Strange Trades (24 page)

“In the attic. Go on up.”

The place was lit with infrequent low-wattage bulbs powered off the same—stolen? —fuel cells that ran the blowers. There were thirty or forty residents in the building. Panther, Three-Card, Cray, Vetch, Pogue, Jimmy Ripp, Vinyl, Skag, Slats, Annie.… I had been introduced that morning to them all, but couldn’t keep names and faces totally straight yet. Some I passed were busy working to improve their quarters; others were asleep on bare mattresses; the rest were relaxing. Some smiled at me; others scowled and looked aside; the rest ignored me. There was no visible order or direction to their actions, and they couldn’t have resembled my disciplined crews any less than they did. But I somehow picked up the same vibes from them as I got from my people. They had a system for getting things done.

Up in the space beneath the roof, it was just Zora and Sledge. They had a plastic leaf-shredder powered by a crank. They were feeding precut strips of newspaper into the hopper, filling the bag below with newspaper mulch. When the bag was full, Zora would catwalk along the rafters and dump it where it would serve as a pretty decent insulation.

Sledge smiled when I came up, but it wasn’t a happy smile. The teeth he was missing didn’t help. He started turning the handle harder.

“Hey, cuz, you brung me somethin’ to feed in my grinder here? How ’bout that cable you was foolin’ with today?”

“You heard we’re wired now? News sure does travel fast.” I paused while Sledge chewed up about a week’s worth of
Times-Post
. The papers were two years old, among the last issues published. Even the merger hadn’t saved them. “Don’t dig the metamedium, I take it.”

“Dig it? I’d like to dig it somethin’ all right—its grave. Damn thing is like suckin’ pap through a straw. It’ll rot your brain faster ’n blue chill.”

“Could be. If it’s abused. But it helps educate and inform a lot of people too.”

Sledge snorted. “Educate, my ass. It’s all predigested by Unilink. Let people read if they want a real education.”

Sledge slapped his rear pocket. There was a paperback inside, title-end up. I made out The Wretched of the Earth.

“Well, no one’s making you tap into the metamedium—”

Sledge laughed brutally. “Oh, ain’t they now!”

During our dialogue, Zora had been squatting on her haunches watching us. Her thick black hair fell in waves to her shoulders. Her skin was nutmeg, sprinkled with cinnamon freckles. (Look close sometime, the two spices aren’t the same color. Nothing really is.) She wore a bandana—one of Sledge’s?—tied around her breasts, a skirt fashioned from a raw piece of leather, and a pair of sandals that laced up her calves.

From where I stood I could see straight up to the shadows between her thighs. Her face was stolid. She didn’t seem to care one way or another. But the view wasn’t helping me concentrate on dealing with Sledge.

I looked away and changed the topic. “I’ve been talking to my boss.”

“And?”

“She wants you and your folks out of the project.”

“And where we spoze to go?”

“The camps—”

“Fuck the camps! Livin’ by the clock, eating what and when somebody else says, sleepin’ in tents, playing fuckin’ video games all day—”

“It’s clean, it’s free, and it’s only temporary. When the project’s done, you’ll have a permanent home.”

“We got a permanent home now. If you let us be.”

I looked at Sledge. Beneath the anger was a silent supplication. But I knew there was nothing I could do for him.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I lied. “You’ve got at least a week.”

I figured I owed him that much. We could work around them for a few days.

Sledge smiled. Zora didn’t. I wondered if I had fooled either of them.

“Excellent, man. Look, I’ll walk down with you.”

At the outer door I took a last glance inside. A wave of
déjà vu
swept over me, and I was sitting again in a college classroom.

“Bricoleurs,” I said.

“Missed that burst, man.”

“Bricoleurs. It’s an anthropological term. It refers to a class of people who live as scavengers, using odds and ends that the rest of society discards.”

“Brick-o-lures. Yeah, you got it, Mike, that’s us. We are the Bricks.” Sledge bellowed back inside. I felt sorry for anyone trying to sleep. “Listen up, all. We’re the Bricks now. And bricks are for buildin’, so get buildin’!”

I went back to my trailer.

It was after midnight when she came. But I had known she would.

“You ain’t so old as you look,” she said around dawn.

“And you aren’t so young,” I said, and kissed cinnamon.

5.

I woke up alone, around noon. The first thing I did after I dressed, even before visiting the commissary roach coach for my vital first coffee of the day, was to stroll over to Doc Hodder’s trailer.

Hodder had owned a successful Park Avenue practice at one time. Then he had started peddling skinslip on the side. He had gotten away with it until becoming addicted himself and losing his facade of competence. It’s hard to conduct a physical when the movements of your clothes or the feel of the stethoscope in your hand is enough to trigger a thirty-second spasm of involuntary ecstasy.

The judge had given Hodder a choice after his twenty-four-hour detox regimen: Riker’s Island or community service. It wasn’t a hard choice.

Hodder wore a Solidarity scarf with President Walesa’s picture silk-screened on it. They were big that year.

“Hey, Doc, you busy?”

Hodder sipped at a beer that left froth on his mustache. “Not so. Just patched up Bonilla’s hand and gave him a tetanus shot. He managed to run a nail through his palm.”

“Don’t put your needle away. I need an STD booster.”

Hodder elevated one eyebrow, but refrained from comment. He dug out the proper ampoule and shot me up.

“Beer?” he said.

I had forgotten it was afternoon. The thought turned my empty stomach. “No thanks. I’ll take a coffee, though, if you’ve got any.”

Heating water on a single electric burner, he made a Melita single cup. When I had it in hand, he couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.

“All our people are clean, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

“And anyway, I thought you and Holly—”

“Don’t bring that up, okay?”

“Well, excuse my big nose, but when our beloved leader comes in looking to have his T-cells goosed, one does feel one’s interest being piqued.”

I told Hodder what had happened.

He looked down into his beer for something cogent to say. I doubted there were any answers there that weren’t in my coffee cup.

“You don’t feel that might have been, ah, a tactical error?”

“Tactical? Who was thinking tactics? I’m trying to treat these people as decently as I can, within the limits of my mission here. I’m not a general, I’m a straw boss. If decency includes having some honest human feelings for one of them and responding to those feelings, then where does that leave me?”

“Can’t say. Just looks like trouble maybe down the line.”

“That, I realize.”

Hodder got to his feet. “Well, if you feel the need to have any more of these little chats with ol’ Doc Hodder—don’t hesitate to go elsewhere.”

“Thanks heaps.”

I went back to my trailer.

Kerry Drucker was waiting there. He looked like a big goofy puppy. His metagraphix tie of yesterday had been replaced with a black and white one that looked like an enormous bar code. He was the last person I needed to see.

“Can we talk a minute?” he asked.

“Sure,” I sighed.

Inside, I spotted a fresh printout lying in the tray of my metamedium node. I picked it up and scanned it while Drucker talked.

“Those squatters, they’re too much, aren’t they? I’ve never seen anything like them. How can they live like that? Don’t they know they could have a decent life just by asking? That’s what government’s for, it’s what we’re trying to do here, if only they’d get out of the way. Why would a person choose that kind of existence? Are they scared of the government? I don’t see why anyone should be. We’ve only got their best interests at heart.…”

I don’t know why I told him. It was just something to say in order to shut up his stupid middle-class babble.

“Well, they won’t be around much longer. This is their pickup order. As soon as I sign it, the Guard will schedule a bus for next week to take them up to Dutchess County.” Fitting action to words, I picked up a pen, signed the order, and ran it through the scanner.

“There, it’s done.”

“Good. Now maybe we can get back on schedule. That reminds me…”

He launched into a discussion of what had originally brought him by.

When I was alone again, I decided to take a little trip.

Hypertext always makes me dizzy. I guess you have to grow up with it to really be in sync with the notion of a completely free- form datastructure. All I know is that I feel old-fashioned whenever I dive into it. But sometimes there’s just no avoiding it.

I started out with the entry for “bricoleur” in the online
Brittanica
. Jumping from keyword to keyword in the kind of intuitive hunt I’ve found works best for me, I traversed dozens of linked texts, skittered across a handful of disciplines, piecing together a deeper understanding of the role of these scavenger-survivors across history and the human continuum.

I ended up in Levi-Strauss. Turned out he was the originator of the word. Fascinating guy. A lot of what I read was over my head, but I emerged with the certainty that my flash last night had been on target.

What was even more fascinating was how many patents had been filed over the past decade by bricoleur-types. I watched the figures graph themselves onto the screen. A myriad of mini-im- provements—nothing revolutionary, true, but lots of stuff crucial to a smoother functioning of society—had first been developed by this growing subclass of people, operating out of intuition, necessity, and the improved access to information offered by the metamedium. Just the contribution of Perkins’s millepore material alone, which could filter all harmful organisms out of drinking water, was incalculable. And Perkins, I discovered, had come out of a group very similar to Sledge’s.

Sledge and his people were true bricoleurs, a subculture seemingly essential to the smooth functioning of any society.

And I was sentencing them to cultural extinction.

And also dooming something vital, perhaps, in the mainstream culture along with them…?

I had my orders from Mama Cass. There wasn’t any way out. Cultures got flattened everyday all around the world, under the steamroller of consensus reality, for the good of the majority. But mankind went on. Somehow.

I wanted to visit Sledge and his Bricks again, especially to see Zora. But at the same time, feeling like the hypocrite I knew I was, I wanted to stay away.

I postponed the decision by cleaning up my office paperwork.

There was a memo from the folks at Caterpillar, explaining the delay in delivering some heavy equipment. Automation Alley was pressed to the limits of their capacity now. It was hard to remember when they had been the Rust Belt. We could manage without the new machines for a while longer. Not so with the lack of cement. National production of that product was insufficient for all the work being done on the country’s infrastructure. We were ready to start pouring, and I had to have my shipments.

I got on the phone and called someone. I won’t say who, except to mention that they had been present on every New York construction site since the Dutch had built their wall on Wall Street to keep the Indians out. I wasn’t proud of dealing with them, but on the other hand, I had a schedule to meet.

He who sups with the Devil must use a long spoon.

But the Devil’s acid broth melts it a little shorter each time.

Finally there came a point where the backlog of nodework was cleared away, and I had no more excuses to stay in.

So I went out.

The warehouse where they had found the toxic waste was down now. So were the three or four other buildings that had been left in that sector. Five crews—Gold, Topaz, Blue, Emerald, and Black—had converged under my orders, and made short work of the remaining demolition. Now, only the brownstone retrofitted with miscellaneous improvements by the Bricks remained standing, a temporary survivor in the war of cultures.

At last, I thought, the whole site was nearly cleared. Already in the northern quadrants crews were driving piles and knocking together the forms used to pour the foundations of the residences, businesses, civic centers, theaters, and stores that would soon swiftly blossom like time-lapse flowers. Society, more than nature, abhors a vacuum. I could feel the incipient tension that the clearing of the ghetto acreage had caused. It quivered like water lipping a too-f glass, or, more exactly, like the formless but energy-dense void of the early universe, awaiting whatever precipitated the Big Bang.

Dust hung over the sweating crew members in the dusk as they clustered in the thick, fading heat around the water coolers, joking, laughing, planning the night’s relaxations. A last truck rumbled off, bearing a heap of crushed bricks and timbers.