Big Machine (21 page)

An older guy got on at the second floor, one of those grumpy-grandad types, wearing a green cardigan all buttoned up. A newspaper folded under one arm. He stared at me the whole slow way down. When the doors opened, he said, “Negro, you are a mess.”

I pushed myself off the wall and stood straight.

“Blow it out your ass, Redd Foxx.”

He took the paper from under his arm, tapped his leg with it a few times. He looked me over again. Then he said, “Mmm-hmmm.”

We sort of raced for the elevator exit, only two feet, but Fred Sanford hit the lobby first. When you lose a footrace to a seventy-year-old, you know you are not in peak physical shape.

He met a few of his cronies out there, gathered to the television again. What were they watching? Not basketball. Maybe the news? That guy in the wheelchair held the most prominent position, only inches from the screen and directly in front. I suppose that if he was their leader, this counted as a place of prestige. The man in the cardigan walked over to the lame one and whispered in his ear. Then they both looked at me. Instinctively I clutched at the belt loop of my Norfolk jacket.

“Hey, Jeeves!” the man in the wheelchair shouted.

“Spot of tea?” he added in a bad British accent.

If I’d been feeling better, I might’ve given him a few lines back, but my pride couldn’t overcome my palpitations. Maybe I should try to reach a hospital, I thought. I bet I could find a men’s shelter closer by. Or a church.

I stumbled toward the front door. I looked back, but they weren’t even watching me anymore. They were back to the big screen. And I misjudged how close I was to the hotel doors, so I bonked right into the glass. The front door opened and I tripped across the threshold, but before I fell, a pair of meaty hands caught me.

“Careful there, Larry.”

Then my right hand twisted, Claude pulled my arm behind me, and in a moment he had me hemmed up in a police hold. His Town Car idled by the corner. I couldn’t have seen it from the lobby. He guided me toward the car now, right arm bent hard behind my back.

“Fucking … !” I shouted, but didn’t have the power to complete a sentence.

“Close your mouth,” he whispered, “or I’ll close it.”

We reached the Town Car and he popped the back door open. Claude tossed me inside, really threw me, so I went into the back headfirst. I fought the best I could. This meant flailing around like a dying bird, which didn’t help much. The only good thing is that my slacks glanced off his cheeks a few times and left a faint red mark, a little Norfolk burn.

Meanwhile, Claude put me in plastic handcuffs.

One loop tight around my left wrist and the other loop around the grip of the car door so I had to sit at an angle, the right side of my face pressed to the window. Claude slammed the door, which made my ears ring. Then he ran around to the driver’s seat and got in. If he had taken me to a field right then and dumped my body, no one would have known.

THE CAR RIDE TURNED
into a silent battle, like most of my time with Claude. I stopped myself from asking where we were going, and he restrained himself from shooting me in the head. Because he had to hold his anger in, Claude drove badly. He swept from one lane to another on the highway.

As we passed the Grand Avenue exit, the highway took a slight curve. In the distance I saw a hill with rows of deco homes in tangerine, taupe, or alabaster, three and four stories tall, chimes on a child’s xylophone.

A large lake rippled below those homes. I saw the calm, green water. It was the color of a Granny Smith apple that’s been left on the counter too long. I sat up higher in my seat, which made the handcuff cut into my skin, and saw a crowd down by the water. A few held signs with slogans, but I couldn’t read them from where we were. My eyes were too blurry for that.

As we continued, I felt a new, more localized pain in my forearm. Right where I’d been jabbed. I’d thought it was the cuffs digging in, but even after I shifted my body, the burning sensation remained. I still felt feverish and achy all over, but now it was like someone had sewn a spark under my skin. I watched the wound, afraid blood or pus or something worse would leak out. But nothing did.

Claude finally got off on MacArthur Boulevard. To my right there
were three small, lopsided apartment houses, all decorated in late twentieth-century Security Door. Battered cars lined the side streets. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, just distressed.

On the opposite side of MacArthur Boulevard, across from the moldy apartments, a big old park bloomed. At least that looked nice. Trees rose three stories high. A chain-link fence divided nature from the neighborhood. We drove alongside the park, stopped at the first traffic light, and then made a left. Into the park. I leaned forward, trying to understand.

Maybe Claude really did mean to shoot me in the woods. I tried to control my breathing.

There was a great stone entrance and we drove through its arch, up to a wooden guard station. Claude waved at the pair of guards inside, but they hardly looked at him. It would be a mistake to call the duo “security,” they were too lackluster for that. They were working hard just to keep their eyes open. The threat of napping was the greatest danger they faced.

“Where … ?” I muttered.

Claude raised one hand triumphantly. “This is the Washburn estate.”

CLAUDE DROVE SLOWLY
along the main road of the estate. A few white pickups were parked along either side of the two-lane road. Each truck had a familiar
W
stamped on both doors. Why did that make me feel better? Nothing more than a letter, but it connected this place to the Washburn Library in Vermont. It was only as we passed them that I noticed one truck had two flat tires. Another was missing its windshield, and leaves had blown inside the cab. They littered the front seat and the dashboard.

Sycamore trees lined the main road, rising thirty feet high, their bark yellowed and flaking. The branches were bare. They leaned across the road, toward one another, and we drove below them. Their grasping, empty branches wove together and formed a ceiling of spiderwebs.

I had a hard time reconciling the magnificent trees with those broken-down trucks and the third-rate sentries at the gate. Things only became more confusing as we continued through the grounds. There was so much land, but large sections of the lawn had gone brown. Except for at the entrance, I didn’t see a human being anywhere.

Claude made a right turn.

“That’s where the Washburns live.” Claude practically cooed when he said it.

The Washburn mansion. Fifty rooms, easily. Eggshell white. With a great circular driveway leading up to its front doors. Arched windows everywhere, all the curtains drawn. It was time to meet my makers. Through the fever, the pain of handcuffs, I also felt my pulse thump nervously.

But then Claude drove right by.

Claude passed the mansion gleefully. I could see him stifling laughter as he looked back in the rearview. It made him happy to confuse me. I twisted as far as I could while wearing those flex cuffs and watched the mansion recede.

He drove down a narrow gravel road and entered a tiny grove of trees. I saw a few scattered cabins that looked like the ones back in Vermont, except these had shingles missing on their Spanish roofs, and one’s windows had been replaced with sheets of wood. At the end of the lane Claude pulled into a driveway. He stopped the car, popped the door locks, and turned around in his seat.

“Get out.”

I flopped my numb left hand. “Want me to chew this off?”

Claude honked his horn at this cabin, the only one in decent shape. The Gray Lady stepped out. She wore a mustard-gold tam that covered most of her hair and cast a shadow across her eyes. Without makeup she looked oily, shiny on her forehead. A tan plaid gingham housedress covered every part of her except her hands and face. She looked exhausted, actually. And plain.

The Gray Lady smiled. She flapped both hands in the air as a greeting. I couldn’t tell if she was excited or shooing me away. She looked halfway crazy.

“Come in,” she said. “Come in.”

But, of course, I couldn’t. Claude stepped out of the car, came round to my door, and when he opened it, he had a small pair of precision cutters hidden in his palm. He grabbed my fingers and squeezed them tight, a boyhood torture, while he snipped me loose.

The Gray Lady stayed at the door. “What’s the trouble?” she asked.

Claude slid the plastic line and the pliers into his jacket pocket without seeming to move at all. Then he straightened, smiled at Ms. Henry, and said, “The boy’s a little tired, that’s all.”

“You must’ve been great at planting evidence,” I said as I stepped out.

Claude slammed the door fast, trying to catch my fingers.

I reached Ms. Henry’s cabin, and as I stepped forward, she stepped back, almost mindlessly. I’d have brushed against anyone else as I came in, but the Gray Lady moved too far, too fast. I’d missed her again. She didn’t trust me, but that was okay. I didn’t trust her much either now. Once I got in, she stepped around me, back into the doorway, and waved Claude off.

The Gray Lady shut the door, walked through the partially furnished living room and past the dining table. She went into the kitchen and poured me a cup of tea. I heard the trickle. She came back and set the
cup and saucer on the dining table. I hadn’t moved from beside the front door.

“I’m a hostage,” I said.

The Gray Lady looked at the cup of hot tea again, touched the side with her pointer finger. “Is this about the other night? Because—”

“This is about twenty minutes ago when Claude
abducted
me from my hotel.”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Rice.”

“He put me in handcuffs!”

She approached me cautiously now, palms up to calm me.

“Let me see.”

I opened my Norfolk jacket and pulled it off. As I stretched my wrist past my shirt sleeve, I peeked at this lovely cabin she had all to herself. Once inside, I realized it was twice as big as the ones in Vermont. One here and one there. She was doing quite well for herself.

I showed her the crease on my left wrist.

“He must’ve been frustrated. You wouldn’t come out.”

“It’s my fault, then?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean we were both anxious to make sure you were all right.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. I heard myself and wondered if I was pouting again.

“Let me see the wound,” she said.

I unrolled the left sleeve, up to my elbow.

The red marks around my wrist and elbow, where I’d been grabbed, had blistered a bit but not too bad. I felt terrible, but refused to show it. Not to her. I’d have liked to sit and groan. Instead I kept my back straight and spoke slowly, but with volume. All Ms. Henry had to do was feel my forehead to realize I wasn’t healthy, but of course that’s something she wouldn’t do. Instead she pulled a ballpoint pen from one of the pockets of her housedress and stabbed the cap into my forearm.

“Does that hurt?” she asked.

“Of course it hurts. You’re jabbing me.”

“Why are you snappy?” she asked, and jabbed me again, harder.

“I got attacked in a sewer pipe. A sewer pipe you led me into. Let’s start there.”

The Gray Lady tapped the same pen cap against her lips absently, then stopped, remembering it had just touched my wound. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Drink your tea,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

But I doubted that. Instead I decided to be nosey and peeked into all the rooms in her cabin. I didn’t even ask. I thought she’d yell at me, but
she let me explore. Only her office looked genuinely inhabited. Two desks, both old, wooden, and kind of crappy. One made of pressboard while the other looked like it had been left out in the rain since the fifties. There were tall particle board bookshelves that leaned sloppily in one direction or another. The computer was big and bulky, and I saw a little white label stuck on the power cord:
REFURBISHED EQUIPMENT
. A hunter green throw rug lay on the floor between the two desks. A wooden picture frame hung on the office wall just above the older desk, with a single hand-painted word in red: Rigor.

“You’ve really made this place cozy.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

We went back into the living room, to her dining table. There were four chairs, but three of them had dust on the seats. Her cell phone lay on the table. I’d seen smaller car batteries. I picked it up without asking. It felt as heavy as a barbell in my right hand. It was one of those old numbers where you flip down a hinged mouthpiece to talk and raise the antenna to get a signal. If there’d been a handle on the side, so you could wind it up to charge, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked. “1987?”

She slapped the wooden table. “What’s your problem?”

“I want to know what the hell happened to me.”

She slipped her pen back into her pocket. She pushed the tea toward me, just one limp little gesture.

“Come look at this,” she said quickly.

She walked around the table, away from me, to a set of books stacked up on the mantel of her dusty fireplace. It wasn’t anywhere near as big as the one in the Dean’s office, and the cobwebs in the corner told me this one had hardly been used. The Gray Lady grabbed one book from the stack and brought it to me.

I read the cover. It was a volume in the Time-Life Books series about the paranormal. Volume 34:
Angels & Demons
. She flipped from one page to the next. There were drawings and photos and paintings next to sections of text, but I couldn’t concentrate on any of it because I thought she had to be joking.

“Why are you showing this to me?” I said.

She looked up, but when I held her gaze, she stared at the page again.

“I’m trying to prepare you,” she said. “You might think you’re ready for all the answers, right this second, but hearing too much too soon will just drive you away or drive you crazy. Neither one is any use to me.”

“Fine, Ms. Henry. But
this
is really the best you can offer?” I asked. “What happened to me down there? At least tell me that.”