The Swing Voter of Staten Island (15 page)

“I did notice. I couldn’t keep up with you.”

“I went back to where we had come from, but after a while, when I realized it wasn’t following me, I ran back to you.”

“How did you get into the boat? I had already left the shore.”

“I jumped from a big rock,” she replied. Uli decided not to ask any more questions, since she obviously didn’t want to talk about it.

They chatted idly a bit more, until the 6 o’clock bus finally appeared in the distance. She kissed Uli gently on the lips as the vehicle came to a halt in front of them.

“Oh, this is for you,” she said, handing him the paper bag she had been holding. “It’s just some fruit for your trip.”

He thanked her. “The next time we meet, will it count as our third date?”

“You bet,” she said with a smile.

“Then I’ll definitely see you later.” Uli kissed her again and stepped inside the bus. The little door folded shut and the vehicle sped off.

“Well, looky here, it’s my old traveling buddy.”

It was the one-armed driver he had been hijacked with in Borough Park three days before. Uli greeted him and took a seat.

“I hate to tell you this, but the fare is still a sixteenth-stamp.”

“Of course.” Uli rummaged through his pockets and discovered that the few stamps he’d had yesterday were mysteriously missing. “Can I owe you?”

“Nothing personal, but I don’t even let my mother ride for free. What you got in there?”

Uli opened the brown bag that Bea had given him. “Apples, carrots, and bananas.”

“With these old teeth, all I can eat are the nanas.” Uli handed them over and took a seat across from the driver. “So, what happened to that lady and the retarded guy?”

“Both were killed.”

“Shame,” the driver replied, not particularly surprised.

“Let me ask you something,” Uli said. “Where would you go if you didn’t have any money or a place to sleep?”

“Well, seeing how you’re educated and all, there’s only one place out here where you can just walk in and get an instant job and a home, but I don’t particularly recommend it.”

“What is it?”

“P.P.,” the driver said. “Last stop.”

“Why wouldn’t you recommend it?”

“Everyone calls it
Pud Pullers
, cause they don’t really fuck you, but they don’t get you off either.”

In a way it made complete sense. The dubious philanthropic organization, Pure-ile Plurality, seemed to be the hidden citadel of power behind the Piggers. Uli remembered what the girl on the bus had said—that if someone could get evidence that the organization was controlled by the Piggers, the City Council would be forced to stop funding them.

“How long is the trip?”

“Long. Several hours. You’re lucky cause we bypass Manhattan, going directly over the Zano on the way back to Brooklyn. I’ll wind through Park Slope, then over toward JFK.”

Uli was glad to hear it. The thought of seeing the decimated Crapper headquarters again was just too much for him.

The bus slowly headed north. No one got on at either Charleston or Rossville.

After another half hour, as the setting sun shot bloodred rays across the desert landscape, the driver switched from fuel cells to the battery, and the bus pulled into a neighborhood called Bull’s Head, where a few others boarded. They drove along the eastern side of Staten Island, where a delta of shitty creeks and inlets broke off from the primary river.

Despite the cool evening air, the toxic smell intensified again, making Uli’s eyes tear. The bus lumbered across another of the many long flat riverbanks where the backed-up sewage swelled out over the highway. Uli tried to snooze but the smell was too much, even with his nose pin.

As they drove up onto the Zano Bridge, they passed over a small barge heading south along the shoals of Staten Island. Since the water under the bridge was significantly less polluted and a gentle breeze was blowing down from the north, the odor virtually vanished as they crossed into Brooklyn. As soon as they arrived in the borough—around 8:30—the bus hit traffic. It took fifteen minutes for them to get through Bay Ridge.

Wanting to avoid traffic coming in over the Brooklyn Bridge as they progressed up the western side of the borough, the driver detoured east, cutting out a few stops in Cobble Hill. The speed dropped dramatically as the vehicle labored up the steep slant of Park Slope.

When the bus reached the plateau, Uli realized they were near Flatbush Avenue/Jackie Wilson Way. He began to smell something burning.

“Shit!” the driver muttered, seeing a column of thick black smoke rising in front of them. “Everyone take a deep breath, we’re going in.”

Throughout the next several blocks, smoke shot out of windows and doorways of buildings on both sides of the street. Uli spotted some guy throwing a Molotov cocktail into the window of a sixteenth-stamp store. Men in blue shirts were running up the street.

“Get that fucker!” Uli heard one of them yell. “He stabbed Barnes!”

Red-shirted figures were slowly retreating. As the bus proceeded, Uli saw two lines of men fighting side by side with pipes, spears, and chains—a gang war was raging.

“It’s retaliation for the Manhattan bombing,” the driver said. “The guys in blue are Crappers, the red shirts are Piggers.”

“Actually, it’s retaliation
for
the retaliation,” some old voice behind Uli chimed in.

“They probably blew up the building themselves. The Crappers are always provoking things,” another rider opined.

The further east the bus proceeded toward the Brooklyn-Queens border, the hotter the conflagration grew. Soon, burning debris thrown from a partially collapsed building blocked the street.

Uli watched as two red shirts grabbed one of the overweight blue shirts. While one spun him to his knees, the other shoved a knife into the man’s neck. Not content to simply let him die, more red shirts joined in, stabbing and kicking him.

Others on the bus looked away, but Uli found himself transfixed. Something new inside of him, some deep animalistic power, like an erection in his heart, made him yearn to join the red shirts.

In another moment, the driver zoomed through the inferno, rolling right over burned pieces of wood. Once clear, the bus sped along for several more blocks until screeching to a halt before a man sitting on a tiny traffic island with a single metal pole. A sign on the pole said:
Grand Army Plaza
. As the man rose, Uli saw he had a shirt that was half red and half blue. For a moment he wondered if it was a statement of bipartisan unity. Then he realized the guy had incurred a serious stomach wound and was bleeding badly. Mercifully, the driver let him stagger on board without paying. The wounded Crapper soldier struggled down the aisle holding his stomach. He limped to the back and dropped into a double seat. Perhaps fearing gang reprisals, no one helped.

When the bus hit a huge pothole, Uli whacked his head against the seat in front of him. The ensuing headache compelled him to sprawl out over two seats and before long he was asleep. Immediately he returned to his interrupted dream.

The mother and son had almost escaped when the last of the marauders, the older man with an eyepatch and walking stick, noticed them passing by. As though inspecting a farm animal, he cupped one of the young mother’s exposed breasts in his hand. She kept moving as though nothing had happened. He grabbed her thick black hair, twisted it tightly around his large hand, and yanked her away from the group. Her crying son clutched her dress, refusing to let go. An older woman protested forlornly, but when the eyepatched man cursed at her, she just looked down and kept walking. The young boy started furiously kicking and slapping the old man with the eyepatch. Without any indication of anger, the guy released the mother and stepped away as though to let them pass. Then, as the two proceeded onwards, he lifted his heavy walking stick and brought it squarely down on the top of the boy’s skull. The child flopped forward, convulsing and gushing blood, and his mother slumped next to his small body. The man with the eyepatch calmly coiled the woman’s long beautiful hair in his hand like rope and led her back up to join the rest of his band behind the pile of boulders.

The last soldier, an older man whose fat head swelled out of his tight helmet, brought up the rear of the prisoners and cursed. As he stepped around the fallen elderly bodies—still alive, yet too injured to keep walking—he shouted angrily at the attackers. For a moment, Uli thought he was condemning the violent assault, but quickly realized why the soldier was outraged: Since the marauders hadn’t slaughtered or taken all the women, he now had to march them into the endless expanse of burning desert.

Suddenly Uli’s vision changed. Someone was holding his arms and legs down. A slender pair of hands were unzipping his pants, reaching into his underwear. Far from erotic, the hands were stabbing a sharp needle into his groin.

An intense pain shot through his body, causing him to leap to his feet and scream. Covered in sweat, still on the bus, Uli felt embarrassed. Yet something was indeed pressing into his groin. Reaching into his pants, Uli found that his missing roll of food stamps had somehow slipped through a hole in his pocket and gotten caught in his underwear.

“Sorry,” he said to no one in particular.

Aside from the weak bus headlights, the streets were pitch black. It had to be at least an hour later. The bus was nearly empty. The working streetlights were far and few. The sporadic buildings in this section of the reservation were mostly industrial warehouses with hurricane fences. There were no other cars or people around. Uli figured they were somewhere in outer Queens. As they rolled past blocks of darkness, haphazard piles of garbage and vandalized solarcars littered the streets.

Soon the road narrowed into a tight single lane as it hugged a concrete retaining wall that went on for at least a mile. When the road lifted above the height of the wall, Uli saw a large enclosed reservoir with a sign that read,
Jamaica Bay
.

Slowly, vaguely, through the darkness, Uli recognized this moonlit basin from a few days earlier. He had come full circle. He heard a large cargo plane overhead, which reminded him that he was near JFK Airport. At a lonely intersection in a neighborhood that the driver identified as Rosedale, Queens, the bus came to a tired halt, the last stop.

The driver threw open the door and called out, “Pud Pullers. Time for everyone to get rubbed off!”

Looking out the window, Uli saw the four large brownish buildings before him. He remembered seeing them from the far end of Jamaica Bay on the first day he had arrived.

“Hey, this guy’s not moving,” an elderly passenger said, referring to the wounded blue shirt. The guy had flopped sideways and was dripping and drooling into a pool of blood below him. Uli helped the driver carry the street fighter’s body off the bus.

Some strange girl who was waiting outside came over as they laid the dead Crapper’s body on the sidewalk. She took rosary beads from around her neck, dropped to her knees, and started praying: “Jesus, son of Yahweh! This man hath fought in the army of Satan. For him it is too late. Please burn his body for all eternity like the many fetuses he aborted and the countless children and virgins he doubtlessly sodomized. Amen.”

Uli realized immediately that it was the zealous Shub campaigner who had threatened him when Oric was detained. Everyone walked away from the dead man on the sidewalk.

“You’re just going to leave him here?” asked Uli.

“Someone will find him before the dogs do,” the driver assured him. “The local gangcops get a reward every time they bring in a body.”

The driver walked around to the rear of the bus, where he pulled out a lengthy orange extension cord and plugged it into an outlet at the base of a streetlight. It was time for a recharge. He returned to his seat and pulled the visor of his hat over his eyes, instantly falling asleep. Uli followed the small crowd heading toward the complex of buildings.

At the doorway, a plaque read,
Pure-ile Plurality: How the Other Half Should Live
. A broad walkway led into a narrow courtyard in front of a large well-lit lobby. Only through this central building could one gain access to the overpasses leading to the three neighboring warehouses.

Roughly a dozen women holding infants or pushing strollers dashed past Uli, presumably to catch the bus. Uli thought perhaps he had been misinformed about the EGGS epidemic.

One straggling mother, noticing his eagerness to glance at her child’s face, smiled proudly. She pulled back a small comforter, revealing a shivering Chihuahua dressed in swaddling clothes. Its moist eyes blinked delicately.

“Dat’s mi bebe,” she cooed.

“But it’s—”

“I think I might owe you an apology,” he heard from behind. It was the self-righteous campaigner who had just condemned the lost soul of the dead soldier.

“Sorry?”

“It wasn’t very Christian of me, scalding your poor feeble-minded friend,” she said. “I know I should be more forgiving, but you have to understand that decent people have suffered so much.” Turning to the mother, who was patiently waiting for her dog baby to be adored, the young zealot said, “You better hurry, Consuela. The bus back to Manhattan is almost recharged.”

“Much gracias,” she said, then dashed off with her pup to the bus.

“May I ask what it is you’re doing here?” the zealot said to Uli.

“Actually, I was hoping to volunteer.”

“Great, where you coming from?”

“I just arrived from Staten Island.”

“Let’s go, I’ll show you the way.”

The young campaigner introduced herself as Deer Flare. As she led Uli inside, she softly explained, “These ladies are here for treatment. You’ve got to be very careful.”

“Careful how?”

“Since the EGGS epidemic, many women have been traumatized about being reproductively challenged. The man in charge here, Rolland Siftwelt, has set up a variety of workshops to help them cope with their infertility. He’s also established these furry surrogates.”

A security guard at the central building asked Uli to pass through a metal detector and then took his fingerprints. When Uli turned up without any kind of record at all, the guard stopped him.