Jericho Iteration

Trike continued pedaling down 13th Street, entering the residential part of Soulard. It would have been quicker to use 12th Street, but too many houses on 12th had collapsed during the quake, and the street itself was full of recent sinkholes, many of them large enough to swallow his rickshaw whole. Even then, 13th was a scene of random destruction. Two-story row houses, some dating back to the late 1800s, stood erect next to the rubble of others that had fallen flat.

The derailment of the Texas Eagle bullet train outside Texarkana, Arkansas, has left three people dead and several others injured. Spokesmen for Amtrak say that the derailment may have been caused by failure of the train’s satellite tracking system, sending the nine-car train onto a siding instead of the main line. Investigators are now probing through the wreckage to see if deliberate sabotage was involved.

We passed tiny Murph Park overlooking the interstate-where a small shantytown stood next to a sign: CHICKENS 4 SALE, MONEY, OR TRADE-and crossed Victor Street, heading uphill where 13th became more narrow, the streetlights less frequent. An old black man sat on the front steps of his house, a 12-gauge shotgun resting across his knees. Across the street was the ruin of a half-collapsed Victorian mansion, where a bunch of street punks sat smoking joints beneath its front porch. Trike pedaled faster, avoiding the standoff between the two forces.

And in Los Angeles, the jury is out on the rape trial of filmmaker Antonio Six. His accuser, Marie de Allegro, claims that Six used telepathic powers to invade her mind two years ago during the filming of the Oscar-winning Mother Teresa, in which de Allegro played the title role. The sixteen- year-old actress says that Six was able to use ESP abilities to seduce her. Jurors are considering expert testimony offered in the director’s defense by several psychics.

We reached the top of the hill, then coasted the rest of the way down to Ann Street, where Trike took a hard right that threatened to overturn the rickshaw. He was clearly enjoying himself, although I had to hang on for dear life. A block later we reached 12th Street, where Trike took a left past St. Joseph Church.

The storefronts of convenience markets, laundromats, and cheap VR arcades lay on this block. Some were open for business, some closed and boarded up, all spray-painted with now-familiar warnings: “YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT”; “NOTHING LEFT 2 STEAL SO GO AWAY”; “IN GOD WE TRUST, WITH SMITH amp; WESSON WE PROTECT”; “IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE DEAD BY NOW,” and so on.

For the CBS Radio Network News, I’m-

“In sore need of a blow job.” Trike changed to one of the countless classic-rock stations that jammed the city’s airwaves. An oldie by Nirvana pounded out of the radio as he turned right on Geyer. I checked my watch. True to his word, barely ten minutes had elapsed since Trike had left Busch Station, and we were almost to my place.

Geyer had withstood the quake fairly well, considering the amount of damage Soulard had suffered during New Madrid. Although many of the old row houses on this block were condemned or outright destroyed, most of them had ridden out the quake. These old two-and three-story brick buildings were built like battleships: chimneys had toppled, windows had shattered, porches had collapsed, but many of them had stayed upright. It only figured. Soulard was one of the oldest parts of the city; it had too much goddamn soul in its walls to be killed in fifty seconds.

Trike coasted to a stop at the corner of Geyer and 10th. A couple of happy drunks were hobbling up the sidewalk across the street, making their way home from Clancy’s. I crawled out of the backseat, fished into my pocket, and pulled out a fiver and a couple of ones. “Thanks, man,” I said as I extended the bills to him. “You’re a lifesaver.”

Tricycle Man took the money, stared at it for a moment, then carefully pulled out the two ones and handed them back to me. “Here, take ’em back.”

“Hey, Trike, c’mon-”

“Take it back,” he insisted, carefully folding up the five and shoving it into his jeans pocket. “You’ve had a bad night. Go down to the bar and have a beer on me.”

I didn’t argue. Trike knew I was on lean times. Besides, I was a regular customer; I could always bonus him later. Soulard was a tough neighborhood, but it looked after its own.

“Thanks, buddy.” I wadded up the dollars and stuck them in my jacket pocket. Trike nodded his head and started to stand up on the pedals again. “And by the way … about the blonde?”

Trike hesitated. “Yeah?”

“She didn’t really have an Adam’s apple. I was just shitting you.”

He grinned. “I knew that. Good looking?”

I shrugged, raising my hand and waving it back and forth. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ve done better. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in London back in ninety-two and fucked Princess Di in the back of a limo? Now that was-”

“Get out of here,” I said, and he did just that, making a U-turn in the middle of the street and heading back up Geyer to ask the drunks if they needed a lift home. Leaving me on the brick sidewalk, alone for the first time that night.

The Big Muddy Inquirer was located in a century-old three-story building that had been renovated sometime in the 1980s and turned into offices for some law firm; before then it had been yet another warehouse, as witnessed by the thick reinforced oak floors and long-defunct loading doors in the rear. The law firm that had refurbished the building had moved out around the turn of the century, and the property had remained vacant until Earl Bailey purchased it early last year.

Bailey had just started up the paper when he bought the building. Ever the entrepreneur, he had intended to open a blues bar on the ground floor and eventually move the Big Muddy into the second-story space from its former location in Dogtown. Bailey had made his wad off the Soulard Howlers, the blues band for which he was the bassist and manager, and Earl’s Saloon had been intended to be the money tree behind his alternative paper. Big Muddy Inquirer might not have been the first newspaper whose publisher was a hacker-turned-guitarist-turned-bar-owner, but if you’ve heard of any others, please don’t let me know. One is scary enough.

Anyway, Bailey was halfway through refurbishing the ground floor when the quake struck. The bar survived New Madrid but not the widespread looting that had occurred in Soulard several weeks later, when vandals broke into the place and took off with most of the barroom furnishings. By this time, though, the escalating street violence in the south city had forced the paper out of Dogtown, so he shelved plans for the bar, moved the Big Muddy to Soulard … and, not long afterward, grudgingly agreed to let out the unused third-floor loft to one of his employees. Namely, me.

I had a keycard for the front door, which led up to the second and third floors, but tonight I really didn’t want the hassle of having to disable the burglar alarm Pearl had installed in the stairwell. The control box was difficult to see in the dark and, besides, I could never remember the seven-digit code that I would have to type into the keypad. So I ignored the front door, walked past the boarded-up ground-floor windows-spray-painted BLACK OWNED! DON’T LOOT! as if it made any difference to the street gangs who would have mugged Martin Luther King for pocket change-and went around the corner until I reached the enclosed courtyard behind the building.

An old iron fire escape ran up the rear of the building. Pearl would have shot me if he had known I was using it as my private entrance, which was why I had to keep my stepladder hidden beneath the dumpster. I had just pulled out the ladder and was unfolding it in order to reach the fire escape’s gravity ladder when I heard a shout from the opposite side of the courtyard.

“Hey, mu’fucker, whattaya doin’?”

“Just trying to break into this building to steal some shit,” I yelled back as I put down the stepladder and turned around. “Why, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

There was a large human shape blocking the light escaping from an open garage across the courtyard. I heard coarse laughter, then the voice changed. “Hey, Gerry, that you?”

“That me. That you?”

“Fuck you. C’mon over and have a beer.”

I put down the ladder and ambled over toward the garage where Chevy Dick and a few of his cronies were hanging out next to his car. Chevy Dick was Ricardo Chavez, an auto mechanic whose shop was the Big Muddy’s closest neighbor. Chavez was in his early fifties; in 1980, when he was barely in his teens, he and his family had escaped from Cuba during the first wave of boat people who had descended upon