Silence sizzled in the heat between them, then their shoulders shook with laughter. As they got back to work, Linc said over his shoulder, thinking of Sydney, “You should try it, change your whole relationship; ten years from now, girl gets up, you’ll be sniffin’ her chair,” knowing that this was what older brothers said to their younger siblings, the joke, the tease, the lesson, hoping somewhere in it Bugs would notice that he’d begun to matter to Linc, that he’d begun to matter to everyone making music on that site that afternoon. Even Bishop had been shaking his head, chest a-rumble with quiet mirth. Didn’t matter that the whole story was a lie. Jake had not been alive to tell him all of that.
He snapped awake to the smell of burning, and snatched his elbow from the bit of plastic the rot had gotten to. But the odor drifted to him from inside the bunker, and Linc shifted, squinted, and saw that the piece of metal on which Michael worked now had flesh attached to it. A light-skinned man sat in his barbershop chair with his arm out on a slab of metal while Michael turned it over and put his tools to it. Sparks sprayed in an arc, Michael having turned from barber to tattooist to mechanic. The man in the chair was saying something, a smile playing on his lips, and Michael looked as though he were smiling too, but everyone saw them, even as they pretended not to. The augment in the chair didn’t seem to notice how some of the stackers eyed the man’s hammer or the way they glanced at each other, information passing with each brief flit of the eye until diagrams had been drawn and coordinates mapped, a cartography written out with the blood of their friend whose death hung like a spiderweb among them, eager to stuff their throats if they moved.
“I mean, there’s no union or anything yet, it’s all just comin’ together,” the augment told Michael. “We find work where we can get it. Stacking’s good stuff and we can go on all day, but enough guys get to a site, and it’s gone in an hour, you know? Some of us found work repairing the air-filtration center, you know the one going up in Newhallville? They’re tryna dome up West Rock, get it connected with Westville, then patch up the Ivy Quarter. I mean, with all these kids coming in, they can’t get it done fast enough. And you got all this wildlife to clear out, and then the municipality with the zoning and all that, can you imagine what it was like before? Just empty houses and trees everywhere? That’s maybe what I should do next. Is maybe find some work clearing forest.”
Linc sat up on the car, one knee up, intently watching everything but the augment.
The sizzling stopped, and Michael lifted his mask.
“How much I owe you?” the augment asked, flexing his repaired wrist, turning his forearm over and back once Michael had scrubbed away the char.
“Uh, just the wrist? Sixty.”
He raised his finger, waiting for Michael to bring his machine.
Michael shrugged an apology. “We only take cash here. Don’t get a lot of augments really.” At all.
“Dang.” The guy reached into his back pocket, unfolded some bills, reached into the others. “This is all I got. How do we work out the rest?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just, you know, bring cash next time.”
A nervous smile that Michael did not return, could not because he was already walking away. The augment turned to grab his hammer and found that it was gone. Scraping filled the air, and he saw one of the stackers drag it away around the corner of another building. “Hey!” He darted down the street, heard the roar of a motorbike grow more and more distant, and by the time he finished running, he realized how silent it had become. The empty houses lining Ella T Grasso Boulevard stared down on him from atop their hills. Small drifts of snow dotted footpaths. Wooden fences, white paint chipped, hung open at the gate. Water gurgled neatly along the gutter. Farther down, project towers sprung up, and he wandered, peeking around building corners for any trace of the kids who’d been hanging around the Body Shop. A barrier blocked the end of the boulevard where it connected to Whalley Avenue.
The place held the silence of the post-apocalypse.
He flexed his wrist and forearm, newly repaired, then something swift and small like a brick thundered into the small of his back, pitching him forward. He writhed on the ground, gritting his teeth against the pain, turned when he heard footsteps tap against puddles of melted snow. Two bodies, slim, filled the mouth of the alley, the sunlight turning them to wraiths. A hammer scraped along the ground, and he squirmed around to see someone walking toward him from the alley’s other end.
“Guys, guys.” Before he could offer them any of what lay stuffed inside his pockets, the first hammerhead swung down, smashing his wrist. Before the scream had run out of air, another blow, this one to his ribs, and so they came down until every limb was broken, and his face had been caved in completely.
Linc had the brush in his hand and was a long time staring at the horse’s flank before he remembered where he was and that he was supposed to be doing something with that brush. It was the draft that woke him out of his day-sleep. Someone had slid a door open nearby or the wind had bust open a window or maybe some piece of wood somewhere had gotten loose. He knew better than to look for Bugs or even to suspect the kid’s ghost leaving footsteps in the small snowdrifts outside. But he knew that another flesh-and-blood person had entered the stables, raised the temperature of the place.
When Linc turned and saw the reporter, she had a pitying look on her face, like she wanted to help. But Linc turned his back to her and resumed scrubbing his dun-colored horse. And she knew then that shutting the fuck up was exactly what Linc wanted her to do.
So she watched him while he worked his way up and down the stalls, feeding the horses, brushing them down. The others liked to talk to the horses, even Bugs. And Linc had watched it change them. Mercedes started out speaking conspiracy with her horse, furtive Puerto Rican Spanish while she cut her eyes at whoever she was gossiping about. But other times, Linc would catch her just making conversation with the beast like she was telling it a story about what what was like when or who did what in front of whom and how things weren’t set right until X did Y with Z. Whether or not there was violence in the stories or danger, there was always comedy. Maybe Mercedes had the horse convinced she was some master storyteller, best out of them if they all started from the same place, language-wise. Timeica talked to her horses like they were infant sisters. She babied them and met them at their impulses, found them carrots or, if she were riding, leaned down to murmur in the horse’s ear instead of speaking through the reins. The Atlanta in Kendrick showed up more in his voice when he talked to his horse, and Jayceon, maybe thinking this made him cool or mysterious, effected a drawl that migrated from Appalachia to West Texas and all points in-between. Sydney rarely spoke to the horses she cared for when it was her turn to do the caring. She just hummed. It was a Morse Code sort of humming, short sounds and long, stretched-out ones. Musical notes. But the horses seemed to understand them well enough, because they did whatever she wanted.
But Linc hadn’t seen Sydney since the night Bugs got killed. Maybe she was avoiding Linc. Maybe he made it too easy.
It came time to shovel the shit and bring it to the compost, and that was when he realized he needed to be two people. He couldn’t haul the horseshit and walk the horses at the same time, so when he had put away his brush and washcloth and had rolled up some of his hose, he pushed a wheelbarrow into the main pathway, leaned on it, and inclined his head toward the stalls.
“You wanna take ’em for a walk while I clean the shit out?”
She seemed so grateful to be included it almost made Linc rescind the offer. It would take too much effort to tell her that she wasn’t participating in his grief, that there wasn’t any grief to begin with, not more than what there was before Bugs, before even arriving in New Haven, that when it came to grief sometimes you ran up the bill and after a while the number just got meaningless. No, she was just taking the horses for a walk. That’s all.
The “vacuum,” as some of the stackers liked to call it, was out by the back of the barn, away from the fence so that the people who came to watch could avoid the worst of the smell. But that meant having an unabated view of the reporter as she brought the horses out for their early-spring circuits. Her breath clouded before her face. He turned away before he had time to think her pretty. He’d never forgive himself if he got to that place. So he wheeled the barrow over to where a large box-like device rose from the ground, coming up to his torso. He unhooked and unfurled an accordion duct hose from the green box’s side, positioned its end just over the lip of the shit cart, and flicked a switch up on the box’s console. Bugs had made the mistake of flicking it down one time, and the storm had been quick but ruthless, and he’d run into the crowd of them in the barn screaming, almost weeping, covered in shit that the composter had decided to spray over him rather than inhale for its own digestion.
He shook Bugs out of his head while the hose worked to clean the cart.
His rhythms meant that they were always crossing paths at different points, him reentering the barn just as she was coming out with a horse, him leaving while she was finishing up a circuit, their arrivals and departures staggered so that Linc wouldn’t have to talk to her. And maybe a part of her clocked this, because she fell in line with it and kept the peace. Until Linc had gotten the last of the horseshit into the composter and she’d come back out, even though she didn’t have a horse to walk. She halfway blocked his path and had her arms folded across her chest, her chin sunk into her neck for warmth.
“We missed you,” she said.
“We.”
She flinched.
Linc let the silence hang between them, but she didn’t give way.
“You should’ve been there.”
He stopped trying to get past her and rose from the cart. “What are you doing?”
“What?”
“This.” He spread his arms to indicate the entirety of his world. “What are you doing here?”
“I … I’m trying to get it right.” Linc knew that wasn’t enough, and he knew that she knew it wasn’t enough, so he waited for more. “I mean, you look at how fast these stables went up. It took us two weeks. If that. And the work you do, stacking. It takes thirty seconds to demolish a home. Half a day to clear away the rubble. If I write about the people who are here already, then maybe … I don’t know. Sometimes, people get to a place and assume nobody’s been here before. And I don’t want that to happen here. That’s why I’m writing about you all and about the horses and the home you’ve made for yourselves.”
Linc just looked at her. He said nothing and he didn’t let his face show her any kind of feeling as she withered under his gaze.
“It’s not my fault, okay?” Something had snapped in her, like a curtain rod. “I can’t get rid of being white. And my guilt is useless if I can’t do something with it. So I write. I educate. I’m able to go into spaces others can’t, and I can walk in and walk back out with these stories that I can show to other people. And they can read these stories and know that these people who look nothing like them are just as human. I have that power. I can do that. I can be of service. How does me doing that get Bugs killed?”
Linc made to run her over and she glided out of the way to let him pass through the open doors. He settled the wheelbarrow in a corner, then found an upended bucket to sit on.
“When you write down what we say, how do you spell it?”
“Spell it?”
“Nigga. How do you write it?”
