Eisenhower Sharkey is the oldest man in Torchtown. He’s forty-three years old: a native, yes, but with firsthand memories of those inmates of yore, the fabled ancient dead. Sharkey’s lost most of the hair on his head, but none of it on his chest. Or back. He shaves twice a day. He had a mustache for a week twenty years ago. One of his swillers made the mistake of asking if it was ironic. He shot the swiller twice in the chest, dumped his body onto the roof of a burning building, and looted his apartment. Then he shaved the mustache. He’s been clean-shaven ever since.
Sharkey is six feet tall with his hat on. He’s five foot two without it. He wears high-heeled boots with silver taps on the soles and wife-beater undershirts beneath the jackets of his zoot suits. He has eleven gold chains and one gold medallion shaped like a dragon tooth. The knuckles of his right hand read FUCK. The knuckles of his left hand read FIRE. Sometimes he carries a backpack full of explosives. Most of them are fireworks. Some of them pack a little more punch. He uses a pince-nez when he reads. He likes the classics: The Governor of Illinois, They Call It Criminal, Richard III. He calls himself a “cultivated man.” He never forgets a face. He can rattle off the name of every man he’s killed to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.” Of the women, he says, “Aw, let ’em rest in pieces.”
It’s been a while since Sharkey killed a woman. It’s been longer since he’s had one. He’s picky. A connoisseur. And the women in Torchtown are too young for him. Not too young in years, though he does like ’em on the older side. But too young in attitude. With no culture, no respect for what came before.
Eisenhower Sharkey steps outside the Chaw Shop, chewing. He’s wearing the pin-striped slacks of his zoot suit with the suspenders down and dangling in loops around his hips. His undershirt is white. His gold gun glints in its holster. No jacket. No hat. He paces on the stoop and chews some more. It’s a beautiful morning in Torchtown. The sky is blue. No fireballs. Two club rats, laughing, round the corner to his block. They’re still dressed from the night before in flashy mesh tops and latex pants; one of them carries a fire extinguisher. They see him out on the stoop; they duck their heads, they cross the street. One glances over his shoulder, his eyes curious beneath singed-off eyebrows. Sharkey spits emphatically down the concrete stoop stairs. The club rats quicken their pace.
Sharkey’s got no family and won’t say more on the subject. But rumor has it his mother died in a fire, his father died in a fire, his uncle and brother and sister and cousin died in a fire. There sure aren’t any of them left, and wherever they’ve gone, Sharkey’s not telling. People sometimes say that Sharkey knows where the fires will be because the ghosts tell him in his dreams. Sharkey says, “I’m alive. They ain’t. Maybe they should take some pointers from me.”
Sharkey scrapes the tap of his high-heeled boot against the stoop, looks at the pale line it leaves on the concrete. Nobody knows how he knows where the fires will be. But he does. If Sharkey’s in a place, it won’t burn. Sometimes at night, when Sharkey bothers going out, packs of natives follow him from club to club. Sometimes Sharkey’ll lead them to a club, order himself a drink, then drop an unlit firecracker and slip out the door. When the place explodes behind him, the firecracker goes up like a warning. Don’t follow too close.
Sharkey used to lead raids out of Torchtown. The last one he led was thirteen years ago. He’s through with all that. It’s a young man’s game. These natives are too soft, anyway. Brought up to duck and run. Out on an expedition, one fuck-up and it’s curtains for everybody. The inmates back in the day, they had discipline. He still thinks fondly back to the Siege, nineteen years ago now. That was an operation with scope. Vision. Five raiding parties, a dozen men to each, working in tandem: it wasn’t a jailbreak, it was an uprising. The kind of thing that gets your name in the history books. Brass knuckles and baseball bats, an oil drum for a battering ram. Chain saws. They marched through tunnels with their dragon-flame torches lighting the way. When they came up to daylight in Empire Island, they hijacked a packboat full of cheap plastic crap off the docks and made their way to Wonland.
Out there, they took over for the better part of a week. Felt like the better part of a life. They lived like pirate kings. Bashed in the doors of houses and pillaged. Some of the places were empty. Some of them weren’t. Sharkey saw his first private bowling alley, shot his first horse. He’d been on plenty of raids to Empire Island, but this was different. This was nature, unspoiled. It makes him sad, how it ended in so much bloodshed, a man’s head spiked on a fence, but he wouldn’t trade those days for the world.
Most everything nice in Torchtown came from raids Sharkey’s helped to orchestrate. Like his books. The Chaw Shop electrolier. His rhino-foot trash can. His pinky ring. He still helms expeditions, commands them from afar, but he’s lost his old ambition. Today’s raiders are small-time, out for a score. They want currency, porn, they want to turn it all over right away. Torchtown’s all they know, all their parents and grandparents knew. It’s all Sharkey knows too, but these young ones lack imagination. They don’t have an interest in the finer things. Most don’t even think about staying out there. On the loose.
Sharkey goes down the concrete stoop steps, opens the metal hatch in the sidewalk, descends the concrete basement stairs. He’s making chaw today.
Sharkey steps beneath a clothesline hung with undershirts into the concrete cell. He’s got a kitchen upstairs where he cooks his dinners, but the basement is where he performs his art. In the middle of it is a hulking gas stove, six burners, covered in blackened grease. On the counter to the left is a cast-iron frying pan, a set of knives in a wood block, a stained wood spoon, and a jar of grain alcohol. To the right is a set of wire mesh shelves, laden with cans, jars, bottles, vials, pouches. A lidded crate fills the bottom shelf. The only window is close to the ceiling, barred up and gray with soot. Sharkey lights the wall sconces. He spits what’s left in his mouth into the spittoon. He puts the frying pan on the burner and cranks up the flames. He figured out how to reconnect the gas a long time ago.