Marco stands up. “Excuse me,” he says, leaves the tea to freeze on the floor.
“Where is he going?” Zeke says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Johanna says. “He’ll be back. I’d say within an hour.”
Zeke says nothing. She wonders then if she has said too much, if inside Zeke’s head, he’s mocking her.
“Do you know what this is about?” Johanna says. “This plan of his?”
“No,” Zeke says.
“But you think he has something in mind?”
“Sure.”
“We’re not on trial here, Zeke. You can answer with more than one word.”
“Okay.”
“…”
“So what do you think his plan is?” Johanna says.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows yet. But I believe he’s piecing it together.”
“And what’ll happen when he does?”
“I’ll help him accomplish it.”
“Just like that.”
“Sure.”
“How can you trust him like that?”
“Why can’t you? Don’t those years mean anything to you?”
“I’m glad you’re leaving so soon,” Johanna says.
Zeke laughs, hard, and Johanna doesn’t know if it’s because he thinks she’s joking, or because he knows she’s not and thinks that’s funny. A sudden hate blooms in her: It’s the same old shit, this complete inability to be serious. She has seen him laugh during gunfights; he laughed when he heard Marco’s verdict.
They both finish the conversation in their heads in the next five seconds. You dumb fuck, she says, don’t you see? He’s trying to go home, like a kid hanging on to one too many balloons, floating over the fair. I wanna go home.
Do you really think that’s all there is to it? Zeke says.
What else do you think it is?
He’s trying to be good, Zeke says. Make his peace.
I know, she says. I’m not an idiot.
Then why won’t you let him?
Johanna gives Zeke an angry look, leaves him inside, walks into the cricketing night, onto the road that goes down the mountain. Clouds haunt a moonless sky, the trees hang in close, but she finds Marco anyway, walking up the slope again, already coming back to the world. He stops moving when he sees her, his breathing stops, the edges around his shape blur and vanish, and for eight seconds, she’s alone, the hairs rising on her neck, her other senses rushing to fill the space. Night birdsclick their claws on rocks and wood; insects rustle in the leaves. A faint scent of rot pulls a scarf across her face; the humidity pushes into her skin. Then his hand is on her stomach; she tilts back, lets her lips land on his cheek. Her breath curls around his ear. You son of a bitch, she says, turns, and is lifted up; she scales him; his hands are underneath her, and she hooks her feet around the back of his knees. They rock back and forth in the road, in the dark, until her hands dig into his back and she returns to the earth.
They don’t come back together. Marco tells Zeke that Johanna’s right, they should go. She gives them a yellow 1985 Mazda pickup with a spare tire bolted behind the passenger seat. The body’s rusty but the engine is good, she says; when it breaks down, they can sell it for parts. It’s amazing what people will do with them. Families of six live in the shells of station wagons, use the fuel injection to pump water into an irrigation system, fit the engine and axles with hoops of wood and metal to spin cotton.
She watches them turn down the driveway from the door of the barn, puts her hand up in a half wave. As they curve around the ruined house, Zeke’s arm, hanging out the passenger window, rises and waves back. But Marco’s head doesn’t turn, his hands don’t leave the wheel, and she shudders as her fear and her lust twist into pity.
She was born into a wealthy Connecticut family that owned a third of the town where she grew up; there’s a graveyard on the village green, protected by ordinance, a plot marked for her already near casualties of the Revolutionary War, a town judge who died of pneumonia in 1826. Her girlhood was a parade of brunches in winged brick mansions overlooking golf courses and reservoirs; cocktails on the patios of spired homes clinging to the rocks of the Thimble Islands; birthday parties on the Sound’s pebbly beaches, in riding stables in the foothills of the Berkshires. She hated it all, the propriety and position, the family’s complicity in thebloody birth of America, the massacres across New England, the Pequot bones sunk into swamps, driven into the ground, paved over with shopping plazas and rest stops; their survivors enslaved three centuries earlier, sold down to the West Indies for rum, for sugar. She convinced herself that when she finished high school, she would abandon it all, take the train as far west as the money in her pocket would get her, then get a job where she stood. She would be a waitress, a short-order cook. A nanny. Join the park service fire crew, digging ditches in the woods to contain flames. She refused to apply to college, left the day after graduation on a bicycle careening toward the train station, shaking with dumb anger. Six days later she was broke and hanging on a pay phone in Detroit, begging her parents to buy her a plane ticket home; she applied to twelve colleges that fall. But in college and law school the old feelings returned, so she immolated herself with partying that frightened her classmates.
“Those people are dangerous,” they said.
“They just know how to have a good time,” she said.
She was the last to join the Slick Six, and it was Zeke who found her, at a party in San Francisco thrown by two record executives in a house perched on the side of a hill that the festivities were shaking loose from the bedrock. Zeke could see the floor warping, broken strings of pearls pooling along the baseboard. He had a photograph of Johanna in the palm of his hand, while the living version almost pitched herself off the balcony until one of the record executives, her boyfriend for the next four days, caught her by an arm.
“It’s Johanna Salinger, right?” Zeke said. “Like the song, then the writer?”
“Yeah, very cute, like the song then the writer. What about it?” she said.
“I’m Zeke Hezekiah,” he said.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No offense taken, Miss Salinger,” Zeke said. “Your reputation precedes you, in every regard. I’d like to talk to you in private.”
They wriggled through the party and out to the curling driveway. By the time they reached his car, she was sober. They drove down to the harbor, where ships trawled in from the bay to be unburdened by cranes and men in dark suits spoke in hand signals. It took Zeke three hours to explain it all to her, the legal representation they needed, the places they wanted to be able to hide between the laws. She didn’t listen to a word he said, said yes anyway. They learned later that the party wrenched the house off the hillside two hours after they left—it tumbled onto its roof and crashed into the house below it—and Zeke saw in Johanna a wistfulness, as though she wished she’d been there. She remembers her years with the Slick Six as a procession of courtrooms, police stations, people in suits that cost more than cars, gleaming beads of parties in cities that lit the land to the horizon, the narrow hours of the night curled into the plunger of a syringe, then a club where people seduced each other in seventeen languages. Her name in the paper all the time, pictures of her on courthouse steps, the only one smiling, always looking right into the camera. See how much I can get away with? She never answered the phone if she knew it was her parents; they had to drive to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, call from a pay phone encrusted with stickers in a truck stop in Wyoming to trick her into picking up. She couldn’t bring herself to hang up on them once they hooked her, endured an hour or so before she started fighting.
“You’ve always been ashamed of me,” Johanna said.
“We’re not ashamed of you,” her father said. “We’re worried about you. Can’t you tell the difference?” They were dead a year later, a car accident in Montana, the remains sent back to Connecticut to be buried on the town green. She got the new
s weeks later after she finally returned her older brother’s seventh message. She never called him back, but in the back ofher brain, head tilted back as she sat in cars and cabs, helicopters battering over São Paulo, she talked to him all the time.
When Johanna lost the case against the Aardvark and Marco went to prison, she understood that she was done. She couldn’t look at him when the police took him away, couldn’t talk to any of the Six. Leave me alone, she said at last to Dayneesha, who was just trying to be friendly. It’s over. No more. Other criminals approached her for representation and were spurned, kingpins and money launderers, men implicated in real estate fraud and tax evasion. She withdrew from the law altogether, flew to Hartford, turned off of 84 and onto the roads that ducked and swerved through the Connecticut hills, the trees overwhelmed by vines, the houses peeking out of gullies, hiding on rises of land squared off by stone walls, until she was back at her ancestral home. She sat on the wide sofa before the fireplace, thought only about what she would do next. A clothing store, a restaurant, a silent partner in a hotel. Anything with no history.
When the economy collapsed, it was a personal insult, for she had gone legit, leveraged capital against capital, the tottering mobile you build when you try to play the game fairly, balancing all the pieces and holding your breath. Why couldn’t this have happened eight years ago, she thought. She would have thrown her head back, sawed off the heels of her shoes. Instead she watched the banks fold in on themselves, the big oil and gas companies shut down their plants, try to sell them. In the winter, she thought, the towns will start to freeze. She called up her brother; I’m going south, she said. He was already gone, talking to her from a satellite phone on a thirty-seven-foot sailboat parked forty-seven miles off the coast of Venezuela. Better hurry, he said, before they close 95 and you can’t go anywhere.
She barreled down the highway, passed the looting along the Connecticut shore, the fires in the marinas, the mansions at the mouths of the rivers and bays emptying into the Sound, Darien, Noroton, Cos Cob. A commuter train streaming flamesfrom its windows, still running north, leaving a trail of oily smoke. Grocery stores with broken windows in Mount Vernon, boxes of food scattered in the parking lot. Cars flipped over along the highway through Jersey and into Pennsylvania, ambulances screaming down the breakdown lanes. By nightfall, she was in southern Virginia. She pulled her car into a patch of trees on the side of the highway, turned off the engine and the lights, and then she could hear it: screams from the farms around her, the town nearby, gunshots, cars crashing, as if the whole country were thrashing itself to death. She crawled into the backseat, tucked her knees under her chin, jammed her shaking hands between her thighs, and sobbed until she couldn’t breathe, for the Slick Six, for herself, for the family she’d forsaken, the land around her, cracking and bleeding, tornadoes destroying mountains, curtains of darkness drifting down from the sky. When she slept at last, she dreamed of traffic jams and taxes, electric bills, garbage day. Men doing road work in bright orange vests, cones along the double yellow line, a steamroller kicking up the stink of fresh asphalt. A man with a ponytail under a yellow hard hat, waving her on with one hand, holding a circular sign in the other. Slow.
The mayor of Asheville concerns herself now with food, the water supply, the bridges over the Swannanoa; people say pieces of them are falling in the water. She had no idea people could produce so much garbage. But it’s the slavery ban, the town’s concession to its hippie past, that crowds the place with refugees. They came first from neighboring towns, then Virginia and Georgia. Now they come from everywhere; they’ve heard that here they’re allowed to be free. She doesn’t know what to do with them all. There are shantytowns along the roads from Tennessee, disputes over where Asheville ends and slave country begins that start with shotgun blasts and end with knives, clubs, sharpened tools, people hauled into the backs of trucks who squirm away to jump under the tires. But they’ve elected her twice, shake her hand when they see her in front of the Grey Eagle, in Jack of the Wood at the edge of a frantic pile of fiddles and banjos, a horde of booming guitars and chucking mandolins. You’re a little Lincoln, they say, and she thinks of the Pequot at the bottom of the Mystic River, in the ocean off Barbados. If only you knew where I was from.
She doesn’t know, as Maggot Boy Johnson does, how history is curling in on itself. One of her ancestors, a certain Jerrold O’Shaughnessy, became an agent on the Underground Railroad to harry his father, who owned 782 slaves on a plantation in South Carolina. Father and son raced against each other throughout the second half of the 1850s, the father buying slaves, the son freeing them. Every night Jerrold came home covered in dirt; his story was that he was a livestock trader, an occupation his father despised.
“How was wrestling hogs today, son?”
“Terrible,” Jerrold said. “They keep getting away from me.”
In July 1859, his father discovered Jerrold’s betrayal, and then there was warfare. Jerrold ran from the house ducking curses and rifle bullets; on his next trip north, driving a wagon of runaways in barrels labeled as rye whiskey, he stayed, moved into Connecticut, set up a cotton-trading company, took the name of his betrothed, and married into Johanna’s grand old family. As the glue fumes exit his brain, Maggot Boy Johnson traces the journey of Jerrold’s genes, flitting from parents to children, parents to children, until Johanna writhes from her mother’s womb, sprouts hair, gets curvy, heads south. Somewhere in Maryland, as she breaks from the New England cold, she passes Jerrold’s wraith in his wagon, trundling north. He knows his kin and waves, but she can’t see him.
Maggot Boy Johnson rises from his stupor and finds himself back in his cell on the Rosalita, the red shutters on the windows, a mural of the kitchen of the apartment in Cleveland where he grew up, his mother rolling out dough in her nightgown, a radio taped to the wall, a little Bobby Womack spiraling from thespeaker, she wanna know that she’s not walking on shaky ground. His books, a fading paperback of the Qur’an, a leather-bound edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, mildewed library copies of books about the coelacanth, expeditions to the poles, to Nepal. Laid-back hip-hop struts into his ears, four women practicing their thing on the cell block floor, a trumpet with a rag stuffed in it, bass, drum kit banged out from trash can lids and a suitcase, the MC plucking out soul licks on a banjo and working on flow, throwing her voice. They moved onto the ship yesterday, them and a few dozen others, and up and down the cells they’re taking out the bars, putting in doors and windows, luscious curtains stripped from theaters. They’re painting with enamel on the metal walls, a jungle of letters and faces, a snapshot of now. We are here. Families with animals came the day before yesterday—can we live here? is there room?—and the children scatter like thrown seeds throughout the hull, hiding and seeking among rat nests and boiler fittings while chickens and goats roam the deck; every evening, the galley air is thick with stewed meat and vegetables. Two of the women think they’re pregnant already, and Piston Beauvoir and Helga Ramstead are beating pieces of the rail into cradles. Big Mother presides over it all, welcomes any who want it, will do so until there’s no room left. He’s proud of his ship, aware of the symbol they became within forty-eight hours of reaching New York, when he told the Aardvark’s harbor police to fuck off and they did, because Big Mother’s name is so apt, because he showed them without moving a muscle what he’d been put away for. They flout the Aardvark’s authority just by being there; they’re a knife cutting off the fingers of his reach, the folk heroes of the new underground. Someone hung a sign over the bow, THIS SPACE IS FREE, and there is business conducted in the mess hall that Big Mother doesn’t need to know about, meetings that begin in suspicious stares and forced eloquence and end in empty bottles of moonshined sambuca, broken glasses, choking laughter, hands poundingthe metal table. Several have asked if the Rosalita is for sale, promise enough for Big Mother to move to a penthouse in Shanghai, swim in under the city’s rising sun. But Big Mother isn’t interested in commerce
, and there among the livestock, watching the harbor’s water darken with evening, Maggot Boy Johnson understands why. They all grew up fighting, behind schools, in apartments in the shadows of water treatment plants, in the parking lots of bars and factories, in the cafeterias of county jails. But they’ve put away their knives now, uncurled their fists; a peace they didn’t know existed has fallen upon them, and everyone on the Rosalita knows it’s here to stay, as long as they don’t scare it away.
All along the Atlantic coast and creeping inland, the grays of night are chasing day into the ground. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, the power is on in patches; in the vast swathes of darkness around them, people grope through the streets with flashlights, lanterns, torches. In Washington there is no power at all, and on clear nights with a new moon, the galaxy unfurls above, its wan light seeing into the future, turning streetlights into trees, sidewalks into paths of rugged moss, buildings into cliffs where falcons dive. In thirty years the vegetation will flood out of the parks, break through the pavement, bore though roofs, climb up walls to claw them down. In 150 more, the forest will grow thick and dark over everything, re-create the swamp that engineers worked so hard to drain, preparing for the day when the earth warms up enough to bring malaria out of exile. It seems like an eternity to us, because we’re young and impatient; the woods and the diseases can wait.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 10