Houston, 2030 Page 8

  “I didn't know the things are so bad in Michigan,” Mark said, “there is nothing on the news.”

  “Who would put the freaking Michigan on the news? Well, from the Dumpster, they wanted to ship me back to Detroit. The Army still runs those trains: once a week, across the country. I asked them: for bloody what? What if I want to stay here? And they told me: regulations, Miss, we must send you back. So, I said: and what in hell prevents me from not coming to your shitty train? What if I simply get out of the port and go my own way? And they said: no, you won't. See that label on the wheelchair? This chair is not yours. It belongs to the Santa Lucia. Your wheelchair is in Detroit. You will be issued one after you get off the train there. Oops!”

  “They wrestled your wheelchair away?” Kim shook his head in disbelieve.

  She grinned, “Yessir! Dumped my sore ass on the asphalt, just like that.”

  “Bustards!”

  “Well, I don't blame them. They are still in the Navy – under orders. Lucky me, the Salvation Way rep came to the port. She looked at me and said: it seems you may benefit from the set of wheels, sailor. So I got my skateboard. Frankly, I prefer it to the stupid wheelchair. You can get to places wheelchair can't access. Besides, it gives you new perspective in life. From below!” She pulled on her To-Ma-Gochi and slowly blew the smoke through the nose: “excellent Grass, by the way. Way-way better than in Mich. Still don't want one?”

  Kim waved his fingers to decline the offer. “And how did you end up here in Sheldon-Res?”

  “Rolled on my skate!”

  “What? All the way from Galveston?”

  “Just joking. It was by pure chance.”

  “Pure chance?”

  The legless made another puff from her cigarette, “Yep. After the Salvation Way lady gave me the skate, I went to shake her…” she noted Mark's raised eyebrows and clarified: “I mean: shake my new skate, not the lady! The shake is a sea trial, a Navy talk for a test run. Ended up in a bar with other vets, as you may expect. The Moonshine was OK, but I miscalculated. Different hull displacement!”

  “What do you mean?” Mark was confused with the naval lingo again.

  “Displacement. The body volume. How did you call it, sir? Halved?”

  “Rude joke, forget it,” Mark apologized.

  “No, I like it. Must remember, it's so-o-o cool. Halved! Drink after drink, and here I am: with the half of the body volume, but with the full volume of 'shine inside. I have no idea how I got to the bus station. Opened my eyes in the morning. Oops! I was sleeping on bare concrete, hugging my skate! No money, pool of barf, you got the picture.”

  “Rough night.”

  “To be honest, I was never so drunk in my life. I hope it was the first and the last time.”

  “You have a perfect excuse,” Mark said, “it's not like every day they cut your legs off and dump you on the street.”

  “I guess, you can call it a special occasion! Anyway, I had nothing else to do in Galveston. Several omnibuses and a couple of motor-buses departed, but I had no money to pay for the bloody ticket. Then, one omnibus driver offered me a free ride. Where the hell to? Sheldon-Res, Miss. OK, Sheldon-Res. Anything is better than Detroit.”

  “And you decided to stay here?” Kim asked.

  “At least for a while. I love the South! Imagine: here you can sleep on the concrete with nothing but your skate, and still wake up alive and well in the morning. I always hated the snow, by the way. The issue of no money was solved immediately. The Salvation Way Command happened to be next to the Sheldon-Res bus station. I bravely rolled in and asked if I can join a vet program here. The officer was not too keen at first, because I wasn't local, but then agreed and issued me the bucket. As an exception, he said. We, the female vets, are still uncommon. Brilliant potential in the donation collection business, or so I was told.”

  “The officer has a point. I don't know about Detroit, but in Houston the female vets are fairly rare,” Mark nodded, “lucky us.”

  “Five years ago, in the Navy,” Kim said, “I was told they never sent the girls in harm's way. Only air carriers and naval bases. Support duties… So what happened to your legs – some freak accident?” he stopped and looked at the girl apologetically, “oh, sorry, is it OK to ask?”

  The legless giggled. “It's OK, asking doesn't hurt a bit. As for the ‘support duty’… Depends what you call a ‘support duty,’ sailor. I was a gunner on a river monitor. Piranha-class. All-female crew. So we gave support to the troops all-right. Fire support, that is! We saw our share of action every day… Admittedly, on the monitor, it's not as bad as in the jungles. The armor is OK. If you don't stick your ass out, they can't hit you. The small firearms – we didn't give a damn. Even an RPG! Although, if with a Russian or Czech grenade, then – maybe. But the guerillas hadn't any Russian grenades – not in their zoo! And the Chinese RPG grenades – just a joke, we didn't give a damn. And then, the guerillas got themselves those portable laser-guided missiles somehow. Probably, it was a Chinese crap too. But a guided missile is not an RPG! They whacked us… In the superstructure… The starboard-side gunner only managed to scream: ‘Incoming! Missile launch at five o'clock!’ Whack! It hit us from the aft side. There is an ammo loading hatch, and the armor is weaker. On those monitors, if you don't know, the crew is seven people. For the gun fight, two go to the gun turret, five – in the superstructure. Out of these five, only I survived, and four others… gone…” She puffed her cigarette.

  “And so: you ended up on the Dumpster?”

  “Yep. What else would you do with garbage like me? Junked – to the Dumpster! LOL!” she made a long pull from the cigarette, closed her eyes for several seconds, and then exhaled a puff of sweet-smelling smoke, “woke up already like this,” giggling, she moved her hand back and forth as if cutting the imaginary legs from the body, “no complains, the chainsaw did his job quite OK…”

  “Chainsaw?”

  The legless puffed her cigarette again; now she was obviously under influence, and her speech was getting more and more disjointed. “Chainsaw! Some smart-ass on the Dumpster invented the name for the goddamn surgeons! Like in the old horror movie… A maniac with a chainsaw, have you seen one of those? Boo-ha-ha-ha! Who is the wounded here? This one? No problems! B-z-z-z! On leg! B-z-z-z! Another! B-z-z-z! B-z-z-z! The arms too! What does he need the arms for, anyway? Hey, nurses, this one is ready to go! Ne-e-ext!”

  The restaurant girl arrived with the ordered lunch and started placing bowls on the table. The waitress did not say anything, but looked at the vet with obvious disapproval.

  “Disregard this crap, officers. Sorry. My To-Ma-Gochi! It makes me telling all kinds of nonsense. Funny!” The vet's cigarette burnt almost to her fingers. She extinguished the stub on concrete. “Don't let me spoil your lunch. And: thanks for the donations, the smoke and the talk, officers… I'd better get rolling… Rolling, rolling, rolling, a-ha…” She threw her truncated body back on the skateboard and set the red Salvation Way bucket in the front. “See you around, gents.”

  “See you,” Kim replied. The legless waved her hand and started moving between the tables, collecting more donations. Then, she returned to the road and continued towards the next roadside cafe.

  “She is pretty,” Kim remarked, watching the skateboard-bound vet.

  “Sure she was even prettier before they chopped her legs off,” Mark mumbled digging into his bowl of spicy soup. The legless vet story made him upset. He briefly imagined one of his own daughters, Pamela or Samantha, being without legs and riding a skate like this. Goddamn generals, he thought. Now sending the girls to war! As if it was not enough to have the young men killed and crippled by thousands!

  “I don't know about the other places,” Kim contemplated, “but here in the GRS, one out of three families has someone either killed or wounded in action. Why are we fighting so many little wars at once? Amazing, how the U.S. of mighty A. got itself screwed up in such a short time.”

  “Our neighborho
od is the same: every third family,” Mark nodded in confirmation, “our family too. Did I tell you about my William?”

  “You did, sir. How is he coping, by the way?”

  “Not too bad, considering… Well, many others have the same thing. Twice a year – the same bloody story. Some young fellow gets drafted. Year, or year and a half, – bang! And he is back, short of an arm or a leg. Or instead of the young man – comes a letter from the Pentagon and a little parcel with a medal. Postmortem! Good that at least some manage to return alive and well… You are what: twenty four, twenty five? How much do you remember about the life before the Meltdown?”

  “I remember it was bloody good. Piece of cake. Perhaps, I was too little to remember any bad things. The first GFC I don't remember at all. I was three at the time,” Kim said, also digging into his Tubu Jigae, “even the version two-O kinda passed almost unnoticed to us. My Dad was a bank branch manager, Mom – a consultant auditor. Both worked in finance and made good money. We lived in Charleston, West Virginia, in a rich neighborhood. Huge mansion for a house. My brother and I went to some posh private school. Boys-only, jackets, neckties, and Eton straw hats – this type of school. The Dad's bank was nationalized and survived. Dad did not lose his job, just the opposite, got a promotion. After the two-point-O, my Dad said we had to start an alternative investment strategy, which was pretty much all I cared about the freaking GFC…”

  “An alternative investment? In what?”

  “Dad stopped at the Wal-Mart three times a week and bought food. Canned beans, canned meat, macaronis, flour and dry milk – that sort of stuff. He filled the basement with non-perishable food. Even the toilet paper – we had an entire shelf full of toilet paper, I am not kidding! Also, we had an electric generator and two barrels of gas – in the garage… Now I think my Dad expected something like the Meltdown to happen.”

  “Did the investment work?”

  “Not bloody much! After the Meltdown, both my parents lost jobs, but it was OK: the shops were empty anyway. We started using what was stored in the basement. Two-three cans a day. Dad calculated we would have enough for at least four years… Shit no! Two months later, we were robbed.”

  “Robbed of your non-perishable food? Like a bank robbery?”

  “Exactly like a bank robbery – at the gun-point. Perhaps, the neighbors learned of our ‘investment,’ and got too jealous, or something like this. There were six robbers: two women and four men, all in ski masks. My Dad tried to fight back and was shot dead. At the basement stairs…”

  “Oh shit!”

  “They locked me and my younger brother in the bathroom upstairs and told Mom they would send us after Dad if she disobeys. She actually helped them to load our stuff into our cars… We had Dad's sport utility and Mom's Daewoo compact. They would load both cars and two or three of them would drive off. Then, they would come back. They filled the cars from our own gas barrels! I am not sure if they were selling the stuff or were saving it for themselves. Frankly, I still wonder why they did not kill us. We were left with nothing, just one sofa and empty cabinets. They could not fit into the SUV.”

  “Did you call Police?”

  “Yeah. They helped right away. Sent a Coroner truck to carry Dad's body away. It was all.”

  Mark vividly remembered how the emergency services in Houston were overwhelmed by the wave of crimes and accidents during few months immediately after the Meltdown. The 911 operators could not spend more than forty seconds on each call! The saddest thing was that they could not do much at all. There were only so many Police cars, ambulances and fire trucks around! Even by working forty-eight hours per day, it would be impossible to investigate all the murders and armed robberies reported, and as for the burglaries and other less violent crimes, there would be no personnel to respond at all. Besides, the fuel shortages began! Thanks God, after four or five months the wave of calls started to subside. In the Force, they had an internal joke that people stopped calling 911 not because there were any less crimes, but because there was no place to charge the mobile phones. Actually, in many places, the criminals simply ran out of fuel for their vehicles, and they had to invent less motorized versions of their crimes. And in some others, the ‘concerned citizens,’ with the quiet approval from the local Police, re-introduced lynching for any violent crimes. No resemblance to the pre-Meltdown soft American justice, with its clever defense attorneys and crooked defense experts. The neighbors would quickly bring all the necessities for a proper trial: a good rope, a sturdy stool to put under the offender's feet, and for the humanity sake – a little piece of soap. Five minutes, and the perpetrator would find himself where he belonged: hanging by the neck from a lamp-post!

  “All in all, the Meltdown was a huge culture shock. Imagine, one day you have almost everything, and the next day – you nave nothing! We had nothing to eat, no clothes, nothing at all,” the Deputy continued. “We slept on the sofa, and were chopping the cabinets to keep the fireplace going. Good it was spring already, not as cold. Mom ran from charity to charity to find food, but most of them closed down. Nobody had enough food, who would donate? Mom said: if we stay in Charleston, we may survive this Summer, but we won't survive the next Winter; we need to go someplace there they don't have snow. Thus, we went. The cargo trucks were still running. They formed large convoys – not to be robbed. One driver took pity of us and drove us all the way to Houston. And – we ended up here in the GRS. Although, it was not called Garret Road Slum yet, and was much, much smaller – only about two miles along the Garret Road. Now, it's so huge… And as for the culture shock… Mom went to work at the landfill. She was a financial auditor, and ended up a rag-picker! We had to rent a corner in a shack. Imagine living in a corner, in the same room with seventeen other people – after having a mansion! Then, we built our own home. Just a shack, really, but our own. And lived in the Slum ever since. Eventually, you can get used to it…”

  “Some story!” Mark said, “fortunately, our kids are younger and don't remember much before the Meltdown. Our oldest, William, was only five when the Meltdown came. He started in school that year.”

  “The schools too were a mess,” Kim nodded, “my brother and I had to go to the Null's, no choice. This was the only school one could reach on-foot from the Slum. I remember how Mom struggled to get us the compulsory uniforms. Remember those first compulsory school uniforms in Texas?”

  “The School-Smarts? White shirts, navy pants, black shoes?”

  Mark remembered the School-Smarts all right. Before the Meltdown, the schools in Texas did not have any uniforms. Immediately after, the State introduced the mandatory school attire. It was a bit of a denial feat, like treatment of an advanced cancer with morphine: one small shot, and you feel no pain – for a while. If you dressed all students the same, it would not be too obvious how poor the majority became. There were state-wide help programs for the poorest families and tax incentives for the rest. Yet most of the families struggled to follow the school dress code. China stopped exporting cheap goods, and there was not enough for all… The School-Smart design did not survive for long, and was replaced within two years by the new, more democratic, uniform called Singaporean for some unbeknownst reason: a knee-long Navy-blue shorts and a matching polo shirt, with a pair of fully-enclosed canvas shoes. When Patrick, Mark's youngest, was starting his school, the last mandatory change was introduced. This one was nick-named Safari: khaki and camouflage fabrics were much easier to obtain than any other color.

  “Our first day at the Null's, the older kids beat us both into crap,” Kim continued, “literally! Those latrines behind the school grounds. This damn pond of crap is still there, and as far as I know, still serves the same purpose: for the sissies.”

  “You were the sissies?”

  “Undeniable. What else can you be in a posh private school? The bullies told us: you, sissies, look too bloody neat. We have rules here. And the first rule: ‘No show-offs.’ We both had brand-new shoes. Nicely polished, as we
were taught in Charleston. Probably these new shoes triggered the entire show. First thing first, we were ordered to take the shoes off. The big boys claimed our shoes went into the latrine. But later I learned the bustards just hid them somehow and sold them at the flea market.”