Monk slips a trembling, sweaty hand into the velvet bag and extracts four smooth pebbles, placing them in Mab’s old claw. Mab polishes the stones inside her palm, glazed eyes looking through Monk’s sweat-dripping face. “East,” she rasps, placing a stone to Monk’s right: black, sticklike lines, a crude letter R. “Raido, the Journey. This may be your best direction for now.” She places a second stone to his left. “West.” Monk stares down at the inverted V, its right leg cut in half. “Laguz, a lake or body of water … this is a dangerous direction … avoid it.” A third rune is placed under the two on the green table. “South.”
“W,” Monk rasps.
“Fuck, excuse my language.”
“What is it?” His teeth chatter, perhaps he could move closer to the fire.
“Merkstave.” Her cloudy eyes reflect candlelight. “The rune is upside down. It’s an M. Not a good omen. Mannaz, means men. There are men waiting for you south…”
“Well, I’ve been trying to get home to my girl. She’s throwing a big rent party at our place and I’m missing it.” He’s wrapped his arms around himself, shivering.
“Merkstave means ‘reversed,’ in other words, one or more of them appear to be your friends but they are enemies.” Queen Mab rubs the final rune and places it on the table to complete the cross. “North.” The rune is blank, only polished bone. “Sorry,” her gnarled black fingers flipping the rune over: the other side is blank too.
“What the hell’s that mean, old woman?” Monk’s staring at the flames, perhaps he could crawl into the fireplace, sit on the nice warm grate.
“The blank rune, the Wyrd stone … There is static in your reading. You are wandering, perhaps in thrall to a demon or an angel … or both, battling for your soul.”
“What should I do? Which way should I go?”
Mab’s milky eyes crinkle and she frowns, her ancient fingers rubbing the polished blank ivory stone: now Monk can see worry, perhaps fear in her silence.
“What is it?”
“It is dangerous to interfere,” her voice pleading, “you should go.”
“Help me!” Monk slams his fist on the table.
“There are angels and demons battling for your soul. This man, Tyrone—” She shakes her head, pauses, closes her wizened eyes as if weighing something, then opens them. “Oh shit, I hope I don’t make things worse for you, young man … Tyrone is real. You were given his phone number by … the forces that protect you … Tyrone is a physicist, an engineer, a genius, a madman, the only Negro physicist to work on that atom bomb, I heard … he is many things … he helped design and invent the telephone companies, their newfangled computers and communications, I don’t understand any of it, I’m an old woman. I heard he made all the phones, every line connect and work in all of Los Angeles and way beyond … but see … he was losing his eyesight, a disease … he raced against time and finished his final work, just a few months ago. He and some other scientists built this satellite called Intelsat One. They launched it, like I said, a few months ago and it’s circling over our heads as we sit here. It’s a communication satellite, and somehow, it beams phone calls—not just the telephone, but radio and TV and God knows what all … beams them across space to anywhere in the world … maybe beyond the world, for all I know … Yes sir, a genius … now he’s blind, in hiding. They built that satellite for a mysterious international company called Comsat … supposed to be for communication only, to help mankind. Well, Tyrone found out Comsat was a military front … that they were gonna use the world’s telephone networks for spying, or worse. But old Tyrone’s one step ahead of them. Before he lost his sight and the world went dark, he rigged the satellite and the phone systems so’s he can hijack it all. Now he’s building up a group of like-minded folks, to sabotage, break down their systems.”
“Why does he want to help me?”
“I don’t know, child. Some say working on that atomic bomb made him hate authority … the government, the police, maybe he’ll close ’em all down with his satellite and computers and second sight,” she cackles. “Maybe he sees you and that notebook as an ally. You must go now. Come, come, young man,” shooing him with her cane toward the back door. “It’s positively roasting in here, why didn’t you say something? ‘Which way, what should I do,’ how do I know? I told you I wasn’t a fortune-teller.” Queen Mab opens the door: beyond, the summer night and distant sirens. The draft warms over him and his shivering subsides.
“Are you really blind, old Queen Hoodoo?”
“So many stupid questions! Was the ancient poet blind when he sang of the odyssey every man’s life must trace? Many have eyes who are blind, and some who are blind have many eyes!” Monk feels a cane nudging between his sweaty buttocks as he’s propelled down the steps and the door slams.
The alley empties into El Segundo, south just as the old hoodoo said. The summer night feels good against his soaked clothes. Monk cuts under the concrete pylons and shadows of the Harbor Freeway overhead; the freeway is eerily silent, as if few cars dare to venture north into the Stack: the cloverleaf multiverse where the Harbor, Hollywood, Santa Ana, and Pasadena freeways interchange … invisible cars pulsing above and below, along the looping arteries of the transitions layered like engineered mazes that rise into the smog. A strange essence radiates from its concrete gyres, perhaps because the four-level exchange—the world’s first—was built in ’53 on the site of the old downtown gallows … its levels corkscrew into the night, promising ascent—cops, reporters, pilots shaking their heads, whispering about some nights when its loops arc up into a fifth level, where cars fade into smoggy banks and disappear …
Monk passes a chain of cop cars that ring the Imperial Cadillac dealership. Police and salesmen guard the new Coup de Villes and Fleetwoods and coupes under the lot’s lights, corporate is trying to get the National Guard out here, yes, it’s only a matter of time before every Negro in town converges on the lot for a joyride in the ultimate soul car … double up those cops around the convertibles, the black-, chocolate-, gold-painted models with those fine chrome wheels.
Railroad tracks stitch along Athens Way. Monk follows the tracks to 130th Street. The small lawns in the front yards of the row houses are all burned brown, like sepia-tone photographs from the past somehow leaching into the present: summer heat, fire, smoke have all conspired to kill any natural buffers between the erupting streets and iron-barred, barricaded houses. Acrid smoke layers the air, drifting somewhere from the east. He passes shops where black proprietors stand guard with shotguns and pistols and hunting rifles. Some plate-glass windows are intact, handmade stenciled signs leaning against the glass, signs painted with black palms and extended fingers: STOP! I’M A BLOOD BROTHER!
At 131st, Athens Way is flooded with rushing water, lapping at the sidewalks Monk treads. Every hydrant’s breached, shooting torrents of white foamy water hundreds of feet into the summer night and smoke, as if the night itself is engulfed. Fire crews and cops fight to wrench off the valves. The police can’t shoot, they can only cluster around fire trucks in their riot gear as firemen are forced to turn their hoses on mobs of men and women across the flooded street lobbing bricks and rocks into the trucks and squad cars and flashing red lights and spraying torrents of water. The water’s rising now, Monk splashing his way down the block, weaving around geysers of water and shouting kids; men smash windows and hurl debris, cops and firemen run for cover. He turns east toward Spring Street but the water seems to be channeling down here, torrents swirling down the narrow street until he’s slogging ankle-deep in water and gurgling trash. Monk’s reached another corner, Charybdis Circle, when some kind of underground explosion rocks him against a brick wall. Towers of water blast into the air, rocketing manhole covers through the sky. Shit, Tyrone warned me. He sprawls into the flooding waters: Monk’s fingers claw at the curb as torrents swirl him into the street. He’s scratching the asphalt, spitting out water; his red Keds kick and splash as he’s swept down the street. “Help! Fuck!�
�� He grabs a mailbox’s iron leg but his hands are wrenched away. Monk gags, spits water, twisting on his back as the cascade slams his head against the curb. Ahead, a great vortex of foamy water, trash, sticks, papers, mud, and now Monk’s motionless body swirls down the black maw of the sewer hole.
16
Shadows, dim light filtered through blankets nailed over windows. Two women and a man lie curled on a filthy mattress, sunken eyes watching. Monk’s clothes are wet, soaked and clammy. His head and his left hand pound in pain as he looks in bewilderment at his swollen, bruised wrist: the last thing he remembers is walking down the alley from that old hoodoo’s house. Two black men sit in the corner, lighting a glass pipe. Monk staggers across the floor strewn with clothes, newspapers, food, trash. In the ceiling’s corner, a great spiderweb radiates out: no, it is only cracks that splinter down toward the door like etched lightning. A black girl sits on the floor with a glass pipe in her lap, she grabs Monk’s hand as he passes but he wrenches away and staggers through a doorway.
Monk lurches between men and women who lie in sleepy tangles, or watch him with glazed indifference as they slump against walls, pillows, other bodies. His stomach churns, the walls seem to glow and throb as if somehow breathing. A sharp, stabbing pain stings his thigh. He digs into his soggy pants pocket and pulls out shards of broken, dark glass. Monk watches, uncomprehending, as the shattered, twisted pieces of his sunglasses slip from his fingers onto the floor.
An emaciated, naked black girl dances alone in the silence: she raises her bony hand, beckoning to Monk as he staggers toward the door. A blinding flash: black men and women line the walls, spectral faces silent masks watching without emotion—then they are gone. He’s in a hallway, alone, acid gnawing the pit of his stomach. His mouth tastes ash as he turns the knob and slowly opens the door to another room.
An ornate four-poster bed sits in shadows under the hazy puce nimbus of a crystal lamp. A woman is draped under the sheets, her breasts dark and heavy in the soft light; behind her, a small black boy snores, his large Afro pressed into a pillow. She is entwined in the powerful, dark arms of a demon, its head impossibly bloated, a giant’s head bobbing, its shadow like a great planet floating against the walls.
“Shit, look who woke up,” feminine giggling, her hand scruffing up the sheet modestly around her dark nipples.
Monk rubs his burning eyes, pinwheels and strobe lights fade from his throbbing head as he stares up in horror. Slowly his eyes focus and his reeling brain processes the monstrous shadow looming before him: a giant black man, over seven feet tall, Monk judges, dressed in gold silken pajama bottoms. His naked chest and biceps are gargantuan. A black silk patch covers his right eye; the left eye, bloodshot, glares down balefully at Monk: perhaps because of the patch, the solitary eye appears too large in the grinning, brutal face; great black sideburns darken his jowls like reversed African continents. The immense demon head, Monk sees now, is just the shadow of the giant’s great Afro, the biggest Monk’s ever seen: a black, impenetrable sphere of kinky hair that extends in a woolly diameter of a meter and a half.
“Where the fuck am I?” Monk rubs his pounding head, his heart thumps as he looks around: they’re in some kind of concrete storm drain, a cavernous cement-block chamber with water gurgling on the floor, drain channels radiating out into darkness, iron-rung ladders on walls leading to drains and pipes and locked steel hatches, river debris and branches and trash clogging grate covers and spillways, drops of cold water dribbling from concrete above like a slow drizzle. Near the immense bed are stacks of steel storage boxes, chairs, tables covered in heaps of comic books, couches. Five or six black gangsters are scattered along the chamber: three playing cards, two weighing packets of white powder on a scale under a generator light, another man cleaning a pistol and drinking beer, wearing jeans and tank tops or shirtless in the subterranean warm, foul air. It’s no gang that Monk can place.
“Don’t cha remember, cutie?” the woman purrs from the bed.
“Shu’ up, LaDot,” the giant’s deep voice growls, echoing across the slipway. “You deep in the Wood.”
“Shhh, honey,” the woman whispers, “you’ll wake up little Ricky.”
Monk rubs his throbbing temples and gazes around, lost in what must be a hallucination. The Wood? The river swept him all the way west to Inglewood? That means he’s off course again. Towering heaps of gang swag rise from the concrete floor and channels like fantastic mountains: piles of guns and rifles, cans of beer, bottles and cases of wine and liquor, purloined watches and jewelery, white-powder bricks and chunks of cocaine, rows of motorcycles, choppers, pyramids of stereos and radios and TVs and phonograph players, pressed kilos of marijuana stacked like ziggurats that domino toward the dripping ceilings and drains, threatening to topple. Down the far end of the spillway, beyond the generator lamps, a great, rusted steel circular hatchway is locked closed. Monk recognizes the wedge-shaped hinges above the hatch as the iron doors he’s seen along the flood channels, los gatos, the ones taggers paint into giant cartoon faces, their riveted hinges pointy ears: through the city’s concrete riverbeds and channels and aqueducts, he’s seen Happy Felix, Stoned Felix, Tom with poor little Jerry dead in his fangs, that Cheshire Cat disappearing behind his iron grin, Sylvester smoking a blunt, Krazy Kat rolling his eyes, red devils, hinges for horns, glowering balefully up into the barrios from their underworld lairs.
“Yeah, you dropped in.” The giant laughs. Turning his great Afro toward the bed: “Make meat, bitch.”
LaDot scowls but sighs and clambers out of bed. Monk’s stomach churns as he watches her prance in a diaphanous powder-blue slip toward a bank of hot plates and a refrigerator.
Through Monk’s seared brain, between flashbacks of blinding white light, floating glass pipes, and incandescent pinwheels, the fog of improbable memory breaks: he was swept away down a flooding street, pried from a mailbox, sucked down a torrential drain … washed through pried iron grates, half drowned and semiconscious down concrete channels and into a great subterranean chamber. The notebook. Monk pats his damp pants, relieved to feel the soggy but intact notebook still tucked under his torn shirt.
“Who are you?” Monk feels fragmented, as if his brain is amped to electric overload while his body is in some kind of slow-motion limbo.
“No, da quesdon is, muferfuckah,” the giant pulls a .38 from the back of his waistband, “where you?”
Monk knows the telegraphic slang is a query of where he’s from, what gang. A fleeting image flashes through his aching mind, R60 sprayed on a pylon as he was swept down the muddy currents of the spillway. Monk’s right hand curls into an R sign, index finger and thumb forming the loop, two middle fingers splayed out for the letter’s legs, left index finger and thumb forming a circle, the other fingers curving to complete the number 6: Rollin’ 60s.
“Good answer, man,” from one of the gangsters playing cards: both men laugh.
The giant’s eye glares at the card table. To Monk: “Shit, I was just fuckin’ wiff cha, ol’ Highbeam don’t cap future clients,” laughing, tucking away the gun.
“Le’s see dat sign agin.” Highbeam grins as he sinks into a black leather double car seat propped against a pylon. Monk flashes the R60. “Better’n you fucks,” to the other two men.
“Like I told you, boss,” says a short, stocky black man, no shirt, Afro crushed under a backward baseball cap. “We should make the fuckin’ sign easier.”
“Yeah, dig this, boss,” from another, a cigarette smoldering from his lip. “See? WM. Easy. We just call ourselves Watts Monsters.”
“No, Cronk.” The other gangster flashes a hand sign. “Dig this, OX.”
“OX?” Highbeam’s eye squints skeptically.
“Outside Experts.” Grinning, revealing rotten teeth gleaming with bluish metal caps.
“Nigger, get da fuck outta here, Blue-Cap,” from Cronk.
“How ’bout this shit, boss?” Thumbs and index fingers make loops as the other fingers ex
tend straight up, describing “BD.” “Blood Daddies.”
“Look here, nigger.” Cronk’s hands give the double finger to Highbeam: “Inglewood Imps.”
“Go count da bazooka ’fore I cap you black asses.” Highbeam waves them away with a cigar-sized blunt: he lights up, takes a huge drag, closes his solitary eye. A sweet cloud of marijuana smoke engulfs Monk. Highbeam offers the joint but Monk waves it away politely. “Frone!”
“Here I am, monster.” LaDot’s shrugged into a silk kimono and she hands Highbeam a huge plate piled with smoking sausages and slabs of beef. Highbeam holds up a dripping shank toward Monk.
“No thanks, I feel kind of sick.”
“Yeah.” Highbeam grins, tearing into the meat. “You won’ be hungry for a week after doin’ a blast.” The bloodshot eye glares at LaDot: “Chivas, bitch.” LaDot frowns, prances over to the banks of hot plates.
“Blast?”
“Bazooka.” LaDot pours two tumblers full of scotch, hands one glass to Highbeam. She sips, lifting the glass to Monk’s pale lips, but he shrugs away. Monk’s stomach flips, his head burns, Highbeam’s words echo now: a future client.
“Bazooka?” Monk’s voice is a hopeless croak, beads of sweat on his forehead and under his arms.
“Yeah, dig this operashun, baby,” Highbeam sweeping his hands around the chamber, big fists clutching a dangling string of sausages. “This is jus’ da beginning. See, dere’s money in blow, dig, but dere’s fuckin’ crazy money if you cook de shit.”
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