Jim introduced her to her guides. Polite boys smiling at her as they lined their vests with magazines. 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 crouched single-file along a path of rubble that ascended into the second story of what was once a bank. They got in under 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, pointed Maggie east to the backdrop that rose up over the grid. Even where much of the city was destroyed, the imprint of buildings remained. And there was the garbage dump, a mountain. And there was the 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. 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 spots 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. Walking very slowly, dragging its 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. On the ground the bug hacked on blood. 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.
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 its intersection.
|
0 comments:
Post a Comment