Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (29 page)

I sighed. “The guy is
trapped under a train,
Wren.”

She glared at me awhile longer, as if suspecting it was a trick. “Fine.” She turned to Dengue. “I'll be right back.”

The guard was just as I'd left him. “You want to crawl under and push, or stay here and pull?” I asked Karen, who didn't deem the question worthy of a response. I dropped to my stomach, dragged myself forward on my elbows.

The bulk of the train blocked outside noise; by the time I reached him, the guard's breath was all I could hear. He sounded like a small animal having a heart attack. Puke glinted in his mustache, trailed down his uniform. At his side lay a pair of eyeglasses, the kind you buy off a drugstore rack. One lens was smashed.

I braced my feet against the metal track, and shoved him as hard as I could. He shifted a few inches. I crept forward, did it again.

“One more,” called Karen. “I can almost reach his leg.”

I couldn't find a decent foothold. I tried pushing him anyway, but it was me who slid. Finally, I got him close enough for Karen to grab, and we did the old ready-on-three routine until the beam of her Maglite shone full on his face.

I came around, and we both looked down at the dude like he was something we'd just hit with our car.

“Well, that was fun. I'm going back to work.”

“Hold on, Karen. We gotta get your man here back inside.”

My mother rolled her eyes, but she bent over him, hands dangling by her ankles.

“Grab him under the knees. Ready? And . . . lift.” I staggered slightly, struggling to control his weight, feeling the sweat burst out of me.

“Got him?”

“Uh huh. Let's go.”

We turned and began the fifty-foot journey to the nuthouse door, both of us walking sideways, leg crossing over leg.

We never made it. Directly in front of us stood five men, their faces cast in shadow, their bodies silhouetted in the moonlight.

14

ell, well, well. So it is true, after all.” A deep voice, clipped and accented. He crossed his arms over his chest. I looked at Karen. She was frozen in place, elbows still locked around the guard's knees.

“Did we come at a bad time?” the man inquired. His companions chuckled.

I lowered my half of the guard to the ground. Karen followed suit. Slowly, together, we straightened.

“That depends,” I said. “Who the fuck are you?”

More low laughter. “We are from Denmark. Copenhagen.”

“Yeah? You lost or something?”

He stepped forward, into the light, and extended his hand. From the look on Karen's face, you would have thought it was a dog turd on a stick. He dropped it to his side.

“Trash, FTP. Fuck The Police, or Fame Then Power. These, I can introduce, are the rest of my crew.”

Karen pulled the pepper spray from her back pocket. “This some kind of joke?”

Trash slid a giant canvas rucksack off his back, took a knee before it, and undid the latch. It was crammed with cans.

“We heard NYC was gonna be the spot this weekend. So we came.”

“Where'd you hear that?” Karen's tone evinced little of her trademark warmth. But she'd put away her weapon.

Trash stroked his chin. “Where
did
we hear?” He stood, and turned to his boys. “Was it from Edom?”

“I heard from Nalgas and Tyko, when they came over from Barcelona,” one volunteered. “But I don't know, Edom might have told them.”

“Who the fuck's Edom?” demanded Karen.

I stepped in front of her. “Who cares? Welcome to New York. You have no idea how glad we are to see you. I'm Dondi. This is Wren 209.”

Practically in unison, they gave that writer-nod that meant they'd heard of her. I shook Trash's hand, then everybody else's. Their names went in one ear and out the other, except for one dude who called himself Fuck. Catchy.

“Edom, from Paris?” Trash said to Karen, when the introductions were complete. “He's one of Europe's most famous writers.”

Trash might as well have said the dude was one of Indonesia's best-groomed mastodons. I could tell he was taken aback that she didn't know. Though not as taken aback as Karen looked, to learn that dudes in France and Spain and Denmark had their ears to our ground.

“So y'all motherfuckers just figured you'd show up and surprise us?” My mother's aggression was giving way to incredulity. Beyond that, on the other side of a treacherous mountain pass, lay jubilation. Getting there, for Karen, took time.

Trash shifted his weight. “Yes, I guess so. I try to come to New York every year, anyway. I usually stay with Hades? Come to think of it, maybe he's the one who told me.”

“Fuckin' Hades,” Karen muttered.

They all looked absolutely scared to death of her. I scrambled for a way to make them feel welcome. Then it dawned on me that Karen's shenanigans might not be as discomforting as the muffled wails of dementia coming from behind the silvered-over windows of the nearest train. Or the unconscious, puke-slathered guard who lay between us even now.

“You guys look ready to paint,” I said.

“Yeah, man.”

“Awesome. Follow me, and I'll take you to headquarters. Which is wherever Dengue's at. You guys know Dengue Fever?” I started to walk. I felt like skipping.

“The Ambassador,” said one of the guys whose names I'd forgotten. “I bought a sculpture from him when I was here in '98. I haven't spoken with him since.”

“Trust me, he's gonna be fucking ecstatic to see you guys.”

Trash was on my right, struggling to keep up. “Yeah, so . . . is everything cool?” he asked, with a backward glance at the various atrocities we'd left behind.

“I don't even know where to start.”

We found Dengue pacing between trains, phone pressed to his head. From the sound of the conversation, he was trying to get a report on M.A.G., and failing.

“Yo, Fev! Fev! You're not going to believe this, B! The fuckin' cavalry just arrived.”

“Hold on, Fizz, K.D.'s calling me. I'll hit you back.” He spun with what could almost be called grace, and grinned hugely.

“Cómo están, pendejos? Ustedes han llegado en el justo de tiempo, en la hora mas desesperado. Hay muchos trenes para pintar, y necesitamos sus ayuda like a motherfucker, ¿me entienden? Pues, ¿dónde está mi gran amigo, Gotch Uno?”

Silence, except for the sound of brows furrowing.

“Uh, Fever? Why are you speaking Spanish?”

“It's not Matamos Todos Crew, from Mexico City?”

“FTP, from Copenhagen.”

“Oh,
shit
!” He flung open his arms. “Bring your asses over here and give me a hug! Ha ha! Dondi, get these motherfuckers a sandwich, or a joint, or
something
!”

One by one, they filed up to Dengue, and were swallowed in his arms. It was pretty funny, watching them trying to tell him their names while he cackled with delight and rocked them back and forth. The Danes couldn't get enough. After Karen's welcome, they deserved it.

“I'm going to assume these Mexican guys are coming too, then?”

“We got cats showing up from fuckin' everywhere, K.D.! Berlin, London, Chicago. Two guys from Stockholm just strolled into the Ghost Yard, fifteen minutes ago. Almost gave Fizz a heart attack.”

“Tobias and Jacob,” said Trash, nodding. “They told me they would try to make it.”

“Everybody wants to be a part of history,” Fuck added. “To bring the New York trains back to life, that is, what would you say, the ultimate.”

“So how come nobody bothered to let us know they were coming?” I asked.

Trash looked as if he'd suddenly found a strange-tasting object in his mouth. “There are no RSVPs in graffiti,” he said.

“Well, how come everybody's showing up at the same time? Y'all coordinate this shit or something?”

Even as I said it, I felt like an ass. Here's this guy old enough to be a twenty-year vet, comes to New York every year, probably famous in his own right—like his boy Edom, who we're too provincial to be impressed by—and instead of offering grub and weed I'm peppering him with pointless, vaguely suspicious-sounding questions.

I bet you're wondering too, though. Right?

“In Europe, we would never dream of going out before midnight. I've never painted earlier than that here, either.”

“Oh.” I looked at my watch. Quarter past twelve.

All of a sudden, it dawned on me that we'd forgotten all about that guard. I rushed back to the spot. No sign of him. I busted a U-turn and headed to Billy's car, to break the news and wash my hands of the whole affair.

First thing I saw, through the cracked-open corner doors? My mother, crouching over the female guard, two fingers pressed to her wrist, the other hand cocked so Karen could read her watch. A bandana covered her nose and mouth.

“Normal,” she called.

“Good,” Billy called back, from the other side of the car. “Massage the pressure points a little.”

I stole away. Found Dengue chilling in a train car as FTP unpacked outside it, and sat down beside him.

“I just saw something that kind of blew my mind.”

“Speak on it, nephew.”

“My mother, she's in there helping Billy.”

“Sure. Was only a matter of time. You got to overstand, K.D. Wren? She loves that fool. She's
always
had his back.”

“Not when she threw him out.”

The Ambassador snorted. “Never happened. She woulda rolled all the way to Mexico with him, if he'd let her—she sure as hell tried. I'm telling you, underneath all her bullshit, your mother's a rider. Till the wheels fall off. And underneath all his, your father's—”

“A cold-hearted bastard.”

Dengue smiled. “Big-hearted. He's a big-hearted bastard.”

“Yeah, well. You say potato, I say fuck that motherfucker.”

“Got to accept the man for who he is, boy.”

“And who's that?”

He pulled a glue tube. “Billy Rage, nigga.”

Outside, Trash and his boys were organizing their cans by color, leaning together over sketches, chatting in their own language.

“They know the rules, right?” I asked. “Amuse throws only?”

“I told them. They said they didn't come all this way to do throws, they came to burn. I think it'll be okay. Europeans paint fast. And we're gonna have crazy manpower soon, so fuck it, you know? Either the tide's turned, or we all drown.” He cracked his glue.

“What's up with M.A.G., and those two guards?”

“Been wondering that myself. But neither of them showed up for work, so . . .” The Ambassador shrugged.

“I could use a nap,” I said, and immediately realized I'd never be able to sleep. Your boy here was a snarl of jangled nerves, dead on my feet but still in panic mode. I told Dengue I was going to take a stroll, appraise our progress.

The Scandahoovians had fanned out, one man to a car, and donned gasmasks. Give motherfuckers a little free health care and all of a sudden they're too good to inhale toxic fumes, I guess. They'd barely gotten going, but it was obvious these dudes had technique: the shapes of their outlines were sharp and decisive, and they painted with a kind of compact efficiency, as if each move was preprogrammed—not just the strokes, but the swapping of one can for another, the periodic step-back evaluations.

I took up position behind Trash, and soon found myself lulled into a meditative wooziness by the stretch-and-bend of his limbs. He clocked my presence over a shoulder, ignored me until his outline was complete. When he finally spoke, I jumped.

“It seems perhaps wrong to be using fancy German paint, and this thing,” he said, tapping the breathing apparatus that hung loose around his neck now. “If not for that, I could pretend it's 1984 and this is
Style Wars
.”

“You'd have to pretend to be thirteen, too. Most of those kids retired from writing as soon as they could be prosecuted as adults. Or tried to.” I knew it was a dickhead answer as soon as I heard myself say it. Something in me felt proprietary toward these Europeans, wanted to remind them just whose shit this was. Not that it was mine.

Trash didn't notice, or he didn't care. “That's how old I was when I saw it. In Copenhagen, it played in the cinema.”

“Huh. No shit.”

He hefted a yellow in each hand, gave them a synchronized shake, then straightened both arms—the left above his head and the right below it, as if showing me what six o'clock looked like—and started on his fill. “My mother saw it first,” he said. “She was a hippie, I guess you would say. The next day, she bought me a bunch of spraypaint, and told me ‘you are going to write graffiti.'”

The empty vessel of his
A
filled up with color, and Trash dropped the yellows like a shooter would a pair of empty handguns. He crouched over his cans, sprang up with a mint green and a royal blue, and started detailing the interior. That threw me for a loop. To finish one letter before embarking on the next was like gutting your apartment, then remodeling the kitchen down to the oven mitts before you even put a toilet in the bathroom.

“
Style Wars
disappeared after a week. By then, every kid in Copenhagen wanted to bomb.” Trash snickered. “We were somewhat confused in the beginning. The way to get props was to be the best at biting Broadway style, or Computer Rock. Many crews named themselves after the NYC ones. Very embarrassing shit, to look back on.”

A strangled wail rang out from Billy's infirmary, several rows away, then faded like an ambulance siren tearing off through traffic. Trash froze, hearing it, paintcans cocked and index fingers hovering. I sensed a question working its way from his brain to his lips, and the thought of having to explain reminded me just how exhausted I was.

“So did it play all over Europe?” I asked, before he could change the subject to torture and kidnapping.

Trash snapped back to painting. “I know in Sweden, they showed it on TV for one night. There were only two channels back then, so basically half the country saw it. Next day it was like, hello Tunnelbanan trains, very nice to meet you.”

I watched him rock his
M
, eased off, and walked on. Matamos Todos had indeed arrived; I found the four of them holding down an outer corner of the yard, speaking low, ultrafast Spanish as they collaborated on a double whole car. A scattered mess of bits and chips and fragments covered the train; the shit looked more like an exploded architectural diagram of some complex machine than a burner. If Trash was remodeling a kitchen, these motherfuckers were Amish farmers putting up a barn; nothing to see but piles of lumber, dudes pounding nails, and then bam, here come four whole goddamn walls swooping heavenward—from spare parts to structural coherence in a single, grand gesture. I could tell the moment was coming, but I didn't have the patience to wait.