The Swing Voter of Staten Island Read online

  “What are your affiliations?” one of the men asked her.

  “None of us are wearing any colors,” Mallory replied, as though citing a key rule of engagement.

  “That’s right. You don’t have the right to ask nothing!” the bus driver declared.

  “How about you, New Yorker?” the bully said to Uli, scanning his eyes with his scopic horn. A red ray shooting out from its tip led Uli to believe it was a lie detector. “You pro-life or pro-choice?”

  “He doesn’t know the issues,” Mallory answered for him.

  When one of the assistants edged up toward Mallory again, Uli stepped forward, compelling the man to lift his blade. Mallory raised her hand, urging restraint.

  The lead cop swung his cyber horn into Mallory’s eyes, but before he could ask any questions, Carnival punched the device.

  “Motherfucker!” Chain groaned, grabbing his forehead.

  One of the other gangcops immediately brought his machete up against Carnival’s long lean neck. Chain tapped his horn until the red light flickered back on, then leaned forward so that the scanner pointed directly in Carnival’s face.

  “What’s your name, asshole?”

  “Chad.”

  “Are those yours, Chad?” Chain pointed toward the old bucket and clunky mine detector.

  “I found them.”

  “What gang are you all with?”

  “We’re from different parties,” Carnival’s wife replied.

  “Not anymore you’re not,” Chain said. He gestured to one of his assistants, who pinned Carnival’s arms behind his back.

  “Don’t you dare touch my husband!” Mary screamed.

  “Or whatchu gonna do?”

  “I used to be a Pigger Councilwoman, asshole,” she shot back.

  Chain scanned one of her eyes with his instrument. “How do you like that? She’s not lying. Well, you’re lucky, honey, cause as you know, our party would never permit us to make a woman a widow or turn a child into an orphan.”

  “The family must be kept together at all costs,” added one of the other gangcops, as though he were reciting an axiom.

  Chain began laughing and two of his lackeys grabbed Carnival’s wife and Mallory, who they seemed to actually believe was his daughter.

  “Hold on!” Mallory yelled. Her little kangaroo was struggling to get out of her arm bag. She grabbed its furry legs and asserted, “We’re not related!” With her free hand, she fumbled through her purse and brought out an identity card.

  Pushing his cyber-eye up against her right pupil, Chain concluded, “You don’t look Jewish.”

  When the gangcop handed back Mallory’s ID card, Uli peered over and read the name on it: Alison Lowenstein—INDEPENDENT.

  “Chad and his Pigger wife are under arrest,” Chain announced. “The rest of you—scram!”

  “Wait!” Mary screamed.

  “They’re my passengers,” the bus driver objected. “I demand to know what you’re arresting them for.”

  “His metal detector is a rifle.” Chain kicked off the pancake base of the instrument, revealing that it was in fact disguising the barrel of a gun. Lifting the plastic bucket, he added, “And here are the rounds.”

  “What the hell?” Mary shouted at her spouse.

  “Pa!” their idiot son cried fearfully. “Howard Beach! Correction!”

  “I’m so sorry, babe,” Carnival mumbled to his wife.

  “This guy called that guy Pa,” said one of the gangcops, grabbing Oric’s chubby right arm. “He’s in the family.”

  Uli clutched Oric’s other arm. “Come on, he’s mentally incompetent and obviously older than that guy. How the hell can this be his son?”

  One of the men pressed his machete to Uli’s throat as the other shoved Oric up against the bus. Another gangcop fingerprinted the fat man and ran the print through a scanning machine in the shiny car’s glove compartment. A moment later, he reported back, “The guy’s clean,” and shoved Carnival’s son toward Uli.

  The driver started back toward his bus, but was stopped by Chain. “We’re confiscating your vehicle.”

  “Officer, where can we post bail for them?” Mallory asked, before the driver could protest. As a response, one of the gangcops grabbed the joey from Mallory’s bag and tossed him to the sandy sidewalk, then shoved her back up against the bus.

  “You’re interrupting a vital Pigger mission,” Uli said as they pinned his arm back. “I work for Council President Underwood.”

  “Oh sure,” Chain replied with a sneer, shining his scope in Uli’s eyes. “I really believe this New Yorker is one of us.”

  “Call Underwood. Tell him you’re holding the guy who was supposed to walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17 to the East Village, and shoot Dropt.”

  Registering no lie, Chain walked back to his shiny car. He snatched the radio phone from his dashboard and made a call. After a minute, he beckoned Uli over and handed him the black phone.

  Uli heard the strangely familiar high-pitched voice: “S’that you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me your mission again.”

  “Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17 and take it to the East Village in Manhattan, wait outside Cooper Union for Dropt to arrive, shoot him once in the head, then grab a cab back to the airport and catch the next flight—”

  “And why isn’t this being carried out, soldier?”

  “These guys hijacked my bus and falsely arrested two people.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that, just tell me you still have the gun I gave you.”

  “Yes sir, I was heading to Manhattan when these guys hijacked the bus—”

  “All right, listen, I just got a call from the blond lobbyist.” Uli had no idea who Underwood was talking about. “She’s impatient, so she’s going to help you. Proceed to Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn and meet her at the bus stop.”

  “Fine, but there’s this fat bald guy who illegally arrested some friends of mine—”

  Chain snatched the radio phone out of Uli’s hand and slammed it down. “Get walking before I change my fat bald mind.”

  Uli, the bus driver, Mallory, and Oric began heading down the road. Seeing her bulky election document amid the shards of shattered solar paneling, Mallory bent down and scooped it up, never breaking her stride.

  “If they’re Piggers,” Uli asked softly, “why do they have jurisdiction in a Crapper borough?”

  “Since they work as Council cops, they have citywide jurisdiction,” Mallory explained.

  After several blocks down the long sandy street, the driver stopped, looked back at his hijacked bus, and groaned. Two corpses swung by their necks from a broken light post. Oric dashed about thirty feet back toward his murdered parents before Uli tackled him. The challenged man collapsed in the sand and wept.

  As Uli stared at the murdered couple in the distance, he blurted out, “Wait a sec, I don’t think it’s them.”

  The driver put his finger over his lips, indicating silence.

  “But whoever is hanging up there looks black,” Uli protested. “The Carnivals were white.”

  “The light’s just playing tricks with your eyes,” Mallory assured him, and making the sign of the cross she added, “They’re back in old New York now.” She handed Uli her election document, then removed the billowy shirt and wig she had used as a disguise. Pausing, she quickly popped the contact lenses out of her eyes and slipped them into a tiny plastic case. She took Oric gently in her arms and helped him to his feet.

  The four of them walked further down the succession of barren streets, away from the swinging bodies. Soon they sat down near a small empty square under the long shadow of a statue that appeared to be Lenin.

  Oric began mumbling, “I didn’t see it coming, I didn’t see it coming, I didn’t see it—”

  “It’s not your fault!”

  “They were my brothers!” Oric retorted inexplicably.
r />   Mallory held the man-child’s hand as he whimpered softly.

  “If all of Queens votes for the Piggers,” Uli asked, tiredly toting Mallory’s giant book, “who exactly are you protecting with this document?”

  “After eight years in office, Shub has disappointed even most of the hard-core Piggers. Hell, he was so damn powerful that he wouldn’t allow any other Piggers in the primary.”

  “So what exactly do you hope to do?”

  “I was appointed to a bipartisan commission that sends officials to monitor the elections at different polling sites. They’re the ones responsible for making sure the right equipment is available and accessible. If I can just make sure that the hardware is there, we should get a reasonably fair mayoral election, and we might actually have a shot at beating the son of a bitch.”

  “Do you know anything about that Chain prick?” the bus driver asked her.

  “Yeah, I know him. He would’ve recognized me with that scope if I didn’t have the contact lenses. Nine years ago, when my husband was mayor and Horace Shub was head of the City Council, that bastard was his chief of security,” Mallory explained. “Hor eventually fired Chain to appease the Crapper moderates—the man was a known sadist. About five years ago, the Slope had a mini uprising because they resented Shub’s Pigger policies. Chain was appointed to oversee Council security for central Brooklyn.”

  Several minutes later, Uli asked the driver, “What color did Jim Carnival and his wife appear to you?”

  “There’s an expression round here,” he replied. “You don’t really know a person till he’s dead …”

  “And by then what does it matter?” Mallory added, still holding Oric’s hand as they got up and marched onward.

  Oric’s mental limitations did not extend to his sense of love or grief. The Carnivals’ adopted and orphaned son continued weeping over his “dead brothers” as they headed down the middle of empty streets, passing abandoned and damaged buildings. By late afternoon, when they had crossed a desolate intersection marked Ditmas Avenue, they came to the outskirts of a new neighborhood that bore the sign, BEN HUR.

  Moving into the northern end of Bensonhurst, they approached a battery of a dozen or so older blue-haired women and six male amputees working in the street. Some of the crew were digging with shovels. Others were stooped on their knees upon squares of cardboard. Each person was an arm’s reach from the next. They moved in a straight line at their own slow pace, scooping sand into wheelbarrows.

  “What the hell is this?” Uli asked.

  “Sandstorms,” Mallory replied. “They hit about twice a month this time of year. The locals dig them out—refundable sand.”

  The four bus refugees stumbled past as the locals harvested the coarse brown sand dropped during the last storm.

  “You should get your children to help you,” Uli suggested to one lady who seemed to be the group leader.

  “Fuck off!” she barked.

  “Didn’t no one tell you bout the epidemic?” the bus driver asked when they were out of earshot.

  “What epidemic?”

  “The EGGS epidemic,” the driver said. “Something in the ground water messed up their plumbing.”

  “Roughly one-third of all women of child-bearing age died within the first five years of coming here,” Mallory chimed in as they labored along down the street.

  MY JAW’S SORE, announced the canary-yellow T-shirt of a brightly lipsticked woman they came upon who appeared to be a malnourished hooker. She was leaning invitingly from the window of a tenement on New Utrecht Avenue, though she wasn’t much to look at.

  Uli heard an emaciated man on a corner chanting in what sounded like Spanish, “Sí … sí …” Then he realized the scary creature was actually hustling something. “What exactly is c-c?” he asked the driver.

  “There are two main drugs here: choke, which you smoke, and croak, which you shoot or swallow. Pigger gangsters control croak because Underwood grabs it from JFK.”

  “What other drugs are shipped out here?”

  “Aside from painkillers and sleeping pills, one of the main drugs of choice is methadone. A lot is sent in.”

  “Is choke shipped in?”

  “No, it’s made from indigenous plants—pot, peyote, what have you. Crappers handle the choke production in Hoboken. They harvest fields of it across from Manhattan, using the river for irrigation.”

  Lapsing back into silence, Uli smelled a foul odor and realized it was coming from Oric. He sped up a little and walked with Mallory, the other two trailing behind.

  “You know that guy chasing us in Flatlands?” Mallory said after a while.

  “What about him?”

  “Did he look familiar to you?”

  “Yeah, he looked like him,” Uli said, tipping his head toward Oric.

  “Did that couple, the Carnivals, seem odd to you?” she asked.

  “Everything here seems odd to me. Do you think they abducted Oric?”

  “Why would anyone abduct a mentally retarded man?” she asked. Uli shrugged. “In any event, there’s a city-run home for the mentally impaired out in Willowbrook, Staten Island.”

  “Maybe we can drop him off,” Uli suggested.

  They began to hear lively carousing in the distance. A group of people were gathered around an energetic band that consisted of two youths drumming on upside-down spackle buckets, accompanied by various homemade wind and string instruments. Beautiful women twirled like dervishes with equally handsome guys. Half a block further down, a group of older men standing around a barrel filled with greenish flames was sucking on stinky cigars. A vendor was turning chunks of skewered meats over a small flame. A sign on his cart said, GB-ways! Smelly, oil-bearing smoke trailed down the block. Oric paused at the food stand.

  “Come on,” the one-armed bus driver said, and led everyone into a small empty shop that had a large rickety table with a row of grills in the center. Against the wall was a stack of old milk crates. He went up to the worn wooden counter where there was a large can of old soup spoons, along with napkins and four plastic squirt bottles, each with a different color paste inside.

  The driver took a crate and dropped it on the floor at the table’s edge. Everyone followed him, taking napkins and spoons. A small Asian woman with the face of a bat appeared at the rear door smoking a corncob pipe.

  “One-stamp size,” the driver said, holding up his index finger for emphasis. Uli saw that there was only one item on the menu; its size was determined by the price. The woman disappeared into the back, presumably the kitchen.

  Several minutes later, the woman reappeared wearing oven gloves and carrying an old pot filled with flat noodles in steaming water, which she carefully placed on the grill. Underneath she slid a small can of some sort of gel. She lit the Sterno can with a match, creating a small but persistent blue flame.

  A boy who appeared to be her son followed her out with a cardboard box containing raw vegetables and several dull knives. He returned to the rear room and came back with a tray of sizzling chunks of meat, which he dumped into the boiling pot.

  “Food here don’t make you sick,” the driver commented, “but you got to work a little.” Since he had only the one arm, he instructed Uli to chop up the browning celery and wilted carrots. Mallory was told to dice an onion the size of a small cantaloupe and Oric was given the task of shredding lettuce, cabbage, and basil leaves. Everyone dumped their sectioned vegetables into the bubbling pot.

  The driver picked up a bright red squirt container and was about to squeeze it into the pot when Mallory said she didn’t like it spicy and that everyone had the right to season their own bowl.

  “Fine,” the driver said, putting down the hot sauce.

  When the flame in the can finally burned out, Mallory began doling out hearty bowls of soup. Everyone quietly slurped down their food. Oric and the driver had another two bowls. The driver and Mallory both said they were getting low on cash, so each of them pulled out a quarter- stamp. Uli ma
de up the difference with a half-stamp, which they paid to the lady. Then, tiredly, they resumed walking.

  The sun began to set about ten minutes later, when Mallory spotted the silhouette of a tall man with extraordinarily wide hips wearing a skipper’s cap—a bus dispatcher. The official stood like a statue before the only illuminated building on the block. When Mallory asked if he knew when the next bus was coming, she was told that some driver just had his bus hijacked.

  “His passengers were hung by the neck,” the dispatcher said, “so all bus service is being suspended in southern Brooklyn until morning.”

  “They only hung two folks over in Borough Park,” clarified the driver as he slowly approached. “That was my bus.”

  “Sorry to hear it. No more buses or cabs neither tonight,” the dispatcher replied flatly. “Best chance you have is bedding down right here.” He pointed his thumb behind him at a run-down building with an old sign that read, HOTEL BEDMILL. “He has several rooms available, and cause of your tragedy he’ll probably cut the price.”

  Mallory led the little group inside a dim, paint-peeled lobby where several questionable characters sat on crates in the corner like human mushrooms. A large bug-eyed man wearing an old derby was sitting at a counter next to a wood-burning stove, listening to the radio.

  “Half a stamp per night. You can do two per room,” the clerk said. Everyone started digging through their pockets.

  “Give me something quiet,” the driver said, slapping a half-stamp on the worn-down counter top. The clerk gave him a towel and explained that the bathroom was in the hallway. “Checkout’s at 9 a.m. sharp.”

  “You snore, boy?” the driver asked Oric, who was leaning up against him at the counter. The heavyset man shook his head and farted. The driver asked for a second towel.

  Mallory politely asked if Uli could spare some cash.

  “This is it.” He held up his last half-stamp.

  “I thought I’d be back home by late this afternoon, or I woulda … All I have is a quarter-stamp,” she said. “Want to share?’

  “Do you snore or fart?” he half-joked.