DIG CITY
by Robert Arellano

Cuban-American novelist Robert Arellano’s Fast Eddie, King of the Bees (2001), is part of the Akashic Urban Surreal series of books which explores the shifting social boundaries in our urban future. Fast Eddie is about an abandoned child on the streets of near-future Boston in the aftermath of the Great Devaluation, where squatters have turned the tunnel system into an underground hive known as Dig City.

"Step right up!" Shep called on the Common. "It’s Baby Eddie, preschool pretzel-boy!" I puttered around on the heels of my hands, grinning goofily at anyone whose attention strayed, sneaks flopping like crimson elephant ears. Shep, a sightless hustler from Southie, was my makeshift Fagin, my only pal. He trained the youngest by pretending grift was a game, supplying his own billfold. If Shep detected promise then off you went, an independent contractor in his ranks of sticky-fingered freelancers.

The Beast was one big Chinatown that had sprawled into South Station, the financial district, and what had formerly been known as the North End. Sooty, sparking skyscrapers loomed above our barrel-bottom dominion in ominous, opulent decadence, but you can bet a road rat never stopped to notice their gothic majesty. It was not in our wiring to admire, much less look up. So little sunlight filtered down to the street that reds and yellows got subtracted from the spectrum. If a helicopter ran out of juice, missing all the pads on the way down, and let a rich man descend upon the Beast, the city might seem to him like some awesome Atlantis, the indigo hues that come along with plumbing the deepest troughs like sinking into an altogether-other medium.

"Take a minute out for mini-magic!" Shep barked. We drew droves of dupes to our spot among the mandrakes by the stump of the old hanging tree, our only props a pair of miniature steel manacles, a shrunken straitjacket, and a mysterious box beneath a sheet. "It’s the babe in bondage!"

Shep provided for his orphan cadets in a cozy, condemned candy factory near Kendall Square. After an old sign on the roof that had lost a letter or two, rats called his flophouse the Nec – rhymes with "mess." Gone were the days when homelessness had been more or less an exception and the most destitute had had access to shelters, group homes, orphanages and adoption programs. Health care had become something for the ultra-rich. For rats, medical attention meant fly-by-night storefronts operated by drunken quacks with expired licenses who were nevertheless enough in demand to require all-day waits. Prevention meant not letting oneself get run over or shot. Shep was pretty fair compared to the dozen or so alternatives available to boys in the Beast. (Although occasionally a pack master might arrange a back-alley mixer with a matron and her mice, there were no coed crews. Guardians for both genders agreed packs produced more income without the drama of that most distracting difference.) By enlisting with Shep, we knew we could depend on him to supply the basic necessities: a leaky roof, our daily grub, and a bed of old Globes.

When the buzz told Shep he had assembled a good-sized gallery, he slapped them with the bondage routine. "Baby Eddie defies the confounding kiddy camisole!" Over my head went that cuffless canvas shirt, size: small/chico. I was fettered, crossed sleeves tied behind my back. Shep invited the volunteer to tighten the straps. Pointing blindly in my vicinity, Shep cried, "Eddie's been a bad boy – let’s put him in the crib!" Off came the sheet at Shep’s feet. What lay beneath was less like a cradle than a diver’s cage, the kind that keeps out sharks. A rat had found the old lobster trap washed up beneath the dilapidated docks of Inner Harbor. I climbed in.

Shep kept everyone idling until it was time for me to scramble for the jingling metal confetti, detaining them with his trademark slogan, which lulled even the sharpest cynics with its matter-of-fact ingenuousness: "What have you got to lose?" The point was: plenty. While Shep and I supplied distraction, the other rats marked the pigeons in the pack. With the pedestrians-turned-patrons pressing close in a circle, I amazed and astounded while my orphan siblings conspired to lighten the burden of select pockets. When the show ended and the crowd dispersed, our agents would tail their marks out from the axis along their trajectories across the hub. Since the beginning, I had understood the practices surrounding my pediatric profession to be a little unorthodox, but I managed to convince myself that, however bastardized by my orphan brothers to promote the conditions of easy crime, my prestidigitation preserved its integrity. Besides, growing into it as I had from an impressionable age, the career appeared to me not just as the only possible job, but as a sort of calling.

Shep padlocked the top and draped the sheet back over the crate. Buckles clinking, bars rattling, the struggle began. "No way the wound-up wonder child can get out of this one!" A couple of rat assistants hauled the whole contraption over to the edge of the Frog Pond and heaved me in. The Frog Pond's only a few feet deep, but as Shep would say, forebodingly, "It only takes a teaspoon." Portentous bubbles rumbled up from turgid turquoise depths. l

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