James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

“I hardly remember when paper money was worth more than a curse,” Curry said. “You fellows would, though. I hear you could buy a shoat for twenty bucks in the old days.”

“That’s so,” Joseph said. “How do we know these men are alive?”

“You want to see them? They’re down below, in stir.”

“I’d like to talk about these charges with them,” Joseph said. “Hear their side of the story.”

“Be my guest. But in the end you’ll have to pay. We both know that. Jojo,” he said to the messenger boy who now occupied a chair near the door. “Bring these fellows down to Mr. Adcock. And take this corn bread. I’m getting fat as pig.” He turned his attention back to us. “You weren’t far off about how they feed me around here. Price of success, I guess. Nothing I courted, you understand. This is just a time when nobody seems to know how to do anything, to get things done. A fellow makes a few things happen, and the world falls at his feet. You come back before four o’clock today if you want to spring these boys. We don’t conduct business after that hour. I’d like to discharge these fellows as much as you’d like to bring them home. It costs me to feed them, you know, and new ones come in all the time. It adds up. Whenever you’re ready to settle, you come back. They’ll show you right up, I’m sure. Oh, and if you don’t come get them in twenty-four hours, I’ll have to hang them. They’re cluttering up my jail.”

“What did you make of that?” I said to Joseph as we followed the boy downstairs.

“I make that he’s a fantastic rogue for such a young buck, and probably not bluffing,” Joseph said.

“He’s holding them for ransom, all right. Just plain extortion.”

“Yes he is. And if we don’t pay it, I believe he’ll kill them.”

“How can we pay him?”

“Oh, we can pay him,” Joseph said. “We’re prepared.”

“Are you going to offer him silver? I imagine he’d lower that figure for hard currency.”

“We have several ways of paying him.”

The basement of the building contained what can be described only as a dungeon, a dim, dank, raw masonry chamber fitted with wrought-iron cagework. Light came through in a shaft from a single slit of a window up near the ceiling, barred both inside and out. The basement stank fiercely of human excretions, mold, and filth. Within the cage, about twelve men sat inertly on benches or lay on triple-decker wooden shelves along the wall, apparently bunks on which they had to rotate in shifts, because there weren’t enough for all the men to sleep at any one time. The boy delivered us to Adcock, the jailer, a tall, skeletal, pallid figure who looked like he had stepped out of a medieval engraving of the apocalypse. Adcock bent down to listen to whispered instructions from the boy.

“You men of Union Grove,” Adcock called into the cage, “your saviors have come.” The crewmen of the Elizabeth leaped from their places in the dimness to the wall of their cage.

“Robert!” It was Tom Soukey, the one I knew best, whom I used to play softball with on summer evenings in the old days. “Oh thank God, thank God!” he said, almost blubbering.

“Is it true?” Skip Tarbay said. “You getting us out of this hellhole?”

“Yes,” I said. “Bullock sent us down to find you.”

“Thank God…”

They didn’t look healthy. They were scrawny and filthy.

“It’s all trumped up crap!” Jacob Silberman said.

“I know, I know. But we’re here to get you out, don’t worry.”

“I can’t believe it,” Tom said. His sobs racked him and he shuddered, despite the heat-and it was very close down in that hole.

“Pull yourself together, Tom, for Chrissake,” Jake said. “We’re not out yet.”

“Aaron’s not doing so well,” Skip said, and canted his head at the bunks.

“Is he hurt?”

“Sick.”

“What with.”

“I’ve no idea. Shitting blood.”

“Who’s he?"Jake said, pointing to Brother Joseph. I explained who he and his people were, and how it happened the five of us were sent down to get them.

“We will get you out of here,” Joseph said. “Today. I promise.”

“They want money,” Jake said. “It’s all about grift-this nonsense about excise taxes and tariffs and all that. There never was such a thing before in the years we’ve been trading down here.”

“I know,” I said.

“Are they going to let us free now?” Skip said.

“We came down here to verify that you’re actually alive,” Joseph said. “We have some arrangements to make now for your release. We’ll come back later for you.”

“Please! Don’t go,” Tom said. “They keep saying they’re going to hang us.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll be out of this shithole and homeward bound before the day is over.”

“How you talk,” Adcock the jailer said, overhearing. He clucked at us. “Don’t let Mr. Curry hear you talking like that. He don’t like to be insulted. He’ll hang ’em just for spite, he gets wind.”

“We’ll be back,” I said again.

“Okay,” Jake and Skip said.

Just then, two other men, strangers, rushed up to the wall of the cage like bugs to a lighted screen. They were young, no older than twenty.

“Wait, please! Can you get a message to our father, Mr. Dennis Marsden of Greenport.”

“I don’t know how I could,” I said.

“I beg you, mister,” one said. Both were in tears.

“Greenport’s pretty far south of here,” I said. “We’re headed north today. I’m sorry.”

Adcock showed us to the stairs and shut the door behind us.

The stairs took us back to the ground floor. I asked the clerk at the front desk what time it was. He pointed to a big case clock over the door. One thirty.

“This is just plain gang rule is all it is,” I said to Joseph as we came back out into the sunshine. “It’s like a bunch of pickers have taken over the city, or what’s left of it.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “This Curry’s no better than a petty warlord. I know the type.”

“Look, I have an idea,” I said. “Maybe it’s a waste of time, but I want to make a side trip to the state capitol building to find out if there’s any government left in this state, any authority besides this Curry.”

“Everything I’ve seen tells me he’s running the show here,” Joseph said.

“Give me an hour,” I said. “It’s just up the hill.”

“All right,” Joseph said. “An hour. Meet up right back here. After that, we’ll do things my way.”

“Are you actually prepared to pay this guy?”

“Don’t you worry,” Joseph said. “I’m ready right now to pay him in full.”

I took off in the direction of State Street, Albany’s old main drag, with my pulse quickening, worrying whether Joseph meant something other than payment of these fines and charges and how I might figure in the transaction.

It felt strange to be in a place that had been a functioning city last time I saw it, now transformed into a vast ruin. I walked past James Street, once the haunt of lobbyists and lawyers, to North Pearl Street, where a few shabby vendors sold salvage from carts, a sort of permanent flea market for the riffraff who lived in the ruins. The office buildings and old hotels on State Street, dating from the 1920s heyday of the business district, were desolate after years of neglect. Bricks had spawled out of the facades, and littered the weedy sidewalks. One actually fell from an upper story as I walked up the empty street and missed splitting my head open by a few yards. I wondered if somebody had lobbed it at me from above but didn’t see anyone skulking up there. The plate glass shop fronts were blown out, of course, and everything of value inside had been stripped.