Jericho Iteration

4

(Wednesday, 10:45 P.M.)

Despite the late hour, my regular ride home was waiting for me at the station. Tricycle Man sat astride his three-wheeled rickshaw at the cab stand beneath the platform, reading the latest issue of the Big Muddy Inquirer. He barely looked up as I climbed into the backseat.

“Did you see this one?” he asked.

“Which one?” I didn’t have to ask what he meant; it was the same question each Wednesday when the new issue came out. There was only one section of the paper to which he seemed to pay any attention.

“‘SWF,’” he read aloud. “‘Mid-twenties, five feet eight, blonde hair, blue eyes, good natured, looking for SWM for dancing, VR, poetry readings, and weekends in the Ozarks. Nonsmoker, age not important. No druggies, rednecks, or government types ….’” He shrugged. “Guess I qualify, so long as I don’t mention my Secret Service background.”

Tricycle man was a trip: a fifty-five-year-old hippie, right down to the long red beard, vegetarian diet, and vintage Grateful Dead stickers on the back of his cab, whose only real interests in life seemed to be sleeping with a different woman each week and telling grandiose lies about himself. At various times he claimed to be a former Secret Service agent, an ex-NASA astronaut, an Olympic bronze medalist, or a descendant of Charles A. Lindbergh. I didn’t know his real name, although I had been riding in the back of his homemade rickshaw ever since I had moved downtown eight months ago. Nor did anyone else; everyone in Soulard simply called him Tricycle Man.

I searched my memory, trying to recall all the women I had spotted visiting the personals desk in the last week. “Yeah,” I said, “I saw someone like that.” Trike’s face lit up until I added, “I think she had an Adam’s apple.”

His face darkened again. “Damn. Should have figured.” He folded up the paper and tossed it on the passenger seat next to me, then pulled up the hood of his bright red poncho. “Going to the office or do y’wanna head home?”

I shrugged. “Home, I guess.” It didn’t make any difference; they were one and the same, and Trike knew it. He laughed, then stood up on the pedals and put his massive legs to work, slowly hauling the rickshaw out from under the platform and onto rain-slicked Arsenal Street, heading northeast into Soulard.

As we crossed the I-55 overpass, an ERA Apache growled low overhead, following the traffic on the interstate’s westbound lanes. Another helicopter. My city had been invaded by space aliens, and they rode helicopters instead of flying saucers. Trike glanced up at the chopper as it went by. “Heard there was some kinda riot in the park tonight,” he said. “Lot of people got their heads busted. Know anything about it?”

“A little,” I said. “Enough to know it’s true.” It didn’t surprise me that Trike had heard about the ERA raid at the Muny; word travels fast on the street, especially where the feds were concerned, but I wasn’t about to contribute to the scuttlebutt. Besides, everything I had to say about the Muny riot would be in my column in next week’s issue, and a good reporter doesn’t discuss his work in progress.

Trike glanced over his shoulder at me. “Not talking much tonight, are you?”

“Too tired.” I settled back against the seat, letting the cold drizzle patter off the bill of my cap. “All I want right now is a cold beer and a hot shower.”

“Okey-doke.” He turned left onto 13th Street. “I’ll have you home in ten minutes.”

We passed by the front of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, a compound of giant factory buildings which, like almost everything else in the city these days, were surrounded by scaffolds. Even at this time of night there was a long line of men and women huddled on the brick sidewalk outside the entrance gate, braving the weather and the curfew for a chance to be interviewed tomorrow morning for a handful of job openings. The brewery had reopened just four weeks ago, following a long effort to rebuild after the extensive damage it had suffered during New Madrid. Through the wrought-iron fence, I could see one of the replacements for the gargoyles that had adorned the cornices of the main building before they toppled from their perches during the quake: a wizened little stone man with a beer stein in his hand, sitting in the parking lot as he waited for a crane to hoist him into place. His saucy grin was the only happy face to be seen; everyone else looked wet and miserable. This Bud’s for you …

As he pedaled, Trike reached between his handlebars and switched on the radio. It was tuned to KMOX-AM, the local CBS affiliate. After the usual round of inane commercials for stuff no one could afford to buy, we got the news at the top of the hour.

U.S. Army troops continue to be airlifted to the northern California border, following the formal announcement last week by the state governments of Washington and Oregon that they are seceding from the United States. A spokesman for the newly established government of Cascadia, based in Seattle, says that former National Guard troops have sealed all major highways leading into Washington and Oregon. No hostile actions have yet been reported from either side, but White House press spokesperson Esther Boothroyd says that President Giorgio does not intend to recognize Cascadia’s claim to independence.

Just past Anheuser-Busch, Tricycle Man paused at the three-way intersection of 13th, 12th, and Lynch. A half-block away on 12th Street was the Ninth Ward police station; across the street from the cop shop, in what used to be a parking lot, was SLPD’s south end helicopter pad. A big Mi-24 HIND was idling on the flight line, getting ready for air patrol over the Dogtown neighborhoods in the southern part of city. Beneath the blue-and-white paint job and the familiar TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE slogan could still be seen, as ghostly palimpsests, the markings of the Russian Red Army. ERA got American-made helicopters and LAVs, while the local cops had to settle for secondhand Russian choppers and rusty old BMP-2s left over from Afghanistan, sans armaments and held together by baling wire and paper clips. A couple of officers hanging around outside the police station waved to Tricycle Man and he waved back; he was harmless and familiar, so the cops didn’t bother him.

Countdown continues for tomorrow’s launch of the space shuttle Endeavour, set for lift-off at one P.M. Eastern time. Aboard the shuttle are the final components of the Sentinel 1 orbital missile defense system. Although antiwar protesters are holding a candlelight vigil outside the gates of Cape Canaveral, the demonstrations have been peaceful and no arrests have been made.

Trike continued pedaling down 13th Street, entering the residential part of Soulard. It would have been quicker to use 12th Street, but too many houses on 12th had collapsed during the quake, and the street itself was full of recent sinkholes, many of them large enough to swallow his rickshaw whole. Even then, 13th was a scene of random destruction. Two-story row houses, some dating back to the late 1800s, stood erect next to the rubble of others that had fallen flat.

The derailment of the Texas Eagle bullet train outside Texarkana, Arkansas, has left three people dead and several others injured. Spokesmen for Amtrak say that the derailment may have been caused by failure of the train’s satellite tracking system, sending the nine-car train onto a siding instead of the main line. Investigators are now probing through the wreckage to see if deliberate sabotage was involved.

We passed tiny Murph Park overlooking the interstate-where a small shantytown stood next to a sign: CHICKENS 4 SALE, MONEY, OR TRADE-and crossed Victor Street, heading uphill where 13th became more narrow, the streetlights less frequent. An old black man sat on the front steps of his house, a 12-gauge shotgun resting across his knees. Across the street was the ruin of a half-collapsed Victorian mansion, where a bunch of street punks sat smoking joints beneath its front porch. Trike pedaled faster, avoiding the standoff between the two forces.

And in Los Angeles, the jury is out on the rape trial of filmmaker Antonio Six. His accuser, Marie de Allegro, claims that Six used telepathic powers to invade her mind two years ago during the filming of the Oscar-winning Mother Teresa, in which de Allegro played the title role. The sixteen-year-old actress says that Six was able to use ESP abilities to seduce her. Jurors are considering expert testimony offered in the director’s defense by several psychics.

We reached the top of the hill, then coasted the rest of the way down to Ann Street, where Trike took a hard right that threatened to overturn the rickshaw. He was clearly enjoying himself, although I had to hang on for dear life. A block later we reached 12th Street, where Trike took a left past St. Joseph Church.

The storefronts of convenience markets, laundromats, and cheap VR arcades lay on this block. Some were open for business, some closed and boarded up, all spray-painted with now-familiar warnings: “YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT”; “NOTHING LEFT 2 STEAL SO GO AWAY”; “IN GOD WE TRUST, WITH SMITH amp; WESSON WE PROTECT”; “IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE DEAD BY NOW,” and so on.

For the CBS Radio Network News, I’m-

“In sore need of a blow job.” Trike changed to one of the countless classic-rock stations that jammed the city’s airwaves. An oldie by Nirvana pounded out of the radio as he turned right on Geyer. I checked my watch. True to his word, barely ten minutes had elapsed since Trike had left Busch Station, and we were almost to my place.

Geyer had withstood the quake fairly well, considering the amount of damage Soulard had suffered during New Madrid. Although many of the old row houses on this block were condemned or outright destroyed, most of them had ridden out the quake. These old two-and three-story brick buildings were built like battleships: chimneys had toppled, windows had shattered, porches had collapsed, but many of them had stayed upright. It only figured. Soulard was one of the oldest parts of the city; it had too much goddamn soul in its walls to be killed in fifty seconds.

Trike coasted to a stop at the corner of Geyer and 10th. A couple of happy drunks were hobbling up the sidewalk across the street, making their way home from Clancy’s. I crawled out of the backseat, fished into my pocket, and pulled out a fiver and a couple of ones. “Thanks, man,” I said as I extended the bills to him. “You’re a lifesaver.”

Tricycle Man took the money, stared at it for a moment, then carefully pulled out the two ones and handed them back to me. “Here, take ’em back.”

“Hey, Trike, c’mon-”

“Take it back,” he insisted, carefully folding up the five and shoving it into his jeans pocket. “You’ve had a bad night. Go down to the bar and have a beer on me.”

I didn’t argue. Trike knew I was on lean times. Besides, I was a regular customer; I could always bonus him later. Soulard was a tough neighborhood, but it looked after its own.

“Thanks, buddy.” I wadded up the dollars and stuck them in my jacket pocket. Trike nodded his head and started to stand up on the pedals again. “And by the way … about the blonde?”

Trike hesitated. “Yeah?”

“She didn’t really have an Adam’s apple. I was just shitting you.”

He grinned. “I knew that. Good looking?”

I shrugged, raising my hand and waving it back and forth. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ve done better. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in London back in ninety-two and fucked Princess Di in the back of a limo? Now that was-”

“Get out of here,” I said, and he did just that, making a U-turn in the middle of the street and heading back up Geyer to ask the drunks if they needed a lift home. Leaving me on the brick sidewalk, alone for the first time that night.

The Big Muddy Inquirer was located in a century-old three-story building that had been renovated sometime in the 1980s and turned into offices for some law firm; before then it had been yet another warehouse, as witnessed by the thick reinforced oak floors and long-defunct loading doors in the rear. The law firm that had refurbished the building had moved out around the turn of the century, and the property had remained vacant until Earl Bailey purchased it early last year.

Bailey had just started up the paper when he bought the building. Ever the entrepreneur, he had intended to open a blues bar on the ground floor and eventually move the Big Muddy into the second-story space from its former location in Dogtown. Bailey had made his wad off the Soulard Howlers, the blues band for which he was the bassist and manager, and Earl’s Saloon had been intended to be the money tree behind his alternative paper. Big Muddy Inquirer might not have been the first newspaper whose publisher was a hacker-turned-guitarist-turned-bar-owner, but if you’ve heard of any others, please don’t let me know. One is scary enough.

Anyway, Bailey was halfway through refurbishing the ground floor when the quake struck. The bar survived New Madrid but not the widespread looting that had occurred in Soulard several weeks later, when vandals broke into the place and took off with most of the barroom furnishings. By this time, though, the escalating street violence in the south city had forced the paper out of Dogtown, so he shelved plans for the bar, moved the Big Muddy to Soulard … and, not long afterward, grudgingly agreed to let out the unused third-floor loft to one of his employees. Namely, me.

I had a keycard for the front door, which led up to the second and third floors, but tonight I really didn’t want the hassle of having to disable the burglar alarm Pearl had installed in the stairwell. The control box was difficult to see in the dark and, besides, I could never remember the seven-digit code that I would have to type into the keypad. So I ignored the front door, walked past the boarded-up ground-floor windows-spray-painted BLACK OWNED! DON’T LOOT! as if it made any difference to the street gangs who would have mugged Martin Luther King for pocket change-and went around the corner until I reached the enclosed courtyard behind the building.

An old iron fire escape ran up the rear of the building. Pearl would have shot me if he had known I was using it as my private entrance, which was why I had to keep my stepladder hidden beneath the dumpster. I had just pulled out the ladder and was unfolding it in order to reach the fire escape’s gravity ladder when I heard a shout from the opposite side of the courtyard.

“Hey, mu’fucker, whattaya doin’?”

“Just trying to break into this building to steal some shit,” I yelled back as I put down the stepladder and turned around. “Why, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

There was a large human shape blocking the light escaping from an open garage across the courtyard. I heard coarse laughter, then the voice changed. “Hey, Gerry, that you?”

“That me. That you?”

“Fuck you. C’mon over and have a beer.”

I put down the ladder and ambled over toward the garage where Chevy Dick and a few of his cronies were hanging out next to his car. Chevy Dick was Ricardo Chavez, an auto mechanic whose shop was the Big Muddy’s closest neighbor. Chavez was in his early fifties; in 1980, when he was barely in his teens, he and his family had escaped from Cuba during the first wave of boat people who had descended upon Miami. Chavez had eventually made his way from Liberty City to St. Louis, where he had successfully plied his natural gifts in auto repair toward making a livelihood.

Chevy Dick got his nickname two ways. First, it was his pen name for “Kar Klub,” a weekly fix-it-yourself column he wrote for the Big Muddy. Second, he was on his fourth wife and claimed to have eleven children scattered across six states. When he got drunk, he bragged about all the NASCAR winners he had pit-stopped in his career. And when he got really drunk, this 300-pound gorilla with a handlebar mustache and a long braided ponytail might unzip his fly to show off his tool kit.

“Shee-yit,” Chevy Dick growled as I stepped into the light, “you look like hell. What’d you do, man, fock some babe in a ditch?”

“Just following your example, Ricardo,” I replied. “Why, did I get it wrong?”

Chevy glowered at me. A couple of his friends murmured comments to each other in Spanish; they were all sitting on oil barrels and cinder blocks, a case of Budweiser tallnecks on the grease-stained asphalt between them. In the background was Chevy’s pride and joy: a coal black ’92 Corvette ZR-1, perfectly restored and completely illegal under the phase-out laws, right down to the vanity tags, which read PHUKU2. Perhaps they were hoping that Chevy would take it off the blocks, gas it up, and take it out Route 40 for another illicit midnight cruise that would drive the cops apeshit; with a speedometer calibrated up to 120 mph, Chevy Dick’s Corvette was arguably the fastest street rod in St. Louis, able to easily outrun any battery-powered police cruiser SLPD had on the road.

That, or they were hoping Chevy Dick would pound the shit out of the wiseass little gringo. Chevy continued to stare at me. He took a step forward and I held my ground. He slowly reached up with his left hand and pretended to scratch at his mustache … then his right fist darted out to jab at my chest. I didn’t move. The fist stopped just an inch short of my solar plexus … and still I didn’t move.

It was an old macho game between us. We had been playing this for months. The gang all moaned and hooted appreciatively, and Chevy Dick’s face broke into a grin. “You’re all right, man,” he said as he gave me a shoulder slap that made my knees tremble. “Now get yourself a beer.”

It was a tempting notion. “I’d love to,” I said, “but I’m beat. If I start drinking now, you’ll have to carry me upstairs.”

“Long night, huh, man?” Chevy’s face showed worry as he looked me up and down. “Jeez, you’re in some kinda rough shape. What happen, you run into ERA patrols?”

“Something like that, yeah.” My eyes were fastened on the case. “If you could spare me one, though, I’d really appreciate it …”

Without another word, Chevy Dick reached down to the case and pulled out a six-pack. There were a few grumbles from his drinking buddies, but he ignored them as he handed it to me. Chevy was no friend of ERA; as he had often told me, he hadn’t seen things this bad since he had lived in Havana under the old Castro regime. In his eyes, any enemy of the federates, was a friend of his.

“Thanks, Ricardo,” I murmured, hugging the six-pack to my chest. “I’ll pay you back next Friday.”

“Vaya con dios, amigo,” he rumbled. “Now go home and take a shower.” He grinned at me again, the half-light of an exposed 40-watt bulb glinting off his gold-capped molars. “Besides, you smell like shit.”

The ragged laughter of his buddies followed me all the way up the fire escape to my apartment.

I opened the first beer almost as soon as I crawled through the fire escape window and switched on the desk light. Home sweet home … or at least a place to get out of the rain.

My one-room loft apartment was a wreck, which was nothing unusual. Clothes scattered across the bare wooden floor and a mattress that hadn’t been tidied in a week. Books and magazines heaped together near the mattress and the desk. A small pile of printout on the desk, which constituted the unfinished, untitled, unpublished novel I had been writing for the last few years. Tiny mouse turds near the kitchen cabinets. I could have used a cat; maybe it would have straightened up the place while I was gone.

I swallowed the first beer in a few swift gulps while I peeled out of my muddy clothes, leaving them in a damp trail behind me as I made my way toward the bathroom, stopping only to retrieve Joker from my jacket and place it on the desk while I grabbed another bottle out of the six-pack. The second beer followed me into the shower, where I leaned against the plastic wall and gulped it down, letting the hot water run over me until it began to turn cold.

I cracked open the third beer after I found an old pair of running shorts on the floor and put them on. It was then that I noticed the phone for the first time. The numeral 9 was blinking on its LCD, indicating the number of calls that had been forwarded to my extension from the office switchboard downstairs. Part of my rental agreement with Pearl was that I would act as the paper’s after-hours secretary, so I sat down at the desk, opened the phonescreen, and began to wade through the messages.

Most of the calls were the usual stuff. Irate businessmen in suits wondering why their quarter-page ads hadn’t been run in the paper exactly where they had wanted them to be, like on the front cover. A couple of oblique calls to individual staffers, giving little more than a face, a name, and number: press contacts, boyfriends, or girlfriends, who knew what else? I hit the Save button after each of them.

Most of the rest were the usual anonymous hate calls from readers, which arrived whenever the new issue hit the street, accusing Pearl of running a commie-pinko, right-wing, left-wing, feminist, antifeminist, environmentalist, technocratic, luddite, anarchist, neo-Nazi, Zionist, pornographic, anti-American, and/or liberal newspaper, all of them swearing to stop reading it tomorrow unless we converted to the ideology of their choice. Most of them had switched their phone cameras off when they called, but there was a demented three-minute screed from some wacko with a grocery bag over his head about how the New Madrid earthquake had been God’s revenge against everyone who didn’t support Lyndon LaRouche in the presidential election of 1984.

You can acquire a taste for this sort of feedback if you have enough patience and a certain sense of humor, but the same could be said of eating out of a garbage can. I erased them all. They could e-mail their comments to the paper if they felt that strongly about them.

I was about to twist off the cap of my fourth beer when I caught the last message on the disc. Once again the screen was blank, but the woman’s voice on the other end of the line was all too familiar.

“Gerry, this is Mari. Are you there …?” A short pause. “Okay, you aren’t, or you’re not picking up. Okay …”

Great. My wife-or rather, my ex-wife, once we finally got around to formalizing our separation. She didn’t even want to put her still-pic on the screen.

“Listen, your Uncle Arnie called a while ago, and … um, he’s mad at you because you didn’t get to the seder last Friday night …”

I winced and shook my head. I had forgotten all about it. Uncle Arnie was my late father’s older brother and the Rosen family patriarch. A lovable old fart who persisted in trying to get me to attend observances even though he knew damned well I wasn’t quite the nice Jewish nephew he wanted me to be.

“Look, I know this is the usual family stuff, but, y’know I wish you’d tell him not to call here …”

Of course she didn’t want him to call. Marianne wasn’t Jewish, and although she had put up with her share of Rosen seders and bar mitzvahs and Hanukkahs, there was no reason why she should be bugged by my relatives. She didn’t understand that Uncle Arnie was just trying once more to get us back together again. Fat chance, Arnie …

“Okay. That’s it. Take care of yourself. ’Bye.”

A call from Marianne. The first time I had heard from her in almost a month, and it was because I had missed last week’s Passover seder.

For some reason, this made me more depressed than before. It took me the rest of the six-pack to get over the message. By the time I had finished the last bottle, I couldn’t remember why she had called in the first place, and even if I had, I could have cared less.

All I could think about was Jamie.