Makers Part 16

"We've got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It's about a half hour walk. It's indoors and there's toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don't have to come, but this isn't going to be any fun tonight."

A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. "What about our stuff? We can't leave it here tonight. It's all we've got."

Francis nodded. "We need ten people to stand guard in two s.h.i.+fts of five tonight. Young people. You'll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out."

The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they'd get of this would come from the news-anchor who'd tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They'd never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.

Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they ma.s.sed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.

Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester's car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis's discretion.

Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.

"What now?" she said.

"We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses."

"At your place? You're going to let them stay?"

"Why not? We don't use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn't been by in five years. He won't care."

She took a couple more steps. "Perry, I'm going to write about this,"

she said.

"Oh," he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. "Of course you are. Well, f.u.c.k the landlord. I'll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks."

"What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?"

"This? Look, this is what I've been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They're a huge untapped market."

What she wanted to ask was *What would Tjan say about this?* but they didn't talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he'd confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people *wanted* to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.

They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.

They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they'd found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.

"This is the place," Francis said. "We'll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there -- orderly lines, no shoving."

"What about food?" asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.

"This isn't the Red Cross, Al," Francis snapped. "We'll organize food for ourselves in the morning."

Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.

"There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It's his place. He's going to go to Costco for us when they open."

The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They'd been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them -- like making up for every panhandler she'd ignored and every pa.s.sed-out drunk she'd stepped over.

There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.

Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet -- she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket -- and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn't climb in between those sheets.

She couldn't.

And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels -- even the sofa cus.h.i.+ons, which the landlord was not going to be happy about -- and speeding back to the workshop.

She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman -- apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny -- sat up and said, "Hey, where's one for me?" Suzanne recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester's friend. The one who'd grabbed her and cursed her.

She didn't want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor.

"Where's one for me?" the woman said more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up.

Suzanne was shaking. Who the h.e.l.l was she to decide who got a blanket?

Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down?

Suzanne gave her a blanket, and she s.n.a.t.c.hed one of the sofa cus.h.i.+ons besides.

*It's why she's still alive,* Suzanne thought. *How she's survived.*

She gave away the last blanket and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on tee-s.h.i.+rts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding.

The new shantytown went up fast -- faster than she'd dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters -- building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic -- and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.

Little things went missing from the workshops -- tools, easily p.a.w.ned books and keepsakes, Perry's wallet -- and they all started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in among the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren't beside her desk-lamp, where she'd left them the night before and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.

She found the earrings later that day, at the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn't voiced a single accusation, she'd accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.

"I have to write about this," she said to Perry. "This is part of the story." She'd stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn't go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.

"Why?" Perry said. He'd been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn't join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young men and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he'd been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. "Can't you just concentrate on the business?"

"Perry, this *is* the business. Kettlewell hasn't sent a replacement for Tjan and you've filled in and you've turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That's important news -- the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you've found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it's not just solving Kodacell's problem, it's solving the problem for all of those people, too."

Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. "I don't want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It's going good. Scrutiny could kill it."

"You've got nothing to be embarra.s.sed about here," she said. "There's nothing here that isn't as it should be."

Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. "You do what you have to do," he said.

:: The original shantytown was astonis.h.i.+ng. Built around a nexus of :: trailers and RVs that didn't look in the least roadworthy, the :: settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of :: land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they :: could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with :: bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs :: with palm-leaves, s.h.i.+ngles, linoleum, corrugated tin -- even :: plywood with flattened beer-cans. Some walls were wood. Some had :: windows. Some were made from old car-doors, with hand-cranked :: handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at :: night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on :: nets.

:: :: A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived, :: and rather than building out -- and farther away from their :: neighbors' latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of :: electrical power -- they built *up*, on top of the existing :: structures, shoring up the walls where necessary. It wasn't :: hurricane proof, but neither are the cracker-box condos that :: "property owners" occupy. They made contractual arrangements with :: the dwellers of the first stories, paid them rent. A couple with :: second-story rooms opposite one another in one of the narrow :: "streets" consummated their relations.h.i.+p by building a sky-bridge :: between their rooms, paying joint rent to two landlords. :: :: The thing these motley houses had in common, all of them, was :: ingenuity and pride of work. They had neat vegetable gardens, :: flower-boxes, and fresh paint. They had kids' bikes leaned up :: against their walls, and the smell of good cooking in the air. :: They were homely homes. :: :: Many of the people who lived in these houses worked regular :: service jobs, walking three miles to the nearest city bus stop :: every morning and three miles back every evening. They sent :: their kids to school, faking local addresses with PO boxes. Some :: were retired. Some were just down on their luck. :: :: They helped each other. When something precious was stolen, the :: community pitched in to find the thieves. When one of them :: started a little business selling sodas or sandwiches out of her :: shanty, the others patronized her. When someone needed medical :: care, they chipped in for a taxi to the free clinic, or someone :: with a working car drove them. They were like the neighbors of :: the long-lamented American town, an ideal of civic virtue that is :: so remote in our ancestry as to have become mythical. There were :: eyes on the street here, proud residents who knew what everyone :: was about and saw to it that bad behavior was curbed before it :: could get started. :: :: Somehow, it burned down. The fire department won't investigate, :: because this was an illegal homestead, so they don't much care :: about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most :: of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire :: department wouldn't fight the fire at first, because someone at :: city hall said that the land's owner wouldn't let them on the :: property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land :: between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is :: unknown -- a decades-old dispute over t.i.tle has left it in legal :: limbo that let the squatters settle there. It's suspicious all :: right -- various ent.i.ties had tried to evict the squatters :: before, but the legal ha.s.sles left them in happy limbo. What the :: law couldn't accomplish, the fire did. :: :: The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters :: into their factory, and now they have "live-work" condos that :: look like something Dr Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the :: Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they :: were "constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind :: that had been drinking," as a press account of the day had it. :: :: Last year, the city completed a new housing project nearby to :: here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get :: them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. The :: shantytowners wouldn't go: "It was too expensive," said Mrs X, :: who doesn't want her family back in Oklahoma to know she's :: squatting with her husband and their young daughter. "We can't :: afford *any* rent, not if we want to put food on the table on :: what we earn." :: :: She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban :: renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of :: place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order :: in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to :: keep any cash around. :: :: The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was :: a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing :: that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they're :: inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and :: homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology :: inside them]

The response was enormous and pa.s.sionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she'd been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She'd expected that -- she'd felt that way herself, when she'd first walked past the shantytown.

But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and emails from homeless people who'd been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you'd think that half her readers.h.i.+p was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners.

"Kettlewell's coming down to see this," Perry said.

Her stomach lurched. She'd gotten the boys in trouble. "Is he mad?"