enough to remember when the Bill of Rights still meant something, but I kept my sarcasm in check. Li’l Himmler here was just looking for an excuse to place me under arrest for curfew violation. My police record was clean, and he didn’t have anything on me, but my occupation was listed as “journalist.” I could see it in his face: reporters for the
“Sort of,” I said noncommittally, careful to keep my voice even. B. Douglas didn’t reply; he was waiting for elaboration. “I tried to jump over a storm drain a few blocks away,” I added. “Didn’t quite make it.” I shrugged and managed to assay a dopey gee-shucks grin. “Accidents happen, y’know.”
“Uh-huh.” He continued to study me, his monocle glinting in the streetlight. “Where did you say you were?”
“U-City,” I said. “Visiting some friends. We were having a little get-together and … y’know, kinda got sidetracked.”
It was a good alibi. The U-City neighborhood was only a few blocks west of the station; that’s where all us liberal types hung out, listening to old Pearl Jam CDs while smoking pot and fondly reminiscing about Bill Clinton. It fit. Maybe he’d pass me off as a stoned rock critic who had fallen in a ditch after going into conniptions upon seeing an American flag.
Off in the distance I could hear the first rumble of the approaching train, the last Red Liner to stop tonight at Forest Park Station. If Oberleutnant Douglas was going to find a good reason for busting me, it was now or never. After all, he would have to file a report later.
The kid knew it, too. He flipped my license between his fingertips, once, twice, then slowly extended to me as if he was granting a great favor. “Have a good evening, Mr. Rosen,” he said stiffly. “Stay out of trouble.”
I resisted the mighty impulse to salute and click my heels. “Thank you,” I murmured. He nodded his helmeted head and stood aside. The train’s headlights were flashing across the rails as I swept my fare card in front of the scanner, then pushed through the turnstile and trotted down the cement stairs to the platform.
The train braked in front of the station, bright sparks of electricity zapping from its overhead powerlines. A couple of my fellow riders looked askance at me as they stood up. One of them was an old black lady, wearing a soaked cloth coat, carrying a frayed plastic Dillards shopping bag stuffed with her belongings.
“What did he stop you for?” she asked as the train doors slid apart and we moved to step aboard.
I thought about it for a moment. “Because of the way I look,” I replied.
It was an honest answer. She slowly nodded her head. “Same here,” she murmured. “Now you know what it’s like.”
And then we found our seats and waited for the train to leave the station.
I rode the Red Line as it headed east into the city. Quite a few people got on or off the train at Central West End, most of them patients or visitors at Barnes Hospital, but my car only remained half-full. Most of the passengers were soaking wet. The train was filled with the sound of sneezing and coughing fits, making the train’s computerized voice hard to hear as it announced each stop. The Red Line sounded like a rolling flu ward; despite the fact we had just stopped at a hospital, somehow all those free vaccinations we were supposed to receive courtesy of ERA seemed to have missed everyone on this train. On the other hand, this wasn’t unusual; most of the people in the city had somehow missed receiving a lot of the federal aid that had been promised to us.
Through the windows, I could see dark vacant lots filled with dense rubble where buildings made of unreinforced brick and mortar had once stood; streets blocked by sawhorses because ancient sewer tunnels and long-extinct clay mines beneath them had caved in; shanties made of scraps of corrugated steel and broken plywood. Armored cars were the only vehicles on the streets, but here and there I spotted figures lurking in the doorways of condemned buildings. Night brought out the scavengers, the teenagers with tire-irons who prowled through destroyed warehouses and demolished storefronts in search of anything to be sold on the black market.
The train left the midtown combat zone and rumbled toward the downtown area. It stopped briefly beneath Union Station, but it passed Auditorium because the platform there no longer existed. Kiel Auditorium itself had survived, but where the old City Hall building and the city jail once stood were now vast lots filled with crumbled masonry, broken cinderblock, bent copper pipes, and shattered glass. Giant piles which had once been buildings, waiting to be hauled away.
By now the downtown skyscrapers were clearly visible, their windows shining with light; the Gateway Arch, seen above the spired dome of the old state courthouse, reflected the city lights like a nocturnal rainbow. For a minute or two there was no wreckage to be seen. It seemed as if the city had never suffered a quake, that all was sane and safe.
Then the train hurtled toward Busch Stadium, and the illusion was destroyed. Silence descended as everyone turned to gaze out the left-side windows at the stadium. Busch Stadium still stood erect; bright spotlights gleamed from within its bowl, and one could almost have sworn that a baseball game was in progress, but as the train slowed to pull into Stadium Station, the barbed-wire fences and rows of concrete barriers blocking the ground-level entrances told a different story.
A group of ERA soldiers were sitting on benches at the subsurface train platform; a couple of them glanced up as the train came to a halt, and everyone in the train quickly looked away. The doors opened, but no one got on, and nobody dared to get off. There was dead quiet within the train until the doors automatically closed once again. The train moved on, and not until it went into a tunnel and the station vanished from sight did everyone relax.
Busch Stadium wasn’t a nice place to visit anymore. Oh, people still did at times, but seldom voluntarily. There were whispered rumors that people who went to the stadium often didn’t come out again.
But, of course, that was only hearsay.
A few minutes later the train rolled into 8th and Pine, the underground hub station for the MetroLink. I got off here and took an escalator from the Red Line platform down to the Yellow Line platform. The station was cold, with a breeze that seeped through the plastic tarps covering a gaping hole in the ceiling where the roof had partially collapsed during the quake. A couple of ERA troopers lounged against a construction scaffold, smoking cigarettes as they watched everyone who passed by. I was careful to avoid making eye contact with them, but they were bored tonight, contenting themselves with ousting the occasional vagrant who tried to grab a few winks in one of the cement benches.
I managed to grab the Yellow Line train just before it left the station. It was the last southbound train to run tonight, and if I had missed it, I would have had to dodge downtown curfew patrols while I trudged home through the rain. At times like this I wished I still had my own car, but Marianne had taken the family wheels when we had separated. Along with the house, the savings account, and not an inconsiderable part of my dignity.
Not surprisingly, the train was almost vacant. Most of the South-side neighborhoods were under nine-to-six curfew, so anyone with any sense was already at home … if they still had a home, that is. Across the aisle, a teenage girl in a worn-out Screamin’ Magpies tour jacket was slumped over in her seat, clutching her knees between her arms; she seemed to be talking to herself, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. At the front of the car a skinny black guy with a woolen rasta cap pulled down over his ears was dozing, his head against the front window, rocking back and forth in time with the movement of the train; every so often his eyes slitted open, scanned the train, then closed again. A bearded redneck sat reading a battered paperback thriller, his lips moving slightly as he studied the sentences. An emaciated old codger stared at me constantly until I looked away. A fat lady with a cheap silver crucifix around her neck and an eerie smile. Pretty much your standard bunch of late-night riders.
I had the seat to myself. The train came out of the tunnel; once again I could see the city. For an instant, though, as I stared out the rain-slicked windows at the lights passing by, I felt a presence next to me.
I didn’t dare to look around, afraid to see what could not be reflected in the glass: a small boy, wearing a red nylon Cardinals jacket, dutifully marking up his scorecard while mustering the courage to ask me if he could enter a Little League season he would never live to see …
Goddamn this train.
“Not now, Jamie,” I whispered to the window. “Please, not right now. Daddy’s tired.”
The ghost vanished as if he had never been there in the first place, leaving me only with memories of the happy days before May 17, 2012.
Let’s talk about Jericho again.
There had been plenty of advance warning that a major earthquake might one day rock the Midwest.
