Passenger(17)

“So he don’t go to the newspapers and make some deal out of all the secret governmental shit,” says Clarence. “Yeah. Maybe that’s how you got that scar at the back of your head, too.”

“What scar?” And my hand goes immediately to the back of my head, feeling around. I only feel the undulations of my cranium.

“Big nasty scar,” says Clarence. “How’d you get it?”

“Don’t know.”

“Yeah, right—see? That’s the government at work, drilling right into your head. Zap. Take all your memory out. Can’t tell no secret stories without no memory.”

“Hell, yeah,” says the cook, eyeing me ruefully. His distrust is mounting. “Zap, all right.”

My fingers finally fall into a vague groove at the base of my skull. I trace it up along the rear of my head toward the top. I think, too, of the scar on my leg.

“You got no memory of being in the Middle East, Mozart?” Clarence continues.

“No.”

“Maybe over in Russia,” says the cook. “We still got spies in Russia, you think?”

Clarence shrugs. “Don’t know. We still got spies in Russia, Mozart?”

“I have no idea.”

“Yeah,” says Clarence, suddenly certain of himself, “you some governmental spy got f*cked with.”

“Zap,” says the cook.

They ply me with more beer and a second helping of the baked beans. Clarence regards me with ambivalence, but I am soon under the suspicion that the cook, ever distrustful, is filling me with beer in hopes that it will loosen my tongue. Who am I? Why am I here? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It takes a while, but soon I am full, and it is a fantastic feeling.

“Here, now,” says Clarence at one point, thrusting a bright yellow T-shirt at me. “Slip this on. We almost ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To march,” says Clarence.

The T-shirt says won’t do 72! and looks two sizes too small. Still, grateful for their hospitality, I pull it on over my shirt. It constricts my movements and I wonder if it had previously been a child’s shirt. Clarence eyes me approvingly and claps me on one shoulder.

“You a handsome, handsome white boy.”

An enormous woman with breasts the size of truck tires has gathered behind a bullhorn. She stands on the curb and begins chanting the T-shirt slogan into the device. Soon, the crowd chimes in. They begin migrating from the yard to the street and, with the large-breasted woman leading the pack, move down the center of the street.

Clarence is right beside me, grinning like he’s got a coat hanger jammed into his mouth. He’s got two cigarettes tucked behind one ear, too, and as we walk and chant, he plucks one out, sniffs it, then sticks it into his mouth. Somehow, he is still able to smile and chant while smoking.

“You watch,” Clarence tells me at one point. “The television news be here soon.”

Clarence is right: vans with television logos appear at one point and film the march. While I have no idea what any of this is about, I am content to be part of something. I am nudged by Clarence, who is now clapping while he chants, so I begin clapping and chanting, too. I have no idea what we’re saying or what any of it means. Still, it feels good to be part of something, to be human.

“What is seventy-two?” I ask just as they reach the end of the street. The crowd has dispersed and there are a lot of children running about, blocking traffic. Police mill about the intersection, engrossed in idle conversation while leaning against sawhorses. “And why won’t we do it?”

“The hike,” says Clarence.

“What hike?”

“Gas hike. Seventy-two percent.” Yet he pronounces it sem’nee-two. “Started it this past July. Baltimore been sweatin’ all goddamn summer and now Baltimore goan freeze all winter.” He pronounces it Ball-dee-moe. I hang on every word. “But this hike, man, is like killing me. Killing everyone. Like Grandma Evergreen—died of heat exhaustion in her apartment back in August. Couldn’t afford air conditioning. Died like a rat in a tin can left out in the summer sun.”

“Sorry about your grandmother.”

“Ain’t my grandmother. Was everyone’s grandmother. All the world. Aw, shit, man—it’s the same all around, yeah? Where they think I got the money for this, huh?” Clarence shakes his wooly head. “You know what I do for a living, Mozart? I haul junk. Got my own company hauling junk. Junk as in crap as in junk. You lookin’ at the president and CEO and every employee down the chain right here. All you do is call me and leave your junk out, I’ll come on by and scoop it up m’self, haul it away. Sometimes if it’s good junk—if it’s salvageable—I’ll sell it. There’s a million places you can sell junk. This city, man, it’s built on junk, selling junk. The whole place revolves around junk being moved from one shitty location to another. Relocation, that’s the game. It’s all the same no matter how you cut it—whether you be moving someone’s junk from the curb to a junk shop, whether you be a taxicab moving junk-head peoples from one part of the city to another, or whether you been taking junk straight from a needle and burying it right in your arm. That’s Baltimore, and that’s what makes the city move—the transporting of junk. We built on it.”