Big Machine (23 page)

“Not long,” another voice offered.

The preacher clasped his big hands and shook them.

“Now, on Tuesday the mayor spoke of better times coming to Garland.”

“Hah!” someone called.

“Well, I’m going to surprise you because I agree. I want to feel welcome in Garland. I want you to feel welcome too. I want us
all
to step inside the tent. You remember what Luther said? ‘A house is not a home when there’s no one there …’ I know. Please excuse my singing!”

He dropped one hand and rubbed the back of his neck with the other.

“But
that’s
the real question, isn’t it? Always has been. Who is welcome?”

The preacher turned, walked to the water’s edge, reached down, but couldn’t quite get his hand in there. The lake sat a little too low. So he stood and came back to us, looking at his dry hand as if it had disappointed him.

He spoke quietly.

“When our mayor made his plans to rejuvenate Stone Mason Square, he faced one big problem. All those folks sleeping on the sidewalks. Where do they go? Well, you and I know because we’ve been feeding more of them over the last three months. They’ve been relocated as far as Fresno. Our mayor treated the square like an anthill. Just kick it over and send those bugs on their way. Being treated like that, I can understand why someone would blow it all to pieces! And from all reports, Mayor Brandy plans to do the same here. To resurrect Laguna Lake. Which sounds fine, but will everybody be welcome in that paradise? Or will some of us, the worst off, be locked outside the gates?”

I looked around for journalists, but saw none and wondered if this congregation would really be able to inspire some interest. I admired the preacher’s idealism, but so many people were struggling. Could a handful of homeless folks compete with a war or a weak dollar?

But then I felt a powerful guilt and remembered my trip to the Library months before. We sent that man off our bus. Drove away and left him in a snowstorm. The preacher and his congregation might as well
have been protesting me. I dropped the electric candle into my coat pocket. I walked away, alongside the lake, on a concrete path that surrounded the greenish waters.

Finally the gray concrete of the path turned different colors, white and green. There was so much goose shit mashed into the ground that it discolored the pavement. A row of wooden benches ran alongside this path in an
S
shape. Parents sat with their children. The children threw food to the birds. Vagrant pigeons and ducks poked at everything. Bread, birdseed, or balls of paper.

I saw pelicans, cormorants, terns, and gulls. Angry geese moved in teams. I wandered forward. Couldn’t lift my left arm because now my shoulder boiled. I was so exhausted that it helped me in a way. My mind stopped registering pain and fatigue. I entered a meditative state. As long as I didn’t rest, I could walk all day.

And then, from a hundred yards off, I saw him. Sitting on a bench with his legs crossed at the knee. Though I’d never been given a picture, I had no problem recognizing the guy. The Unlikely Scholar we’d idolized. The enemy of the Washburn Library. The traitor. The fanatic.

Solomon Clay.

SATURDAY MORNING FOR A CHILD
in a so-called cult was not that different from Saturday morning for most other kids. We wanted to watch cartoons too, we wanted to play. The difference is that we put on church clothes instead.

We weren’t going far, not even to the other side of our apartment building, but the trip stressed me out anyway. Me and my sister both. Daphne took her longest showers on Saturdays, and I looked out the window of our fourth-floor bedroom to watch the boys in the street. They were doing what I wanted to do. Slinging jokes and kicking one another and dancing through those liberated weekends.

The morning I’m thinking about now, I was leaning at the windowsill, but didn’t long to play with those boys quite as much as when I was younger. I was only ten but felt like a veteran. I’d survived an untold number of skirmishes with those kids. So it wasn’t that I wanted to play with them, just that I wanted to play And anyway, our whole community was feeling a bit sad and anxious because one of our own kids had been taken: Veronica Gibbons, a sixteen-year-old girl who liked to dye her hair crazy colors, no matter what her parents or the Washerwomen said.

A social worker had come by claiming she was taking Veronica for lunch and a simple interview, but Veronica never came back. She was put into foster care, and her parents were told that she wouldn’t be returned. Child endangerment. That’s what they called it. They took her on Tuesday. Her parents so scared they seemed crippled when we visited to show support. Sitting on the couch, watching a television that
wasn’t even on. Four days later, on Saturday, I leaned at the windowsill and wondered if Veronica felt scared out there.

I felt shocked, but I can’t say Veronica’s abduction (later, in the press, they called it “liberation”) was a surprise. Renouncing Christmas, denigrating the Church, revising the Bible, even my father’s new trucks added to the strain. Maybe the neighbors just had enough. All those grievances led, finally, to this Saturday. It’s a famous date, at least locally. November 8, 1975. Neighborhood kids called it the Night of Thunder.

My mother came into the bedroom that morning and told me to get away from the windows. She pulled the curtains closed again and squeezed my shoulder too tightly. Carolyn Rice was as skinny as my dad. And she could never grow her nails very long. Not on her toes or her fingers. They were dry and brittle, and because of that she never wore nail polish. She didn’t talk with her hands like me and Daphne did. She hated to show them to anyone, even us. So she squeezed my neck and let go just as quick and crossed her arms again. She tucked those hands into her armpits. She did this automatically, all the time, and never realized it made her seem perpetually angry. She had a good sense of humor, but you’d never know it from that stance.

“Put on your suit,” is all she said.

Then she went to the bathroom door and nearly punched it off its hinges, so impatient with my sister’s stalling. She went inside and pulled Daphne out the shower. My sister and I shared a bedroom, so I waited in the kitchen while Daphne dressed. I heard my father in their bedroom. He’d returned from the road on Thursday, two months earlier than scheduled.

Big band music played on his little alarm clock radio. I heard the opening and closing of drawers in there. I’d seen open suitcases the night before. He wasn’t planning to leave us. For all his faults he’d never do that. This afternoon the Washerwomen were running, all of us I mean. We wouldn’t lose one more child. Time for a mass migration. An exodus.

My mom left Daphne and came to me. She picked at my hair until it was a relatively round little Afro. Then she looked me over, tightened my tie, kissed my ear (going for the cheek, but I was fidgeting), then she went back into her bedroom. I felt warm air rush from under the door, and the big band music became louder. My mother was so anxious and distracted that she left the pick in my hair. But I didn’t even have time to pull it out before my sister appeared.

Now that Daphne had been put in motion, she didn’t even ask me to come with her. She just dragged me out by my wrist, while I fought to stay. The pick fell out along the way, its metal tines pinging against the tile floor. We bucked along through the kitchen, into the living room,
and out of the apartment. I dragged back as best I could, but Daphne was fifteen and she had our father’s strength. The rangy kind, which isn’t about muscle. It’s all starch. I weighed more than her (and I didn’t weigh much), but if she’d wanted to, Daphne could’ve lifted me over her head. I believed that.

So the two of us walked out of apartment D23 in our duds. My little blue suit even had a blue vest. Daphne’s white handbag matched her white lace socks, and she wore an aquamarine church dress. But she was proudest of her black kitten heels. They were the one thing of hers I never touched, and even as she dragged me down the hall, I wouldn’t get near them.

In that hallway we found the other eleven children left in the Washerwomen’s community. Fourteen of us had made this march just the week before. I’ve got to say that we were well trained. Leave that many kids on their own for even a minute, and you can bet six of them will put their lives at risk somehow. But I only remember two boys who ever skipped out of our Saturday services, and even they only missed it a few times. We weren’t conscientious only out of fear of being punished, and that’s the part that seemed hardest for outsiders to understand. When everything went bad and the police took our statements, when reporters tracked us down, there was only one thing they refused to believe: that we’d
liked
so much of this life.

So it wasn’t a long trip to church. A walk of less than two hundred feet. From our apartment to the Washerwomen’s. The floors of our apartment building were shaped like an uppercase
F
, so for me and Daphne it was a walk from the bottom of the letter up to that first tong, turn a right and walk to the end. Ring the doorbell of apartment D3 and enter holy ground.

If that’s all it took to get there, then why did my sister and I get so stressed about the trip? It’s because the walk was a bit of a gauntlet thanks to those same boys I’d been watching outside. They loved to creep up the stairway on Saturday mornings, crack open the heavy black door, and bother us as we marched to Saturday service.

If we were lucky, they might just heckle us. Open the door and shout things like, Paging Dr. Jesus! Or they might yell, Tiiiiiiiits! (The taunts weren’t
always
about religion.) But worse was when they felt bold enough to step into the hallway and throw handfuls of pennies or gravel. Sometimes they just left bags of garbage in front of our apartment doors.

How’d those boys even find out about our Saturday morning ritual? I don’t know. None of us was going to brag that at ten
A.M.
, while regular kids were out playing tag, we suited up and spent the daylight hours kneeling in a living room. But children are clairvoyant about what makes other children squirm.

That morning Daphne and I met up with the other kids and walked toward the door of apartment D3. We kept looking back down the hallway as we moved, waiting for the neighborhood boys to appear. But they never showed up. We thought maybe they’d heard about Veronica and today they’d kept away out of sympathy. I don’t know if this was true, but it’s what we thought. And this only made us feel worse. Things must be really bad when teenage boys feel sorry for you.

For that reason I wanted to get inside the apartment. In the hallway my clothes felt like a clown suit, but inside they would return to vestments. My best friend, and pretend cousin, Wilfred, rang the bell. The Washerwomen opened the great door.

Obviously all three of them didn’t answer. It was Gina, the oldest, who let us in that morning, but when I remember them, it’s hard to think in singles or even pairs. They were a trio, from the first day to this, the very last.

“I’m so glad you could come,” Gina said.

Like we had a choice!

Gina reminded me of a duck. The way its head leans back toward the tail so that it seems suspicious of all it sees. She was the one you didn’t lie to, the oldest and least fun. Everything out of her had a lesson attached, even that greeting. “I’m so glad you could come” was meant to imply that
of course
we had a choice and we’d made the right one by appearing on time. Not a bad bit of wisdom, I guess, but I still preferred Rose’s greeting. Rose was the youngest of the three sisters. Whenever Rose answered the door, she’d just look at all us kids gathered there and say, “Who are you people?”

But I don’t want to downplay Gina’s appeal, especially that morning. She watched us as we stood at the door and didn’t say one thing to cheer us up. Instead, as we passed her in single file, she touched the top of each head, and it was a reassuring pressure. Kids like a firm hand. We’d been in danger of floating off into our fears, but Gina pulled us back down.

“Can I use the bathroom?” I asked Gina after she lifted her hand. I wanted to fix the dent she’d made in my Afro before I saw Rose.

“I don’t know,” Gina said. “Can you?”

“May I use the bathroom?” I corrected.

“Of course you may,” she answered.

Quickly I popped past my sister and Wilfred. They’d already found the other kids in the kitchen, all crowding the third Washerwoman, Karen, as she prepared biscuits for the oven. I twisted the dirty silver bathroom knob only to find Rose inside. She yelled, “Shut that door!”

Which I did.

Jumping into the bathroom and closing us both inside.

“Usually people step
out
of a bathroom when they find it occupied,” Rose said.

“Not me,” I whispered.

“I guess not,” she said. “Why are you covering your head?”

I dropped my hands.

“You need to run a pick through that hair,” she said then. “I can’t believe you left the house with it all dented like that.”

I felt too embarrassed to speak.

But then I noticed that I hadn’t caught Rose in the middle of a shower, though she was standing in the tub. On the rim of the tub, actually. With the small bathroom window up, her face to the opening, and in her right fist a lit cigarette. Nine more, smoked down to butts, were in an ashtray. She was as anxious as us children. Imagine catching Buddha biting his fingernails.
You’re
nervous?

“Wave your hands or something,” she said. “Kill the smell. Be useful.”

I flapped my arms, but there wasn’t much use in pretending I was getting rid of the smell. I kept hopping but only because it made Rose smile. Better to see her grinning than in fear. But I don’t want to pretend I was all about cheerleading. I was ten, and Rose an easy fifty-five, but my feelings for her weren’t entirely innocent. Where do crushes start? Close to home.

Rose had the kind of body that collected in the middle. Her skinny face and neck matched her skinny calves and ankles, but the parts in between were swollen. And not in a good way. She wasn’t buxom, she had a belly. She wasn’t pretty. None of the Washerwomen really were. Rose’s thin eyebrows ran together in the middle, and I never saw droopier ears. And yet that woman captivated me all the same.