Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (28 page)

“When this is over, your ass is fucking grounded, talking to me like that. Tell me what, fat man?”

“I figured when this was over, I'd go back to being kicked out.”

“I'll ground you
and
kick you out.” Which made no sense, obviously, but that's where Karen's head was at. Maybe telling her wasn't such a good idea. She'd find out soon enough.

The Ambassador sighed. “The rest of the guards are flipping out, and Zebno's bringing them here. Billy's orders. Says this is what he's trained for.”

“No way. Tell Zebno to dump them in Brownsville or some shit.”

Brownsville: I had to smile at that. One thing about my mother, ol' girl is consistent. No sudden fits of morality. Fuck 'em today, fuck 'em tomorrow, fuck 'em for all time.

“Come on, Wren. You know that's not going to happen.”

“Since when is Billy giving orders around here?”

“These are human beings.”

“No, Dengue, these are
transit guards
. God, is everybody having a crisis of confidence around here? You wanna make an omelette, you gotta fuck some people up!” She handed me a can of silver. “I hope you've learned a thing or two about your precious father.”

“Crisis of conscience,” I said.

Karen frowned. “What?”

“You said crisis of confidence, but you meant crisis of conscience.”

She pointed at the train. “Go do your fills.”

For the next ninety minutes I shadowed my mother, concentrated on coloring her hollow shapes and let my fury simmer, unattended. As for Karen, anger seemed to improve her work. She'd been painting by rote before, in keeping with the philosophy behind throw-ups: they're supposed to be mass-produced, easy to assemble, attractive in repetition. Now, though, each outline was a little wilder than the last. The
A
's crossbar sprouted flares, the horizontals on the
E
whipped skyward with greater and greater insouciance, the
S
hit puberty and started dressing sexy. It was like those evolutionary charts you sometimes see, monkey to a caveman to a dude in a suit. The outlines were getting harder to fill, but I was getting better at it, even as dusk turned to night and we had to work by the light of the moon and the far-off streetlamps.

If it comes as a surprise that Dengue was indeed capable of painting, then you haven't been paying attention, to either the litany of tasks the blind man managed to manage or the implications of my recent statements concerning dance and fencing and martial arts. If a ballerina loses her eyesight, the ability to bust pirouettes and whatnot doesn't vanish, right? If somebody King Lears one of those ponytailed dudes you see doing qigong in Fort Greene Park, can he no longer embarrass himself in public?

So yes, Fever picked up a can and did his thing. In the Immortal era, he'd strictly been a wildstylist, not the uppest dude but one who upped the ante, whose pieces advanced and disseminated aerosol theory each time one rolled out. Asking him to do throw-ups was like asking one of those super-freaky free jazz intellectuals to play a wedding,
hey, excuse me Anthony Braxton, can you give us a few choruses of “I Can't Help Falling in Love with You” before we cut the cake?
Dengue did his best to keep it swift and simple, but his letters couldn't help shattering into segments, growing connections, masking themselves with camouflage. Eyes or no eyes, the Ambassador's sense of space was impeccable. Occasionally he was off by a few inches, overlapped something he didn't mean to or vice versa. But the style made it work, at least to me.

We worked in silence, the vibe poisonous. When Zebno called to announce his approach and Dengue sent me to meet him at the gate, the prospect of overseeing a nine hundred percent spike in cambiafuerza-deranged security guards actually cheered me up.

I jogged over in time to see the van lurch to the curb. Supreme Chemistry and two other M.A.G. men threw open the doors, leapt out, and started hauling forth passengers. There were sixteen of them—every guard but Vexer's, both of whom remained the picture of tranquillity. Perhaps it was due to previous familiarity with hallucinogens, or sympathetic brain chemistry. But what were the chances that a matched pair would groove on the dose while everybody else was bugging? The walkie-talkie chatter was heavy on Vex-as-guru jokes, though he insisted the only amenity he'd provided was a transistor radio tuned to the oldies station he always left on for his cats.

The rules of the van ride, apparently, had been that anybody who got loud got duct-taped. That was all of them. And, of course, securing a sovereign individual's pie-hole is pointless if he retains the use of his hands, so what anybody watching would have seen was three masked men in camouflage yanking a series of bound, gagged, uniformed hostages from an unmarked van and dragging the disoriented, flailing victims through a flap in a fence and into the blackness beyond like it was just another evening at Guantánamo Bay.

“You gonna help or what, ninja?” Supreme Chemistry called.

The truth was, I could barely move. Watching people get tossed around like luggage made me sick, and I just stood there, knuckles whitening around the portion of chain-link I'd pulled back. The last time I'd felt this way I'd been wedged into that window seat, watching Knowledge Born and Twenty-Twenty swing the bats.

It was an ugly business, there was no getting around it. But then again, so was whapping people unconscious with a blackjack and force-feeding them rainforest peyote, and I hadn't objected to that, had I? On the contrary, I'd dreamed it up, believed it necessary—and if it was, why wasn't this? Maybe the only difference lay in the relationship between the act and my eyeballs, and I was confusing moral repugnance with being a pussy.

“Make yourself useful,” 'Preme said, and shoved one of the guards at me.

I caught her in my arms. She was a mousy, bony thing, looked like some Irish cop's frailest daughter. Her clothes were sweat-drenched. There was vomit in her hair. The eyelids fluttered open, then closed. Homegirl was a million miles away.

I draped one of her arms over my shoulder, grabbed her by the waist, and started walking. Supreme Chem followed, pushing two guards ahead of him, one hand fisted around each of their belts.

“You better untape them before we reach Billy,” I said. “If he sees this, he's going to freak out.”

To my surprise, 'Preme accepted that. He stopped, and I heard the flick of a switchblade, the fibrous rip of tape. As the other prisoners passed into the yard, he cut their bonds as well. Some screamed when the adhesive was peeled from their mouths. Others babbled nonsense. Mine stayed quiet. I wondered if Karen and Dengue were still painting, or if they'd stopped to listen.

Sustaining verticality was more than most of the guards could handle, but M.A.G. didn't seem to care. They shoved and yelled and threatened, determined to advance the whole group at once, as if we were taking sniper fire.

“Look, they don't get it, okay? You doing
this
”—I pushed Megs in the shoulder, or maybe it was Maser—“means nothing in cambiafuerza-land. Their brains are too busy frying to translate
this
”—I pushed him again; I would have liked to punch him in the mask—“and even if they did, it wouldn't make them stand up and walk. It'd be like when you're dreaming, and the alarm clock goes off, so you start dreaming about fire engines. You understand?”

Some kind of bootleg soldier mentality had really set in on these guys. As long as you acted like an authority, somebody further up the chain of command, they responded with deference.

“What should we do?” asked the guy I'd been pushing.

“Carry them.”

M.A.G. dropped guard after guard on Billy's threshold like so many sacks of flour, jumped back in the van, and peeled off to go deal with the next catastrophe: it was past ten, and two of the guards working midnight-to-eight still couldn't been reached, one guy's cell going straight to voicemail and the other's landline disconnected.

Mop And Go was short on time. They had to gamble. The guy who hadn't paid his phone bill lived in the Bronx but was reporting to a yard in Queens, and the guy with the cell lived in Brooklyn but was pulling his shift in the Bronx. The plan was to roll to the Boogie Down, ambush Cellie on his way into the yard and grab Landline outside his house. If he was home.

I saw them off, then backtracked to the loony bin and lingered outside. I needed to see Billy in action. My revulsion at the guards' treatment hadn't softened me any toward him—okay, maybe five percent, but five percent doesn't get much done; ask Clarence 13X. I suppose I was curious whether he could do them any good. Mostly, though, I wanted the satisfaction of a glimpse inside the hell Billy had built himself.

To say that the patients had taken over the asylum, as the expression goes, does the situation little justice.
Taken over
implies some kind of agenda: inmates take over prisons, the state takes over management of failing schools. This wasn't even a frenzy; this was eighteen separate frenzies. Billy dashed from one shrieking, thrashing victim to the next, constantly forced to decide which of these people was the most desperate, when to abandon one for another. The noise exploding through the cracked-open doors was unbearable, least of all for being ear-splitting. The smell made my eyes water like a punch in the nose.

My father never wavered. No breaks, no breakdowns, focused and purposeful.
In the moment
, as some of my fake-Buddhist fuckhead customers are fond of saying. It was like he could diagnose the particulars of each agony, and ease it—with words, with touch, with his very proximity. Had Billy been able to devote himself to any one person, I'm sure he could have steered him back toward enlightenment—and I had no doubt that cambiafuerza could take a motherfucker there, for the simple reason that something had to lie opposite of this.

I stood and watched for five or ten minutes, the spectacle hypnotic in its horror. If Billy noticed me, he didn't let on. I paid special attention to my guard. She was one of the quietest, but when she did open her mouth, it was to loose a scream so sharp it cut a swath straight through the general cacophony—which then crested, as if the sound had actually penetrated their brains, folded itself into their nightmares.

The sound of rapid, labored breathing wrenched me away. It wasn't particularly loud, but it was coming from the wrong direction. I stepped away from Billy's hospital and prowled the corridor between the trains, straining to home in on the source.

It was a guard. He lay on his back beneath the train, chest heaving so hard it nearly touched the undercarriage. I dropped down and tried to grab him, but the poor schmuck was too far in. I ran around to the other side, but he was out of reach from there as well. I'd have to get down and push. He was a big guy, one of three Megs and Maser had carried in together. No way I could do this without someone on the other side to catch hold of a limb and pull.

I found Karen and Dengue two rows away, slouched inside a half-painted car. Static poured from the walkie-talkie. They were sharing a joint.

“What the hell is this?”

“We're on break,” my mother croaked. “It's fucking hopeless, Dondi.”

“Yeah, if you sit around getting high it is.”

“Don't be an asshole. We've been working nonstop until five minutes ago. But two people can't bomb a yard. It's impossible.”

She passed Fever the joint, now doubling as a conversational baton.

“I'm slow,” he announced, and pulled some weed into his lungs. “Fat, blind and slow. And stupid.” He passed it back.

“It's not just us,” Karen explained. “Everybody's behind.”

“How behind?”

“Enough that all of this could be for nothing. The MTA's only gonna run bombed trains if there's no other option. We leave even a quarter of them clean, and they'll have one.”

“So we break windows.”

“I already tried. They're made of fiberglass or something now. Not like the old days.”

“We should have reached out to more people,” Dengue said. “Active people. That was a mistake.” He shook his head. “Blam's crew just lost forty minutes, to a patrol car. Turned out some drunk was smashing bottles outside the yard, and a neighbor called in a complaint. But they had to hide until the cops bounced. Shit like that will kill us.”

“M.A.G. will help out here,” I offered.

“M.A.G. is in up to their asses,” Karen replied, and shut her eyes.

The walkie-talkie static swelled, and then a voice came on. “Yo, it's Paco. I just got word, they're booking the boy Frog, up in Harlem. He made them chase him for like half an hour, before he got caught. Fucking A-plus work, right?”

Dengue picked it up, and pressed a button. “Good. How many's that?”

“Uh . . . two, dude. The juvie over on Staten, and now Frog. I'm spacing it out, just like you said.”

A new voice crackled through the speaker. “Fever, you okay, money?”

The Ambassador put his phone down.

“What's up with Cool Rage-ski?” a third writer chimed in. “He chilled them niggas out, or what?”

“Ha ha. Probably got 'em doing fills!”

“Yo Species, how many trains you rocked, kid? Spe? You there?”

“Smoke break's over,” I said. “Karen, I need a hand with one of these guards.”

She crossed her legs. “I'm here to paint. You want to play Mother Teresa with your father, that's on you.”

“I've got a fucking guy lying underneath a train, Karen. I can't get him out alone.”

“So ask—”

“He's busy.”

“Yeah, well, so am I. Doing his job. As usual. And yours.”

She grabbed the pole and swung to her feet, eyes blazing. My mother in full I-dare-you-to-speak mode was terrible to behold, like when the Greek gods revealed their true forms to mortals.