They got their subpoenas from the offices of Winderhoek and Associates, but they knew who was behind them. Johanna stood in her suit with her arms crossed, brow wrinkling and smoothing. Carolyn’s hand spidered over her mouth; Hideo’s eyes angled toward the door. Zeke lay on the couch, scratching his head. Dayneesha sat on the floor. Words stuttered out of them: Maybe we can, there’s always a chance that, it doesn’t mean that. But they couldn’t; it did mean that. There was no chance.
“This is stupid,” Marco said. He stood at the windows. “There’s no reason for any of us to go to prison.”
“You mean, other than the fact that we’re guilty?” Zeke said.
“He has nothing hard on us, unless one of us talks,” Marco said. “I won’t turn any of you in. And none of you will turn me in.”
But one of them did. Zeke has never found out who, though he remembers how persuasive the Aardvark could be. The man he sent to Zeke didn’t talk about physical harm. He threatened financial destruction, the ruin of his reputation. He would make sure Zeke never worked again. Then he talked about Kuala Lumpur, how much of a shame it would be to drag her into this. The things that could be done to her.
“It’s useless to do anything to anyone,” Zeke said. “To me or to her.”
The man smiled. “I forgot to mention how much I enjoy hurting people.”
Zeke looks at Marco driving into Texas; his hands are still at ten and two and he wants to tell him: I never talked, Marco. I didn’t because I knew you wouldn’t have. It was beyond trust. I just knew. You are a brother to me. But it would kill these things to say them.
“The stars at night,” Zeke says, “are not big and bright.”
“We’re not deep in the heart of Texas yet,” Marco says.
They pull into Fort Worth at dawn. The highway between Dallas and Forth Worth is thick with craters and metal carcasses, some from a long-ago shootout between separatists and the National Guard that nobody’s had the energy to clear away, others dug by the rockets from the south. A colony of dogs lives inside the rusting body of an armored troop carrier. The streets of Fort Worth are strewn with papers of a dozen colors, signs for the missing, people sleeping in rows along the sidewalk. A few raise their heads as the truck passes, mouths open, still dreaming. They meander into a labyrinth of warehouses to what can only be Dayneesha’s place: Spray-painted on the gate to the courtyard of a big brick building is the silhouette of a woman with an Afro as tall as her body, hip to the side, finger pointed out and away, FOR THE LOVE OF MONEY, PEOPLE splashed across her chest. They’re pulling in, all smiles, until the truck trips an alarm, loses its tires to a low hail of darts and spikes. Zeke and Marco start crawling out of the windows and onto the hood when they see the long barrel of a military-grade sniper’s rifle slide out of a window, aim in their direction.
“Don’t come any—holy fuck, it’s you!” Dayneesha yells. “Ray, don’t shoot!”
The rifle slides back inside. Twenty-one seconds pass. Then the door to the building flips open, and Dayneesha is running across the parking lot with a shaved head and a gigantic smile that lets them see the gold stars planted on her canines.
“How the hell are you guys?” she says. “I’d apologize about the truck, but I know it’s not yours.”
“Johanna told us the tires were worth something,” Zeke says. “You planning on reimbursing us?”
“I got tires; don’t worry about it. Just come inside and tell me how you are. Tell me how the fuck you are.”
The walls against the stairs to the second floor writhe with cables, the machines upstairs set the steps to thrumming beneath their feet. Upstairs, computers surround them; monitors bolted to the walls, resting on the floor, hanging from the rafters, leaning in to peer at the intruders, all of them busy at once with a roil of images, scrambling voices, a sparking wire of words: a twelve-pound baby born in Kirkmansville, Kentucky; Abe Turley fell off his roof in Sumatra, Montana, swears he was dead for three seconds but walked away with just a broken wrist; five hundred dead in Corpus Christi; pine bureau for sale in Nageezi, New Mexico, cheap; four boys for sale in Haverton, Pennsylvania, cheap; the town of Greenfield, Ohio, burned to the ground three days ago; Toyota pickup wanted in North Paris, Maine, runs on vegetable oil; three fine horses stolen from a yard in Meriden, Connecticut; fifty thousand half-starved refugees arriving in Willacoochee, Georgia, nobody knows where they’re from; sneakers for sale in Wallowa, Oregon, best offer; woman for sale in Thornhope, Indiana, best offer; man survives stabbing, drowning, writes concerto for glockenspiel; dog wanted in Lamona, Washington, must be able to kill and eat snakes; man for sale in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, best offer; tornado strikes Waukomis, Oklahoma, town feared disappeared; woman in Shevlin, Minnesota, teaches her cat to paint—
“You really are the news,” Zeke says.
Dayneesha laughs. “Sure. But did you ever hear that old reporter joke? You can either write the paper or read it? I don’t even look at the screens anymore. I do search requests if someone’s looking for somebody, or they want to know everything that’s happening in South Dakota, I’ll set them up. But Ray here does the daily feed. People think what I put out there is the most important news around the country that day, but it’s really just whatever caught Ray’s eye. I don’t know if thatmakes me any different than papers before. But it makes me realize I never knew what was going on before, even when I thought I did. Now at least I know I don’t know a damn thing. But I can find you a decent push-reel lawn mower for a not-bad price in no time.”
“Or a slave,” Zeke says.
“Yeah,” Dayneesha says. “The slavers mention all the people they buy and sell, so nobody buys someone that someone else already owns. Big market right here in Fort Worth.”
“You ever been?” Marco says, and she narrows her eyes, looks at him for too long.
“No. Every city’s got one, though, a whole network set up, and our man the Aardvark is running the whole show from that tower of his. Thing’s made out of human bones, I’m telling you.”
“But you helped him build it.”
“Yeah, I did,” Dayneesha says. “Sometimes I try to defend that choice. I say, well, if I didn’t keep the information coming, somebody else would. They’re a big-time operation; they’d figure it out. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s me who’s helping them, does it? But I got me, and Ray, and when I find the rest of my family, I’ll have all of them too, and I can’t bring down slavery all by myself. And, people: The money’s too good.”
“It was too good for me too, Day,” Zeke says. They both look at Marco. We sold you out when we went to work for him, they want to say. Took the money and didn’t even write; and there is a twinge in Dayneesha’s brain, the lighting of a fuse. She doesn’t know where to start, and if she does, how she’ll ever stop.
“So how’d you get here?” Dayneesha says.
“Johanna lent us a car in Asheville and—”
“—No,” Dayneesha says. “How’d you get here?”
She makes Marco begin on the prison ship, makes Zeke start with his flight to Monaco. Survival tactics in the North Atlantic. The best espresso on the Mediterranean coast. Metal ladders and marble steps in morning light. A stew of Spanish and Chinese, a broth of European words. Then the shudder of collapse, a ripple against the ship’s rudder, an earthquake on the shore. For Dayneesha, a ride from Chicago to Fort Worth on a bus packed with people and bags, yelping children and dogs, guns on the floor, every few hours the smell of vomit. She stood in the aisle, may have slept against those standing near her all the way through Kansas, but it’s hard to remember. By Oklahoma, the bus was a swamp of stale sweat and diapers, the windows fogged with breath. The driver gave a boy four candy bars to wipe the windshield down every fifteen minutes with a pink towel. Then there was a holdup, the bus surrounded by men with machine guns on horseback who made them all get out, took everything they could from the white people. A man wearing camouflage pants protested; a look passed between two
of the riders, and one of them put a bullet through the protestor’s skull. He winced like he’d been beaned in the temple with a quarter, did a half spin, and spilled across the shoulder of the road.
“Anyone else want to fuck with the New Sioux?” the other rider said.
After she was off the bus, she smelled the clothes she’d been wearing and burned them. She regrets that now; she could have traded them for a stapler, a package of pens, 150 yen, maybe 600 yuan. Fort Worth looked like the tornado from 2000 had come back. Half the windows in the high-rises were gone. Plastic bottles scuttled in the street; a broken power line slithered against the side of a building. Pieces of masonry lay hulking on the sidewalk like asteroids; store awnings hung in tattered strips; letters from signs lay in the gutter. People walked across town with splotches on their clothes, days of grease in their hair. An old couple didn’t leave their house for days; they’d heard about looters, gangs who stripped victims down to their skins, left them unconscious in the middle of thefreeway. Their cat complained about the lack of canned salmon; the couple looked at each other and wondered when they might have to eat him. And Dayneesha’s family, the ones she’d ridden the spine of the country to protect, were nowhere to be found. Just her cousin Ray, living in their grandparents’ house with three chickens, a fattening pig, a .44. But he hasn’t said anything since she found him. They’ve developed a sign language for simple things: lock the door, get the guns. Anything complicated he writes on a blackboard in the kitchen. But he won’t tell her why his voice is gone; he doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Joke’s on me, right?” Dayneesha says.
“Why haven’t you left, then?” Zeke says.
“I couldn’t before. I had nothing. Nothing anyone wanted bad enough to give me a ride out of here. Nothing I wanted to give.” There is a hurt in the way she says it that makes both men pause, not push any further.
“But you could leave now,” Marco says.
“I got all my gear here.”
“You could move it. People don’t care where the news comes from. They just care that they get it.”
“Marco, where am I going to go? I don’t know where my family is. My name is all over the country, and they haven’t called, you know: Here we are, come and join us. I’m in all fifty states, and it ain’t happened yet, it ain’t happened.”
A shuddering thump pulses through the ground. Three more in staggered succession, flickering all the screens at once, peppering the voices from the speakers with static.
“They’re bombing Dallas,” she says. “Oh, all those people.” That twinge in her head again—a truth has been spoken to her, but she’s not ready to hear it.
“I have a plan to reunite the Slick Six,” Marco says.
Dayneesha nods. “What did Johanna say?”
“Does it matter?” Marco says.
You poor bastard, Dayneesha thinks. “And do you know where Hideo and Carolyn are?” she says.
“No,” Marco says.
“So you don’t know what’s happened to them, do you.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Marco, they’re slaves.”
“…”
“…”
“Where.”
“California. Near Watsonville.”
“How long have they been there?” Marco says.
“About eight months.”
“How did it happen?”
“They sold themselves. I think they were starving.”
“And you didn’t help them?”
“Marco, I was just about starving myself. And I didn’t know where they were until they sold themselves and got posted.”
“How much would it cost to buy them?” Zeke says.
“They’re not for sale,” Dayneesha says. “The Aardvark will see to it that they’re not.”
“You said you had tires?” Marco says.
“You’re going after them now?”
“Yes.”
“I hate to point this out,” Zeke says, “but we just got here, and I have car ass.”
Marco looks at him. Don’t fucking joke around.
I’m not joking around.
This is serious.
So am I.
“You can stay here if you want, but I’m going,” Marco says.
“Just like that? What are you going to do when you find them?”
The Vibe slips in through a crack in the window and circles Marco’s head. It’s whispering something, but Marco can’t hear it.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I have to see what’s going on first.”
He has his foot on the gas before Ray has finished tightening the last nut on the rear tire. Dayneesha watches them careen around the corner, hears the tires sing on the next one. She stands there for over a minute, watches a rocket trace an arch of smoke across the hazy blue, its stream ending somewhere east of her; the impact vibrates the soles of her shoes. She pulls the metal gate to the warehouse closed. Thinks of her grandparents’ house, empty now. Her parents. Cups her hands and shouts to Ray, I’ll be back in a little while. I have to see it for myself, she thinks. See what I’ve become a part of, what the world has fooled me into.
Downtown Fort Worth swarms with a new horde of refugees, children and babies screaming, parents shaking with terror and indignation, jabbering at the people who are already there. Don’t you know how serious this is? And the people raise their skinny arms, point toward the river, nudge their chin in the same direction. Don’t worry, honey. You’ll get used to it. The burger and beer place is now a chicken joint called Rusty’s Avian Clearinghouse, serving every part of the bird—if you’ll eat it, we’ll fry it, they say—along with shots of grain alcohol that you can cut with the sugar-water squatting in a plastic milk jug on the counter. An old city bus growls and shimmies in front, surging with passengers, dogs, and birds, benches soldered to the roof and covered with a tarp and strips of fencing, tires chewing on broken glass. She waves at the driver, who nods, and she climbs to the roof while the bus angles north, jostles onto the bridge over the Trinity amid a mass of people with bundles and baskets balanced on their heads, sharp squares of sheet metal, the merchants of the new economy. The crowd thickens as the bus lurches down Main Street; the driver lays down a blast from an air horn and the people part for ten seconds, then close in again. Four boys climb onto the side, giggling, fingers curled through an open window, toes latched to grooves in the bus’s walls, hitching a ride, until the driver’s son wades through the passengers on the inside, bangsat the boys’ knuckles with a rubber mallet, and the boys jump off squealing and tumbling, roll on the pavement, flow back into the trunks and crates, scraping their feet. Then the bus turns onto Stockyard Boulevard with its stores duded up in wooden planks, split-rail sidewalks, long, meandering porches, ghost signs fading above the doorways. The places that used to sell stirrups, spurs, and license plates to tourists are now flophouses, whorehouses, stands selling heroin and whiskey in tiny increments. Men and women in dirty clothes, tattered cuffs, ragged hems, stand in a jagged line and wait for their fix, to call up their courage, blunt their terror at selling themselves into slavery. At the gate to the yards, currency traders holler out exchange rates from white wooden booths, start in small coins for the starving, work their way up to yen, yuan, and pounds sterling for the traders, going into denominations that most people will never see. The crowd is insane now, the street choked with howling trucks, yelping dogs, people roaring and pushing into the yards, buses with bars over the windows trundling people out. But even over the horns and hawkers, the men in sandwich boards selling binoculars, the woman festooned in colored foil yelling lollipops, cotton candy, tin toys for the children, Dayneesha can hear the stockyard barker, his high, nasal voice pumped into the air through two-story speakers mounted on the old weigh station, calling out numbers that rise on a swell of noise until one word—sold—shoots them down, as another rocket lands on Dallas and the multitude shudders with the wave that goes through the ground.
&nbs
p; The bus stops just inside the gate, and people climb out the windows to avoid paying, swing down off the roof, chickens and canines biting and flapping. Dayneesha shoulders through the mob to the pens, where the spectators crowd around a block with a square of black earth around it, a man in red-and-white striped pants and a top hat standing beside it, calipers and a tiny hammer in his hand. The musicians that play between the rounds of bidding are churning throughsomething Dayneesha can’t recognize—it’s all jangling strings yearning to break, a spastic drum, the bass player lost and inaudible, shouting out incomprehensibility as loud as he can; it’s the end of words, the end of music. Then the man in the striped pants nods, the music stumbles and dies, and a beautiful man steps onto the block, scratches on his legs, a long scar on one hand, a constellation of tiny boils on a forearm, dreadlocks matted and coming undone, but still beautiful. The man in the striped pants puts down his calipers, pulls a pair of long shears from his top hat with a flourish, and cuts away the beautiful man’s clothes; four quick strokes to the shirt, two longer drags on the seams of the pants. Then he gets a stepladder and cuts the man’s hair; one by one the locks fall from his head, roll down his face and off his shoulders, catch in his fingers, gather at his feet like snow. It’s then that the color of his eyes softens; he’s pulling away from all this, departing from this place: good night everyone, don’t wait up for me. The music is gone and the voices are withering away; all the sound is going out of the world. That was my great-grandfather, Dayneesha thinks, and his brothers and sisters. Her people, covered in grease and tar, limbs pinched and pricked, fingers forced into their mouths, their heads full of curses, entreaties, or nothing, nothing at all, because they killed themselves to bear it. They are chained together and drowning, staring up at me from the ocean floor, and they look at me and shake their heads. So this is what you used your freedom for.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 12