Jericho Iteration

by Allen Steele

  Bailey had just started up the paper when he bought the building. Ever the entrepreneur, he had intended to open a blues bar on the ground floor and eventually move the Big Muddy into the second-story space from its former location in Dogtown. Bailey had made his wad off the Soulard Howlers, the blues band for which he was the bassist and manager, and Earl’s Saloon had been intended to be the money tree behind his alternative paper. Big Muddy Inquirer might not have been the first newspaper whose publisher was a hacker-turned-guitarist-turned-bar-owner, but if you’ve heard of any others, please don’t let me know. One is scary enough.

  Anyway, Bailey was halfway through refurbishing the ground floor when the quake struck. The bar survived New Madrid but not the widespread looting that had occurred in Soulard several weeks later, when vandals broke into the place and took off with most of the barroom furnishings. By this time, though, the escalating street violence in the south city had forced the paper out of Dogtown, so he shelved plans for the bar, moved the Big Muddy to Soulard … and, not long afterward, grudgingly agreed to let out the unused third-floor loft to one of his employees. Namely, me.

  I had a keycard for the front door, which led up to the second and third floors, but tonight I really didn’t want the hassle of having to disable the burglar alarm Pearl had installed in the stairwell. The control box was difficult to see in the dark and, besides, I could never remember the seven-digit code that I would have to type into the keypad. So I ignored the front door, walked past the boarded-up ground-floor windows—spray-painted BLACK OWNED! DON’T LOOT! as if it made any difference to the street gangs who would have mugged Martin Luther King for pocket change—and went around the corner until I reached the enclosed courtyard behind the building.

  An old iron fire escape ran up the rear of the building. Pearl would have shot me if he had known I was using it as my private entrance, which was why I had to keep my stepladder hidden beneath the dumpster. I had just pulled out the ladder and was unfolding it in order to reach the fire escape’s gravity ladder when I heard a shout from the opposite side of the courtyard.

  “Hey, mu’fucker, whattaya doin’?”

  “Just trying to break into this building to steal some shit,” I yelled back as I put down the stepladder and turned around. “Why, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

  There was a large human shape blocking the light escaping from an open garage across the courtyard. I heard coarse laughter, then the voice changed. “Hey, Gerry, that you?”

  “That me. That you?”

  “Fuck you. C’mon over and have a beer.”

  I put down the ladder and ambled over toward the garage where Chevy Dick and a few of his cronies were hanging out next to his car. Chevy Dick was Ricardo Chavez, an auto mechanic whose shop was the Big Muddy’s closest neighbor. Chavez was in his early fifties; in 1980, when he was barely in his teens, he and his family had escaped from Cuba during the first wave of boat people who had descended upon Miami. Chavez had eventually made his way from Liberty City to St. Louis, where he had successfully plied his natural gifts in auto repair toward making a livelihood.

  Chevy Dick got his nickname two ways. First, it was his pen name for “Kar Klub,” a weekly fix-it-yourself column he wrote for the Big Muddy. Second, he was on his fourth wife and claimed to have eleven children scattered across six states. When he got drunk, he bragged about all the NASCAR winners he had pit-stopped in his career. And when he got really drunk, this 300-pound gorilla with a handlebar mustache and a long braided ponytail might unzip his fly to show off his tool kit.

  “Shee-yit,” Chevy Dick growled as I stepped into the light, “you look like hell. What’d you do, man, fock some babe in a ditch?”

  “Just following your example, Ricardo,” I replied. “Why, did I get it wrong?”

  Chevy glowered at me. A couple of his friends murmured comments to each other in Spanish; they were all sitting on oil barrels and cinder blocks, a case of Budweiser tallnecks on the grease-stained asphalt between them. In the background was Chevy’s pride and joy: a coal black ’92 Corvette ZR-1, perfectly restored and completely illegal under the phase-out laws, right down to the vanity tags, which read PHUKU2. Perhaps they were hoping that Chevy would take it off the blocks, gas it up, and take it out Route 40 for another illicit midnight cruise that would drive the cops apeshit; with a speedometer calibrated up to 120 mph, Chevy Dick’s Corvette was arguably the fastest street rod in St. Louis, able to easily outrun any battery-powered police cruiser SLPD had on the road.

  That, or they were hoping Chevy Dick would pound the shit out of the wiseass little gringo. Chevy continued to stare at me. He took a step forward and I held my ground. He slowly reached up with his left hand and pretended to scratch at his mustache … then his right fist darted out to jab at my chest. I didn’t move. The fist stopped just an inch short of my solar plexus … and still I didn’t move.

  It was an old macho game between us. We had been playing this for months. The gang all moaned and hooted appreciatively, and Chevy Dick’s face broke into a grin. “You’re all right, man,” he said as he gave me a shoulder slap that made my knees tremble. “Now get yourself a beer.”

  It was a tempting notion. “I’d love to,” I said, “but I’m beat. If I start drinking now, you’ll have to carry me upstairs.”

  “Long night, huh, man?” Chevy’s face showed worry as he looked me up and down. “Jeez, you’re in some kinda rough shape. What happen, you run into ERA patrols?”

  “Something like that, yeah.” My eyes were fastened on the case. “If you could spare me one, though, I’d really appreciate it …”

  Without another word, Chevy Dick reached down to the case and pulled out a six-pack. There were a few grumbles from his drinking buddies, but he ignored them as he handed it to me. Chevy was no friend of ERA; as he had often told me, he hadn’t seen things this bad since he had lived in Havana under the old Castro regime. In his eyes, any enemy of the federates, was a friend of his.

  “Thanks, Ricardo,” I murmured, hugging the six-pack to my chest. “I’ll pay you back next Friday.”

  “Vaya con dios, amigo,” he rumbled. “Now go home and take a shower.” He grinned at me again, the half-light of an exposed 40-watt bulb glinting off his gold-capped molars. “Besides, you smell like shit.”

  The ragged laughter of his buddies followed me all the way up the fire escape to my apartment.

  I opened the first beer almost as soon as I crawled through the fire escape window and switched on the desk light. Home sweet home … or at least a place to get out of the rain.

  My one-room loft apartment was a wreck, which was nothing unusual. Clothes scattered across the bare wooden floor and a mattress that hadn’t been tidied in a week. Books and magazines heaped together near the mattress and the desk. A small pile of printout on the desk, which constituted the unfinished, untitled, unpublished novel I had been writing for the last few years. Tiny mouse turds near the kitchen cabinets. I could have used a cat; maybe it would have straightened up the place while I was gone.

  I swallowed the first beer in a few swift gulps while I peeled out of my muddy clothes, leaving them in a damp trail behind me as I made my way toward the bathroom, stopping only to retrieve Joker from my jacket and place it on the desk while I grabbed another bottle out of the six-pack. The second beer followed me into the shower, where I leaned against the plastic wall and gulped it down, letting the hot water run over me until it began to turn cold.

  I cracked open the third beer after I found an old pair of running shorts on the floor and put them on. It was then that I noticed the phone for the first time. The numeral 9 was blinking on its LCD, indicating the number of calls that had been forwarded to my extension from the office switchboard downstairs. Part of my rental agreement with Pearl was that I would act as the paper’s after-hours secretary, so I sat down at the desk, opened the phonescreen, and began to wade through the messages.

  Most of the calls were the usual stuff.
Irate businessmen in suits wondering why their quarter-page ads hadn’t been run in the paper exactly where they had wanted them to be, like on the front cover. A couple of oblique calls to individual staffers, giving little more than a face, a name, and number: press contacts, boyfriends, or girlfriends, who knew what else? I hit the Save button after each of them.

  Most of the rest were the usual anonymous hate calls from readers, which arrived whenever the new issue hit the street, accusing Pearl of running a commie-pinko, right-wing, left-wing, feminist, antifeminist, environmentalist, technocratic, luddite, anarchist, neo-Nazi, Zionist, pornographic, anti-American, and/or liberal newspaper, all of them swearing to stop reading it tomorrow unless we converted to the ideology of their choice. Most of them had switched their phone cameras off when they called, but there was a demented three-minute screed from some wacko with a grocery bag over his head about how the New Madrid earthquake had been God’s revenge against everyone who didn’t support Lyndon LaRouche in the presidential election of 1984.

  You can acquire a taste for this sort of feedback if you have enough patience and a certain sense of humor, but the same could be said of eating out of a garbage can. I erased them all. They could e-mail their comments to the paper if they felt that strongly about them.

  I was about to twist off the cap of my fourth beer when I caught the last message on the disc. Once again the screen was blank, but the woman’s voice on the other end of the line was all too familiar.

  “Gerry, this is Mari. Are you there … ?” A short pause. “Okay, you aren’t, or you’re not picking up. Okay …”

  Great. My wife—or rather, my ex-wife, once we finally got around to formalizing our separation. She didn’t even want to put her still-pic on the screen.

  “Listen, your Uncle Arnie called a while ago, and … um, he’s mad at you because you didn’t get to the seder last Friday night …”

  I winced and shook my head. I had forgotten all about it. Uncle Arnie was my late father’s older brother and the Rosen family patriarch. A lovable old fart who persisted in trying to get me to attend observances even though he knew damned well I wasn’t quite the nice Jewish nephew he wanted me to be.

  “Look, I know this is the usual family stuff, but, y’know I wish you’d tell him not to call here …”

  Of course she didn’t want him to call. Marianne wasn’t Jewish, and although she had put up with her share of Rosen seders and bar mitzvahs and Hanukkahs, there was no reason why she should be bugged by my relatives. She didn’t understand that Uncle Arnie was just trying once more to get us back together again. Fat chance, Arnie …

  “Okay. That’s it. Take care of yourself. ’Bye.”

  A call from Marianne. The first time I had heard from her in almost a month, and it was because I had missed last week’s Passover seder.

  For some reason, this made me more depressed than before. It took me the rest of the six-pack to get over the message. By the time I had finished the last bottle, I couldn’t remember why she had called in the first place, and even if I had, I could have cared less.

  All I could think about was Jamie.

  PART TWO

  The Nature of Coherent Light

  (April 18, 2013)

  5

  (Thursday, 9:35 A.M.)

  I DIDN’T REMEMBER FALLING asleep: that’s how drunk I got.

  Sometime during the night I moved from my desk chair to my unmade bed. I was never conscious of the act; it had been reflexive action and not part of any deliberate decision to hit the sack. I simply blacked out at some point; the next thing I knew, a heavy fist was pounding on the apartment door.

  “Rosen! Yo, Rosen …!”

  Long, bright rays of sunlight were cast through the dusty loft windows. My eyes ached, my mouth tasted like the bottom of a cat’s litter basket, and my brain was stuffed with thousands of shorted-out wires. Somewhere out there, birds were chirping, bees were humming, cows were giving milk to blissful farm girls, happy little dwarves were humming as they marched in lockstep on their way to work.

  But that was far away, because here in my rank loft, on this beautiful morning in late April, I felt like a hundred and eighty-five pounds of bat guano.

  “Rosen! Get the fuck outta bed!”

  I shoved away the blanket and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My right foot knocked over a half-empty beer bottle as I sat up; I watched as it rolled across the bare wooden floor until it bounced off the kitchen table and came to rest by the door, leaving a small trail of stale beer in its wake. Somehow, that seemed to be the most fascinating thing I had ever seen: an elegant demonstration of Newtonian physics.

  “Rosen!”

  “Okay, all right,” I muttered. “Don’t wet yourself on my account.” My legs were still functional, at least to the degree that I was able to stand up without a pair of crutches. I found an old T-shirt on the floor and slipped it on, then stumbled across the room to the door, twisted back the dead bolt and opened it.

  Earl Bailey, two hundred and sixty pounds of malice stuffed into six feet and two inches of ugliness, was the last person I wanted to see while suffering from a hangover. He stood outside my door, glowering at me like I was a rat the exterminators had forgotten to kill. Not that the exterminators ever visited this building since he had owned it.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he snapped. “I’ve been banging on the door for five minutes.”

  I stared back at him. “Sorry, but I was taking a long-distance call from the president. He wanted to know if I would come over today to help him fight for world peace, but I told him I needed to deal with you first.”

  Pearl’s fleshy nose wrinkled with disgust as he took a step back from the door. “Your breath stinks. You been drinking this morning?”

  “No, but I was drinking last night.” I reached down to pick up the beer bottle I had knocked over. “I think there’s a little left,” I said, swirling around the half-inch of warm beer remaining. “Here, want some?”

  “Lemme in here,” he growled, pushing my hand aside.

  I stood back as he marched into the loft. He stopped in the middle of the room, his fists on his broad hips as he took in the clothes and empty pizza boxes heaped on the floor, the dead plants hanging from the rafters, the half-full carafe of cold coffee on the hot plate, the disarray of papers and books on my desk next to the computer. “Man, this place smells like a dumpster.”

  “C’mon, Pearl,” I murmured, “who did you think you were renting to, the pope?”

  “No. I thought I was renting to a responsible adult.” He looked back over his shoulder at me. “You told me you were going out to Forest Park to find a story.”

  “I did. Got one, too.”

  “Huh.” He walked over to my desk to gaze down at the books and papers. “Morning paper says there was an ERA raid at the park last night,” he said as he bent down to shove some trash into an overturned wastebasket. “The Post claims they arrested a bunch of people who were trespassing at the Muny.”

  “That’s an understatement if there ever was one,” I said. “Did it say anything about shootings?”

  He looked up at me, one eyebrow raised slightly in surprise. “Nothing about shootings. Why, did you see any?”

  I shook my head. “No, but I heard gunfire. Sorry, but I didn’t stick around to—”

  “Didn’t stop to see, huh?” He set the can upright and stood erect, dusting off his hands on his jeans. “Why didn’t you?”

  I gently rubbed the back of my sore neck with my hands. “Well, boss, you know what they say about someone shooting at you. It’s nature’s way of telling you it’s time to go home.”

  “Bullshit. You’re a reporter. First you get the story, then you worry about letting your ass get shot off.”

  “Easy for you to—”

  “But you didn’t see anyone get hit, right?” I shook my head, and Bailey closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Then there weren’t any shootings,” he said softly. “Not unless w
e can produce any bodies.”

  “Ah, c’mon, Earl!” I shouted. “I was there. I heard the gunshots, for cryin’ out—”

  “But you didn’t see anyone actually get hit, did you?” He stared back at me. “Oh, I believe you, all right … and, yeah, I think you were actually there, not just holed up here drinking yourself stupid.”

  He walked over to the bed, picked up the pair of mud-caked boots I had struggled out of last night, and dropped them back on the floor. At least I had some tangible proof that I hadn’t blown off the assignment. “But unless you can find me a corpse with an ERA bullet lodged in its chest, you know what the stadium will say.”

  I nodded my head. Yeah, I knew what the official spokesmen for the Emergency Relief Agency would say, if and when questioned about gunshots heard during last night’s raid. The troopers had been fired upon by armed squatters and had been forced to protect themselves. That, or complete denial, were the usual responses.

  This wasn’t the first time ERA grunts had opened fire at unarmed civilians in St. Louis, yet no one, from the press to the ACLU, had yet to make a successful case against ERA on charges of unnecessary use of deadly force. Life in my hometown was becoming reminiscent of a third-world banana republic; allegations were often made, but material evidence had a habit of disappearing. So did material witnesses …

  The local press was treading a thin line. Especially the Big Muddy, which was in the habit of intensively covering stories the Post-Dispatch only mentioned. The feds couldn’t cancel the First Amendment, but they could make life difficult for Pearl. Tax audits, libel suits … Bailey knew the risks of being a public nuisance, and he was being careful these days.