“Cain? Like from the Bible?”
“Cai-ANNE.” The horse twisted under him, antsy. “She’s a friend from work.” Then he waved his hat by way of salutation, put it back on his head, and left.
Sydney’s knuckles itched, watching him go. “Ain’t never heard of a white woman named Cayenne,” she said under her breath. She bounced Bambi in her arms, trying to forget the new gray in the little girl’s hair and what it meant. “Bad man’s gone now.” She looked down and let out a mock gasp. “You ain’t give back them dance boots!” The notice fell from her hands and curled in the Texas heat.
THEY’D fallen asleep on the blankets, Mercedes with her arms wrapped around Sydney, when the door banged open. Mercedes turned over. Sydney stirred against her and wiped sleep from her eyes.
Linc stood in the doorway, hunched over, held up by the doorframe, covered in blood and vomit, gasping for air, shoulders heaving, whole body held together by sheer force of will.
Sydney rushed past Mercedes, peeled back some of Linc’s clothes, searched him for answers. “What? What on earth?”
“They killed him.”
“What?” Sydney’s eyes widened with horror. She could still hear the pawnshop robbery story as clear as if Bugs were telling her now. “Where are you hurt? Whose blood is this?”
Linc was weeping. “Those bitch-ass toasters killed Bugs.”
Short Cuts: Born to Run
For me, it started with the bloody fingertips. You see a kid who got booked come out, and he’s got bloody fingertips, or maybe they’re already wrapped in bandages from a brief pit stop home or at some neighbor’s house or the basement of some churchgoer’s place to get patched up before the kid’s back with the crew. Their hands are gentle around a hammer handle for a while, and they spend some time on the sidelines, trying not to look too dependent on the kindness of others. But it’s more a system of exchange than anything else. Looking at them, Kendrick, Jayceon, Linc, Wyatt, even some of the younger stackers, they’ve all been in, and they all have to have been taken care of when they got back out.
The settlers have brought with them an increased police presence. Their return from the Colony happening under the auspices of urban development. Cyberized workers win jobs working on air-filtration centers, mech cops (affectionately dubbed “toasters”) find work patrolling desolate, potholed streets on which now live white Colonists. Now that the air is cleaner here, it must be protected.
And so I watch as these denizens relearn how to avoid the police.
When running fails and they get booked, they sometimes put their fingers to the electric force field shielding the control box to which the cops put their ID badges. Their fingertips come back charred and smoking and missing the first few layers of skin, so that when it’s time for their fingerprints to be taken, they are ghosts, non-people, just as they were before the police showed up. It only takes a few trips to the pen to learn this.
If you sit with them long enough, you watch them develop their heightened awareness like a superpower—what the police look like,how the different models of their mechanized bodies move, the cut of their hair, the rust patterns on their undercover cars, their routes and how they time them. Then you see them: sitting in plain clothes on a park bench with their children, in the rearview on the freeway ten cars behind. Sometimes, the body reacts first, launching a sheen of sweat, quickening the pulse, before the mind registers coordinates and escape routes.
“You don’t think what they might want from me,” Wyatt told me one afternoon near the end of a workday. His overalls were nearly white from overwash. “Whoever they’re looking for, even if it’s not you, they’ll book you anyway.” Timeica sat at his knee rolling a stylus around her fingers.
They practice running from each other. Maybe a Flex gets stolen or someone’s old lady is trying to track them down because their daughter needs them more than the bar does. Maybe someone flicks someone behind the ear when they weren’t expecting it, and the lesson begins, learning alleyways, how to leap over cars, how to watch out for rusted edges and not cut yourself on fences, weaving in and out of traffic, how to note who you went to church with and whose house was safe to hide in when the five-oh rolled past or a low-grade mech ran its scanner over license plates and addresses, instantly checking them against warrants.
With each passing week, as the celebration and industry of the new arrivals spreads and spreads, the number of police pursuits increases. The growth is exponential at this point. Some are foot chases, some are car chases, some a combination of the two. If your motorbike has gas, that’s ideal, as a red-blooded stacker stands almost no chance running on his or her own from a half-mech trained officer.
And if there’s ever trouble on the block or an injured stacker needs help, no one thinks to call the police. Between active hostility, then malicious neglect, followed by weary reappraisal, they’ve been known to do more harm than good.
Jayceon, in the middle of an afternoon, had grabbed an older stacker, a parolee, yanked him to the side and spat in his ear about why he shouldn’t have called the police when he saw an old friend ofhis steal the stereo out of his mother’s place. “You done got home like a day ago!” Jayceon hissed. “Why the fuck you callin’ the law for? They coulda grabbed both of you.”
Rodney had joined them and put a hand to the parolee’s shoulder. “They didn’t grab you. You didn’t have any outstanding warrants. That buddy of yours didn’t snitch on you for nothin’. But you filed a statement, brother. You gave them your government name. And now they got your girl’s address as your last known. Next time they come looking for you, guess where they’ll show up.”
Three days later, the mech at his halfway house had been doing drug scans on all the residents. You didn’t need cyberized parts to know what bloodshot eyes meant, and he booked it. He’d been planning a life on the move, following the migrant train somewhere else, a next-generation Exoduster, but just as he was preparing to leave, they found him at his girlfriend’s place.
You catch how quickly they start coming back with bloody fingertips, and you remember that their reality is not yours; they stayed, were forced to, had come from other places to get here. Their parents, the Exodusters, their grandparents, they too had bloody fingertips, so that if they all put their hands to the wall of this country’s history, one would find a single, uninterrupted bloodsmear, inclined inexorably toward oblivion.
Linc lay on the hood of a stripped car set up on cement blocks.
Kendrick’s legs dangled over a pile of metal crates to the beat of the reggaeton coming from Michael’s speakers. Everyone else sat or stood or lay, angled in repose, against a block of wood or metal or plastic, searching for shadows, smelling of sweat and menthol. Michael worked inside the bunker, its massive doors wide open, smudged plastic windows, rusted hinges, his truck a dusky mammoth behind him. Linc knew, without looking away from the sky, that Sydney wasn’t with them. The last time they’d seen each other, he’d had Bugs’s blood on his shirt and the few words she had spoken had taken knives to her throat. He wasn’t ready to see her again.
“All your favorite rappers eat booty,” she had told him one time. They were sitting on the stoop of an abandoned house, and they had blankets wrapped around them and beanies tugged tight over their ears. She looked like an insect curled in on itself, tufts of hair poking out like fat, ghostly red fingers on her forehead. “You say you don’t, it’s ’cause you’re a kid. Just wait. Day’s gonna come when eatin’ the booty is like eatin’ the box.”
“You’re gross,” he had told her.
“You’ll walk up to a girl and tell her you’re down to suck a fart out her butt.”
He sputtered, chuckling and protesting at the same time.
“Like when dudes used to walk up, all cool and shit, and tell a woman ‘you’re so fine, I’d drink your bathwater.’” She looked at him, eyebrow arched all the way into her beanie. “That shit is gross. To drink a motherfucker’s bathwater? Now, that shit is disgusting.”
“More disgusting than a fart?” She had turned into a sibling, a piece of family, because who else could you talk to about farts.
“Yes, man. The fart? It’s like a bong hit. You suck a fart out your woman’s butt, it’ll change your whole relationship.”
He shook his head, put on the frowniest frown he could manage. “Nah, I’m good.”
“Used to be trendy. It’ll start trending again. But if you start now, you’ll be the hipster of eatin’ ass.”
“The original ass-eater.” A bark of a laugh. “That should be a T-shirt. O.G.A.E. Original gangsta ass-eater.”
Suddenly, he stood over a pile of bricks, fishing through the bats for some gold with Bugs working not too far off. “Yeah, man,” Linc is telling Bugs from behind his bandanna. “Eat the ass and it’ll change your whole relationship.” Bugs tried to maintain his rhythm, but his hammer strokes hiccupped. “I mean, how old are you, Bugs? Really.”
“—teen.”
“Exactly.” Clink. Scrape. Scrape. Clink. “I remember, I was in the car.” He huffed while he spoke, words like train cars between hammer swings. “I was seven, eight. I’m riding a burgundy Mercury Tracer. And it’s my brother, Jake, and a friend of his.” Clink. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. “And a homeboy from back then, Juicy. And they was talking about eatin’ pussy. And I was like ‘euck, that’s gross; that’s disgusting; that’s nasty; ugh, who eats pussy?’” A forearm across the forehead, dirty sweat like a menace on his eyelids. “Turns around, ‘man, how old are you?’ ‘Ten.’ My lyin’ ass. ‘Man, please, shut the fuck up. When you get to our age’—they were twenty-five, twenty-six—‘when you get to our age, you’ll be eatin’ ass.’” Bugs is trying not to chuckle. “EATIN’ ASS?! I’m screaming in the car ‘EATIN’ ASS? WHAT?! Y’ALL EAT PUSSY AND ASS?! Oh, let me out.” He put his hand to his stomach and swayed back and forth over his hammer. “I’m never drinkin’ after y’all again. Don’t pass me a blunt no more. This and that, this and that.” He propped his hammer beneath him. Leaned on it. “Nigga. They was right.”
