Goliath, p.27
Goliath, page 27
I still remember a time when we typed things on tablet screens with our fingers. Christ, I’ve gotten old.
The kid dashes away, returning in a few moments with a makeshift writing station. He kneels on the desert ground, back erect, with the small cardboard box holding the paper down. After a moment, he undoes his gun belt and lays it neatly at his side, then relaxes into his posture.
“You ready?”
The kid nods. Everyone but the kid stands in an aspect of reverence, like scattered penitents of a church congregation finally gathered in the presence of a process bigger than themselves.
“Date: the eighteenth of July in the year of our Lord twenty fifty—” Dogs bark and I don’t catch the rest. We wait. The dogs stop. “Location: Eden County, Texas.” He looks to one of the suited men, probably a magistrate or a magistrate’s errand-boy, for confirmation. And when one of the marshal’s deputies nods, the errand-boy nods too.
I shuffle my feet, suddenly bored.
“The deceased, Absalom Clark Morgan, aged”—a pause, then aside to one of his factotums—“how old are we sayin’ here?”
“Does the prisoner not know?”
The sheriff regards me. “How ol’ was he? General range-like.”
I shrug. Gene-fuck property ain’t got that kinda age. “Adolescent. Kid-like.” I think. “Maybe sixteen. But just barely.”
The sheriff frowns at me like I’m playing a joke on him, but I guess that’s to be expected. He returns to his former attitude. “The deceased, Absalom Clark Morgan, aged fifteen, was found under a patch of earth within the boundaries of Eden County. Approximately seventy-five yards from the valley ridge a corpse was buried in the ground and upon recognition of said corpse, officers of the law proceeded to dig up and exhume the body. Among them Sheriff John Bell of Eden, Deputy Sheriff Bill Oates, Deputy Magistrate George Hawkes, U.S. Marshal Cayenne Jackson, hailing from Lorain County, Ohio, and several of the marshal’s deputies from neighboring counties. Upon their arrival in Texas, they traveled over the course of many miles in a single evening to reach the spot at which lay the final proof of a crime committed in the Specials-Occupied State of Ohio.”
The scribe scribbles as the sheriff dictates.
One of the marshal’s deputies steps toward the sheriff. “We’re not doin’ all that autopsy business here, are we?”
The sheriff looks around, shrugs as if to say “why not.”
“Ain’t a doctor-type among us, Sheriff. We should take him back into town. Least so’s his people can identify him.” The young man’s face softens. “Be a nice bit of closure for the family,” he finishes, softly.
Doesn’t occur to any of ’em that the boy ain’t got no more family, none that can be found, anyway.
I realize then how young all the deputies are, especially the local ones. They have hair on their faces, sure, and they have a man’s bearing about them, and they wear their guns the way men should, but many of them don’t have the spiritual wrinkles that come with manhood, those devotional foldings that show up as crow’s feet or gray hair or arthritis. Those that have it, I notice, seem like the war-hardened back home. The rest, it turns out, had managed to avoid that hardship and haven’t yet had the kindness beaten or shot or cut out of ’em. They have a bit more aching to do.
“Yeah, we’ll do that,” the sheriff says back. He faces his congregation. “The corpse of the deceased, after it was decided that present conditions did not allow for a full and thorough autopsy, was transported back to Galveston, where it was to be transported back to Ohio, reunited with the deceased’s family, and prepared for burial.” A pause. “You get all that?”
A moment’s scribbling, then a vigorous head-nod from the scribe, who fans the paper, then folds it and slips it into his jacket pocket.
Everyone is standing now, silent, unsure of what to do or how next to proceed.
“Y’all can roll him up now,” says the sheriff, saving us. And the gravediggers do just that while the big fella fills the hole back in with the shovel I’d made that Morgan boy use before I’d murdered him. The marshal jerks my length of rope, pulling me away, and we all walk back to the caravan while the nigger toils in silence.
I walk close to the marshal, but she doesn’t seem inclined toward speaking. Maybe she’s got no more cigarettes. Maybe seeing that extra shovel in the grave, that indication of a particular cruelty, has changed her mind about me.
Sunlight bleeds down the valley wall in strips.
I think maybe I’ll ask the woman for a cigarette anyway.
The nigger giant batters the rest of the delinquent earth into the ground with a thud-dull smack, and joins us.
A sideways glance at the marshal confirms my suspicion that she ain’t from no Lorain County.
* * *
[May 18th, 20—, 3:30 a.m.]
Anyway, that was the last thing I ever heard him say to me.
You see, Gladden sits between Black River and Lynch River. And the reason it looked like there were fewer and fewer people outside was that they were being evacuated. We were so busy dancin’ in the rain that we didn’t notice. The reactor I told you about, it got flooded and was leaking its shit into the soil and the water. And the river waters were starting to rise. We had no sandbags, they hadn’t even given us enough bottled water. It was either September 13 or 14. One of those days.
Because, the next day, Hurricane Faustine hit us.
That night, we felt the shock wave from the explosion. The power plant had flooded. Was supposed to have been decommissioned, but the state wanted to try out nuclear energy again, I guess. Core exploded. Just gone. Afterward, people were talking about graphite falling straight out of the sky. You pick it up, your hand melts. Anyway, stormwater came. Hurricane took the ash. Wind and flood brought it straight to us.
Washed us all away. It was hell. They left us in hell. No one came to save us. It was …
It was …
[Inaudible.]
Lot of us were too sick to get out and avoid the worst of it. We’d been fed poisoned food and water for months now. Eventually, clean-up arrived. People said, afterward, that they looked like ghosts. With their masks and their gowns. Some of them were dripping in whatever they got sprayed with to protect from the radiation. Those of us who didn’t get out in time, they got shot. Those bodies are under the concrete now. Whole place was paved over. Never saw Freddie’s boyfriend again. I don’t think he got out. Don’t know why I was so sure the old man did, but I was. Even though they got rid of all of it, I was sure. Anyway, they razed the whole state of South Carolina. And buried that prison underneath layer after layer after layer of concrete.
And that’s how it started. That’s how … all of this got started. The red dust storms, the radiation, the fallout, the war, the Exodusters. All of it.
* * *
THE dead body grows pustules in the heat and even a few wagons away, can be smelt by Cayenne and one of her deputies, with whom she rides back to Galveston. She wonders why she doesn’t yet feel completed. She tries to speed her thoughts already to the next job, but instead parallel presents and imaginary pasts capture her. Clipped with scissors and stitched together with thread, a variety of recollections that fracture her sight like a broken mirror. In this one, Jacob checks the buttons of his shirt, then the cuff links of his collar, then brushes some of his hair while he stares at his reflection in a fingerprint-smudged bathroom mirror. A job interview. In this one, Jacob sits on his bed in darkness, with the stillness of a mountain, while she kneels before him in their Vegas apartment and dabs at the cut above his eye with cotton and cleaning fluid. Already, a cemetery of copper cotton balls soaks in the bucket at her bare heels, toes peeking out from beneath the patterned wool of her nightgown. In this one, Cayenne shovels dirt onto her son’s grave after having cut him down from a streetlamp while his father watched. She is preparing it for anonymity. And in this one, she is unearthing the corpse untouched by maggots, carrion unsullied by pillagers and pestilential tenants. In this one, she sweeps the bedroom floor and her two children, unknowing of the apocalypse they’ve been born into, read quietly on their beds. In this one, Cayenne lies on the desert floor, foot still twisted in her stirrup, life leaking out of the gunshot wound in her chest. And in this one, mirroring the choreography of the previous, she is not frowning in confusion, nor is she weeping with regret, but rather smiling. Faintly. With the corners of her mouth. Hoping no one else sees it. Cain finally harmed beyond fixing, the mark of the beast no longer an infernal protection from the After. In this one, she is running with her second son, now half-grown, through a field of waist-high grass that bends in a breeze shepherded by fortune from the surrounding mountains. In this one, it is that boy leading her. In this one, this second son, her Lincoln, is a pace or two ahead, his hand rough and scabrous and firm against Cayenne’s: the origin of the heat sweating her palm.
* * *
THE desert is littered with dead things.
This is what it’s gotta be like. Slate-cleaning for those of us comin’ after me. Settling here, making this place anew. I don’t look at us, doin’ what we did, as janitors. No, it’s more cosmic than that. We was a flood. Space ain’t a home. The Colony ain’t a home. It’s a waystation. A place to catch your breath. We know that truth to be self-evident. Powers the heart of every Marauder. Somebody’s gotta keep this place warm for when the returnees get back.
Truth is, this place never stopped being ours.
I content myself with dreams as we ride back. Thinking perhaps that in some other future, we make it back to Galveston and a bunch of the Morgan family is waiting for us and they see me and the sheriff and the marshal and the deputies rush to my aid to beat back the rioters and preserve my life for just a few more days. Thinking that as the company holds back the vengeful relatives and the Specials sympathizers who’ve taken up the Morgan family’s cause, I catch sight one last time of that woman, Margaret, and see everything in those eyes I’d been wanting to see for the past half decade. Thinking that she might have at her side a little boy, who looks a bit like the marshal but smaller. And as they take the body into the hospital and the doctor waits with the gravediggers who are just there to fill space because no one knows where else to put them, one of the niggers spots the little boy in the doorway, a cousin maybe, peeking surreptitiously through the crack in the door at the boy only a little older than him on a slab of wood. The large nigger is sitting down, fatigued in his entire body, but the smaller one has a coin in his hand, probably a week’s wages in Whiteland, and closes it in his fist, then opens it again for the child to see his empty, lined palm. Then he pulls the shining thing from behind the kid’s ear with an expression of mock-wonderment, and maybe it nudges a smile onto the boy’s smudged face.
With the creosote bush and the mesquite and the blackbrush, I wonder how often it’s rained since I was last here. Whether this flora ever saw any hint of relief in the clouds.
* * *
THE train stops and for an instant, neither the marshal nor Lingerfelt moves, captured as they are in the inertia of the journey. They regard each other. Between them passes some unseen communion, some silent remarking of the day’s passing, and it is then that the door to their compartment opens and one of the marshal’s deputies enters to let them know they’ve arrived at Oberlin. The rest of the troop enters and, together, they escort the prisoner out and into a rusted town car that spirits him into the night.
Tim sidles up beside Cayenne at the hilltop as they watch the transport head toward the prison; the music of chains clanking grows softer with each passing second, until it’s nothing. And Tim rolls a cigarette. Cayenne wonders why she is waiting, what she is waiting for, knowing, as she waits, that she’ll find no ram caught in the bushes and that the prisoner will hang and the future will unfold as it will. She wants to hate him the way Jacob would’ve hated him.
Guilt wraps its arms around her chest like her husband used to do. She can’t help but feel she had something to do with that little boy’s murder. She fights back visions of her two boys, the one dead, the other abandoned. But each time she sees a Black boy’s lifeless body she also sees her own Jacob hanging from a tree, strung up by whites maddened by the end of their world, and she sees her second boy, a baby, cradled in her arms and she sees herself walking away, from the memory of the one and the reality of the other. She’s grown so comfortable in the body of this heart-hardened woman, and she hopes, as she does with every mission, that some sense of completion awaits her. She’s waiting for the day she can say to herself, “Both my sons are dead, and here are their bodies.” Someday. Not today.
“You’re lookin’ a little sideways, marshal. Prisoner give you a hard time?”
Cayenne wishes she could find a way to quiet the ache thrumming in her chest. “Nah, Tim. Just tired.” She straightens. It doesn’t feel like revenge. Maybe it still is. It doesn’t feel like reparation, but maybe it still is. She says nothing more to Tim and watches them take that white man away in chains.
A man shuffles past with a long-handled hammer leaning against his shoulder. He shoulders into her, and the head falls off, thuds into the ground. She stoops to pick it up, and that’s when she sees the man has stopped.
“You dropped—”
The Preacher
How two deaths in New Haven, Connecticut, illuminate the intergenerational plight of the Exodusters
On the 29th of April, in 20—, Bishop died. The precise hour of his passing is not known, but by the time the riot had ended, he was gone, hunched over in Saint Michael Church with a young man asleep on the floor next to him. On the morning of May 2nd, a small, makeshift caravan ferried Bishop to a nearby graveyard, traversing roads made winter by smashed plate glass.
Beneath a sky whose red and whose blue swathes wrapped around each other like rival gang bandannas, the caravan moved through tranquil post-apocalypse. The brutality, enacted with drone strikes and augmented police officers and makeshift radiation rockets, was Old Testament in its indiscriminateness. Looking around, one expects to see the corpses of frogs littering the sidewalks, flanking a stream of blood. One looks at doorposts for any markings shielding that household from the Angel of Death. It is, more than anything else, the realization of a vision. Whose vision, it is perhaps impossible to tell, but the tragedy of this is its inevitability. All throughout the New Testament, the Book of Revelation sits and waits. The Dome above shimmers, the colors of the sky fighting against themselves, and if this isn’t apocalypse, it’ll do until the real one gets here.
I had only spoken to Bishop directly on two occasions, each instance in the basement of the duplex he squatted. On the dresser and the mantel were bricks, mementos from worksites, propping up flower vases or acting as paperweights. One brick, he collected the day he met a stacker named Ace and Ace’s family; he had written the date on that one. Another, he had picked up to find $100 beneath, all of which had made its way into the collection plate at the Town Green Methodist Church in which he served as deacon. Some of them bear a name and a date, and in our first interview, Bishop had confessed that it was to mark new arrivals. He had been a part of the first generation of Exodusters, making their way from points west and south to the East Coast, where rumor had it things weren’t so bad, the air was halfway breathable and there were no toasters to be seen. “Anywhere without Marauders and police was Eden,” he had said that afternoon. He points to the brick that marks Jayceon’s arrival, the one bearing Wyatt’s visa stamp and Timeica’s, gestures indiscriminately as there is no organizing recent arrivals and old-timers. Mercedes has no brick because she had staked a claim for herself here while Bishop was winding his way through the middle of the country. She’d had a husband he would like to have met. Despite their lack of arrangement, there is an order to them. Spend enough time in the brick fields and you realize that this is what he is replicating here in his home. And occasionally, he moves around to palm one, fondle another, even now after all these years mesmerized by the texture and design, the poetics of the thing in his hand.
Those who didn’t know better considered Bishop a New Haven institution. He looked the part and certainly acted it, his death the final coda ramming home the point that the younger generation never gets around to rapping with the older generation in time. No one knew how old he was. Had he remained in Timmonsville, South Carolina, where he is purported to have been born, the information could have been easy enough to find and maintain, a digital footprint impossible to erase, but the red dust and the massive migrations it preceded were in the business of erasing such footprints, so that there was nothing but desert afterward. Red-bloods like Bishop arrive in a place like New Haven with only what they’ve stored in their unaugmented heads. But he was old enough to have witnessed the building of the first Colony.
A quirk and feature and sadness of the Exodust is the penchant that the first and second generations have for referring to where they came from as the Old Country. For one the Old Country is Laramie. Another, when asked, spits out Galveston like an epithet. For another, Indianapolis is the land they left. Sometimes, Newark is the city they are trying to forget.
He was a young man just as the pandemic was loosening its grip on the country. The internet was ubiquitous, but what he talks about, when he brings himself back to that time of relative optimism, is the sound of it all. He does it now. Sometimes, when no one else is home, the TV will be left on while he vacuums or washes dishes or sweeps staircases. Sometimes, leaving perhaps to run an errand in the evening or to attend a meeting, the lights will be left on and they will buzz and hum. The white noise of the Internet was the equivalent for children born a decade into this past century. It is the drone and bang of a washing machine at work, when everyone else is gone. Now, without that constant connection, cut off by the Dome, then by the radiation, he has only a thing like a TV to fill a room. The Medusa stare changes forms, but the youthful eye drawn to it is ever overstimulated and jaundiced.
