The judge turned her attention on the defense attorney, like she was both surprised and pissed that he had somehow ended up in her courtroom. “Did you forget why your client is on trial? Why we’re all here? I’ll refresh your memory. She denied the main culprit behind all our damn problems—global warming.”
The defense lawyer shook his head like he was very aware of the power of global warming to change the civility of a courtroom into a circus.
Cricket was burning up again, not with shame but with indignation. This couldn’t be real. She looked at Becca, who was watching the insanity’s unfolding with great interest.
The defense attorney’s voice shook. “Judge, I know why we’re here—”
“Say it loud then, so my people can hear it in the back row.”
“Denialism,” the man said, bowing his head like he, too, were on trial.
“Climate denialism!” Ralph the attorney added, and the man nodded in the affirmative.
“What the hell is going on here?” Cricket said loudly enough to Becca that the judge heard as well and speared Cricket with eyes that could have carried off a stoning all by her lonesome.
“Lady, you interrupted my courtroom for the last time.”
“This is no courtroom, not even a kangaroo court,” Cricket replied. “This is South Park! What are you morons doing here, putting a woman on trial for teaching something you don’t agree with?”
The judge pounded her gavel viciously, like it was Cricket’s head that should be taking the blows. Some in the crowd rose from their seats and started toward Cricket. Becca stood up and shot both hands over her head, and the room fell quiet except for a smattering of curses, rising and falling.
“What are you gonna do with her?” Judge Maxine yelled. “I know what I’d like to do—I’d like to take her ass apart.”
“She’s a friend of mine, recently arrived from a dangerous place up north,” Becca said, defending Cricket. “She’s a good person, a survivor, but this is all new to her. Believe me, she’s a quick learner. She’ll get the right information. There are no problems here today.”
Becca’s bodyguards had drawn their weapons, and the prosecutor and the judge both brought out their pieces.
“Becca, I love you,” the judge said, “but it’s my courtroom. I think you should take your friend here home and educate her on our ways.” She addressed Cricket: “Our town is peaceful because we deal with all the big issues. And we don’t take any crap.” She ended with a more judicious rap of the gavel.
“Right, or you’ll take my ass apart,” Cricket shot back, and the judge rose from her seat.
“You get her outta here, Becca. There’ll be bloodshed. Right here in my courtroom.”
Cricket and Becca, flanked by the bodyguards, were led out. The yelling and cursing of the mob were heard all the way to the parking deck.
29
Showtime for the Great Unwashed
“What was that, Becca?” Cricket, hand on the front seat, took a deep breath, trying to control her rage. “What kind of medieval crap was that?”
“Settle down,” Becca said, pulling a compact from her purse, eyeing herself, licking her lips, trying to decide whether to freshen her lipstick. The two bodyguards in the front seat focused on the road ahead. They weren’t far from Cricket’s new home, but she felt like she was returning to her prison cell. She wished they could all pick up and move tonight. All of the craziness and treachery of the Brazilian had dragged her out to deep waters, where she thought she’d drown. Was she again in those waters?
“Tell me that was just entertainment, a play, a movie in production.”
“It’s all those things,” Becca said, unbothered. “And a lot more. The lights may be out, but people crave entertainment. This is one of their outlets.”
“What’s the other, biting people to death on a slow afternoon?”
“We deal harshly with Coyotes and Patriarchs. They’re both disrupters. I believe that the Patriarchs control the Coyotes.”
Becca went on to explain that the Coyotes had gone after people saying the wrong things about religion. “Some have been attacked for not going to church.”
“Don’t believe it.”
“Whiteness is oozing from every action they take, or the propaganda they force the citizens to read.”
“Really, forcing people to read—what, the Declaration of Independence?”
“Authored by a slave owner.” Becca crossed her arms and looked straight ahead. She had hit Cricket with an argument killer. Cricket knew a little about Thomas Jefferson but couldn’t muster the strength for a battle over American history. She understood that Jefferson had known that slavery was coming to an end but couldn’t snap his fingers and end it overnight.
Cricket briefly argued with Becca in her head before blurting her closing argument. “Becca, you’re a few quarts low. Dangerous for cars and minds. That burnt smell is your brain right before it freezes up.”
“Male dominance, the Ten Commandments, traditional values, which were imposed forever against those who were different. Whiteness can invade any gender, any skin color, even though it started with white people. The Patriarchs are composed of men and women, blacks and whites, and they use the Coyotes to terrify and kill their enemies. You can point to people hurt by the Coyotes who are Christians, but that’s due to the excitement of the hunt. Ultimately, they serve the Patriarchs.”
Cricket had met the leader of the Patriarchs, and they were no insane biters, killing for sport or ideology. She wouldn’t reveal her connection with them, especially Sergeant Wills’ identity, a black man Becca would regard as suffering from the white disease. The day’s courtroom farce was enough for discussion.
Cricket saw the driver glancing at her in the rearview mirror as her voice rose dramatically. “That woman—on trial—she’s a teacher. She’s on trial for teaching!”
“Was a teacher,” Becca said with finality. “Her ideas are regressive for our current world, and the one that we’ll eventually return to. That defendant today is a roadblock against change and real progress.” Becca abruptly stopped talking and stared down a street they were passing, turning to keep it in view, like it was a place from childhood full of memories, crammed with meaning. Her voice softened. “Let’s go to the hospital first.”
The driver slowed down, made a U-turn, and was soon on a narrow street with dead cars: many vandalized, tires missing, others rolled onto their backs or sitting on flat tires in driveways. At the end of the street loomed a large hospital, partially erased by the falling snow. To Cricket, its size and darkness seemed to be crushing the thin band of light coming from the first few floors. A giant stepping on a bug.
30
Purgatory
They parked in an underground garage and heard the deafening roar of a generator until reaching the hospital. Cops and plainclothes guards stood along the dark hallways, where lights flickered a few times when the generator coughed. They went to the basement and into a well-lit room with a middle-aged man attached to IVs and a breathing tube.
Becca went to the man’s side and held his limp hand. She lifted it and kissed it and walked to the foot of the bed. Cricket thought she was praying. Becca stood silent, head bowed. A nurse approached and led her to a chair against the wall like someone made feeble by grief, needing guidance and a strong arm to keep from falling. They spoke for a few minutes, and Becca returned and held Cricket’s hand.
“I know what I should do, but I can’t.”
“This man?”
“My father. In a coma since shortly after the attack at our house. I’m told there’s no hope. But I’m stubborn.”
They turned toward the door, and Cricket felt Becca’s brittleness, taking wooden steps out of the room and down the creepy hallway of half-ass, dim, battery-powered lights attached to the walls with rubber suction cups. The man under hospital care had garnered all the good graces of the gods of electricity and left the rest of the mammoth building in the semidarkne
ss of flashlights, candles, and lanterns. No other room appeared so perfectly illuminated, normal-looking, and clean.
In the cold parking deck, Cricket feared the generator’s racket was going to give her a lobotomy—wiping away her most precious memories and feelings. The long, squat machine sounded as if it had been raging at the same intensity for years.
Becca stood outside the car, hand resting on the door handle, emitting a thousand-yard stare. Cricket and the bodyguards suffered the noise for several long seconds before Becca scooted inside the old Ford. The unbearable sadness cloaking Becca reminded Cricket of her own loss. The rawness of that loss zinged her with a burst of sorrow that threatened to reduce her to a crying rubble.
“I’m in purgatory, Cricket.” Becca ran her hand down Cricket’s leg, covered by a long, black leather coat of Becca’s. The mayor grinned painfully. “Good metaphor, don’t you think?” She looked around. “I lose all my purpose when I come here. And I have a job, a big job to do. I’ve followed my father into purgatory. His suffering could be ended, should be ended. But I’m a hypocrite, like my mother, who enjoys the title. Most of the time I am like my mom and don’t give a damn that I am a big-ass hypocrite. The staff around the city are instructed to quickly end the lives of those in serious trauma. My father’s a top candidate, but I just can’t do it.”
The quiet car gave Cricket ample time to consider the amazing transformation of a woman who had been an insane bureaucrat hours ago, tormenting a priest and his congregation as well as allowing a farce of a trial to continue.
“I know a nice place where we can go and talk.” Becca said this looking at the homes and the few people and children who were walking in the fresh snow. They pulled alongside what looked to be a neighborhood bar: rough stone facade, droopy cloth overhang weighted by snow.
“The food is incredible and we can get drinks. Whatever you like.”
Ajax floated behind the two women down the hospital’s hallway into the room where Mayor Frank Givens still breathed with the help of a ventilator fed by a generator, guarded by a few men from his own army and needing lots of gas and a man like Ajax to supply it.
Ajax was mystified by not being able to track the spirit of Frank Givens. No dream or vivid dreaming brought Frank into view. Where was he hiding? What fun he could have with the mayor, who despised Ajax’s influence on his daughter, especially after the EMP attack?
Ajax knew he could remove the air supply from this bag of water at any time, but his instincts told him not to. Becca was better controlled with that womanly part of her in perpetual sorrow—the ancient damsel in distress. And he was her black knight in dark armor. At this time he didn’t need her all “wheels and gears,” business and appointments. He needed her unpredictability, her warmth, her lust.
31
Revelations
Lanterns and candles illuminated the bar and tables. Warm air circulated from several tall heaters powered by natural gas and propane when needed. Cricket thought they looked like flying saucers that had landed atop miniature grain towers.
Cricket looked around the room, most of the small tables were full with people eating and drinking, relaxed and talking, lots of talking. She eyed her glass of red wine and Becca’s Cosmo, an ordinary, pleasant moment she hadn’t experienced for nearly a year. She brought the wine close, inhaled, and then set it back down. Everyone around Cricket was enjoying the moment, except her. “I can’t believe it. Your dad’s alive but your mom doesn’t know.”
“Nobody knows except for a handful of close bodyguards and Angel. I’d thought, like my mom, that my dad was dead. I was so distraught, I had to follow him to the hospital. I wanted to help clean him, prepare him for burial. He wasn’t a religious man, but he believed another adventure took place after death. He was a kid like that.” She paused and smiled with effort. “At the hospital, a nurse detected a pulse and everybody went into action.”
“But your mom?”
“I was going to tell her, of course, but Angel cautioned me. He said her cynicism would take over and she’d pull the plug on him. She lacked a big vision for everything. Only a few knew the condition of my father, and they swore secrecy. Angel believes in miracles, and he said sometimes a miracle could take years, whether it’s transformation of society or the return of a loved one. He said my mom would be even lonelier and more bitter than she is now. Some people need a black-and-white world, one of the living and the dead. He knew my world was much more complex. Angel knew I’d wait and use that time to get the city under control and have everything we needed in place when my father woke up.”
“What did you think you’d have in place?” Cricket questioned.
“Oh, just the entire world.” She laughed at her own words, and others in the bar ignored Becca, as if they knew better than to respond to the mayor unless invited to do so. It was odd, but the strangers’ timidity had given Cricket a sense of freedom, along with the glass of red wine she finally sipped but wouldn’t finish due to her pregnancy. Each table had a glass-covered candle and the bar had a row of them. The alcohol at the back of her tongue warmed her, loosened her up. She felt important. She had the mayor’s ear.
“Be careful about redesigning the entire world,” Cricket said, interrupting herself with another sip, her voice deeper, serious. “More than once my friends and I had to wipe out monsters wanting to redesign people.”
“And now you think you’ll need to take me out. The monster on the river.”
“You’re not a monster. You lost your father. You want to do right by him. But you don’t have to run people over to make the world a decent place.”
“Still worried about that priest.”
“I’m worried about the way you think, the way you look at the world.”
“And you think I’m going to set it on fire, like that Brazilian woman tried?”
“Yeah, maybe out of good intentions.”
“You need good intentions when you govern people. My dad had the best of intentions, and he knew how to get things done. But he didn’t have to do it living in the eighteenth century.”
Cricket pulled the Constitution from her pocket.
“You’re not going to read from that little book.”
“It’s the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
“The CliffsNotes version?”
“I guess you haven’t read either in a long time. My dear, it’s all here. This is our detailed framework for this nation of ours. And it’s really needed right now. Forget about weird stuff like ‘whiteness’ and fear of religion.” Cricket paged quickly through the short pamphlet, exclaiming about the great ideas, especially the beauty and soundness of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, ending slavery and granting citizenship and voting rights to former slaves. She would have read aloud, but the light was inadequate.
“All men are created equal,” Cricket solemnly said.
A few in the bar took notice.
“I hope you haven’t memorized the entire Declaration. It gets boring quite quickly, and I’d have to have my bodyguard shoot you. Really, only men are created equal. Right at the very beginning, they’re screwing it up royally.”
Cricket dismissed her bar mate’s ignorance with a wave of her hand, and continued.
“And endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
“Dear, I don’t believe in God. So how can we get something from someone who doesn’t exist?”
The small bar became quiet. Everyone listened.
Cricket had become tipsy after only a few swallows. The alcohol swooped through her system and warmed something central inside and further loosened her thoughts. But she didn’t become more eloquent. Tears filled her eyes thinking of what her dad believed in, what he had taught her. She wanted to say a lot about the colonies’ breaking away from England, to recite the freedoms of the people and all the restrictions placed on government in order to keep a people free. She longed to say why that was essential. But all t
hat came out was, “I love my dad, and I really miss him. He’ll never know this child.” Whereupon she burst into tears.
Becca jumped from her seat and hugged her, and soon she too was crying and a man came over and asked if he could be of help.
Their foreheads pressed together, both women took turns shaking their heads no.
“We’re just talking,” Becca said.
“We’re fine,” Cricket said to the kind man, who reminded her of her friend Ron, who had died over the past summer in Fritz’s hometown. Gun battle in the suburbs, she said to herself, her head bobbing slightly up and down, crying even more. The man was big, barrel-chested, and sweet.
Before turning and walking away, he said, “Well, I’m here if you need me.”
Drying their eyes on their sweater sleeves, the two women toasted and finally began laughing about stories from the past, the past of young girls growing up with fathers they admired. Soon, Cricket dismissed all her concerns over Becca Givens, and shoved the bizarre courtroom scene off her “calendar of things to discuss.”
Listening to Becca carry on about her father, Cricket knew that there was no hope of the man ever waking from his coma. There had to be multiple reasons for keeping him alive, though Cricket couldn’t name them all except that Becca loved him and wanted to feel his presence. Perhaps it made it easier when she talked to him during the day alongside his bed or in her mind before she drifted into sleep. Becca’s love for her father had made it almost impossible to accept death. Dad was forever. If he still breathed, he might come back to her.
“Tell me about your parents,” Becca said.
The bar was without music, but the hum of conversation gave the place a cozy feel. Cricket pushed her wine glass toward Becca, who emptied it into hers.
American Blackout (Book 3): Gangster Town Page 10