“You didn’t even think about how Spinks had Dig City in the clink?”
“How about you? You’ve just left DC in some jam.”
“All AJ wanted was your killer. Now that I’m up and out, he has to release the Bees.”
“Wrong. Apple Jack was just riding your ass. The pressure’s still on.”
It dawned on me that I had to survive if Dig City, which Levis, in his deranged cynicism, had abandoned, was going to stand a chance at rescue. Shep never would have let me quit a trick like this, not without giving it the best flick of my wrist. It was a straitjacket escape I could not simply wrest my way out of alone: There was an entire colony strapped to my back. Why was I here, anyway, if not to protect these children orphaned by the earth? I was responsible as a father for every one of them, by an obligation greater than blood. A psychic contortion was required: I had to submerge the memory of that perverse maternal propinquity. Besides, Jocy, too, had been sorely deceived by Levis’s scheme. However abominable our affiliation, I could not let it distract me from the next step. Yet without even the power to focus on this fugitive freak, I was still in a literal bind. This wasn’t the first time he had tried to blow my mind. Inconspicuously working on the knot at my ankles, I endeavored to distract the maniac with questions. “Who was my real dad?”
“Ha!” he snorted. “When it comes to Jocy, who knows? She’s so loose it could have been anybody. But I’ll bet you one thing, whoever he was…” The shades went back in place. “They call your daddy Big Boots.”
“Where have you been hiding out?”
“I’ve been traveling over mountains.”
“And you never let on who you are?”
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” he replied. Again, Levis lowered his sunglasses. “But I knew I was sunk back when Apple Jack found out you weren’t mine.” He pulled something from his pocket. “This trinket came with my death warrant. AJ mentioned it belonged to you. Here, Eddie. I want you to have it back.”
The sound of the plink! told me that Levis threw it in the drink.
“What’d you do that for?”
“So you can go after it.” Levis kicked the weight over the edge of the dock and the line at my feet began rapidly unraveling. “No matter what you do, play it, son!”
I, a roped calf, was jerked injuriously against dock’s edge, where rotting wood ripped into my rump. I went off the pier and into the frigid water of the harbor, fresh splinters stinging with brine. I kicked and thrashed, going down fast. A good, long rope had assured that the anchor would be well underway in its accelerated sinking by the time the tethered quarry followed. Now the plumb was plummeting, as it was designed to, in its vertical search for the nearest horizontal, which turned out to be pretty far from the liquid surface. The taste of blood rushing into my mouth commingling with the salt water invading gaping nostrils permeated my taste buds like a slice of tomato. Sound takes on a womb-like compression for creatures who bathe, as did I, in the embryonic fluid covering three-fourths of the globe. A small, coppery fin flitted and glimmered before my clouded eyes. I knew it could not be a goldfish, not in this dreck. It was the other item Levis had thrown in, and I clamped it between my teeth: One Cent!
The anchor sank into a foot of muck and the speed and chaos of plunge stopped. I was bound, stuck like a finger-sandwich toothpick in the excrement at the bottom of the bay, down among the beggar quahogs, down in the piles of rocks, bottles, and orphaned telephone lines, down where went beings unwanted and unmissed, down with me. This would require some hairy Houdini. Armies of contortionists, charmed and charlatan, have tried this escape, and not a few among the idiot arrivistes have succeeded, but for them it was a trick with predetermined parameters and an anticipated, if not rigged, departure. In my case the outcome involved a lobster.
She was about all I could see in front of me, bowing at my feet like a reluctant emissary in the inky sediment of the bleak, sun-deprived abyss. Call it dementia stemming from panic, but I understood, in the empathic language of these most highly organized crustaceans, what she was saying. I knew that she had come from Outer Harbor, not only because not even these legendary bottom feeders could stomach the mucky junk food down in Inner, but also since she was caught in a cage that trailed a severed line. I noted her gender for the copious combs of eggs clinging to the feathery hairs of her swimmerets. She could be carrying those for ten months, to term, if not for getting stuck in a stray starvation trap that had drifted in with the tide. Now no lobsterman would release her so that she could make a bigger harvest next year.
I spat out the penny and caught it in pinched fingers. With a flick of the copper coin, I snapped open the couplings on the trap’s back, just like old times, albeit under greater pressure than when I had been a kid. I slipped the penny under my tongue. Timidly did I crouch and, with closed eyes, reach my fluttering hands in the direction of her gilled cephalothorax. I lifted her from the murky depths with ghostly-white grip and fixed on her stalked ocular. She reached out and touched my mouth with the ripper, not the crusher, and I understood the message. I grabbed her claw and, with one great clip, made quick work of the rope tethering my knotted leg, then cast the lobster and her babies away to the bay. I kicked away the sodden surface of suboceanic earth. The suction of the mud, conserved as energy from the instant I had been thrust up to the calves in the stuff, supplied the explosion that jettisoned me powerfully back to the surface, where I gasped for big gulps of fresh air.
Loony Levis had left Long Wharf, but as a precaution I swam across the channel to the World Trade Center pier. Back on land, I felt rejuvenated. Plumbing the old powers of escape had been exhilarating. Revived, reunited with One Cent, I conjured the adolescent mystic and concentrated on the coin. I didn’t care whether it brought me good luck or bad. I needed a sign, and I found it on the back of the penny. “Say no more, Abe, I’m on my way.”
Levis had given me something to fight against, something to save; Lincoln showed me where to go next. I checked the watch on my wrist. The old sucker still ticked. Waterproof, it too had survived, but time was running out. I knew the oxygen in Dig City was at that instant winnowing to Everest-thin, my people packing up, resigned to desert all we had worked so hard to build. I had lost an essential hour in the midst of my self-immolating tirade and the run-in with resurrected Levis. That laughing Lazarus, my non-father, had twice tried to sink me when Dig City required rescue from a hostile aggressor. First it had been Miss Spinks, now it was my old nemesis, Apple Jack.
The outage had left stoplights blinking, and badge cats blew brash whistles while at their intersection pirouettes, but nothing could touch me. I was an invisible ninja slipping through the Beast. Nobody paid attention to me, even with my wild, disheveled aspect, because this was where the dispossessed went to be themselves. I was on the street, in the game. Flared nostrils took lusty snorts of freedom. Long ago, the locals must have felt a little this way—right here, on these weary cobblestones—when the Brits went home having soiled their redcoats and the Yanks knew for certain they were no longer colonists. Shivering, dripping, trailing a remnant of rope, I made sorcerer’s tracks through the landscape of past dramas. I sensed rather than saw these places. It was as if I passed more through moments than spaces.
Here I am at the Kendall Square candy factory the day Levis offers up his decoy, Jocy’s love child, in backhanded payoff for a barbaric bet with Apple Jack. On the Common, a crowd has gathered near the stump of the old hanging tree. Whom are they watching? Me, twisting myself up in a pretzel, slipping out of miniature manacles, tearing and repairing a sucker’s G-note as my conniving colleagues watch the watchers fondle their wallets. Here I am in front of the Federal Reserve, hypnotized by portentous patterns in poured concrete, the moment my fate is sealed, hermetically, as one of trickster. Here I am standing accursed on Metzger’s stoop, the blurt of his security door buzzing above the curb where I will be shoved into deceit’s back seat, a long black limousine ride that inaugurate
s my precocious death-longing. Here I am at Quincy Market, where that madman Mano makes me run for my life and, by the chase, gives me the contest of my career.
Standing behind the rank of granite columns at the code-access entrance of the Custom House, I felt for the touch pad, put my fingers on the home row, and typed five characters. For an instant, as the portal started to slide open, I considered tenderly old man Corrente, who had made my name the key to all the toilets all over the Beast and the Northeast. Then in the entrance I saw a hulking shape and heard a voice that, like three others that fateful day, was recognizable but unwelcome: “¿Que pasa, Sasquatch?”
I had narrowly escaped Levis only to fall right into Mano’s hands. He palmed my skull like he had done the basketball. The hacker-trafficker had finally caught me, and it was right at the site where we had left off. Had he been laying in wait all these years for me to return to the scene?
“It’s a wonder nobody tried to crack the sewage system before,” Mano mused, “with a password as parsed as EDDIE.”
“You can do whatever you want with me, Mano, but first you’ve got to give me a few minutes.”
Mano gave my head a couple of quarter-turns, right and then left. “Looks like you lost your glasses.” He held a smelly foot right under my nose. It was one of those big, grizzly Nikes. “Remember these?”
“I’m sorry about stealing the shoes, okay? I won’t run this time.”
“Aw, I wasn’t mad.”
“Yeah, right. The way you’ve chased me, you’re out for blood.”
“I was just going to offer you a job, but you were too fast, Eddie.”
How was I going to get rid of this sicko? “This is bigger than the two of us. I’m talking about the survival of the underground.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Apple Jack isn’t budging with the juice,” Mano said. “Someone has to save Dig City from the stranglehold.”
I squinted. Did I have the right man? Everything aboveground seemed upside down. Levis, alleged progenitor, had tried for the second time to snuff me; now here, appearing solicitous, was my prototypical predator. “Why should I trust you?”
Mano leaned close, the corners of his mouth turned down in a dour frown of determination, and gave my cranium a squeeze. “Because my mama’s down there.”
Awestruck, I squeaked, “I never knew.”
“I’m pretty private about my bio. Kind of like you.” Mano let go of the ball. “Come on, Eddie: I’ll be your eyes.”
If there was anybody who had the programming chops to help me throw a wrench in the works it was Mano, the high holy hacker and bishop of cybertropics. He had melted security systems a hell of a lot icier than the water works’. From what I, myopic, could make out, a great tangle of copper piping and diverter valves covered the Custom House walls and ceilings. It had been built to last back in 1838, but it had taken about two hundred years for Pauly Corrente, the godfather of modern plumbing, to put the Doric temple to use as his vault for blackmail by brown water. Mano sat me down at a shrine in the middle of the floor: a single monitor atop the black box that contained the mainframe for public works. In a touch that made this outpost just like home, Pauly had put a toilet in front of the term.
Mano flicked on the monitor. The blueprints to the sewers blossomed on the screen like a fuzzy dream. Everything I had found important up to now had come from Shep, the first fosterer. Suddenly I discovered, at the turning point in my people’s lives, that the decoy ’rents, the Correntes, had something to offer the situation. You might have thought it was genetic, that genius that moved me as if involuntarily. Maybe it was Pauly’s fresh ghost passing through me. With Mano’s help reading the fine print, I sealed off the entrances to the Ted Williams and took control of the sprinkler system. While the tunnel was flooding, Mano ciphered the master password, making it possible for him to maintain complete control of the TW pumps from any term in the city. In a few minutes, the tunnel was filled with water. Clutching One Cent, I chuckled in diabolical satisfaction at the giant exclamation point that popped up on the monitor, along with the ominous inquiry: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?
“What do you think, Eddie? Can the Bees take it?”
“Dig City’s tunnels are built on pillars drilled forty feet into bedrock and waterproof to between five and ten feet below the floor. Slurry forty inches thick, reinforced by Ibeams twenty-five feet long, goes down to 120 feet. Dig City is like a nuclear submarine. So far, the Bees haven’t even fired pigeon shot, but now there’s a warhead ready for launch. As long as we alert them to shut the doors, they won’t suffer any side effects. There’s someone you’ve got to contact and personally deliver the password to, Mano—fast.”
“Terry—I’ll tell him.” Mano said, marching away.
“You know Terry?”
“I’ve got news for you, Eddie.” One foot out the door, Mano called, “I’m Hermanito.”
“Holy shit!”
“Good luck, bro.” The portal slammed. When Terry got the message, we would be ready to deal Apple Jack a royal flush.
Our hack was based on the problem that gives the master plumber one of his most lucrative fixes: back-siphonage. Fluid inside a pipe can go either way, and, as long as it’s toward lower pressure, flow will continue once the direction is established. This holds true for plumbing of household or citywide proportions. In the Beast’s case, effecting the reversal would be as easy as bypassing a few valves. After sepsis had been coaxed to flow backwards, drains would spout dreck like faucets without handles. The Bees would take a deep breath; the brighter Beastonites, meanwhile, would have to hold their bladders and noses. Water—as long as it was gray or shadier—would keep flowing up. The brown water assault could be waged for weeks, but we probably wouldn’t need more than a few hours. The Beast would surely blink. Flummoxed, the fat cats would plead for a meeting and, noses pinched, legs crossed, be forced to accept the Dig City Piss Treaty. “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?”
A lips-like icon appeared at the edge of the screen and the term said, in its emotionless stacatto: “Apple Jack would like to chat. Are you presaged to engage?”
Godfather from the machine! I figured: Why not watch the worm squirm? “Sure!”
Apple Jack launched into a rabid rap. His sepulchral voice, threatening to blow out the term’s tinny speakers, boomed up to the Custom House dome. “Flooding the tunnel’s a clever trick—and with my fresh water, you flat-footed prick. But if you think this will help the Bees survive, you’re already oxygen deprived!”
On the monitor, all I could make out was the grinding gilt hole that an hour earlier had breathed fire on me and Metzger in our chimera disguise. Without a doubt, if it had been in the house, that mouth would have prefered to chew me up and spit me out. “Listen to this, Apple Jack: The TW is like an enormous toilet tank, and the pressure drop beneath the Beast is set to suck a monster of an excremental cocktail from the central sewage treatment plant. In seconds, downtown will be inundated with sewage, and you won’t be able to reverse the flow until I give Dig City intelligence the say-so.”
“I knew this Eddie, about the john, but you don’t know what you’re sitting on. The second you give the flush command, the bilge will shoot right up your can!” I scrutinized the stats and saw that he was right. The Custom House was locked around me like a safe and the throne on which I sat was the detonator of my own bomb. If I went through with the plan, it would take less than a second for a black sea of terror to be rising above my ears. “There’s no way out of this shit bath, and the pressure will rip your ass in half. No matter what the mojo in your feet—in case you didn’t notice you’re stuck to the seat!”
The suction had grabbed me like a hydra. Apple Jack had me by the actual balls. It was a death trap, a system glitch. I sat at the vortex of my own dunk-swish. In an effort to disarm him, I spouted, “Levis lives!”
“I know what gives. Levis’s hep. He k
new he was cuckoldkept, and therefore that his wife’s first kid couldn’t be nothing that he did. Levis cheated, and tried to get away with giving old AJ counterfeit pay.…”
On standby, glued to my commode, I was Apple Jack’s captive audience as he retold the story. He was gassing on just to stall, all the while behind the scenes scrambling to see how he might plug my plan, but I had my hand on the handle. The Beast’s water main was a virtual vacuum, and I was ready to switch the direction of flow with a single keystroke.
“… But he didn’t know Dig City’s spy-man was there to bust his luckless hymen. When Jocy, she gave birth to Mano, Terry went up on the wharf and fished around until he found himself a little baby orphan.”
“Then Jocy’s not my mother!”
“You’re just a shill for Little Brother. Cray made the switch in the baby cage and, just like Levis, my repo agent—”
“Shep?”
“Correct: Shep Veils—neither one knew heads from tails. But like extra ace or ill-suited jack dealt from the bottom of the pack, you came back to haunt the finks with that attack on old Miss Spinks. Cray and Terry hunched something when they saw behemoth feet. Then Jocy knew you bumped the King, making fate complete.”
“How’d she get the jist?”
“That faux Rolex on your wrist.”
“So when she and I had kids …?”
“In your dreams is where you’d pucker!”
“You mean …?”
“Jocy’s not your mother, brother, and you didn’t fuck her.”
I had been twice trumped. My identity had been snatched, the pocket of my subconscious picked.
“I know who the real folks are. In fact, we’re outside in the car.”
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