2028, p.14
2028, page 14
Sal lit a cigarette and grabbed up a beer from the cooler. “So, you spent some time talking with Silvia Morales. What about?”
“About them all joining forces on a national sort of thing. Flexing our muscles and showing the Kenton-types, we’re a force not to fuck with.”
Elise put away her nail file. “Our? ... We? What you talkin’ about, girl? You didn’t go out and join them or something.”
“Yeah. I did. Like I said...We need to show our strength. Together. I told them I could help...We could help..maybe offer up some muscle. I believe it’s time, hunh? Don’t you?
“Starting with Stanley Saunders,” Sal mused from a distance.
Karen went to him and placed her hand on his arm. “So, Sal. You’re game for this?”
He took a long thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “Maybe. To offer up some muscle, yeah. And some hardware, ammo, whatever. Meet force with force, like you say.”
“You shittin’ me, boy?” Elise said. “Join up with the Neo-Pubs? I thought we weren’t political. We stick to our own problems.”
“Elle, they killed fifteen innocent people. In cold blood.”
“And that’s not what we do? Sometimes?” Elise said.
“We never do innocent people, Elle. Not like that—out in the open. No,” Sal said. “So, Kar. You think your boy Saunders was behind this?”
“He’s not ‘my boy’, Sal. And yeah, I know he was behind it. He has wet dreams about that kind of shit. Him and Randy Montefiore.”
“Not to mention that bitch, Kenton, either,” Elise added.
Sal took it more into consideration. “Okay,” he finally said. “I need to talk to some people first.”
Elise heaved a big sigh of relent. “I guess I better call my uncle, then.”
“Yeah, you should, Elle,” Sal agreed. “And then, I think we should send Stanley Saunders a message.”
14
The Message
June 15
S
tanley Saunders concentrated on the paperwork about where the 45 arrested protesters had been confined. He had sent seven of them to Guantanamo; seven to Unqutuck; four to Arapaho, the new, smaller gulag in Montana; nine to Montehaute deep in the lower Colorado Rockies; eight to Qatapica, in the endless, featureless South Texas plains; and ten, those with names that had sounded Mexican or Hispanic in any way, to over-crowded Dalaxuma for Sheriff Jeff to deal with. Each of the gulags had their distinctive brand of abuse, and he prided himself on such a creative mix and match.
He reached absently into the Ken’s Deli lunch bag delivered a few minutes minutes before and lifted out his usual liverwurst sandwich. Even if he had noticed his sandwich was a tad weightier than usual, it would have pleased him—he savored his liverwurst mounded high between the slices of rye. He marked something on one of the forms then bit wide into his lunch. He felt something soft, then hard, within the glob of meat filling his mouth. A chicken bone? Those fucking idiot Mexicans that packed the sandwiches at the deli!
He pulled back the top slice of rye to pick out any more bone that might have been left in the meat. They weren’t chicken bones. They were human fingers, looking like three small, calcified turds covered with flecks of liverwurst. He choked and spit out the contents in his mouth. Horrified by the finger emerging from the regurgitated meat, he flung the sandwich down. As it hit the papers on his desk, the two other fingers and a thumb flopped out with the splatter of the liverwurst. The thick, horny nails were dull black and brown. “Fucking SHIT!” he gasped in a choke, “SHIT!” He shot desperately from his seat and backed away terrorized, staring wide-eyed at the severed digits as if they might have been rattlesnakes. “Fuck shit!” he shouted out.
His secretary rushed in. “Stan! What’s the matt—“ she shrieked when she saw the one of the fingers, then tented her hands against her face. She noticed the other two and the thumb packed into the meat and shrieked again.
“Joan!” he shouted, as though she wasn’t standing just three feet away from him. “Joan!”
“What?” She shouted as loudly, also mesmerized in terror by the crusty, dry fingers dappled in liverwurst.
“Pick that up!” he ordered her. “Get rid of it!”
“Hell I will, Stan. Shit! I’ll call maintenance.”
“Who the fuck brought this thing in here?”
Joan turned her head away in disgust. “The Ken’s Deli delivery kid. He’s outside waiting for his tip.”
“Get him in here! Now!”
Hands still tented against her nose, Joan dashed from the office. “He’s gone, Stan!” she called back in. “He left.”
“FUCK!” Saunders shouted. A morbid curiosity kept him from averting his eyes from the finger sandwich.
He heard Joan calling up maintenance, as his desk phone rang. He rushed to pick it up. “What!” he shouted into the receiver. “What the fuck is it?”
The voice through the handset was a threatening, low, echoing croak: “That’s One...One.” Then there was the click of a hang-up.
————————————————————————-
Saunders took the afternoon off, but this time it wasn’t to go to Aqueduct Racetrack, or one of his usual, sleazy west side whore houses. Seized with a feeling uncommon to him—the lingering one of dread—he rushed to his apartment down the hall and locked the door. Like a kid who’d just been terrorized by a horror movie, he drew closed the slatted blinds and drapes across his windows to keep the bogeyman out. He needed a drink, maybe many, to calm his shakes.
He heaved a sigh as he laid some lines of coke on his cocktail table, rolled up a ten-dollar bill and sniffed it in. He sunk down into the deep cushions of his living room couch, then arched his head back. He then let out another trembling sigh as he lifted his glass of Scotch on the rocks.
In his bloated remembrance, that split second when his tongue touched the finger, loomed. He imagined the salty, metallic, and chalky taste—how dry and rough it felt, like a small chunk of concrete. Had the seriated old nail scraped against his tongue? Or was it against the roof of his mouth? He sensed a dull pricking in both places. He felt a hot swell of fever and tried to position himself on the couch to ward away his lightheadedness. He took another gulp of Scotch.
Surely, he’d seen worse on his trips to the gulags, where body parts abounded. Often, they were set out in the exercise yards as a reminder of what could become of an uncooperative inmate—the same way the heads of medieval brigands might be stuck on pikes on ramparts as a warning. But this hit closer to home; his sanctuary. His mouth. He sipped his scotch again to purge a rise of bile and the finger’s after taste.
He reckoned that the threatening phone call over the secured line could have only come from somewhere inside the building. An inside job! He vowed to hunt down the son of a bitch who did this. Send him off to a gulag to be flayed to the bone. He would seek out the Ken’s Deli delivery boy. He would hold Joan, his secretary, and Herman Cutter, the maintenance man who picked the mess up, to secrecy on the surety of their being sent to a gulag if they told anyone. One thing was for certain: Randy Montefiore and Premier Alexander Kenton would never find out that someone had sent him that God damned finger sandwich.
He took another hefty hit of cocaine, then a desperate pull on his drink to empty the glass. He rose to get another but took a detour to pace his living room like a cat stalking pray, while muttering incessantly about how he would satisfy his revenge. Pacing. It was what he often did to work out his frustrations. He paced for at least an hour, until, exhausted, he slumped like a rag doll to rest his back against the wall, muttering the mantra: “That’s One...One.” until he passed out into the next morning.
————————————————————————-
Claiming he had a fever and another flare-up in his intestinal tract, he avoided having to go back into his office. He went underground—spending two full days tri-angulating his usual haunts: Madame LeBrau’s Palace of Womanly Delights down in Times Square; an unmarked whorehouse in the bowels of Hell’s Kitchen; and Angel Ambrosia’s up in West Harlem. Though the places might have been scroungy, their girls were clean.
Haunted by his visions of crusty old fingers writhing like worms, he’d let himself devolve from his own recognition. He bounced among the three whorehouses like a sluggish, meandering pinball, while interrupting his two-day binge of carnal visits with bouts of drinking anonymously in shadowy bars.
He huddled in a dank Hell’s Kitchen bar, redolent in the stench piss mixed with puke. Twenty-two hours without sleep or food—just tired, wet, sloppy sex with baggy, faceless, middle-aged women. And booze. A lot of cheap booze. He’d sunk down to the level of Chianti poured carelessly from straw-wrapped bottles. He hunched over a sticky old oak bar populated with flies as he sipped from a thickly smudged wine goblet. The wriggling fingers came through the bar mirror straight for his face to gouge out his eyes. He flung his glass at them, winging the elderly bartender in the shoulder.
“You’re cut off, fellah!” he croaked angrily.
Saunders continued to stare wide-eyed at the advancing fingers. “The fuggin’ fingers!” he slurred heavily. “They’re coming for me…agh!” He groped around and found an ashtray to pitch at them. As he did, he lost his balance and crumpled from his stool to the filthy, chipped linoleum floor.
“Go home an’ sleep it off, fuckhead!” a patron barked at him.
“I—I coul’ sen’ you to a gulah, for talkin’ me like tha’!” he grumbled from where he lay balled-up on the floor. “You dunno who yer fuggin’ wi’, here, ya shid-bird!“
“Get the fuck outta my bar, asshole!” the bartender carped angrily at him. “Or I’ll sen’ you to a gulag, alright! Now, get outta here, now!”
“I’m not a snot nosed whimp!” Saunders nearly sobbed, then crawled on all fours toward the door until he was able to stand and stagger out the door to collapse in a nearby alcove.
“Tha’s one...tha’s one...one,” he whispered dryly until he passed out.
————————————————————————-
“You okay, now, baby?”
As Saunders’ vision dimmed into clarity, a rotund, worn-out, dark brown woman’s face filled his view. He lowered his gaze to the wrinkled sacks of her breasts hidden partially by the drooping bodice of a filthy satin slip of no particular color. Horrified that he might have had sex with an old black woman with haggish hair, he tried to skitter himself back against the headboard, until a swell of pain raged through his body.
“No, sweetie, don’t try to move.” Her voice was practiced and smooth.
“Where am I?” he croaked. His jaw felt tight; his lips dry and cracked.
“Why, you’re in Harlem, baby, an’ mamma’s here to take care of you.”
“You’re not my mother,” he replied tightly.
“For tonight, I am.” She showed him a smile. Half her yellowed teeth were missing, and her breath was fetid with the odor of sardine. “An’ you need me.” She reached out to touch his cheek, and he weakly swept her cold, gnarly hand away. He saw his own hand was bloodied and raw on the knuckles.
“Wha’ happened?” He paused to catch his breath only to feel a tightness in his chest. “How long have I been here?”
“Why, you been here two days, hon. An’ I don’ know what happen to you. You jus’ knock on my do’ showin’ up the way you look. Beggin’ fo’ help. So, momma, here, she help you, tha’s all.”
He looked down toward his groin, and saw his shirt was spattered with blood. “Did we...?”
She disdainfully shook her head. “Laud, no! Momma don’ do them sortsa things. Not anymo’” The old bed springs complained in dry squeaks as she shifted her bulk to lumber to a stand. “You wan’ somethin’ ta eat, baby? I got soup cookin’ on the stove.
He breathed in the thick fragrances of fried onion, hot pepper and something sweet that might have been liquorish, relieving the ubiquitous taints of kerosine, old garbage and wet socks. “No. Thank you.” He tried to shift his weight, and this time it seemed easier. He lifted his hand and touched a scab on his cheek. He cringed when he touched below his right eye, which felt tight—swollen shut. He looked out the smeared window of the place and saw it was pitch dark. The timid flame light of the three hurricane lamps ebbed and flowed, casting their timid light over bolts of cloth piled around the room, and an ancient sewing machine. The smell from the many heaps of dirty laundry lying around seemed to smother the air. Momma was in the far corner of the room stirring the soup in the stewpot as if it was a witch’s brew. “What’s your name? Other than ‘Momma’?”
She pondered her answer as she slowed her stirring. “Why, it’s Maribelle. Maribelle Washington.”
“No relation to George, I assu— Agh!,” he groaned in pain as he shifted his weight again.
“Now you stay put, hon, okay? You bin through too much to go hoppin’ about, now.”
Broken as he was, he knew he’d reached a bottom and felt too helpless to move. His inner Dante had showed him the ninth rung of hell and trapped him there. He’d realized he had taught himself enough of a lesson and vowed to get back to his apartment—his world. He’d had enough of this miserable one.
The last however many days had reduced him to powerlessness among these ruins. “I’m tired, woman,” he said as he slipped back down into the comfort of the stinking bedsheets. “It’s best you don’t say anything, now.” His only recourse now was to slide his mind into a state of nothingness until he fell into the relief of sleep.
————————————————————————-
It took him several more days to eat whatever glop Maribelle had forced upon him to feel mended enough to leave her hovel of a room. He grudgingly thanked her without deigning to offer a hug for all her efforts, then hobbled down the two flights of close, creaking stairs, and finally out onto 128th Street and the slim sanity of sunlight. He hailed a battery-powered yellow cab to take him back downtown.
He felt the heat of the battery in the trunk pulsing through the stained Naugahyde of the back seat as he calculated his excuses. He’d tell Randy Montefiore that he had rested enough in his locked apartment during his six-day absence to finally go out for a drink. He’d explain his bloated, raw, wounds off to a bar fight to defend the sublime efforts of Premier Kenton. He reasoned Montefiore would buy that because it had happened twice before. He also resigned to get away from New York, in a few days, if possible, to vacation from all he’d been through. Maybe take a tour of the gulags, starting with Dalaxuma in New Mexico. He was long overdue for a visit with Sheriff Jeff, where they would sit over tequilas and compare uproarious antidotes of prisoner torment.
He finally got back to his apartment over an hour later, as the cabbie had driven slowly to preserve the drain on the battery. He opened the door of his still-darkened apartment to a gush of air-conditioning and a damp funky, stench he didn’t recognize, but assumed was some food he might left out on the kitchen counter. He stooped to pick up the pile of mail and inter-office memos and concentrated on fanning through them as he made his way across his living room to the bar. He placed the stack of mail on the bar and reached for a bottle of decent Scotch.
His stomach clenched tight at the sight of a severed foot on the marble bar top. Its grey, crusted sole facing him. Looming ever larger, it held him a captivity of horror. His hand on the stack of mail dragged it to the floor as he staggered back, then hurled out whatever Maribelle had fed him over the smoked glass top of his cocktail table.
Between his wretches and heaves, he saw a note had slipped out from the stack of mail spread out on the carpet. Written on it in a firm hand:
“That’s Two...Two.”
15
The Soccer Game
July 2
B
y the way the tennis courts at Dalaxuma Gulag were decked out with bunting and Real-America flags, it could have been Independence Day. But in Real-America it had become illegal to celebrate anything relating to the former America, and anyone found doing so risked spending a week as one of PRICE’s guests in a detainment cell. But today had been a cause for celebration because the PRICE Commissar was paying one of his visits. The nets had been removed from the four courts, and soccer goals set up at either end. Armed BlueShirt guards had been posted in higher platforms on the corners of the courts. They kept a furtively watchful eye on the rest of the inmates held within the labyrinth of concertina-wire-fringed fences in the near distance flanked by the vast, open desert.
Saunders, Sheriff Jeff, his grandson, Zach, and a few other dignitaries watched from a raised dais and drank copious amounts of iced tequila in the searing heat as the soccer games were played. In the first heat, the Mexicans had taken on and defeated the Nicaraguans; and then in the next heat, the Venezuelans; then the in final one, the Guatemalans. The Mexican team proved victorious throughout, as favored. Some of the players had lost control of the ball, and collapsed in the dry, wavering, desert-summer heat.
“Man!” Saunders slurred. “This is great entertainment, Jeff. Look at the way those little brown fuckers keep passing out. I’m loving this! You sure do know how to throw a party.”
“More Tequila, Stan?” The sheriff asked in his slow drawl.
“Fucking-A, right!”
Sheriff Jeff poured him another, then offered a silent toast. “I planned a special treat in your honor, Commissar. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.” He took up his bullhorn from the adjoining seat, held it close to his face, and keyed it. “Congratulations to the Mexican players for winning not one, not two, but all three matches. Let’s have a round of applause for them!” He repeated it in Spanish. This was answered with enthusiastic applause from the BlueShirts and lower dignitaries in the bleachers, along with scattered gratuitous clapping from the inmates. He turned to face them. “Hey! You! Louder, now!” There followed a rise of fatigued enthusiasm from the captives behind the fence. The sheriff returned his attention to the courts and keyed the bullhorn. “And to the losing teams: Thank you for your try. Now, you losing players, please gather on the court in front of us here in the bleachers. I have a special prize for you, even though you lost.”
