Big Machine (26 page)

I walked the block toward downtown Garland and reached a pay phone. I moved with an awkward stoop so I wouldn’t brush my nipples against my shirt fabric. Whenever I did, it felt as if I’d rubbed my chest with broken glass. I kept stopping and reaching into my shirt because I expected to see some blood. But there never was any. Finally, I stopped redoing the Norfolk jacket and let the front hang open.

At the pay phone I went through each of the calling cards the Gray Lady had given me. The first two barely had a nickel left on them, but the third had a whole dollar. I got Ms. Henry’s voice mail and told her what happened at Laguna Lake. I didn’t ask her to come find me.

As soon as I hung up, I felt the boiling feeling from my arm again, but this time it had moved up to the space between my left shoulder and my neck. It felt like a hand grabbing my scruff, and I turned expecting to find the cop from the lake, but I was alone. The throbbing near my neck threatened to knock me out. When’s the last time you ate? I asked myself. Maybe all this could be solved with a little food.

But even after my third convenience store spicy tuna roll, I wasn’t feeling any better. I went back in for a big bag of guacamole chips and even a pint of orange juice. When I finished those, I bought a cherry ice cream bar. Thank goodness for that per diem. I didn’t eat this way normally, but this time I just passed through the aisle, and whatever I craved I ate.

I missed my rented room back in Utica, the one right over a barbershop where the owner sold weed back by the hair dryers. The closest thing I had to a home base in Garland was the By the Bay hotel. I used my last phone card to call a cab. Let them fight their war without me.

THE CAB LET ME OFF
on the corner of 35th and San Pablo Avenue, but instead of using the front entrance of the hotel, going through the lobby, I went around back. Seeing that homeless boy Martin, under Solomon Clay’s influence made me a little suspicious of every vagabond I passed. Mr. Clay might’ve pushed the boy forward, but it was Martin who’d carried that explosive bag. He’d played a willing part. So now even a crowd of smokers in front of By the Bay might be more soldiers in Solomon Clay’s indigent army. Using the service entrance seemed safer.

I went one block over, and was amazed by the new quiet. On San Pablo Avenue you heard the jabber of a hundred cars as they moved along the street, but the loudest sound on Chestnut Street was the wind thumping against the old houses across the road. It was so hushed that I even heard the window blinds snapping in one of the hotel rooms above me.

Looking up, I saw that loud old blind swinging out through one room’s open window like a big gray flag. Those blinds probably hadn’t been white in years. I didn’t like seeing it slipping past the frame, though. What if someone tripped and went right through the opening? I looked at the ground, expecting to see a suicide, because, you know, this day hadn’t yet been morbid enough. But I found nothing.

The blind snapped again up there. Once, twice.

It wasn’t until I reached the back parking lot that I realized the sound of the blind had stopped. I looked up just because it made me feel better to know the window was safely shut. The sun flashed in my eyes. I point this out to admit I was squinting, not a perfect witness, in other words. But I still know what I saw: the big gray shape had slipped out of the window. It pressed against the brick wall of the hotel. But, rather than being carried off with the wind, the big gray shroud moved up.

It climbed.

NOW CAME THE HARD PART
for the Washerwomen, giving a sermon in a storm.

We’d said our peaceful greetings, then pounced at the snacks set out by the Washerwomen. Within minutes the kids were all in fifth gear. I mean amped. Talk about getting high! Methamphetamine has nothing on sugar bread, and trust me, I know.

Thirteen live wires in their living room, and even the Washerwomen looked a little scared. I could tell because this whole morning they hadn’t sat as close as they did now. We whooped and hopped, damn near hollered, and the living room floor bucked beneath us. Even the state maps on the walls began to flutter. We made the whole country shake.

I wonder if it wasn’t this kind of thing that actually turned our neighbors against us. Not that they were religiously intolerant, but they didn’t want to live above or below a juke joint that got loudest on Saturday mornings. Right when they meant to rest. Maybe the first few calls to child services only happened because the Washerwomen conducted riots in their living room.

“All right now,” Karen said. “All right.”

But it hardly registered. Not over all our noise.

Gina and Rose stayed seated, but clapped loudly. Hushing and shushing, but I don’t believe they meant it. I think they
liked
the way we turned all wild. A preacher loves to channel the ecstatic much more than motivating the mild.

“You must control yourselves,” Gina said, but her voice wavered.

Only Rose spoke loud enough just then.

“You all have been going on long enough!” she shouted. “If I have to get off this couch, I’m gonna whup every one a you.”

Most of us had the good sense to heed her threat. We’d heard rumors about what the Washerwomen had done in Jacksonville, because parents hide the truth as well as sieves hold water. But we didn’t believe those stories were true. Not Gina, Karen, and Rose. Still, a respectful fear remained. We quieted down.

Everyone but me.

I couldn’t help myself. Most of the kids had restricted themselves to one or two pieces of sugar bread, but that morning I’d had three. Okay, four. This wasn’t a cafeteria. The Washerwomen didn’t keep track of how many times you got in line. And by the second piece of bread there were no lines, just a mob grabbing at the tray. I didn’t always eat four pieces, but I’d been gluttonous this time. Let’s say it was nerves. I might as well have poured the sugar from the container straight down my throat. I was plugged in. That’s why I didn’t listen. One hundred thousand watts.

Also, Annabelle Cuddy kissed me! It was my first kiss. And Wilfred saw it. It wasn’t just the sugar.

And what was I doing with all that power? Imagining things. I guess that’s what you could say. Not seeing hallucinations, but living in a daydream. While some of the kids had been dancing and hopping, a bunch of us boys wrestled in one corner of the living room. That’s what boys do when we’re excited. Or angry. Or nervous. Bored. Pretty much every occasion is a good occasion to get our fists up. And the Washerwomen encouraged this. They were Southern women who had no interest in raising punks. Both girls and boys were meant to be strong. You might fistfight or just argue, but you better not lose.

I’d squared off against some other boy at first, but Wilfred quickly stepped in. He’d basically bumped the other boy toward the stereo set and then come at me. Wilfred was only ten, but easily mistaken for a young man. And me? I might be mistaken for a stick of black licorice.

Nevertheless, I’d hopped on Wilfred’s back. You could say I was choking him, but that’s probably generous. I like to think I made a nice necklace, at least.

“Now, now …,” Karen wheezed, stooped over, as if she might collapse. “Be cool.”

Wilfred had probably stopped being real angry after a few minutes of fighting. I sensed this because he hadn’t pulled me off his shoulders and squeezed all the water out of me. He was really only giving me a piggyback ride at this point, but in my head I meted out hellish tortures.

I forgot to mention what I’d been daydreaming about, exactly. I was playing out a scene from my favorite book in the King James Bible. The book of Esther. That was my nectar. I never admitted it to anyone, but the Washerwomen’s version of Esther just didn’t compare. They couldn’t match the bloodlust of the ancient world.

No surprise, of course. It’s got to be the most mindlessly violent story in the whole book. The one where the Jews rise up against their enemies and, at one point, slay seventy-five thousand of them in one day. That’s 3,125 people per hour! Talk about a valley of slaughter! Can you see why this would thrill a boy like me?

Also there’s a great moment in the Second Book of Kings when the prophet Elisha is walking through a town called Bethel. Some small boys see him and start yelling, “Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!” So what does Elisha do? Does he forgive? Nope. He curses them in the name of the Lord, and in the next moment two she-bears come out of the woods and maul forty-two children. I used to draw pictures of the she-bears chewing off boys’ heads.

In the Washerwomen’s version the same moment takes place on the south side of Chicago. The children all taunt the bald prophet, whose name is now Hampton. The kids shout, “Crackhead! Crackhead!” But instead of she-bears this prophet calls forth two rottweilers. The kids still get their heads bit off, so that was pretty good.

So when Rose made her threat to us kids, I didn’t register it because I wasn’t there. I was back with Esther. How could I, a Jew living in the land of King Ahasuerus, heed the cautions of a woman sitting on a couch in Queens? I was squeezing at evil Haman’s neck! (Boo! Hiss!) I couldn’t stop until I’d dragged him to the gallows once meant for my man Mordecai.

“That boy is getting on my last nerve,” Rose said.

And in my manic state I shouted, “Go have another cigarette! The bathroom’s free!”

You ever seen a black woman fly?

When I said those words, Rose launched off that couch. Rose. Object of my adoration. Fifty-five years old and a heavy smoker, but she changed, her every organ revitalized by rage.

She raced across the room, and children scurried from her way. Even Wilfred had the good sense to submit. He tapped my arm, the one still around his neck, and shouted my name. Finally he flung me off his back and fell to the floor, and Rose actually leapt over his big butt. That’s when I fully returned to the present. To the Washerwomen’s living room.

Rose’s eyes were flat and blank, her mouth curled up into the kind of
howl you find etched into gargoyles that guard monasteries. She wasn’t herself. Or she wasn’t the woman I’d met just an hour before. In this state she might really throw me out the living room window. It was the first time I believed she really might’ve killed her family.

Had I really just been praising, even celebrating, violence?

Well, let me amend that. I am morally opposed to violence, anywhere and everywhere, if it’s directed at me.

In the meantime, being only ten and unable to articulate my newfound respect for peace, I did the next best thing. I screamed.

“Daphne!”

Someone else might’ve beseeched Jesus, but my idol was already in the room. Daphne Rice. With her hair pulled back into a short ponytail, she had the silhouette of a claw hammer. And she could hit just as hard, let me tell you.

My big sister jumped to her feet.

Rose was nearly on top of me.

Daphne threw herself between us.

Then things got a little nuts.

I DIDN’T GO RUNNING
into my hotel, but I couldn’t exactly run away either. Where would I go? Instead, I stood in the parking lot and tried to convince my mind that my eyes had been lying. There had
never
been any blind flapping out through an open window, and so
nothing
had pulled itself up another two stories and then flopped over, onto the roof.

Somehow my brain wasn’t convinced—it refused to let the rest of me move—but it couldn’t come up with a better plan. We had to go inside because the outside was even less defensible. At least I had a key to my room. If I wandered the streets, I’d collapse, just one more bum, and there were plenty of those around San Pablo Avenue already.

Go inside, I thought. Let’s just get to it.

So I opened the back entrance and found a squad of old men huddled in the service hallway. Three sat on a row of chairs, and the fourth held a video recorder, taping them. I thought I’d walked onto the set of a Sunday morning political chat show. But instead of three old white guys in bad suits, it was three old black guys in bad sweaters. They sat in a semicircle and spoke into the camera, slowly, though they stopped a moment after I opened the door. It was such a confusing sight that I stepped backward, even stammered an apology as the sunlight illuminated their faces.

“Step in or step out,” said the guy doing the taping.

I didn’t recognize him or the one seated closest to me, but the other two were more familiar. The man in the green sweater had ridden the elevator down to the lobby with me earlier that day. And, sitting in the
middle, was that clown in the wheelchair. The guy with all the jokes. I stepped inside, slamming the door shut. Now the director stepped away from the recorder.

“You ruined our shot!” he said.

I slapped the corroded green walls. “I did you a favor.”

I expected a louder response, especially from the one in the wheelchair. At the very least I thought he’d crack wise. If the guy in the sweater thought I had looked bad earlier, I must’ve seemed undead by now. But they didn’t speak, none of them. They only seethed. This made them seem more serious. For the first time I actually looked at the cheap camera, noticed the low ceiling and dim lighting. They were filming themselves, but the image wouldn’t come out too well. The three men would hardly be seen. The director went back to the camera, his face lost behind the machine.

“Get on now,” one of them said. “This is grown folks’ business.”

What would they do to me if I stayed? The part of me that likes to argue wanted to find out, but my stomach pitched. I couldn’t catch a break from my body. The throbbing and burning in my neck had stopped, but in their place I felt a powerful nausea. I left those men because I had to a find a toilet.

I floated from the ground floor to the fourth. Even before I stepped inside the elevator, I imagined myself ascending. As the elevator rose, I was already walking down the fourth-floor hallway. And as the elevator opened, I was already on my bed, comatose.

So I was halfway down the dark fourth-floor hallway before I noticed the broken lights.