The morning of the fire at the Assawoman Bay refugee camp, Linc stood on a ladder scrubbing the stained-glass windows of the Church of the Nativity. Most mornings, he would be up before the other kids of the camp and would make his circuit through the chilled back alleys and down the cracked streets where Relief Agency trucks sat parked. Caws and birds going kyurr-kyurr trailed him all the way to the stone threshold, built small so that every visitor had to humble themselves whenever they came in or left. All the janitors knew about the back entrance, though, where you could come and go straight-backed where no one could see. Additionally, going through the back got you easier access to the cleaning supplies than any other point of ingress or egress. Linc didn’t know why he always insisted on that front threshold, though. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his father, once he started preaching here, had gifted him a set of keys that made him feel special, made the place feel like theirs, his. Maybe it was because of the first time his father brought him here and how he’d paused for a long time outside that entrance and something had washed over his face, the kind of soft slackness Linc hadn’t seen in him since Vegas, before he stooped low, so low it hurt, and walked in. Every other church they’d stopped at on their travels had regular doors, some of them wood and some of them wood reinforced with steel, but they were regular doors you pulled a handle or pressed a button to open. And they didn’t demand of his father’s back what this one did. But the old man seemed to like it, so Linc did it, hoping that whenever he did, he would see what his father saw.
There was always sweeping and mopping to be done. In the early mornings, the floor glowed with irradiated bootprints, the dirt illuminating what other trash had been left behind either by churchgoers or someone looking for a roof when the acid rain fell.
Even though Linc hadn’t needed it, his father, soon after their arrival here, had quoted verses from First Corinthians Chapter 3 at him: “Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour. For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.” It was the man’s favorite chapter. Every place they went to was a chance to see the Word played out, people pitching tents or teaching schoolchildren or setting up domes or midwifing or guarding the entrance to a settlement. And when the place would fall apart and Linc would despair for their being made homeless again, his father’s voice would not falter: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.” Which was perhaps all just the old man’s way of coaxing Linc into his chores.
He always did the windows early because he had to open them to let them dry and when he did, the patterning caught the sunrise to spray green and red and orange and blue on the sidestreets flanking the place. A kid wearing an oversized helmet with the RA’s logo stenciled in white on it had been caught one day scampering through and had landed on the rainbow rhomboids and had stopped in her path and giggled, hopscotching from one shape to another. The next day, other kids came to do the same. It grew into a ritual, Linc timing the window-drying with the sunrise so that the kids could start the day with their little dance routine then head off to wherever it was they were going.
He opened the window and heard, in a high-pitched timbre, “C’mon, Vonnie. Bang on the camera! Bang on the camera!” And saw outside one kid, surrounded by his confederates, aiming a scuffed-up recorder at a girl in a denim jacket and a ruffled skirt. “Bang on the camera one time!”
“I’m not bangin’ on camera,” the girl said, annoyed.
One of the kids behind the camera boy popped out and curled his fingers into a sequence of gang signs while the others whooped and laughed and shouted, “Ooooh you killin’ it, cuz!”
And somebody else said “c’mon crip walk” and another high-pitched disembodied voice replied, “I ain’t never crip walk a day in my life, I’m a shooter.” And in between bursts of giggling from the others, “I transformed into that. I was tryna skateboard at first but niggas kept tryin’ me because I guess I look try-able, so we gon’ see who ready to go to hell.” “Mi run tings, tings nah run me!” The rest, drowned out by fading peals of laughter.
Next came the skylight, which was trickier to get to and required setting up the harness and pulling himself up to the ceiling. It was while he was horizontal to the ground that shuffling footsteps echoed in the sanctuary. He couldn’t get too good a look at who had entered, but it sounded like two people. The rhythm of their walking told him that they’d turned at the entrance, which meant they were probably heading to the dish that held some of the church’s candles, their bottoms stuck firm in sand. You were supposed to put in a donation in exchange for a candle, and Linc wanted to tell the early comers as much but then one of them started speaking softly in Arabic and he realized it must be one of the camp’s Palestinians, that wave of refugees who migrated with much of South New Jersey when the tides swallowed up the peninsula. It was often the Arab teens Linc’s age who tagged the walls of the camp with their art—a pole vaulter in mid-spring over the thing or verses from the Bible—and who had smells from the food they made in Little Ramallah wafting over the whole sector. Linc generally left them alone to do their thing, as they had the look of folks who had been wandering much longer than Linc and his father had, the type who settled too easily into camps like these and hated having the skill. Hated having needed it.
The two Arabs moved from fresco to fresco and the one voice seemed to be explaining them to whoever the other person was. Long as they weren’t making any mess, Linc felt content returning to his washing. He expected them to make the whole circuit, go through all the landmarks, see where this saint was buried, kiss the star-marked spot where this other saint had been born, cross themselves at the altar. They were smart to do it before the early-afternoon rush. While Linc might’ve preferred to do his work in silence, he didn’t begrudge the duo’s desire for the same. There was always so much noise in the camp. And not everybody was as good as Linc’s father at pulling God and contemplation thereof out of the air.
“It is difficult,” Linc’s father had told a small congregation in a boat at the docks one night as they swayed on the moon-dappled water, “to look at these things, the Wall and the rebellion painted on it and not see a religion flavored by last things, by apocalypse. Revelation.” He’d picked up this new way of talking somewhere in Colorado and it had gotten thicker the farther east they traveled. His sentences became longer, grew swirling, cirrus clauses. Felt less like they came out of the earth they stood on and more like he was pulling them out of the sky. More often than not, it was gibberish to Linc, who was content only to no longer have for a companion someone catatonic with mourning. Still, he’d stopped sounding like the man who’d bounced him on a knee in Vegas or who worried over him in Long Beach. Around Iowa, he’d begun to sound like a stranger.
“But New Testament liberation flowers out of Old Testament roots,” he said of the camp. “That’s what hope is. It’s the unseen. We mustn’t be trapped. Trapped in that Old Testament dogmatism that believes only in things seen, then clings to them at the expense of everything else, every other word in that message of which the burning bush, the ram in the briar patch, the parting of the Red Sea, is only a small part.”
The morning of the fire that gobbled up the camp’s school buildings and swallowed the bread distribution site whole, the fire that would have bodies crowded in the rubble afterward, climbing over fallen stone walls and trying to salvage the “Sawmill Site” sign that kids had taken to doodling on, the fire that chased camp dwellers to the dock that would collapse under their weight and leave them to drown, Linc figured his father was talking about himself. About their journey. Reasoning with God, who knew better than them the why of it all. The morning of the fire that would see the old man trapped in the very church Linc was now cleaning, Linc figured the man was simply puzzling in his own way over the mysteries of his life. It wouldn’t occur to him until he was pulling the man’s body from the charred rubble and saw the look on his face—that soft slackness—that he’d wonder if maybe the man had been talking about his son’s mother instead.
The morning of the fire at the Assawoman Bay refugee camp, Linc had not thought about that woman in eight years.
No one but the stackers saw to the horses during winter, but as soon as the first drifts of snow began to melt, small crowds formed at the wood fence that had been erected around the barn. At first, just a few kids who, playing nearby, saw the new thing and were drawn, and they saw Bugs, who looked only a little bit older than them doing what looked like important work, brushing down horses and stacking bales of hay and feeding the horses and leading them by the reins in small circuits throughout the field. And the kids would watch in grinning silence. Then others would come and they’d catch sight of Bishop or Linc on a roof swiping snow or red dust to a place where it could be collected and taken care of later.
Those kids musta gone and told their mothers because then their mothers and fathers came and the kids asked their guardians what those things were and what they ate and how they moved and Linc or Mercedes or Sydney or Jayceon or Bugs would tell them and even let them pet the horses. Then the parents would thank the stackers and take the kids, on fire with questions, back home.
Whalley Avenue awoke to the clopping of hooves.
A distant, regular sound that was first heard around Edgewood Park and could be heard by the dragonchasers hidden within the Westville Cemetery, then continued past the Beechwood Gardens Housing Complex, and that was when the first residents peeked their heads out their windows to see what the noise was. The clip-clop grew clearer, sharper around the Food Market, and Destiny froze in the act of opening her hair salon when she turned and saw what was happening. She wiped at her mask to clear whatever smudge must have caused her vision, but when the sight was still there, she took the mask off completely and followed the horse as it cantered by shuttered take-out stores and banks that had been converted into county stockpiles for radiation-wear. Past the juvenile court, within view of the pranksters on the roofs of the St. Martins Townhouses, then past the liquor store and the auto repair shop run by the Dominican Miguel, not the Puerto Rican one.
The first white residents to see the source of the sound were the ones who lived in the loft apartments that had gone up in the late fall where Whalley became Broadway, far enough within the Dome that the air no longer rasped the lungs. So the rider slipped off his mask and hooked it by the pommel of his saddle as he rode down past the open-air market on that stretch of Broadway between Whalley and Elm that was just waking up.
Horse and rider ambled to the New Haven Green with its broken obelisk and crossed to Chapel Street so that it stood in the shadow of the apartment complex just as Mercedes, at the window, nursed a mug of coffee spiked with pitorro. The rider raised an arm, hailing her, knowing she was watching, and she smirked.
Then horse and rider made their way up to Wooster Square, passing the abandoned library and the city hall building on the way, and when he arrived to find the group of stackers that spring morning on the side of the street, he sat straighter in his saddle.
They had their hammers in front of them and had pulled their masks and bandannas down around their necks while they drank melted iced coffee or Malta Goya. They all had to look up to the rider, some of them shading their hands against the sun, and a few of them grumbled about not being able to enjoy this too-brief spring, knowing summer with its weight and wetness was waiting just over the horizon.
But Bishop stood to his full height and adjusted his chewing stick, then he said, “So, Bugs, you finally decided to show up for work.”
Bugs awoke from the dream smiling.
Bishop found him in the truck bed under a ratty blanket and jostled his ankle. “Ready to head out?”
Bugs fumbled for his hammer, then sat up and wiped the dream from his eyes. Then he nodded and made himself comfortable against the wall of the truck bed. Bishop turned on the rattling truck, it rose a little off the ground, then they were gone.
“Don’t forget your mask!” Bishop hollered from the driver’s seat, but Bugs didn’t hear him.
David and Jonathan passed beneath the Wooster Street archway, wirework that had at its center a wrought-iron elm tree, the city’s symbol. The only bits of winter David bore were the stories Jonathan had told him, and, looking at him now, walking next to David with one hand snug in one of David’s back pockets, the boy’s muscles had filled out. He had developed sinew, had turned into the most delicious thing David had ever seen. Buds had only just now begun to sprout on the trees that lined the street, distinguishing them from the telephone poles that towered over the rusted, chopped-up husks of maglev cars. Nineteenth-century architecture tracked their progress up and down and along the avenues and roads. Greek style, Revival, Second Empire, Italianate. And with each house that returned David’s gaze, he saw not the stripped, peeling façade of a gutted home but the colorful, robust, ancient monument it had once been. One of the first things he’d made Jonathan bring him to was the fabled sycamore tree on the west side of Wooster Street Park that was said to resemble Jesus Christ. Their tour of the neighborhood took them to the famous pizzerias to which people from everywhere had flocked and through streets with names like Chapel and Chestnut and Water.
Saint Michael Church drew them to Wooster Place. Even as a pericarp, it held that gravity David had felt in the abandoned opera houses and warehouse factories, buildings made sacred by the memory of the life that had thrummed in them. No more colored glass in the windows meant that the tall arched frames permitted an unobstructed view of the shit-colored interior. There were no wooden pews, off of which the echoes of their footsteps could bounce, nor golden organ pipes, nor statues of St. Mary Maddalena, nor frescoes of haloed New Testament titans. Only the pebbles and litter and the innards of what remained of the walls, all of which could be seen from above through holes in what had once been the golden dome you could see from just about anywhere else in the city.
Jonathan had his eyes on the street. His vigilance unnerved David and he brought himself closer to the man to whom his soul was knit.
“They used to have a cherry blossom festival here,” David said into Jonathan’s ear. “Started out with a local band and a handful of neighbors under some lighted trees. Then it turned into this huge event with singers and speeches from politicians and gospel music and a band playing on a stage right there”—he pointed to some imaginary spot at a far corner of Wooster Place—“salsa music, jazz”—he chuckled—“prog rock.” Jonathan’s body hummed against his. “Shadow puppets. And the New Haven Clock Company would have an exhibit. All ’cause a bunch of folks decided it’d be pretty to plant some Yoshino Japanese cherry blossom trees in their corner of New England.”
Jonathan leaned into him, eyes closed with the idea of it all.
“All we need here are some neighbors and some tree lights.”
A motorbike engine ripped through the quiet, followed by another, until a whole chorus of them grumbled around a street corner. Jonathan pushed David behind him. The street bikes growled as a group of Black kids made their zigzag parade past them. Some of them doubled back, balanced on their front wheel, another popped a wheelie and sped forward, the plastic frames bending, nearly breaking, beneath the weight of their bravado.
“I bet he asthmatic!” shrieked one of them over tire-squeal. “And he got a ass-bag. His feet come up and his ass-bag come out!”
One of them pulled a hard turn that should have thrown him off his bike and wheeled past the two white boys on the steps of the Catholic chapel. “He slip and fall and his ass-bag come out.”
A third: “Or he get knocked out, and his ass-bag come out.”
The first stood up so that the wind whipped his shirt against his long torso and put some bass in his voice: “Good thing my ass-bag come out.” He screeched to a stop in front of the church, his back to David and Jonathan, and addressed his coterie, who had by now stopped their bikes, the massive mosquito-buzz drone replaced by the hungry grumbling of street bikes in repose. “Now, all you niggas that’s knockout-prone, be sure to cop the all-new ass-bag.”
“Nine ninety-nine!” another shouted through dust-covered hands cupped around his mouth. “We got them shits for sale.”
“You heard it here first, we got ass-bags for all the niggas that’s knockout-prone. For when you get knocked on your motherfuckin’ ass, you better hope the ass-bag come out.” Their giggles had turned into thunderclaps. One of them clutched his stomach and doubled over on his handlebars. “We have the additional chitti-chest bag too, in case you get snuffed from the back.” A pause. “For fifty-nine ninety-nine!” He held a hand up to stop the laughter that had by now rippled over the entire block. “We do take personal checks and all that. EBT, food stamps, whatever—”
