But behind Smoke, a man with a leader’s voice said, “Turn around.”
Smoke turned slowly around and saw a compact young man in his early thirties—but, no. Wrong. Subtract the etchings of wartime stress and fatigue and hunger, and the man was perhaps mid-twenties. He was gaunt from hunger; his chin was just a shade too prominent, like the old drawings of the man-in-the-moon at quarter-phase, and his forehead was high; he had a straight nose; a wry, red-lipped mouth; and small, dark-lashed green eyes rimmed with sleeplessness. His hair was thatchy, oily because it was something he ignored. When it was clean, it was probably blond. He was not more than five-seven, and lean in a weathered brown flight jacket that looked like it had done its flying in bad weather; ancient, faded Levi’s; motorcycle boots held together with duct tape.
He was carrying a… Smoke stared. “Where’d you get the old Weatherby?” he asked, interested. The boy was carrying a Weatherby Mark V hunting rifle. Gun must be thirty, forty years old, Smoke thought. Bolt action, .460 Magnum. Long, long rifle. Developed for big-game hunting. Anomalous thing to find here, Smoke thought.
The man with the green eyes chuckled and shook his head. His eyes didn’t change expression when he laughed. They remained flat, hard, candid. “You’re supposed to be scared,” he said, “not asking where I got my gun.”
“So he knows all about guns,” one of the other men said. Moved to Smoke’s right. He was a big-framed man who had the look of someone who’d been overweight, starved down to sagging folds. He wore a long black coat, open at the front. And to Smoke’s left there was a twitch-eyed vulture of a man breathing noisily through his open mouth. He wore a raincoat and beneath that something so ragged it was unidentifiable. The starved bear carried a .22 rifle, and the vulture carried a sort of mace made from nails soldered to a long pipe. “If he knows about guns,” the bear went on, “he ain’t some wanderin’ tramp.”
“That logic is questionable,” Smoke said. “A wandering tramp is someone who used to be someone else—and when he was the someone else he might have made guns his hobby. I am, in fact, a wandering tramp. That doesn’t mean I don’t have business. I have business. But I’m not an eye for the Armies. And I’m here unarmed.”
“What’s your ‘business’?” the green-eyed one asked, jeering the word business.
Smoke was thinking that the starved bear should have the big Weatherby, and the green-eyed one should have the .22, because he was smaller, and because he was the leader, so he should have known better. But maybe the gun was the totem of power here. And the king should carry the scepter.
“Here’s where I take a chance,” Smoke said. “I’m going to refuse to tell you my business. Except to say it’s no threat to you.”
The starved bear took a step toward him, and Smoke closed his eyes and said, “I hope they don’t hurt my crow.”
Not sure if he’d said it out loud.
“Jenkins,” the green-eyed one said, not very sharply. But that’s all it took. The big guy stopped, and Smoke, even with his eyes shut, knew the starved bear was looking at the green-eyed one for his cue.
“Lez go through his stuff,” the vulture said. “Might be food.”
“Animals,” Smoke said, opening his eyes. “One’s a starved bear and one’s a vulture, and you make me think of a coyote or a wolf.” He looked at the leader. Again the guy made the smile that didn’t travel to his eyes.
“You’re just a roost for a crow,” he said. “You got a name?”
“Smoke.”
“I heard about you, something. Like you barter, black market or…” He shrugged. “What’s to be so mysterious about?” Smoke didn’t answer, so the guy went on, “What’s your crow’s name?”
“I haven’t decided. We’re of recent acquaintance. I’m wavering between naming him Edgar Allan Crow or Richard Pryor.”
The green-eyed one lowered his rifle, maybe only because it was heavy. “Edgar Allan Crow is corny. What’s ‘Richard Pryor’ mean?”
“He was my father’s favorite comedian, and he was black. That’s all I know about him.”
“We could eat that bird,” the vulture suggested. He looked at the green-eyed leader. “Let’s eat the bird, Hard-Eyes. Fuck it, huh?”
Hard-Eyes. Quite a monicker.
Hard-Eyes said, “No. Crows are good luck where I come from.”
The clouds had congealed into rain and the rain had wormed and nosed and nudged its way into the high-rise’s ten thousand hairline cracks, and it was seeping out of the cracks in the ceiling and dripping with a smell of dissolved minerals into a large bathtub—which someone had dragged from its original mooring just to catch the rain—and into a wooden box which itself was beginning to discolor and leak.
The crow was asleep on Smoke’s shoulder.
“I wisht we could have a goddamn fire,” Pelter was saying. Pelter was the vulture.
They were sitting on red plastic crates around a dead TV set. The TV screen had been painted with a symboclass="underline"
…in red paint. They weren’t looking at the screen. But it was a kind of chilled hearth for them. They’d eaten a tin of sardines and a pound of cheese Steinfeld had given Smoke “to soften them up.” Smoke had brought it out as soon as they’d arrived at the squat. “This’s our squat,” Hard-Eyes had said, just as if he’d wanted to displace the word bivouac in Smoke’s mind, in case Smoke was working for the Armies after all.
There was a jumble of old furniture in the room, mysterious geometries in the half-darkness. They’d blacked out the window with three thicknesses of taped-on black plastic; the plastic’s wrinkles made glowworms of the anemic yellow light from the two chemlanterns. Smoke said, “You’re gonna need a new lump for your lanterns. That solid fuel seems like it’s going to last forever, then all of a sudden you’re in the dark.”
“I don’t like the way this guy talks,” Pelter said. “He’s gonna bring us bad luck.”
Hard-Eyes ignored Pelter. He looked across the cone of lampglow at Smoke and said, “You’re not talking just about lamp fuel.”
Smoke shrugged. “It’s all in the lanterns. Energy and attrition and entropy.”
Hard-Eyes blinked, looking skeptical. Then his face cleared and he nodded. “And glass going black.”
Jenkins and Pelter looked at one another, then at Hard-Eyes and Smoke and then at the floor.
“What’s the TV fetish-sign about?” Smoke asked.
He nodded toward the red symbol on the screen. He’d seen it the first time in Martinique, ten years before. He’d seen it on pendants and on screensavers. No one had explained it, except to say, “It’s good luck.” Later, in Harlem, seeing dead TVs turned into household iconography, he’d figured it was big-city cargo cultism, in a way, and something more: an invocatory variation on the Gridfriend sign.
“You believe in Gridfriend?” Smoke asked.
Gridfriend, god of the global electronic Grid. The Grid gives TV, and news—and credit, which translates into food and shelter. Pray to Gridfriend and maybe the power company’s computers lose your bill, and you go an extra month before they turn off your lights; pray to Gridfriend and maybe Interbank makes an error in your favor, computes you five hundred dollars you shouldn’t have. And then forgets about it. Pray to Gridfriend and the police computer loses your records. Or so you hope.
“That’s not the Gridfriend totem,” Hard-Eyes said. “It’s Jenkins’ thing. It’s Jenkins’ invocation to the Big Organizer, the god who manufactures patterns—and luck. Jenkins used to do a lot of meth.”
“Big Organizer? Just another Gridfriend. You a believer in luck?”