They say he wasn’t out there a week before a tornado formed right around old Cal, twirled out of the clouds and lifted up the earth he was standing on, transported him skyward. Story goes that he was up there for a day on an island of land that got smaller and smaller until it crumbled away, and he fell. When he opened his eyes, the earth was a different color and the plains spoke to him in a language like a razor, cutting into him until he obeyed, until he knew what he had to do. He collected the people who remained and they moved across Kansas, stripping out the mills, the construction equipment, the oil rigs; got at last to the plant outside Arkansas City, the place where he was born, he told them. They took everything theycould use—the motors, the cables, the shredders, the hooks— took all of that refuse and rebuilt it all, into machines that lurch and wander, that spit and wheeze but do no work, a mockery of what they were. Nobody knows where he got the camels, the rhinoceroses, the elephants, but they’ve seen the circus when it sleeps, people and animals spread on the ground around Cal in a spiral. And when he lifts his arms and speaks, they gather around him and move in a crawling clot of screeching gears and horns, machines hanging in the air, and the people who see it run. They’ve heard what the circus does when it comes to town. Some of them have seen it themselves, and they either won’t talk about it at all or can’t stop, as if they’re trying to empty their heads of it. The circus is trying to undo progress, some say, trying to make it as though we were never here. I don’t know about that, say others. I just know that a lot of people have died before they should have because of Cyclone Cal. And I can’t find the town where I was raised anymore.
Marco looks at the howitzer bobbing at the end of the train.
“Bullshit,” he says.
The engineer shrugs again.
“You ever see a town they’ve hit,” he says, “you ever see what they do to the people they find, you’ll understand why we have that thing.”
The yellow and black of the fields yields to green and brown, and the land begins to ripple again. Scrub grows into trees that line the track and the creek beds, mark the old lines between farms. A wooden barn stripped of paint leans on a combine black with mold. Rows of auto repair places, motels, and minimalls. All the lights out. In the middle of a gigantic field left fallow is a red house surrounded by trees, a small field enclosed in wire, green with cornstalks and vegetables. On the edge of Lyons, laundry is strung up to a cinder block garage, a pen with two horses. A chicken shack. In the shade ofa rise in the land, a man and his wife bend to the earth, killing potato bugs with their hands while their three children fly tattered kites on the roof of a mill. The train curls around a turn in the tracks, sweeps by a hill with three crosses leaning off the ridge, one of them broken, CHRIST PILOT ME laid into the hillside in white stones.
“We’re almost to McPherson,” the engineer says.
The squares of the land break against a line of trees at the edge of town as the Janis Joplin passes the silver spires of an oil station, a nest of train cars with doors blowtorched off of them to make homes for swine, though none of the pigs remain. At a railroad crossing, without explanation, the lights are still flashing, bells chime, the barricades lower to block the quiet highway. Four squad cars with shattered windows are parked along the side of the police station. A squat white building across the street has an ad painted on the side of it, a jailbird in striped jumpsuit, ball and chain around his ankle: IN JAIL, NEED BAIL? CALL STEVE. Then trees again, masking low-slung bungalows, lawns overrun with crabgrass. Buildings of bricks and stone all around the train, the twin hulks of grain elevators, awnings of corrugated metal hanging over the tracks. The train wheezes to a stop, and the engineer looks at Marco.
“Here’s where you get off.” He points up the road. “That’ll take you all the way to Salina. I advise you move quickly. There’s not much here anymore. Tornado, you see. Just a week ago.”
The train squeals against the tracks and rattles east, the chickens frantic in the cars. Then, for Marco and Dayneesha, it’s quieter than it’s been in days. Along Main Street, there are cars left in the middle of the road, doors hanging from hinges. Shops with the doors propped open, hardware, furniture. Two blocks south, jutting piles of rubble on either side of the street, shattered timbers and masonry, a splash of broken glass. A jagged rend in the turret of the courthouse. Then they smell them, the bodies lying on the asphalt, buried under fallenbuildings, tangled in the grass next to the tracks. They all deserved better. Once there were cars ambling down these streets; strollers on the sidewalks; bookstores selling paperbacks and greeting cards from wire racks; an instrument shop kicking back in the cavernous lobby of a bank building, the man inside friends with all the musicians for seventy-five miles; a restaurant near the green lawn in front of the library serving scrambles from skillets snug in planks of wood. But a storm wrote its name across this town, left nobody behind to erase it. The cyclones are the land’s agents, its saboteurs. They bring down power lines, buckle roads, shudder the walls of houses so the winter can knock them down. In time, perhaps, one annihilating tempest will level everything, smooth it all over with dust and dirt; the grasses from the prairie will come in, cut the city apart blade by blade. It will take centuries to push McPherson into the earth, cover it over, for our structures are stubborn. But the land can wait.
Twenty miles away, the town of Buhler is an inferno, a shimmering pyramid of light and smoke. It has been like that for days, the flames jumping from one house to the next, from rooftop to rooftop. The houses squirm, breathe out smoke through the windows, grow arms of fire that wave above the chimneys until the structures give in and fall into the basement; push the pictures from the walls; burn up the poster bed in which five generations had slept, the lacquered green spinet piano from the living room, the white electric stove. In the fields to the north, on the heels of Buhler’s refugees, the soil shakes and stones scramble across hardened dirt to the rumble of machinery and the stomping bulk of animals as the Circus of Industrial Destruction wheezes across the prairie, powered by the panting and huffing of gigantic lungs, the screech and whump of flying machines shuddering through the air.
The people of the circus are going wild, rattling the bars of the animals’ cages, hooting and shouting, clambering onto the backs of elephants and jumping off again, chewing on theflesh of the citizens they slaughtered as the melody from the calliope stumbles and gasps. In the middle of it all, shaded by human pelts and plastic, Cyclone Cal himself sits in a slashed and tattered car seat, hands behind his head, eyes closed, face tilted toward the clouds, transported back to his time in the sky, when everything fell away around him; in his head, the tornados are always descending, bearing him up but leaving him within reach of the earth to do their work when they can’t get close enough. He asks them if they like what his circus did in Buhler, the way it tore the town off the earth so that future maps will forget it, as though it never were; lets out a cackling laugh when he feels their blessing.
Above him, Tyrone Fly, hands and legs hogtied, swings from the belly of a mechanical vulture, seven other captives swaying on ropes around him, three of them butchered and cleaned already. He has left the present, refuses to feel what the people of the circus have done to him. It’s a bad joke, a bad dream. His eyes don’t see the flaying fan belts, the spitting teeth; he can’t smell the stench of grease and innards; he is back in his past, in the arms of his ex at the state fair, among funnel cake and painted signs, the screams of children, the blinking lights of amusement park rides. He is in his mother’s kitchen in Phoenix, a steaming tamale in his hand; he peels back the husk to reveal the warm flesh beneath, cornmeal and jalapeño peppers, the tang of chorizo. He can taste it on his tongue now, and he hangs from that memory, fingernails dug in, knuckles parched and bleeding. He’ll stay there until he’s free, or until the people around him finish what they’ve started.
CHAPTER XI.
Security grows lax; OKONOMIYAKI,
kumis, and REFUGE AMONG Swedes;
>
the CIRCUS comes to town.
A small cloth bag crosses into New York City over the George Washington Bridge, taped under the driver’s seat of a truck carrying a load of television parts; it vibrates with the grooves in the West Side Highway until the driver reaches under, pulls it out, lobs it out the window at a square of sidewalk in the Financial District, where it’s picked up and tied to the rack of a bicycle that weaves through the streets and squeals to a stop at the loading dock for the downtown jail. There, a pair of gloved hands slides the package into the bottom of a crate, covers it with cabbages. It hides in the kitchen for two days, is moved back and forth from stockpot to saucepan, until it ends up in Maria Lista Sandinista’s hands when she returns her tray to the dishwasher, who gives it to her with a nod. The bag already has a line of thick white tape weaving down the side; she shoves it in her pants, sticks it to her thigh just above her knee, and conveys it back to her cell, where she waits until night to open it. Inside is a lump of plastic explosive, enough to demolish a car. She molds it to the larger block of the stuff that’s stashed under her bed, figures she now has enough to open one side of her cell to daylight. If she wanted to, she could free herself this minute, herself and anyone who survived the blast. They’d scatter into the streets, swim across the river, disappear into the countryside. But she has this idea that she wouldn’t survive it; and the bomb is meant for Marco, anyway, for leaving her on the pier, leaving her here after she’d given him such devotion. In the bomb’s bloom, he’ll see how he has wronged her. If she could, she would slow the explosion so that the boiling heat crawled through the air and gave him a few seconds to speak. There would be repentance then, pleas for forgiveness, and she would rush forward and accept them all, until the flames overtook them. In her cell, just the dream of it, the phantom blast burning the back of her neck, is enough to make her happy.
But nothing could make the Aardvark happy now. He stands before a topographical map of the United States that he stole from the corporate headquarters of a pharmaceutical company six days before a man drove his truck into the front of the building, sent the revolving doors spinning across the marble floor and into a bank of defunct elevators, causing the front of the building to swing down and chew on the truck’s back, the windows above to lean over and shatter on the sidewalk. Across the street, another man took pictures of it all. He later presented it as an art project: The Collapse of Corporate America. That man is now famous among international businessmen; museums in Europe and Asia commission him to address the fall of the most recent superpower in his work, give lectures in front of harsh white screens. What was the United States, anyway? the artist asks through a microphone in Seoul. He lets the question float through galleries and halls. What is it now?
The Aardvark isn’t unhappy about the man’s prosperity. Once, he might have been; in his days as a crime lord, he was a collector of sculpture who despised performance art; it’s public flagellation, he used to say. He had a Giacometti in the living room, a small Rodin in the bathroom. He once bludgeoned a man to death with a Picasso—a model for a monumental piece—after the man argued that sculpture had never existed asan art form until the twenty-first century. But he can’t find the urge to care about art these days, because his city is coming loose around him. There are water shortages, a rumor that one of the main pipelines collapsed somewhere north of the city. People say they heard it underneath the street in Queens, a raking crash that echoed into a rumble. But it can’t be confirmed; the Aardvark can’t convince anyone to go down there to investigate. And the subways only go halfway into the outer boroughs now, after a series of explosions—the Aardvark has no idea what caused them—left jagged holes in the elevated platforms. No trains arrive at the sweeping Coney Island station anymore; it’s become home to a colony of musicians and pigeons. Then there are the ships that draw a warping grid in the water of the harbor, gather into a floating city, the piers lit with trade. The Aardvark can’t say what goes in or out, or how much money is involved. All of it is documented, the papers are piled seven feet high in an office on the floor below his screaming family, but he has no way of verifying what they tell him. Crates and containers come off the ships, into the streets; crowds flood on and off the decks. There could be plagues, armies, carnivals invading his city, and he would never know until his fingers fell off, a bullet careened toward his head, the clowns in pink and purple descended from the ceiling. They’ll all find a way in.
Then there’s the map in front of him. An array of broad-headed pins has been pushed into it, one for every slave camp he financed. Just a few weeks ago, the camps fanned across the country, arms of a vast spiral of commerce circling his office. He put the pins in there himself, in the days when the excitement of a new market, a new industry, held him in thrall. He imagined that it would only grow because he had rigged it to be so: The interest he charged the slaveowners on their slaves was so high that their operations must grow or perish, and people weren’t getting any less desperate.
But in the last few weeks, he’s been pulling pins out. Firstin Watsonville, Eureka; later in Nevada, in Utah. It’s a disease; he can see it in front of him, chewing through red muscle. The Aardvark wants to blame the Slick Six. He recognizes Marco’s havoc in the stories that came out of Watsonville. He’d seen it himself, the first dozen times he hired Marco, back when Marco had just left Red Kwon, before the Slick Six were slick. First for extortion, theft. Then assassinations, for which Marco showed unusual flair. The Aardvark tripled his fortune while Marco was working for him, extended his enterprise into Southeast Asia, China, India, for the flood of the world’s money was flowing from there; they were the Tigris, the Euphrates. And he saw more of himself in Marco than he did in his own children. They’d both had a youth of bones and metal, of howling in the dark; the urge to act before thinking, to cut straight lines through the arc of the planet’s surface, leave marks that could be seen from space. Before Marco’s last job for him—though the Aardvark didn’t know that yet—the Aardvark invited Marco to his office. Marco stood before him, awaiting orders. The Aardvark tried to get him to sit, have a drink.
“What for?” Marco said.
“Because I’d like you to work for me all the time,” the Aardvark said.
“I do.”
“I mean, me alone.”
“Why would I do that? Can you pay me that much?”
“…”
“…”
“I see,” the Aardvark said.
The Aardvark never called Marco for a job again. But he did talk to him once, after the Slick Six had taken their first few million from him and he traced where it had gone.
“Why did you do that to me?” the Aardvark said.
“The pay is excellent.”
“I’ll double it to get you to stop.”
“Sorry,” Marco said. “I work for them now.”
“Ah.”
“You would have done the same thing,” Marco said.
“No, I wouldn’t have. I never would have.”
Later, on the dirt of a runway dug out of a Peruvian jungle, the Aardvark already on the plane, the propellers spinning, twenty soldiers with machine guns stationed around the aircraft to ensure a safe flight, Marco descended from the sky. Watching him at work on the soldiers, shouting go, go to the pilot, the Aardvark thought of folklore, like a hawk through sparrows, the wheat before the scythe. By the time the Aardvark was in the air, the runway was a dark, slick smudge of earth, fingers of shadow reaching into the air in the plane’s wake. It was the same there on the California coast; he was sure of it. Spurning the loyalty he’d offered. Screwing him.
But Eureka, Nevada, Utah—these were bigger than anything one man, even Marco, could do. Men who’d never been in a fight before fighting each other. Bullets searing air, skittering on the ground, hitting the wrong people. Boards with nails in them. The blunt ends of farming tools. They say in Watsonville that the Devil rose from the sea to sweep the fields; in Provo, they say it was jus
t a riot. The slaves are doing it all on their own. The Aardvark has warned all of the remaining camps to arm themselves, has given them advances to do it; in public, he blames the owners when the camps flutter away in screams and fire. But he knows it’s not the owners or the slaves. It’s him, who pushed too hard; it’s history, pushing back. And he doesn’t know where any of the Slick Six are, or what they’re planning. He goes to his desk drawer, opens a bottle of pills, pops a bright orange amphetamine into his mouth, but his unhappiness is still profound.
Seven thousand miles away, a half-digested yellowish biscuit that was once a slug of dough squirms in Zeke’s stomach, then lurches into his esophagus and pops out of his mouth, riding a fountain of orange bile. Zeke’s hands shake and grip the rail.
“Just look at the horizon,” Captain Bengwe Saloon says.
Zeke gives him a friendly wave. Blow me, you bastard. For three days, Zeke has been sick while Captain Saloon has been churning around the coast of Thailand, wrapping up his business with the Mumbai Stinger. First there was the matter of ditching its crew and passengers; he let them go in Phuket, because with three of the Slick Six as his new slaves, the captain was feeling generous. Then to Bangkok, where Saloon repainted the freighter and sold it under a different name back to its owner, a shipping conglomerate owned by a Korean loan shark; none of the people in the company had seen the vessel in years. Captain Bengwe Saloon smiled. “I found it derelict at sea,” he said.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 22