My family is gone, she thinks. They are gone and they have left no message; the words aren’t coming; the photographs will never arrive. Tonight, she thinks, I will take Ray and go, find Marco and Zeke under a blue-roofed gas station outside of south San Isidro, where there’s only enough gas to fill the tank once but enough room for her, her only two friends, her last cousin.
But on the bus away from the slave market, the Vibe taps her on the shoulder. Something’s wrong, it says, but she swatsit away. As she approaches the warehouse, the Vibe insists, tickling her neck, running down her spine, and this time she sees the tire spikes tripped. Now she doesn’t need the Vibe; her eyes can trace the recent history of death, someone zigzagging through the piles of junk, Ray shooting from a second-story window. More bullet holes on the side of the school bus up on blocks; she follows the lines in the air back to the window, open only a crack, enough to slide a rifle barrel through and still be able to aim; there’s an angry hole in the glass, wood splintered from the frame. The zigzagger threw something, just one thing, and Ray stopped, the gun grew quiet. The lock on the front door lies snapped to pieces. Dayneesha doesn’t need to see any more—the spike burrowed into Ray’s skull, the assailant’s shadow floating through the warehouse, her kitchen, her bedroom—to know that she has two seconds to decide what to do. Hours later, shrieking across the Sonora on a stolen motorcycle, the loss of her cousin will knife into her stomach and she’ll have to stop, kneel in the sand by the side of the road, and wail into the headlights, high and primeval, for the last of her family is gone and she’s alone in this world. But there in front of the warehouse, she just turns and walks away, doesn’t look behind her. I’m coming, boys. Don’t drive too fast; I’m coming.
Marco and Zeke are skimming across the Arizona desert, lizards and scrub as far as the headlights will let them see, a town with lights out, doors locked, windows smeared with sand, swimming pools filling with dust. The desert is taking the place back, dunes growing on the sides of schools and garages, blurring the lines of curbs, narrowing the highway to one swerving lane lined by tilting telephone poles; both of them watch the road, expect it to peter out into an expanse of earth, nascent cacti. Later, while they’re skating through the light film of dirt that lines Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, they pass through a cluster of ghosts from a troop of migrant Mexicans who had died trying to get to Phoenix eight years ago. Because the migrants’ last hours were hallucinatory, they awoke into their spirit lives confused, wandered among small birds and reptiles looking for human life, a sign to point them toward home. They’ve been walking along the highway for two years, their steps slow and heavy, and as the car passes through them, they cry out, ask for directions, a lift. Marco’s ears tingle, he can almost hear them, but the buzz against his eardrum never resolves into words, and he doesn’t even slow down.
CHAPTER VI.
Reconnaissance; the last DAYS OF ORDER
and the fields of CENTRAL CALIFORNIA;
the ghosts rise.
Are you awake?” Carolyn says.
“No. I am sleeping,” Hideo says.
“How about now? Now are you awake?”
“I am still sleeping.”
“You don’t talk in your sleep. So you must be awake.”
“Kari. What do you want.”
“I saw Marco.”
“He is in prison.”
“But I saw him.”
“What time is it.”
“Two-thirty.”
“In the morning.”
“Yes.”
“I am asleep at two-thirty in the morning.”
“I’m telling you, I saw him.”
“I believe that you think you saw him. But I must see him myself. In the daylight. Now, I am asleep.”
They’re risking too much by talking. It’s bad enough that they’re together, though they’ve done it dozens of times, creeping across the rows of strawberry plants in the hanging mist, taking an hour and a half to cover a distance that would take five minutes walking. But the punishment doesn’t daunt themanymore. They’ve been whipped already, know it can’t kill them unless they decide to give up halfway through. Even then, it wouldn’t be so horrible; each of them has already decided what to do. If Hideo gives up, Carolyn will walk into the ocean, make no attempt to swim. If Carolyn gives up, Hideo will run for the edge of the fields, arms waving in the air, giving the guards the easiest shot possible. It surprises both of them, the way they’ve harnessed their lives together. In their years in the Slick Six, there was nothing between them but explanations of plans, corrections of English.
“At three thirty-six, you will go at the bank—”
“—in the bank.”
“Go in the bank. Yes, yes.”
She was charming, of course; it was why Hideo had chosen her. He and Dayneesha sent her to parties to dazzle crowds into blindness. A day later, when it was discovered that several rare paintings had been stolen upstairs while she entertained hosts and guests, the victims suspected her at once. But she was an abstract concept; nobody could remember the color of her dress, the shape of her nose, the brooch at her breast. A curator once recalled her eyes—they were sumptuous daggers, he said—but he couldn’t draw the rest of the face around it. The security cameras in hotels, museums, and mansions caught only hat brims, the back of her head, blond, black, brown. They couldn’t even guess the color of her skin. It was a rare gift, to enthrall and vanish, to make everyone fall in love with her and then forget everything about her.
Carolyn and Hideo began to talk only after Marco was sent away, at a dinner in New York for the five that remained. Zeke was getting on a plane for Paris in four hours, brought no luggage with him, toasted Marco twice and left before dinner was served. Johanna said nothing, left soon after Zeke on a cherry-scented commuter train up to Connecticut. Dayneesha put her elbows on the table, steepled her hands. She wanted to go out dancing, somewhere where a horn section leaned into the same microphoneas the singer while the bass and drums laid down a serious strut, let her move against strangers, pass along some of what was leaving her, what she had been.
“I never liked Johanna’s moods anyway,” she said. “So, are you coming dancing with me or what?”
“No,” Carolyn said. “I’m leaving early in the morning. And I’m exhausted.”
“Where are you going?”
“LA.”
“Me also,” Hideo said.
“Me too,” Carolyn said.
“Me too,” Hideo said. “I am going to Los Angeles too.”
They met first once a month, then once a week, coffee in Pasadena, gorditas and fish tacos in East LA. They went to Crystal Cove just north of Laguna, hiked down the bluff until the shopping malls and peach-colored developments were out of sight and there were only the curls of sand and wave, the immensity of the Pacific, a woman in a pink bathing suit and flippers riding the surf toward shore, descended from seals. Their friends assumed they were sleeping together, didn’t understand that they were war veterans, that the panic in their blood was real, for the damage they’d done, the death they’d wrought. She worked in public relations for a major media conglomerate; he was a talent scout for a major record label. He signed a band that toured Asia. She massaged a divorce through the press.
“I feel like an asshole,” she said.
“Me also,” he said.
“People work for years to get what I have.”
“Yes.”
“Does missing being a criminal make me bad?”
“No,” Hideo said. “Also, I do not see the difference between what you do now and what we did then. In money terms. What is it, siphoning? Siphoning money off the rich.”
“What about moral terms?”
“Ah,” he said. “After Marco joined us, the morality became complex,” he said.
“Yes.”
“There was too much death, I think.”
“Yes.”
But they still missed the life, now that it w
as over. They’d forgotten how they used to stare through the night, their arms and legs splayed out across their beds. Hideo had dreamt he was nestled in a pile of corpses, Carolyn that she was floating down a river of coagulating blood, and both wondered how they’d ever get out of it alive. She finished her coffee, looked out on the pastels and bright glass of the new Old Pasadena, the people clustering at the corners, good citizens waiting for the chirping crosswalk sign to tell them they could move, then swarming into the intersection, a gaggle of bright bags, T-shirts, sunglasses, singing cell phones, and whitened teeth, serene in the image of a long string of tomorrows not so different from today, avocados and air-conditioning punctuated by sex and smog alerts, a four-hour traffic jam from an accident on the I-5, the smoke from distant wildfires. It didn’t seem like too much to ask for.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Me too,” he said.
“That’s right. Too.”
“You did not correct me before.”
“I’ve given up trying to change you.”
“I am hopeless.”
“No. You’re charming,” she said. “Is it time for us to get married now? Have children?”
“I do not want to marry you.”
“I didn’t mean to each other.”
“Oh. Good.”
They watched the riots start on the televisions in their offices as though they were happening in another city thousands of miles away. Interviews with upset bank managers, peopleoutside the bank who were even more upset. Where’s my money now? they said. How do they think I’m going to eat? How am I going to feed my children? The art-deco tower of city hall wavering in the background. Panic writhing on the muted faces, the city talking about mayhem. You know something is happening here but you don’t know what it is.
On South Grand Avenue downtown, a phalanx of police in black-and-silver riot gear barricaded the Mizuho Corporate Bank of California with an armored car, set their shields in a wide semicircle of plastic and metal, stuck their rifles like spears between them, yelled into the surging crowd: Would you please disperse, just please fucking disperse. The street was already cordoned off, more police were coming to clear the mob away, but the commanding sergeant, standing in front of the police truck with a bullhorn, could tell it was already too late. The people before the shields were angry and confused; they could feel how things were coming apart. It was a bad scene, even before the Red Hand of Anarchy showed up; when they did, with their crimson masks and black sweaters, the sergeant had a premonition that he had less than a half an hour to live. He put the bullhorn down, ducked into the serene lobby, and called his wife, told her to leave as fast as possible, and then said a few things he’d never quite gotten around to saying, though he’d thought them almost every day, while watching her step into the shower or squat in the garden, picking rosemary.
The Red Hand huddled as the mob grew around them; for twenty seconds, the sergeant couldn’t see them at all. Then, all at once, they crested through the crowd, shouting and throwing punches, smashed themselves against the phalanx’s shields, pummeling at heads and torsos with crowbars. The police responded with the butt ends of their rifles; there were eleven minutes of bruises and blood while the police pinned the Red Hand to the ground and the crowd whirled and contorted, trying to flee but not knowing how.
At last, the police hustled the Red Hand into the back of the truck, and the sergeant’s mouth opened, incredulous; he was a kamikaze pilot left over at the war’s end, his explosive-rigged plane still at bay in the hangar. Perhaps he wouldn’t die after all, he thought. He was wrong: One of the Red Hand, grinning, pulled the theatrical move of opening his jacket to show them the plastique that lined it. Yes, this had been their plan all along, to get inside the truck and blow it up, take as many policemen with them as they could. We are servants of chaos, the bomber thought before he set himself off; and had time too, to think of Maria Lista Sandinista, whom he hadn’t seen in years. Maria, someday you’ll get to do this too.
A low boom thudded through the floor, and in Carolyn’s office, heads turned to look out the window, where fire left its wavering mark over the tops of towers, throwing off a tail of black smoke. Then another explosion, farther away, blooming out of the soil of office buildings and palm trees. Swooping sirens formed a dissonant chord, rising and falling, that Carolyn had heard before, dozens of variations in dozens of countries, singing through the street as she and Marco hid beneath a Dumpster wrapped in plastic or swerved on a moped toward a helicopter waiting at the pier. She had seen the lights from police cars bounce off the sides of skyscrapers as she rose on a kite into the Dubai night; she had floated underwater in a dry-suit while police boats trolled the bay in Cape Town. And she knew what to do now.
It took her six hours to get across the city, running, pedaling on stolen bicycles, hitching rides in the backs of pickups already spilling out people and luggage. She passed three men breaking into a jeep, putting it in neutral, pushing it away. A family of fifteen walking under the freeway with a set of living room furniture hoisted on their heads. A man dragging a red cooler full of batteries behind him, a large stuffed giraffe under his arm, for his daughter when he found her.
Hideo’s house was a box of white panels and glass balancedon the ridge of a hill in West Hollywood. Los Angeles was already eating the sun, pulling it under the horizon with a hand of smog. Something was wrong with the streetlights—they weren’t coming on—and the roads were getting dark, gray thickened by shadow that smothered noise; she had never heard it so quiet. She rapped on the door, then kicked at it, called his name, was about to pick up a brick from the garden and throw it through a window when a ladder slid down from the roof.
“Climb,” Hideo said. He was up there with a rifle and two pistols; she recognized them all from the days of the Slick Six, remembered them on hotel beds, in the bottoms of suitcases, on his lap in small planes. She couldn’t remember ever having seen him use them.
“There has been no looting here yet,” he said. “But, by the mall, it is beginning.” From the valley below, shouts and whistles, breaking glass, a chorus of cheers.
“When we leave this place, we will have nothing,” he said.
“Why did you stay?”
“I was waiting for you. I knew you would come. You always did.”
It hit them, then, the enormity of their loss. Johanna nursing her wounds in Connecticut, Zeke detached in Monaco, Dayneesha back in Chicago. Marco in prison. It was walking without legs; and as they watched the fire spread below them, her hand crawled under his, his fingers closed around it. They fled Los Angeles in Hideo’s car, got up the coast as far as Ventura before two tractor trailers in flames blocked the road. The stores in Ventura were all closed; it was just the rows of white, arched buildings and palm trees, the boardwalk along the beach, the high pier over the water, like it was early Sunday morning, but for a tent city growing from the sand, a child in mismatched clothes, holding one left shoe in his right hand. They ditched the car at the state park, collapsed onto the sand by the jetty, in the lee of the wind; sat close together without speaking, watching the smoke from the highway boil into theair above the hills and the heaving ocean. When it got dark, and there was only the sound of the surf and the wind through the rocks behind them, she straddled and kissed him while her hands scrambled to undo the buttons on his shirt.
Five months later, the shirt was stained with grease and sweat, flecks of blood from three weeks before when he and Kari had cornered a dog, slaughtered it, and eaten it after roasting it on a spit over a burning, hacked-up door. Carolyn sold herself for a sum she couldn’t ever hope to pay; then Hideo stood on the auction block, his ribs ridging the skin on his chest while the auctioneer tapped his muscles with a cane. His tongue was dry in his mouth; he hoped only that they didn’t check his teeth too well, because he knew one of them was ready to come out.
The slave camps at Watsonville are a vast enterprise, spiking fences into the ground across the strawber
ry fields and farmhouses that run from the edge of town to the teetering edge of the cliff that drops to the deserted beach, a long crescent of sand bending from Monterey to Santa Cruz. It’s still strawberries here, strawberries and oranges, because the water’s still coming from the north. Myra Jong, the slaver, has a satellite phone to the water barons; she tells them when the bandits are draining the pipeline. Her office is in Watsonville, in the shell of a purple diner; she sits in a booth near the window to show how unafraid she is, but everyone there is armed twice over. She eyes the new slaves, has her men beat the rebellious ones with metal pipes they tore out of the kitchen plumbing, shoots the ones who can’t work anymore herself. She has them sit right across from her in the booth, asks them if they’d like something to eat, or a cigarette, which is a tease: Her pistol’s already in her lap, aimed at their gut, and the cigarettes are long gone. When they open their mouth to respond, she puts a bullet in their stomach. Then she gets up, puts a second one in their left temple. What a waste, says Cesar Ramirez from behind the counter, using two bullets like that. And shelaughs, because Ramirez is screwing with her; he’s the one who suggested using two in the first place.
The slaves live in tents of mildewed burlap, dusty blankets, troughs of brown water and mess halls in orbit around Watsonville, circled by moons of sentries. The slaves have taken to walking to the outhouses with their hands in the air after one of them, sick with vomit and approaching diarrhea, ran for relief and was shot dead by two of the guards, who thought he was trying to escape. Sickness tears through the camp in waves: cholera, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis take more than the guards do. Myra Jong doesn’t like sick slaves; they take food and water and give her nothing in return. It puts them more into debt, but after a few months it’s clear to everyone that the size of the debt is a formality anyway. At a certain point, she just shoots them and buys more slaves. She’s done the numbers, has a chart that shows when she feeds and when she shoots, but it’s just a linear equation, simple algebra. A few months ago, Hideo figured out how to keep himself and anyone who would listen from being put down. Now he and a few dozen other slaves each smuggle food away from mess, hide it in their clothes, wrap it in plastic, and stash it in the roof of an outhouse so they can feed the sick more than their share without the slavers knowing. This shifts the curve on Jong’s chart, puts a few more days between a feverish brain and a bullet’s tip. When the slavers find out, many of the slaves will be whipped, and they’ll stare at Jong while the skin is taken off their backs, forcing a smile onto their faces. Let her know they’re onto her, that they’re just waiting like the diseases once did.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 13