The Swing Voter of Staten Island (4 page)

“And by then what does it matter?” Mallory added, still holding Oric’s hand as they got up and marched onward.

O
ric’s mental limitations did not extend to his sense of love or grief. The Carnivals’ adopted and orphaned son continued weeping over his “dead brothers” as they headed down the middle of empty streets, passing abandoned and damaged buildings. By late afternoon, when they had crossed a desolate intersection marked
Ditmas Avenue
, they came to the outskirts of a new neighborhood that bore the sign,
BEN HUR
.

Moving into the northern end of Bensonhurst, they approached a battery of a dozen or so older blue-haired women and six male amputees working in the street. Some of the crew were digging with shovels. Others were stooped on their knees upon squares of cardboard. Each person was an arm’s reach from the next. They moved in a straight line at their own slow pace, scooping sand into wheelbarrows.

“What the hell is this?” Uli asked.

“Sandstorms,” Mallory replied. “They hit about twice a month this time of year. The locals dig them out—refundable sand.”

The four bus refugees stumbled past as the locals harvested the coarse brown sand dropped during the last storm.

“You should get your children to help you,” Uli suggested to one lady who seemed to be the group leader.

“Fuck off!” she barked.

“Didn’t no one tell you bout the epidemic?” the bus driver asked when they were out of earshot.

“What epidemic?”

“The EGGS epidemic,” the driver said. “Something in the ground water messed up their plumbing.”

“Roughly one-third of all women of child-bearing age died within the first five years of coming here,” Mallory chimed in as they labored along down the street.

MY JAW’S SORE
, announced the canary-yellow T-shirt of a brightly lipsticked woman they came upon who appeared to be a malnourished hooker. She was leaning invitingly from the window of a tenement on New Utrecht Avenue, though she wasn’t much to look at.

Uli heard an emaciated man on a corner chanting in what sounded like Spanish, “Sí … sí …” Then he realized the scary creature was actually hustling something. “What exactly is c-c?” he asked the driver.

“There are two main drugs here: choke, which you smoke, and croak, which you shoot or swallow. Pigger gangsters control croak because Underwood grabs it from JFK.”

“What other drugs are shipped out here?”

“Aside from painkillers and sleeping pills, one of the main drugs of choice is methadone. A lot is sent in.”

“Is choke shipped in?”

“No, it’s made from indigenous plants—pot, peyote, what have you. Crappers handle the choke production in Hoboken. They harvest fields of it across from Manhattan, using the river for irrigation.”

Lapsing back into silence, Uli smelled a foul odor and realized it was coming from Oric. He sped up a little and walked with Mallory, the other two trailing behind.

“You know that guy chasing us in Flatlands?” Mallory said after a while.

“What about him?”

“Did he look familiar to you?”

“Yeah, he looked like him,” Uli said, tipping his head toward Oric.

“Did that couple, the Carnivals, seem odd to you?” she asked.

“Everything here seems odd to me. Do you think they abducted Oric?”

“Why would anyone abduct a mentally retarded man?” she asked. Uli shrugged. “In any event, there’s a city-run home for the mentally impaired out in Willowbrook, Staten Island.”

“Maybe we can drop him off,” Uli suggested.

They began to hear lively carousing in the distance. A group of people were gathered around an energetic band that consisted of two youths drumming on upside-down spackle buckets, accompanied by various homemade wind and string instruments. Beautiful women twirled like dervishes with equally handsome guys. Half a block further down, a group of older men standing around a barrel filled with greenish flames was sucking on stinky cigars. A vendor was turning chunks of skewered meats over a small flame. A sign on his cart said,
GB-ways!
Smelly, oil-bearing smoke trailed down the block. Oric paused at the food stand.

“Come on,” the one-armed bus driver said, and led everyone into a small empty shop that had a large rickety table with a row of grills in the center. Against the wall was a stack of old milk crates. He went up to the worn wooden counter where there was a large can of old soup spoons, along with napkins and four plastic squirt bottles, each with a different color paste inside.

The driver took a crate and dropped it on the floor at the table’s edge. Everyone followed him, taking napkins and spoons. A small Asian woman with the face of a bat appeared at the rear door smoking a corncob pipe.

“One-stamp size,” the driver said, holding up his index finger for emphasis. Uli saw that there was only one item on the menu; its size was determined by the price. The woman disappeared into the back, presumably the kitchen.

Several minutes later, the woman reappeared wearing oven gloves and carrying an old pot filled with flat noodles in steaming water, which she carefully placed on the grill. Underneath she slid a small can of some sort of gel. She lit the Sterno can with a match, creating a small but persistent blue flame.

A boy who appeared to be her son followed her out with a cardboard box containing raw vegetables and several dull knives. He returned to the rear room and came back with a tray of sizzling chunks of meat, which he dumped into the boiling pot.

“Food here don’t make you sick,” the driver commented, “but you got to work a little.” Since he had only the one arm, he instructed Uli to chop up the browning celery and wilted carrots. Mallory was told to dice an onion the size of a small cantaloupe and Oric was given the task of shredding lettuce, cabbage, and basil leaves. Everyone dumped their sectioned vegetables into the bubbling pot.

The driver picked up a bright red squirt container and was about to squeeze it into the pot when Mallory said she didn’t like it spicy and that everyone had the right to season their own bowl.

“Fine,” the driver said, putting down the hot sauce.

When the flame in the can finally burned out, Mallory began doling out hearty bowls of soup. Everyone quietly slurped down their food. Oric and the driver had another two bowls. The driver and Mallory both said they were getting low on cash, so each of them pulled out a quarter- stamp. Uli made up the difference with a half-stamp, which they paid to the lady. Then, tiredly, they resumed walking.

The sun began to set about ten minutes later, when Mallory spotted the silhouette of a tall man with extraordinarily wide hips wearing a skipper’s cap—a bus dispatcher. The official stood like a statue before the only illuminated building on the block. When Mallory asked if he knew when the next bus was coming, she was told that some driver just had his bus hijacked.

“His passengers were hung by the neck,” the dispatcher said, “so all bus service is being suspended in southern Brooklyn until morning.”

“They only hung two folks over in Borough Park,” clarified the driver as he slowly approached. “That was my bus.”

“Sorry to hear it. No more buses or cabs neither tonight,” the dispatcher replied flatly. “Best chance you have is bedding down right here.” He pointed his thumb behind him at a run-down building with an old sign that read,
HOTEL BEDMILL
. “He has several rooms available, and cause of your tragedy he’ll probably cut the price.”

Mallory led the little group inside a dim, paint-peeled lobby where several questionable characters sat on crates in the corner like human mushrooms. A large bug-eyed man wearing an old derby was sitting at a counter next to a wood-burning stove, listening to the radio.

“Half a stamp per night. You can do two per room,” the clerk said. Everyone started digging through their pockets.

“Give me something quiet,” the driver said, slapping a half-stamp on the worn-down counter top. The clerk gave him a towel and explained that the bathroom was in the hallway. “Checkout’s at 9 a.m. sharp.”

“You snore, boy?” the driver asked Oric, who was leaning up against him at the counter. The heavyset man shook his head and farted. The driver asked for a second towel.

Mallory politely asked if Uli could spare some cash.

“This is it.” He held up his last half-stamp.

“I thought I’d be back home by late this afternoon, or I woulda … All I have is a quarter-stamp,” she said. “Want to share?’

“Do you snore or fart?” he half-joked.

“If I do, my husband never told me about it,” she replied. “Then again, he was usually sleeping with some underage, overweight assistant.”

Uli put his half-stamp down and said, “Keep your cash and buy me coffee tomorrow.”

The clerk handed him a key and two towels.

They marched up two flights of steps and down a corridor filled with various creaks and bangs coming from the rooms they passed, until they located their door. Inside they found a narrow, ancient bed with a ridiculously springy mattress.

Feeling sore all over, Uli didn’t want to sleep on the filthy floor, especially considering he had paid for the room. Before he could prepare some suitable compromise, Mallory kicked off her shoes, unbuttoned her shirt, and said, “You want the wall or the outside?”

“Either’s fine,” Uli replied gratefully.

She stripped down to her bra and panties and brushed an accumulation of sand off the bed. Then she jumped on the mattress, pulling a threadbare sheet over her. For a moment there was an awkward silence as each of them listened to the other’s slow breaths. Uli tried once again to remember anything about his past, but all he could think of was his assassin’s mantra—
Walk to Sutphin Boulevard, catch the Q28 …
It was driving him nuts.

“So how’d you like your first day in Nevada?” she finally murmured with her back to him.

“Carnival and his wife or whoever that couple was, they didn’t look black to you?”

“No, the light was just playing tricks on you,” she answered with a yawn.

“How did a national refugee camp turn into this polarized prison yard?”

“During the first year they talked about building a monorail connecting us to Vegas. Hell, we could even make calls off the reservation. Then, while monitoring phone calls, they discovered they had accidentally shipped half a dozen different terrorist cells here, but they didn’t know exactly who or where they were. The attorney general’s explanation was that the baby
was
the bathwater. He eventually used it as the basis to end our right to communicate with the outside world until they could figure out who the bad guys were.”

“How did they get professionals out here? Doctors, lawyers, and so on?”

“A.S.—Alternate Service volunteers.”

“Alternate Service?”

“The government allowed conscientious objectors to serve here instead of Vietnam.”

A moment later, now much more at ease, Uli yawned. Within ten minutes they were both fast asleep.

The strange nude woman was holding his naked body so tight that he had stopped trembling and was starting to sweat. Although she was beautiful and he sensed that she liked him, she was reluctant to be intimate. Lying in her arms, he was wildly attracted to her. They were watching some strange wild animals in the darkness. He wasn’t sure what the creatures were doing, but while watching them, he felt himself slipping and thrusting into this tall beautiful woman.

Awakening, Uli found he had become intimate with Mallory—though she wasn’t the woman from his dream. He was grasping her thighs and slamming himself against her while she slept.

“Oh god!” she gasped. Before he could apologize, she reached around, clutching his hips, clawing his ass cheeks, and pulled him into her. Her head turned and their lips locked together. She was plunging her tongue into his mouth. He unclasped her bra as she pulled off his boxers, then he tugged off her panties and they pressed on feverishly.

“No … I don’t want you to get pregnant,” he muttered, remembering that it could be a death sentence in this strange place.

“My tubes were tied long ago.”

They spent the next hour screwing. There was something incredible about this woman, even though he couldn’t recall ever having sex before. Finally, in unison, they trembled into a shivering orgasm. Uli knew he probably wasn’t a virgin, yet he couldn’t imagine a more intense and joyful experience. Holding each other tightly, they fell fast asleep.

10/28/80

W
alk to Sutphin
, Uli thought as soon as he woke up,
catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17 and take it to—
He couldn’t remember where. Opening his eyes, he saw that Mallory had already dressed and left the dank room. After using the communal bathroom for a quick sink-bath, Uli dressed and went down to the shabby lobby. There, surrounded by prematurely old retirees and a bizarre number of amputees, he found Mallory sitting next to two gawking seniors, feverishly working on her endless election form.

“I would’ve woken you up with a frothy cappuccino,” she said without looking up, “but they don’t have room service here at the Bad Smell.”

“That’s Bedmill!” shouted the same bulbous clerk who had checked them in the night before.

Oric and the driver appeared moments later, before either Mallory or Uli could so much as mention last night’s indiscretion.

“If you’re all heading up to Manhattan, the nearest bus stop is over in south Sunset Park,” the driver offered. “It’s not too close, so we should probably get started.”

The four spent the next twenty minutes hiking alongside the drab semi-occupied, Soviet-style projects of New Utrecht Avenue, which grew increasingly desolate. At one demolished intersection there was evidence of a major gun battle. Uli couldn’t tell if it was from an old military training exercise or a recent gang conflict.

Mallory, who was walking ahead of the others, abruptly froze and seemed to stare up at the blue sky. Uli saw, however, that her eyes were closed. She was smelling the air. Without warning, she bolted full force down an empty street.

“Hey!” the driver shouted.

Fearing that she was in some kind of danger, Uli dashed after her. He seized a rusty pipe on the ground in case he needed a weapon. Mallory came to a dead halt roughly two blocks away, before a sandy field that looked like it had once been the parking lot for an old factory of some kind. There, she dropped to her knees as if she were about to be executed. Uli looked up, trying to spot the enemy, but the vast industrial complex was eerily deserted.

“What’s going on?” he cried out.

She signaled over to him frantically, instructing him to back away. He approached timidly, nonetheless, trying to follow her sight line. That was when he spotted it, about ten feet away, hopping slowly toward her. It was a small kangaroo, possibly the joey she had lost yesterday. It was unlikely that the baby marsupial could have hopped all the way to this neighborhood without being attacked by dogs or hit by solarcars, yet the animal seemed to know Mallory. Uli watched as it tentatively sniffed her face. She picked it up and set it snugly into her bag.

“What the hell is that?” Uli asked, pointing to the three stone smoke stacks rising from a long, flat building that looked like some kind of plant. A hooded conveyor belt angled out of it in the distance.

“It was modeled after a famous steel mill in Leningrad and used for battlefield simulation.”

Moments later they returned to New Utrecht Avenue, where Oric and the bus driver were waiting for them. They resumed walking.

“Is there any connection between these various military training zones?” Uli asked.

“I think they were built as three different scenarios,” answered Mallory. “The Japanese architecture is back that way, and the Soviet structures are clumped here in western Brooklyn. Manhattan is largely Germanic.”

“What about Bronx and Queens?”

“There were no rivers or swamps back then, so they were both long stretches of land. The Air Force did a lot of bombardment there. Because the area was so heavily blitzed, it had to be redeveloped later on from the ground up. So for the most part, those pricks got all the best houses.”

“Where are the newest houses?”

“The newest are here—they were hastily built when we were still coming in—but the the best ones are up in Queens. They were built in the fall of ’71.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“Construction workers were still working when we arrived. We struck up friendships with some of them when we got here, and they told us all about their work.”

“How about Staten Island?”

“They have gorgeous houses over there along the shoreline. People believe they were meant for Feedmore administrators and the military. Proof that they had intended to stay and oversee Rescue City.”

“And when were those built?”

“That’s the funny thing. The workmen claimed they were built during the first wave of construction in ’71, but after the flooding, when the water went back down and some of the houses collapsed, we found newspapers behind the walls and in the floorboards that were dated from as early as 1968.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Manhattan was hit in 1970—why would they build housing
before
the bombing?”

“Maybe they needed an administration center back then.”

“I suppose.”

“So when the administrators and military pulled out, who moved in?”

“Pigger officials mainly, but that didn’t last too long. When the sewer got blocked and the area flooded, the homes became uninhabitable, even after it drained. The rest of the borough is strictly Third World. I stayed down there for a while after Shub came to power …”

The first sign of Sunset Park was a food stand where for a sixteenth-stamp the driver bought a piece of deep-fried dough covered in powdered sugar—a donut without a hole. Although Oric and the others watched him eat, no one else ordered anything.

After another block they passed a strip mall of small businesses: a body-art parlor called Tattoo You; a barber shop, Unkindest Kuts; a homemade brewery, Fine Fermentations; and a diner called Hamburgeriffic. Lastly, there was a Chinese takeout place, operated by two scantily clad Asian women, entitled Food Ho’s.

“They got awful versions of every major cuisine here,” Mallory told Uli.

If there was a sauce covering their beefy bones, Uli thought, it’d be chocolaty, curried, MSG’d, chilied, oreganoed, all under a milky base. Everyone seemed a bit ethnically homogenized. All the blacks he’d seen were fairly light-skinned. Whites looked tanned. Asian eyes appeared relatively oval. If any details established clear heritage, it was the styles of dress and the haircuts, which varied wildly from person to person. Caesars, crew cuts, dreadlocks, ricebowls, as well as age-old mullets all defined individual cultures more clearly than skin tone.

Throughout this area Uli spotted betting parlors. In addition to the Council-operated OTDs—off-track dog races—Uli saw slot machine and blackjack parlors, not to mention scratch-and-match tickets for sale everywhere.

“This place has a serious gambling problem,” Uli observed.

“The five mob families that ran things in the old city had wiseguys who came here and divided up everything,” the driver imparted as they marched westward.

“Did you lose your arm in Vietnam?” Uli asked. The two of them were walking ahead of Mallory and Oric.

“Why, you find one there?” the driver countered. When Uli didn’t laugh, he said, “About eight years ago I got into an alley fight and shanked some dude.”

“Must’ve been a heck of a fight,” Uli muttered.

The bus driver led the tired group to an establishment with a sign that read,
SIXTEENTH-STAMP STORE
. The driver and Oric entered.

Next door was the Sunset Park Crapper headquarters. Mallory dashed inside. Explaining her vital mission and dire situation, she was able to appropriate ten stamps for official business. Then she entered the general store and surveyed the largely addictive impulse items lining the shelves. Candy, mentholated cigarettes, and various liquors—all of which fit into sample-sized wrappers or narrow containers so they could be sold for a sixteenth-stamp apiece. Mallory purchased fruit-named soft drinks for everybody.

As Uli sipped his bright pink “strawberry” beverage out front, a beat-up minivan screeched to a halt and the driver hastily tossed out a small bundle of the
Daily Posted New York Times.

Uli surveyed the headlines:
Big Antiwar Rally Today
. A smaller article announced, A
ntiwar Folksinger Fillip Ocks Hangs Self in Rockaway, CIA Involvement Strongly Suspected.

Uli read the latest listing of crimes and their terrorist links. Like in the issue he had read on the bus, they were all supplied by nameless sources. A truck bomb had blown up in Rego Park, killing eighteen. Members of the Shining Path were suspected. Six middle-aged women from Howard Beach—who had somehow pissed off members of an extremist cyclist group, the August 30th MassCritters—had been raped and strangled. The Symbionese Liberation Army was suspected of shooting and killing a dozen people in Far Rockaway. According to the paper, the Black Liberation Army had engineered a string of jewelry heists in Staten Island. The list went on.

The single detail that the
Times
failed to mention, Uli noticed, was how these crimes—particularly the violent ones—served each of the revolutionary organizations’ higher ideals. How could raping middle-aged women from Howard Beach help the cause of the notorious August 30th MassCritters? What did the B.L.A. do with cheap bracelets, paste-gem amulets, and imitation diamond tiaras to further its cause of racial equality?

Inexplicably—since there was no official communication between the residents of Rescue City and the rest of the world—the newspaper also included a lively page of national and international news. One misspelled headline screamed,
Reagan Orders Secret Bombing of Louse and Terroran!
A second article proclaimed,
Religious Cult in Go’on’ya Commits Mass Sewercide.

Uli turned to the sports/politics page:

WEEKLY CITYWIDE ELECTION RESULTS

MANHATTAN:

Total Pigger districts: 1

Total Crappers districts: 9

No change from last election

STATEN ISLAND:

Total Pigger districts: 0

Total Crapper districts: 0

Total Independent districts (Verdant League): 10

No change from last election

THE BRONX:

Total Pigger districts: 9

Total Crapper districts: 1

No change from last election

BROOKLYN:

Greenpoint (Pigger) invaded

2,124 Crappers, 2,122 Piggers

Outcome: Crapper

Councilman Guido Basilicata (P) removed

Councilman Antonia Basilicata (C) reelected

Total Pigger districts: 2

Total Crapper districts: 18

One change from last election

QUEENS:

Far Rockaway (Pigger) invaded

2,438 Crappers, 2,435 Piggers

Outcome: Crapper

Councilman Ted Kostiyan (P) removed

Councilwoman Carmen D. Sapio (C) reelected

Howard Beach (Pigger) invaded

1,335 Crappers, 1,332 Piggers

Outcome: Crapper

Councilman Newton Underwood* (P) removed

Councilman Dwight Valone (C) elected Total Pigger districts: 16

Total Crapper districts: 4

Two changes from last election

*Former President of the City Council

The Crappers had won in both Howard Beach and Far Rockaway by only three votes. And in Greenpoint, they had beaten the Piggers by two votes. All were paper-thin victories. Yet the number of people killed in those three districts nearly mimicked the figures that Oric had been nervously barking out during the previous day’s trip through Brooklyn.

The newspaper report set Uli’s thoughts into a paranoid tailspin: If that cross-shaped object buried in the back of Oric’s shaggy-haired skull was harnessing the man’s psychic abilities so he could predict the slim margins of Pigger victories, then the late Jim Carnival—the overzealous Crapper—could travel into the designated neighborhoods and “correct” the Pigger constituencies, disguising the casualties as typical crimes, thus altering the outcome of the local elections.

And if Oric did have special abilities, this potentially answered the question of why the Flatlands pursuer had been coming after them.

Uli reentered the sixteenth-stamp store and discreetly guided Oric out to the street, then delicately asked, “What exactly does
correction
mean?”

Oric looked at Uli strangely. Without warning, the man bent over and grabbed Uli around the waist and playfully pulled him down.

“What are you doing, Oric?” Uli said, shoving him away. “Stop it!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let go,” Oric replied.

“Listen to me,” Uli tried to regain the challenged man’s attention, “what does
correction
mean?”

Oric paused a moment, then pointed his chubby index finger at Uli and said,
“Bam!”

“What’s going on here?” Mallory asked as she came out of the store, seeing the incompetent man shooting off an imaginary pistol. While she fed the baby kangaroo a succession of celery stalks she had just purchased, Uli filled her in on his little theory.

Taking a deep breath, she said, “The majority of this city is registered as Crappers, yet through strategic invasions and pork-barrel patronage, the Piggies under Shub have managed to stay in charge for the past decade.”

Uli considered this, then asked, “Why are you sharing this with me?”