Chain Gang All Stars

Randy Mac stood at the register of an organic cheese stand associated with a farm owned by an Amish family.

“Seems like partaking in this would be a little against the code or something?” Mac said. He sniffed cheeses. A line had formed in front of the stand, the people’s holophones out and ready to record. Randy knew the reason they were participating: money.

“It is,” the bearded man said, and then he smiled.

“Say it. Say the thing you say,” said the first man in line, who had to be Randy’s father’s age. He pointed a holophone.

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

“No,” Randy said, and he handed the man a circle of cheese.

“Fuck you,” the man said, smiling as he took a video anyway.

The farmer’s wife appeared from behind the stand with a goat that had apparently been sleeping.

“You kidding me?” Randy asked, taking the goat in with his eyes.

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

The goat was a regular beauty. He kneeled down and petted her head. “She’s beautiful.”

—

Sai Eye made lemonade. They worked in front of a pile of lemons and limes that climbed up to their waist. The owners of the lemonade stand were a youngish couple with pale skin and brown hair. They looked like they could be siblings.

“I have to know what I’m selling,” Sai Eye said, taking a drink from a paper cup. “Okay, okay. That’s good shit.”

“Thank you,” the couple said in tandem.

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

There was already a line twenty people deep. Having done a lot of so-called Civic Service before, Sai Eye knew what was to come. People telling them what they thought or didn’t think about their identity. So many opinions that were never asked for. Civilians offered their opinions like gifts to Sai Eye Aye. They’d gotten used to it. Sai Eye had long before decided to accept their harshness with a laugh.^[*1]

“Before we get started, we just wanted to say thank you for being here. We totally support you and, like, your whole thing,” the woman said.

“So you guys wanna help me escape today? Is that what you’re saying?” Sai said, straight-faced.

“No, no.” The man literally hopped forward in the soft grass. “We just meant we’re totally supportive of you and your identity.”

“So no escape, then?” Sai asked, then laughed, letting them off the hook. “I’m just joking. Let’s sell some lemonade.”

The people never stopped chanting and it made the whole thing, the farmers market and the Links’ presence there, even more ridiculous. Sai Eye could lean into the joke.

Sai put their hand in the middle of the group and gestured for the other two to do the same, as if they were a high school basketball team. “ ‘Lemonade’ on three,” Sai said.

—

Walter “Bad Water” Crousey was, as usual, surprised to be alive. But life was a thing that seemed to stick to him despite all the bad luck that found him too.

He gulped a sip from a water bottle. “I get it, ’cause I’m Bad Water,” he said.

“Exactly, except our water is good,” the young man who owned the stand said.

Good water, a rarity for so many. His name was a reminder that some places, like where he was born, still had to struggle to find drinkable sips of the most basic necessity. That and Wright had liked the ring of it.

“Right,” he said. And waited. For now no one was at the water stand but him and the stand owner, who was probably eighteen. Around the same age Crousey had been when he’d been thrown in.

Ten years ago he’d been innocent.^[*2] And now he wasn’t in the same way. Now he’d killed. Funny how things went. He tried to forget that he’d been thrown in for nothing. Thrown in for being poor, lawyer-less, and dumb. He went in for murder and was sure that they’d see he wasn’t like that, couldn’t be like that. And yet here he was.

—

The soldier-police walked Rico to his stand. Bunches of shining tomatoes of many sizes and colors. In a few minutes, customers would start asking him for pictures. Could they see that he was terrified? This was a question that had run through his mind from the beginning. So much of his life had been spent wondering exactly this. He looked at Randy, who was petting a goat and laughing. Sai was sipping lemonade. Even Bad Water was—well, he wasn’t doing anything, but he didn’t look terrified. Just lost, or surprised.

Why the fuck am I such a bitch? Rico thought as he wiped his hands against his gray sweatshirt. There was an energy summoned by the collective that surrounded them, and it scared the shit out of him. Each of them might know how terrified he was if he could not prove otherwise.

Rico smiled. “What’s poppin’?” he asked an old white lady and her daughter.

They looked at him.

“How’s it going?” he tried again.

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

The crowds screamed, pressing and punctuating each syllable into the air. Rico looked past the tomato hustler and her daughter, out at the masses. The people closest to the gate were watching him, carrying signs. The dissonance between the protestors and the people in the farmers market made him want to jump out of his own body. It was a dissonance that he felt in his core. They were all humans, and yet they had completely different ideas about what humanity meant.

“We’re doing well,” the mother said.

“We got some great tomatoes today,” the girl said. And when they spoke, their eyes brightened, and their almost trembling voices caused a great wave of calm to rush through his body.

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

They did not know he was terrified; in fact, they feared him.

“Lemme see how great” is what he said. And he smiled but hoped they knew he knew.

.    .    .

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

Ice Ice the Elephant. Was a man, a warrior, a great gladiator, and a wise ally. He was a Link in Chain-Gang All-Stars. These things were true.

“It’s an easy day,” he told himself as he held a paper cone to the machine spinning fresh pink sugar.

“Ice Ice over here with the cotton candy,” a young man said to his phone, presumably to the five people who cared that he was livestreaming.

“Hey,” Ice Ice said to the boy.

“Oh shit, Ice Ice the fucking Elephant just spoke to me, y’all. Insane,” the boy said, still mostly just glancing at Ice Ice occasionally while he talked into his holophone and its electric reflection.

Ice Ice gave a cotton candy to a woman who grazed his hand unnecessarily.

“Thanks,” she said. “Wish you and me could get outta here after this.”

She didn’t, but it was a delusion, an offering, and a joke all in one.

Ice said nothing.

He looked over his shoulder to the woman who ran the cotton-candy stand. The woman who handled the register.

“You’re doing great,” she said.

—

If that’s how they felt, he didn’t see why they were pussyfooting with the signs and the screaming.

“That’s a lot of horseshit, isn’t it?” Gunny said to the old man, who was angling a rocking chair so it could better catch the leaves of light that poked though the sugar maple just behind the woodcrafts stand Gunny had been assigned to.

“Sorry?” the man said, looking up at him. He had a thick white beard and sharp blue eyes. He was almost comically comparable to Santa Claus.

“It’s horseshit that all these people are trying to ruin the good time y’all are trying to have this afternoon.”

Gunny gestured to the protestors, the closest of which were about thirty feet to his left.

“Fuck off!” Gunny screamed at them.

EVERY DAY A DEVASTATION

Santa looked at Gunny and Gunny watched some slow math unfold in his blue eyes. Gunny saved him the trouble.

“I’m not fucking with you. I know where I’m supposed to be and I’m sorry that these people are causing so much trouble, thinking they know shit.”

The man was silent as he stood up from the rocking chair.

“When we start selling, please keep the cussing to a zero.”

Gunny regarded him. It was a little sickening how unafraid he was. The way he acted as if he were dealing with some intern and not a man who had gutted hard sonofabitches up and down the goddamn country.

Gunny threw his head back and laughed.

Then the black outside the gates began spilling in. The screaming and chanting changed. And Gunny Puddles thought, Finally. This at least was something.

“Oh dear,” Santa said.

“Oh dear is fucking right.”

*1 Trans Americans are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as cisgender Americans. More than twice. And trans people of color are more likely to be incarcerated than white trans people. The vulnerable are targeted, again, always.

*2 It is estimated that between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of incarcerated people in America are innocent. That number represents potentially over 100,000 people. George Stinney, Jr., again and again.