Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Albany’s port is presided over by the Queen of Delmar, who floats above the river in a pink-and-purple hot-air balloon, directing the movement of ships on the water. During the day, she says, she can see as far as Poughkeepsie. Nobody believes her, but they can’t explain how she knows what’s coming, day or night, or how the balloon stays aloft; they’ve never seen it come down. The queen sees the Rosalita churning north, thecolors flashing on its hull, and sends a signal to the Lucky Sun, already there, waiting. Zeke, Hideo, and Carolyn stand on the pier as the Rosalita docks and the gangway is lowered; two men—one gigantic, one wormy and skinny—stride toward them.

  “Zeke Hezekiah and Carolyn Crowley? I’m Big Mother. This is Maggot Boy Johnson.”

  Zeke hands a suitcase to Big Mother.

  “Your down payment,” he says.

  Maggot Boy Johnson hands Carolyn a briefcase with water stains on it.

  “The papers to land in New York,” he says.

  Hideo is holding a very large suitcase that he’s having trouble carrying.

  “Where is Marco?” he says.

  The Queen of Delmar sends a signal to the piers to make room, lots of it. The crowd parts, and the people on the pier can see a great mass moving forward from under the overpasses. Marco appears from out of nowhere, scares the crap out of everyone; shakes Big Mother’s and Maggot Boy Johnson’s hands, then finds a way to hug the three of the Slick Six present at once.

  “You’re here,” Marco says. “I can’t believe you’re all here.” I’ve never seen him so happy, Zeke thinks.

  “Is Dayneesha with you?” Hideo says.

  “She says she’ll join us when this is over.”

  Zeke looks at Hideo, at Carolyn. You going to tell him it’s over already? he says with his eyes. But they won’t look at him.

  “Where is our army?” Hideo says.

  The sounds of horses, shambling axles, voices speaking in sharp syllables; and the war party of the New Sioux moves from the city onto the highway, all leather, calico, and rifle metal, faces hardened by wind, eyes appraising the prison ship, the small band standing in front of it. They’ve come a long way, through Ohio and Pennsylvania, up into New York, unused to traveling so far in such unchanging, gloomy weather, though they could feel the days shortening, the darkness coming earlier; feel, too, the shades of their people rising to watch them, the wars between tribes forgiven so they could move as one, put out their hands, touch the riders as they passed. Robert Blackfeather Sherman rides in front, his face painted for conflict, his soldiers fanned out on both sides, jackets creaking against saddles, bows and machine guns angled across their backs. The Sioux form a thick semicircle at the end of the pier, and Robert Blackfeather Sherman dismounts, strides forward. With a grunt, Hideo lifts the suitcase.

  “This is yours,” he says.

  Robert Blackfeather Sherman shoulders it with ease. “For our trouble,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “And land besides, if we succeed.”

  “Yes,” Hideo says. “And land besides.”

  Robert Blackfeather Sherman turns around, faces his people, and a unified shout bursts from the New Sioux that volleys across the river, into the hills. From the decks of the Rosalita, Maggot Boy Johnson can see the city curl into the earth behind them, the Iroquois climb out of the rocks to stand along the water’s edge. A wraith with white hair and gray skin, wrapped in a blanket filthy with tuberculosis and smallpox, hobbles over to Robert Blackfeather Sherman, beckons with a bony finger. This was a chief who had watched his towns and crops burned on the shores of the lakes to the west, his people driven from their country into exile or death on reservations. His descendants lingered along the interstates at night, threw rocks at the windshields of tractor trailers growling by, while farms and factories rose and fell around them, cities were built and abandoned, the canal the revolutionaries had shot across the state filled with silt. What was it all for? The Sioux chief leans over in the saddle so the old man can whisper in his ear, and his voice enters Maggot Boy Johnson’s head: I’m sorry it came to this, that we couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry for what they did to us, and then for what they did to you. And Robert Blackfeather Sherman puts his hand on the old man’s shoulder, looks up at the Rosalita, sees Maggot Boy Johnson watching him, and knows that he can see it too, hear it too.

  In New York City, Jeannette Winderhoek is at the window of the Aardvark’s tower again, watching the sun go down over New Jersey. The sunsets are paler than they used to be, she thinks, now that so much of the pollution’s gone. When both sides of the river were mobbed with cars and trucks, the sunsets used to be glorious, rich with colors the world couldn’t have made on its own, except during catastrophes, eruptions. That’s what we’d done to the place, she thinks—made it into the inside of a volcano exploding all around us, all the time. She supposes it’s better now; but sometimes she misses those colors, the taste of fumes on her tongue. She misses candy bars, Twinkies, and Mallomars. She misses all the people. She’ll be walking along a sidewalk in midtown at 5:15 on a Tuesday afternoon, and her brain will repopulate the block with people in raincoats, holding umbrellas aloft, swinging briefcases and purses, shouting into cell phones, hailing cabs, climbing onto buses with windows foggy from the crowd already inside. She wonders if there’s any way she might return to that someday; if there’s anything she could do to get all those people to come back. She looks down to the river; looks again to make sure.

  “The Rosalita is back, sir,” she says.

  The Aardvark staggers to the window beside her, watches the ship cut a curving wake in the darkening water, heading for the 34th Street pier. At first, because he doesn’t know about Mozambique, the Aardvark thinks it’s going to plow into the dock, run itself aground, it’s lined with explosives, a nuclear device, germs from Nairobi. He’s so distracted by the thought of it that he doesn’t even notice the Lucky Sun skirt the Rosalita, pirouette around the island, and dock at the 42nd Streetpier near the United Nations building, even closer to where the Aardvark is now.

  “Miss Winderhoek,” the Aardvark says.

  She picks up the phone, dials three digits. “Send police to the 34th Street pier,” she says. “As soon as we can board the Rosalita, arrest everyone on board.”

  The Rosalita docks, lowers its gangway, and a squadron of policemen gather at the pier to greet them. Two sergeants board the ship, disappear into the bridge, then come back out with nobody in tow.

  “What just happened?” the Aardvark says.

  His phone rings.

  “Um,” says the police sergeant on the other end, “I’m a little confused.”

  “How’s that,” Jeannette Winderhoek says.

  “The Rosalita has full permission to land.”

  “Given by whom?”

  “Your boss.”

  Jeannette Winderhoek looks at the Aardvark’s desk, the bottle of amphetamines. On the Queens side of the East River, Kuala Lumpur, forger and counterfeiter, is on the roof of her building, watching the Lucky Sun dock at 42nd Street. Her phone rings; she knows who it is immediately from the static crackling on the signal through the Kansas atmosphere.

  “Check’s in the mail,” Dayneesha says. “Your Singapore account.”

  “Thanks,” Kuala Lumpur says.

  “You did excellent work. As always.”

  “I always try to do my best.”

  “So what are you going to do with the money?”

  “I always liked Argentina.”

  “You taking Nerve with you?”

  “He won’t go. He’s still waiting.”

  “I get that,” Dayneesha says.

  “Sorry, Day.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Dayneesha says. “I know we’re supposed to say good-bye now, but I’ve stopped doing that.”

  “At the next good party, then,” Kuala Lumpur says.

  “Right. At the next good party.”

  The next plane for Buenos Aires via São Paulo leaves tomorrow morning. I
n a few hours, Kuala Lumpur will leave Nerve half of the money the Slick Six gave her, in the form of Japanese treasury bills. A note attached to the documentation: Thanks for saving my ass five years ago; now get out of here, he’s not coming back. In Buenos Aires, she’ll buy a three-bedroom apartment in Recoleta, spend her days drinking coffee with sugar, her evenings sipping limoncello with the owner of the French bistro at the end of the block. He’ll make the liquor himself in the basement, where the stones smell of cinnamon and lemon rinds and he insists on listening to Carlos Gardel, who’s the reason he came to the country in the first place. When her new neighbors learn where she’s been for the last few years, they’ll turn reverent, as they do for survivors of bombings in Colombia, political purges in Chile, diseases in Central Africa that killed everyone else.

  “What was it like?” the restaurant owner will ask.

  “You should know,” she’ll say. “It happens here all the time.”

  “Yes, but we’ve always bounced back.”

  “So can we.”

  “Of course,” he’ll say. “But the first bounce is the hardest, I think.”

  In his tower, the Aardvark has his palms against the window. The things that he paid Marco to do, the dirt on the runway in Peru. A hawk through sparrows.

  “There’s only one squadron down there, Miss Winderhoek?” he says.

  “Sir—” Jeannette Winderhoek says.

  “—Send more down.”

  The policemen’s helmets are too loose, too tight, their uniforms hang where they shouldn’t, but they do their best to line up. The head of the squadron is already barking the terms of arrest through a bullhorn as the Rosalita’s cargo doors begin to open. The policemen prepare to surge forward, but they’re stopped all at once by a full-throated, ululating scream, soon joined by dozens more, the whinnying of horses, the stamp of hooves against metal. Then the first of the New Sioux race onto the pier in a tight whip of a line, loading their weapons on the fly. They trample the squadron and race down the middle of 34th Street. Two blocks from the shore, another group of policemen is more prepared for them; they form a blockade across the street and start shooting at the shapes streaking toward them in the dying light, under streetlights buzzing on one by one. Three of the Sioux are knocked from their horses, fall into a jumble of limbs; the rest steady their guns and pull out Molotov cocktails, let fly with another war cry, and the police line disappears in a cloud of blood and fire. When they reach the Empire State Building, the tower the Mohawk built, Robert Blackfeather Sherman turns his horse, points a flare gun toward the sky, and lets loose a rocket that draws a trunk of smoke high above the city, then sends off branches of green light, fronds of color that turn the glass around them into mirrors. At this signal, the Sioux planted all around the city burst out of hiding and begin to take their island back.

  Charlene Duchamp is in her office in the South Bronx, her feet up on her desk, the window to the river open so she can hear the first attacks. For the last two days, she and her boys have been shuttling back and forth between Albany and New York, snaking through the city to the subway stations and sneaking the Sioux into them. Someone always saw the drops: a man with a mustache sitting in front of a deli, a woman sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette next to a green station wagon up on blocks, three kids on a fire escape playing with a rat on atwine leash. They stared at the Sioux, at their half-shaved heads, the ends of their guns peeping out from under their jackets. The Sioux stared back. Nobody ever said anything.

  She picks up her phone after the second ring.

  “Did it work?” she says.

  “They’re taking the city now,” Dayneesha says. “Can you hear it?”

  Charlene goes to the window, phone under her chin.

  “Yeah,” she says. “A little.”

  “What does it sound like?” Dayneesha says.

  Charlene holds the phone out of the window. Across the river, an explosion blooms, then the report of another, of sirens; and then the power in northern Manhattan is out. Above the dark apartment buildings, Charlene can see the glow of midtown, of the Aardvark’s tower. Shouts and screams, machine-gun fire. Isolated shots. The warbling war cries bouncing off of the brick towers of the projects. Charlene thinks of the riots, the fires leaping out of windows. People sinking in the river. Bad times. But this life she has now, flying across the country blasting Stax, always a bit of money in her pocket, always with friends nearby, always a bed to sleep in, would never have been possible without them. She puts the phone back under her chin.

  “You hear all that?” Charlene says.

  “No.”

  “It sounds like mayhem. It sounds like five years ago. Like we’re all going to have to start over again.”

  The Aardvark’s phone won’t shut up. All around his tower, smoke pours into the clouds, rising from police stations, roadblocks, power stations. The stutters of machine guns ricochet up to him, tap through the glass. Even in the dark and from so far above, the Aardvark can swear he sees them, people on horseback, one hand on the reins, the other swinging a firebomb on a long rope; the rider lets it go, and it spins into a storefront, starts another blaze.

  “Miss Winderhoek,” the Aardvark says.

  “Yes.”

  “You are hereby relieved of my employ. Don’t say it has been a pleasure serving me. I know it hasn’t. Just one thing before you go: Please make sure my family is out of the building. They don’t deserve this.”

  Jeannette Winderhoek walks to her desk, high heels tocking against the floor. She snaps her briefcase shut, walks out, without smiling or looking at him. Presses the button to call the elevator, waits for four seconds. Looks down at her feet. Before the elevator arrives, she has headed down the stairs instead. The elevator rings, a sharp chime, and the doors slide open; then the power goes out, and the entire room, the entire island, is dark. The buildings have become their shadows, and in the Aardvark’s office there’s only the gray light from the last of the sun, the angry orange glow from the fires below. All across the island of Manhattan it’s like that, and people huddle in their apartments, listen to the screams outside, figure they’ve got to stop soon, it can’t go on like this much longer. In the jail downtown the darkness is almost perfect; the emergency generator, long ago eviscerated for its moving parts, doesn’t kick in. Ten seconds later one of the guards is down, and six prisoners run from block to block, unlocking all the cells to shouts and giggles, clapping and cheering. A couple hundred inmates have already started a party in the cafeteria; they’ll miss everything that’s going on outside, assume when they emerge that it’s been that way for years. But Maria Lista Sandinista is out on the blackened streets in minutes, listening to what’s going down around her. She recognizes it at once: It’s what her parents told her about, the disorder that had to come, needs to now and again, and she’s ready. She looks uptown to the Aardvark’s tower, a dark, jagged knife against the sky, and starts running toward it, cradling the bomb, her baby, to her chest.

  The Slick Six are still standing on the shore of the East River, looking down the dark valley of 42nd Street at piles of flame in the street that once were cars or barricades but nowilluminate the corpses nearby, helmets connected to padded shoulders at the wrong angles, a leg bent backward, a foot pointing straight up. A man tumbled where the pier meets the land, poked with bullet holes, one arm twisted back and lying underneath his torso, a look of surprise on his face. A woman curled around the post of a parking meter, her intestines unraveling around her. A bicycle tottering down the sidewalk, riderless, its tires on fire. A horse on its side near the flames, a half a block away. All around them are the shouts of police, the yelps of the Sioux, the drumrolls of guns, the racket of horses charging on concrete and asphalt, a low rumble of the moaning of the dying. This is what we were talking about in California, Zeke thinks. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. But Hideo and Carolyn are just shaking their heads.

  “Let’s go,” Marco says, eyes only on the Aardvark’
s tower. “We’ve done buildings like this before. We just have to cover the staircases to make sure he doesn’t get out—”

  “Marco,” Carolyn says.

  “—then block off the—”

  “Marco,” Hideo says.

  “—and then before he can—”

  “Marco!” Carolyn says.

  “What?”

  “We’re not going with you.”

  Marco nods. “I understand. I can take care of the Aardvark myself. Just wait here; give me two hours. If I’m not back by then—”

  “—Marco,” Hideo says. “We are not waiting.”

  “I don’t understand,” Marco says.

  “We mean,” Carolyn says, “that we don’t want this.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “This,” Hideo says, and his arm makes an expansive gesture, taking in the dead around them, their open mouths and eyes, their broken horses. “This is too much.”

  “But it’s almost over,” Marco says, “and then—”

  “—And then what?” Hideo says. “More of this? We do not want it.”

  “But this is what you’ve always asked me to do,” Marco says.

  “You wanted it this time,” Hideo says.

  “To set you free. To set us all free. To …”

  Do some good in the world, Zeke thinks. He doesn’t even have the words for it.

  “I did all of this to get you back,” Marco says. “To take us back to where we were, us and the world.”

  “But we don’t want to go back there,” Carolyn says. “Us or the world.”

  They can’t see his face, but they hear him make a sound, a long sigh with a shriek coiled inside it, and it occurs to each of the three of them that they might have only a few seconds to live. I should have married her years ago, Hideo thinks. I should have called my parents, Carolyn thinks. And Zeke’s mind goes to the photographs he’s seen of Victoria Falls, the canyons of water, the rainbows upon rainbows. I should have gone when I had the chance. But Marco just stands there, his breathing coming fast; he wrestles it down, breaks it, forces it to slow.

  “I see,” Marco says. “Now I see everything.”