Big Machine (20 page)

Now a second hand touched me, wrapping around my left elbow.

“Mr. Clay,” I whispered. “Solomon Clay.”

He didn’t answer. I could only see outlines in the dark. I wasn’t fighting a man yet, only a shadow.

I jerked my forearm away from him as hard as I could now, and he fell forward, but held on. Then he squeezed my arm harder, and my fingers opened and I dropped the flashlight. It fell right into the muck. I saw even less after that.

I tried to punch with my right hand now, but without any light, I only swung at the air.

The silence only felt more powerful the longer it went. I’m not saying this was a quiet moment, not with all the splashing and my own heavy breaths. I mean his lack of words. His hush was worse than a threat.

I felt an insane pressure around my wrist and elbow. A squeeze like you wouldn’t believe. Can bones turn to dust? I wondered. I was about to find out. But then I heard this ripping noise instead. I swore it was my skin, but it was only my jacket and shirt. He tore off my sleeves at the shoulder, and my whole left arm was exposed.

“I’m innocent,” I whispered. “I’ve got no fight with you.”

Then he stabbed me. Just above my left wrist.

“Adele!” I screamed. “Adele!”

I looked down, and now my eyes had adjusted so I saw the back of his head. Bald, sweating, sickly, almost green. I had to stop pretending. This wasn’t Solomon Clay. This wasn’t any man. I felt a heated pain in my wrist, as if this thing were digging the blade deeper, until it reached bone. I tried to pull away, but failed again.

Down the sewer line I heard the Gray Lady. “Mr. Rice?” she called.

How many minutes passed before she arrived to help? I couldn’t count them, but finally she appeared.

Flinging road flares?

That wouldn’t have been my first choice of weapons, but maybe that’s all she had. Either way the pressure on my wrist and elbow weakened. Red sparks flashed around me, nearly hit me in the face. She was barely aiming. So what did I do? To get out of the fire lane? Yup. Plopped right down into the sewage. I didn’t even get to take a breath.

The Gray Lady chased my attacker down the tunnel, but there weren’t any more flares left. She came back as I stood up. I fished my flashlight out of the gunk with my right hand. She held her flashlight and looked at me with concern.

“Why didn’t you have a gun?” I asked.

She crossed her arms. “And what were you doing? Besides panicking?”

“Blow it out your ass, Ms. Henry.”

The Gray Lady trained her flashlight on my forearm and asked me to turn it round so she could see. There were red marks around my wrist, like rope burns. The same around my elbow. But no stab wound. Not like the gash I’d expected from all that fighting. No torn flesh. Not even blood. It seemed impossible.

She leaned closer to my arm. I did too. But when I moved in, she pulled back. Even down there, after all that, she couldn’t relax. Close up I saw just a tiny little pinhole prick in my skin. Nothing more.

“What was that?” I asked her.

“Solomon Clay,” she said. “Who else?”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “Or you’re lying.”

The Gray Lady looked behind us.

She said, “I wouldn’t keep anything from you.”

Of course I didn’t believe her, no one with any sense would. I’d held some suspicions before this, but now I really wondered what I’d volunteered for. Why had I assumed the Gray Lady and the Dean and the whole Washburn Library were on my side? Or even on the right side? Just because I wanted to believe such a thing? And once I’d turned a little
skeptical, why didn’t I
do
anything differently? They told me to fly out here and I flew. They told me to climb into a dark tunnel and I dove in. A domesticated animal. Maybe Solomon Clay had come to my hotel to warn me, not to harm me. Imagine entering a fight without knowing the sides.

I used to hang around the dope spots trawling for exactly that kind of chump. White, black, yellow, or brown, it didn’t matter. If they were on the block looking soft, then I played chummy. Just give me the money, I’d say after a little conversation. I’ll go upstairs and score us that dope. It didn’t always work, but worked much more often than you can guess. I’d go up, buy the bags, and sneak out a back way before those fellas ever knew they’d been played. So now I stood there in the sewer wondering at my role. Had the whole Washburn Library made me into a vic?

I replayed the feeling, something sharp piercing my skin. I raised my flashlight to see the cut more closely. The tiny little wound looked like a needle mark, honestly. I certainly recognized those. Had I been stabbed, or injected? Was it my imagination, the adrenaline, or just fear that made the spot feel like it was burning? No, it wasn’t the wound, deeper than that. This pain was in my blood. What had just been done to me?

I stared at the spot. Ms. Henry did too.

It was as if we could see poison flooding my veins.

THE WASHERWOMEN WERE THREE SISTERS
from Florida who escaped north before the Jacksonville police found what they’d left behind. All three women had husbands and children who would be discovered, six days later, tucked into blood-soaked beds.

The Washerwomen shot their families, plain and simple. And when it was over, they fled to New York. They’d been born Baptists, but the murders marked a change. They didn’t lose their religion, they resurrected it. After those deaths they became
better
Christians. That’s what the Washerwomen believed.

I wonder how that sounds to someone who wasn’t there with them, firsthand. Crazy, no doubt. Terrible. Criminal. Even evil. I can’t really argue. It comes across as pretty nuts to me too from a few decades away. But I was there then.

Years after our community fell apart, people still called the Washerwomen devils, and when my old apartment building went condo, they had a very hard time selling the places on our floor. As if the living rooms and kitchens and stairwells were still possessed.

So what could possibly make my parents stay and raise their children into such a thing? That’s the funny part about the Washerwomen. Their doctrine fit my father well. Their main idea was pretty straightforward: the Church is broken. Which one? Take your pick. All choices were correct. The Church, that abiding institution, had stopped working. A new church had to take its place. Something small and defiant and renewed with concern. Which is about as traditional an idea as Christianity has.
This appealed to my father because, in his own life, certain institutions had failed him too, and he appreciated that the Washerwomen hadn’t surrendered to despair.

To show how profoundly they distrusted every church, they even rewrote the Bible.

And why not? They wouldn’t be the first. The King James Version (1611). The English Revised Edition (1881–85). The American Standard Version (1901). The Revised Standard Version (1952). Others include the Amplified Bible, the Contemporary English, the Darby Translation, the Douay-Rheims 1899 American Version, the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the New Life Version, the New Living Translation, the Wycliffe New Testament, and the Message. That’s just a few examples written in English. So why couldn’t the Washerwomen try?

And if it had been as simple as one more approximation of the original texts, maybe it would’ve been okay. If these three sisters from Jacksonville had been self-taught in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, then pored over the available source documents and simply transcribed what they’d found, I doubt many people would’ve had trouble with them. The problem is that the Washerwomen’s version wasn’t about translating every line on what to do about stolen oxen or all the names in the priestly class. They deleted that business entirely. When African slaves came to the Americas, they identified with the bondage of the Jews in Exodus, and this, above all else, was why they embraced Christianity so firmly. So the Washerwomen’s version of the Bible didn’t take place in towns like Jericho or Judea. Instead the Israelites escaped out of Georgia and Tennessee. And, for that matter, in this book they weren’t even called Israelites. They were called Negroes.

LET ME ALSO MAKE THIS CLEAR
, the Washerwomen didn’t
tell
anyone about the mass murder. They omitted that from the official record. Because that would, you know, drive sane people away before they had a chance to hear the message.

Our small community only found out about it after the news made it from Jacksonville to New York, and it’s sad to say that this took quite a while. What does that have to do with me? New York seemed to say. I’m busy wit my own problems, ovah heah! While a womanhunt electrified northern Florida, and southern Georgia, it only rated grainy “Wanted” posters in the post offices of Queens. In the days before cable news and Internet searches, infamy had a good chance of remaining localized.

By the time those rumors did filter north, Sargent and Carolyn Rice knew the sisters too well to believe the rumors were true. The whole
Washerwomen community felt that way. Because of love they held no doubts.

This sounds like our great mistake, putting our trust in three women who’d been accused of a massacre. And yet, for all that, it wasn’t the Washerwomen who killed my sister, Daphne.

It was me.

THE GRAY LADY AND I CLIMBED OUT
of the sewer, and then I hid in my hotel. Never was I happier to see the ratty room at By the Bay than after I’d locked the door behind me. Riding back from the sewer in Claude’s car, I was afraid Claude and Ms. Henry were going to lock me away for observation. But they didn’t. Just left me off exactly as they had the night before. In fact, I’d say the Gray Lady looked more frightened of me. As if I might spread some sickness to her. She practically booted me out of the car that night. I got upstairs, shut the door, and stuck a chair under the doorknob. Had the Gray Lady set me up, or was I being paranoid? Should I search out Solomon Clay myself and hear his side?

But how could I track him down when I barely had the energy to tear off my soiled clothes? Funny that no one in the lobby knocked me for being saturated in sewage. The only time they noticed me was when my clothes gave off a snotty vibe. When I looked like a mess, they disregarded me. I piled the soggy suit on top of the bathroom sink, but I felt woozy before I could even get a shower going. Nearly passed out on the tile floor. I made it into bed, and there I lay, feverish and aching.

The Gray Lady didn’t forget me. Phone calls began the next morning, right around eight
A.M.
That went on, every hour, until noon. Then the desk clerk rang, saying I had visitors. First Claude and then, when I wouldn’t let him up, Ms. Adele Henry. But I denied her too. And, to my complete amazement, By the Bay wouldn’t just let them up. Who expects tight security at an SRO? By late afternoon the desk clerk had been persuaded to come upstairs herself. She knocked at my door, but I refused to open up, and eventually she left.

For the rest of the night my mind returned to the shadows of the sewer. I thought of the laundry detergent flowing down from that pipe until a citrus scent returned to me. The splash of Ms. Henry and me marching through the sewage. The attack. Being stabbed. The poison.

As my mind gathered these impressions, my body throbbed. It felt as though each of my muscles was leaping out of my skin. They jittered and sparked so badly that eventually I couldn’t shut my eyes. And finally the next morning, I tried to rise.

Getting myself to sit up, then stand, that energy all came from the power of positive thought. But when I fell forward, face-first onto the floor, that was hard-core reality. My body couldn’t think itself past its pain. So I lay on the dirty tiled floor, not because I liked it but because I didn’t have a choice. If my mind had tried to rally the limbs just then, we would’ve fallen into civil war. So I lay there.

Being a reasonable diplomat, I decided on a series of concessions. We’ll lie on the ground for five minutes. Okay, we’ll stay here for ten.

Twenty minutes, but nothing more!

After thirty, my arms were willing to press me up, and my legs agreed to take the weight. See that, a little compromise lifts your spirit.

Like that, a model of statesmanship, peace between body and mind, we ran the shower. Got in and washed ourselves. The fever got worse, bad enough that even a steamy shower felt lukewarm when compared with the temperature in my skin. I came out and found it necessary to enter into a second set of negotiations.

This time as the body slumped stubbornly on the toilet seat while the mind wandered up along one of the walls. We were in danger of never coming together, but finally my soul mustered the others back around the bargaining table.

We need help. We have to get out of this place. Is everyone agreed?

I awaited their answer patiently.

BY NOON
we’d decided to wear a Norfolk suit. It was no less formal than my pinstripes, but more rugged. Have you ever seen one? Probably not, unless you’ve been out shooting in the English countryside in the 1870s. All Harris Tweed and warmer than a bear’s butt. Good for “hard wearing.” It even had a strap that went around my middle, which helped to hold me straight up, like a truss. There weren’t too many old Scholars rocking the Norfolk look, but there had been one guy in the photos, thankfully.

Add to the suit a pair of calfskin chukka boots and a black and white herringbone newsboy cap, and I looked like Ricky Rice, Gentleman Adventurer. But I felt like Ricky Rice, Terminally Ill. The last thing I did
was take out my heroin. I put those baggies in my pocket, thinking of them almost like a talisman, an evil to ward off greater evil.

In a way, heroin had already protected me. While I felt feverish and achy, while my limbs shivered, I was still able to shower, to dress, to move. Kicking dope so many times had toughened me. All those withdrawal pains had weathered my body. Leather wasn’t even as durable. Everything hurt, but I could still function.

I got on the creaky old elevator and rode down to the lobby. Leaned against one wall for support. I heard myself huffing even though I’d hardly moved. It sounded like the sigh of a dog when first setting itself down.