Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Which returns me to My Brothers’ Keeper, a debut memoir by marine veteran and former Pelican Island colony guard Edwin Rodriguez. With searing clarity and brave truth-telling, Rodriguez chronicles his journey from artillery missions in Sinai back to the homeland.

  “Everyone wanted to shake my hand and say the good, pretty words about country and patriotism,” he writes. “Only Pelican Island offered a job with health insurance.”

  Seventy percent of guards at rehabilitation colonies are military vets themselves, according to the McNamara Institute. This results in daily encounters like those outlined by Rodriguez, where “A fellow warfighter I would’ve trusted with my life three years before was now asking my permission to get another Jell-O helping.” Last year’s infamous Pelican Island riot is detailed in full here, with a direct view of the president’s controversial decision to send in federal force.

  What kind of country does this to those who gave their youths to our republic and empire? What kind of country maintains such a status quo and shrugs at any attempt to remedy it? My Brothers’ Keeper asks those hard questions. It also provides a possible way forward.

  “Some of the veterans with troubles had developed hard politics,” Rodriguez writes. “They’d say that maxim: ‘Defy the Guards. Guard Those Who Defy.’ It was a joke that bridged the divide between them and us.

  “Now, after the riot, after everything, I don’t think it’s a joke. I was a guard. My colony brothers defied us, and some got killed for it. Now it’s my turn to defy. I don’t know what the right answer is. But it’s not this.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE POWER OF bone splitting bone shot up Jean-Jacques’s arm, knuckle to shoulder, like a cold marble. He punched again. Beneath him, the man’s nose cracked open while the back of his throat gurgled with animal dread. He lashed around trying to buck off Jean-Jacques. Jean-Jacques kept his hooks in and threw down more punches and hammer fists until the man stopped lashing. Then he found another and did the same to him.

  The men were Sheepdogs.

  One of the Sheepdogs got on his back and dragged him to the ground with a metal chain. Jean-Jacques dug in his neck to protect it, arched his back for leverage, and threw back three elbows. The last one connected, snapping the man’s head into the cement. A sound like dead radio fizzed out into the darkness.

  Jean-Jacques untangled himself and took the chain as his own. Adrenaline was juicing his veins. Bloodlust smothered his mind. He reminded himself to breathe through the pain in his ribs.

  The young men in the social service wing called these Mayday hunts. They weren’t supposed to do them. Lamar Pierre disapproved and had ordered them ended. But Lamar Pierre couldn’t control everything. Social service Maydays looked up to the Mayday soldiers. They wanted to be like them. To fight for the cause, with force. And besides—now they had a war hero of their own.

  Deeper in the park, Emmanuel was exchanging knife slashes with a tower of a man. Jean-Jacques used his speed and came upon the Sheepdog with an open palm, keeping the strike at elbow level. The man dropped like a razed building. Anything harder would’ve killed him and Jean-Jacques was proud of himself for the restraint.

  “Motherfucker,” Emmanuel said, his mouth gored, face already swelling with welts. Jean-Jacques noticed not-so-shallow cuts across both of his arms. “This is mad fun.”

  They’d followed the group from a beer hall in the Bowery to a district across the bridge, past the rusting lady statue with her torch to a quiet place with wide, curbed streets and matching square houses and big porch flags. Emmanuel had set the bait, one lone immigrant lost, far from home. The Sheepdogs took it, following him into the black of a park on a hill. They smelled like whiskey and cigarette smoke and a couple had firefighter tattoos. That might’ve bothered Jean-Jacques a few weeks before, attacking public servants.

  He knew better now.

  They finished the fight, not too quick, not too slow. Then the ritual commenced. The Mayday version of bagging and tagging. Gather the bodies together, masking tape across mouths for silence, shirts over heads for impotence. Sprinkle around their coins, their lighters, their teeth, like faerie dust. Take the boots, toss away the shoes. Break the phones. Steal the weapons. Take out the can of black spray paint, shake the can of black spray paint. A black circle with three black arrows across each face, each stomach, each groin.

  “Freedom Beast, my niggas,” Emmanuel said, both for them and for the others, too.

  Mayday hunts, not so different than midnight raids abroad. Of their own accord, for one. Quiet as sin, loud like virtue, for another. A mission for someone, or something, a mission like any other. Voices of command and voices of care and voices of alarm all whirling together into one singular monk chant of violence.

  A hunt’s thrills, a hunt’s terrors. Dark everlasting. Jean-Jacques was home, again.

  * * *

  “Wake up, brother.”

  Jean-Jacques opened his eyes to find his cousin looming over his bed. It was still ink-dark outside. His body called out for Vicodin and coffee and ached in a general way that would become very specific as soon as he moved. They were supposed to have the day off. That was why they’d gone on a hunt the night before. He looked toward the floor, past a heap of dirty clothes. The digital green of an alarm clock read 4:04 a.m.

  “Get dressed,” Emmanuel said. “We’ve been chosen for rite.”

  Jean-Jacques tried to form an objection but all that came out was incomprehension. Emmanuel took it as a question.

  “Mayday ceremony. Gotta be there by sunrise. The Chaplain runs it.”

  That got Jean-Jacques moving. He found the light switch. Finally, he thought through his predawn stupor. Finally this fucking guy appears.

  He put on jeans, boots, a hoodie and reached for his wallet and phone.

  “Leave them,” Emmanuel said. “No IDs, no electronics. Rules of rite.”

  Jean-Jacques nodded and waited for his cousin to turn around. He needed his phone to text the Bureau agents. But Emmanuel kept looking at him, severe as an owl.

  “I’m serious, man. We can’t screw this up.”

  With no recourse, Jean-Jacques left the wallet and phone untouched. It wasn’t until they were already on the subway that he decided he’d erred. He should have insisted, or found an excuse to turn back to his room. Now I’ll have to put hands on this clown and bring him in myself, he thought. Like a citizen’s arrest. Not that he minded. It felt good to have his knuckles raw again, stinging with the work of violence.

  The entrance to Revolution Park was marked by granite columns adorned with carved faces of bygone men. Bronze eagles perched atop the column tops, one with wings tucked, the other’s outstretched. The Front had left this place alone during the war memorial bombings because it didn’t venerate a foreign war. It still seemed a stupid distinction to Jean-Jacques. There was no such thing as clean war, wherever it got fought. They were all dirty. Why did Mayday want to pretend otherwise?

  “Some battle during the American Revolution was here,” Emmanuel said. “Killed a lot of British with cannons. Goddamn cannons.”

  “Says on that plaque the Americans still lost.”

  “So.” Emmanuel shrugged. “Won the war.”

  Traces of almost-light had begun to speck the horizon. They crossed an open field to a dirt path through trees. A half mile or so down, the road diverged into two forks. Emmanuel and Jean-Jacques went left. Forest dark snuffed out the almost-light and midges buzzed at their faces. A bird warble filled the air. Then down a muddy slope, up another muddy slope, across a running trail. Gathered around a small barrel fire were a group of people in rags who didn’t bother to look over as the cousins approached. Homeless enclaves deep in the bigger parks were nothing new but Jean-Jacques hadn’t ever seen one before.

  “Is rite always back here?” he asked.

  “We ain’t there yet, homie,” Emmanuel said. “And no. Always changes. My first one was in a high school gym.”

  Jean-Jacques was
considering a quick leak to super-speed his way back to the running trails to borrow a jogger’s phone when the sound of engines rose from the surrounding park forest. Three all-terrain vehicles rumbled up to the firelight, all hitched with long utility trailers.

  “Get in,” a voice shouted, all drill sergeant force and conviction. “Hoods on.”

  Burlap sacks lay across the seats of the trailers. Jean-Jacques followed Emmanuel’s lead and put a sack over his head so he couldn’t see where they were being transported to.

  Bureau’s wrong about these fools, Jean-Jacques thought. They’re nutters, sure enough. But there’s nothing amateur about their operation.

  They drove about fifteen minutes, hard east, best as Jean-Jacques could tell. The all-terrain vehicles never got above ten miles per hour, but the autumn wind still bit in the half dark. The dank smell of a person in rags next to him drifted into his nostrils and Jean-Jacques swallowed away a swig of throat bile. Not for the first time he thought he was getting too old to mix late nights with young mornings.

  The vehicles stopped and they were told to remove their hoods. Jean-Jacques blinked back to clear vision. They sat in a low meadow, raw sun spilling over a hillside. A set of chewed-up plastic chairs had been placed in front of a small pond. A stream hissed with rushing water while midges continued to buzz at his face. Jean-Jacques smacked one from his neck and hopped off the trailer side.

  There were about three dozen people in the meadow beginning to greet one another with hugs and blessings. Big, round Lamar Pierre emerged from the crowd and slapped Jean-Jacques across the back.

  “Welcome, Saint-Preux. Peace be with you.”

  “And also with you.” Jean-Jacques hadn’t been to Mass in well over a decade but still the refrain came out. He shook his head. “Huh. That’s still in there.”

  Pierre laughed. “They beat me in the name of Jesus,” he said, citing a vodou song from slave times. “They burn me in the name of Jesus.”

  Jean-Jacques nodded at the reference. “Seventy percent Catholic, thirty percent Protestant, one hundred percent vodou.” Before Pierre could take the old joke as a sign of comradeship he added, “Don’t leave much room for the church of Mayday.”

  The other man crossed his stubby arms, the omnipresent three-arrowed lapel pin rising up his jacket. Through the murky dawn he looked older than his fifty years. Jean-Jacques felt certain he’d finally rattled him. But then Pierre smiled and raised a hand to Jean-Jacques’s shoulder.

  “Nothing better than converting a skeptic.”

  Jean-Jacques raised a non-eyebrow and asked if Pierre wanted an update on the plan for the V-V Day Parade. Jean-Jacques hadn’t done shit, but Emmanuel had taken the mission to heart—he’d tapped into the Haitian community and found a disgruntled bouncer who’d worked parade security in past years. They had three years’ worth of parade security plans because of it, and were going to walk Fifth Avenue themselves to identify any soft spots.

  Pierre shook him off, though. “No business here,” he said. “Rule of rite.”

  The lack of specifics and group paranoia were beginning to wear on Jean-Jacques. That both were serving their intended purpose made it even worse. He was about to instruct the Mayday lieutenant to trust him when a soft chime sounded through the meadow, then another, and another. Bodies began massing toward the pond. The rite was upon them.

  * * *

  Jean-Jacques remained standing, following his cousin’s lead and facing the pond. Some older people took the plastic chairs in the front. With the arriving light, Jean-Jacques saw that not everyone at the gathering was homeless; some were deadbeat bohemian types who belonged in Gypsy Town, some were students with loose khakis and backpacks, a few others were middle-aged business folks in crisp blazers and slacks. A thin, wizened man wore a motorcycle jacket with a bunch of different military unit patches Jean-Jacques figured from Vietnam. He even counted four other black people there, not including Pierre and Emmanuel. Whatever Mayday rite was, it had attracted something like a cross section of Empire City.

  The ceremony began with a blond-haired girl in an Empire State track sweatshirt singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Her voice drifted through the meadow like a scratchy requiem. She changed the line “Land where my fathers died” to “Land for which my brother died,” which made another girl with blond hair and an older woman with blond hair clasp one another’s shoulders. Many of the people around Jean-Jacques grabbed hands and hummed along but he kept his hands and his silence, too.

  The song ended. Jean-Jacques smacked a midge on his neck. Bug guts stained his fingers. The man with the motorcycle jacket switched places with the girl. A large burn the tint of old copper covered much of the man’s jaw and upper neck.

  “This is a poem,” the man said. “Some of you here helped me write it. It’s for the boys, the ones who didn’t come down from Hill 937. I call it ‘Praise to the Victors.’ ”

  It was not a good poem, as far as Jean-Jacques could tell. It didn’t rhyme, it didn’t use big words, it didn’t use imagery in interesting ways. But it had power, the kind that came from telling something straight and telling it true. Hill 937 sounded savage, like hell on earth. Jean-Jacques started picturing the faces of the fallen he’d known through his twelve tours. Good men, mostly. Good soldiers, mostly. Then he stopped. I’m here for the Legion, he thought. Duty looks forward, not back.

  The man with the burned face finished his poem and sat down. One of the homeless rose from a plastic chair and hobbled toward the pond, barefoot. He was a hunchback and wore a flimsy woodland camo jacket and took slow, measured steps into the pond water until it reached his calves. He turned around, palms outstretched, and straightened his back. A long chin jutted from the man’s face, but it wasn’t until Jean-Jacques saw his eyes, cloudy and hypnotic pale, that he knew he’d found the man he’d come for.

  A man in rags, Jean-Jacques thought. But of course.

  Jonah Gray stood a scrap over six feet, a black watch cap folded over his forehead. Tufts of dark gray hair stuck out from the bottom of it. His face was shaved clean. He carried a body of loose angles, like a scarecrow, and moved with the affected presence of someone used to being watched. He began his sermon, turning his hands outward, toward the congregation. Thick, gnarled crosses were seared into both palms.

  “Mayday, Mayday.

  “Fellow believers. Fellow citizens. Welcome to rite. From the ashes, holy redemption.” He spoke like a metronome, each word, each syllable, a chant. The softest of lisps hung from his voice, measuring his diction more than it feminized it. The agents had warned about his charisma, Jean-Jacques remembered. I should just slap him out and be done with it.

  He listened, instead.

  “They call us revolutionaries. They call us fanatics. I posit: What is revolutionary about peace? What is fanatic about wanting the bounties of American life to come from honest work? To protect those in need rather than exploit them? What is crazy about wanting our homeland to fight fascist encroach, to stay true to the ideals it was founded upon?

  “No, we are not revolutionaries. We are egalitarians. We are patriots. We don’t seek chaos. We seek reckoning.

  “Everyone here is either warfighter or warfighter family. Everyone here knows what has been demanded of our caste, our tribe, for thirty years. We’ve lost friends, siblings, parents. To everyone here, words like Honor and Duty and Sacrifice are much more than hollow phrases. They have been ways of life. We did not expect reward, but we do deserve care. We deserve dignity, not humiliation. We deserve answers.

  “Everyone here has arrived at this understanding: no more. As Americans, as children of God: no more. If we are to Honor the Warfighter, we must free the Warfighter. Yes—free the Warfighter! At home and abroad.

  “ ‘Care for those who have borne the battle.’ America believed that, once. We’re making it believe again. Through resolve, through force. That is my charge to you today. Bring them to your days going forward, and Honor your Warfighter in th
e process. Through holy blood, holy redemption.”

  Jean-Jacques snapped from the trance of church. Holy blood, holy redemption. Another man in rags had said that to him weeks before, the night of the riot at Xavier Station. He hadn’t looked anything like Jonah Gray. Had he? He couldn’t recall what that man looked like—just that he’d been decrepit. Dismissed in a single moment with a curt nod and brush-by.

  He thought of something an old sheik in the Near East had said during a manhunt for a bomb maker. He couldn’t place which tour it’d been, or even which country, but the sheik’s words came back to him in the meadow.

  “The best place to get lost isn’t somewhere. It’s everywhere.”

  They never had found that fucking bomb maker. Gone and disappeared into the infinite shadows of the wars. Just one more name for the rolling list of targets across the Mediterranean. But now, Jean-Jacques thought, I’ve got this target right here. Jonah Gray may have been everywhere this whole time. But now? Now he was somewhere very specific.

  Jean-Jacques tried to keep from grinning and began prepping his assault. A quick choke hold would be easy enough. Getting the man out of the park would be trickier. If he could get the keys to one of the all-terrain vehicles, though…

  “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword.” Jonah Gray had reached the apex of his sermon. Catholic, Protestant, vodou, Mayday, it was all the same. Jesus quotes came at the end. “Now, communion. Please bow your heads. Think of someone you love who’s departed this world for the next. Someone who gave themselves for someone else.”

  Now, Jean-Jacques thought. Now’s the time to move. Everyone was looking toward the ground with eyes closed, including Jonah Gray. He wet his lips and took a slow breath, ready to go turbo and come upon the man with an open palm. He felt something biting at his chest. He reached under his hoodie and pulled out the teardrop pendant affixed to a dog-tag chain. It was glowing warm through the dawn.