“I’m sorry. Unc.”
Bishop chuckled.
“Nah, when you out gettin’ into situations and all that, it just speeds up your shit too much. It’s exhausting. You gotta think about what street you can walk down to and from school. After a while, you just stop goin’ to school because it’s too dangerous. You know you’re gonna get banged on. Ain’t nobody got a job, ain’t nobody breathin’ clean air, and it’s just drones everywhere, droids up and down the block and niggas ain’t gettin’ enough credits for food or school or whatever and when that’s all you know, it’s what you get sucked into, then you grow up a little and you ain’t tryna have time for all that.”
“How old is y—”
“You could see the homie get shot dead in front of you and die on the street literally at your feet and two weeks later niggas is moved on. Rest in peace to the homies, but when you see that—when you see the homie die in front of you who all these people say they care about, then they go about they business—you know ain’t no afterlife or nothin’. The light just go out and that’s it. And I’m not tryna get into all that.”
Bishop watched him eat in silence for a while before asking, “So what you lookin’ to get into?”
“Here? I dunno.” Munch. “I seen the way them birds be bothering you when you was up that pole. Shit was hilarious.” He grew pensive. “I know I’m supposed to say some shit like school or whatever or try to make it up to space, but I got more sense than that. I know what this is. I dunno. I guess I seen you up there, old-ass man tryin’ not to get your ass beat by an eagle, and I was like ‘I could see that for myself,’ you know?”
“Thought you wasn’t tryna be old and bored no more.”
“That was before I seen you rob a government nigga.” Smirking, he popped the last of the taco into his mouth, halfheartedly wiped the grease on the paper wrapping, tossed it into the trash-strewn aqueduct, and climbed up onto his feet. “I’ma be in the truck.”
“Aight, Bugs,” Bishop said quietly, hoping to linger a little bit longer on the bridge.
THERE hadn’t been air sirens for a long time, but the sound was rarely absent from Bishop’s dreams. Repurposed tornado sirens in one city, fire alarms in another, voices over loudspeakers muffled into unintelligibility. It was always at least one of these waiting for him every time he went to bed. Earlier on, in the loft on State Street, he would sleep with the pump-action shotgun cradled against his chest, but one morning, he woke to find a massive hole in his headboard and his lieutenants at the door with their hands on their pistols and he’d had to watch them look at him with worry and pity when he shooed them away with a gruff, “Bad dream.” So he kept it just out of reach. He would have to get out of bed and with deliberation to get it. Night terrors wouldn’t take his life. Not after all he’d gone through.
But tonight it was a different sound that woke him.
Thoughtlessly, he slipped his legs over the side of the bed, grabbed a bathrobe from the walk-in closet, then came back for the shotgun. Half-sleep still fogged his mind as he mumbled assurance to the guards outside his door, then took the elevator down to the ground floor.
He came up short when he almost stepped on the winged dog that flitted by his feet. The thing had orange fur and matching feathered wings, all the color of napalm, and moved in hops. Thing was the same color as the chickens that ran riot on his great-grandfather’s farm. So many generations of God-man occupied that land that it was assumed Bishop would follow in their footsteps. It was in his name too. And they’d watch approvingly as he preached the Word to those chickens, trying to keep them enthralled, trying to corral their attentions. Praying over chicken births, conducting chicken funerals when one or two of them had been picked for slaughter, baptizing them in the face of their furious flapping. There wasn’t a name for what had skitted across Bishop’s feet just now. He doubted it woulda listened to him. He had only a little more power over it as a gangster than he mighta had as a preacher.
The sound—now a cacophony of different sounds—drew him in the direction of the Long Wharf waterfront district. He felt, behind him, the presence of the maglev Range Rovers. Protection even though he doubted he needed it.
Hammering, wedging, sawing, splitting. It sounded like the simultaneous tearing down and building up of things.
The vision slowly clarified, blurs growing edges, until he saw a single man tearing down his own house. Instinct had Bishop cock the shotgun and hold it like he was about to cap this nigga who was making the only bit of noise to be heard for miles, but he stopped.
In a city filled with craters and an administration falling over itself trying to follow a fleeing tax base, in a city pockmarked by desolation and disrepair, this man was destroying his own house. And Bishop watched, transfixed, remembering vaguely that there’d been some warning from county officials about fire lanes. Whether to protect from militia strikes or from whatever blazes the red dirt and the poisoned air could start, the lanes would hopefully localize any fires that broke out. He’d seen kids just out of school in days past clearing roads and pathways to make space for the wide fire lanes, backpacks bouncing on their shoulders while they worked. And now here was this man, tools moonlit in the night dark, taking apart his own home.
It’s all gonna be gone.
After the worst of the storms had passed through and the tsunamis and the red dust, he’d twisted his power to force the big out-of-town construction companies to hire locals as subcontractors, and he’d believed he was doing the right thing, a durable thing. And he’d do it again after the next disaster and the next. As long as he had money and as long as people listened to him when he talked and got out the way where he walked, he’d do it. And it’d be a good thing to rebuild a city. A city that wasn’t his, wasn’t his birthright, but a place he could participate in anyway. No one was from anywhere, right? Being an Exoduster proved that.
He’d told himself that to be a good man was to build something that would last. And he watched that lie get taken apart right in front of him.
The winged dog did something that was half-bark, half-caw. It kept trying to achieve liftoff, and Bishop was consumed with bitterness. If he stayed any longer, he’d shoot that animal and that man, so he turned and went back to his apartment.
The main entranceway spritzed cleanser all over his body and the agent sank into his pores, fighting whatever radiation he might have picked up while suitless outside and when he got to his unit, he took the hose from what was once a sink and sucked in the filtered water, trying to rinse his mouth. But the grit never left his teeth.
BISHOP wasn’t really angry they’d dragged him out down the highway for their little adventure. He was set, as far as money and rations went. And, sure, he did find solace in the work, but the weather was chilling and the world’s cooling was unkind to his joints. He didn’t miss the stiffness. Plus, they weren’t using up the voltage on his truck. Still, he made sure to grumble every now and then to make sure Timeica and Mercedes and this little Sydney girl heard it. He did have a reputation to maintain.
The world outside looked freshly rained-on, and it had that mulchy smell to it. Didn’t smell like desiccation and dehydration and lung rot. Smelled, instead, like that joke people used to tell when things started going bad, that humans were the virus and the earth was healing. Best thing that coulda happened to the planet was all the white folks left it.
“Ay, put on some music.”
Mercedes, in the driver’s seat, turned her head slightly. Though it wasn’t raining anymore, her windshield wipers were at work, sliding the glowing motes of radiation to the corners of the Plexiglas. “Whatchu wanna hear? I got some reggaeton.”
“Nah, put on that Freddie Gibbs.”
“Who?” This from Timeica in the passenger’s seat.
“Y’all don’t know about that Freddie Gibbs.”
“Bishop, is that one of your rappers again?” Mercedes said it with such playful disdain. “You listen to a lot of drug music for a preacherman.”
“It’s poetry. Y’all got no idea the poets we used to listen to back in the day. Freddie Gibbs, Pusha T. Oh, man, that Pusha. King Push. He was the Poet Laureate of Cocaine Rap.”
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me, right, Bishop?” Timeica said, then guffawed.
Bishop sulked. “We contain multitudes, girl. Sometimes, you just gotta put something ignorant in your ears. Sometimes, I’m ready for gospel, and sometimes, I wanna hear about robbin’ the plug. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”
“You are so old, Bishop!” Timeica shrieked, and that got Mercedes nearly collapsed over the steering wheel until they hit a bump that sent them through the air and quieted them a little bit.
“And there’s education there,” Bishop continued, undeterred. “Y’all ever heard that Young Jeezy? You ain’t e’em gotta go to college. Just listen to the Thug Motivation intros, that’s all the education you need.”
Mercedes: “So, I sell a kilo of cocaine and no more student loans?”
“Sí, señora!”
Sydney laughed softly with them. She’d been quiet the whole time. While Bishop knew she generally wasn’t much of a talker, she had an energy the whole ride that Bishop recognized. He knew they all wanted to show him something, even though they were vague about what. Sydney had the look of someone who’d come up with the plan. Real G’s moved in silence. A rapper had said that.
“Y’all ever seen a moose before?” He aimed the question up front, but really just wanted to hear Sydney say something.
