The Bridge Trilogy Part 125

contented?"

A laugh, beamed down from the secret streets of that subminiature cityscape in geosynchronous

orbit. "Not that extraordinary, no. But some very basic state is on the brink of change, and we are near its locus."

"We? We have no current involvement."

"Physically Geographically. It's happening here."

The man moves into the final sequence of the exercise, remembering flies on the instructor's face

during that initial demonstration.

"Why did you go to the bridge last night?"

"I needed to think," the man says and stands.

"Nothing drew you there?"

Memory. Loss. Flesh-ghost in Market Street. The smell of cigarettes in her hair. Her winter lips

chill against his, opening into warmth. "Nothing," he says, hands closing on nothing.

"It's time for us to meet," the voice says.

Hands opening. Releasing nothing.

136.

- -32. LOWER COMPANIONS.

THE back of the van collected a quarter-inch of water before the rain quit. "Cardboard," Chevette told Tessa.

"Cardboard?"

"We'll find some, dry. Boxes. Open 'em out, put down a couple of layers. Be dry enough."

Tessa clicked her flashlight on and had another look. "We're going to sleep in that puddle?"

"It's interst.i.tial," Chevette told her.

Tessa turned the light off, swung around. "Look," she said, pointing with the flashlight, "at least it isn't p.i.s.sing down now. Let's go back to

the bridge. Find a pub, something to eat, we'll worry about this later." Chevette said that would be fine, just as long as Tessa didn't bring

G.o.d's Little Toy, or in any other way record the rest of the evening, and Tessa agreed to that.

They left the van parked there, and walked back along the Embarcadero, past razor wire and barricades that sealed (ineffectually,

Chevette knew) the ruined piers. There were dealers in the shadows there, and before they'd gotten to the bridge they were offered speed, plug, weed, opium, and dancer. Chevette explained that these dealers weren't sufficiently compet.i.tive to take and hold positions farther along,

nearer the bridge. Those were the coveted spots, and the dealers along the Embarcadero were either moving toward or away from that particular arena.

"How do they compete?" Tessa asked. "Do they fight?"

"No," said Chevette, "it's the market, right? The ones with good s.h.i.+t, good prices, and they turn up, well, the users want to see them. Somebody came with bad s.h.i.+t, bad prices, the users drive 'em off. But you can see them change, when you live here; see 'em every day, most of that stuff, if they're using themselves, it'll take 'em down. Wind up back down here, then you just don't see 'em."

"They don't sell on the bridge?"

137.

"Well," Chevette said, "yeah, they do, hut not so much. And when they do, they're quieter about it. You don't get offered on the bridge, so much, not if they don't know you."

"So how is it like that?" Tessa asked. "How do people know not to? Where does the rule come from?"

Chevette thought about it. "It isn't a rule," she said. "It's just you aren't supposed to do it."

Then she laughed. "I don't know: it's just like that. Like there aren't too many fights, but the ones there are tend to be serious, and people get hurt."

"How many people actually live out here?" Tessa asked as they walked up the ramp from Bryant.

"I don't know," Chevette said. "Not sure anyone does. Used to be, everyone who did anything here, who had a business going, they lived here. 'Cause you have to. Have to be in possession. No rent or anything. Now, though, you get businesses that are run like businesses, you know? That Bad Sector we were in. Somebody owns all that stock, they built that storefront, and I bet they pay that sumo boy to sleep in the back, hold it down for them."

"But you didn't work here, when you lived here?"

"Nah," Chevette said, "I was messin', soon as I could. Got myself a bike and I was all over town."

They made their way into the lower level, past boxes of fish on ice, until they came to a place Chevette remembered on the south side. It had food sometimes, sometimes music, and it had no name.

'They do good hot wings in here," Chevette said. "You like hot wings?"

"I'll let you know after I've had a beer." Tessa was looking around at the place, like she was trying to decide how interst.i.tial it was.

It turned out they had an Australian beer Tessa really liked, called a Redback, came in a brown bottle with a red spider on it, and Tessa explained that these spiders were the Australian equivalent of a black widow, maybe worse. It was a good beer though, Chevette had to agree, and after they'd both had one, and ordered another, Tessa ordered a cheeseburger, and Chevette ordered a plate of hot wings and a side of fries.

This place really smelled like a bar: stale beer, smoke, fry grease, sweat. She remembered the first bars she'd ever gone into, places along rural highways back up in Oregon, and they'd smelled like this. The bars Carson had taken her to in LA hadn't smelled like anything much. Like aromatherapy candles, sort of.

There was a stage down at one end, just a low black platform raised about a foot above the floor, and there were musicians there, setting up, plugging things in. There was some kind of keyboard, drums, a mike stand. Chevette had never been that much into music, not any particular kind, although in her messenger days she'd gotten to like dancing in clubs, in San Francisco. Carson, though, he'd been very particular about what music he liked, and had tried to teach Chevette to appreciate it like he did, but she just hadn't gotten with it at all. He was into this twentieth- century stuff, a lot of it French, particularly this Serge Something, really creepy-a.s.s, sounded like the guy was being slowly jerked off while he sang, but like it really wasn't even doing that much for him. She'd bought this new Chrome Koran, "My War Is My War," sort of out of self-defense, but she hadn't even liked it that much herself, and the one time she'd put it on, when Carson was there, he'd looked at her like she'd s.h.i.+t on his broadloom or something.

These guys, now, setting up on the little stage, they weren't bridge people, but she knew that there were musicians, some of them famous, who'd come out and record on the bridge just so they could say they had.

There was a big man up there, with a white, stubbly face and a sort of mashed-up cowboy hat on the back of his head. He was fiddling with an unplugged guitar and listening to a smaller man in jeans, wearing a belt buckle like an engraved silver dinner platter.

"Hey," Chevette said, indicating the bottle-blonde man with the belt buckle, "this girl gets molested in the dark, tells 'em it was a mesh-back did it. 'Well,' they say, 'how you know it was, if it was dark?' ''Cause he had a tiny little d.i.c.k and a great big belt buckle!'"

"What's a meshback?" Tessa tilted back the last of her beer.

"Redneck, Skinner called 'em," Chevette said. "It's from those nylon baseball caps they used to wear, got black nylon mesh on the back, for ventilation? My mother used to call those 'gimme'

hats. .

139.

"Why?" Tessa asked her.

"'Gimme one them hats.' Give 'em away free with advertising on them."

"Country music, that sort of thing?"

"Well, more like Dukes of Nuke 'Em and stuff. I don't think that's country music."

"It's the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat," Tessa said, "barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America. Or that's what they'd say on Real One. But we have that joke about the big buckles in Australia, except it's about pilots and wrist.w.a.tches."

Chevette thought the man with the belt buckle was staring back at her, so she looked in the other direction, at the crowd around the pool table, and here there actually were a couple of the meshbacked hats, so she pointed these out to Tessa by way of ill.u.s.tration.

"Excuse me, ladies," someone said, a woman, and Chevette turned to face directly into the line of fire of some very serious bosom, laced up into a s.h.i.+ny black top. Huge cloud of blowsy blonde hair a Ia Ashleigh Modine Carter, who Chevette thought of as a singer meshbacks would listen to, if they listened to women, which she wasn't certain they did. The woman put two freshly opened Redbacks down on their table. "With Mr. Creedmore's compliments," she said, beaming at them.