Revolution No.9

by Neil Mcmahon

  Monks paused, his attention caught by something he could not quite identify.

  “It’s bad enough they don’t give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like this,” the speaker fulminated. “Those politicians better start realizing, there’s twenty million people out here who got nothing. Outlaws, or damned near.”

  Monks dropped the shrimp he was holding and strode to the TV. Sara glanced at him in surprise.

  “What-” she started to say, but he held his hand up for silence.

  The television screen showed a fiftyish white man with the look of the homeless-thin and bearded, wearing a greasy parka and mismatched pants and shirt-stabbing a forefinger with violent emphasis as he spoke. A mob hundreds strong was grouped behind him, murmuring and erupting in shouts of anger and menace. The background looked somehow familiar-a slum in an older city, four-and five-story brick buildings with rickety back porches hung with laundry.

  “There’s an army already out there, and it’s ready to fight back.” The speaker thrust his fist into the air in a Black Power salute. The crowd repeated the gesture, pumping fists up and down and raising its collective voice to a roar.

  The TV screen switched back to the studio anchorwoman, well groomed and professionally poised.

  “Again, Chicago police came down hard on an urban homeless camp after items were discovered there that might be linked to the ‘Calamity Jane’ killings,” she said.

  Chicago. That’s where he’d seen those buildings-on the South Side, where he’d grown up, down by the Rock Island Railroad tracks.

  “Officials deny that any brutality was used, but a videotape has surfaced of police rampaging through the area, evoking outraged comparisons to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles,” the announcer went on. “Authorities say they’re looking into the matter.

  “Up next, a look at the weekend’s sports. Stay with us.”

  Sara’s face was questioning.

  “Freeboot said the same thing to me, in almost those same words,” Monks said. “The same number, twenty million outlaws. The riff about the army already being out there.”

  He flipped to a different channel and this time caught the story as it was starting.

  “…now we’ll hear how a shocking murder in an Illinois gated community has led to a near riot in a homeless camp,” another anchorwoman said. “Here’s Ted Derrick in Chicago. Ted?”

  The screen flashed to a good-looking young man with a microphone, standing at the fringes of the same slum and crowd that the earlier newscast had shown.

  “Kelly, events have taken a strange and even uglier turn here, since the murder yesterday of Walter Krieger and his wife,” he said. “This morning, items of Mrs. Krieger’s lingerie, believe it or not, started turning up in this urban homeless camp-very expensive stuff, Italian silk and what-have-you, not the kind of thing you’d expect to find here.”

  Sara was watching now with dismay, holding a chopping knife in a posture that looked unconsciously defensive.

  “They stole her underwear?” she murmured. “That’s creepy.”

  “Police received an anonymous tip about the lingerie, is that right?” Kelly, the anchorwoman said.

  “Correct. There’s speculation that the tip came from the killers themselves, wanting to link this to the previous Calamity Jane murders.”

  “Why are they doing this?” she said, leaning forward suddenly and slapping her hand down on her desk, with the petulance of a teeange girl.

  Not just petulance, Monks thought. Fear. It could happen to her.

  “Nobody seems to have any answers yet, Kelly.”

  She leaned back, regaining her composure. “And there are complaints of brutality when police searched the camp?”

  “Yes. Residents say they ran amok, with violence, threats, and racial slurs. Here’s a video that was taken by a bystander.”

  The screen changed again, this time to a scenario that looked like it could have been from a movie of a postapocalyptic world. Unsteady and amateurish, surreally lit by the garish flashing lights of squad cars, the footage showed a dozen policemen in full riot gear charging through an alley, tearing apart cardboard shelters, kicking men in bedrolls and clubbing those who tried to stand.

  “There’s a sense that the police were taking out their frustrations on the homeless,” Ted’s voice cut in. “Blaming and punishing them for the murders.”

  The screen switched to the same homeless spokesman who had been on the earlier broadcast, repeating his strident shout:

  “It’s bad enough they don’t give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like this-”

  Monks felt Sara’s hand touch his arm. The concern was in her eyes again.

  “How about we turn this off and get in the hot tub?” she said.

  “There’s an army already out there, and it’s ready to fight back,” the angry face shouted.

  Monks switched off the set. “Let me just clean up,” he said. He peeled the few remaining shrimp, put them in the refrigerator, and washed the counter.

  Since the fire, he had checked out some of Freeboot’s claims and found them accurate. Official estimates put the homeless population at over three and a half million, more than a third of them children. That was probably on the conservative side, and didn’t take into account the many more who were marginal-one short step away.

  More than three million jobs in industry had disappeared over the past couple of years. There was a pervasive perception of the homeless as lazy and irresponsible, but a whole lot of them were staunch, hardworking citizens who couldn’t pay their bills after the factory doors slammed shut. The few jobs that were “created” to replace those lost tended to be either high-end technical-beyond the reach of people without higher education-or minimum-wage. Thousands of soldiers were coming home from overseas deployment and finding that out.

  And the big rock of poverty that dropped into the national pond spread other ugly ripples. The FBI estimated twenty-four thousand violent gangs. Prisons were overcrowded to the bursting point, their population over two million, with millions more ex-cons and parolees also on society’s fringes.

  The total might not add up to twenty million, but it was a hell of a lot of people. How many more were that one short step away, who weren’t showing up on any economic-indicator charts? Outwardly doing all right-but in fear of losing their jobs, facing power bills that suddenly tripled and surging gasoline prices that hammered commuters and other escalating expenses, unable to afford health insurance and knowing that a sickness or injury would wipe them out. Literally a paycheck or two away from losing everything. If you went another rung down the socioeconomic ladder, you were talking people who worked for minimum wage, who would never own a house, who were condemned to a semi-desperate life with the talons of drugs and crime clawing at their children.

  When Monks was growing up, the lucky kids had a chance at college. Others went into jobs in factories or the trades, not glamorous, but stable and adequately providing. If you were responsible, you could live decently, buy a home, and hope that your children would have it better-the American dream. His own father had been a laborer, and his mother, a grade school teacher. He had been one of those lucky kids.

  Now that was pretty much gone. Lucky was more and more equivalent with affluent, and for the others, that stable life was edging closer to extinction all the time.

  For all of Freeboot’s madness, he had pinpointed a major weakness that had crept into society over the past couple of decades-a huge mass of rage and desperation. Monks thought of it in terms of basic chemistry. If you put water in a pot and turned up the heat and pressure, the molecules got more and more agitated until they finally boiled over.

  It had been eerie, watching Freeboot’s words come out of a stranger’s mouth. But the really surprising thing, Monks realized, was that he was not really surprised. The three months of constant worrying and looking over his shoulder had been building, not receding.

 
He had been waiting for something.

  25

  Sara’s antiquated hot tub dated back twenty-some years, to when she and her coke-dealer ex-boyfriend had first lived here. It was an indulgence, even a caricature of California decadence, but nice for chilly nights and watching the ocean, calm and starlit, or ominous under an incoming wall of fog, or wild with a storm.

  “It’s just a word-of-mouth thing, don’t you think?” she said. She was leaning back, water up to her chin, calves draped across Monks’s thighs. Her hair was a damp, dark cloud. “What that homeless guy was saying, that sounded like Freeboot? Something that gets passed around between street people. Maybe Freeboot wasn’t even the first one who made it up.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I can understand why it upsets you, but-I think you’re seeing Indians behind every tree.”

  Monks realized that she was working to soothe him, as she often did. He caressed the back of her knee appreciatively.

  “You didn’t know you were taking on a full-time job, trying to keep me calm,” he said.

  “Listen to you-finding something else to feel guilty about.”

  “What do you mean, something else?”

  “All kinds of things. Thinking Glenn inherited your bad side.”

  “I don’t exactly think that,” Monks said. But it brought back the unhappy memory of his conversation with Shrinkwrap at the camp.

  “But you’re afraid of it. Every parent is-the honest ones, anyway. You think I don’t worry that Lia grew up like me? Sex, drugs, hooking up with a guy who ran her life?”

  “You turned it around,” he said. “So will she.”

  This time it was Sara who looked distracted by her own thoughts. She had been a good girl, the pride of her blue-collar family, attending UC Berkeley on a full scholarship. Then, home for the summer before her senior year, she’d started living with the area’s ranking coke dealer, a man almost ten years older. She never went back to school. For a while, they’d lived the high life. But the drug business started changing, with rougher competition moving in and her boyfriend getting paranoid and erratic.

  Then she got pregnant. Ostensibly, it was unplanned, but on some level she understood that it was a desperate move to ground herself. She had quit the drugs, leveraged her ex out of the house, and borne Lia-and then started to face the reality of paying for a child and a life. An uncle in the construction business had hired her to do book work. She had started cleaning job sites for extra cash, picked up skills quickly, and eventually parlayed them into the novelty of an all-female crew, backed by a reputation for quality work.

  But she alluded to times, during those intervening years, of bad relationships, lapses back into drug use, and almost abandoning herself to the downhill crash of that earlier life that she had barely pulled out of.

  “She’ll find her own way,” Sara finally agreed. “You ready for a refill?”

  “Sure.” Monks drained the bit of vodka left in his glass and handed it to her.

  She went to the kitchen and came back a minute later, carrying the full glasses like a waitress, except that she was naked and dripping wet. Monks watched her the entire time. He loved to look at her-her smooth olive skin, dark-nippled breasts soft and etched with the lines of mothering, lush black V disappearing between her thighs. Although he had witnessed many births, he would clasp her slim hips and touch the soft petals of her labia in near disbelief that a child could have passed through. The older he got, the more fascinated he became by the beauty and resilience of women.

  She knew it, and took her time getting back into the tub.

  “You feel guilty about us, too,” she said.

  Monks started to deny it. But, like most of her insights, it bore truth.

  “There’s a part of me that says I don’t deserve anything this good.”

  “Maybe it’s an Irish-versus-Italian deal,” she said. “You brood about things forever. We just do them, then we scream at each other, or go to confession, and it’s over.”

  “I don’t think it’s that cut and dried.”

  “Okay, it never is. But-I don’t know exactly how to put this. You’re a tough guy in some ways, but you’ve never really gotten down.”

  “Gotten down?”

  “Compromised yourself, to get what you wanted.”

  “I’ve done plenty I’m not proud of,” Monks said.

  “I mean really down and dirty, hon. Like, there were a couple of times I blew guys for coke.” She watched his face. “Shocks you, huh?” she said.

  “A little,” he admitted, annoyed with himself for his prudishness.

  But she seemed amused. “It helps you learn to get over things. You realize it’s not the end of the world. So what about fucking in a hot tub? Does that slam you with extra guilt?”

  Monks slid his hand up the inside of her thighs to their wet, furry juncture. She closed her eyes and scooted her rump forward, pressing into him.

  “Sometimes guilt makes things sweeter,” he said. “Any mick can tell you that.”

  It was the strangest apartment building that Monks had ever been in, an old brick tenement hung with laundry, but the front walls were missing, so he could see right into the rooms. He was talking with a pixie-ish young woman, standing where the doorway would have been. She was pretty, her skin very pale, her hair orange.

  That will be fine, then, she said earnestly. Monks agreed, but her features started changing, becoming bearded and disheveled, and she was speaking angry, accusing words. Disturbed, Monks drifted on, through a vaginal labyrinth of deep purples and reds.

  Now there was something behind him, following, that he didn’t like at all. A name was coming into his head, with an “F” sound. Federico. Francesco. Freefreefree-

  He ran, but the world around him had thickened into an endless swamp. His legs were like chunks of lead, his steps agonizing. He clawed at the decayed cypress knees that thrust up around him, pulling himself along, but it was way too late, because whatever had been following was not really behind him at all, it was already in him-

  Monks said, “Haaah,” and struggled to sit up. His eyes were open. He was in Sara’s bed, with her sleeping beside him. He put his hand on her flank. Her breathing was undisturbed. Glad that he hadn’t awakened her, he settled back again and closed his eyes.

  But a page from Pilgrim’s Progress, its Gothic etchings forever seared into his childhood memory, opened in his mind.

  …he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apol-lyon.

  Monks got up quietly and carried his clothes to the living room to dress. There was no chance of getting back to sleep.

  The green LED readout on the microwave read 3:13. He opened the liquor cabinet and looked at the vodka bottle. But he knew that if he started, he wouldn’t stop, and come dawn, he would be wide-awake drunk. He started heating water for coffee instead.

  His own dream had fit a pattern that was common for him-images that had recently been in his mind, blended with elements of absurdity, and ending in a helpless attempt to escape. The young woman’s face, melting into an ugly blur that recalled the homeless man on TV. The comforting birthlike passage giving way to a world that was harsh and dangerous. Federico and Francesco, Italian names stemming from his earlier talk with Sara, his mind groping for the “F” that it linked to the threat.

  Freeboot.

  In the aftermath of the fire, law-enforcement authorities had quickly identified Freeboot. His real name was James Reese. He had grown up semiferal in the northern California backwoods, part of a loose clan of dope growers and outlaws. As he had claimed, he’d spent a lot of his later life in prison. It also seemed true that he had experienced some kind of conversion-not religious, but intellectual and political-that had turned him from a run-of-the-mill loser into a serious figure who won the respect of other inmates. He had cleaned up his act, even getting his prison tattoos filled in to symbolize his turnaround. With his l
ast sentence in Folsom served without incident, he faded off the radar of the criminal-justice system.

  But there was another factor in the equation-a psychologist with the all-American name of Mary Jane Wilson, and an unsavory past of her own. Twice, as a high school counselor-once in her home state of Ohio, and later in Missouri -she had been dismissed for seducing teenage boys.

  Hard-pressed to find work, Mary Jane had ended up as a counselor in the California prison system. She had her own ax to grind against authorities now, and, like many of the convicts, she felt at heart that she had been perfectly within her rights to do what she had done, that it was the law that had wronged her.

  One of her clients at Folsom was James Reese. It was during that time period that he had his “epiphany.” The two of them bonded, him taking the name Freeboot, and she Shrinkwrap. The details of what followed were unclear, but an overall picture emerged from what solid information was available, what Marguerite had contributed, and guesswork.

  About four years ago, Shrinkwrap had moved to the North Coast, where she falsified her record, deleting the dismissals, and set up shop. Here in the heart of pot-growing country there were plenty of troubled kids. She quickly became popular with them, although this time there were no reported incidents of sexual misconduct. If she was at it again, she kept it well hidden. She bought an isolated rundown farm near Lake Pillsbury and turned it into an informal retreat for her young clientele. Using intuition and her skills as a psychologist, she determined their susceptibility.

  When Freeboot got out of jail and joined her, he brought with him a rhetoric-charged agenda and a training program cobbled together from his superficial reading of history, folklore, and paramilitary creeds. The chosen candidates were carefully brought up through levels, their loyalty constantly tested, their personalities systematically broken down and rebuilt along fanatical lines, with the reward of belonging to a secret, super-powerful elite. Drug use was encouraged, especially of methamphetamine-which, Monks had learned, had been given to kamikaze pilots and Nazi soldiers to make them more alert and aggressive, enabling them to function up to ten days without sleep. A popular form of manufacturing the drug was even known as “the Nazi method.”