Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 7
by Joshua Ellis
Monsoon season comes that morning, hard as a knife, the rain coming down from the mountains and staining Red Rocks a dark crimson.
Maria hates taking the goats Downtown during the season. Well, that isn’t entirely true: she loves going Downtown. She takes Charleston; it was covered with that nanotube stuff right before the Crunch and it’s still relatively smooth, only a few big sinkholes. She just kicks the trike into neutral and lets gravity do its thing, the trailer full of gently bleating goats adding a little extra momentum, and she raises her smile to the sky and lets the rain wash across her eyelids and her forehead and drip off her hair. You can still smell petrochemicals seeping out of the old buried asphalt when it rains, a faint exotic smell, like a rare spice.
It’s getting back that she hates. In the gray gloom the solpans are nearly useless, barely able to suck up a single watt of sun, and she’ll have to sit outside the Center for an hour cranking her dynamo under the contemptuous eyes of the security cadre and the rich people coming and going. She can always feel their eyes on her, all the way up the building, though Carlos says that was stupid. “Nobody’s looking at you, baby,” he tells her. “They don’t even see you right in front of them. They can only see themselves.”
He’s probably right, but she still feels the weight of their gaze, their glare, their judgment. But not now. Not sailing down the big black hard river, the water catching in little arcs as she weaves between fissures with edges riding up like tectonic plates.
She wishes they lived on the Eastside, where it’s flat. But that’s not how it worked out, all those years ago, when the Family staked out their claim, right after the Crunch. The pastures are all up here on the Westside; Abu told her once that when he first came here, when he was a boy, they were artificial lakes, built by the people for no reason he could understand. “They were a kingdom of ducks,” he said. “Ducks and milfs.” But they’d filled the lakes in with soil and seeded them with the tasty grass the goats loved, and now she couldn’t imagine them any other way.
When she had asked him what a milf was, he had laughed until he’d nearly cried and told her he’d explain when she was older. He never has, though.
Of course, back when Abu came here, this was still a desert. Maria can’t imagine it now, but he swears it never rained in the Valley. That was before the Crunch. Abu calls it the “naco singularity,” though Bela rolls her eyes at him when he does. He used to teach philosophy at the University back in the day and Bela says he’s still got some leftover bullshit in him that bubbles up from time to time.
But no desert now, just a hot swamp that boils in the summer and freezes in the winter. She can see the Charleston Waterfall coming up, the overpass, the water a rippling translucent sheet that will make the goats squeal as she passes through it. No other way to get where she’s going.
The Center, the arcology, is at the heart of the old Strip but it might as well be a monastery at the top of a Himalayan mountain for all the effort it takes to approach it. Maria has to show her vendor pass at Sahara to a big Korean with a pneumatic gun. She’s never seen him before and he peers at her and the goats suspiciously.
Then the maze of tents and vendors down the Bazaar, stretching between the different arcologies; someone put an old sign above the entry that says FORUM SHOPS and Maria isn’t sure if it’s meant to be a joke or not. She weaves between the makers and the sellers and the whores and the pickpockets, trying not to crowd anybody but it’s impossible here, the irritated shouts and cries fading past her as she keeps moving.
Past the UFO, the big solpan array that blinds birds, past Caesar’s, and then quick duck down a side street, awnings hanging over like a patchwork roof, to the vendor entrance. There’s nobody else in line before her today.
Reynolds is there, as usual. She doesn’t like him very much. He pulls out a soiled MRSA mask whenever he sees her coming; he claims it’s because of the goats but she thinks he’s one of those old gabachos (old Anglos, she corrects herself) who still doesn’t like brown people. He’s from someplace called Quentaqui, and he has white hair and light eyes and speaks in an accent she’s never heard anyone else use.
But he doesn’t have the mask today. “Sorry,” he says, holding a hand up before she can even stop moving. “No call today.”
She slows down, stops, blinks at him. “Que?” she says She speaks perfect English, of course, but she does this just to fuck with him, just a little. “Why not?”
He shrugs. “Just the way it is,” he says. “Y’all get mobiles, you could call first, steada wasting your time coming all this way.”
She nods, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. No point in arguing with him. Reynolds is just the doorman. She turns the trike and trailer around awkwardly — normally she rolls right into the unloading zone — and pulls back onto the Strip.
She’s only got enough battery left for about a mile of driving, so she stops in the Bazaar and gets a plate of al pastor tacos, scrambling to sit crosslegged on top of the trailer to keep the goats from getting jacked and ending up hanging off hooks in one of the butcher shops off Paradise.
She knows they’ll end up that way anyway, up in the arcology, birria steaks for some rich gabacho and their skin just upholstery for the couch under his fat ass, but that’s in another universe. Reynolds is San Pedro; once she gets her charges to him, he’s the one that leads them into whatever happens next.
As she pushes her tacos around, trying to get as much of the tomatillo and pineapple salsa onto the greasy meat as she can, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a piece of waxy cardboard — faded now, creased and folded.
It’s a picture of a woman, a beautiful Anglo woman with dark hair, dressed in a kind of clothing that Maria has never seen with her own eyes: a shimmering skirt made of what look like black jewels, a tiny purse on a chain strap over her shoulder. She’s leaning forward out of darkness, fabulous colored lights behind her, and she’s laughing out loud. In her head, Maria can hear it, like dark candy, throaty and full of promise. A fairy queen of wonderland. Maria sucks the grease off one finger and traces the letters below the picture, big hard-edged letters: exotic dancers. discreet. a night you’ll never forget.
Maria wonders if the woman, her fairy godmother, ever forgot that night. She wonders if she died during the Crunch, like so many others, or if she’s still out there, somewhere, maybe one of the old crones in the stalls hawking their junk. The old ones have that look in their eyes, what Abu calls “that Colonel Kurtz stare”. The old ones remember what it was like before, when the sky still glowed at night from a million streetlights and the air was filled with the smell of gasoline and sweat. When this was a desert. They still remember, and Maria doesn’t know if she envies them or pities them.
She puts her godmother back in her pocket and hops down, pops open the motor of the trike, pulls out the extending handle for the dynamo.
She’s got a lot of cranking to do, before night falls.
