“Where’re you staying?”
“Got a hammock at a rooming house while I try to figure things out. Looking to buy a house on the West Side.”
#TeamBeige took a toke. “Whereabouts?”
“Beaver Hills. Maybe Edgewood.”
“You think about West Rock?” He toked again. “Bought a house there last month, in fact.” He pushed himself up. “Eamonn.” Stuck out his hand.
Jonathan grabbed it, hoisted himself up. Then it turned into a lingering handshake. “Jonathan,” he said. “A pleasure.”
“Welcome to New Haven.”
THE next morning, Linc walked up to the Body Shop to see pieces of the wrecker strewn about the junkyard. Michael had a bit of metal on a stool and was taking his tools to it, but Linc saw the dejection in dude’s hunch. Michael hadn’t even bothered to wipe the #WhalleyAveWarriors radiation tag from the side of the hangar. That made this the third stash house they’d demolished this month.
He hefted his hammer in search of other work.
Linc tugged down the bill of his worn Red Sox cap and closed his eyes against the sweat stinging them. The truck, lifting carpets of ash and dust into the air like someone spreading a bedsheet, provided the morning’s only sound. But Linc thought he could maybe hear the excavators that always worked alongside wreckers up ahead, monstrous, steel-tooth jaws spreading open to dump another load of bricks on the growing pile. In the shadows cast by the leaning, crumbling apartment towers stood Black girls and a few jaundiced snow bunnies in leather, neon-colored short skirts, hips kinked to one side while the stone wall supported their lewd poses. The other men in the back of the truck with Linc leaned over the side of the flatbed and whistled.
“Them stretchmarks get me a discount?” one shouted.
“I’m just tryna put one in ya, guh!”
“Love bites, Mami, and so do I.”
“I get paid next Friday!”
They laughed and it sounded like thunder, joyous, irresponsible, and even as Linc gripped the handle of his hammer, he couldn’t help smiling. He wanted to get at least a little bit of sleep before they got to the worksite, but the heat was a few dozen degrees past sleepy. Why not holler at a few hoes to pass the time?
At least it wasn’t raining; at least it wasn’t cold enough to aggravate his busted knuckles and the smashed fingers and toes that belonged to any number of kids in various angles of repose in the flatbed. None of them looked up at the red-blue sky threaded with knife-scar clouds and the Colony hovering like a pitted moon overhead.
The sex workers vanished behind a corner, and the young men retreated to their seats. Hunger hung around them like an odor. Linc knew the work would be the best thing to happen to them. Otherwise, they’d be out there just like he was before rehab, letting hunger compel him to destroy the very things he needed.
“We pickin’ up Ace?” one of the youths asked. He had his hammer draped across his chest, his head propped against the rickety back of the flatbed, his hat brim low over his eyes.
No one answered.
“We pickin’ him up or what?”
Linc stirred, then rapped loudly on the back window. When nothing happened, he rapped again, hard enough to crack the Plexiglas. The driver’s side window creaked downward and a leather-skinned Black man with a lazy eye, the ratty remains of a cigar in his false teeth and a straw hat on his head, leaned out on his elbow.
“You gon’ break my damn winda poundin’ like that.”
Linc leaned over to be heard over the rumbling through the abandoned roads by the old Ivy Quarter. “Yo, Bishop, we pickin’ up Ace today?”
“Whatchu think?” Bishop spat back. His cigar clung to his teeth. “His place comin’ up right now.” And with that, Bishop retreated. The window only went halfway up after that.
They drove out of the old Ivy Quarter and the dilapidated houses got smaller, their lean more pronounced. The broken windows with their crumbling frames like Bishop’s droopy eye watching them pass. The houses here on the outskirts of that neighborhood looked no different, but out front, piled up on the sidewalk, were mattresses, some with bloodstains like large copper half dollars on them, children’s clothes mixed in with dirty linens, ants swarming over half-empty bags of fast food, old radios that looked like they’d only recently stopped working.
Bugs sat up a little in the truck bed and looked around. “There was a riot here when I was a kid.”
Linc shot him a look that tried to tell him he still was a kid.
“Cops chased a bunch of us right down this street.” He made a sweep with his arm like he was shooting up the block. “Beat the shit outta my homeboy right on that front lawn.” He snorted out a laugh, tucking the hurt beneath bravado. “Yeah, the homie Jamal got caught outside the Dome and he died, then a bunch of police came through and tore up the block.” He quieted, contenting himself with merely looking around, retracing the ordeal’s trajectory through the neighborhood.
It was originally Linc’s story. About the boy named Jamal who got caught outside a Dome and who had to lie on his back looking up at augmented cops while he suffocated on irradiated air. And it had happened in Long Beach, not New Haven. And the “homeboy” who’d gotten the shit beat out of him had been his brother Jake. Bugs took the story Linc had told him and left out Linc’s mother, who had been trying to tug Linc indoors, and how the cops had been presaged by a band of white Marauders, how they came in on horseback to beat up Black and brown folk, warm ’em up for the police. And how Linc’s pops had looked at the whole thing like “damn, not again.” Maybe something like this had happened to Bugs wherever he’d come from. Or maybe he just liked sounding like he had more history than he really did. Linc was glad when he stopped talking.
When they got to Ace’s spot, a slouching duplex that used to be blue and yellow once upon a time, there was five-oh out front and a couple people that looked maybe like social workers. The County Sheriff was there, a large metal sphere with arms like a spider, one sporting a small-caliber pistol. On its front, a display of a white man’s mustachioed face. Remote policing. The cops were partially cyberized, their essential parts replaceable; hence their stomping around irradiated wasteland. But the social workers looked flesh-and-blood enough. One of them looked like she might boot all over her jeans.
Nobody in the truck bed stirred. The chalky dust on their overalls and their jeans and their boots didn’t even budge. But they all silently watched the man they’d worked with being dressed down like a bitch in front of his family. Linc wanted to spit but had run out of saliva.
The front door hung open, and inside, Ace could be seen sitting down in his living room couch, his arms around his two kids, boy and a girl, relaxed but protecting them from the officer who, hand leisurely to his weapon, stood over them. Staticky blue and white from the TV flashed on the eviction cop’s back.
Linc couldn’t hear what was being said, but Ace, from where he sat, raised his voice. The officer never raised his, but eventually Ace shot up from his seat and screamed, “This some bullshit!”
Ace stomped out before the cop could make it look like he was being escorted, waited for the cop and made like he was standing his ground. “You ain’t got no right. You see this neighborhood? You see it? We the last family on the block. Ain’t no one livin’ here. So what goddamn difference it make if me and my family make a life here, huh? What difference it make?”
The cop raised his non-gun hand, inches from Ace’s chest. “Sir, leave the immediate premises or you will be arrested.”
The social workers walked the children and Ace’s wife out onto the sidewalk, and already movers had materialized to start offloading the family’s furniture. The TV blared. “Do you have a place where you can stay?” the social worker asked Ace’s wife.
“No,” she said back. She seemed too tired to be annoyed or upset that their life was being brought out into the street like so much trash. “We ain’t heard from his family in a couple years.”
The social worker’s face half crinkled in sorrow. “There are some shelters further out. Fairfield and a few more further down the rail line. Our office can furnish you and your family with rail tickets.”
Ace’s wife had stopped looking at the social worker as she droned on, looked instead at the growing pile of furniture and appliances, some of them already rusting from exposure to the poisoned air, some of them already growing rusted blood blisters. Her son, six years old in overalls like the ones Ace wore to work, scurried back inside where his bowl of cereal waited on the table for him. The sight of the kid with his cereal, riveted on the TV while the movers emptied his house, reminded Linc of his own dad who, at the same age as that kid, had come home from school to see all their shit on the sidewalk, an eviction notice stapled to their front door. He hadn’t told Linc much about it, but Jake told him one afternoon when they were skipping stones off the warped pipes of the California Aqueduct that Dad, as a kid, had spent the following two months living in a truck with his dad, their grandfather.
Bishop turned in his seat. The engine had been idling.
