by Nova
“Look, Max, just tell me,” I finally said, since it was getting kind of irritating.
“Well, look, it’s like this—the killing thing. I know . . . I mean . . . well, don’t get to liking it. You go down that road and you’re not going to like what you find.”
I just stared at him. He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “You know about me. You know where I’ve been.” I nodded. “I saw guys like you in the Corps. You get to liking it—the power, the reaching out and snatching a life or three. I was like that; maybe I still am a bit. I never really figured it all out.”
He was looking away from me now . . . far away. I don’t know whether it was inside himself or out under a hot sun in a place where so many others had died.
“I had my sarge take me for a walk. Wasn’t far—you couldn’t go far there. All that space, and we could only use a tiny piece at a time. That’s when he told me this.” Max closed his eyes and recited:
“Some men are born to a love of violence; others acquire a taste for it. In wartime many consider it a tool to be put aside once victory has been achieved. Nevertheless, all of those who have experienced it will find they remain marked by it until death. For those of us born to it, only a few will realize that it is a gift that must be contained, hidden, and controlled, for otherwise it will destroy us. Like fire, all it knows is that it must burn. Who and what it consumes in the process means nothing to it.”
He told me that his sarge had learned it from an old German back when he was a private and stationed there. He never said one way or the other, but my guess was the German had served in World War II. “What I am saying is, don’t let it burn you out.”
I sat there for a minute and then said, “Well, Max, that was some profound shit. Thank you for sharing that with me.” Then I grinned at him.
“You’re an asshole, Gardener. I don’t know why I freaking bother.” He was smiling as he said it. I knew what he was trying to do. I didn’t really understand it, but it was cool. We had our little moment and then it was back to reality. “We got a job tomorrow.”
“Really? Anything good?” I doubted it, but you had to ask.
“Yeah, it isn’t that bad. The chief wants us to go over to the Forest Meadow development. You know which one I mean?”
I did. It was a development of brick “executive manors” that had once sold for $1.4 million apiece. They had only built out about half the development before the Crash. When the builder went bankrupt there were about ten houses built; nine of them were empty last time I biked through there on the way to somewhere else.
“Yeah, is that the teardown?”
“Yeah, we need to go through one last time. I guess they’re expecting some brass to show up for the bulldozing. Supposedly, the sheriff’s department went through and cleaned the last one out. We just got to make sure no one’s moved back in since.”
I had read about it and heard the talk. The federal government was giving out money so “excess housing” could be torn down. It would create a few jobs, and the local municipality would get the land once it was cleaned up. Supposedly, a park was going to be built, but I doubted it. There was no money. That is, unless a vacant field fit the description of a park, which it probably did. Word was, the city was going to sit on it until the economy came back, then sell it to a builder.
Good luck with that, I thought. We made plans to meet at 0800 hours over at Forest Meadows. A couple of the city patrol officers were going to show up to help. We parted ways, and I went back to my room to eat some soup and get some sleep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BARBIE
I was there the next morning at 0745. Max was already there waiting. It was a beautiful morning—cool, with a nice light breeze out of the east. We sat on a pile of bricks, kicked our heels, and talked about nothing until the city patrol officers rolled in around 0815. I won the bet. Max had figured on 0830 for their arrival; I had taken 0815 or earlier. He was buying lunch next time. I heard him mutter, “What the hell? Was the coffee place out of bagels again?” I laughed.
We did our greetings, spending about ten minutes doing it until Willis—he was the sarge—said “Well, might as well get this over with. You two take this side of the road; me and Robbie will take the other. Shouldn’t be nothing to it—oh, and don’t get lazy on me either. Check downstairs and upstairs. We don’t want anybody getting run over by a dozer in front of the suits.”
“Yeah, yeah, we got it covered,” Max told him over his shoulder as we walked away.
“How we going to get in, Max?” I hadn’t seen any keys change hands.
“No problem—no doors.” He was right: Most were missing their doors, and if it wasn’t a door, it was a window.
“Hard to believe they got more than a million dollars for these.” I had never been in a house that cost that much when they were actually functional.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t look like they did,” Max replied.
We started checking them. Max would go in through the back and check the basement and garage. I checked the first and top floor. Usually, there was more than one staircase to the main floor, which is where we would meet. There was a lot of space in these houses. My room was about the size of a bedroom closet in these places. They must have been nice once, but not anymore. They had been hit by waves of destruction.
The first wave came with the owners’ departure. Some owners, not all, had gutted them of the appliances. Others, perhaps harder up for cash, went for everything else of value. Carpet would be ripped up, wood flooring would be pried up. Craigslist was a good place to get a deal on cabinets and vanities or flooring back then. The second place we checked was missing all the light switch covers. Sometimes the owners would do malicious damage; sometimes not.
Then the second wave would come through: the scavengers. If the owners left the appliances and everything else intact, well, that was a great day in a scavenger’s life. They went for copper wiring and pipes. The way they harvested it was hard on the drywall. They were like giant rats gnawing through it to rip out what they came for. The neat ones used a knife; the others just punched a hole and began ripping.
The third wave was squatters and kids. They built fires and crapped where they felt like it. After all, there were plenty of houses to move to when the stench got too bad or they were moved along. They never left anything the way they found it. Windows would be left open, and rain would soak everything—eventually the mold would take over. Animals—especially raccoons and squirrels—would come in, take a look around, and build nests. Which reminded me: I needed to keep an eye out for wasps. They loved these empty houses, too.
We were on the fourth house—this one had an intact entry—when she pulled up. Max had just gone around the back. I heard the car and quit kicking the front door in. It was a Volvo that had seen better days. I walked down the driveway toward the car when she stepped out. She was one of the “hard to tells.” That’s what I called them, because it was hard to tell their age. Whatever your first guess was, you usually ended up adding twenty years to it.
She was pretty from a distance—they always are—blonde, almost slim, with a nice rack of silicone. I don’t know a lot about women’s clothes, but hers fit nicely and looked expensive. Back when I worked for the mortgage company, a lot of the female brokers looked like her. Well, the new ones usually didn’t, but after they worked there for a few months they would begin the transformation. First they did the hair, then the breasts, followed by the face, ass, stomach, wherever. The clothes would get more expensive, tighter, more revealing. Their attitude would also change. They became “broker bitches.” Simple tech support guys no longer had a chance with them. We couldn’t afford them. If you caught one early, well, you had until a couple months after the transformation began. Then you would get dumped. After all, a girl needs her space. Oh, occasionally they might forget, like at an office party, but the next day it was as if it never happened.
So as I watched her approach, I was not radi
ating awestruck appreciation of the goddess who would be soon was standing in front of me. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, hesitated, and then gave me the smile—she had a great smile. “Hello, officer. I thought I would come by and see my house before they blew it up or whatever it is that you people do.”
“Ah, we bulldoze it . . . well, I don’t. I was just checking to make sure it was empty.”
“Really,” she drawled this out, “I saw you knocking on my front door. Perhaps these will help?” She held up a set of house keys.
“Well, there is only one way to find out.” I took them from her hand, and we walked to the front door.
“I was so hoping I would be able to look inside once more. I really loved this house.”
I slid the key into the lock. It fit, as did the dead bolt key. “You had one strong door there, ma’am.”
“Oh, please, call me Tiffany.”
“Okay, Tiffany,” I held the door open for her.
As she went through she told me, “Yes, it’s not an ordinary door. It’s is teak and it was handcrafted especially for—” She stopped dead “Oh . . . my . . . God.” I had no idea what the house looked like before, but I am sure it didn’t look the way it did now. It was nothing new or particularly shocking to me. It was to her. “Oh, my lord. What the . . . ” her voice trailed off. The foyer floor had been tiled with ceramic; most of it was now shattered. The floor in the great room had a large burnt spot where someone had built a campfire. The fireplace pit was full of trash. The walls had been tagged with profanity and a poorly done outline of a giant black penis that had been labeled Obama. Yep, nothing new or unusual here. “My floor . . . oh, my God, my Italian ceramic floor! . . . And my mahogany floor, too”—she had noticed the fire scars. “My walls . . .” Her hand was over her mouth, her eyes were large; she was slowly spinning in place as she took it all in. “It was so beautiful, it was so beautiful. . . .”
After a moment, in a quiet voice she asked me, “Is it all like this?”
“I don’t know. My guess is yes.”
“Oh,”—a pause—“will you show me the rest?”
“Sure. Except we’re going to skip the basement. It might be dangerous.” She nodded in agreement. The real reason was, I didn’t feel like running into Max and having to explain—or share.
We walked the kitchen and dining area; all the appliances were gone. “They took my Vikings!” Whatever those were, their being taken had her sounding irritated for the first time, rather than stunned as she had been. She rattled on about her Natuzzi sofa and how her idiot husband had tried to mount the flat screen over the fireplace. The brackets had come loose, and the TV had ended up broken on the floor. Apparently, that had really been a big deal at the time.
She took my arm as we mounted the stairs; mounting was on my mind as I looked over at her. She gave me a little smile when she saw me looking. So what if it was past its prime? It had been a while. We made it to the top without incident and began touring the upper-level bedrooms. Once again it was endless decorating chatter—I would interject a sincere sounding “Really?” or a nod of the head if she was looking and a “That sounds really pretty.” Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out where we could make it happen. Everything was dirty. That wouldn’t bother me, especially as I wouldn’t be on the bottom, but I was pretty sure it would matter to her. She looked like that type. We had just come out of the master suite, where she had spent what seemed like an eternity describing the master bath and the twin, cedar-lined walk-in closets.
She was looking around the room. “And that was where our king-sized bed was—Donny liked it. He told me that we would have plenty of room for playing—shit, the only thing he did in it was play possum. Even Viagra couldn’t get a rise out of him.”
As she finished spitting this out, the sun came out from behind the clouds and flooded the room with light. Not only did it illuminate the room, it illuminated her. I normally wouldn’t have cared. I had already seen her in the sunlight.
This time, the look on her face as she spat out her disdain of her husband’s sexual prowess, combined with the harshness of the sunlight on her face, was as effective as a cold bucket of water. The vicious glint of hate in her eyes, the artificiality of her body, of her soul, her mindless recitation of items purchased—it all repelled me.
An image of my last trip to a thrift store: a bin filled with old toys—on top, a naked Barbie, the dirt on it looking like bruises, the hair damaged by some kind of chemical, the body twisted. That was the woman in front of me. A cold chill ran down my back. The look of expectant pleasure replacing the glint in her eyes was frightening in its intensity. I had a vision of her reaching out, taking me in her arms, and devouring me like a fresh-baked cookie. When she was done she would leave. The only thing left behind to show I had ever been here would be my rapidly dimming shadow and a hair ball.
“Okay. Time to go.” I didn’t even touch her. I just headed for the stairs. I think I heard a faintly muttered “Shit” behind me, before the sound of her heels let me know she was following. We left the same way we came in. I was surprised that Max wasn’t waiting there.
We were out the door and I was about six feet down the walk when she called out to me, “Wait! We have to lock the front door!”
I still had the house keys. I tossed them to her. “You can if you want. That door won’t be there in four hours.”
I think that’s when she understood: It was over. Wherever she was going now was just another step on the way down. No more everything, no more forever. I turned away and kept walking over the remains of the grass to the next house. I didn’t turn around when I heard the Volvo engine start up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DIVISIONS
Max was sitting on the top step waiting for me. He eyed me, grinned, and said, “I guess it didn’t work out—or it has been a long time since the last time.”
“Fuck you, Max.”
“Ah, no score; I should have known.” He laughed. “Let’s finish this up. I want to be out of here before the suits shows up. I don’t want to end up getting stuck here doing security until they leave.” We finished up a little behind the city patrol boys working the other side. They were waiting for us.
Willis, the patrol sergeant, asked, “You boys see anything?”
Max and I both shook our heads. “Same old, same old,” Max told him.
“So you boys want to hang around, maybe pick up some OT?” We all laughed at that—we were volunteers, so we didn’t get paid.
“Maybe next time, Sarge.” We spent a few more minutes talking the usual bullshit and then parted ways.
The first cars were beginning to roll in as we walked through the tall, patchy, gone-to-seed grass of what were once manicured yards. Max and I walked and talked about nothing in particular: Some woman he had been seeing was pushing him to move in; whether or not we wanted to play softball for the city municipal team. It looked as if we were going to have to, even if we didn’t want to. The only way out would be if they canceled the season, which was looking possible. We split near the market and went our separate ways for the day. I thought I would cruise the market, go down the street, get something to eat, and head back to the room—maybe see if Night wanted to watch a movie or something. I had found out from one of the ninjas that she was older than I thought, which made me feel less like a pervert about hanging out with her.
I was still shaken up a bit from my encounter with the American harpy. Maybe I would just sit under the oak tree and talk with whoever was there or wandered by. Hopefully, it would be quiet. Some of the problems that were brought to us were so fucking petty that you wanted to shoot both parties involved. We were hearing more problems lately. People seemed more quarrelsome. Either that or we were just a lot easier and faster than getting enmeshed in the county legal system. We were definitely a lot cheaper. Official justice was an option increasingly available only to those with money. The courthouse charged for everything. Even a simple complaint could
be very expensive to someone who had nothing. It wasn’t that the county fees had gone up; rather it was that so many people’s incomes had gone down.
Some people, especially media types, pontificated about how Americans would grow closer despite our diversity. Usually, it was a white person doing the talking. Their idea of diversity was based on what they observed at work. It never occurred to them that the reason a company had such diversity in its lower ranks was because it paid the lowest salary or wage it could. They also seemed totally unaware that those same people knew to the dollar what kind of bonuses their “betters” were getting. Too many people in positions of power in this country mistook ass-kissing for actual affection.
I was walking past the shelter and heading for the oak tree when Tito, the security guard at the shelter, waved me over. “Hey, you got to go in there and see what’s happening on TV.” He was watching it through the window. I walked up and stood next to him so I could see. There was a group of people watching it inside. It looked like there was a riot somewhere that was getting seriously out of hand.
“Ain’t that some shit! Where is it?” I was expecting him to say Los Angeles or Miami from the complexions of the rioters.
He laughed. “That’s Arlington.”
Damn. Arlington was about eight miles down the road. What made it even more surprising was that it was inside the Zone. I thought security was too tight inside to let anything more than an argument break out.
“Thanks, Tito. I got to check this shit out.” I walked in and paused behind the crowd of women who were gathered in a tight knot, raptly watching the big flat screen. The few who had cell phones were off to one side getting more information from friends and family about what was happening.
The shelter only housed women and children. It had been at capacity since the day it opened. Carol was standing to one side with her staff so I went over to join them.
“Hey, Carol.”