The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  15

  RC was cremating Clarence, he was in a groove, he was a juggernaut in gym shorts. As he took his sixth straight point with a fader in the corner, Clarence slapped his thigh and laughed: “What’s happening to me?” In reply, RC served a high hard one. Clarence pivoted and stumbled, flailing at the ball, letting the score advance to 9-1. RC drilled his next serve flat off the wall and back at Clarence, who threw up his arms to protect his face. “Time! Time!” RC bounced on his feet to keep his rhythm going and watched impersonally as his opponent dropped to his knees. “Your game,” Clarence gasped.

  RC wasn’t even winded. He ripped the Vel off the Cro of his handball gloves and stretched his punished fingers. From the other courts came grunts and rumbles, heavy shuffling, the erratic ponk! Ponk! of racquetballs, squash balls, handballs. Clarence was still kneeling and shaking his head, as if heaping abuse on himself for losing could make him a winner. He rose resignedly. “Let’s get cleaned up, Off-sir.”

  They climbed through the little door and walked down the passageway single file to the showers. You had to pay for fresh towels here. Clarence took two from the man in the cage and gave one to RC. There were red threads in his eyes. “Played a damn fine match,” he said. He turned back to the man in the cage. “My brother-in-law played a damn fine match, Corey.”

  RC would have sworn the look he got from Corey was dirty.

  He stepped under a shower head and faced the wall, as usual, to avoid the sight of Clarence’s layered back flesh and the profile of his hairy gut. As the hot water poured, he blinked and rotated his head, his vision like a movie where the cameraman dropped the camera, tumbling, blurring together glimpses of tiled floor and reaching steam, toes and elbows, a third man showering two heads over. The sound track was courtesy of Clarence, who was singing.

  …All dem barges inner day

  Filled it lumber callin hay

  An ev-er-y inch of the way we go

  From Albany to-oo Buf-fuh-uh-lo, OH!

  Today was the fourth day of February, which would make tonight the fourth night for RC and Annie in their new apartment in University City. They’d moved on Wednesday with one of Clarence’s trucks, and by now they’d emptied all the boxes except the ones with broken toys at the bottom, or summer equipment, the barbecue tools, the snorkel and fins. RC couldn’t complain about the new building itself. There was a nice mix of people in it. But the footsteps above him and the voices downstairs were busy and foreign, and the rooms were just rooms. He felt like a TV actor sitting at a table that was plunked down wherever, using forks and spoons from a box of props. His actions lacked smoothness, he couldn’t make things work the way they’d worked a week ago. Last night, when he and Annie were watching Saturday Night Live on the living-room couch, he’d reached over and taken off her glasses. Immediately the TV laughed, and Annie grabbed her glasses back and put them on crooked. She straightened them. “I can’t see.”

  “What do you need to see for?” RC flopped onto the bare floor and stuck his head in the middle of the screen. “It’s me,” he said. “Live from U-City.”

  Annie leaned to one side. “Richie get out of the way.”

  “We have some very special guests tonight—”

  “Get out of the way.” She sat tight in the gray light, her legs folded up underneath her and her arms crossed across her sweat-shirt. She’d been tired for two months, ever since she took a job with one of the new companies in the old neighborhood. She’d learned word processing. Words like: I’m fatigued, RC. There’s a psychological toll. We’re a two-career household now…. But if she was fatigued, RC was even more so. He’d come home at 10:00 after a long shift on patrol and two hours of desk work.

  “So OK,” he said. “OK.”

  “Richie don’t.”

  “Hey, don’t mind me.”

  He put on his coat. Annie kept watching the TV while they played games with the blame. She asked him where he was going, and he remembered that they weren’t in the old neighborhood anymore. They were in U-City. He didn’t know where he was going. “Walking,” he said.

  Annie stuck her tongue out at him, and he almost laughed, which was the idea; his mouth twitched, but the laugh came out as a cough. “You get some sleep,” he said. “You get all nice and rested.”

  Outside, he hurried up the street. After a few blocks, as the buildings grew larger, institutional, he started seeing students. In the few lighted windows there were test tubes, blackboards, gray enamel instruments, computer screens. Girls in jeans and long wool coats pulled a little closer together when they passed him. He veered down a path among trees, away from the buildings, and cut across the snow on the big front lawn that led down to Skinker. At the top of the hill, to his right, stood the crenellated towers you could see from the golf course when the leaves were down. He reached the walk that split the lawn in two, and stopped and leaned against a tree. The shower poured on him, the water so hot it felt cold. Clarence changed key.

  Ask any mermaid you happen to see

  What’s the best tuna?

  (Wah wa-wah wah-wah?)

  CHICKEN OF THE SEA.

  RC was eighteen years old when he finally licked his older brother Bradley wrestling. They had a mat, a mattress they’d saved from a hide-a-bed broken by him and Bradley using it as a trampoline. It lay on the floor of the storeroom off the garage in their mother’s house. Bradley was a varsity wrestler at school and used the room as his workout salon. When he dropped out of school to be assistant manager at a Kroger, he kept the salon. Besides the mat, he had a set of barbells he’d found two-thirds complete by the side of a road, and a bench press he’d bought with the part of his paycheck he didn’t hand over to their mother. The room’s two windows, looking into the dark garage, were filled with his beercan collection. Under a loose floorboard was a Sterno can that never ran out of dope, and all around the baseboards ran a white dusting of DDT from a rotten cardboard can off a shelf in the garage. DD-Tox was the brand name. The dying bugs in the picture on the can were black with white eyes.

  It was June. Bradley had taken to sleeping in the little room and partying there with his buddies. The transistor, always tuned to KATZ, was playing posthumous Otis Redding on the Sunday afternoon when RC crossed through their back yard, past the nasturtiums his mother tried to make grow every summer, past five kids’ worth of towels and underwear, the netless hoop and Brad’s Dodge, and knocked on the wall. He needed a room for the night.

  “What for?” Bradley asked.

  “Fiona.”

  “Mama won’t like that.”

  “Mama won’t know.”

  Bradley had a perverse reverence for certain rules. He smiled. “You can take my car keys.”

  “I want a room.” RC was a determined kid. He had plans, images of scenes, how they should go.

  “I’ll rassle you for it.”

  “What’s it to you, Brad? What’s one night?”

  “I’ll rassle you for it.”

  They kicked the magazines off the mat and stripped to their underpants. RC got points for a takedown, but they weren’t counting. On, the mat, his fingers sought the borders of his brother’s rounded muscles, any groove or bone or ligament to get a grip on. He locked the crook of his arm in the crook of Bradley’s knee and pushed with all his might, his neck bending and his cheeks to Bradley’s ribs and his lungs filling with the smell, scalpy and strong, which he’d thought was Bradley’s distinctive smell, the smell of the sheets in the bunk above him, until he turned twelve and started to smell that way himself. Bradley had never looked pretty in wrestling meets. His style was defensive, the turtle’s tactic of stomach flush with the ground and back unassailable. It didn’t look like the way a man should wrestle; the other school would murmur and boo him until, when his opponent changed grips, Bradley exploded, often lifting the boy clear off the mat and heaving backwards, pinning him immediately. So RC was wary. He got Bradley to his side and turned him around in a full circle. The mat’s buttons tore at
his skin. He thought Bradley’s puffing was just suppressed laughter, he thought Bradley wasn’t trying, and then suddenly, for the first time in his life, he had both his brother’s shoulders on the mat and words were coming out his mouth, four, five, SIX, SEVEN, triumphant and surprised, as if he’d won the room purely by chance, and he realized Bradley had been fighting after all.

  Bradley giggled a frightening thin giggle, slapped the mat, pointed. “You beat me, bro!” His eyes were beaded slashes. “You beat me clean.”

  That night, while his mother and sisters slept, RC wrestled with Fiona like a real man in a real bed. With space to roll in, smells and liquids and limbs could intermingle. He licked yeasty, vinegary, salty flavors off her belly (in fifteen years she’d be obese, a teller at a Mercantile branch that RC avoided), his tongue gliding without friction and then lodging in her navel. She scooted into him, making noise. He closed his fingers over her mouth and bent them backwards. Sex is in the mind, RC. Later on he watched her fall asleep. The room was stuffy as a jar, and looking at Fiona’s rump and shoulders and neck, he saw how pretty girls, without changing, might not be pretty anymore. Just lyin’ there. It was horrible. That these curves would stay curves but empty of meaning. That Annie could be a brittle bitch in glasses, too boring to even fight with. He put on his shorts and went out walking in the alleys, through ragweed and rodents. The soles of his bare feet were thick enough to take the chips of broken glass.

  Somebody’s dog barked.

  It was July, and the garage room was his now, Bradley gone to war. RC smoked through the contents of the Sterno can with new girls and took shit from the activists for not getting involved. It was September, October, November, and Bradley, without seeing action, became a number. Drowned, in ten feet of water, in an ambushed APC.

  RC’s own number—twenty-two—came up. In February, at Fort Leonard Wood, he overheard a conversation between lieutenants. “He’s a bright kid. His brother came home in a coffin two months ago.” He found himself transferred, a typist, the only black soldier on the infirmary staff. He almost took it for granted. He was a bright kid.

  A pair of headlights towed a car across the lawn, approaching him over the snow. The bumper stopped a yard from his knees. White uniformed men, campus security, got out. “What can we do for you?” one of them said.

  “I’m fine,” RC said. “How ’bout yourself?”

  “You here for any reason?”

  “Just taking a walk, thank you.”

  “You want to get in the car?”

  “I said I was fine, thank you.”

  “We’ll give you a ride.”

  “Thanks but no thanks.”

  “Let’s get in the car.”

  “I’m taking a walk, man. I’m a St. Louis cop.”

  The other man spoke. “Just get in the car, boy.”

  “RC, you be turning into a prune.” Clarence, flushed and dripping, wound his soap-on-a-rope around his wrist. The shower room was quiet, RC’s water splashing in a solitary way. He turned it off, and they went to dress.

  “Something on your mind?” Clarence said.

  “Nah. Just stuff. The move and everything. It’s like we’re some sort of refugees.”

  “You mean the off-sir ain’t happy?”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Never thought I’d see the day.”

  For three months Clarence had been saying he’d never thought he’d see the day. The day the bright kid complained. RC pulled his shoes off. “Are you really sorry I’m a cop?” he said.

  “Me? Sorry?” Clarence went to a mirror and teased his hair. “Sorry? Me?” With a finger he dabbed at the skin behind his ear and along his jawbone. “I’m just sorry if you’re taken in by all the hoopli-do.”

  Sitting on the bench, RC discovered how tired he was. “No hoopli-do,” he said. “I just don’t see what your problem with Jammu is.”

  “Right. You just don’t see. Neither does Ronald, which is the reason I’m so pissed with him.”

  “You pissed with me?”

  Clarence sighed. “You don’t count. It’s Ronald has the mayoral aspirations. He thinks he’s got a future, and in the county too, no less, just because Jammu says he does. I been feeling almost sorry for him. He’s underestimated that woman, same as you’ve overestimated her.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I mean it’s the same thing. She doesn’t give a damn about you or Ronald or anybody else. She’s just a bomb. She’s going off, and it’s us who take the brunt of it, ’cause we happen to live here. Look at the hospital thing. For twenty years we been fighting for Homer G., and now we got a promise from everybody who matters, and this time it’s not just one of Schoemehl’s promises to do a study. They’re really going to save the place, signed sealed and delivered, and now everybody says Hooray! We’re gonna vote for this merger! We’re gonna vote for Jammu and Wesley and Ronald! And shit, RC, they’s so blind. Because that ain’t gonna be our hospital anymore. It’ll be a first-class white folks’ hospital, because that’ll be a first-class white folks’ neighborhood. The whole city’s gonna be first class, but whose it gonna be? You’re already in U-City. You’re already gone. You think you ever gonna make it back? You’re in the county now. You think a merger’s gonna do you a damn bit of good? But you’re still a city cop, and I bet you, RC, I bet you, you’ve been thinking it be a good idea to vote yes in April, because Jammu says so and her word is law. Am I right?”

  RC pulled his pants on. “You know I ain’t even registered, Clarence.”

  Every time it looked as if they might talk about RC’s life, Clarence turned it into politics. Just like the Panthers fifteen years ago, just like everybody, always. All the things that happened to him, floating into his present out of what had been the future, all the death and moving, the jobs and breaks good and bad, the turns of his life—these all had to be part of something bigger. You weren’t allowed to have a life that belonged to you unless you belonged to the majority. It wasn’t fair. All his life he’d known it wasn’t fair, and he’d tried to ignore it, tried to play the man of independent means. Only now did he see what Clarence and the rest of them were driving at.

  Get in the car, boy.

  He wondered, Why me?

  The runt month, February, half over before it started, saw the beginnings of a battle for public opinion in St. Louis. All the ingredients were at hand. There were two sides. They were committed to fight. They had the personnel. They had the materiel. They were opposed to each other. But seldom in the history of warfare had a battle been fought for a more dubious piece of ground.

  What would happen if the city and county merged? The few definite answers—the Republicans would suffer, West County would be bridled and broken, Chief Jammu would eat the Missouri Democrats for breakfast, four thousand county employees for lunch, and the $200 million county budget for dinner—could not be mentioned in public argument. They required swaddling in phrases, and here the war machine really began to balk. The Globe-Democrat warned that a merger (“this nonsense”) could unbalance the regional economy disastrously. Martin Probst warned that a merger (“unrealistic thinking”) would do nothing at all, not even enough to justify the cost of a special election. Chief Jammu maintained that it (“this godsend”) would rationalize local government at the expense of nothing but unfairness. Ronald Struthers, more cautious, admitted that some unfairness might linger, but promised his constituents that for once they wouldn’t get the short end of the stick. Mayor Pete Wesley likewise ignored the fears of countyites; he said a merger would free the city from the burden of many basic services and allow it to regain its rightful ascendancy. Ross Billerica was derisive in every direction, unable to believe that both city and county residents would run the risk of higher taxes by voting in a merger. KSLX-TV and KSLX-Radio disputed Billerica’s logic and announced the ceaselessly interesting results of their weekly phone polls.

  The salvos plopped in the bog, disappeared. Public Opinion, its lily pads and me
andering canals, could not be taken by a frontal assault. And yet the battle affected it. Rumors bubbled to the surface after shells had fallen. Subtle forces of drainage and reflooding were at work, unseen, and at night there were flickerings and flashes in the air that looked like ghosts.

  After a month of quiescence the Osage Warriors had reappeared, this time on the outskirts of the county, where open spaces grew with the square of their distance from downtown. At 3:15 a.m. on January 22, a sequence of detonations collapsed the pillars of a six-lane overpass on U.S. Highway 40 north of Queeny Park. The human toll was relatively slight. Sixteen travelers were injured when a California-bound Trailways bus overturned in braking to avoid the sudden precipice, and a motorcyclist suffered a broken spine plunging off it before the police closed the road. The blast also shattered windows up to half a mile away, injuring three more.

  The real headache began the next morning, when thousands of commuters from the distant suburbs flooded narrow county roads in search of alternate routes. A heavy snowfall on the night of the twenty-second completed the disaster. Work began on a temporary overpass, but weeks would become months before the commuting situation returned to normal. West County homeowners, already facing steeper property taxes and the distant threat of mortgage foreclosures, demanded to know how the terrorists could function with impunity in what was supposedly a highly civilized district.

  In the second week of February, a series of machine-gunnings terrorized isolated subdivisions along the county perimeter, in Twin Oaks, Ellisville, Fenton, St. Charles, and Bellefontaine. As usual the Warriors showed a curiously high regard for human life, firing their guns into dark windows and tool sheds, and as usual they were prompt in claiming credit for the attacks. In response, state and county police staged frequent roadblocks, but they had only the sketchiest physical descriptions of the terrorists, could only guess at their numbers, and were able to cover only a fraction of the vast network of county roads. The roadblocks did, however, compound the traffic tie-ups.