Temporary People

by Steven Gillis

  How we danced during the Day of Deliverance, a jig for me in Pyrrhic victory. Twenty years later, I shook my head and shouted down at the others from atop my tower, “I can’t help you,” when they came and asked me to join them against Teddy in yet another war. “What don’t you understand?” I pointed at the stars, and the pictures posted on my tower, explained for those too young to remember what happened, how a half mile from the capital, before I could get home, the last of the government soldiers with silver daggers and puffed muscled stabs found Tamina as our children looked on. “The way,” they said, “your baby pups did wail.”

  In short sleeves, Emilo’s right arm showed a blue tattoo outlining the head of a woman. On his left arm the letters “A POS” were pricked into his skin with black ink, the reference to his blood type, a trick those of us who joined the War of the Winds borrowed from soldiers of earlier rebellions. We cut across the designated streets, stopping every block so Emilo could attach to building fronts and the bark of trees those flyers he carried in his back pocket. The tracts accused Teddy of profiting from Good Baby. I watched for soldiers, spotted too late a jeep speeding toward us a block from Emilo’s shop.

  The soldiers braked at the corner, pulled down the last flyer Emilo posted, raced toward us again and cut us off. The one soldier holding the flyer was no more than a boy dressed in a worn brown uniform a size too large. He shoved the flyer flat against Emilo’s chest, asked “How’s business?” laughed and waved as the jeep drove off.

  Turning, we saw the soot clouds rising from around the corner, the smell of smoke reaching us as Emilo ran and I followed. The smoke from the fire created a haze which gathered above the pile of instruments the soldiers had pulled from inside Emilo’s shop and thrown to the curb. Guitars and basses, reeds and recorders, sound equipment, pics and bows, banjos and fiddles, all smashed and doused with gasoline. I jumped with Emilo into the flames, our shoes and pantlegs singed as we stamped about, kicking through the remains for anything worth salvaging.

  The entire block was otherwise empty, people having rushed inside their own shops and houses at the first sign of trouble. Emilo cursed and held up the charred neck of a violin, waving it like a wand. We spent the next several hours cleaning up what was left of the shop, sweeping the floor, resetting the shelves, carrying off broken glass and inventory completely ruined. Sometime after 11:00 p.m. we stood outside and drank from a second bottle of anisette. “Sucks, André. You see what happens?” He looked around at the absence of people there on his block and spit into the ash.

  I tried changing the subject, mentioned the piles of garbage at the curb. “Tomorrow we need to get rid of the trash.”

  “You’re right. The trash.”

  “Before it draws rats.”

  “Rats, exactly,” Emilo laughed. “We have too many rats as it is. But we can’t get rid of a rat with just cheese, can we? We need the springtrap to crush his skull.” He stomped behind the pile of amps and keyboards shattered, and grabbing the back of a broken ukulele, whipped it frisbee-style over my head. “Koupe tet, bioule kay,” he made a toast.

  I pulled at the front of my shirt to release the heat, went and stood further down the curb where, looking east, I could see the top of my tower in the distance. At forty feet, squared through the base and rounded like a silo, the shadows fell toward the capital each morning and covered my house at night. The outer skin was papier mâché, weather-proofed with lacquer, the frame held together by wires and wood molded deep inside. A week after returning from the War of the Winds, only a day removed from Tamina’s funeral, with Anita and Ali asleep and my head a heavy slosh of sour peach brandy, I went into the yard and pasted Tee’s picture to a single block of wood. For several minutes I sat in my yard, then walked back into my house and got an article on Dr Subandrio, the one-time foreign minister of Indonesia and chief architect of then President Sukarno’s ‘guided democracy.’ Dr Subandrio had hoped to bring modern reform to the Indonesian archipelago, but was caught in a military takeover and sentenced to death. The penalty was later commuted, though Dr Subandrio remained imprisoned for thirty years. I glued the article on Subandrio beside the photo of Tamina, I don’t know why.

  Each night now I go back into my yard, cutting and pasting additional photographs and articles to more wood and wire, working with hammer and nails on the base of a tower I never meant to build. Emilo saw me staring of and came to stand next to me. “In the moon, André, no?” He handed me the anisette, waited for me to nod and drink. I appreciated the gesture and told him in turn, “Not to worry, we’ll have your store up and running again in no time.”

  “Sure, sure,” he touched his shoe to the trash. The whiskers on his cheeks were dark ink dots, his hair a bushy black with flecks of grey. “You want to do something?” He pointed back down the street, chanted lines from still another revolution. “Cuffee! Cuffee! Cuffee! Rise, Sally, rise! Help me wake them.”

  “It’s late,” I got us moving from the street upstairs to Emilo’s apartment. His place above the shop was small, filled with instruments and sheet music, old and new recordings on vinyl, tape and CD. Emilo found the guitar he brought to the funeral and sat in his chair where he started playing Bob Marley’s, ‘I Shot the Sheriff, But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy,’ followed by the first chorus from, ‘Junta Hear tache.’“Oh the devil’s at our gate/In a souped up ‘68/Waiting to see/What will it be/Weak knees or revolution/To halt this Junta Heartache.”

  Drunk, Emilo’s fingers still performed, his voice craggy but in tune. He wrote new songs about Teddy, pieces he played on the beach and in after hour bars. His lyrics provided a civics lesson, addressed the collapse of our economic landscape, Teddy’s looting of our domestic markets, factories and farms peddled to foreign investors, unemployment and double digit inflation leaving basic staples unaffordable, the middle class pushed toward poverty and the poor over the edge. Young aspirants sought Emilo’s counsel. He taught them the art of making explosives from fertilizer, gunpowder out of potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur, and dynamite from ammonium nitrate and nitro-cellulose. When the sky above the capital exploded now in high streaks of orange and grey, Emilo and his friends played Bruce Cockburn’s ‘If I Had A Rocket Launcher’ in chords of G.

  “Wake up!” he went to the window and shouted loudly at his neighbors. “Deaf, dumb and blind.”

  “I’m sure they’re sleeping.”

  “Right. Head in the sand. Tail between their legs. Bend over, here comes Teddy! Hell,” he raised the bottle. “All tucked away. Bad dreams, I hope they have. Deaf, dumb and blind,” he repeated. “Someone needs to wake them. All these nervous rabbits.” He leaned outside the window and yelled, “Do you hear?” then waited to see if any lights came on. When nothing happened, he pulled himself back in and clicked his tongue.

  I pointed toward the chair, told him to sit. “You’re drunk.”

  “I am for sure,” he blew into the top of the bottle until the neck whistled. “And tomorrow when I’m sober, what else will have changed?”

  We both looked out the window then. Everything was pitch black beyond the light inside the apartment. I rubbed my head, felt the stubble coming in, thought of what Gandhi said about revolution, the rules for noncooperation and civil disobedience and how “Brute force will avail against brute force only when it is proved that darkness can dispel darkness.” I started talking about the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, Poland’s Solidarity Movement, the teachings of Nelson Mandela, America’s Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King, but Emilo stopped me.

  “Babble, babble, babble. The only way to deal with a mad dog is to give him a smack of the stick,” he extended his arm, turned his free thumb and forefinger into a gun. “You want to get rid of a snake in the grass,” he cocked his hand and pretended to shoot, then raised the bottle in his other hand and began singing the second verse of ‘Junta Heartache.’

  I went and took the anisette from him, put it on the table by his chair and motioned to his bedroom. “Yo
u need to call it a night. There’s nothing more to do. I have to get home and sleep. I’ve work in the morning.”

  “Do you now?” Emilo went and sat in his chair, picked up his guitar. He was right, of course, my business was in no better shape than his shop, Teddy having undercut my margin of profit by forming his own agency, run as a State owned protection racket, demanding payments to bond against harm. Bameritans who did not pay wound up collecting on the policies I held for them. “It’s all too ironic,” Emilo strummed high C.

  I said nothing, squeezed his shoulder and went downstairs. As I headed through the shop I heard him playing Dylan. “All the tired horses in the sun/How am I supposed to get any ridin’ done?” Outside three urchins were poking through the trash, two boys and a girl, each thin-limbed and long-haired. They glanced up as I approached, hesitated for only a second then ran between the buildings and disappeared. Ten minutes later I turned onto my street, eager for sleep. Katima would be there, I knew, waiting for me at home, a recent arrangement, a reality that made me quicken my stride. I didn’t want to think of anything more and purposely avoided picturing Emilo in his apartment after I left, convinced all would be better tomorrow.

  There is a clipping on my tower which describes political prisoners in Uganda, Liberia and Iran using black and white strings to stitch their faces in protest of their circumstance. Emilo has read the article, has seen the photograph, has stood with me in front of my tower and said “Can you imagine that shit?”

  Tomorrow I will learn how Emilo went back to the window and called again to his neighbors “Deaf, dumb and blind.” I will picture him moving to his bedroom, fishing through his dresser drawers until he finds the small sewing kit with needle and thread. In the bathroom next, he’ll run the needle under hot water, dry the end with three quick shakes and feed the thread into the hole. The first push passes upward through the underbelly of his bottom lip, breaking the skin and coming out the other side. He’ll pull the thread around, in and out and back down, his mouth closed with four crude stitches. Additional threads will be used to close each ear, Emilo’s eyelids pierced and sewn to the puffy brown flesh beneath. Deaf, dumb and blind, he wants them to see. In the dark, he’ll turn and follow the walls with his hands, make his way down the stairs to the stoop outside where he’ll sit and wait for people to find him.

  CHAPTER 2

  Milton Jabber kneels and works his hands between the toes of the dead boy. His fingers are strong from years of experience. He grips and bends the boy’s feet, rolls and washes the arch and heel, removes the dirt and flakes of skin. The floor is a cool grey slab made slippery by the wash water. A small pool fills the center of the room, three feet deep and bordered by white slate. Wooden buckets, plastic sheets, soaps and bowls and bags of cotton are spread nearby.

  Yesterday soldiers raided Abel Morkin’s farm, accused him of giving milk and meat to NBDF rebels gathering again in the hills, and beat him to death with the butts of their rifles. Abel’s family brought the boy’s remains to the body washer that morning, a fragment of bone having passed through the red muscled center of Abel’s heart, his flesh marked by black welts, gashes and clots of dried blood. Milton finishes with the feet and moves up the legs. He works in silence, dips a brown bucket back into the pool of water, sprinkles camphor inside, uses a round sponge to swab Abel’s right arm.

  A pumice stone scrapes away scales and scabs before powdered soap is applied. The narrow gutter surrounding the room flows with bloody water. Two windows, each round and no larger than a porthole, sit high up the far wall. The sunlight through the windows reflects off the pool. The cleansing takes three hours. Milton’s meticulous and inspects his work several times. When he’s finished, he uses a clean sheet and wraps Abel gently before signalling the family to come and take the boy away. Another body is already waiting, with a third to arrive at 4 o’clock. Milton rinses his hands in a separate sink, then goes next door, sits in the kitchen and eats the chicken salad his wife’s made for him.

  Kart Jabber arrives and joins his father at the table, watches the older man eat. “Busy day.”

  Milton nods in the direction of his work area.

  “Teddy will make you a rich man yet.”

  “The General and others,” he eyes his son. Last night, a few hours after the demolition of Emilo’s shop, a pipe bomb exploded at Delistone’s Bistro. The restaurant was crowded with soldiers, the bomb thrown through the front window. Luci Ferre had just finished singing a line from an American pop classic, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone,” when flashes of orange appeared in the sky. Milton says nothing for several seconds, then asks. Kart leans back in his chair. His father shakes his head, pushes his lunch away, wipes his mouth with a hand that smells perpetually of camphor and harsh soap. He tries to counsel his son about restraint, refers to the consequence of impulse and the aftermath he’s paid to wash clean.

  “Who’s seen more?” he starts to say, but a knock keeps him from continuing. Five people are waiting on the stoop out front, three of them in costume. American style zoot suits from the 1920’s, one green and two yellow jackets with matching pants, pin-striped, dangling pocket chains, broad painted ties and Stetson Temple fur felt fedoras. The men introduce themselves as relatives of a boy killed last night in the blast, and ask of the body washer, “We would like you to prepare him.”

  “Of course,” Milton has the dead boy brought next door. Kart waits only until the men go and remove the boy’s body from the back of a blue station wagon before turning to his father. “What are you doing?”

  “They’ve come to me.”

  “So? He’s a soldier.”

  “The boy is dead.”

  “As he should be.”

  “That’s enough,” Milton leaves his son and begins walking to his work area. The other men carry the body next door. Kart stares at the bare feet of the dead boy sticking from the black plastic tarp, the irony a burlesque. He rubs his face, his own hands with a strong scent, not of camphor but sulphur. He remembers a night earlier that month when he and Kara and Angeline snuck in and waded through the cool shallow waters of his father’s pool. Naked and softly splashing, their play seemed no more profane than the waters being used to cleanse dead soldiers.

  Kart goes around back to where his mother’s working in the garden. Mariene Jabber is a round woman with dark hair and large tea cup eyes. She’s wearing her assigned costume as an American flapper in short skirt, turned-down hose and powdered knees. “Kart,” she smiles and drives her hoe into the earth, churning the soil as he comes to kiss her cheek. “I know,” she tells him, and he thinks for a moment she means about the Bistro, but she complains instead about her outfit, how she’s scheduled to be on Burine Avenue in twenty minutes. She says to him then with a mix of both embarrassment and aggravation, “Isn’t it though, by this point now, all so ridiculous?”

  Teddy sits on the side of a large Louis XVI ottoman, the cushions flat beneath him, stuffed with the down of ducklings imported from Argentina. He leans back, raises his right leg, says “Come here girl and help me with my boots.”

  She is twenty, wearing a Little Bo Peep outfit, minus the leg muffs, the hemline cut just above her calf, the colors white and blue. Teddy runs a hand up under the girl’s dress as she turns and bends over him. The camera mounted high in the corner is already recording as Teddy flips the hem, finds the warm seam between Bo Peep’s cheeks, massages the fold and squeezes her rump. He slaps her bottom as she frees his foot. “Hooray for Hollywood,” he whoops. “Let’s see if you pass the audition.”

  In bare feet Teddy stands just over five feet seven inches, the lifts he wears in the heels of his boots adding four inches, altering his stride to something resembling a stumble. During his six years on TV, Teddy starred in Bamerita’s top rated television show, ‘General Admission,’ a half hour comedy parodying the private and workday life of General Cornelius Hedgwaller following the War of the Winds. Dismissed from the ar
my, Cornelius wound up taking a job as a maitre d’ at the Steer way To Heaven Steakhouse. Teddy’s natural capacity for farce and his ability to convey Cornelius’ struggles adjusting to a newly liberated Bamerita gave ‘General Admission’ its appeal, was always good for a laugh.

  At the height of his popularity Teddy left TV and took his act to the stage, where he presented a stand-up routine as the General. The audiences roared as Teddy in costume delivered jokes about the good old days when the military ruled and people had a healthy r espect for authority. He praised the benefits of totalitarianism and the luxury of going to bed at night knowing everyone was well watched over. Members of the GRA - the Greater Republic Alliance - invited Teddy to join their group, offered specific ideas to improve his act. Speechwriters and image consultants were hired. Teddy began playing the largest venues in Bamerita, his shows recorded, quoted in the papers and broadcast on TV. At the time of the coup, Teddy’s act had evolved to a point where few people thought of him anymore as the man from ‘General Admission,’ but saw him solely as Bamerita’s newest ruler and face of the GRA.