard's on 14; the base camp for a long-standing Jersey outfit of pigs. The kid was one of theirs: his hands and feet chewed off, his skull flattened, the flesh splayed, refolded around it, so that he looked like a fish staring into the sidewalk drain. Two more showed up like this, and it might have kept going except Saucy J frigged big, picking Texas Pete for victim three rather than Jersey Mike.
Roger held on to her up on the roof. The Helipad Kids wanted to know Saucy J.
Where'd they get him?
Feeling the kinship of shared drugs, Roger told them:
They walked down Eighth from St. Bernards, and shot every bug they saw until someone told. These were the bugs they had let hang out, their launderers, the scavengers they traded supplies with. The 88's called us. To say they were doing it. It was shoot it up with them, or don't. We chose "don't". Killed twenty Bugs before the Bugs gave him up. He was living in the Path tunnels. They went down and got him. The Bugs watched twenty die before they realized the Eights weren't stopping. These bugs didn't want to give him up. They love Saucy J. Love cops chewed up.
One of the Helipad Kids asked, Did you see him?
J? I did. Long nails. Covered in shit. He's tiny. I don't know how he killed them. It was him, the face from the posters. If you go down to Hudson his head is hanging on their front door. There's a candle burning in his mouth.
MAGGIE WENT up to the roof at dawn of this the day she would go down town to meet Henny Newton, the second day of Roger Kent's absence. Heli-Kids were sleeping on old beds they had dragged up from empty apartments. It was an orphanage. A Tetris screen of old cots. High above them were the advertisements of the closing age as guidelines on what product to scavenge:
Drink COLA ROBA! COURAGE, BALLS, AND GUILE!
She crawled into bed with a Helipad Kid she knew had gone safely homosexual in the year he had been skilleted. Gay for the stay, indeed. His sex drive nothin'd by her previously, she cuddled with him. Raccon Kid she called him behind his back, big stupid kind eyes. She cuddled, he was oblivious, and she counted sodas in the air.
0 comments:
Post a Comment