South Village

by Rob Hart

  “Got it,” Tibo says.

  He shakes our hands each in turn.

  “I’m not saying these dumb kids were right,” Ford says. “I don’t want to endorse their plan. But sometimes a man has to step up and take the shot that’s been afforded him, know what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir,” I tell him.

  He tips his cap at me and heads back, loads everyone into the van, all of them shooting us dirty looks. Magda says, “Tools of fascism.”

  “Oh shut up,” Ford says. “If anything we’re the tools of a totalitarian government, and even that’s hyperbole at best.”

  Ford gets into the car with Corey and they drive off. I walk toward the pickup truck with Tibo and Aesop and ask, “Which one of us is going to do the honors?”

  “C’mon,” Aesop says to Tibo. “Find a cinder block or something.”

  Aesop goes to the car, turns it on, and puts it in neutral. Then he lashes his belt to the steering wheel. Tibo waddles over carrying a cinder block, which he hands to Aesop, who drops it onto the gas pedal. The engine races.

  “Stand back,” he says.

  He climbs into the car and shifts it into drive. It leaps forward, headed for the tower. After twenty or thirty feet, after it seems it’s going to stay straight, he dives out, hits the ground hard, and rolls. Tibo and I run over to him, to make sure he’s okay, just as the truck smashes into the concrete base, crumbling the wall, the front flattening.

  Aesop gets up, shaking it out.

  We watch the wreck for a second, a little disappointed that it didn’t do more damage. The car is still running, wheels spinning in the mud, wisps of black smoke coming out of the engine.

  “Well that’s too bed,” Aesop says.

  And then the car explodes.

  That leads to three or four bigger explosions. I can feel the pulse of them pushing through my body, the heat washing across us like a wave. It throws thick plumes of smoke into the air and we watch it burn for a few minutes. The part of me raised by my dad goes into alarm mode, wanting to pull out my phone and call emergency services.

  But I don’t have to. We did this.

  “You know what this means?” Aesop asks. “We’re technically terrorists.”

  “No, we’re not,” I tell him. “This is how you do a good thing a bad way. I hope the Soldiers aren’t able to claim credit for this.”

  “I suspect Ford will work something out,” Aesop says.

  “Guys. Why the fuck are we still here?” Tibo asks.

  “Good point,” I say.

  And we take off for the tree line.

  The sun comes out. None of us speak. There’s not much to say. I think we’re all carrying the explosion of the fracking derrick in our chests. It was something I don’t think any of us were really ready for.

  And afterward, we’re shocked at the efficiency with which we just did something like several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

  A little bit down the road, we pass a long line of black, shiny cars, like beetles gliding down the road. Hopefully the FBI is off to the crime scene and away from South Village for good.

  Aesop pulls into the front entrance and over the bridge, and once we’re parked, Tibo jumps out of the car, off no doubt to see where he’s needed and start moving pieces back into place. Aesop says to me, “We really ought to go check on Gideon.”

  “Do we have to?” I ask.

  “You can slap him around a little if he’s still there.”

  “That works.”

  We walk in silence, climbing onto the boardwalk and cutting through the woods. I stop at a board that says: Go where the peace is. Tap it with my toe. Keep walking.

  After we pass the sign for Sunny and Moony’s place, he says, “I’m happy to see that you’re feeling better.”

  I stop. After a moment he senses this and he stops too, turning around to face me. The two of us, standing in the middle of the woods, alone and quiet.

  “What you said,” I tell him. “About knowing you can die. About all this being fragile. It helped. I don’t know why. It just did. And I want to thank you for that.”

  He smiles. It’s an easy, comfortable smile.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he says. “Truthfully, sometimes I think it’s less about the message and more about knowing you’re not carrying shit by yourself. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I think I do. I just… I guess I wasn’t used to people being nice to me. But you, and Cannabelle, and even Tibo, even though he got frustrated with me.”

  “I know you think you’re a bad person,” Aesop says. “But you’re not. You could have done anything when you got here. You could have taken permanent machete duty and been by yourself all day. But you chose to cook. You chose to feed people. Even at your darkest, you picked a task that would mean giving comfort and nourishment to other people.”

  Aesop looks up into the canopy, then down at the ground. Kicks at a board.

  “Do you know why I cook?” he asks. “It’s not because I have any particular affinity for it. It’s just… I told you I saw some shit. I had a hard time when I came home. And cooking was something I picked up that covered up all those bad feelings. It gave me a sense of purpose. Across all cultures, across all demographics, food and hospitality are a shared bond. You sit down and break bread with strangers, it’s a way of communicating ourselves. After what I did, it feels important to use my hands to create something. To feed people. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I sniff and look down, and he’s about to say something else when I dive forward, put my arms around him. I’m afraid that after I leave I will never see him again but this has been important to me, and I want him to know that, but I don’t know how to say it.

  So I hold him, and hide my face so he can’t see that I’m close to crying. He hugs me back and we stay like that until finally he pulls back a little and says, “C’mon dude, lay off the theatrics. All you have to do is buy me a drink.”

  I laugh and we disengage. Walk some more. Get to the spot where we left Gideon, and he’s gone. Check the back road, and the car with the weapons in the trunk is gone, too.

  We head back toward the main camp and Aesop says, “C’mon, I want to show you something.”

  He leads me to the artist hut, and the painting that’s hanging, untouched by the raid, safe from the elements. He opens up a beer cooler and takes out jars of paint, arranging them carefully on an open table. I step to the painting. Cannabelle was the last person I saw working on it.

  A swirl of colors, like a wave curling up, one side of the wave a treescape, the other side of the wave a starscape. They come together like they’re part of the same scene, but encroaching on each other in small measures. Trying to find a middle ground between two different stories.

  Aesop hands me a jar of paint that’s white with a tiny bit of blue mixed in so it’s tinted. He nods toward the starscape.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “The sky could use a couple more stars.”

  “Are you sure? This was Cannabelle’s.”

  “This is everybody’s. Do you know how long this has been here?”

  “How long?”

  “Years,” he says. “It’s kind of incredible that it’s still standing.”

  He unscrews the top of the jar of green paint he’s holding, dips in a brush, and lays the wet point of it against a dry leaf on the forest side of the painting.

  “It changes and it grows,” he says. “The original images are still there. I could probably take a knife and pull off bits and show you the layers of color. Point is, nothing ever has to be the way you think it has to be. Cannabelle knew that. I don’t think we’re going to get a chance to memorialize her. Body got shipped off to the family. So we do this. This is our memorial for her. And one day someone will come along and put something over it, and that’ll be okay, too. She’ll still be there underneath it.”

  “Okay,” I tell him.

  And I lay the brush over the black, bring a little light
to the universe.

  I pack my stuff. This time in far less of a rush. I check my passport again. I’ve never had a passport before. Showed up yesterday, and my flight leaves tomorrow. Glad to see Katashi, or whatever the fuck his name was, didn’t follow through and have the document pulled.

  I check my phone, the harsh white light filling the bus. It’s 2 in the morning. A few hours to go before Aesop and I need to be on the road, if I’m going to make it to the airport in time.

  The last few days have been busy. Cleaning up camp. Restoring order. Lots of talking to cops and investigators, but luckily their gaze is on the folks they captured, and they’re not too worried about us. Ford came through. The official story is that Marx and his crew planned to set off an explosion but messed up. The truck crashing into the tower was an accident. They come out of it looking like buffoons. And they were credited as the Earth Liberation Front, not the Soldiers of Gaia. They can’t even make a name off it.

  The fracking operation is permanently suspended, too. No kitchen sink flamethrowers.

  I’m still a little conflicted over this. It was pretty awesome to blow something up, and I know what we did was for the greater good of the community. I’ve done a lot of illegal things in my life. This is pretty much way up at the top.

  But at night, I sleep, and that gives me comfort.

  Sometimes I dream about my dad and Chell.

  But not about the hole. That’s gone.

  I step off the now-empty bus, close the door. Climb onto the boardwalk and head toward the back of camp. It’s a nice night. A little cool, finally. The air turning to fall and the brutal summer behind us. The world is changing. I wonder what this place is like when it gets cooler. Less bugs, probably. The fires are probably more welcoming. I’m sad that I’ll miss it.

  I reach the clearing toward the back of camp, where a fire is already going. Alex and Job are sitting on a log, Job is plucking away at an acoustic guitar while Alex hums the tune to “Redemption Song”. A little clichéd and yet so completely perfect. Zorg is here too, and Sunny and Moony, and Aesop and Tibo. And Robert and Ginger, making out like teenagers.

  Aesop takes a canvas bag and pulls out three packages of bacon while Zorg sets up a cast iron skillet on a grill grate over the fire, which Tibo is feeding with kindling. Getting it nice and hot and ready so I can fulfill the promises I made.

  This is my goodbye party.

  It makes me think back to home. The night I left New York. There was a goodbye party there, too. Apocalypse Lounge was closing, and it was snowing, and there was a great big party, mostly to send the bar off, but some people there to see me off, and the thought of picking through the crowd, trying to say goodbye to every person, it was too much. So I pulled an Irish goodbye. Up and left before anyone realized I was gone.

  Thinking back on that now, I regret it. Here, now, I’m happy to get a farewell.

  And I could not think of anything more perfect than night bacon.

  Aesop is about to cut open a package when I stop him and say, “We didn’t do the circle.”

  Everyone stops and looks at me, like they don’t understand how those words could have come out of my mouth. And then smiles break out across the clearing, faces turning up in the dancing orange light.

  Tibo’s is the biggest.

  We take our spots around the fire, hands reaching out to each other. I end up with Aesop on my left and Zorg on my right, Tibo directly across from me.

  “Would you like to start?” Tibo asks me.

  “Yes,” I tell him. “Community. I’m thankful for community.”

  “I’m thankful for community, too,” Aesop says.

  Everyone answers with ‘community.’ And when we’re done we stand there, looking at each other in the glow of the fire. Really looking at each other.

  After a few moments, we let go.

  Aesop throws the bacon onto the skillet. The scent of it fills the forest and we sit and talk. People ask me questions about my life, how I got there, and I tell them honestly, even the parts that hurt. They share the things that hurt them, and their paths that brought them to the Georgia woods in the middle of the night, sharing fistfuls of bacon in secret.

  As we’re cleaning up, as the sky is cycling shades of blue, I realize Chell and my dad, they’re still there, out in the darkness. But it doesn’t feel like they’re accusing me of anything.

  It just feels like they’re with me.

  Read other title by Rob Hart

  Thank you to Bree Ogden and Jason Pinter for their continued support of both me and this series. Thank you Rayne, for your intel on the inner workings of camgirls. Huge thanks to the booksellers who’ve carried my books, including Seattle Mystery, Powell’s, Poisoned Pen, MysteryPeople, The Astoria Bookshop, Murder by the Book, Barnes & Noble, and The Mysterious Bookshop. Plus all the bookstores I don’t know about. Support bookstores! Thank you to my wife, Amanda, for giving me the space to do this. You are the best of wives and best of women. And most of all, thanks to everyone reading this book.

  Rob Hart is the publisher at MysteriousPress.com and the class director at LitReactor. Previously, he has been a political reporter, the communications director for a politician, and a commissioner for the city of New York. He is the author of two previous Ash McKenna novels: New Yorked, which was nominated for the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and City of Rose. He is also the author of The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella. His short stories have appeared in publications like Thuglit, Needle, Shotgun Honey, All Due Respect, Joyland, and Helix Literary Magazine. He’s received both a Derringer Award nomination and honorable mention in Best American Mystery Stories 2015, edited by James Patterson.

  He lives in New York City.

  Find more on the web at www.robwhart.com and on Twitter at @robwhart.

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Rob Hart

  Cover and jacket design by 2Faced Design

  Interior design and formatting by:

  www.emtippettsbookdesigns.com

  ISBN 978-1-943818-39-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951361

  First trade paperback edition October 2016 by Polis Books, LLC

  1201 Hudson Street, #211S

  Hoboken, NJ 07030

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Rob Hart

  About South Village

  Dedication

  Quote

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice