Another Life (14 page)

* * *

W
aiting for him to call me with a time and place, I patted the couch for Rosie to take a nap with me.
I don’t know if she dreamed. I know I did. I call it a dream, but it was just a memory, replayed so vividly that I was transported back to a lifetime ago.

* * *

The old man next to me on the bench was too clean to be a bum. He was dressed like a dockworker who knew he’d never be picked at the shape-up, but still doggedly showed every morning.
Big, heavy-boned, with thick, gray-streaked brown hair. His eyes were the color of soot; hands callused on the palms, scarred on the backs.
“When clowns say ‘anarchy,’ they mean a riot,” he was telling me. “You know, like a ‘state of anarchy’? But anarchy isn’t a condition, it’s a philosophy. Anarchists don’t want a lawless state; they want a state governed by the natural order of humanity. Breaking down the government isn’t enough. In fact, it’s a mistake, because fear is all it takes for fascism to emerge. People want order restored so desperately, they don’t think about what that’s going to cost them later. Or who’s financing it.”
“I thought anarchists threw bombs,” I said.
“Some people hang a black man from a tree, then go right to church.”
“So it’s all a lie?” I asked, ready to believe
that.
“Nothing’s
all
a lie.” The old man drew in a deep breath, expanding his chest like he was going to shout, but he never raised his voice. “Anarchism is anti-authority, not pro-violence. Anarchism is the enemy of exploitation, in any form. It’s not about blowing things up for the sake of destruction; it’s about razing a foul structure, so you can build a better one. Collectively.”
“That sounds like—”
The old man knew the joint I’d just been released from had no shortage of explain-it-all philosophers, and he sensed which one I’d been about to quote. “Anarchism is
not
Marxism, young man. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is
still
a dictatorship. We broke with that crowd a long time ago.”
I knew the old man was IWW. Maybe one of the last. I knew they were stand-up guys. Even high-status cons talked about them with respect. That was about all I knew, but more than enough to make me listen.
“No government doesn’t mean no law,” he said. “While you were locked up, you ever read any Proudhon?”
“Never heard of him.”
“I figured,” he said. Not surprised, resigned. “But I know you heard the story about the guy who wouldn’t let the government pick the time for him to die. The guy who made a bomb out of match heads packed into a hollow leg of his bunk, lay down next to the radiator, and blew himself up right on Death Row, just a few hours before they were going to execute him?”
“Sure!” Cons treasure that story the way career soldiers do Medal of Honor winners.
“But you think it’s a folk legend, am I right? You know, like how the guy they gunned down in Chicago wasn’t really Dillinger?”
“I…”
“It’s no bullshit, son,” he said. Not persuading, just laying it out for me. “Louis Lingg was the man’s name. And he wasn’t some crazy ‘anarchist,’ he was one of us.”
“Us?”
“A syndicalist,” he said, proudly. “The government always tried to make us out to be all the same, but the Wobblies weren’t fighting to take over the country; we were fighting for social justice.
Years
before the unions rotted from the top down, we were out there, organizing the workers.
“Yeah, some of us used dynamite instead of pamphlets—like the McNamara brothers when they blew up the L.A. Times Building. But those men weren’t after anything but justice. They
believed.
And if that whore Darrow hadn’t sold them out—”
“Clarence
Darrow?”
“You heard me,” he said, still not raising his voice. “The newspapers were all killing us. Look how they lied about Haymarket Square—maybe that’s why our biggest force is still in Chicago.
“But how they
really
nailed us was to make out like we were against the war. World War I, I’m talking about. They said we were anti-American, agents of the enemy. Sedition! Treason! Vigilante mobs attacked us everywhere…and the cops helped them do it.”
I offered my pack of cigarettes to the old man. He took one, lit up. So did I.
He exhaled like a sigh of relief. “Centralia, Washington. November 11, 1919. That’s when they lynched Wesley Everest. They had him locked up for organizing, which they called spreading sedition. Now, Wesley wasn’t some theoretician; he was a combat veteran. So when they came for him, he didn’t go quiet. There was a big shoot-out, but they finally wounded him bad enough so they could drag him to jail.
“Then the
guards
handed him over to a lynch mob. Those dirty cowards castrated Wesley before they strung him up, then they used his body for target practice. People cheering, taking pictures. Real patriots, they were. The coroner wrote it up as a suicide. Where were the ‘reporters’ then, huh?”
“I never—”
“—thought that happened to
white
men, right? Yeah, well, it did. But even that couldn’t stop us. It was the damn Commies who got
that
job done.”
“But I thought—”
“Emma Goldman—you ever heard of her?” He didn’t even wait for me to confirm what he suspected, just rolled on as if I’d admitted I hadn’t. “She supported the Bolsheviks. But the minute they took over, they kicked her out of Russia, so she came over here. Even did time on Welfare Island for campaigning against the First World War.
“That’s when it started to all go wrong for us. See, the IWW led the world in anti-fascism. Wesley Everest, he
served
in that war, because it was the right thing to do. We were the first to fight for equal pay for equal work; that’s not the same as goddamn Communism, and it never was. So we blazed that trail, but what are we now?”
“I don’t know. I just heard you—”
“I know,” the old man said, not bothering to hide his sadness anymore. “Look, I just gave you enough information so you could do some work, maybe even discover you haven’t been spending this afternoon talking to a crazy old man. Then, when you see I wasn’t lying, maybe you’ll pay attention to the one thing I have that’s actually worth something to you.”
“I will,” I said, knowing it was a promise I was making.
“Always stand your ground,” the old man told me then. “Yeah, you know that.
Think
you do, anyway. But standing your ground means not just picking the right ground to stand, it’s making sure you’ve got the right people to stand it
with.
“There’s where we went wrong. And, by the end, we had more martyrs than we had movement.”
I never saw him again.
Never forgot him, either.

* * *

I
woke up realizing that, even way back then, I was always paying attention. Listening to anyone who I thought might have answers for questions no kid should ever have to ask.
I was trying to find the path. Not to some Taoist ideal, to someplace where I could belong. The path that would prove my father—the State—was wrong.
They
thought I belonged in some kind of cage. As I got older, they kept changing the names of the cages, but they never changed their mind.
Every time I got back on the streets, I knew prison was somewhere down the road, a cheap motel with a bright, blinking VACANCY sign. Even stronger than the hate in my heart was my need to believe prison was a stop on my journey, not the final destination.
Belonging to a street gang wasn’t what I was looking for. I’d been there, and I knew. A gang is something you belong
to,
not
with.
It was a long time before I figured out the only place you ever truly belong is the place you make for yourself.
You can’t buy it; you have to build it. “Blood in, blood out”—that’s just another pair of handcuffs. Tattoos don’t make you anyone’s “brother.”
I was searching for something…anything…to explain why I’d been picked for the diet of blood, terror, and pain I was raised on.
Back when I was still a gang kid, I thought prison was where true men of honor were formed: a test you had to pass, with self-respect the top grade. I finally learned that was a lie, but I learned it
in
prison. From my true father.
“You
can’t
do your own time in here, Youngblood,” he broke it down for me. “You try, you die. This school only got two rules. You volunteer for lockup, or you walk the yard.”
I didn’t say anything. I was there to listen. And we were standing on the yard.
“Yeah,” he said, as if I’d answered a question correctly. “Okay, boy, here’s the slant on the plant: you don’t diss, you never kiss, but if your name
still
gets called, make sure you don’t miss.”
I nodded, still too awed to speak. The Prof was a legend Inside. And he had picked
me
to school.
“Only thing that’s true is what you
do
” is what he taught.
I live that. That’s how I found the one place I rightfully belong. My heart and my life.
Your
life doesn’t mean any more to me than I ever meant to any of you. Trespassers should bring their own body bags.

* * *

T
he one-use-only, cloned-chip cell buzzed.
“Location Four,” Pryce said. “Plus two.”
I checked my watch: 11:00 p.m. Plenty of time. I threw in a stack of bootlegged CDs and listened to Stevie Ray Vaughan destroy a stereotype with “The Sky Is Crying.” I went out of the door on Bobby Bland’s “I’ve Got to Know.”
“You want company, boss? Ain’t nobody going to check in this late, especially in this weather.”
“No thanks, Gate. But I’d appreciate it if you’d—”
By then, Rosie had already vaulted into his lap.

* * *

P
ryce didn’t like public places. Liked them even less after dark. I reversed the Plymouth into the open bay of a Brooklyn factory slated for the wrecking ball. I wasn’t surprised when the accordion door descended in front of my windshield, sliding on soundless runners.
He climbed into the front seat of the Roadrunner, making the capture a two-way street. Pryce wasn’t into ceremony or bravado; he was the kind of man who keeps his copyrights up to date.
“You have something?” he opened.
“Just a suspicion.”
“Go.”
“Cui bono?”
“I didn’t know you studied Latin in prison. But I
do
know you didn’t call another meet just to tell me this wasn’t a ransom snatch
again.
”
“No, I didn’t. I think you knew that even before you called
me.
But I also think you hired me to find porterhouse in a fish store.”
“English, okay?”
“Not a ransom, so has to be a freak. Maybe a sex freak, maybe a Master Race freak. Or one with dual membership. That’s your math, right? So your next play is, ask the man who knows them.”
“And?”
“Sometimes, you can bond a man to you with gratitude. Especially if you do something for him money can’t buy. You know all that; you
did
all that. Only the tree you planted sprouted a lot of branches.”
He made some faint gesture with his right hand.
“Someone wants something from your sheikh,” I told him. “Not money. Something he
could
get done, but nothing you could
make
him do…unless he was bonded to you, too.”
“Maybe,” he conceded.
“You’d think he could just have another baby. Ten more, if he wanted.”
“Agreed.”
“And that…training he was doing—he
liked
doing it. Right also?” I pressed.
“Yes,” Pryce said. You had to be listening real close to catch the slight change in his breathing. I always listen real close.
“The baby gets his value because he’s a direct descendant of the OG himself. That’s what your boy told me,” I said.
“It’s true.”
“But that bloodline runs through the father, not the mother.”
“So you’re saying the baby isn’t irreplaceable. Unless…”
“He can’t make another one.”
“But he
could,
” Pryce said, sticking a pin into that balloon. “There was no fertility clinic involved in the birth of this one. No embryo implant, no special…”
“And if the
mother
was shipped home, tried for infanticide, and found guilty, what then?”
“Tried?” Pryce snorted.
“Exactly. So the Sheikh starts over. No shortage of choices. Maybe even covers his bets, since he needs a son if he wants the kid to stay in the running for the throne.”
“Yes. So?”
“So it
still
wouldn’t be the same for him. He had
years
invested into training his successor. Starting over, that would be tricky. Especially with what he has to figure you found out about him by now. But if
this
baby was recovered somehow, and handed back to him—maybe with a hint that it cost a few lives to pull it off—then he might…
might
be grateful.”
“A man like—”
“I know. Anything he gets, he believes he’s entitled to. Probably doesn’t even know what gratitude feels like. But whoever returns that baby gets two cards, not one. One might pile up some gratitude, but that’s no ace of trumps. The other is: the Sheikh
has
to be thinking, ‘Maybe the people who returned the baby to me are the same ones who took him.’ Which means—”
“—they could do it again.”
“Anytime they wanted,” I said, using language the Sheikh himself would understand.
Pryce went so still that his pulse rate probably couldn’t be detected.
Time passed.
“You think the Prince went to the wrong people for help, before he came to us?” he finally said.
“Could be.”
He studied me for a long minute. “He did,” the shape-shifter admitted. “But
they
didn’t. Never mind the theorizing, okay? Just keep doing your work. I’ve got some of my own to do now.”
He handed me a gym bag.
“There’s enough in there for whatever you could possibly need, next two, three weeks. Don’t reach out for me. Every contact you have is already erased. When I’m ready, I’ll find you.”
“Good enough,” I agreed. “But what if I find the kid myself, looking where
you
told me to? I’ve got to have some way to—”
“Tell the guy who manages that flophouse you live in to wear a bright-red jacket next time he walks the dog.”
“He’s in a—”
“I know. He won’t have to go far; a couple of blocks’ll be enough.”
“Got a camera on me, have you?”
“Better,” he said. Then he slipped out of the Roadrunner and back into the darkness.
The garage door rolled up. I rolled out.