Houston, 2030

by Mike McKay

  Mark tried to stop his racing mind: must have a good sleep now. There would be long, grueling day tomorrow. He quickly wished good-night to William and Clarice, and went upstairs, stumbling his way in pitch-dark corridor. In the bedroom, Mary moaned something in her sleep. Mark did not bother checking his telephone alarm clock. Most of the family would be awake at five, so he had plenty of time for a ride to the Station. He climbed under the mosquito net, and three minutes later, was fast asleep.

  Chapter 3

  Mark woke up from the movement in the bedroom: Mary was piling old foam boxes on the windowsill, a somewhat futile procedure for keeping the bedroom cool through the day. Apart of William, Clarice and little Davy, who would start their day a bit later, the rest of the family was already awake. The three younger kids: Samantha, Pamela, and Patrick, were at the dinner table, munching on their breakfast. In the built-in garage, Michael, Mark's second oldest son, was loading his cargo tricycle with empty plastic jerrycans. Before the school, the kids had to make a daily run to the Reservoir to fetch fifty gallons of water, or there would be no warm shower in the evening. Mark's father-in-law, David-senior, had finished his breakfast already and was sitting at the back deck, smoking his pipe.

  Mark quickly fixed a piece of bread with some lard spread on top and poured himself some acorn coffee. The real coffee was no longer imported, and they had to save their small stash for special occasions. While finishing his breakfast, he quickly checked his telephone. There had been no updates. Fifteen minutes later, he was on his Police bike, pedaling towards Beaumont Highway in cool morning air.

  The small shops and food stalls along the highway were still mostly closed, but the traffic was picking up. Some people rode bikes and cargo tricycles, the others simply walked. Now nobody lived farther than ten miles from work, and ten miles would mean an hour and a half of commute, – if one was lucky to have a push-bike. Despite the early hours, there were many school-age children on the road too. Some carried water or firewood, perhaps, helping with the daily chores before going to school, the same way as Mark's kids had to do. He overtook a large group of teenagers, dressed in rags, barefoot, and with large straw hats. These kids would not be going to school. Considering the clothes and the early time, they targeted to the labor market, the Day-Pay, as the locals called it, across the Beaumont Highway from the McCarty Road Landfill.

  Few years ago, as part of his FBI duties, Mark was required to participate in multiple raids to the Day-Pay while the Police was trying to weed out illegal child labor. To Mark, the Day-Pay resembled a medieval slave market, taken from some fantasy novel and planted into the present day Texas. Many thousands of people were sitting on the bare ground, each holding, like a price tag, a small piece of cardboard with the desired day wage (these cardboard tags were called ‘day-pays,’ hence was the market's name.) The potential employers walked between the sitting workers, selecting the ones they liked, negotiating employment conditions and remunerations. Some workers would be hired for several months or even permanently, but most would end up with a week or two worth of work, or more often than not – were hired for just a couple of days.

  There were dedicated rows for qualified and semi-qualified labor: carpenters, brick-layers, fixers, and such. These workers were predominantly mature men, and somewhat better dressed. Some would display their tool kits, as an advertizing for their professional qualities. Next, there was an area for agricultural workers. Here the majority were women, some with small kids. There was an overwhelming display of poverty, but nothing particularly illegal. The largest portion of the market was occupied with ‘Wanna-Any-Job’ category, and this was the place in which the majority of the illegal activities in child labor were going on. The Supreme Court ruling of 2026 was explicit: no full-time, no hard, and no dangerous labor before the age of fourteen. All kids from six to thirteen inclusive must attend schools. The Police, as a law-enforcement agency, had to enforce the federal law. The problem was that nobody at the Day-Pay gave a damn about the Supreme Court. If one is hungry, they said, the federal law goes low on one's priority list. The employers, quite the opposite, loved the Court ruling: if a youngster could not work by the law, but yet hungry, he or she would work for almost anything.

  For starters, there were kids, some as young as eleven or twelve, completely on their own, searching for jobs. If confronted, all of them claimed they were fourteen. Nobody at the Day-Pay had an ID, and for the most the Police had to accept a fake age at face value. After all, malnourishment was too common, and some fourteen-year-old kids looked as if they were eleven.

  Then, there were adults, who could not (or rather did not want to) work by themselves, but posed as potential workers in order to send even younger children to illegal work. These people were in turn divided into two groups. The smaller group was composed of the parents and direct relatives of the potential child workers. With these, the Police could not do much, but to issue a fine ticket and politely ask the lazy moms and dads to send their kids to school instead of the landfill. The Police main target was the elimination of the second, much larger group, so-called ‘rag barons.’ These were heartless criminals, controlling vast numbers of children, who worked at the landfill, in the garbage processing shops, and sometimes in the other local industries. The children were mere slaves, – for their hard and dangerous labor they received nothing but little food, while their handlers pocketed all the wages. By any definition, the ‘rag barons’ were an organized crime, and so the FBI was involved in the Police operations. Besides, some children working for the ‘barons’ were in fact kidnapped and trafficked to Texas from the other states.

  Mark vividly remembered an episode from about three years ago. He spotted a young woman, pregnant, and with a baby in her arms, accompanied by three girls, aged about ten or eleven, and skinny to an extreme. The woman was holding a piece of carton: ‘$550.’ Slightly less than two times an average garbage processing worker would get per day. As per the standard Day-Pay pricing, a pregnant woman should not be asking for more than $200, and a pregnant-with-a-baby type would not be probably called in even if she asked for $150. The girls were dressed as experienced rag-pickers. One even had a thick rubber glove sticking out of her pocket. These three girls would be an adequate match for two adults, hence was the price… Mark approached the woman, flashed his badge, and asked for some IDs. No surprise, there were none.

  “These three girls,” Mark asked, “are they with you, Madam?”

  “Yessir! I'm look'n for work,” now the woman reversed her carton, and the other side appropriately read: ‘$150.’ “The girls're my nieces, sir. They've a school break, so I let 'em come here wim'me. We've nobody at home to leave 'em with, sir…”

  “Yeah, and I am Rudolph the Reindeer, with my red nose, and straight from the North Pole,” Mark felt enraged listening to such a shameless lie. “I have five kids myself, ma'am. The school break you are talking about… It is not due in two bloody weeks!” he pointed to the oldest girl, “what's your name, young lady?”

  “Jasmine, sir,” she replied readily.

  “How old are you, Jasmine?”

  “Ten…”

  “What school are you in?”

  “The Creek Side, sir. I'm in the fifth grade.”

  The Creek Side. This was one well-rehearsed story. The school was thirty miles away, conveniently preventing any local policemen to have their kids in it. He could ask for the teachers' names, and then phone the school. But to make such a call, he would have to wait till nine or even ten, and the Day-Pay would be closing before nine…

  “Listen,” Mark tried to reason with the woman. Perhaps, she was not in the ‘rag barons,’ after all, “I will not dispute what you've said. However, let say, the girls are not in school, but rather rag-picking at the McCarty Road, right? It's off-the-record. You don't need to say anything, just nod…”

  The woman nodded, quietly confirming Mark's assumption.

  “They should not be working at the landfill at this age, d
on't you understand? It is bloody dangerous. There are needles, dead bodies, chemicals, old batteries, God only knows…”

  “Nos'sir, 'em aren't work'n at McCarty! As I'aid, 'eir school's on quarantine for three weeks! So I let my nieces comi'n here wim'me. At home, we've nobody to leave 'em with, sir. Nobody…” She started the rehearsed pitch again, but applied a little correction about the school break.

  After some procrastination, Mark decided to let them go. They could not arrest good third of the labor market and bring them to the Station for further questioning! He regretted his decision a couple of months later, while participating in yet another raid to the Day-Pay. He saw the same skinny girl again, but now she was on her own. It was her, no doubts. The girl was wearing the same baggy cut-off jeans and the same oversized shirt as two months ago, only now her clothes had multiple small holes, apparently eaten by acid. Her face and both hands were covered in a constellation of open sores, and her right eye was all white from a burn. She held the customary day-pay tag: ‘$30.’ Thirty bucks for a full day of hard work – would not be enough to buy a sandwich for lunch. Really, who would want to hire an injured rag-picker for any better pay?

  “Jasmine?” he called, approaching.

  “Yessir…” she recognized him instantly and corrected herself: “No, sir. My name is… Amelia! Amelia Khan!”

  “I have seen you before. Two months ago. Back then, you called yourself Jasmine, and said you were at school.”

  “Must be a mist-under-standing, sir. I have not seen you before. No, sir. Also, I am not at school. I am fourteen, and I can work. Un-rest-trick-tied!” The girl evidently struggled through the difficult legal term.

  “What happened to your eye… ‘Amelia’?”

  “A battery exploded, sir. At the 'Fill, shit… Sorry! I mean: such bad things… happens. All the time…”

  “Were you working at the McCarty Road Landfill?”

  “Yessir. In a smelter's shop.”

  “What shop was it, exactly?”

  “I… I have no re-coil-lection, sir. I mean: I don't remember.”

  She understood the Day-Pay rules too well: if an accident happens, do not ever point to the employer, or nobody will hire you again. Mark insisted that Jasmine-Amelia (or whatever her real name was) would come to see the Police medic, who was also participating in the raid. An hour later, the girl came by to say thanks. The bigger sores were all plastered. She was clenching a small bottle of Betadine the medic gave her to take care of the wounds, and looked a bit happier.

  The same evening, Mark told the story of Jasmine-Amelia at home.

  “Now I am positive that woman, two months ago, was in the ‘rag-baron’ ring,” he concluded. “She said the girls were her nieces. Nieces, my ass! They didn't even look alike! I should have arrested that bitch right away.”

  “Take it easy, darling,” Mary replied, “you can't catch them all.”

  “Yet, if I arrested that bitch, the poor girl would not lose her eye,” Mark insisted.

  “This is called perverted logic, Dad,” Michael interjected, “you automatically assumed that if you had arrested the handler, the girls would stop working at our shit-pile.” Back then, he already dropped from the school and started working at the McCarty Road Landfill. Granted, his job was strictly legal – he was almost fifteen at the time. Unlike Jasmine, he did not need to endure the Day-Pay to get himself hired. Mark's neighbor was expanding his synthetic gasoline business and offered Mike a permanent job at his little processing plant. Mark and Mary did not complain much about Mike leaving school. Unlike William and the younger kids, he was disorganized, and did not do well. Working at the 'Fill made better of him. He became more responsible and finally began reading his textbooks. While in school, he hated Chemistry, but now could discuss solvents, optimal temperature regimes and product yields like some bloody engineer.

  “You are right, Mike. The girls would not stop working, arrest or no arrest,” Mark agreed. His son had a point. No need to torture yourself. Whatever he had done, the girl would still be working with the garbage and still could be hurt.

  “This is just statistics, Dad,” Mike continued. “Nobody can stop what they are doing, right? Take our plant. In each bomb, we got to put in a ton of plastic scraps a day! If we stop, the thing stops. And we have nothing to eat. So we don't give a shit…”

  “Mike!” Mary interrupted. Perhaps, she did not object Mike working at the 'Fill, but she surely did not like the 'Fill language.

  Mike smiled apologetically and continued: “OK, OK. So we don't… want to know, who picks the scraps, as soon as the scraps keep coming. Twenty thousand people are working every day, right? Then, nobody is perfect: anybody one day can make a stupid, simple mistake, right? So accidents will happen – sooner or later. Or should I say: ‘sooner than later?’ As the matter of fact, on the 'Fill, shit… Sorry, Mom! Stuff happens two or three times a day. Statistics, as I said! If not with your Jasmine, or Amelia, whoever, it must happen to some other girl. Large numbers. A law of mathematics.”

  “Hey, who is talking about mathematics!” Mary said, “your highest achievement last year was someplace between ‘D’ and ‘D+,’ if I remember correctly.”

  “As a matter of fact, I had a ‘C+.’ Once,” Mike replied. Then, admitted: “although, I copied all the answers from Krystal. She boasted she was OK in math.”

  “Krystal? Was she before or after Ashley?”

  “Before Ashley.”

  “And what, exactly, was Krystal's grade for the same test?” Mark asked, smiling. Krystal was Mike's third girlfriend. But she did not last, the same as two girls before her, and an unbeknownst number of girls after.

  “She also got a ‘C+.’ I am very good at copying… Anyway, back to the 'Fill business. If I were you, Dad, I wouldn't worry about that Jasmine at all. She's probably better off after her accident than before.”

  “How come?”

  “Simple. The bad news: she lost one eye. But her second eye is perfectly fine, so no big deal. Now, the good news: it looks like the ‘rag barons’ kicked her out. To look for a job, completely on her own. Perhaps, now she can start working for herself, and not for some fake ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties.’ And if she did not get this acid burn – well. She would still be a slave, for another three or four years. Working hard for little food, a lot of beating, and nothing else! Perhaps, even dying from some bad food or some 'Fill accident. Or – from one of the regular prophylactic beatings! Would it be any better than a little acid burn?”

  Finally, Mark pulled into the Station's parking lot. It was few minutes past six o'clock. Benito was sitting outside, smoking his pipe and shuffling through the reports. He was an early starter too and frequently commented that his brain worked the best on the cool mornings.

  “Morning, Mark,” Ben waved his hand, “so today I come to the Station, and: surprise, surprise! The on-duty deputy tells me that yesterday you three brought two stiffs in here! Brilliant! Just freaking brilliant! The Deputy complained, as you may imagine. He said, the emergency generator was on all night long and interfered with his research.”

  “What research?”

  “He is trying to prove Albert Einstein wrong. Our deputy believes information can move faster than the speed of light.”