Triptych by David Castlewitz

Author:David Castlewitz [Castlewitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

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The lines at the trailers melted away just when Potter arrived. All three job ads on his All-Pod pointed to the same set of six trailers sitting in a street that bordered a wide plaza where empty office buildings stood as testament to the recent wave of both municipal and private sector layoffs. A central fountain, where noontime workers once gathered for lunch during the spring and summer, stood empty and dry, the ornamental fish and nymphs no longer pouring water into a pool. In a roped-off area, crowded with broken food carts and kiosks on wheels, a few people stood watching the crowd outside the trailers.

A tall cop in dress uniform waved a megaphone in the air and announced that all jobs were filled for the day. Angry shouts followed. Not questions, not even demands. Just shouts. Incoherent words that accompanied shaking fists and stamping feet. More police arrived from the other side of the trailers. They formed a phalanx, steel clubs fully extended, four lines deep, all of them with visors down and body-length clear plastic shields raised.

Potter hesitated on the edge of the unruly crowd, hands in his pockets. He wanted to turn around and go home, back to a nagging Lydia threatening divorce, his frightened wife who seemed to be fighting the two halves of herself, pitting the frightened, meek waif she'd been years earlier against the mature and confident middle-aged woman she'd become. Potter felt like he'd been caught in the middle of this war, and on top of that he had diminished prospects for his own career.

The police didn't advance. They spread out, the four rows moving sideways to create a thin, curved line of resistance. Potter always enjoyed the moments before an officer gave the order to charge. He expected the cop with the megaphone, the one in dress-browns, a red cap on his head, to announce "Advance, advance" at any moment.

Potter drifted into the mob. He chanted when the cry went up at the front of the crowd. He chanted with them a demand for work and sustenance. Someone stood atop one of the trailers, arms waving, fingers pointing at the police. Just what they needed, Potter thought. A leader. Someone to guide them in their next steps.

Dress-Browns lowered his megaphone and retreated behind the line of police. People pounded on the doors to the trailers. They banged at the windows. When a throng began pushing at one of the trailers, making it rock on its small wheels, the police charged. Potter watched from the back of the mob, his hands in his pockets. Transfixed by the scene, he trembled, furious that he didn't have a club and a shield, that he wasn't one of the cops engaging the rioters.

Instead, he realized, and stopped shaking when that realization came to him, he was part of the horde, just one of the many who'd come to the plaza. The police swarmed at both sides of the packed mass, the middle of their line moving less quickly than the wings.

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