Strange Trades Page 16

  As usual, the inside of my trailer could have served to illustrate a doctoral thesis in chaos theory. I was hoping that today would be the day order would emerge from the random components.

  Rebuilding half a city was a complex task. The infrastructure is a harsh mistress. My personal inclinations were to get the job done and let the paperwork slide. It showed.

  “I had the plans right here,” I said, rummaging through a stack of papers half as high as the Moscow Hilton. Invoices, job orders, OSHA reports, RFPs, memos from Mama Cass.…

  “No sweat,” said Drucker. “Ill have the home office fax us another set.”

  Kerry Drucker was one of the architects involved in the New York operations of the UCC. In the spirit of the whole project, his firm was donating all its time. Young, round-faced, black-framed glasses perched on a snub nose, Drucker wore a look of easy competence. I marvelled at how relaxed he looked, how much he seemed to be enjoying his stint as a volunteer. During the Hollow Years, not so long ago, someone in his position couldn’t have spared a scheme like this a minute of his precious time—if such a scheme could even have gotten off the ground.

  But today, with the Urban Conservation Corps a flourishing reality, with our enlistment up over that of the Armed Services by fifty percent, with the victory in last year’s presidential election by the incumbent serving as validation of his daring policies, everyone wanted a part of the glory. Self-interest and altruism, each somewhat leery of the other, had mated, and the offspring were thriving, with godparents aplenty.

  Drucker pulled at the knot of his tie. It was patterned with colorful metagraphix, in the latest style. “Jesus, it’s hot in here. What a summer.”

  I notched up the noisy air conditioner. It was a new Czech model, and a little balky. But what the hell—now that we were running a trade surplus, we could afford to help the former satellite countries get back on their economic feet.

  “If those cytofabbed phytoplankton take up as much cee-oh-two as they claim, we should notice a change in a few years.”

  “I hope so. My place on Fire Island is now five feet from the water.” Drucker seemed struck by a new thought then. “You don’t have access to a metamedium node, do you? I could call up those plans then—”

  “No such luck. It’s ironic, I know. Here we are, trying to wire the city, along with everything else, and we’re temporarily off-line ourselves. Something about a bunch of hackers reprogramming the signal repeaters for this part of Manhattan. Unilink doesn’t want to add any new nodes until they get the whole mess straightened out. It’s been three weeks now, but they claim they’re working on it all the time. We should get hooked in real soon. In fact, that’s one of the things I have to check on today. Maybe we could add a stop to our tour?”

  “Sure,” said Drucker agreeably. “I just need to have a look at how the demolition is going, to see if we’re keeping to schedule.”

  I stood. “Let’s go then.” At the trailer door, I grabbed a couple of yellow plastic hardhats off a pile of dirty clothes. I gave Drucker the one with the NASA decal: Snoopy riding Space Station Alpha.

  Outside, the mixture of brick dust and soil that covered roughly a hundred and fifty acres in the heart of Harlem baked in the sun, reminding me of how Benares had smelled, the few times I had managed to get in from the countryside. My trailer was stationed on the northern periphery of the dusty clearing, 135th Street. (The project acreage was bounded on the west by St. Nicholas Avenue, on the east by Lenox, and on the south by 125th Street.) My headquarters was hooked into the city’s utilities, and reachable by car. Surrounding it, like some sort of modern gypsy encampment, were the dozens of other trailers that housed the UCC crewmembers. They were decorated with each crew’s totems and slogans: THE BLUE CREW RULES!, TOPAZ CREW HAS BIGGER SHOVELS AND BUCKETS, GOLDIES EAT GREENS FOR BREAKFAST.

  Drucker and I hopped aboard a little two-seater ATV with fat tires, and sped south to where the last of the demolition was taking place.

  Threading our way among graders and cranes, surveyors and engineers, we talked above the noise of our vehicle and the work all around us, mostly about the project.

  Drucker started to get really excited.

  “You know, seeing this today, I really feel success in my bones. We’re doing it right this time. No half measures, but no government megalomania either, like the urban renewal of the sixties. It’s a project of the people. We came to this place when it was nothing but burned-out shells without heat or water or windows, and we’re going to leave it an environment fit for human beings to live in. No big faceless blocks of flats either. Small units, mostly, with plazas and parks, fountains and flowers, churches, stores and schools, all integrated into an organic whole, a real community—”

  I looked back over my shoulder. Drucker wasn’t holding on to his seat, but was waving his arms around in architectonic rapture. I looked forward again.

  “Hold on!” I shouted, then swerved.

  I almost lost Drucker, but not quite.

  A cornice, probably weakened by the surrounding blasting, had fallen off one of the isolated brownstones that dotted the project, standing like lonely sentinels looking backward into the past, while the future approached from their blind side. (These were the buildings the city’s historical preservation board had deemed worthy of continued life.) The pile of bricks, lying in the building’s shadow, sprawled right across the dirt track I always took.

  A quick radioed squawk to the nearest crewleader insured that the obstacle wouldn’t be there on our return. The near-accident seemed to have taken some of the wind out of Drucker’s sails, and he kept quiet until we reached the southwest corner of the project, where the final demolition was underway.

  A flagger stopped us. She smiled and wiped sweat from her brow with the back of a gloved hand.

  “Holly needs to see you, Mike. They’ve run into something unexpected.”

  Looking around, I saw everything at a standstill: trucks, dozers, wrecking ball, compliants, people. The building, a warehouse, stood half-leveled, its interior exposed to the harsh sunlight like a smashed crab. It was one of a cluster of four, the remnant of a block. Beyond the chain-link fence that ran along St. Nicholas Avenue, a few pedestrians were watching. Behind them, CUNY stood on its bluff amid listless trees.

  Holly Noonan was dressed in jeans cut off high on the hip, thick white socks and scuffed workshoes, a thin, faded flannel shirt with the sleeves torn out. Over the shirt she wore her gold crewleader’s vest, emblazoned with the patches of all the projects she had worked on: Atlanta, Detroit, Roxbury.… She was skinny, blonde, and burnt brown as a September lifeguard. Once a film major at NYU, she had reenlisted with the UCC for a second hitch after her compulsory two years, and now looked to be intent on making the Corps her career. I had seen her single-handedly lever up with a pry bar a fallen girder that was pinning the leg of one of her crew. She was the best I had.

  “Trouble, Holly?”

  “Twice over, Mike.” She scratched at her nose and looked embarrassed. “One’s my fault, the other—well, you’ll see.”

  “Let’s get any dumb guilt trip out of the way first.”

  “Okay. We thought the warehouse was clean. But there was a bricked-up room no one knew about that I should have spotted. When the ball cracked it open, it also cracked open about a dozen drums full of God-knows-what. Wastes, obviously, probably toxic, stashed there when they couldn’t be dumped.”

  “Well, shit, that’s bad enough —means a day’s delay. But it’s nothing to kick yourself for.”

  “I should have seen that room on the plans—”

  “Forget it. Anyone call for the bugs yet?”

  Holly smiled. “They should be here any minute.”

  “While we’re waiting, why don’t you tell me about the other thing.”

  Holly’s expression changed to one of utter disbelief. “Mike, there’s people living in one of these shells.”

  At first I literally could not make sense of he
r words. When the semantic bits lined up right, I still didn’t know what to say. So I repeated Holly’s words with a slightly different emphasis, hoping that would make them resolve.

  “People? Living in one of the shells?”

  “Right. They weren’t there the last time anyone remembers looking, about three days ago. But they’re there now. We found a section of fence that looked fine, but was really only held in place by a couple of links. We think local kids did that, but it’s how these others must have got in.”

  “Well, hell—anybody talk to these folks yet?”

  “Nope. So far, we’ve just seen them through a window. We thought we should wait for you before confronting them.”

  “Let’s go do it, then.”

  Drucker had been listening intently to our conversation. I really didn’t want him tagging along, but couldn’t quite see how to ditch him.

  Then the chopper sounded, growing louder.

  “Bugjuice delivery!” someone called.

  The helicopter set down in a mushroom of red-mottled dun dust. Two guys dressed in protective white bunnysuits hopped out and scuttled over. They had refrigerated tanks strapped to their backs, which fed via hoses to long spray-wands.

  “Where’s the chow?” one said.

  Holly pointed out the spill. Inspired, I said, “Kerry, maybe you’d like to watch this?”

  Drucker smiled, too sharp to be diverted. “No thanks. I think I’ll tag along with you two, if it’s all right. I’ve never seen actual squatters before.”

  I sighed. The bugmen were already laying down a film of toxin-eating microbes on the waste. By this time tomorrow, the stuff would be harmless, and demolition could resume.

  Assuming we could handle these inexplicable squatters.

  Holly, Drucker and I walked over to the old apartment building where the intruders had been seen. It was a large derelict structure, and we could make out no movement in its shadowy interior.

  We stood there a minute, baffled. Finally, I yelled out, “Hello, you folks inside! My name’s Mike Ladychapel, I’m the boss of this project. How about coming out for a little talk?”

  For a full minute there was no response.

  The shadows in the doorless entrance seemed to stir, and then a portion of them detached.

  A big dark man dressed all in faded blue denim walked down the stoop. He wasn’t a full-blooded Black, but mostly. Might have been some Amerindian, some Hispanic in the mix. A bandana held his long straight black hair away from his face. He had a length of thin plastic cord laced as decoration around his right biceps. It looked like twine around a boulder.

  Striding across the gap between us, he looked neither left nor right, but kept his gaze pinned to mine.

  A foot away, he stopped. I could smell his sweat.

  “Sledge,” he said, and held out his hand.

  The ring was fashioned of striped wire, soda can pull-tabs, colored plastic, a couple of scratched “gems” from a child’s toy. It bit into my palm when we shook.

  “I guess I can speak for the others,” said Sledge, after he had squeezed my hand just hard enough to indicate what he held in reserve. “That is, if you’re sure you know what you wanna talk about.”

  2.

  Take a big-boned woman and swaddle her frame in about two hundred pounds of fat and muscle. Give her long gray-threaded hair usually worn in a sloppy chignon. Groove her face with lines that show how she kicked an addiction to synthetic endorphins she picked up in a Pakistani hospital. As a final fillip, hide her left eye with a ridiculous piratical black patch.

  “Cass,” I at last asked outright, a month after we had started working together, “is it real?”

  She knew what I meant, and lifted the fabric cup.

  “Lost it in Afghanistan, working with the Medecins Sans Frontieres. We were building a clinic when the government troops came. Caught some shrapnel.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly, my gut muscles—which I had been unconsciously clenching till then—relaxed of themselves.

  “A prosthetic—” I began.

  “No thanks. I’m waiting for one that works.”

  That was Mama Cass, New York head of the UCC.

  I had nicknamed her that. The name stuck. All the kids in the crews called her Mama. Only thing was, they were all too young to get it. Only Cass and I, and a few other old fogies of our generation, got the thirty-year-old allusion.

  When the nova had blossomed in May, although I had been friends with Cass by then for a few years, it occurred to me that I didn’t know her full first name.

  “Not Cassiopeia, by any chance?” I asked one day.

  “Nope. Would you believe Cassimassima? Father was a Henry James freak, and thought Cassimassima Culver sounded particularly neat.”

  Cass fixed me with her lopsided stare now as I sat across from her. Her desk in her City Hall office was covered with metamedium printouts: progress reports on repairs to the Washington Bridge, the aquaculture farms in the South Bronx, the Westside Parkway, my Harlem minicity. She had a lot to keep tabs on, and I didn’t envy her job. And now here I was dumping another problem in her lap.

  She laced her fingers together and extended her arms straight out at me. She must have been out in the field this morning; her palms were dirty.

  “This is giving me a fucking headache, Mike.”

  “I know, I know, and I’m sorry. But I can’t figure out exactly what to do with these people.”

  “What’s there to figure? They’re in the way of the project. They’re trespassing, they’re illegally squatting on land the city owns by eminent domain, and they’ve got to go. Convince them to move to the camps. And if they won’t move, then call the cops.”

  I smoothed a forefinger nervously over my upper lip. “It’s not so clear-cut, Cass. These people are not just your average squatters. They’re more like—like a tribe of some sort. They’ve got a headman, a whole culture, a philosophy, an ethos. I don’t feel like I’m confronting trespassers—I feel like I’m conducting peace- treaty negotiations.”

  Cass lowered her arms and leaned back in her chair. “Oh, come on—”

  “No, I’m serious. You weren’t there, you didn’t meet this guy Sledge, and you didn’t see the inside of the building. I did. These people are not ignorant, they’re not dumb, and they won’t just pick up and move to the temporary relocation camps upstate like you want them to. They couldn’t preserve their culture there. And I’m not sure I want to be the one to force them out.”

  Cass came forward across her desk. Her half-stare felt like a gun muzzle pressed between my eyes. “Now you’re talking shit, boy. Bad, dangerous shit. The UCC is my life. It’s what I’ve been working for since the first Kennedy was president. I thought it was yours too. Now, you want to do something to endanger it. Am I reading you right, or not?”

  I had been in the Peace Corps in ’64. Cass had been in VISTA. When that decade and its idealism had wound down, we stayed committed. Some years found us abroad: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Central America. Some years found us working to better the lot of America’s own hidden Third Worlders: Cambodian immigrants in Boston, Haitians in Florida, Hispanics in Texas. Employed by one social welfare agency after another, all scrabbling during the Hollow Years from grant to grant, working on shoestring budgets.… We had even been on the Indian subcontinent at the same time, although we didn’t know it while there.

  And now, finally, the social climate at home had swung around to our viewpoint. Volunteerism, activism, reform—all were hip right now, trendy. Money was plentiful, diverted from a pared- down military made possible by the internal changes in the fragmented USSR. But always on the horizon lurked the spoiler question: how long this time? How much could we get accomplished this time, before the pendulum swung again?

  I looked back at Cass. She read something in my gaze, and relaxed.

  “I guess you know me, Mama,” I said.

  “That’s what I hoped.” She looked at her watch. “Hey, I’ve got
to pick up Traci at school and take her to dance class. It’s tough being a single parent.”

  I shrugged, feeling a little residual anger at Cass, for how she had deftly pushed my buttons, making me choose. “Your decision,” I said. Traci’s father had been a syringe. Then, more amiably: “How’s she like the new school year? Does she miss summers off? I think I would’ve at her age.”

  Cass stood. She was taller than me. “No, she doesn’t think twice about it, it’s all she knows. This generation is different from ours, Mike. Maybe better. Could be they’ll make a finer world than we did.”

  “Could be,” I agreed. “But we’re still in charge for a few more years.”

  “Prove it,” said Cass.

  She never could resist the last word.

  3.

  “You weren’t there—” I had said that to Mama Cass, expecting her to reply, “Well, tell me, show me, make me see.” But she had not made the proper response. That’s the trouble with other people: they never do what you expect them to.

  But maybe it was just as well she hadn’t asked. How would I have made her share my experiences, when I myself hadn’t yet sorted them out?

  Standing on the stoop of the building, I had explained what we were doing here to the big Black man, told him he was trespassing, interfering with a government project. He listened patiently, attentively, asking no questions. Then he spoke with absolute assurance.

  “What you say is fresh dope, man, but it just don’t pertain to us. Listen, come inside. I want you to meet some people. Then maybe you’ll understand.”

  Sledge led me then into the dark tenement building. It took my eyes a minute to adjust. When they did, I saw about two dozen people sitting on bare floorboards. They were a ragtag lot.

  “Folks, we got a man here wants to tell us something. Mister Mike, go ahead.”

  I repeated my spiel. They listened silently. After a while, their massed faces wore me down, and I ground to a halt like a dozer with sugar in its gas tank.

  “Finished? Okay. Now I want you to listen. Everyone, tell the man where we’re coming from.”