The Swing Voter of Staten Island Read Online Free

it wasn’t working. Their bus was slowing down. Pretty soon they’d be forced to a halt.
    Mallory nervously pulled her chestnut wig back over her head, then grabbed a heavy flannel shirt out of her bag and slipped it on.
    As Carnival’s shrieking wife kept the steering wheel turned against the mad driver from Flatlands, Uli watched the bus driver reach under his seat for a bottle of wine, which he uncorked with his teeth. With his one good hand, he calmly shoved a napkin down the bottleneck. Then flipping open a lighter, he lit the napkin and tossed the bottle out the window. It exploded along the top of the car. “Hold on!” he shouted, grabbing the wheel from Mary and slamming on the brakes, which sent the other vehicle flying into an abandoned building. The bus driver turned left and sped away.
    “That was too damn close,” Mallory muttered.
    “I wonder what they wanted,” Uli said.
    As the bus turned up Flatbush Avenue, the sand that had been covering the road began to thin out. The quality of the roadway was still poor, but the one-armed driver gracefully dodged potholes without having to slow down. Eventually they made a left on Church Avenue, where signs of life began returning.
    “Welcome to Japtown,” Carnival said with a sigh.
    The neighborhood was covered with delicate wooden buildings that had tiered levels and swirling pagoda-style bamboo roofs.
    “This area was designed to resemble Japan for ground and aerial training,” Carnival explained.
    Little shops with twirling mansard roofs dotted the area: a tarot card psychic, a barbershop, a scratch-and-match vendor, a sushi bar, an Optima cigar stand. When the bus turned down a side street, Uli saw a mini—restaurant row—a group of food vendors toiling over smoky barbecues and hibachis. Directly across from them, a line of people gathered outside a movie theater that looked like it might originally have been a Buddhist temple.
    With an apparently limited supply of red plastic letters for the marquee, the establishment had improvised: W9zT S10E StoR7.

    A fter ten more blocks, the cute japonica architecture ended, and with it, all signs of civilization. Streets were again barren, and the buildings took on a harsher, colder style. Soon they came upon a complex of larger buildings that looked like skeletons of the Soviet housing made popular under Khrushchev. The structures appeared empty and most were burned out altogether.
    Six passengers who had boarded the bus along Church Avenue had already gotten off, leaving only the five original riders.
    “Welcome to Borough Park,” Mallory said. “Once a thriving Hasidic community.”
    “What happened?”
    “It was a dignified Pigger neighborhood eight years ago—before the Crappers took over Brooklyn. The local residents kept supporting their own Pigger leader, Moss Leere, and the Crappers persecuted them until they couldn’t take it anymore and moved to Queens.”
    The bus passed a partially collapsed cupola with a big Star of David on the front. It looked like something out of Czarist Russia. According to Mallory, the destroyed synagogue had once been the spiritual center of the area.
    “Shit!” the driver suddenly shouted. “He’s back.”
    Turning around, they all saw it. Smoke from the burned paint on the roof was streaming off. The car from Flatlands was gaining on them. In a desperate effort to lose it, the bus driver veered off his route and sped deeper into the desolation of Borough Park. Soon, though, the Flatlander once again slammed into their rear bumper.
    “I can’t outrun him,” the driver conceded, trying to block the car from getting around.
    “Maybe we should stop and give him our money, or just slow down and see what he wants,” Uli suggested.
    Carnival noticed a cinder block propped under a broken seat in front of him. He pulled open a hole in the mesh covering his window and hurled the large concrete weight onto the front of the pursuing car. The block shattered the solar