“I think so too,” I say.
“That guy Shwo-Rez ain’t exactly all there,” she says. She has a dusky voice, hoarse and low. I’d put her at sixteen. “And he don’t like outsiders.” Her bad grammar sounds hot in a wrong-side-of-the-tracks way.
It is the most I’ve ever seen of a real-time hottie, and though she’s more strategic than some of the other Shrub People (you can’t see any bits or pieces), you can see practically everything. I think. I’m trying hard not to stare, like seeing a bearly nude chickie is just as run-of-the-mill as lobster night at the compound.
“So,” I say, slipping into His Eminence’s publicspeak, “you from around here?”
Seabrook and Kang come over, and Seabrook asks who she is. She says her name is Esmerelda Chicklis, and that she’s lived with the Shrub People for about a month. Again, she says the Shwo-Rez guy is messed up in the head and that if we don’t get out of here, who knows what he might do.
“What about your parents?” Seabrook asks.
“I can help you guys get out,” Esmerelda continues, ignoring him. “On one condition.”
“What do you want?” Seabrook asks.
“Take me with you,” she says. “If we make it to your boat, take me to the next town or something and drop me off. Is it a deal?”
“She’s crazy,” Clarence says. “Y’all will never make it.”
“How can you help?” Seabrook asks.
“Well, when it gets dark, Shwo Rez will walk through town. At that point they dance. They’ll carry on so long that I can ease us on out of here unseen. I know the way.”
I’m surprised that a homeless chick like Esmerelda—someone His Eminence would refer to as lazy and shiftless and a barnacle on the bottom of the ship that is the US economy—could be a bona fide hottie if she’d slather on a little makeup and shave her pits. In fact, I am running through movie scripts trying to find a line that won’t sound made up, preferably dialogue from a movie she would not have seen. So I settle on a passage from this episode of Sniper Dude X from the seldom-viewed third season.
“Esmerelda,” I say, cutting off Seabrook, “your days of fear are at an end.”
Everybody—including the hottie—looks at me like I’m out of my mind. So I lower my head and continue to listen to Esmerelda and the Doctor parlay about the homeless weirdos.
The chickies are coming, people. After my band’s first disc drops, they’re coming. In droves.
CHAPTER TEN
arthur becomes dinosaur king
So, you’re probably thinking I’m a bubble boy since I haven’t taken a toke of Mary Jane (yet) and because the Shrub People are the first homeless I’ve seen up close. Not so. I may be young, but I’ve seen my share of action.
Check this out—two thousand tons of poured concrete. Think about that. That’s what surrounds the Compound at Westchester. The wall is feet thick. Yards thick. Yards high. There’s razor wire atop it and cameras at every door. Machine gunners—Ralph, Harold, Sven, Gunther, Michael, and Ray—watch from twin fifty-foot guard towers at the lone entrance to the compound. There’s this kick-ass Jason Bourne–ified alarm system that’s been known to freak out if a squirrel farts somewhere nearby.
I breach it all the time.
I’m telling you, His Eminence’s head of security is a Nazi. Nothing ever goes in or out of the compound without him checking it out. And there’s also the chambermaids and the butlers and the black suits with the shades and dangly earpieces on the prowl. But I bust this security down. I’ve got inside men—Gunther in particular—who help me out. Unbeknownst to anyone, I sneak entertainment past them that would, frankly, cheese off the Moms and His Eminence big time. Entertainment some of you might find immoral. And probably illegal.
Dirty movies.
You have to be seventeen to watch Zombie Cannibals, what with chicks showing their breasts and that scene where the zombie makes the girl eat her own belly button. I’ve also seen Teenage Nuns II: Holy Water Sports and The Boobsie Twins. NC-17 movies, people.
Download them, you say? Please. The ’rents monitor my Internet history like it’s a stock ticker.
Gunther gets my DVDs for me. That took some convincing. The first time I approached him, he waved me off and said he’d have to speak to my old man first. I told him to forget the whole thing and not to mention it to anybody. I thought I was sunk. So it was weird when the next day Gunther came to me and told me he reconsidered and would get me whatever I asked to see.
Anyway, since I’m able to break through the Compound’s airtight security on a nearly weekly basis, it should be easy to push over the chicken wire dome the Shrub People have us caged in. Instead, we wait for dark to arrive, for Shwo-Rez to march through the town, and for the dancing to start, which is when Esmerelda says she’ll set us free.
After not talking to me for a long while, a pretty big pile of wood chips covers the ground at Arthur’s feet. He’s whittled another dinosaur, this one out of anger at me, I guess—a wicked-looking four-legged beastie with a beak and big horns. By the time he finishes, a crowd of little Shrub People has eked out of the boxes and edged up close to the cage. Grade-schoolers, some gaining on me in the height department, but all still scarcely breaking the plane at Arthur’s waist. Five of them—hair filthy, matted, and shoulder length; mud and grime streaking their little butt-naked bods; and hands and fingers smudged black.
“What is that?” says a shrub kid with scary-big moss-green eyes.
Arthur writes on the ground with a twig, TRICERATOPS.
The green-eyed kid is quiet a minute and then says, “It’s cool, man.”
Arthur smiles and nods.
“Do they have animals like that where you’re from?” the kid asks.
Arthur will try writing out an explanation on the ground if I don’t cut him off. “Yo, kid. It’s a dinosaur.”
The green eyes remain unblinking.
“You know, one of those lizards that went extinct ages ago. Come on, didn’t you get that in first grade?”
“Don’t have school,” he chirps.
Lucky little bastard! A bonus to the Shrub People, forgoing that whole snoozefest. I guess it isn’t all bad here, and I’m about to say so when Arthur hands him the dinosaur through the cage. Filthy little fingers take it and cradle it, and his lips fall slack. Then all these little monsters start running around, oohing and ahing over this wooden dinosaur. So Arthur reaches into his pocket and pulls out the allosaurus he whittled at Godspeed Summer Camp and passes it through the chicken wire.
Well, next thing you know there are Shrub Kids everywhere. “Come see the dinosaur man!” they yell at each other, or, to their moms and dads, “Please, Mommy, I want to go see the dinosaur man.” They take turns holding the toys Arthur made and then they stare at Arthur like he’s a rock star. Arthur writes things like CRETACEOUS PERIOD and HERBIVOROUS in response. He doesn’t seem so shy, actually; he looks like he’s having a good time there in the cage. I doubt the kid has ever gotten this much positive attention in his whole life. It seems to warm him, even when the adults come by—including a couple who don’t have kids in tow.
“You sure know a lot about dinosaurs,” says one of the men who is here by himself. “My little girl’d love to talk to you. When she was real little, I used to buy her stuffed dinosaurs by the truckload. She’s probably about your age now. Ain’t seen her myself in three years. They got her in a foster home somewheres. They didn’t have this place back then, this town for homeless folks, so the state come and took her away. If I ever see her again, though, I’ll tell her I met somebody her own age that knew everything there was to know about dinosaurs.”
Arthur doesn’t shy away. He stands and smiles and writes things on the ground.
These are the people from the boxes closest to the cage, understand. The big stack of boxes, the palace where we were taken—Shwo-Rez’s palace—sits still. Nobody goes in or out, but we keep looking up that way, waiting.
The rest of the Shrub Peop
le don’t seem so scary. They seem just like super poor people (which you’d think would be scary).
We don’t notice at first when Gladys comes. All the other Shrub People run away.
“Y’all think we crazy,” she hisses. Gladys is a black woman—a Shrub Person with this giant nest of hair that’s full of little knots. She’s naked to the waist, though you can’t see anything because she’s holding this little white bundle up in front of her. It’s a baby.
“Y’all think we crazy,” she says again. Behind her a handful of Shrub People peer out of the mouths of some of the boxes. Gladys has a thick face, but her body is all ashy and bony, with flesh hanging off it like an old dress two sizes too big.
“Y’all think we crazy.”
I want to say, Can you blame us, but I’m scared.
“I don’t know who ya’ll is coming in here, but we ain’t crazy,” she says, rocking from side to side, I guess to soothe the little bundle she’s carrying. “I’m doing what I need to do to take care of me and mine. We ain’t all crazy. After Super Corp. go down, what you expect us to do? A body got to eat, you know?”
“You’re just as bad as they are, Gladys!” Clarence says. He rushes over to the side of the cage next to me. “You don’t have to pretend, damn it!”
“Fuck you, Clarence!” she yells. “You tryin’ to spoil it all!” She looks back at me. “Ain’t nothing on the streets of Lynnbrook for us. That unemployment check stop coming, and you can’t pay the rent. Then what you expect us to do? Some of us turn to junk just to make our minds forget what’s happening to our bodies. But some of us got little ones to take care of. What you expect a body to do? Find a job? Move where the work is? Well, how’m I gonna do that when there ain’t no more job and nobody hire no old bag lady with no clothes and no family ’cept this little one? So we hear tell that the councilman gone crazy come out here and set up a place for us to go, and that there food and there place to keep out the cold.”
“You don’t have to pretend, Gladys, goddamn it!” Clarence yells. “If we all hung together, they’d never . . .”
She ignores him. “Sure, it ain’t decent. Got to pretend all kind of things, like ain’t no city over there and ain’t no God, and got to put on clothes like crazy people ’cause that old councilman Shwo-Rez gone lost his mind. What you expect? When you need food you can’t afford believing in beliefs no more. You just go on with what he say and get to live without nobody hassling you. So why you have to hassle us now? I’m glad y’all in there, and I’m glad what they going do to you, but I know there be more of you. I see you lookin’ at me like I’m crazy, white boy. But I ain’t crazy.”
It occurs to me the whole time she’s moving that the bundle—her baby—doesn’t budge.
It just hangs there.
* * *
At dusk they light the bonfire with torches and old newspaper (I wonder what they call newspaper—palm leaves, maybe?) and the fire grows up and licks the tall logs.
Seabrook leans against the cage. He’s been leaning against the cage most of the day. And he’s been staring at his crucifix key chain, rubbing it with his thumb. That’s Seabrook. He’s all the time gloomy, quiet. Friendly when you talk to him, a blur of limbs when he has a chart or technical readouts, but sad and soundless the rest of the time.
“I hope this doesn’t taint your opinion of the Tamzene, Mr. Brubaker,” Seabrook says. “Once we get out of here, we’ll drop you off at the next town and call your father.”
But that seems unlikely as we sit here watching the fire burn. I want His Eminence to burst in with some guys with submachine guns to take out Shwo-Rez and these hunter guys. Not so much the other homeless people. I’m not sure why, exactly. They don’t seem so crazy anymore—just in need of some serious grooming. His Eminence says the homeless are animals that you can’t feed too much, or they get fat and spoiled. I’m not sure where he gets the farming imagery from, or when he might have tested his theory of feeding them too much. But if he saw the little Shrub Kids, maybe he’d understand that they’re prisoners too.
Still, they stuck us in this cage, and some of them are acting like mental cases.
I ask Seabrook what he thinks might be wrong with them. He agrees with me that it isn’t the homeless people’s fault but Shwo-Rez’s, and maybe a handful of others. From what he knows of Lynnbrook, a few years ago the town faced an air pollution disaster that killed off a lot of people, forcing the company responsible for the disaster to close down. The closing cost a lot of Lynnbrook residents their jobs.
“But how does that explain them acting like we’re ghosts or something?” I ask.
Seabrook is sulking again. More than that—he has his crucifix in his right hand, and he’s rubbing it so hard he’s shaking with the other. Something has him pissed off.
“Well, it’s like His Eminence says, I guess,” I say. “They’re all a bunch of wackos.”
“Who?”
“Bums. Homeless. These people. Following everything that Shwo-Rez guy says just for some cardboard cribs.”
Seabrook shifts his weight from his right foot to his left. He opens his mouth to speak and then closes it.
“Sometimes I forget who I’m talking to,” he says eventually.
I realize I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth again, and I apologize. But he just gives me this uncomfortable smile and says it isn’t his place and that maybe I should talk to His Eminence about it. About what, I’m not sure.
“Besides,” he says, “what they’re doing isn’t so different from what your d—what some people in the government do every day.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s good policy to pretend nature doesn’t exist. In fact, in some offices it’s a fireable offense to consider rocks and trees and animals and air as real things. And nobody bats an eye. So why is it such a surprise that a government official would do the reverse and pretend that buildings and litter and civilization don’t exist?
“You can fill people’s heads with all kinds of nonsense,” he continues, and even though he is talking to me, it’s like he’s not anymore. He looks back at his crucifix key chain. “People will believe anything.”
* * *
“SHWO-REEEEEEEEEZ!” shouts someone from the crowd. It’s just starting to get dark, and Shrub People are filling the courtyard. And here’s the Shrub King, moseying along out of his cardboard box palace down the main corridor toward the bonfire. Shwo-Rez is a pile of flesh that ripples when he walks. He smiles and nods at the collected Shrub People.
A yell goes up, then falls, then rises up again in a chant: “Shwo-Rez! Shwo-Rez!” Some of them start acting like Beatles fans in a black-and-white movie, screaming like they’re ready to climb out of themselves just to touch the wrinkly fat guy with the soda cans around his neck. Others seem to think the whole thing is hilarious, smiling and nudging one another. And others just look like they want to go back to their boxes, but they’re chanting anyway: “Shwo-Rez! Shwo-Rez!”
Shwo-Rez looks like His Eminence on a campaign photo op. A big smile slackens his neck. He waves and points to people in the crowd. He stops and kisses a few babies, musses the hair of a couple of youngsters.
“There he is,” Clarence mutters. “The king fruit nut.”
The gray-haired guy I recognize from the palace is following him; Bob Schwartz called him Gray-Aide. When his sweeping eyes land on us in the cage, he looks away.
“Friends of the great Eden!” Shwo-Rez shouts when he reaches the bonfire. The crowd falls silent. “Today is a monumental day in the history of our people. For we have proven that not only does evil exist—but that it walks among us.”
A great roar erupts from the crowd. A couple of the hunters run to the cage and jab us with spears.
“Tonight,” Shwo-Rez continues, “after our celebration, we will put these evil spirits to their death by lighting them ablaze on our sacred fire.”
Well, that wigs us out something fierce. The crowd goes wild again, lifting their spears
into the night and chanting, “Shwo-Rez! Shwo-Rez!”
“Your devotion is truly super,” Shwo-Rez says, smiling. Then the crowd stops chanting his name and there’s nothing, no noise but the crackling of the fire and the sound of bugs fizzing. Some of the Shrub People look at their feet and toe the ground.
The smile slips from Shwo-Rez’s lips, and he looks off past the tops of the trees. He stares at the city in the distance. “Super,” he mutters absently, as if he can’t get past the word. “Super . . . super . . .” His body seems to melt, and he staggers backward. “Super . . .” The crowd flinches.
Gray-Aide leaps to his side and wraps his arm around Shwo-Rez’s shoulder. “The great Shwo-Rez is overcome by your worship in the face of such evil!” Gray-Aide shouts. “And tonight, he will reward us all by ridding us of this scourge!”
The crowd goes nuts. Shwo-Rez blinks. Then the smile grows across his face again, and he lifts his arms above his head and howls at the sliver of moon on the horizon:
“I don’t wanna grow up
I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid . . .”
And they dance.
It’s like a crowd of people having seizures. One woman tucks her hands into her armpits, leans forward, and does a chicken dance, then does jumping jacks with her feet and head flopping. Another man falls onto his back and thrusts his arms and legs into the air, shakes them like he’s doing the hokey pokey, sits back up, runs in a circle, then falls down and does it all again.
“There’s a million toys in Toys ‘R’ Us
That I can play with!”
“Here we go,” Esmerelda says. She’s sneaked up on the side of the cage where I’m leaning. Her breath warms my ear, and I smell her sweat. Female sweat is sharper than male sweat—a little more acidic, maybe, more alluring than man sweat but not much better smelling. I can only see her silhouette in the dark, but I picture her in designer hip-huggers and a belly shirt with her navel pierced.
Then her shadow disappears and the cage inches upward.
We Are All Crew Page 10