The Swing Voter of Staten Island (2 page)

“Howdy,” said the thin male passenger. He had a bald head and squinty eyes. “The name’s Jim Carnival.” He was holding what looked like a World War II mine detector with his free hand. Between his knees was an old bucket. “This is the wife Mary and our boy Oric.” The woman appeared slightly younger, but the heavyset “son” seemed to be around the same age as his father. Through Oric’s shaggy curls of hair, Uli spotted a small metal cross protruding from the back of his cranium and tried not to stare.

“Is that the former First Lady?” Carnival shouted over to Mallory, who hunched forward, annoyed. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep it on the hush-hush, ma’am. I worked briefly for your husband.”

Mallory nodded without stopping her frantic scribbling.

“So where are you from, pal?” Carnival asked Uli.

“New York, I think. I just got here.” Whenever he tried to remember anything, all that came to mind was,
Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17 …

“Hold on,” the guy said. “You just arrived from old New York?”

“I think so. I’m totally disoriented.”

“You look familiar,” the wife spoke up. Uli shrugged.

“Howard Beach 9!” the supposed son, Oric, blurted for no apparent reason.

Amid the trash littering the floor of the bus, Uli spotted a newspaper entitled,
The Daily Posted New York Times
. Picking it up and flipping through the articles, Uli read the last page:
Weekly Police Blotter
. A subcategory read,
Number of Car Bombings: 4
. Without listing the names of any victims or any other colorful details, the article gave bare-bone descriptions of the four harrowing bomb blasts. One car was blown up on the Little Concourse in the Bronx, killing twenty-one people and wounding fifty-four. An alleged former member of a group called S.N.C.C. was suspected. A second car bomb exploded in the Upper West Side, killing thirty-four and wounding twelve. A third one detonated in Brighton Beach, killing four, wounding eighteen. The last bomb that week had gone off near the Chrystler Building in Queens, killing six and wounding thirteen.

Under
Conventional Crimes
some details were offered: Five former F.A.L.N. suspects died in police custody in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. A family of seven was found murdered during a home invasion in Astoria, Queens. One of them had been an associate of the Black Cubs, a splinter group of the Black Bears, which in turn had splintered off from the Black Panthers. A solarcar was hijacked in Staten Island and the driver, a known B.M.T. operative, was murdered. In Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, ten seniors, possible fundraisers for the March 29th Army, were killed when a suspicious fire swept through their retirement home. Six former S.L.A. suspects were shot dead during a concert in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. There was a massacre at a Crapper club in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, which claimed twenty-five lives.

Underneath that, Uli read:

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 Crappers 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:

Total Pigger districts: 3

Total Crapper districts: 17

No change from last election

QUEENS:

Fresh Meadows (Crapper) invaded

2,345 Crappers, 3,392 Piggers

Outcome: Pigger

Councilwoman Diana McNair (C) removed

Councilman Abraham Hodges (P) elected

Hillcrest (Pigger) invaded

6,331 Crappers, 6,323 Piggers

Outcome: Crapper

Councilman Larry Mahonney (P) removed

Councilman Earl Grims (C) elected Total Pigger districts: 18

Total Crapper districts: 2

Two changes from last election

“It’s good to see communities standing up against invading gangs once in a while,” Carnival commented, staring at the paper over Uli’s shoulder.

“These invasions occur every week, do they?” Uli asked.

“Just like with car bombings—every time
they
do one,
we
do one.”

“And who are
we
again?” Uli asked.

“This is Crapper territory and we’re Crappers,” Carnival responded proudly.

“Speak for yourself,” his wife murmured.

“Hey! We’re losing our plate!” the driver shouted back to the passengers.

Uli pressed the solar panel harder against the roof. He peered out of the window across the barren urban landscape. On the far side of a huge lake, he spotted a cluster of tall, liver-colored buildings in the distance. He could see lines of dark-suited people filing into several buses.

“That’s Pud Pullers up in Howard Beach,” Carnival said. “You definitely don’t want to go there.”

“Pud Pullers?”

“Its real name is Pure-ile Plurality. That’s the only good thing about this stinking place,” his wife retorted. “It’s a haven for family unity.”

Carnival shook his head in disgust. The couple were clearly not of one mind.

The bus turned a corner and moved past a row of buildings with plastic garbage bags dangling from them. Down a side street he was surprised to see a single-humped camel sticking its long neck into one of the suspended garbage bags, rooting for food.

“They figured that by releasing all these desert animals out here we’d somehow become more lovable,” Carnival said. “Instead we have mountains of strange dung.”

Some of the buildings were clearly abandoned and covered with crudely painted images of male faces. Captioned underneath each one were apparent birth and death dates, as well as brief epitaphs, like
Crapper Hero
and
Killed 8 Piggers
. Doing the math, Uli realized that few of them had made it to the age of twenty. The semi-abandoned neighborhood was like a large cemetery where the amateurishly rendered portraits on the collapsed structures served as large headstones.

“Flatlands,” the driver announced as they entered what looked like a new neighborhood.

This area was bordered by a row of four-story apartment buildings with street-level stores that had been converted into flimsy bulwarks and slapdash fortifications. Interspersed through these principal structures were poorly built garages, usually just corrugated tin roofs affixed between uncemented cinder-block walls.

“Correction! Howard Beach 9!” shouted Oric, the manlike child, rocking back and forth.

At that moment, the bus hit a bump and Carnival’s old mine detector fell toward Uli, who caught the large pan base before it could brain him. A long beep sounded.

When he handed the contraption back, the man looked at him strangely, then leaned it toward Uli’s head. The machine elicited a second beep.

“You got a deal with some CIA pointy-heads?”

“What do you mean
deal
?”

“You got an electronic bug in your skull.”

“Underwood probably inserted it there,” Mallory spoke up.

“What are you talking about?’

“Greenpoint 22!” Oric shouted.

“It means someone is tracking you,” Carnival replied. “Go to the Manhattan Crapper headquarters—if anyone can corkscrew that thing out of your head, they can.”

Uli thanked Carnival for the advice and asked where he and his family were coming from.

“Rockaway Beach,” Carnival said. “The wife and I met in old New York’s Rockaway when we were kids.”

“Correction! Rockaway 6, Greenpoint 22. Correction!”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Uli asked.

“Don’t mind him,” Carnival said, “he’s a little mushy in the penthouse, but the wife and I love him all the more for it.”

“So what were you doing in Rockaway?” Uli asked.

“We were digging for clams.” The man lifted the bucket between his legs and revealed a collection of rusty and sand-encrusted bullets. “These clams are worth money. Bunch of them got buried in the sand down there during the parachute drops years ago.”

“Do you have guns for the bullets?”

“Everyone has guns, but no one has any ammunition left. Hence, bullets are expensive. I can get about five to ten stamps for each one.”

The conversation was interrupted by the driver shouting through his window: “Get the fuck out of my way!”

Some vehicle was slowing down in front of them. The one-armed man swung the bus onto an empty sidewalk and pulled ahead of the car. As they sped past, Uli could see a strange-looking man in the vehicle shouting upward at the bus driver.

“Fuck you!” the driver yelled back.

“What’s going on?” Uli asked nervously as they sped down the sandy street.

“Some damn Flatland motherfucker is trying to hijack us.”

Uli could hear the man shouting from the car behind them: “Just give him back!”

“How far along are they in the cleanup anyway?” Carnival asked.

“Cleanup?” Uli replied, his confusion mounting once again. As Carnival rambled on about the operation, Uli got a clear view of the guy in the car behind them. Other than his fashionable goatee and a trimmed widow’s peak, the man looked uncannily like Oric.

“One way or another,” Carnival said, “I’m getting back to old New York.”

Suddenly the car slammed into their rear bumper, sending Mallory and her document to the floor.

“Oh shit, he’s got a gun!” Carnival’s wife shrieked, seeing the man holding something out his window. A blast exploded through the rear window and out the roof of the bus.

“This guy’s going to kill us all!” Carnival cried out, grabbing his mine detector in both hands as if it were a rifle.

“Okay, everyone, hold onto the damn panel!” the driver shouted. All did.

Without slowing down, the bus made a sharp left turn and slid across the unswept sands of King’s Highway. All the buildings on the north side of the street were bleached white by the Nevada sun while the structures along the south side were carbonized black by some bygone fire.

“Shit!” the driver yelled, peaking into his rearview. “That Flatlander’s serious. He ain’t letting up.”

Seeing that Oric was starting to cry, Uli tried to break the tension by asking Carnival, “How are you planning to leave this place?”

“I’m stuck here just like you,” Carnival replied, staring out the window.

“You said that one way or another you were going to get back to New York. How do you plan to do that?”

“I said that?”

Mary shot her husband a stern look.

“I just meant I’m nearing the end of my appellate process—what do they call it, the Road Out Program. Eventually, when they see that I wasn’t supposed to be sent here in the first place, we’ll get flown out.”

“There’s an appeals process?” Uli vaguely recalled filling out some forms while he was with the white-haired guy at the airport.

The pursuing car, which had now edged next to them, slammed into the side of the bus. The two vehicles drove neck and neck, scraping and slowing each other. Carnival’s wife jumped out of her seat and positioned herself next to the driver, trying to help him turn the wheel against the car, but it wasn’t working. Their bus was slowing down. Pretty soon they’d be forced to a halt.

Mallory nervously pulled her chestnut wig back over her head, then grabbed a heavy flannel shirt out of her bag and slipped it on.

As Carnival’s shrieking wife kept the steering wheel turned against the mad driver from Flatlands, Uli watched the bus driver reach under his seat for a bottle of wine, which he uncorked with his teeth. With his one good hand, he calmly shoved a napkin down the bottleneck. Then flipping open a lighter, he lit the napkin and tossed the bottle out the window. It exploded along the top of the car. “Hold on!” he shouted, grabbing the wheel from Mary and slamming on the brakes, which sent the other vehicle flying into an abandoned building. The bus driver turned left and sped away.

“That was too damn close,” Mallory muttered.

“I wonder what they wanted,” Uli said.

As the bus turned up Flatbush Avenue, the sand that had been covering the road began to thin out. The quality of the roadway was still poor, but the one-armed driver gracefully dodged potholes without having to slow down. Eventually they made a left on Church Avenue, where signs of life began returning.

“Welcome to Japtown,” Carnival said with a sigh.

The neighborhood was covered with delicate wooden buildings that had tiered levels and swirling pagoda-style bamboo roofs.

“This area was designed to resemble Japan for ground and aerial training,” Carnival explained.

Little shops with twirling mansard roofs dotted the area: a tarot card psychic, a barbershop, a scratch-and-match vendor, a sushi bar, an Optima cigar stand. When the bus turned down a side street, Uli saw a mini—restaurant row—a group of food vendors toiling over smoky barbecues and hibachis. Directly across from them, a line of people gathered outside a movie theater that looked like it might originally have been a Buddhist temple.

With an apparently limited supply of red plastic letters for the marquee, the establishment had improvised: W9zT S10E StoR7.