going like a little unfocused hatred. The bat looked a little familiar, though. I edged closer to the railing surrounding the orchestra pit and peered through the drizzle. There were white-painted autographs burned into the black surface of the bat.
Oh, God, this was a sacrilege. This sick puppy had managed to get his mitts on one of the team bats that had been on display in the Cardinals Hall of Fame. Probably stolen shortly after the quake, when Busch Stadium had been overrun by the newly homeless, before the Emergency Relief Agency had chased out the looters and set up their base of operations inside the stadium. By then, everything worth stealing from the display cases in the mini- museum was gone. I prayed that he hadn’t gotten his hands on a pennant-year bat; that would have been the worst insult of all. A bat with Stan Musial’s or Lou Brock’s signature inscribed upon it, now in the hands of some crazy with a grudge.
“Three!” he howled. “The bat should be long enough to reach across home plate and the strike zone as you stand in a correct position inside the batter’s box!”
“Get off the stage!” someone yelled from the seats.
The demented yup ignored him. “Remember, a longer bat is harder to swing, regardless of how much it weighs!” He hefted the bat menacingly. “That means you gotta get in good and close, so you can count his teeth before you bust ’em out of his goddamn lyin’ mouth …”
Now that I knew where the bat had come from, I made the proper association. He was reciting, with significant annotation, a list of batting recommendations that had been posted in the Hall of Fame museum next to a cutaway of a Louisville Slugger. The instructions were meant to advise Little Leaguers and other potential Cardinals champs of the future; now they were being howled by a psycho who would have given Hannibal Lector the chills. An innocent set of guidelines, reborn as directions for up-close-and-personal homicide.
(And with that memory, another one: Jamie sitting next to me on the MetroLink a couple of weeks before New Madrid. Saturday afternoon. We were on our way back from the stadium after watching the Cards stomp the gizzards out of the St. Petersburg Giants.
(“Pop?”
(“Yeah, kiddo?”
(“Can I play Little League next year?”
(“I dunno … we’ll see.”)
“Four! If you plan to buy a bat and you normally wear batting gloves-”
“Get outta here! Yer not funny!”
The memory of a quiet Saturday afternoon with Jamie evaporated as suddenly as it had materialized. I couldn’t have agreed more: it was not funny, if it had ever been funny in the first place.
I had come to the Muny in hopes of finding something worth reporting for the
So far, though, the only interesting speaker had been the psychotic Cards fan, and things were tough enough already without my repeating his advice for using a stolen baseball bat as a murder weapon. I turned and began to make my way up the concrete steps of the left-center aisle, feeling the rain pattering on the bill of my cap as I emerged from beneath the stage awning.
Huddled all around me were the new residents of Forest Park: people who had been left homeless by the New Madrid quake, either because their houses and apartments had collapsed during the quake or, as in the case of the north side communities, because last December’s food riots had caused so many of the surviving buildings to be burned to the ground.
Forest Park was the largest municipal park in the country. Before the events of last May it had been a pleasant place in which to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon. The World’s Fair had once been held here and so had the Olympic games, both more than a century ago. Now that the park had become a little bit of Third World culture stuck in middle America, the Muny was the only bit of free entertainment left available to the city’s vast homeless population. Tommy Tune no longer danced across the stage, Ella Fitzgerald was long gone, and the national touring companies of
I looked around as I walked up the steps, studying the dismal crowd. Men, women, and children; young and old, alone and with families, white, black, hispanic, oriental. No common denominator except that they were all clinging to the lowest rung of the ladder. They wore cheap ponchos and cast-off denim jackets and moth-eaten cloth coats donated by the Salvation Army; some didn’t even have raingear to speak of, just plastic garbage sacks and soaked cardboard boxes. In the weak, jaundiced light cast by the few sodium-vapor lamps that still functioned, their faces reflected hardship, pain, hunger …
And anger.
Most of all, anger: the dull, half-realized, hopeless rage of those who were pissed upon yesterday, were pissed upon today, and undoubtedly would be left standing beneath the urinal tomorrow. Halfway up the aisle, I was jostled aside by a burly man making his way down the steps; I stumbled against a chair and almost fell into the lap of a young woman who was holding a child in her arms. The little boy was chewing on a piece of government- issue cheesefood; his eyes looked glazed beneath the hood of his undersize sweatshirt, and the long tendril of mucus hanging from his nose told me that he was ill. If he was lucky, perhaps it was only the flu, although that could quickly escalate into pneumonia. His mother glared at me with silent, implacable rage-
No one here wanted pity. No one wanted the few government handouts that were still being given to them. All they wanted was survival and a chance to get the hell out of Squat City.
The mad yuppie was through with his screed by the time I reached the covered terrace at the top of the stairs. The terrace was at the rear of the amphitheater, and it was crowded with people trying to get out of the drizzle. Through the stone arches and past the wrought-iron gates, I could see the glow of dozens of trash-barrel fires in the adjacent parking lot, silhouetting the people who huddled around them for warmth against the cold spring rain, watchful for the apes …
Yes, apes. Real apes, not metaphorical in any sense whatsoever, although a case could be made for the ERA troopers who patrolled the park. One of the unforeseen side effects of the quake was that the Forest Park Zoo had practically split open at the seams, allowing lions, tigers, and bears-not to mention a few giraffes, antelopes, rhinos, and elephants-to escape. Most of the animals were recaptured by zoo personnel within the first few days after New Madrid, although quite a few wild birds had taken wing, and a handful of coyotes and bobcats had been wily enough get out of the inner city and into the county’s wooded west side. Some of the zoo specimens, unfortunately, didn’t make it back to their cages; two weeks after the quake, a rare Tibetan white leopard was shot by a redneck National Guardsman after it was cornered foraging through garbage cans in the University City neighborhood. When zoo officials arrived at the scene, they found the leopard’s decapitated carcass lying in the alley; the weekend warrior who had shot the leopard had carved its head off and taken it back to his place in Fenton as a trophy.
But the apes that had survived the collapse of the monkey house had done much better. Only a handful of apes had been recaptured, mostly gorillas and orangutans; most of the chimpanzees and baboons had taken to the trees and had survived the short, relatively mild winter that followed the earthquake summer. Indeed, they had been fruitful and multiplied, adding to their numbers as the months wore on. Now monkey packs roamed the park like street gangs, raiding tents and terrorizing squatters.
Even the ERA troopers were frightened of them; there had been one rumored account that a chimpanzee pack had fallen upon a parked Hummer and chased its crew into the woods. If the story was true, then good for the chimps; I had more sympathy for runamok apes than for runamok goon squads.
There was no sign of apes, either human or simian, so I found a vacant spot beside one of the Doric columns holding up the awning. After looking around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I unzipped my leather bomber jacket and reached into the liner pocket to pull out my PT’s earphone.
“Joker, can you hear me?” I said, switching on the PT and holding the earphone against my ear.
“
