Big Machine (25 page)

Mr. Clay stooped over me. “Do you want to know the order the Voice gave me? Just three words.”

I could move my body, but the shock of the blast paralyzed my mind. I couldn’t meld thoughts with actions. When I tried to hit him, grab him, I only found myself slapping the ground. My back stung sharply, between the shoulder blades, like I’d fallen on a stone.

Solomon said, “Vengeance is mine.”

ROSE FINISHED HER LAST CIGARETTE
and left me alone in the bathroom. I might’ve stayed until sunset if Karen, the middle sister, hadn’t come to the door. She twisted the knob a few times, lightly, so I’d know someone was there, and then waited patiently until I unlocked the door and opened it. She was in the hallway, kneeling, pretending to sweep crumbs from the clean floor.

“Did you think we wouldn’t miss you, Ricky?”

Because of her illness Karen had gone down to about a hundred pounds. She’d been nearly two hundred once. There were deep lines on either side of her mouth, and her eyebrows were falling out. They were only two black pecks above each eye.

“You can’t come in here,” I whispered.

“Why’s that?”

“It smells.”

“Did you have a BM?” she asked.

“No!” I shouted. Not only out of embarrassment, but because
BM
was a term reserved for three-year-olds. I was ten.

Karen leaned backward, resting her butt on her feet, and moved her head left to right trying to see inside, around me.

“It smells like cigarettes,” I explained.

Karen put her hand over her mouth and nose.

“How many did Rose smoke?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A lot.”

Karen tapped the door with her pointer finger. “Let me in.”

So I opened the door, and she lifted herself into a crouch and walked inside. Then she stood, sniffed, and smiled at me, for me.

“Can’t hardly tell,” she said.

Then she coughed like hell for more than a minute.

Her beige pantsuit flapped, loose around the legs and midsection, though they’d been snug only a year before. When she recovered, Karen said, “I don’t want you telling Gina about Rose’s smoking, okay? Even if she asks.”

“That’s lying.”

“Yes it is, Ricky. I’m telling you to lie to my sister.”

A kid is always confused by straight answers from adults. He’s not taught to expect them. But, after thinking her answer through, I thought I understood so I said, “Okay.”

Karen Robins, feeblest of the Washerwomen, but the one who actually kept our community’s pulse. She touched the sink. Rubbed at water spots on the faucet.

“We’re going,” she whispered. “You’ve heard?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Now Karen held my cheek. “And are you ready?”

I didn’t know the answer, so I didn’t speak.

“I’m very tired,” she said.

I put her hand on my shoulder, led Karen out into the living room.

It was a large space, as cold as a meat locker, chilly in the winter because the windows never sat evenly in their frames. We strove toward spiritual triumph, but we still lived in a tenement.

There were state maps on the walls and little red lines drawn over various routes. This was how we tracked the movements of our parents, the pilgrims. I felt I knew the back roads and highways of the United States intimately because of all the time I spent staring at the pathways of our folks. We’d get letters from them with detailed driving directions or bus routes, read them aloud on Saturdays and then draw the lines onto the maps with red pens. When our mother couldn’t send letters, she’d mail me and Daphne local newspapers and we’d pore over them closely to guess at the routes between this town and the last. In this way Carolyn Rice educated us even from a thousand miles away.

I entered the living room to find the other kids already sitting on the floor. The state maps covered all four walls. America wrapped itself around us.

Gina and Rose sat on a yellow sofa pressed against one wall. Karen joined them while Rose gave me a suspicious eye. Gina poured iced tea from a green plastic pitcher into tall cups for herself and her sisters. I refused
to look back at Rose and tried to find an open spot on the cut pile carpet.

There were a few spaces, one right beside Daphne, for instance, but forget that. I spent enough time with her. I went farther back, toward the windows, but not because I hoped to peek outside. That’s just where I’d find Miss Annabelle Cuddy.

Annabelle Cuddy, I still remember you! With your mouth of crowded teeth and your enormous Puerto Rican Afro. You bit your nails until your fingers bled. We danced to Ohio Players’ “Fire” at a party in your living room.

But despite what I might’ve wished, she was not my little girlfriend. She hadn’t decided between me and Wilfred, my play-cousin. I wonder if everyone, everywhere, used that term,
play-cousin
. It means that we weren’t related, but always close. Best of friends. Real road dogs. Right up until Annabelle Cuddy became beautiful.

So, my dawdling in the bathroom meant that Wilfred had enjoyed many minutes alone with Annabelle, and apparently he’d used them correctly. When I got there, she was leaning close as he spoke into her ear, and when she tipped over too far, she threw her arm around his shoulder.

And the thing about Wilfred is that he actually had shoulders to grab. Same age as me, but he looked twenty. How is that possible? He’d skipped six grades of puberty. What ten-year-old is big enough to dunk? This was happening in 1975, don’t forget, not the modern era, when sixth graders look ready for the NBA.

But I had two things over Wilfred. The first is that he was big, but lumpy, and self-conscious about it. When Annabelle put her arm around him, I watched him shift, afraid she’d drop her hand and graze his gut.

The second thing I had over Wilfred Tanner? The boy had no game.

Wilfred thought “Pssst!” was how you woo a woman.

I sat down on the other side of Annabelle quick, trying to think of something funny, but before I could speak, the oven bell rang in the kitchen and Gina left the room. We’d been going through this ceremony for years, so it was natural, nearly automatic, for all the kids to stop shifting or flirting and sit straight until Gina returned to the living room. We’d lived with the ritual too long to do otherwise.

The Washerwomen only brought three things with them from Florida: their guns, their love of college football, and any number of outstanding Southern recipes. Gina carried a plate of hot biscuits, a bowl of butter, a bowl of sugar, and a stack of napkins all on a tray. Combine the biscuits, butter, and sugar to make yourself some sugar bread. In the desert the Jews received manna. In Queens we were also blessed.

This might seem crazy, feeding so many young bodies that much
sugar and then tucking them indoors until nighttime, but really we only bounced around for about half an hour, and after the rush we settled into a daze that lasted well past lunchtime, ready to listen quietly for hours. A truly prostrate audience. The Washerwomen weren’t fools, not on their worst day. They knew how to hold on to our crowd.

“Before we eat,” Gina said, covering the biscuits with a napkin.

The first thing, always, was to pray.

Karen stood slowly. Rose and Gina followed. Then all the children stood and bowed our heads and recited the Lord’s Prayer in the traditional words. They didn’t try to revise, improve, or modernize everything in the Bible. Some things were ideal already. We prayed for Veronica’s safe return. We were thankful to find all our parents back with us. We asked for protection while our community moved.

“The peace of the Lord be with you always,” Rose whispered at the end.

“And also with you,” we responded. Then we moved around the room, shaking hands.

Annabelle stood between Wilfred and me. She waited to watch us wrestle for her touch. Wilfred even turned toward me, flexing his fat hands. I think he actually meant to fight, right in front of the Washerwomen. That boy was in love! But I turned my back on both of them and walked over to my sister.

“Peace be with you,” I said as I shook Daphne’s veiny hand.

“Peace be with you too, Ricky.”

I looked back at Annabelle and Wilfred. They were so surprised by my exit they hadn’t even touched each other yet. He looked confused. When she turned to him now, she didn’t smile. It was one thing to choose Wilfred, another to be stuck with him.

Daphne smacked me in the back of the neck, just for jokes, and then moved on. I kneeled in front of a small girl, Altagracia Munoz, who already had her hand out.

She shouted, “Peace be with you, Ricky!”

“Peace be with you,” I said.

I understood her excitement. The adults might have been preparing for our mass migration, but I couldn’t be anxious right then. This was my favorite part of the day. Shuffling around and greeting one another. So much of our lives was spent memorizing the stories of the Bible (both the Washerwomen’s version and the King James) or listening to a sermon, meditating on concepts like goodness or sin, that it was easy to forget the glory of simple affection. To look into another person’s eyes and wish them peace. To have them do the same. The surprise is when you realize you both actually mean it.

Now the living room felt cozy despite the cold.

Those state maps along the walls had been put up so we could track our parents, the red lines illustrations of their commitment, but eventually the maps themselves became manifestations of our mothers and fathers. Here in Queens, with us, in their place. So it became a habit to even wish peace to these sheets of paper because then we were still touching our loved ones. And even though our folks were actually back in Queens that morning, we tapped the maps out of habit, moving from one wall to the next.

Peace be with you Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, and Utah.

Peace be with you Mississippi and New Mexico.

And so on, crossing the living room as if we were settlers traveling the Great Plains.

We treated the whole nation as our family.

The practice of shaking hands as part of the greeting was pretty much the standard in churches by that time. But it wasn’t the only choice. There were congregations that only smiled and nodded to one another, nothing more. Some hugged. There’s even something called the
holy kiss;
that one goes back to Saint Paul. But it wasn’t used much. You know how people get about smooching just anybody, even somebody they know. But that afternoon I felt it was time for a return to Saint Paul’s holy kiss and suggested it to Annabelle after Wilfred had no choice but to leave her side so he could shake hands with the other kids.

I saw my opportunity so I slid up beside her and explained the history of the greetings. Handshake, hug, and wave. And, of course, that holy kiss. A practice in need of revival. Did she feel holy enough,
Christian
enough, to bring it back? For instance, she could begin with me….

Annabelle, I remember your exasperation!

But also, my lips blessed by yours.

WHEN I WOKE UP AGAIN
, a paramedic and a cop stood on either side of me, but I wasn’t lying on the ground anymore. I’d been propped up on a bench.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to move an unconscious body” I said to the EMT.

“I didn’t move you,” she said.

The cop watched me. Was that a flash of recognition on his face? I’d been shifted one hundred yards farther back from where I’d fallen when the bomb went off. Solomon Clay must have dragged me to safety. That’s what I thought first. But then, I’d been safe right where I was, so why pick me up, really? Then I figured that moving me made for perfect cover. He wasn’t running from the scene, just helping a victim.

The cop asked, “Where were you before?”

“Way up there.” I pointed, and my left arm throbbed. The whole thing, from fingertip to shoulder. Like I’d dipped it in boiling water.

“Do you feel any pain?”

The EMT leaned forward as she asked this, and her shirt hung away from her boney frame. I looked right down there and saw her bra, a robin’s-egg-blue. I should’ve mentioned my forearm, but suddenly it wasn’t my primary concern. Now my nipples stung real bad. I leaned forward to answer her question and flinched when my skin scratched my cotton shirt.

“Is it your chest?” she asked.

I nodded, pulled at the belt of my Norfolk jacket. Had Solomon put
this back on me? It took me a couple tries to get it open, and while I flailed, the EMT and the cop just watched.

“That’s some outfit,” the EMT said.

The cop nodded, spoke louder than he had the first time. “Are you visiting from another country?”

I finally popped the belt, opened the jacket, undid the shirt, my chest stinging the whole time. Only to find there were no marks, no scratches, burns, or cuts. Just my two brown nipples.

The EMT leaned close, poked at me with a gloved hand, frowned a little.

“You can close that up now,” she said. “I don’t see anything wrong. Why don’t you let us take you to the hospital?”

But she spoke without enthusiasm. I think I wasn’t interesting enough. Weren’t there some people out here who’d experienced real trauma? She hadn’t become an EMT to give middle-aged men chest massages. And while I needed the help, I felt paranoid, like I’d been broken down to my very last compound, the part that’s kin to a cornered rat. If they had me in a hospital, they could handcuff me to the bed. I know how it sounds, a little unrational, but I wanted to find a dark corner where I could curl up alone. Let me get my thoughts together. So I told the EMT I didn’t want to go in for treatment, and she walked away before I finished the sentence. Leaving me with the policeman.

He asked for basic stuff, name and address. He asked to see some proof so I gave him my New York nondriver ID. After writing down that info, he asked why I’d come all the way to Garland since my ID still listed my home as Utica, New York. He waited for a suspicious answer. But I offered the blandest one instead. I came out here for love. I’m in this city because of a woman. This disappointed him so much that he returned my ID quickly.

Nearby a table with bottles of water was set up next to an ambulance, and I took a bottle. A pair of geese nipped at an EMT’s jump kit as if it was a lunch box. Survivors with the worst injuries had already been evacuated, so only the lucky ones, like me, and the unlucky ones, the corpses under the colonnade, remained. Plus lots and lots of spectators, huddled in agitated crowds along the sidewalks across the street from Laguna Lake. First Stone Mason Square, and now this?