“Brother, you hungry or something?”
“Belly. Pork belly.”
“Okay, after this house we’ll hit the bodega.” Silence. “You got another one for me?”
Linc thought. “Cupine.”
Quietus. “What?”
“Tell me that ain’t an answer,” Linc shot back.
Michael chuckling. “Pork. Cupine.” His seat began to shake. “Cu…” The rest was choked in a fit of laughter. “Cupine.” Convulsions rocked the cab of the truck. “HWHAT?” Thunderclaps of laughter. “HHWHATT? Is CUPINE?” The truck swerved, Michael laughed so hard.
“Damn, nigga.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He was probably wiping tears from his eyes right now. Sniffing away excess mirth. “But that’s the greatest answer I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s the right answer.”
“I feel you, brother. I feel you.”
“On my mama.”
“Pow, brother.” Another crippling fit of laughter. “Damn, brother, I wish I were recording this. I tell you what, you ask anyone else. Anyone else, they tell you the same. That you the only person who said ‘cupine.’ I bet you every dollar I got.”
The truck straightened its course, resumed its lumbering deliberateness, Michael muttering the “cupine” beneath his breath and trying not to let his howling kill them both.
The sky bled across the clapboard houses that lined the road. Wood domiciles and brick edifices. Single-family homes made after a war that happened before Linc’s father’s father had been a man. The twelve-wheeled demolition truck hovered over the ground, the maglev strips under the concrete still in working order. Kind of. But the truck rumbled nonetheless. The noise the engine made had the truck huffing like a fat man rounding a corner. The heat and the humidity conspired to stain Michael’s third shirt of the day a new color. Linc had stripped down to a tank top and jeans. Even the truck’s brow beaded with sweat.
Linc sat in the space between the truck’s cab and its bed, that shifting connector where overhead hung the lip of the trashbed. Shade was shade.
He heard the neighbors before he saw them; female voices, generations of motherhood, streamed out of their houses to gripe. Mothers taking care of their mothers, other women taking care of their grandkids, bouncing them on their hips, managing, just by touch, to cool those poor kids down so that they didn’t look like black porcelain dolls in the light. They came out one by one, then began to line the streets like trees, following the truck’s course.
“When them dead trees coming down?” came a voice from behind the trashbed. They asked like Linc had any say in the matter, like they could even see him and his hammer at all. “When you gonna stop them kids from pushing that dope two houses down from here? I’m pickin’ up goddamn needles every goddamn morning!” Someone caught sight of Linc. “You got a job for my son? He’s lookin’ and he’s able to work. Healthy as whatever, no lung rot or nothin’.” Another: “My nephew! You can git him some work, he’s willin’ to do it.” Another: “Hell, I can lift just as good as any of ’em. Them checks from Fairfield ain’t enough to feed a dog kennel, let alone this family I got here.” They announced how well they could tap a water vein and run a hose, how easily they could heft a shovel, how the dying of the earth hadn’t yet crushed them, but when Michael’s truck stopped, they didn’t crowd. This had all happened before.
Linc shifted, ready to hop out from his space. The women started pointing to the abandoned houses on the street. One of them, in a purple blouse, a baby in one arm, the other hand dabbing her forehead with a kerchief, stepped forward. “You finally gonna tear this one down? I been callin’ the city for months now. Months!” Another woman beside her stepped up, left behind a little girl who fidgeted with her sundress. “How ’bout that one?” She pointed to another duplex three houses down with a massive tree trunk bursting through to the second floor, branches sprouting out the windows.
Michael leaned out the driver’s side window, squinted beneath the brim of his insignia’ed ball cap. “I’m only here for that house over there.” He nodded toward a spot two houses in from the corner. A two-bedroom with a gable roof, one half of its second-floor façade charred. The porch was missing its bricks. Some of them saw Linc descend and their target reticles zeroed in on him.
“You tellin’ me you’re here for just one house? One house?” This one wearing an orange blouse and holding close to her face a tiny solar-powered water-fan. She swept her arms to indicate the row of houses across the street from the one targeted for demolition. “Those are all drug houses. Someone got raped in that one on the corner. I called about that one! I been calling all week. I called and called.”
Linc’s shirt caught on the edge of a groove and the sun lit the puckered course of a scar that ran along the skin just above his hip. An almost-healed souvenir from a house he had cleared a few weeks back. He pulled his shirt down, dragged his hammer off his seat, and hefted it over his shoulder.
“I’m just a wrecker,” Michael pleaded. “The mayor don’t forward no calls my way.” He spoke with a bit of a Puerto Rican lilt; certain vowels and consonants would rise like he was inviting himself over for dinner. The city sent Michael to this part of town pretty often. Linc didn’t know how Michael was gonna break it to those ladies that he did have other houses to demolish today but that the rest of those twenty houses stood on the other side of the city.
Linc shuffled toward the house that must have preceded the urban renewal projects that swept through the city during the beginning of the millennium. The houses like these, they were like the Pyramids in Egypt. It made sense that humans had built them, but without the stuff that they had now, such things seemed an impossibility. Digging the hole and filling it with foundation. The ceiling joists and the floor bridging. They probably laid the shingles that had once upon a time been there one by one. Pulleys and men with tool belts. Wood siding put in manually, mortar spread, bricks stacked. Maybe the house had once upon a time been beautiful. The fulfillment of a promise. You work hard, you strive, you take out a loan, and you move along with the business of starting a family. Now, the thing’s roof had caved in, trees grew throughout it, and summer heat had made the bulging walls crisp. The women had complained about drug dealers and rapes; some of these places had probably hosted more than a few murders.
The counsel Michael held with the ladies turned to a muffle. Linc entered and could see that the scavengers had been recent here. The floor was soft with mold, shifted beneath his footfalls. Out back, there had probably been a rusted van, maybe without doors, to make it easier for the vultures to load the furnace and the stove, the piping that they had picked out from behind the walls. Maybe they were at this very moment getting paid for their scrap metal. It all probably happened in the time between when the dangerous-buildings inspector had phoned Michael and when Michael had picked Linc up from his apartment. A large, person-shaped lump stopped Linc’s boot and he kicked the thing over to find the remains of a face staring up at him. Parts of the body had been gnawed away, some of the fingers down to the bone, the eyes still there, but the cheek jowls torn and hanging. Traces of quicklime lined the corpse. He’d been told to report corpses, maybe they would help out with open investigations. Linc stepped over the thing.
In another room, on top of a molding, rust-pitted mattress slept a wraith. Next to that wraith’s head, just underneath its opened hand, was a Tec-9. Red-tops and yellow-tops, wrapped in small plastic bags, peeked out from inside a crinkled paper sack. Linc stooped, gingerly pulled the Tec out from beneath the emaciated hand, doubted the person could have lifted it anyway, pulled out the clip and stuffed it into his pants’ pocket. He ejected the bullet in the chamber and tossed the thing into a pile of empty burger wrappers. His hand tightened on the neck of his hammer. The junkie was dissolving into the ruins, turning into the house ready for demolition, and its head would’ve been easy enough to crash in. The junkie was done living anyway, but Linc moved on.
Descending into the basement, he noted the water damage, but it was far enough along to show that the water had been turned off some time ago. Nothing had lived in there for a long time now. He stayed on the concrete steps for a while, frozen, reminded of the time he’d come down into a similar basement to find a little boy cuffed to a radiator after having passed a man ambling out the back door and buttoning up his pants. He blinked away the vision. Nothing stirred. And if, like the junkie, anything were still breathing, it wouldn’t get anything approaching a proper burial. The local cemeteries had long since burst through their capacity.
He came back up for air. The board-up crew had already sealed off most of the space. A roving band of custom-cut sheets of plywood and screw guns. They moved like whirling dervishes, and sometimes their haste left shoddy work in their wake, like bodies that they hadn’t accounted for, the ignored junkie or rape victim or dead body or eco-freak trying to make art out of ruin porn.
Coming out of the house felt like emerging from hell. The light blinded. The air, poisoned as it was, cleansed the lungs. The mind-fog and the shell shock dissipated, and all of a sudden, there were new parking lots or bits of road or signage that he hadn’t noticed before. Everything seemed draped in clarity. In focus.
Linc gave Michael the thumbs-up. House cleared. His hammerhead dragged behind him.
Michael nodded, then opened his dashboard and out came a small console with a touchboard protruding from its bottom. Empty stimhalers tinked against each other as he stretched and geomapped the house’s location, input the coordinates, and armed the drone that would arrive in just under five minutes. There was shade at the bunker, and a radio where he could tune in to the ball game or put on a playlist, and he could operate the drone from there. The console was bigger there, had more equipment and became much more of an immersive experience. Plus, the operating room was air-conditioned. But he had grown to hate it. He needed to be around the people.
On the console would be a high-definition moving image, turning the northwest of New Haven, a span of about a dozen or so blocks, into a midsummer palette of copper and brown and gray, punctuated by occasional, invasive green. The houses, in rows, would be easy enough to pick out, but it was always when he switched to infrared, waiting for heat signals, that the cracks would run through his heart. The ghostly white always stood out against the irradiated landscape, and there was always movement, sometimes the smallest of gestures, until there wasn’t. He would linger over well-populated neighborhoods to remind himself that people still lived here, but when he’d have to head over to his target, the blotches would drop off until there was only a blood-red sea below, all twenty-three homes on a once-busy block empty. Sometimes, a single white snowflake would move among the red, an amoeba lumbering among the charred husks of thirty-five neighboring vacancies.
At the hangar, the only sounds would be the hum of machines and the reggaeton that came from the radio. He’d go through his verbal checklist once he got to the target house, countdown, then mutter his code. And someone near, sometimes a ghost, would whisper back.
Over the course of that incantation, a small gravity bomb would slip from its container in the drone’s bottom, fall toward the center of the house’s roof, then, as it fell, would pull the house in around itself. The screen would light up with white flame, the smoke would clear, and the crater would stare like an empty eye socket back at the drone’s camera. There were times the bomb would malfunction, and the house’s remains would sink upon itself, then bounce back up like a rubber band in extremis, pink insulation stretched like cotton candy, paper and plastic and fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes and a basket of unused diapers and tires and phone books and sometimes heroin needles, exploding upward before the bomb resumed its work and sucked the entirety of the place’s ghosts into a cube that landed on the cracked foundation right on top of the gravity disc. Before the final moment, there was always an arc made of discarded clothes and, in that arc, every single time, several pairs of children’s shoes.
Municipal technicians never figured out how to get the disc to swallow up the more unwieldy parts of the home, so the undigested bricks would be vomited in a pile of architectural effluvium on top of the disc that someone would then have to fish out. And just as his truck would leave or just as they would retrieve the disc, stackers would swarm over the site, harvesting the bricks for building residential units up in the space colonies.
The drone loomed over the targeted house, and by now, residents had set up lawn chairs to watch. Several neighborhoods had gone through test runs where the city government and relevant departments made sure to properly calibrate the tonnage of the bombs. Take down the targeted house and try not to swallow up the ones next to it. The residents didn’t seem to care that they sat or stood so near to the blast radius. His truck, even now, was parked dangerously close.
“Feelin’ lit, feelin’ light,” Michael said, cheerier than usual.
“Two a.m., summer nights,” chimed Linc, who had, by now, taken his seat next to Michael, surprising the driver.
The bomb dropped and the house did one of those dry-heave things where the bomb tried to swallow everything, then choked up what it couldn’t digest. Michael made sure to watch it actually happen, see the browns and whites and greens and blues and reds of the actual house, rather than have the glow of the screen burn his retinas. When he turned, though, he saw Linc’s gaze riveted on the monitor, watching as the smoke cleared and small glowing blobs writhed in the wreckage, pieces of the person he was supposed to declare. The junkie was missing a leg, just above the knee, and her blood was hot when it hit the ground, burned bright on the monitor, and she writhed on the ground and reached instinctively for something, for her gun, but couldn’t find it, wailed soundlessly and rolled beneath the rubble where she could until she became the same color as the ground.
Michael gave Linc a look, but Linc didn’t acknowledge it.
