by Ginger Booth
“Is that why you left the Ville, Jelly? Because LaTisha was mean?”
“I wanted to color. Coloring makes me feel better. There’s nothing to eat here but cockroaches.”
Tyrone offered, “I can get you crayons in the ville, man. Maybe a coloring room in the community center, huh? Or maybe your own crayons and coloring book.”
“What do you care?” Jelly asked suspiciously.
Ava reflected that was a damned good question. Fortunately, Tyrone answered. “Soho Ville is our gang now, and our work crew. We watch out for each other.”
“The food is good,” Jelly allowed. “And I know what to do. I don’t like being pinched by mean old ladies.”
“No more LaTisha,” Ava promised. “Isn’t it better in for you in the ville? In your dorm?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Jelly said.
“So you’ll come home? With us,” Tyrone prodded.
“OK.”
“Good, because we don’t know how to get out of here,” Ava said. “There are some nasty people around here.”
“I can show you,” Jelly promised. He rose from the stair, and they followed his lead.
The door guard didn’t bat an eye when Jelly said he was leaving. “We’ll still be here.”
Ava considered inviting him into Soho Village, but thought better of it. These kids knew where the ville was. Someday she hoped they felt safe to come in.
Well, there was that. She turned back to the guard. “In the winter, if it gets really cold, or hungry, come in to the ville sometime. It’s OK to visit. See? Jelly could leave. No one stopped him.”
The guard shrugged that off. But at least she’d planted a seed.
With a casual sureness, Jelly led them back to the low garages. He knew the spot where there was a knotted rope and toeholds to climb to the top, where he walked with no concern for their safety. Across the roof, they climbed a rope ladder back down, this one with plastic rungs. Then they walked through a falling-down low wooden building across the street, and out onto the Hudson River Greenway at the Hudson River Park.
This section was patrolled by militia, because the ferries stopped at this wharf. A cop advised them to expect the next bus to Soho Village, Lower East Side, and Tribeca in 10 minutes or so. Transfer at the Bowery for Midtown.
“Why didn’t we think of that?” Tyrone growled.
Ava shrugged. This wasn’t her turf. “How long has the bus been running, officer?” she asked.
“Just started last month,” he supplied. “Too many incidents walking through the ganglands, so people didn’t use the ferry here.”
“You’re Soho Ville?” Ava asked, surprised she hadn’t heard about this. She hadn’t seen this cop around, either.
“Tribeca, ma’am. Let people know in Soho Ville, OK? All secure at the ferry.” The militiaman smiled at them cordially and returned to his rounds.
“Good to know,” Tyrone quipped.
Ava shot him a dirty look. It wasn’t like knowing the bus route would have prevented all their problems. They hadn’t known Jelly’s rabbit run route from the museum.
The bus dropped them off at 14th Street, north of Washington Square. That’s why they hadn’t seen it before, rarely having any reason to visit 14th Street, which skirted another gangland. When they reached 8th Street, the older teens tried to talk Jelly into joining them for dinner later at the community center. They warned him not to show that cheese in his dorm unless he planned to share it. Jelly shrugged, and scampered off to his own building without a backward glance.
They stopped in the middle of the street on 8th. “Well, bye, White Trash,” Tyrone said. He and Songkram abandoned her there, walking toward their place west of the Square.
“Hey, guys? Thanks for helping.”
Tyrone raised a hand in acknowledgment, but didn’t look back.
In high school, Tyrone and Songkram would have been freshmen or sophomores, while Ava applied to top-notch universities, from her exclusive high school, far from the dismal PS-whatever that the boys attended. They never were in the gangs, freelance ‘losers’ who were the natural prey of gangs like White Supreme.
It was silly to feel hurt that the boys turned their backs on her. It was dangerously stupid to feel that this jaunt into the ganglands was the most fun she’d had in a while.
She hadn’t been alone.
7
Interesting fact: The Army Resource Coordinators, Rescos, supervised the civilian Community Coordinators, Cocos, like Yafuel Guzman of Soho Village. Rescos were the interface between the Hudson martial law government and civilians.
The Army recruiting office on Delancey was lit up with Christmas lights. What were they thinking? Ava perched on a park bench across the street for a few minutes, hugging her knees, glaring at the storefront.
She hadn’t intended to walk to the Lower East Side, Manhattan’s model ville, to visit the recruiting office. She had some afternoon left to kill after she parted ways with the boys, and just set off walking. LES was designed to be fun to walk. The mini-city sought to preserve the ethnic neighborhoods of Manhattan in miniature. Kosher Delis, Little Italy, Chinatown, and so on.
Someone needed to tell the recruiters to turn off the damned Christmas lights. Clueless.
“No junk food! Only staples,” Deda had told her. “Rice and dried beans if you can get them. And vitamins! And bottled water! Keep that scarf over your face. Don’t touch anybody!”
Easier said than done, in the pandemonium at the corner supermarket, the day Ebola broke out and the borders slammed shut. At least the angry mob drowned out the Christmas carols playing over the sound system.
Rice and dried beans were strewn liberally across the floor from food fights. The short staff couldn’t reach through the crazed shoppers to sweep it up. At her height, she could barely see through the press of bodies. She couldn’t wriggle her way into the pasta and rice aisle, but she squeezed into the packaged soups. Those little plastic tubes of kosher bean soup mix would work. She claimed a couple dozen, stashing them in her shopping bag, before panicked fellow shoppers caught on and pushed her out of the way, so they could claim the rest. She managed to grab bulk matzo meal and potato pancake mixes, then escaped the aisle.
Bottled water was a lost cause, the shelves already bare. Health and beauty was a comparative oasis of tranquility, only about fifty people in that aisle. The pricey organic brand of vitamins with minerals that her parents favored was still in stock. She slipped six 60-count bottles into her bag, hoping Deda’s credit card limit could cover all this. The cheap bean soup mixes were $24 apiece today, and the vitamin bottles $133. Supermarkets didn’t bother listing cents on prices anymore. They hadn’t for a couple years now.
A snake of green and gold Christmas garland fell to her shoulder, making Ava jump. Enough with the supermarket. She needed to get out of here. She slipped into the back of the mob gathered at the checkout counters. There was no room for lines.
A scratchy announcement broke through Silent Night. “Attention, shoppers! We’re sorry, but our credit card processing system is down. Cash sales only.” A growl rose and carried her forward with the crush of bodies. Ava dead-ended at a checkout conveyor belt. She hopped up onto the belt and skipped to the end, and carefully slid back down into the crowd. They carried her along out the doors just as the plate glass windows smashed.
She ran home in the early December dusk, past the Christmas lights on the shops. Into the Christmas lights in the vestibule at Washington Square Apartments. Back to the Christmas tree at home on the 16th floor, glowing by the slider to the balcony.
“You didn’t touch anybody?” Deda demanded anxiously, colored lights reflecting off the window behind him. “Take off those gloves! You wash them! Kitchen sink. I filled the tub with water.”
“Everybody touched me, Deda,” Ava complained. She squirted detergent on her tiny stretch knit gloves and worked them into an apple-scented lather. “When will Tata and Mama be home?”
They shouldn�
�t have gone to the hospital. It wasn’t safe. They closed Ava’s school at 10 a.m., sent her home from Brooklyn. She stayed out of the subway. But the packed buses and sidewalks weren’t much better. Panicked people jostled her. She couldn’t prevent it.
“Milan called,” Deda admitted. Milan was Ava’s father, Deda’s son. “Mount Sinai has Ebola. Quarantine. They come back when this is over.” He turned away while he said it, though, not meeting her eyes.
Breathe out. Your lungs breathe in by themselves. Frosty’s voice. No kindness, no censure, just the calm focus of one black belt speaking to another.
Ava uncoiled from the park bench and strode into the recruiting station. She nodded to the smiling pair of soldiers on duty, glanced around, and yanked the plug on the Christmas lights.
“Don’t do that,” she told them, rhythmically waving the plug at them. “No Christmas lights.”
“Ah, OK,” said the older white guy, sharing a raised eyebrow with his black partner. They were the only two souls in the shop front, a fact that surprised Ava not at all.
Ava held the plug by her face like she wielded a switchblade. “Ebola broke out in early December. The Christmas lights and carols stayed on until the transformers blew and left us to die in the dark. We don’t have lights in our homes. We don’t waste power. Christmas sucks. No Christmas lights!”
The black guy shook his head at the crazy apple.
But the older man sobered and listened. “I understand. Thank you for explaining that. We’ll leave the lights unplugged.”
Ava suddenly felt like a fool, wielding this light plug, and let it drop. “My name is Ava Pawic. Soho Village. Call me Panic. I might volunteer for the Army. I have questions. And there was an aptitude test. Do I take the test here?”
“Welcome, Panic!” her older host said with a warm smile, and held out his hand to shake. Ava pursed her lips, and shoved her own hands more firmly into her leather jacket pockets. Belatedly the soldier remembered his briefing, that apples didn’t shake hands, and withdrew his offending member.
“I’m Sergeant Michael Callahan. That’s Specialist Nicci. We have tea, and ham and cheese subs. Want some?”
Ava nodded and sank to a steel folding chair at one of the half dozen bare banquet tables arrayed before their working desk. She chose an outer table, facing the windows. “Have you been here long?” she asked.
“Just a few days. We’re kinda surprised. You’re our first real customer!”
Callahan handed her a mug of actual, steaming, honest-to-God brown tea. He took a seat across from her. Nicci rummaged in a box behind the desk, to supply a 12-inch sub, thick with ham and cheese, mayonnaise, pickles, lettuce and tomatoes, on wheat bread.
Wheat and tea didn’t grow in Hudson. She didn’t remember the last time she’d had them. The sandwich supplied well over half the calories of Ava’s daily wage. Eyes closed, she sank her teeth into the torpedo-shaped feast, and savored every layer of flavor, salt and fresh, texture grainy and smooth, dry and bursting wet. She’d forgotten the heavenly scent of fresh wheat bread. Someone should tell them that serving ham and cheese was a bit rude here in Kosher Delis, the orthodox Jewish block of LES ville. Someone not Ava. She loved ham and cheese.
Callahan burbled on pleasantly, something about curious adults dropping by, a Hasidic rabbi with his side curls, but so far no teenagers. She nodded on automatic. When she opened her eyes, four gang rat faces were outside the window, staring at her chewing. She saluted them with the sandwich, and they barreled in.
The recruiters were busy for a time greeting the others, and more poured in. Nicci had to start cutting the sub sandwiches in half. Ava ignored them and relished every last bread crumb.
Sergeant Callahan sank to a seat across from Ava, arms resting open on the table, a curious look in his eye. It had not escaped his attention that her arrival changed everything. Before her, no customers. After her, the place was packed. She’d done something, and he wasn’t sure what.
“So, Ms. Pawic. Panic. What can I tell you about joining the Army?”
Could I start over? Escape the city as though none of this nightmare ever happened? Eat like this every day? Have friends? Not a glimpse of that inner hunger reached her cold face and calculating eyes.
“What kind of training could I get? Medical? Engineer?” Demolition? Surely the Army blew things up.
“Well, we start with an aptitude test.”
When Ava returned to her apartment, a card peeked out under her door. She almost missed it in the dark. But her flashlight set some opalescent glitter to sparkling. She picked up a Christmas card featuring Frosty the Snowman.
If anyone knew and shared her hatred of all things Christmas, it was Frosty. In fact, he counted on it. He collected Frosty the Snowman cards and gift tags to bestow on his enemies. Frosty was here.
Frosty helped her carry her grandfather’s body to the corpse piles on Christmas Eve. That was the day they left the Washington Square Apartments.
You killed an ally today. Come back. Miss you. Love you.
Ava dropped the card on the table. The apartment’s walls suddenly closed in on her. Her throat constricted, too. She escaped back out onto the streets to think.
Guzman tried wiping some sleet off the step of St. Anthony’s with his leather glove, but gave it up. He remained standing in front of Ava in the near-curfew dark. “Getting too cold for this,” he complained.
“We should open a cafe,” Ava suggested. “Don’t have to serve anything. Just someplace to sit in public and talk out of the rain. Bet one of these restaurants had an awning.”
“There’s an idea. So what are we talking to your grandfather about tonight?” He thought he knew. Ava volunteered for the Army today. Colonel Margolis already emailed Guzman that he turned down her application. Guzman hated to break it to her. He was pretty annoyed with Margolis.
Ava surprised him. “Killed a man today. Always tell Deda about that.”
Guzman sank to the wet step after all. “Are you confessing a crime?”
“Not that. He was White Rule, jumped me out in the ganglands. No one will miss him. We both killed people before, Guzman. No big deal.”
Better and better. “You went back out today? To your old gang?”
“Huh? Oh, no!” She sketched her little adventure to retrieve Jelly. “Deda and I were done with that, though. Problem is, Frosty left me a calling card. He knows I killed one of his allies.”
“Your ex-boyfriend Frosty? Runs the white supremacist gang?”
“Yeah. Good thing I applied to the Army today, huh? Staying here just became a problem.”
Or did it? Even for Frosty, that was an awfully mixed message. You killed my friend. Love you, come back to me. The Frosty-was-here calling card tended to suggest a revenge notice. Yet he added three short Miss you type sentences. Damn you, Frosty. That’s just cryptic.
“Yeah? Well, congratulations!” Guzman said heartily. “We’ll miss you.” He’d have to appeal to Margolis. These recruits were supposed to be Guzman’s picks, not Margolis’s.
“You will,” Ava said thoughtfully. “Why are you so willing to get rid of me? I’m useful. I get my work crew to get the job done. They’re not very good at it, and getting worse. Still.” A piece of ice slid off her hair and down her collar. She rose and flipped the ice out.
Guzman gratefully rose too, and gestured for her to join him in the church doorway. It wasn’t very deep, but kept some of the sleet off.
“I told you why, Ava. I need a gang rat to succeed. Break in the program so other gang rats can succeed. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll be back in a couple months. Even if it does work out, you can leave in a year.”
The new Army only took one year enlistments, part of the anti-slavery clause in the new Constitution. Sergeant Callahan had explained that to Ava. The plan called for short bursts of training, rather than front-load a five-year stint with expensive specialization. The first year, the recruits would only get basic combat training, then go fo
rth to make themselves useful. If they proved themselves, they would be invited to re-up, and offered a choice of skills to master next.
“You’re sure, Ava? You want it?”
Ava played with a buckle on the back of her sleek leather glove. “You need a gang leader to work this out. You don’t need a gang leader to teach halflings and visitors to strip wires.” She huffed a sad laugh. “Nine halflings I’ve got on my crew now. Seven day visitors yesterday. I’m not doing anything useful here. And we’ve only got the two gang leaders.”
“Two?” He didn’t know of any besides Ava. Even she was arguable. The queen wasn’t exactly the gang leader, but close enough.
“You, Guzman. You ran the grown-up gang in Soho. When the Greenwich Village gang leadership failed, you took over them, too.”
“Hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“We’re the same kind, Guzman. But I have no gang here. I care about the gang rats. But they don’t care back. You know? Of course you know.”
“Yeah.”
“But we’re not built to give in. We need to take care of people, fight for them. Kill for them if we have to. Besides, I want to know. You ever get the feeling, Guzman, that there’s some kind of Wizard of Oz behind the curtain?”
That’s what Frosty said, when he was being so cryptic about committing to White Rule. Then he clammed up, wouldn’t explain any further. You just have to trust me, Panic. Do what you’re told.
No. Damn you, Frosty. We were partners!
Guzman had that secret currents kind of feeling. He was a detective once, and trusted his gut on that. But he wasn’t sure what was on Ava’s mind. “What do you mean?”
“Something doesn’t add up, with Hudson. Governor Cullen ran the Apple borders, kept us penned in here to die.”
“Until the U.S. was disbanded, those were his orders,” Guzman agreed. They hadn’t waited until the U.S. disbanded. The Army broke in five months early. “That’s the story.”
“But then Colonel MacLaren got those orders set aside.”