Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny

by Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn

  This all hits me like a 6.7 on the Richter ‘cause I catch a whiff of the Tree as I’m contemplating. Doug is no mere channel, he’s a talisman and he’s a staff of power and every part of him is a stafflet of power, and it walks in and slaps me upside the head that that dream I just dreamed happened ‘cause I dropped one of those self-same stafflets in the Tin Hau.

  I find myself repeating Chen: “An ear, an eye or merely debris.”

  I am struck with the wonder of it. Then, I am struck by the intriguing possibilities. With Doug flying our white-flag I head up to the Farm, but John Makepeace is not there. He has returned to his headquarters — the Mission Dolores — to oversee the work there. Fine by me.

  It’s late afternoon when I approach the Mission. I’m really surprised to get in this time, but I am welcomed by smiles that say, We’re laughing at you, not with you.

  I get it. They think I’m A Character — Local Color, like John Makepeace said before. Okay, I can live with that.

  One of the guards takes me to his leader’s winnebago this time. He takes is sweet time about it, too, stopping to talk to folks so they can say funny and insulting stuff at me like I don’t get it.

  While this is happening, dropping little ears and eyes about everywhere, which is when I notice that the cover is off the big thing in the courtyard. Hard to miss, for sure — it’s a giant version of the satellite dishes on top of the winnebagoes. It’s black — a matte, light-sucking black — and it’s got shiny chrome stuff on it and it’s tilted up to the sky. It reminds me a lot of the radio dishes the SETI people used to listen for aliens.

  Ironic.

  My escort leads me to the winnebago of John Makepeace, then makes me wait while he goes off to talk to someone else. While they look at me and chuckle, I note that my Tree is straining toward the vehicle with his little branch tips all aquiver.

  I step a little closer to the door and prick up my ears. I hear voices, and if I try real hard I can make out words.

  “...cathedral,” someone is saying. “Those onion domes are amazing.”

  “Isn’t that...” begins a new voice, then I lose it, then it says, “pretty damn deep. We don’t want to split ourselves up too much.”

  “What are you afraid of, Gino?” says a third voice, louder and closer to me. I recognize John Makepeace. “Has this city shown you anything you should be afraid of besides a few stray shadows you can’t account for? We’re okay. We’ve got the satellite rig and the GPS. We’re armed to the teeth. The only problem we’ve got right now is that we’ve got to pick and choose our targets as carefully as we can.”

  “Yeah, that and the little spooks,” says Gino. “I’d sure like to know what that’s all about.”

  “Overactive imagination,” answers John Makepeace sharp-voiced.

  “My guys say not. My guys are sure there’s something there.” There was kind of a funny pause, then Gino says, “I’ve seen them.”

  “We’ve been over this and over this, Gino. These spooks of yours aren’t real. They can’t be. If they were real, they’d have tripped the security system...wouldn’t they?”

  “You haven’t seen them,” Gino accuses.

  “Thank you for making my point for me. Now, can we get back to business?”

  There’s another pause, most people’d call it an awkward one. Then a softer voice says, “Where do we go next?” and I realize it’s Ty.

  “You guys ever hear of Jack Kerouac?” asks John Makepeace.

  There are some noises that could mean ‘no’ or ‘yes.’ I’ve heard of Jack Kerouac. On the Road. Beat generation. Lost boy. Joined at the hip to the Wiz back in the days before Wiz-dom.

  “He was a folk hero,” says John Makepeace, “an iconoclast and an urban poet. Hung out at a place on Columbus called City Lights — a bookstore. I have it on good authority that the place has actually been kept up by the abos as a kind of shrine. It’s a prime target.”

  “Prime target? It’s a bookstore.” This is a voice I haven’t heard before.

  “It’s a potent historical icon. A monument to a bygone age. In fact, in 1997 it was accorded the status of an historical landmark by the state of California.”

  “It’s a pet project, John,” said Gino. “How many tourists are going to come here to see a bookstore? You said it just a mo’ ago: We’ve got to choose our targets carefully. If we don’t, we lose our shirts.”

  “I think Gino might be right,” says Ty. “I doubt there are so many history buffs at home that we can afford to waste resources on something like this. Besides, we’d have a real fight on our hands if we tried to take that bookstore. Like you said, the abos think it’s some sort of shrine. I think we’ve got to go for easier targets that are more glitzy.”

  There is another silence. “You think so, do you? If the Spanish had felt that way, this place would have stayed a godforsaken swamp.”

  “I’m just trying to be practical, John. I think we need to look at what will convince our backers this venture is viable, don’t you agree?”

  I never get to hear if John Makepeace agrees because my escort comes back and knocks on the winnebago door.

  I’m shaking like a 5.2 temblor. John Makepeace wants the Wiz. I don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the same as Lord E Lordy wanting the Wiz. For one thing, I’m pretty sure John Makepeace can read. So, as I am thinking these deep and tremulous thoughts, I am once again struck silly and mute when the door of the winnebago opens.

  “You again?” asks John Makepeace and he smiles at me in what they call an avuncular way, and then glances back into the room. “It’s my little friend with the tree,” he says. “What’s up?” This is to me.

  “It’s about the Farm, John Makepeace. I need to talk with you about the Farm.”

  “What Farm?”

  “The hunk-o-land you swallowed up the other evening — Golden Gate Park. It’s a significant part of our food chain. You might have noticed some of the greens you trampled upon were a bit better organized than is normally the case in nature.”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess they were, at that. What about it?”

  “We sort of need it back,” I say, lame-o.

  “Which is why you tried to attack us last night?”

  “Well, not me in particular. My wife, General Firescape, actually, and her knighties. But, yeah, that was the general idea.”

  “Sorry...Taco, is it? But I can’t let you have such a valuable piece of property. You wouldn’t know what to do with it, for one thing.”

  “We grow food on it.”

  “My point, exactly. You have no idea of its real value.”

  I am getting a little hostile, at this point, and it comes through in my voice.

  “Like hell,” I say. “It may just be property to you, it’s life and death to us. That’s our food. We don’t care about the buildings, except for the fish tanks and the greenhouses. All we really want is the land we got planted — the food crops and the tree farm. You can have the rest.”

  I look over John Makepeace’s shoulder and realize other faces are looking at me. One of them is Ty’s and he looks sort of pitying. Pity is not what I want, but I’m willing to settle. John Makepeace don’t strike me as a guy who negotiates.

  “Look, Taco, I would say ‘yes,’ but it would just be postponing the inevitable. You’re going to have to move on anyway. The new San Francisco isn’t going to have room in it for transients. I’m afraid you’re going to have to accept that.”

  Even I know that transient is just an expensive word for homeless. I shake my head. “There haven’t been transients in Embarcadero since anyone can recall,” I say. “Everyone here has a home. Or did, until you came. If there are homeless people here, John Makepeace, you made ‘em.”

  He gives me this long, thoughtful look, while Ty gives him the same, and hope springs eternal. But it gets dashed pretty damn quick.

  “Sorry. But I can’t let this city and all its marvels go to waste.”

  And that, as they say, is t
hat.

  Deflated, I take my Tree and slink away across the compound. I find myself drawn to John Makepeace’s big old talisman. I am staring it at, trying to fight down the despair I’m feeling and wishing I could get into the old church without being noticed when I hear someone calling me. It turns out to be Ty and he still has that kind of funny pitying look on his face. There’s something else there, too — a little uneasiness, maybe, or shame.

  “Hey, Taco,” he says, then. ”Should I call you ‘Taco’ or ‘Del?’”

  I take a calculated risk. He doesn’t understand the power of names, I’m pretty sure. “Call me Del.”

  “Hey, Del, I’m awfully sorry about all that. About John, I mean. He can be pretty abrasive when he’s got his mind set on something.”

  “Not to mention greedy,” I add, and feel guilty right off. “Sorry.”

  Ty tilts his head sideways and scrunches up his face. “Well, I don’t know that a person ought to be sorry for speaking the truth. John is...ambitious.”

  “This is a big kingdom,” I say. “The Gam Saan’s even bigger. We could get used to sharing it, but he wants to grab everything and push us out. That’s not good, Ty. This is our home. We stayed when everybody else left. We have lives here.”

  His brow wrinkles. “No, I don’t suppose it is ‘good,’ at that.”

  “The Spirits don’t like it,” I say baldly.

  He smiles, but it’s a twitchy little thing, just a weak tugging of the corners of his mouth.

  “You really believe in your spirits, don’t you?” His voice tries to sound pitying, and a little superior, but misses by about that much.

  I give back a very direct look. “The Spirits are real, Ty. They speak to me.”

  Oh boy, I think, now I sound like one of those old movie Indians.

  Ty glances at John Makepeace’s winnebago, then sits against the platform under the satellite dish and opens his mouth.

  “What’s the dish for?” I ask, before he can say anything.

  “Huh?” He jerks his eyes up to the thing. “The-the satellite dish? It, uh, talks to the other satellite dishes. What I mean is, I can talk to anybody else who’s got one. It’s, um, like, um — ”

  “It’s a communication device,” I supply. “Let’s you phone home, huh?”

  He looks surprised that the dumb transient “abo” would know something like that.

  “Yeah. Yeah, right.”

  While I give myself a mental kick for my cynicism, he says, “Can I ask you something?”

  I nod. “Sure. Anything.”

  “We’ve heard all kinds of stories — legends, I guess you’d call them — about the lost cities.”

  “They aren’t lost, Ty. They were abandoned.”

  Ty looks blank for a second. “Yeah, well. Anyway, there’s a shitload of legends about these places — especially San Francisco. It’s the quakes mostly. You learn about them in school and, well, I guess that’s just a matter of geology, but they’ve got sort of a legendary quality to them. The World Series Quake especially.”

  I nod. “The Loma Prieta,” I say. “A’s and Giants.”

  He gives me that surprised look again, which is followed by a shifty glance around, like as if he doesn’t want anybody to hear what he’s going to say next. He leans towards me, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “But it’s not just the quakes. There are other things too. Like Crips and Bloods.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, street gangs. Those women with guns...are those Crips and Bloods?”

  “Those are knighties. They protect the realm. We got gangs here, but they mostly have tire irons and old baseball bats.” I shrug. “Some knives. The Jade Dragon gang runs a food co-op over in Embar. I’ve never heard of Crips and Bloods, Ty. What do they do?”

  “Well, the legends say they’re like vampires or zombies or something — you know, undead, immortal. And invincible. They’re involved in this eternal warfare, tearing the cities apart and sucking up innocent children. And Tongs,” he adds, and I think there must be a whole flood of legends in Ty’s head. “There are stories about Chinese Tongs that own the city and run things behind the scenes. They sort of let the street gangs have their little wars because it suits them to keep the undead occupied.”

  I have to admire Ty’s vivid imagination. “We got Tongs,” I admit, “but they’re not gangs. More like...community service organizations.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit, Ty. They do all kinds of philanthropic stuff Mostly keep the hospitals running, although they provide pre-schools, too, and organize the big market in the Sang Yee Gah.”

  Now Ty is ogling at me. “Hospitals? You got hospitals?”

  “How else could we meet the medical needs of our community?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Okay, how about the sewers?”

  “Uh,” I say. “They work, mostly.”

  “But what about alligators? I’ve heard there are alligators in the sewers. Giant ones that feed on refuse. John says that’s all bunkum, of course. I imagine he’s right about that.”

  I think for a moment about saying that, of course, there are giant alligators in the sewers, in the church gardens and in the crypt under the church, but that kind of lie is pretty easy to debunkify.

  “No alligators,” I say.

  “Nah. I didn’t really think there would be. I suppose the dread diseases and plagues are all legends too, and the mutated animals and all.”

  Right about now, I’m staring at him like he’s sprouted a horn between his eyeballs. Alligators, okay, that I can see. I mean, I read about how those kinds of stories got started in New York — urban legends, they’re called — but mutated animals? Whoa.

  “What kind of diseases?” I ask.

  “Plague-type things, I guess. None of us were too sure about that, I think. We sort of expected we might find corpses in the streets. Even John. After the mass exodus out of here, well, we weren’t sure what might have happened to the people that got left behind.”

  I reflect that the people who got left behind did just fine, thank you, and that the only corpses in the streets were the ones these guys put there. Ty seems like such a nice dude, I hate to remind myself that he was part of that. But I do.

  “We have diseases,” I say, nodding and looking muy thoughtful. “And plagues. Especially in the heat. Embarcadero is better about that than most of the kingdoms and Potrero is worse. They have awful sanitation problems here. I wouldn’t drink the water.”

  “We noticed.” His nose wrinkles. “We noticed how much cleaner it was over on your side of that trench.” He pauses, looking at me real intent. “You have quite a culture over there, don’t you?”

  I nod, straight-faced, sober as can be. “Yes, Ty, we do.”

  He shakes his head and says nothing.

  “Hey, Ty, fog’s coming.”

  This comes to us from one of the workmen bustling hither and yon.

  Ty looks around. Indeed, the fog has come up since we started talking. It’s a shabu, which I think is the Mission’s pet variety of fog. I say as much.

  “Shabu?” Ty repeats.

  “Gauze. Usually, it’s a shabu dong — Moving Gauze. But today it’s just gauze.”

  Ty chuckles. “You got names for your fog?”

  “Of course. When you got so much of something and it comes in so many different varieties, you gotta name it just so you can talk about it intelligently. There are thirty-two known varieties of fog in the Gam Saan. Some are quite localized. For example, you only see a real wu planchar dong on the Presidio. That’s a truly heavy moving fog — oppressive.”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, but seems distracted.

  “What’s the matter, Ty?” I entertain the idea that the fog is making him nervous, but that seems...well, silly. If these jakes are afraid of fog they couldn’t have come to a worse place.

  “Damn fog. Gives everybody jitters.”

  If I understand "jitters" right, he’s jus
t said fog makes ‘em nervous. Well, you could knock me over with a pine cone.

  “Ty,” I say patiently, “fog is a fact of life here. It’s inescapable.”

  “It’s not just the fog. It’s this place...and the fog. And ...and maybe something else.”

  Every hair on me stands up and says "howdy."

  “The Spirits,” I say nodding and trying hard to look sage.

  “Hell, no. Hallucinations is more like it.”

  I shrug and shake my head.

  He scoots a little closer to me. “Sometimes, around dusk or at night or when the fog comes up like this, some of the guys... well, they’ve seen things. Little...somethings...slipping in and out of the fog and the dark, around the buildings. You wouldn’t ...you wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”

  “No, Ty, I wouldn’t. Um, what sort of somethings...if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Little, dark, darting figures.”

  “Like the shadows of big cats?” I ask.

  He makes a funny noise. “I-I suppose so. Why?”

  Ninjas! I’m thinking and try not to let my face do anything stupid. I wonder if Chen is scopin’ out the aliens as a possible market for his — I mean our relics and magics. But back to the problem at hand: I contemplate going off about mutant animals, but say, “Doesn’t sound like spirits. They’re more foglike.”

  Ty laughs. It’s shallow laughter that doesn’t get all the way up to his eyes.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Del. Now, I think maybe you should get out of here. Things tend to clamp down a little more when the visibility’s poor.”

  “I was wondering,” I say, “if maybe you could let me go into the church. Just for a minute or two.”

  “To talk to your spirits?”

  “Yeah. It’s been a while, you know and, uh....”

  He’s shaking his head. “Sorry, Del. I’d like to, really, but John would have my head on a plate if I let you in there. You might disturb something.”

  I might disturb something? Yeah, right.

  I leave, but not without looking back a whole bunch of times at the church and asking myself what Chen’s ninjas want there. I don’t much like the answer I’m imagining.