A Map of Moldeth City

Every city has a shape, and the shape tells you who's afraid of whom. Here's mine.

Moldeth sits where a dying river runs out into a colder lake, and the port to the north is the reason the city exists and the reason it can never quite rest. Everything else arranges itself around that water.

Go east and the ground climbs into Cataldo Hill. That's the Ratsapones — Italian, old, run these days by a widow off a kitchen table. Row houses paid off in cash, gravy on the stove Sunday mornings, a parish on every third corner and a funeral home on the fourth. The family money is in things you can watch get built: construction, the waste contracts, the union locals. The buildings really do go up. It's just that the permits cost more than paper.

Cross the Pulaski bridge to the west and the whole register changes. Polish now — the Stopiaks. Kielbasa and kapusta, twelve meatless dishes on Christmas Eve, a social club with the windows frosted over so you can't see the card game. They ought to be the strongest family in the city, and they aren't, because three captains run the thing by committee and not one of them can stand the other two. A house divided holds the West Side for now. It won't hold it forever.

South, the land drops into the Flats — low, wet, floods every spring, the kind of streets where people work for whoever's hiring and don't ask which family signs the checks. Past the Flats, out toward Southworks, that's Pays ground. Trafficking — the ugly trade, the one the old families swore they'd never touch, back when the old families still had rules. The Pays are the newest and the smartest. They watched the feds take everyone else apart and they built something that's harder to get a grip on.

Then north. The port. Nobody owns it clean, and that's the whole point of it — a port is a door, and every family in this city wants a hand on the door, because whatever comes off that water is worth killing over before it's even unloaded. The contested ground stays contested on purpose. Peace up there would mean somebody had won, and nobody's won.

In the middle of all of it, downtown: city hall, the chief's office, the development authority, the courthouse. Neutral ground, officially. The zoning board doesn't belong to any of the three families — which is just a way of saying it belongs to all of them, on a schedule, by appointment.

Eleven years back the feds came in over a single weekend and blew the old map to pieces, and this is what settled out of the dust. Three families in three directions, a door to the north nobody can lock, and a downtown that'll rent to anyone with the paper.

Stand on Cataldo Hill some night and look out toward the water, and you'll see the two things that have run this city since long before anybody thought to draw a line through it. A smokestack. A church steeple. Side by side, against the dark.