Authors: Bruce Sterling
“Why the hell would I wanna do that?” He turned to the others. “Hey,
borrachos
!” he shouted. “
Tenemos tequila
!”
Surrounded by swift and boisterous demand, Starlitz distributed the contents of the bottle. It didn’t take long to kill off the Gran Centenario. Straight, no chaser.
Layered onto a bellyful of kosher wine, the tequila hit the crowd like ruinous high-octane jet fuel. One of the day laborers drunkenly yanked the generator back into life. The Christmas lights flickered on. Two guys flung rags and bits of ancient board into the trash barrel, which blazed up enthusiastically, flooding the garage with a bloody glare.
Starlitz spoke up earnestly. “Dad—tell me about Mom, okay? What is she like now, in that old folks’ home?”
Joe knocked back his tequila and shuddered. He nodded reluctantly, chin wobbling back and forth. It could
have been a trick of the flaming light, but Joe looked a full hundred years old now. He shook his head mournfully. “Senicide medicines.”
Starlitz tapped his forehead. “She’s already gone, up here, for all intents and purposes, right? Y2K can’t touch her now: she already left.”
Joe’s brown eyes glittered. Joe’s eyes looked quite ageless suddenly, like two puddles of heat-fused glass. Not glassy cold, though. Lit from within by masculine will, almost a soldierly heroism, a man who had come fully to terms with every blow that life would ever be able to deal him.
Joe drew a solemn breath and lifted his shabby arm, the flag bearer at the barbed-wire brink of his trench. “Are we not drawn onward, we few—drawn onward to a new era?”
Starlitz turned his face away. He swallowed his tequila, and now the booze was on top of him, with that fatal charm of alcohol, that deadly skill the drug had of turning real emotion into sentiment. When you were drunk, you knew very well how you felt; the truth welled up from its deepest pits of repression, but the booze bleached the sharpness and the color away, it became the cheap, grainy cartoon version of your anguish. “My God,” Starlitz said, “my God, I’m truly
stuck
now. A few more ticks of the old atomic clock, and I’m finally all alone in the world. I’m alone in the universe, Dad. No mother, no father. I’m an orphan.”
Zeta’s eyes welled up. “But
I’m
still here, Dad! Look at me!
I’m
not an orphan!”
Starlitz put an arm around her shoulder. The two of them fell silent, looking at Joe. Starlitz had never realized it, that a child could be such a source of strength. She was pulling him into the future, like hands reaching over the gunwale of a lifeboat.
The drunks were singing again. They’d found a Mexican “Feliz Navidad” record in the stack of battered vinyl, a pop track with a little more picante to it. Someone had marijuana. The juice and weed had liberated their sense
of seasonal generosity. The ones who could still stand were attempting to dance. Joe looked at their staggering tea-head antics, amused, his wily face the picture of forties hepcat cool. “So!” he said. “Catnip in tacos?”
As the smoldering barrel continued to blaze, the garage filled with toxic smoke. Starlitz felt his eyes stinging painfully. Why hide anything? It was a wake, the century was a dead dog.
There was a violent banging at the broken door. “
¡Policía
! Police!”
“¡La Migra!” someone yelled. Instant panic broke out among the revelers.
Joe laughed in defiance as he faded from sight. He simply evaporated before the pair of them, like a veil of handmade lace in an atomic sheet of purifying flame. Starlitz barely caught his last cry: “
So crank on in, OK narcos
!”
“Dad, it’s cops!” Zeta shrieked in terror.
“Just sit down, Zeta,” Starlitz said, wiping his eyes. “Put your hands where the officers can see ’em, okay? This is just something we gotta get through.”
STARLITZ WAS ARRESTED FOR VAGRANCY. THERE WERE potential charges aplenty waiting for him: breaking and entering, trespassing, corrupting a minor, driving without a license in a boosted truck with no inspection sticker, creating fire hazards, attempted arson, and so forth. And so forth. But these charges were all contingent on his revealing who he was. Starlitz had no ID, and he wasn’t answering any questions.
He got one obligatory phone call. He tried an emergency number, got an answering machine in Washington, D.C. No dice. Starlitz went back into the jug.
Three days passed. Starlitz wouldn’t talk. The sheriff’s department soon grew bored with him, but this was a question of will. In any prison situation the bulls always had it figured that time was theirs to give or take. Starlitz stayed out of fights, watched prison television, kept his
teeth, hair, nails, and his uniform clean, and finally wheedled his way into a second phone call.
This time the line picked up.
“Jane O’Houlihan?” he said.
“You got her. It’s your dime.”
“Actually, this is the county’s dime, Jane. I’m in a county slammer in Socorro, New Mexico.”
“Yeah, that’s what my Caller ID says. So who is this?”
“I can’t tell you, because even county cops tap phone calls these days. But think back to the early nineties, okay? You’re an assistant attorney general in Utah. There’s a Section Ten Thirty bust of a bunch of radical anti-abortionists. Inside the Utah state capitol. Remember that?”
“Oh, fuck,” O’Houlihan said thoughtfully. “It’s Leggy.”
“Yeah. Sorry, Jane. Voice from the past, and all that. Guy who knew you when. Listen, I need a favor.”
“Did you leave a message on my answering machine last Monday?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Damn, I had that figured for phone phreaks. They’re all Bulgarian now, did you know that? Shitloads of crazy Bulgarians.” O’Houlihan sniffed. “What the hell good is telecom security when the fucking national phone company is owned by Bulgarian maphiya? And the little sons of bitches have got my office number too.”
“At least they’re not Serbian.”
“You’re joking, right? The
worst
ones are Serbian.”
“Well, at least they’re not Russian.”
O’Houlihan’s voice fell even lower. “In Russia the
cops
are the maphiya.…”
“Jane, I know you’re busy, so let me cut to the chase here, okay? Things got out of hand, down here on the border. I got busted for vagrancy. I need the DoJ to yank me some big federal strings from Washington, so I can walk out of this mess.”
“You’re kidding, right? You expect
me
to get you out of some county jug? Sonny boy, you have no idea what kind of operational constraints we feds labor under. I gotta fill
out six OMB forms and an Al Gore Website to procure a friggin’ hairpin.”
“Janie, you’re hurting my feelings, okay? Who was it that boosted you into the Spinster Prosecutors’ Club, at the right hand of Janet Reno? If it wasn’t for my unique talent-spotting abilities, you’d still be busting check forgers in deepest, darkest Mormonville.”
“Don’t you dare tug my chain, boyo. I can reach out with my big Yellow Pages finger here”—there was a series of rapid disconnection-clicks on the line—“and you’re just another sad cry for help in alt dot prison dot support. You get me?”
“Janie,
don’t hang up.
”
“That’s more like it,” O’Houlihan said.
“Look, it’s just a vagrancy rap. I was broke, and I have no ID on me, and I was sleeping in an empty garage. Those aren’t even supposed to be
crimes
, for Christ’s sake.”
“You weren’t holding dope, right?”
“No, no drugs.”
“You didn’t have a hot-wired laptop, or a shitload of guns, or anything?”
“No way.”
“Then what was it? You’re not telling me what it fuckin’
was.
”
“Well, there’s an underage kid involved.…”
“Aw, Jesus.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“Your
daughter
?” O’Houlihan gasped in astonishment. “
Your
daughter, Starlitz? Your daughter by
what
?” She paused. “Not those little toll-fraud dyke bitches from Oregon.”
“Uh, yeah, one of them.”
“Why do men do this to themselves?” said O’Houli-han wonderingly. “When there are wonderful women in the world, like Grace Hopper, and Madeleine Albright, and Janet Reno.
Honest
women. Clean. Dedicated. Faithful public servants.”
“It’s not just asking for me, okay? It’s for the kid.
They’ll book her in some kind of juvenile facility, and she’s led a really sheltered life. She’s only eleven years old.”
“So what is this alleged child’s name? You got her SS number handy?”
“Her name is Zenobia Boadicea Hypatia McMillen.”
“Look, that’s enough names for five or six little hippie kids.”
“I didn’t name her, okay? And I don’t have five or six kids, I only have one. I’m at rock bottom, Jane. She’s all I’ve got left in the world.”
“Okay,” said O’Houlihan slowly. “Maybe you got me all touched here. Maybe I can do something about dismissing a New Mexico vagrancy rap. It’s not some Chinese Los Alamos atom-spy thing, anyhow. Right?”
“Yeah, right.”
Her voice grew taut. “So: give over. And I’ll think about it.”
“What do you need to know?” Starlitz said cautiously.
“Whatta ya got?”
“We shouldn’t talk about this on a tapped line.”
“I’m a heavy fed now, okay? Rule number one, I don’t want anything that any fucking redneck county sheriff can do or care a fucking thing about.”
“Okay,” said Starlitz. “If that’s how you want to play it. I wanna help you out here, I’m serious. I appreciate the role of law enforcement. I got my ear to the ground. I got some pretty weird contacts. I think I could turn you on to some pretty heavy-duty, fed-style casework here.”
“I’m listening,” O’Houlihan said.
“Like, for instance … hey! Come to think of it, I know two girls who had oral sex with the President!”
“The Big Guy beat the rap in Congress. Barely. Reno’s not gonna go through that scene again. She’d rather cut her own ears off.”
“Okay, how about: a big commune full of backwoods, Bible-thumping, apocalypse cultists. They’re totally insane. And they are armed to the teeth.”
“That’s an ATF job. I never work with the ninja tobacco-inspectors.”
“Uh, okay … how about a military washout kid who’s got a borderline, white-supremacist, paranoia thing? He’s buying fertilizer and he hired a rental truck!”
“Tell it to Ted Kaczynski! I don’t do loners. There’s way too many of ’em. I need a case with some meat on it, like a good RICO thing.”
“I’m with you here.… Okay, maybe I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, but how about a private mafia of trench-coat-wearing high-school teenagers who want to shoot all the jocks in their gym class?”
“That is
kid stuff
! Do I look twelve years old to you? Come on, get serious!”
“Okay,” Starlitz said wearily. “Listen. This is my best pitch. Turkish heroin is being smuggled into Turkish Cyprus inside giant inflatable bags of tap water.”
Starlitz heard the rapid scratching of a mechanical pencil.
“ ‘Cyprus,’ you said? ‘Turkish’ Cyprus?”
“Yeah.”
Starlitz heard the dry tapping of a keyboard and the rapid swish of an ergonomic mouse. “Eastern Mediterranean island? Economic embargo regime? Under international trade sanctions?”
“Yup. That would be the place.”
“This is heroin, though, right? And a brand-new smuggling method, right? Never discovered, never been busted by anybody before?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Starlitz said, brightening. “So listen: if I’m gonna out these submarine smack guys, I need the witness-protection nine yards. Me and my kid, too, okay?”
ONCE HE’D BEEN SIGNED OUT OF THE SLAMMER, STARLITZ took a bus north to Albuquerque to spring his daughter out of the state juvenile facility. This was by no means an easy matter, since the facility had been designed specifically to repel any and all suspicious male loners who might claim that they were somebody’s father.
While he planned Zeta’s prison break, Starlitz kept his daughter’s spirits up by smuggling in her favorite foods: tuna sandwiches on crustless bread, all-white-marshmallow bags, provolone-and-macaroni casseroles. Given that it was her first time in custody, Zeta had been bearing up well. Granted, there had been some unfortunate incidents. An episode of walking on the ceiling, the spontaneous poltergeist-style explosion of a television, a social worker’s handbag bursting into flame. Starlitz was not too concerned. These things could be swiftly explained away with the normal paradigms of child misbehavior circa 1999, i.e., designer drug use and bad digital media. Starlitz knew that the kid had gumption. He was convinced that she would be okay.
When they finally met in the cheerless conference room, with its unburnable, unbreakable, tot-colored plastic furniture, Starlitz saw a lost, doubting look in Zeta’s eyes. He’d never seen such a gaze of silent reproach in a human face. It lanced through him like an emotional harpoon; he found it worse than being shot. He had failed to take proper care. She knew it. He knew it. He could offer no conceivable excuse.
Starlitz social-engineered the staff by phoning and faxing in a stream of deceptive messages, adopting the guises and letterheads of a child-custody lawyer and a school psychiatrist. He extracted Zeta out the facility doors on a “day trip.” The two of them swiftly vanished from New Mexico’s official ken.
Starlitz had had more than enough of the local hospitality. They crossed the border into Colorado.
They finally departed the Greyhound together at Boulder. The city of Boulder seemed as good a place to stop and recoup as any, and maybe a better place than most.
Over the next week Starlitz finally buckled down to the real-life role of single fatherhood. He rented them a trailer at the Mapleton Mobile Home Park. The trailer was owned by a carpenter with a collapsing marriage, so the front and rear yards were full of unplaned boards and
broken tools and mounds of rotting sawdust. A giant set of transmission towers strode through the neighborhood, through the pines, the willows, the brown Dumpsters, the kids’ bicycles, the clotheslines, and the barbecue pits.
Starlitz got a straight job as a retail clerk at a convenience store, just up the street past the pediatric center and the eye clinic. He opened a bank account and acquired some training-wheel credit cards. He enrolled Zeta in sixth-grade classes at a Boulder public school. He hired a child-custody lawyer and filled out the reams of necessary paperwork.