splat chapter thirty-three

SPLAT CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Suzie rolled into the sparkly city with a profound sense that she had worn out her welcome. She was jobless, homeless, friendless. She had no business in Atlanta anymore. With Auntie Mae probably dying there was nothing holding her there. In fact, it was dangerous to stick around, having soiled the nest so many times.

She had a deep, uneasy sense of unfulfillment. She felt like she'd been wasting her time. In a shallow examination of her life, she decided she hadn't learned any lessons at all. She was the ultimate loser. Hell, she even ran from a fight with Ed. She berated herself for it. She couldn't even act on her convictions when her life was at stake. She told herself she had to be a soldier, that it was honorable to not flinch. Then she thought of all the teenage boys who played chicken, and how stupid she'd thought they were. Then she thought about her own painful death as a result of some contest of honor. Fuck that, she concluded. She was right to run.

But she was still a loser. She ran from danger on a daily basis. She couldn't stand up to Nelson, she didn't stand up to bullying at work, she never stood up to her roommates. Such a little mousey thing, always trying to please, to be acceptable, to earn just a few brownie points. Always looking for approval. Suzie was tired of this bullshit. Approval was her reason for living? She hocked a loogie out the window. Yuk fu. Not anymore.

The new Suzie was going to be a smarter, harder, more worldly Suzie. Nobody was going fool her anymore. She wouldn't trust nobody. She would keep to herself. She would above all avoid emotional entanglements.

If she believed this for a moment, it was out of willfulness. Suzie fell in love with every man she met; she was curious about every little thing she saw, and every situation she came across. She always spoke to strangers; she always said the wrong thing. She never really knew what she thought about a given subject until the words were out of her mouth and it was too late to take them back.

But she did believe it was time to manifest some change, to bring forth some new version of herself; to grow up a little. She needed to do something she could point to, an icon of her spirit, of her intention. A legacy. A statement.

This naturally brought her to thoughts of tagging that bridge. And then it was hardly the work of a moment to persuade herself that she needed to vandalize property, just as it was to persuade herself she had to rid the world of the Ed and Jerry show.

She needed to tag the bridge. It was her moral obligation. Her duty to society. Her duty to her friends. After all, the guys had probly been arrested for tagging. That made them political prisoners of an unjust government. So, in a show of solidarity, she had to vindicate them by carrying on their work the obligation to comment on society, in front of God and everybody.

Not just vandalism. Art.

Not just terrorism. A statement.

Okay, she cautioned herself. This is more bullshit. So how does Surrender Dorothy make a statement about the plight of political prisoners?

Hmmm, she thought. It shows the false values of consumerism, imprisoning us in sparkly dreams of perfection? Prisoners of the glitz?

That's stupid.

It shows how we're all innocents in the hands of forces beyond our control, just trying to get home?

No.

It illustrates the moral, All That Glitters Is Not Gold? Except just two hours up Georgia 400 is Dahlonega? Where all that glitters sure enough is gold?

Now you're back to being stupid.

I give up. The only thing Surrender Dorothy is to illustrate how pretty Atlanta is, how fairy tale it seems from far away. So cute, sitting there in the middle of infinite forest like that. I know; I've got it. it celebrates the fact that Atlanta's the Capital of the South, the place of hopes and dreams, where there's work and a good life, not like the million little munchkin towns everybody came from. It really is the Emerald City.

Why don't you just say why you want to do it?

I just thought it was funny when I saw it next to the Mormon Temple up in DC, and I wanted others to appreciate the joke.

Why didn't you say so?

It was a full moon. Shit always happens on a full moon. This full moon had Suzie talking to herself. She hadn't had much sleep the past couple of nights, and the sleep she'd had was loaded with toxic hazards. She'd been under a lot of strain lately. She wasn't thinking very clearly; she didn't grasp all that was happening in her life, and she was wishing like crazy that she could get out of dealing with it.

The pressure of the full moon was bringing everything to a head. All the problem areas of her life were under attack, and she didn't have fingers enough to plug the leaks. Suzie was on her last nerve.

But she was by God going to do that tag. She drove down to just south of town, and got off at University Avenue. She turned east and explored the industrial neighborhood around the railroad tracks. She could park her car somewhere around there and hike in from the grade crossing at University and Ridge streets. But it would be a long hike.

She turned around and went back under the highway to see what it looked like on the west side. She took her first right, onto Moton, and snaked her way northeast along Roy, West, Fletcher, and finally onto Fortress Avenue, which paralleled the Connector. She was getting good with the dance on the pedals.

It was a very poor section of town: teeny houses with garbage-filled yards, kudzu-eaten houses with boarded windows, burned-out hulks sprayed with gang graffiti. It was in much worse condition than her Reynoldstown ex neighborhood. Used to be.

A little way up Fortress, the houses gave way to vacant lots and a railroad crossing, and then proceeded north across the tracks into an even worse-off neighborhood.

South Yard was massive. It stretched away to the left; trains and tracks as far as the eye could see, a sort of plain of metal and rock in a hilly landscape of trees, poor people's houses, and rusting industrial lots.

However. To the right was the railroad overpass at the Connector, not twenty yards off. The promised land awaited.

Suzie parked her Trooper near a house that looked like it might have occupants, so that nobody would mistake it for an abandoned vehicle, a burned-out version of which was splayed all over the street a little ways up. She changed into black clothes in the back of the truck, gathered up her bag and Jason's gear, and locked the door behind her.

It was after 2:30 in the morning. Did she really want to be wandering around South Atlanta on foot at that time of night? But there wasn't a soul out in that neighborhood; nobody was on the street corner selling crack; there were no cars worth robbing or passers-by to scam. There was no reason why she should be afraid. But she shivered anyway. She realized how much she disliked being by herself.

She walked out onto the bridge. It was an awesome sight. Suzie stared open mouthed at her surroundings. The power of the trains, their giant proportions. Five tracks were a hundred feet across. The view was vast. It was very quiet, and very clear. It dwarfed her.

Atlanta shone from there. You could see everything, Turner Field, all the downtown buildings, straight up Peachtree. All lit up, with fairy lights all around. It was a magic city. It was the Emerald City. New York and DC rolled into one with a touch of Detroit and LA; the spiritual capital of America. The heart. Or maybe just the gut - who's to say?

Suzie stood looking at it and sighed. I love this city. She walked out across to the east edge of the bridge, overhanging the right lanes of the Connector, and thirty to a hundred feet from the gigantic road signs. Nobody from the road could see her there. She had a good look at the elements she had to work with. Iron railing, chain link fence, concrete edge, then nothing until the road, a long way down .

She considered how she was going to proceed, having only theoretical ideas about how to hitch herself to the fence. Another thing she'd never done because the guys wouldn't let her. She could tie the rope at one end, and then get it somehow to the other end of where she wanted to the tag to go, and tie it off there. There would be slack.

Was there anything she could to do take up the slack? She could put a third anchor in the middle, but then she'd have to transfer her lead from one to the other. 'It's easy,' she said, mocking Jason in that nasty way he had of making her feel stupid for asking. 'Just hook this thingie to the other thingie and go.'

She was remembering things she'd managed to worm out of Jason, rudimentary instructions for dealing with fall hazards. Obvious things that might assume subtlety when she was in the middle of a situation.

Like, don't fall. If you fall, don't swing. Keep your balance. And practical advice, like don't tangle your rope. Don't get it knotted up, don't hook your lanyard back onto itself thinking it'll hold. Don't connect your hooks to each other. Don't hook onto anything that could give way.

She continued figuring out the mechanics. All her anchor points were on the inside of the fence, and she needed to run a rope on the outside of the fence to hang down below the bridge surface. That was simple. She could tie one end and stuff the other through a link in the fence.

She had a sudden thought. She'd better have string tied to the end of the rope and attached somewhere so she could retrieve it once she'd climbed the fence. She looked down at the road. A truck and two pickups whizzed by doing 70.

Then there was the fact that the rope would sag in the middle, so she was only going to be able to paint the iron bridge support in the middle part of the rope. So maybe thirty feet. One two three four...sixteen letters and a space. How legible would eighteen inch letters be from 300 yards? Better make it forty feet. That would give her thirty feet of usable rope. So she thought.

She wasn't sure about any of this, especially whether she could safely launch herself off the side of a bridge. If she tied a hundred -foot rope to a fence post or a railing, she could use it to climb over and back. Once she was over she could just climb down and hook her lanyard to the guide rope. Simple.

She tried to remember how Jason said to get into the harness. She looked at it in her hands. It was a jumbled up mess of webbing and buckles. She tried putting the wide loops around her legs and her arms through the narrow loops, but it didn't feel right. She looked at the size of the narrow loops. Grown men put their legs through those things? She stuck her foot through, and scooted the strap up her thigh. It pinched. She pulled the large loops apart and stuck her shoulders through them. But the harness was right up against the bottom of her throat. Maybe she had it on backwards.

She peeled back out of it and turned it around. Better. But it was flopping loosely down off her shoulders, so she had to go around to all the buckles and take close to a foot out of each length. She hadn't realized Jason was that tall. Or she was that short.

Finally she had it on and snug. She stuffed a couple of paintcans into the equipment loops on the harness, and put her cellphone into the pocket of her black jeans.

She put her bag on like a backpack. She attached a lanyard to a loop at the side of her harness.

She picked up the rope and inspected it. Not for frays and stiffness cuz what did she know, but to admire its beautiful purple color.

Suzie stood there coiling the rope and thinking about how to attach to the anchor point. Jason had showed her how to make a figure eight knot once. He was a Boy Scout. She tried to remember.

Suzie ran the end of the rope around the railing, and then whipped it back off. It was rusty, with sharp edges. No. She ran it around the thick fence post instead, made a loop, then wrapped the end around the rope around the post, and tucked it through the loop.

She stood there for several minutes trying to figure out how he'd shown her to make the knot. She'd done it a bunch of times when he first taught her, and she should remember it, but the pattern was gone. She knew she had to loop a loop, though.

She paid out twenty feet, and stuck the rest of the coiled rope into the top of her bag. Oops. She looked at the descent device at her feet. She'd forgotten to thread the rope through her descender before tying it to the fence post. But Jason had shown her a special feature.

She took the descender and swung the side plate open. Inside were little cam rollers zigzagging along its length. She curled the rope up between them like river bends, and pressed it in with her fingers. Then she swung the cover back over it and latched it down. She attached the descender to her harness. She was ready.

Shit. No she wasn't. She'd forgotten the hook. She stamped her feet. This was taking too long. She unhooked from the descender and sped back to the truck, unlocked the back, and retrieved a six foot long metal hook with a short lanyard attached. She ran back with it over her shoulder like a javelin thrower, connected the rope again, attached the lanyard to her harness, and slipped the hook between the straps of her bag. Now she was ready.

She never noticed the baleful eye of the traffic camera not thirty feet from where she stood. It saw all her preening and prancing and staring open-mouthed at the city lights. It watched her struggle into the harness. It watched her go over the fence.

She scaled the chain link, crawling upwards with hands and feet. She was in black. She had silver spraypaint. She was standing on the outside of a fence off a railroad bridge, holding on to a rope, traffic rumbling below. If that wasn't cool, what was?

Except she was scared shitless and thinking this was the dumbest thing she'd ever done. It was no joke trying to climb a chain link fence in flipflops. All she could think about as she'd crawled over the top was that she could fall at any moment. She spent several humiliating minutes hooking her harness lanyard to the fence at eighteen-inch intervals all the way down. She called herself a few choice names during these moments.

When she got down to the edge of the fence, she squeezed her descender and dropped jerky, short distances to the edge of the concrete lip, her feet swinging as she bounced, the taste of bile in her mouth. Then she grabbed the string tied to the fence and retrieved the guide rope and tied it to the bottom of the fence post. It sagged a lot more than she expected. She hooked her lanyard to the guide rope.

Suzie stabilized herself with a white-knuckled fist around the guide rope, grabbed the hook, and swung closer to reach it under the edge of the metal bridge support. It caught. She swayed. It was kind of scary to be suspended over the highway. It was so far down, and she was so high up, and the traffic was going by so fast. She felt very small. Very vulnerable. Very panicky and short of breath. She started feeling sorry for herself. She felt tears. Enough, she scolded herself angrily. None of that crap, you wimp. You pussy.

It was hard to hold her position without having three hands. Just holding on with the hook in her left hand and painting with her right wasn't going to work. She had to sling her left arm over the guide rope and hold it with her body weight while using the hook. She found this out the hard way; the first time she loosened her grip with the hook, she immediately slid to the middle of the sagging guide rope, and had to haul herself hand over hand back to her position.

Time was passing. She had no idea how much time was passing, but it already felt like she'd been there for hours. There was a little false-dawn lightness on the horizon. Well, she thought, uncomfortably surveying the traffic below, might as well get into it.

She unhooked her spraycan, selected a fat tip for that 6'' sweep, and got started. She was mostly hidden by the exit signs a few yards away. They were massively huge. The signs she always squinted at when she was driving were twenty feet tall. She was glad they were there. They gave her a lot of invisibility until the cars got right underneath them. Then everything came clear - there was the bridge, there was the Emerald City beyond, there was Suzie dangling from ropes. It made her nervous. She was certain each motorist was looking up as they went by directly underneath.

She started to draw. Then she hesitated. She was suddenly struck with the lameness of the words she'd chosen. First, she was stealing from a successful and famous tag that belonged somewhere else. DC taggers resprayed the words Surrender Dorothy every time the DOT took it off, and it had been going on for the past twenty years. It would be disrespect if she just stole it.

So leave them their glory, and make an assertion to top it. Suzie leaned over and carved out a big silver E, as far over to the left as possible. She drew herself close with the hook, bent over, and twisted around to reach out with her spraycan. The letter turned out a little wobbly. But it was big. And clearly it was an E. She went over it again to make it thicker.

Then she moved over slightly, using her right hand to pull herself along, and sliding the hook with her left, sprayed a big M, only deciding at that moment to do all upper case letters. She bobbled over a few inches, and made another big E. It was a nice E, Suzie thought. There was a certain grace in the way she'd drawn the bottom leg. Like it was edging along.

She edged along. She was moving lower with each foot as her weight added to the sag of the amateurishly tied rope. Suzie was spraying level with her knees now. The R wasn't as nice. She wasn't paying enough attention to the zen of writing. She was paying more attention to the ground beneath her, and how often something big and lethal went by at 65 miles an hour.

She moved over and contemplated her work so far. She noticed there were no cars going by at the moment. Silence on the highway, the sounds of crickets and a distant siren. She loved the sound of the crickets. They were all around her, even suspended in the middle of a highway.

She continued, making a big A with a curly bar through it. Cars came by and she lost the sound of the crickets, but the siren kept getting louder.

Over in the state-of-the-art DOT Transportation Management Center, with eight operator consoles and nine 120-inch screens showing a three-by-three grid of traffic cameras, a small group of technicians had stopped monitoring the traffic to stand and watch Suzie clowning around on the bridge. Finally, after all bets were taken, and with a tinge of regret, the operations manager alerted the dispatcher, and the squad car took only a few moments to reach the scene.

Suzie got frightened when she realized the siren was for her. It got louder and louder, and then stopped. Oh shit, she thought, they've got me.

She moved along the rope and kept working, having to reach up slightly to make the next letter. For a moment she forgot which letter it was. It wouldn't be cool to misspell her tag. She hurriedly painted an L.

She moved into position for the next letter, and then stopped to wedge the paintcan between her thighs and grab her cellphone out of her pocket. The leg straps of the harness made this awkward and painful.

She reached up and started painting the D as she hit the button to redial, muddling the upright a little in her haste. She heard voices above her. The cops had spotted her rope.

The phone rang and rang, and finally she got Uncle Daddy's voicemail. Oh no! She waited frantically through the announcement, and blurted out, 'Help, help! Uncle Daddy help me. I'm out tagging a bridge and the cops are after me. I'm stuck on the Pryor Street bridge, and I'm fixing to fall onto the northbound Connector. Oh, please help!'

Then she screamed as her descent rope was tugged violently from above, jerking her upward and whanging her shoulder into the bottom of the concrete edge. The hook was pulled out of her grasp and swung away beneath her, attached to her harness.

She heard the cops calling for backup. They were holding on to her rope. Quickly she paid out some line, grabbed the hook and latched on, and then bent over and scrawled out a C, much looser than the rest of the letters. It was harder to make a round C when she was being snatched at. Suzie heard another siren getting louder and then stopping. Wonderful, she thought, join the party, endanger my life. She resumed practicing her handwriting. The C turned out rather chunky.

She looked up and saw shiny helmets and brims of cop hats above her like petals of a flower, backlit by the orange sodium vapor streetlights. They were hauling her up, hand over hand. She lost the hook again. Swearing viciously, she paid out more rope to keep out of their clutches. It was only a hundred foot rope. She looked up and saw frays appear in the rope as they continued jerking her upwards over the concrete lip. She remembered what Jason had said about avoiding sharp edges.

As they brought her above the fence bottom, she saw their shoes, their pants, and the baleful stare of the traffic camera on the other side of the bridge, pointing out over northbound traffic, and at the moment, capturing her struggling image a jerky who knows how many times a second. Suzie felt sick.

She struggled with the cops. They were trying to haul her up over the side of the bridge, trying to grab her through the fence. She was using her hands and legs like a cat resisting being stuffed into a box. Her guide rope was resisting them, but they didn't realize it. She was being pulled from both sides.

She was a million percent certain she did not want to go up there with them. She said No, with every breath of her being. Rebellion filled her soul. No, you can't. No, I won't let you. No, you are not going to win. She was just one little girl standing up to the way things are. I won't participate in this kind of society, she thought melodramatically, this cruel world. I'd rather drop to my death on the highway.

She hoped it would be a truck that hit her, because then she'd be good and dead and wouldn't feel anything. She pictured an unpleasant alternative: herself hitting the ground, which would almost kill her, but not quite, and then being hit by a speeding car, which would leave her only mostly dead. It would be horrible. The pain, the fear, the broken bones, the splitting headache, the agony of waiting for the ambulance so they could make her well enough to serve time. Oh, God. Anything but that. A good whack from a thirty-ton truck would be a blessing if she managed to live past the drop onto the concrete.

While she was up at the fence, she took the opportunity to hook her descent rope to it with a D-ring, above herself. Maybe it would slow them down. She paid out a bunch more rope and got back to work. She hooked onto the bottom of the bridge, and drew an I. It was a big, flourishy I, the cap rising at the end as she was once again yanked upward.

She didn't mind dying as much as the thought of going through the system. She saw herself in handcuffs in front of a judge. She saw a cell door opening and clanging shut, she saw herself getting lost among thousands of prisoners in colorless suits, shuffling down gray corridors. She saw herself being strapped to a table and sedated for her execution. No, a thousand times No, she'd want to cry out, but she'd only be able to think it loudly as the drugs kicked in.

The cops pulled on her rope again and the movement slammed her head into the cement lip of the bridge. She could a feel a bump starting. It felt like it was bleeding. She started to swing. Her head bounced off the concrete a couple more times.

Hands were reaching down at her through the fence. She bounced and swayed and pried herself away from their grasp. Then her phone popped loose from her pocket. She spared a moment to watch it take forever to reach the pavement and shatter into a thousand pieces. And she still had minutes left on that phone.

She paid out more rope and came down a little to the right of the last letter. Quickly she stabbed out an upright, and then swung her arm up to describe the cap of a T. It was badly ragged. It looked more like an A on its side.

Suzie began to consider her options. She could stay and finish her tag, which who knows they'd probly paint over anyway, or she could try to avoid being sent to jail.

She'd planned for this very contingency. Actually, the way the fantasy went, the cops would arrive to block her exit after she'd finished her tag. The plan was simple. Repel down to the road smiling and waving at the cops, scale a wall, and walk off into the surface streets. She'd thought about it in detail, and it had seemed pretty practical. But Suzie was finding out that shit happens. There are always more variables than you can plan for.

The cops were keeping her too busy to paint at the moment, and they'd taken up most of her rope. Now one of them was reaching down a noose thing on a long pole, trying to nab a flailing limb. She threw her spraycan at the other end of the pole, and the rope went away with a yelp. She heard guns cock above her on the bridge; that's how much the cops respected her pitching arm.

She unhooked another paint can and returned grimly to work. They had now drawn her so high above her writing that she was bending over, almost upside down, her hook arm burning with the stretch, reaching out with her can to start the Y. The road surface was over her head. She began to get dizzy. It was hard to breathe. But she soldiered on. The Y turned out squished pretty flat, like a T. She drew a straighter Y on top of it. Now it looked like an F.

She heard a truck horn, faintly, just at the crest of the next hill. The cops were hauling her higher. She turned upside down in the harness and went to correct the Y. It was an efficient, if jagged, Y. Except it was almost a P because they'd pulled her away from the tag and hauled her up to where they could reach her again.

The cops lunged for her, and caught at her heel but lost their grip. They touched her, she thought in panic and revulsion. And fear. She was so vulnerable. She kicked out and spun away from then. She paid out more rope, hooked onto the bridge, and went to finish her letter.

The truck horn was louder. She heard sirens in the distance. She heard the crickets again, and it gave her the confidence to reach right out and redraw the leg of the Y, beautifully straight, thick and expressive. She looked south, and saw a big rig lumbering down the road toward her. It was a beat-up old red Kenworth with fangs painted on the grille. It was hauling a container. Suzie almost let go her spraycan. Uncle Daddy.

He was honking his horn at her, and flashing his lights. He put on his signal, moved over a lane to the right, and began to slow, positioning himself below the bridge. She looked up at the angry red faces of the cops and smiled. But they jerked her upwards again and she banged her shoulder against the concrete.

Uncle Daddy came up underneath her and stopped in the middle of the highway. Not an easy feat with that kind of momentum. His brakes squealed and hissed, his trailer slewed around. You stop 50,000 pounds of trailer on a dime. Four-wheelers honked wildly behind him and made emergency maneuvers.

The cops saw traffic stopping in the road and redoubled their efforts. Suzie was slammed into the concrete, and slammed again, and then hauled up alongside the foot of the bridge. She guessed maybe they wanted to kill her before she could drop to her death. She thought about spraying paint at them as she came up to face level. It would be a bad thing, she reflected. Permanent blindness. She thought for the first time about the consequences of pissing off your captors. She wondered if the traffic camera would catch them beating her up.

Suddenly, she was caught. A hand grabbed her by the hair. She screamed. She kicked, and another hand caught her foot. Her flipflop fell off. Her spraycan went flying. She was caught. She swayed in her harness between the two cops, looking into their triumphant faces.

She jumped and flipped and spasmed trying to get loose, but they had her. If only her hair was shorter, they'd never have gotten a hold on her. Suzie spent time wishing she'd shaved it back when the weather turned hot. Of course, they would have fired her if she'd turned up like that at the Club. Except it would have been fine for working in the kitchen.

She thought of her chef's knife. Cops were climbing on the fence to get to her. She was pinned like a butterfly. She struggled to get to her bag, slung over her shoulders. She shrugged it over to where she could reach the zipper. Which stuck. She screamed in frustration.

The cops were getting closer. That noose-thing was back waving in her face. She batted it away and it did a little parry and then caught her by the wrist. Now she only had her left hand free. And it was under the bag. She reached all the way around the bag and stuffed her hand into the opening she'd made for the tail of the descent rope. The zipper scraped her wrist.

She thought 'Knife' with every shred of her being and reached past the rope to the bottom of the bag. She brushed past a bunch of stuff, and when her hand came to a rest it touched the handle. There is a God.

She pulled out the knife.

Someone cried, 'She's got a weapon!' The cops drew their guns. One of them called for backup. The cop holding her by the hair loosened his grip in surprise.

Suzie pulled her head away and screamed, whirling in the air by her ankle and her wrist. The cops took aim. Swinging dizzily, waving the knife in her free hand, she slashed wildly in the air above her head in the direction of the rope.

The knife found something. She hacked at it in desperation. She felt it catch and pull. She sawed. She was crying now, whimpering and blubbering. The cops were fixing to shoot her and she was going to die and it was all so frustrating because she was stuck, trapped, doomed. And it was all her fault.

One of the strands popped. She kept sawing. The wrist noose pulled her upwards. The rope pulled her upwards. They were drawing her upright against the fence. Her ankle hurt. She looked down at the cop. 'Would you mind loosening up just a little?' she asked through her tears. He looked sorry to be hurting her, and tightened his grip some more.

Another strand popped. The rope started unwinding. She started to sag against them. She felt a surge of hope. Then the rope broke. Suzie let out a roar and shoved against the fence with all her might. She broke free of their grasps and dove, seeing their faces as she arched away. They looked disappointed. She heard somebody calling for more backup.

Suzie dropped like a stone. She was staring at the dark sky, falling backwards with a knife in her left hand, the noose thing on her right, and the hook beneath her. She let go the knife, and it fell alongside her. They all rotated together.

* * *

next, suzie bounces