by Ryder Stacy
Shiftless scum. These lowlife wasted their time hanging around the park, leaving their trash behind them like the wake of a garbage scow. Don’t know the meaning of work. Or dignity.
Eddie knew what dignity was. It was a thing you didn’t have, back in the old days, if you were a small man, barely five foot four, and you worked for the Salt Lake City Parks Department wearing a baggy olive-drab jumpsuit, slogging through the parks day after day, dragging a garbage bag behind you and spearing trash on a long, pointed stick.
Then had come the coup that changed Salt Lake City for the better. The glorious, wonderful Chessman, had been rebuilding a new world of glass towers on the ruins of the old. It was the Chessman who had given Eddie his dignity, given him twenty-five tons of high-tech machinery to replace his garbage bag and stick, and given him a smart, epauletted uniform to replace the sagging jumpsuit. As his first act under the new regime, Eddie had revved up his brush-eater, trained its sites on his old jumpsuit, which lay like a heap of rags on the ground, and then he’d ground it up to a total oblivion. Since that time, Eddie—now Sergeant Eddie of the Salt Lake City Parks Police Force—spent six nights out of seven on patrol, vigilantly searching out the litter that threatened to destroy his parks.
After his battle with the pizza box, which now lay shredded in the belly of the mechanical beast that all criminals feared, he switched on the radio. There was no choice of country-western, light rock, jazz or classical music these days. Each station now broadcast only the proper music of the Chessman regime, or, as in this case, announcers exhorting pawns to work hard, to spend their money on houses, cars, furs, and the other goods that would help bring the economy back to life. And it warned them always to shun the unclean.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Eddie recited his mother’s credo. He could remember her only with a bar of soap and a pail of water as she scrubbed endlessly the dishes, the floors, the clothes, and Eddie himself. He embraced the cleanliness part of it, but rejected the godliness. Belief in God had gotten his mother nowhere, especially after the economy faltered. She’d slowly rotted away from the toil and was finally done in by a teen mugger.
“Cleanliness is next to Chessmanness,” Eddie substituted. He would always be faithful to his mother and to Chessman. Eddie would scour the park night after night, searching and destroying the detritus that threatened the very heart of the Salt Lake City civilization, circa 1989.
“Dirty people have dirty minds; they contaminate our society with their filth,” the voice on the radio droned on and on through Eddie’s shift. With its soft zzzzzttttt, zzzzzttttt, the brush-eater wheeled through the park, sucking up beer cans, soda bottles, old newspapers, paper bags, and half-eaten sandwiches. When the first traces of dawn struggled out, Eddie swung back toward the Park Police garage, where his machine disgorged its digested load. Then he went to bed in his small room, staring at the ceiling tiles, which were red and white in chessboard pattern, until he fell asleep.
The sounds of birds twittering in the leaves woke Rosa from her sleep. At least, in her drowsiness, it sounded like the song of birds. Actually, it was just a dead tree limb scratching against another limb in the hot wind that was stirred to life as the sun appeared.
She sat up, then gathered the rags that served as a bed, stuffing them into an old Zion Co-op shopping bag that looked like it couldn’t last out another rainstorm. Oh, well, thought Rosa, who was inclined to look on the bright side, since it’s a heat wave, it seems unlikely that we’ll have rain any time soon.
As an optimist, she spent much of her time counting the blessings that life had bestowed upon her. She was still young, only twenty-five, and had kept a nice figure. Curves where they should be, tight muscles where they belonged. She knew she was attractive, and she liked to laugh a lot. Her health, well, maybe it had gone down a little after the bulldozers took down her apartment building, leaving her homeless, but she was still strong. She had a soft spot to put her bed every night. And best of all, she had a colony of good friends to live with, among them that most special person, Karl, who had recently become her lover.
If Rosa were the kind of person to count the bad things about her life, she might have noted that she was homeless, living in a little shantytown of cardboard boxes, packing crates, and tarps surrounded by piled brush in Pioneer Park. She might also have recalled that the Chessman and his cronies called her ilk “shiftless vagrants” and “untouchables,” and that his rookies sometimes rounded them up from the doorways and sidewalks, and beat them or threw them in the dump. She might also have remembered that there were lots of homeless people—friends of hers, as well as strangers—who seemed to just disappear into the night. Where did they go? Into the desert? Swallowed up by the great Salt Lake? It was best not to think about that.
“Rise and shine. It’s going to be a beautiful sunny day,” Rosa said, shaking Karl, whose snores rose from his newspaper bed next to hers. When his snores turned to snorts, Rosa got up and went to the little lean-to the group jokingly called the kitchen, to get a morning cup of coffee. It was a rare treat Rosa had scavenged from the new glass office towers: partly drunk cups of coffee left by office workers; cold coffee brought back to the shantytown to reheat for breakfast.
She brought a cup back to Karl, who was invisible except for a single arm groping out from under a sheet of newspaper. His hand looked like a crawling spider as it felt around for an empty bottle of port wine lying nearby, and the sight made Rosa giggle.
“Have this instead, honey,” she said as she substituted the steamy coffee for the wine bottle. “You’ll need your energy today. Remember? It’s Carmella’s birthday. We gotta get some money so we can have a party and buy her a nice yam cake.”
Karl grunted, then sat up, shaking pages of the Salt Lake Daily Reporter from him. He grabbed Rosa, pulled her to him, and gave her a passionate kiss. Rosa stopped laughing long enough to kiss him back.
“Rosita, my little Rosita, how about a little—”
“Not now, babe.” She pushed his hand from her breast. “Maybe later, after we get Carmella’s cake.”
“Can I lick the icing?” Karl teased as he licked her nose and eyelids. They both knew getting a cake wouldn’t be easy.
“Karl wants to have his cake and eat it too,” joked an overweight, white-bearded man who had just emerged from a nearby packing crate. Despite his soiled and tattered clothes, the dignified way he held himself reminded the other shantytown inhabitants of a college teacher. “The Professor,” they’d dubbed him, and his packing-crate home was nicknamed “the campus.”
By this time, the other residents were beginning to stretch and rise from their various cartons, crates, ragpiles, and newspapers. A number of scrawny dogs and bony cats began to sniff around for a bite of food or a friendly pat. The whole shantytown, hidden in the dense copse of dead elms, was awakening.
“Rosita! Rosita! Look what I found last night—a birthday present for Carmella.” Angie shouted from her last own “home” thirty feet away. She was holding in front of her the mangy yet somehow appealing remnant of a fur coat, now about as patchy as the fur of the yard dogs.
“I found it in the trash of one of the new apartment buildings. A rookie came up just as I was pulling it out of the garbage can, and I thought for sure he had me. I couldn’t decide whether to drop the coat and run, or keep it and maybe be caught,” she laughed. “So I kept hold of it, and started complaining that the missus always throws things out, then sends me down and makes me go through the trash to get them back. I complained so loud he believed me, thought I was the maid, and didn’t try to arrest me.”
Amused, her audience applauded Angie’s quick thinking and courage. She tossed the coat over her shoulders and began prancing up and down the yard, turning like a fashion model on a runway. “Hey Professor, how does this look?”
“Angie’s hot stuff now. You need a limousine to take you to your restaurants and parties,” the Professor said. He wheeled a rusted wire shopping cart to
the center of the short alley between the homes. “Please step aboard, madam.” He bowed and took her hand. “Your car is ready.”
Angie clambered into the cart, the fur coat still dangling from her shoulders, and the Professor spun her around the yard to the laughter and shouts of the colony.
They pulled to a halt in front of Rosa, and the Professor gallantly helped Angie from the shopping cart. Rosa hugged her enthusiastically, and ran her fingers through the patches of fur remaining on the coat. “It’s beautiful. And it’s just what Carmella needs to keep her warm on winter nights. Angie, you did great. We’re going to send you to do all our shopping.”
Rosa, the Professor, and Angie set out after a short while to earn the money needed to buy Carmella a birthday pie. There were few stores that would sell anything to a homeless person, even if they had money. But Carmella deserved the best, and that, said Angie, was what she was gonna get.
They would buy Carmella one of Auntie Marsha’s delicious—and large—yam cakes. The steaming hot cakes were sold out of an abandoned bakery in Ryder Alley, near Pioneer Park. Of course, Marsha didn’t have a permit to operate a bakery, but the apparently-boarded-up store did a thriving trade late in the evening. The old heavy set black Marsha, with her huge white apron and white kerchief tying up her pigtails, made the best cake. The cakes didn’t have any of those Chessman hypo-drugs in them either. Marsha was unlicensed, so she didn’t have to do that.
The cake was only two dollars, but that was a lot of money. And there was only one way to get it—collect all the discarded soda and beer cans around the construction sites downtown and bring them to the Acme Supermarket parking lot. In the parking lot was a machine that digested the cans and spat a five-cent piece out for each one. The trouble was, digging in the garbage for discarded cans was illegal, by the Chessman’s edict. To be caught could mean a stint on Twenty Questions, the notorious TV torture-quiz program.
But Angie was quick, and the Professor and Rosita were good lookouts. They had collected the cans many times before without incident. And the small group of homeless had thrived, sharing in the relative wealth that the can collection created.
That night, at about eleven P.M., the little encampment of packing crates and lean-tos in the middle of the park was the scene of a jolly, if restrained, party. A single candle was lit on the hot yam cake that had been cut carefully into twelve sections, one for every member of the community. Carmella, dressed in her best dress—a “previously owned” but repaired house frock with a floral red design—blew out the candle. She was forty-one and toothless, but her smile was like that of a young happy child. She had friends. What if she had no “real” place to live? The encampment in the park was pleasant enough. And if they were very careful with the lights, only using the battery flash when absolutely necessary, the thick brush and fallen tree limbs they had encircled their makeshift community with would protect them against discovery.
It was indeed better than the city dump, where more and more of the city’s homeless were being crowded. In some ways, the little park community was better than the condos too. At least the company was better. Warm, charming people, not cold rich snobs. Real people, who would give you the shirt off their backs.
It was with those thoughts running through her mind that Carmella thanked them all for their presents and especially for the cake. They all took their pieces and began to eat. It was delicious, and the passed-around bottle of port wine was just the thing to rinse it down with.
Eddie was out again this night, his big machine roaring up to full speed in its sixth gear. The mad-eyed driver of the brush-eater stared at the park ahead through his windshield, occasionally looking at the sweep of the green line around the litter-detector radar screen in the dashboard. There. There directly ahead—a pie box. Another pizza box? No, as his headlights brought the object clearly into his sights, Eddie saw that this was one of those taller white cake boxes. A birthday-cake box.
What was it doing so far into this park? People didn’t even like to walk here, so far from the streetlights. It was creepy here, and full of debris—thick debris.
He twisted the gearshift, wrenching the machine to low. The twisting cutters and suction arm of the Parks vehicle engaged the box and tore it up and digested it—along with a good part of the turf under it. There. That’s better, he thought.
He was about to back off, for the vehicle was nearly dead up against the thicket of brush and fallen elm branches. But he hesitated. There hadn’t been any other litter in the park; he probably wouldn’t come across any for the rest of the night. He’d been too efficient these past few nights, too good. Perhaps it was time to tackle the harder job—clearing the damned tangles of brush and branches that loomed before him. Yeah, that’s a job that would last the night!
The Professor was the first one to notice. The city had a din to it—traffic, the all-night music pouring from its lightpole speakers—but this sound was different. Throatier. Closer.
Everyone held their breath, sat motionless on the spread-out picnic blanket, staring into the dark.
“There,” whispered the professor, “over there!”
The group’s twenty-four eyes turned as one, spotted the searchbeam of the huge machine Eddie was hurtling at the nestlike thicket to the north.
“Brush-eater,” Rosita screamed, dropping her last piece of yam cake and hurtling up and away from the danger. The others, too, arose in panic. But there was only one way in or out of the head-high, carefully piled, impenetrable tangle of twigs and sticks. One little alley led to the little village—and the brush-eater was chewing its way down that narrow alley right now, its blinding searchbeam sweeping from side to side, its huge metal teeth and rotating scissor-jaws chomping away at the wood.
“We’re dead meat,” whimpered Karl.
“No!” yelled the Professor. “Don’t panic. I’ll tell you what to do!” He gave rapid instructions: “Take the packing crates apart, start throwing them one after the other on top of the thick brush, make some sort of bridge over the tangle away from the brush-eater. That way we can scramble over the debris to safety!”
It worked, though it was wobbly. Most of them made it. But not the Professor. He was old, and he was also brave, determined that the others would live, even if he should die. He picked up a thick branch, wider than the yawning jaws of the brush-eater, and walked toward it. “Stop,” he yelled, jamming the thick branch into its yard-wide grin. “Stop. You are destroy—”
He never finished. The gears ground, the jaws snapped the thick branch as if it were a toothpick, and the suction, like a hurricane, drew the Professor into the gullet of hell.
Laughing madly, Eddie continued his work. What a find! A whole fucking village of the derelict bastards. That’d teach ’em. The bastards thought they’d use the park as a fuckin’ condo, did they? Didn’t want to pay no rent, did they?
I’ll get a medal for this, he thought. A damned fucking big medal . . .
Rosita, sobbing, held onto Karl’s shoulder as the big man, holding the flashlight, led the others east, then south, down the midnight-drizzly streets of the city. “Ain’t no place for us now,” she sobbed. “The Professor is dead, and there ain’t no place for us now except the city dump.”
They all knew she was right.
Eleven
Rock looked up at the sign. He was on King’s Street, close to King’s Three Square. He’d been zigzagging through the city, using the twisting streets, avoiding the squares, as Barrelman had suggested. The going had been slow: the streets were filled with housewives picking up groceries and goods from the official city-run stores—the only stores still operating in the city. Rockson stood out like a beacon, being practically the only man in the streets at the shopping hours. He decided he might as well chance the direct approach through the last two squares planted with roses—the King’s Squares. People came there just to look at the beautiful red flowers—women and men.
The Chessman had these squares especially wired
for camera surveillance. Every time you set foot in a square you were on camera. Only by moving through the side streets around the square could you avoid being tracked by computer. But he was in disguise, after all. And impatient. Rockson, despite Barrelman’s warnings, plunged into the King’s Three Square.
High above him, on the light stancions, tiny cameras began to turn, locking onto the man moving at too fast a clip.
King’s Three Square was, indeed, more evenly sprinkled with both sexes. Looking at the flowers was practically a patriotic duty. The red roses were well-tended, aromatic. He soon realized he was walking a lot faster than anyone else. He slowed down. The camera watching him was not fooled, however. It kept him in its sight. Rockson, trying to blend in, paused at a bridal shop along with a group of citizens. The animated window dummies, a lifelike man and woman wearing Victorian dress, were depicted having a nice evening at home. The man-dummy was smoking his pipe; the dog, complete with mechanical wagging tail, was eating his Ruffy dog food. The woman was baking bread, opening and shutting the old oven. The speaker in the window said, “Domestic life can be blissful! Listen to the Chessman, find a suitable mate, and get married today! Otherwise, you might end up as a street person and get eaten by the brush-eaters.” A rookie car cruised past. As soon as the rookie car turned the corner, Rockson took off again toward the Tabernacle.
He had just entered King’s Two Square when he noticed everyone had suddenly stopped walking. They were standing there looking up at the speakers mounted over the elaborate rosebeds. Rock, who had used all his mental powers to ignore the hypnotic music, now let himself hear. Something was up.
“We interrupt this program of exciting elevator muzik to warn all citizens that the psycho-stalker is at large again. All Squad Nine red knights go to King’s Two Square to apprehend suspect. Warning! He could be armed. Shoot to kill. Repeat, shoot to kill!”