Bugs, with his chin, indicated something silhouetted against the gray-gold firmament. It looked like a massive crucifix, cross-beam spread over Edgewood. “Looks like we got tomorrow’s work if they ain’t already pick that place clean.”
It was a crane.
“This kinda work, you ain’t gotta pull a jux,” Kendrick told Bugs that first day Bugs had wandered in off the street, lost kid with eyes practically popping out of his head, too young, they thought, to be a dope fiend. But a couple of the stackers wouldn’t have been surprised to find track marks on the kid’s arms. “First of all,” he said between sweeps with his curved-claw hammer, “you get paid for this rightchea. Second of all,” a huff, “time you finish stacking your skids, you way too tired to go off and rob someone.”
“Beats sellin’ roses on York and Broadway!” someone shouted, maybe Timeica, and a few of the stackers chuckled behind their bandannas.
Jayceon told Linc about a guy he knew, used to tell stories about how he preyed on women in abandoned apartment blocks just like this, cornered them where they couldn’t run. Linc remembered that time after they’d gotten to a demo site and Mercedes had found an arm sticking up out of her mound. “Goddamn dead body broke my bricks!” she’d screamed. Timeica and Bugs and Linc had helped her cart the thing off, wrap it in a nearby rug on someone’s sidewalk, and toss it in a dumpster. The rest of the day, they worked under the stench of burning flesh and smoke filled with human ashes corkscrewing in whorls up into the sky. Jayceon had watched them in silence the whole time.
“This here craftsmanship,” Bishop said between breaths.
“Oh, he gettin’ ready to preach,” Timeica warned from her skid.
“This here what happens when labor meets love.”
“Preach, Bishop. Earn that collection-plate money!” Mercedes cheered over her six-high.
“My great-grand-pappy,” Bishop said with new wind, “worked this building site in Virginia. Him and his boys had to drive up from South Carolina every day. The carpenters were all white folk, so ’course them laborers and street sweepers and all them other folk were Black. They’d watch the carpenters work in between their own shifts and they’d bullshit, but my pappy always told me how much he envied them carpenters. Pappy knew the trade some and he used to make that wood sang, woo!”
“Sang!”
“Oof!”
“Preach, Bishop, preach!”
“Made that wood SANG!”
Bishop waited for them to calm some. “So one day, he walks up to the foreman, makes sure no one else can hear ’im, and tells that foreman he sees the job the white carpenters are doin’. He doesn’t say how much better he is than them, though he could’ve and he wouldn’ta been lying. ’Stead, he asks if maybe he could pitch in a little, make hisself useful. Don’t even need no extra pay. He still take his laborer’s salary. Foreman say sure.”
“What else the foreman gon’ say?” Kendrick said, clapping his hammer to a brick. “Your great-grand-pappy pro’lly was the best carpenter that side of the Mississippi.”
“You ain’t wrong, Kenny. You ain’t wrong.” Bishop had his hammer propped up underneath his two hands and chin. He was like that, could stop working for a bit, finish a sermon, then get right back to it. His back never straightened, though, just changed its angle of hunch. “Anyway, pappy gets to the work site extra early so no one can see him work. He do his work and the foreman’s smiling something fierce like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Pappy was a blessed magician with wood, and the foreman saw it too. Then they’d hear the white folk truck comin’ up over the hill, and pappy would put away his tools, give back the foreman the one’s he’d borrowed, and he pick his broom back up so’s none of the white folk comin’ out their truck got the wrong idea.”
Reverent silence settled over the demo-site. A few had stopped stacking altogether.
“I’da let them see me carvin’ that wood,” Jayceon said, that implied violence thick in his voice. “They’d see I was that much better than ’em. And they wouldn’t be able to say shit to me on account of it.”
Bishop shook his head, sadly. “And they woulda asked you to come out back, help ’em with somethin’ else. And there wouldn’t a been nothin’ but them six white men, twelve foot of rope, and the peachtree they’d hang you from.”
“Peachtrees only grow in Georgia,” Jayceon said, smirking.
Bugs watched Linc. Linc felt the boy’s swollen eyes on his back and turned on his skid to let the kid see his smirk.
“Whatever tree it is, it got branches. And that’s all they’d need.” He turned to the rest of the congregation. “So this right here, this all an honest man needs. Kinda work where he can make his own hours. He’s his own boss, and his pay is commensurate to his efforts. This is huggin’ the earth right here. Getting real, live dirt under our fingernails. This the type of work the Lord meant for us to be doin’. And I don’t know about y’all, but I’m a happy and content instrument of His will.”
The bedsheets chilled their bodies with sweat-soak, rumpled beneath them. They lay side by side, David and Jonathan, and, behind their blindfolds, they traced the arc their drones made over Earth. Lux levels rose in golden bars just outside their vision as the drones dipped through cloud cover and flew past domed cityscapes. Chicago glowed through a blanket of clouds. The drones swooped upward and dwarf galaxies turned from cosmic smudges into multihued ninja shurikens. The two sleek machines dipped again, satisfied with their glimpses of the constellations, and darted over landscapes swept with porch lanterns and city glare. The flash of an antique smartphone unwittingly documented their passage.
“I miss it sometimes, you know?” David said from behind his blindfold. Below him, below the Colony, was a massive planetary sphere populated with people who had looked to the star-choked sky, depended on it, for guidance. For answers. How did we get here? What are we doing here? Playing out massive, celestial battles of light versus dark, tracking in a star’s course a message of gospel. Their futures were inscribed.
Jonathan shifted next to him. “Don’t talk like that, David.”
“Don’t say I don’t mean it. Don’t patronize me.”
Jonathan let out a sigh, returned to his angle of repose.
A line divided the continental United States such that the spheres of gilt were larger on the eastern side than in the south or west. Headlights periodically dotted strips of broken, empty highway. Across the Atlantic, Europe was a collection of shimmering diamonds in the West and a misshapen octagon in the East, whole swathes of the Asian continent draped in black.
“David, it’s okay not to have your whole … future … lined up in front of you.”
“What, so most people here are just flying by the seat of their pants? Jon, if I don’t figure something out, I’ll lose my benefits. They’ll garnish whatever wages I eventually end up making. I’ll be in waste disposal. A law degree and I’ll be taking one of those hoverboards out into space to detonate garbage.”
“David, it’s not going to be that bad.” He didn’t say, “But I’m a garbageman.”
A supernova flared in the distance. “At least, when I was back out,” he murmured, “I had control.”
“No, you didn’t, David.” All playfulness leaked out of Jonathan’s voice. “Whenever you pick up, you have no control. That’s why you can’t.”
“But I knew where I was headed,” David murmured beneath his breath, more to himself than to Jonathan. “I had a future. Even if it was—”
“David, we’re talking about student loan debt. Nobody’s died. You’re not maimed. You’re—”
“Jon, I swear to Christ, if you tell me one more time how I’m going to land exactly where I need to be or how incredibly qualified I am for wherever I end up, I will kick your fucking teeth down your throat.” From his altitude, his drone couldn’t see the ecosystem of the midnight desert below, the Atacama, but he imagined the beetles and red scorpions he’d seen in holos scuttling across the blued dirt. Gray foxes sniffing the earth, furry viscachas trying to run away. Leaf-eared mice somewhere in the fray. Vallenar toads, legs bent in a crouch on the lomas. Horned owls circling overhead, keeping carnivorous watch over the foxes and rodents. All of it happening in the dark where no one was supposed to see. The drone spiraled upward and cut a course over the northeastern corner of the continental United States, light levels rocketing to 30 lux. “You know, the migratory birds that fly at night, this kind of light is like a siren song. They’re feathered moths to the flame. That light that shoots up from the shuttle station and all its lit-up bridges and towers, it draws tens of thousands of birds into orbit around it. The birds think they’ve found the moon and the stars then, they smack right into the buildings. Dash themselves against windowpanes, then plummet to their deaths.”
It was still dark when Dad had Sydney pack her mask and her suit and her Geiger counter and her livestreaming equipment. Dad always carried the heavier of their two packs, but the way the heat sat on the shoulders always got her thinking he got off easy. This time of morning, however, it was only a little warmer outside than inside. As was routine, she went through her usual rounds of jealousy, first envying Dad his lighter meteorological load, then envying Bambi, who always got to stay behind on these runs. “I was so bored I fell asleep,” Bambi would always say upon their return, and Syd would almost black out with the effort it took not to slap the taste out of that girl’s mouth for not knowing what she had.
“Why’s it always so hot?” Sydney had asked Dad when she was still young enough he didn’t mind carrying her. He’d told her about what it meant to live in a rain shadow desert, that the Sierra Madre Occidental to the west kept the moisture from the Pacific Ocean from reaching them and the Sierra Madre Oriental to the east blocked the wetness coming from the Gulf of Mexico. But occasionally, if they were lucky, a tropical cyclone would hit them and it might get a little cooler, but they’d be swept away and would probably die horribly if that happened. And maybe he’d been trying to make a toddling Sydney laugh at the image of them being tossed around in a circle, them and their trailer made of corrugated metals, but, looking back at the memory and looking at Dad now, she could taste the bitterness like snake venom in his voice every time he told her this. Maybe a cyclone had done something to him before. Maybe the mountains had too. Sometimes when the Chihuahuans would come by to pick up what Syd and Dad took from the desert, they would bring Sotol with them, and Dad would have Bambi fetch the glasses, and Sydney tried to work up the courage to ask one of the Chihuahuan smugglers what the cyclone and the mountains might’ve done to her dad, but she never could, so she never did.
By the time it started to get light, Sydney could see the wind turbines in the distance, like copper-penny pinwheels several shades darker than the desert floor they’d been planted in. But they were the ugliest flowers she’d ever seen, and even though the rising sun brought heat-pain with it, the light it threw raised color out of the black grama and the purple three-awn around them. A stomp through floodplain brought them through the sacaton the shape of what popped out the other end of a scrunchie.
