Jericho Iteration (3 page)

With the insurance company now in receivership, it may be many months before the Morans are reimbursed for everything they are owed. Yet this is only one of many nuisances, large and small, with which Jean has had to cope as the widowed mother of two children.

“Summer wasn’t too bad,” she says, sitting on her bunk and gazing through the furled-back tent flap. “It was hot, sure—sometimes it was over a hundred degrees in here—but at least we had things to do and people were taking care of us. And when construction companies started looking for crews to work on demolition and rebuilding contracts, some people around here were able to get work.”

She laughs. “Y’know, for a while, it was almost like we were all in summer camp again. At first, we liked the ERA troopers. They put up the tents, smiled at us at mealtime, let Danny play in their Hummers and so forth …”

She suddenly falls silent when, as if on cue, a soldier saunters past her tent. An assault rifle is slung over the shoulder of his uniform parka, which looks considerably warmer than the hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket Jean is wearing. For an instant their eyes meet; she glances away and the soldier, who looks no older than 21, walks on, swaggering just a little.

“Lately, though, they’ve turned mean,” she goes on, a little more quietly now. “Like we’re just a bunch of deadbeats who want to live off the dole … I dunno what they think, but that’s how we’re treated. Sometimes they pick fights with the guys over little stuff, like someone trying to get an extra slice of cornbread in the cafeteria line. Every now and then somebody gets pushed around by two or three of them for no good reason. We’re at their mercy and they know it.”

She lowers her voice a little more. “One of them propositioned me a couple of weeks ago,” she says, her face reddening. “He made it sound as if he’d requisition some extra blankets for the children if I’d … y’know.” Jean violently shakes her head. “Of course, I’d never do something like that, not for anybody, but I think some of the other women around here who have kids … well, you do what you think you gotta do.”

She pulls at her lank hair as she talks, trying to comb out the knots with her fingers. It’s been several days since she has taken a shower in the women’s bath tent. Like everything else in Squat City, hot water is carefully rationed; she gives her bath cards to her kids.

“Last night Ellen wanted to know if Santa Claus was going to visit us even if we don’t have a chimney anymore,” she says. “I told her, ‘Yes, sweetheart, Santa will still find our tent.’ I didn’t tell her I don’t know if he’s going to bring us any presents—I’m hoping the Salvation Army or the Red Cross will come through—but I know what she wants anyway. She wants Santa to bring her daddy back …”

Her voice trails off and for a couple of minutes she is quiet, surrounded by the sounds and smells of Squat City. The acrid odor of campfire smoke, burning paper and plastic kindled by wet branches. The monotone voice of the announcer for Radio ERA, the low-wattage government AM station operating out of the Forest Park Zoo, talking about Friday night’s movie in the mess tents. A helicopter flying low overhead. Children playing kickball.

“Let me show you something,” Jean says abruptly, then stands up and walks between the bunks to push aside the grimy plastic shower curtain separating her family’s space from the others in G-12. “Look in here …”

In the darkness of the tent, a middle-aged man is lying in bed, his hands neatly folded across his chest. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s asleep or awake; his eyes are heavy-lidded, as if he’s about to doze off for a midafternoon nap, yet the pupils are focused on the fabric ceiling of the tent. He is alone, yet he seems unaware that he has visitors.

“That’s Mr. Tineal,” Jean whispers. “He used to own a grocery down on Gravois. He was buried alive under his store for six days before firemen found him. Six days, with both arms broken, and he hung on until they located him. After he got out of the hospital, they put him here, and he’s been like this ever since. His wife and his daughter have been tending to him, but I don’t think I’ve heard him say fifty words the whole time we’ve been here.”

Jean lets the curtain fall. “Three days ago, an ERA caseworker stopped by. They do that once a week, mostly just to have us fill out more forms and such. Anyway, this bitch—I’m sorry for my language, but that’s the way she was—the lady looked him over once, then turns to Margaret, his wife, and they’ve been married now for over thirty years, and says, ‘You oughtta just let him die. He’s only using up your rations, that’s all.’”

Jean walks back to her bunk and sits down on the same impression she had recently vacated. Once again, she’s quiet for a few minutes, gazing down at the muddy tracks on the wooden floor.

“So what do you think?” she says at last. “Is Santa going to visit us this year or what?”

From the
Big Muddy Inquirer:
April 3, 2013

Like a houseguest who has overstayed his welcome but is apparently deaf to hints that it’s time to hit the highway, the federal Emergency Relief Agency shows no signs of leaving St. Louis anytime soon, despite the fact that the last aftershock of the New Madrid earthquake has been felt and many local officials say the city is off the critical list.

Although 550 ERA troopers were recently withdrawn from Metro St. Louis and returned to the agency’s federal barracks at Ft. Devens in Massachusetts, some 600 soldiers remain on active duty in St. Louis County. ERA officials claim that the situation in St. Louis remains dangerous and that the agency’s paramilitary forces are needed to maintain order in the city.

“Look at the map,” says Col. George Barris, commander of ERA forces in St. Louis. He points at a street map tacked up on a wall in the central command post, in what used to be the Stadium Club at Busch Stadium. Large areas of the map—mostly in the northern and southern sides of the city, as well as the central wards—are shaded in red, with black markers pinned to individual blocks within the red areas.

“Those are the neighborhoods still under dusk-to-dawn curfew,” Barris explains. “The little black pins are the places where our patrols have encountered hostile action in the past 48 hours alone. Street gangs, looters, assaults against civilians—you name it. Now you tell me: do you really want us to just pack up and get out of here?”

It’s inarguable that vast areas within the city remain volatile, particularly on the north side where three days of rioting late last December caused almost as much damage as the earthquake itself. Several parts of the city are so unsafe that authorities can patrol them only from the air, forcing SLPD to use military helicopters—including secondhand Mi-24 gunships recently purchased from Russia—instead of police cruisers.

Yet many persons in the city believe that the continued presence of federal troops in St. Louis is only exacerbating the crisis. “Look at what we’ve been through already,” says LeRoy Jensen, a Ferguson community activist who made an unsuccessful run for the city council two years ago. “People up here lost their homes, their jobs, some of them their families … now they can’t even leave the house without being challenged by some ERA soldier. Everyone who lives around here is automatically assumed to be a criminal, even if it’s just a mother stepping out to find her kids after dark. How can we go back to normal when we’re living in a combat zone?”

Jensen points out that when $2 billion in federal disaster relief funds were made available through ERA to Missouri residents after New Madrid, very little of the money found its way to poor and lower-middle-class residents. Like many people, he charges that most of the cash went to rebuilding upper-class neighborhoods and large companies that didn’t really need federal assistance in the first place.

“The government based the acceptance of loan applications on the ability of people to repay the loans,” Jensen says, “but how can you repay a federal loan if the store you worked at is gone? Yet if the government won’t help to rebuild that store, then you can’t repay the loan. It’s a catch-22 … but if you get mad about it, then along comes a dude in a uniform, telling you to be quiet and eat your rations. And when the food runs out, like it did last Christmas, then they send in the helicopters and soldiers again.”

Jensen also claims that ERA crackdowns on north-central neighborhoods in the city are based on social and ethnic attitudes among ERA troopers. “When was the last time you heard of a white kid in Ladue or Clayton getting busted by the goons?” he says. “Answer: you never do. But all these ERA troops, they’re rich white kids who got out of being drafted to Nicaragua by getting Daddy Warbucks to get ’em into ERA, so now they’re trying to make up for being wusses by kicking some nigger ass in north St. Louis.”

As heated as Jensen’s remarks are, they have some justification. The Emergency Relief Agency was established in 2006 as part of the National Service Act, which also reestablished the Civilian Conservation Corps and started the Urban Education Project. Under NSA, all Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 are required to serve 18 months in one of several federal agencies, including the armed services. At the same time, ERA was founded to replace the Federal Emergency Management Agency after FEMA came under fire for perceived mismanagement of natural disaster relief during the 1990’s.

After national service became an obligation for all young American men and women, CCC was the most popular of the available agencies. Soon there was a four-year waiting list for applicants to this most benign of organizations, with UEP being seen as an only slightly less benign way to spend a year and a half. Widely regarded as a hardship post, ERA was the least popular of federal agencies.

This changed when the United States went to war in Central America. As casualties began to mount among American servicemen in Nicaragua, many young men and women sought to duck military conscription by signing up for the ERA. Can’t get into the CCC? Not qualified to be a UEP teacher? Want to be a badass, but you don’t want to risk getting your ass shot off by a Sandinista guerrilla? Then ERA’s for you.

Congressional critics have charged that the agency has become a pool for young rich punks with an attitude. Indeed, the number of encounters between ERA patrols and local citizens in St. Louis that have resulted in civilian casualties tends to suggest that ERA soldiers have adopted a “shoot first, ask questions later” stance toward what ERA training manuals term as “the indigenous population”—that is, whoever lives in the curfew zones.

“Look at this place,” says Ralph, a young ERA corporal who has been assigned to curfew duty in Jennings. He stands on the corner of Florissant and Goodfellow, surrounded by burned-out buildings, an assault rifle cradled in his arms. “Every night the same thing happens again … the coons come after us and every night we gotta fight ’em off. I’ve lost all respect for these people. They don’t want to help themselves … they just want more government handouts. Shit on ’em, man. They’re not Americans.”

Ralph is originally from Orange County, California, where he was the assistant manager of a fast-food franchise before he joined ERA as a way of avoiding military draft. He spits on the ground and shakes his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t be prejudiced and call them coons,” he admits, “but that’s the way it is. If I knew it was going to be like this, I’d sooner be down in Nicaragua instead, shooting greasers and greasing shooters.”

This callous attitude seems endemic among ERA troopers who are still in St. Louis, but city council member Steve Estes claims that the continued ERA presence in St. Louis is justified. “Most of my constituents want law and order on the streets, period,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, ERA has a moral obligation to be here, and I’m behind them all the way.”

Estes, who is seen by several political insiders as contemplating a run for the mayor’s office, also wants to close down the tent city that was established in Forest Park to house the people left homeless by the quake. “The place has become a sanctuary for freeloaders,” he says. “If these people really want jobs and other places to live, then they could get them. Right now, though, it’s become another Woodstock, and I support any efforts to rid the park of these bums.”

Barris claims that all civilian casualties that have occurred during incidents involving his men and local residents have always been the fault of the civilians. “These guys are out there on their own, outnumbered a hundred to one,” he says. “When you’re cornered by a street gang and they’re throwing bricks and bottles or whatever they can get their hands on, your options tend to run out in a hurry, believe me.”

Jensen disagrees. “We see them as an occupational force. They want us dead or gone, period, so they can chase all the poor people out and build some more shopping centers. But we live here … this neighborhood may be burned out, but it’s still the place where we grew up.”

He stops talking to look around at the tenement buildings surrounding him. An ERA gunship flies low over the block where he lives. “We don’t want no trouble,” he says after it passes by. “We don’t want to go on living like this. I understand each bullet that thing carries costs the taxpayer five dollars. They want to make things better? Fine. Gimme five bucks for each shell casing some kid brings to me from the street … we’ll turn this side of town around.”

T
HERE WAS A MAN
on the stage of the Muny Opera, but what he was singing wasn’t the overture of
Meet Me in St. Louis.
In fact, if he was singing at all, it was a demented a capella called the New Madrid Blues.

My guess was that at one time he had been a young, mid-level businessman of some sort. Perhaps a lawyer. Possibly a combination of the two: a junior partner in the prestigious firm of Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck & Putz, specializing in corporate law. A yuppie of the highest degree, he had been a graduate of Washington University, graduating somewhere in the middle of his law school class: good enough to get an entry-level job with Schmucks and Putz, but not well enough compensated to have a place in Clayton or Ladue. So he had lived in a cracker box somewhere in the south side and commuted to work every day in the eight-year-old Volvo he had driven since his sophomore days at Wash You. Five days a week, he had battled traffic on the inner belt, dreaming of the day when he would have a Jaguar in the garage of a suburban spread in Huntleigh and his law firm would now be known as Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck, Putz & Dork, as he steeled himself for another grueling day of ladder climbing and telephone screaming.