Big Machine (45 page)

Still holding us, they rose to their full size and cast shade across our bodies. Both were very tall, maybe eight feet, but their bodies were nearly as flat as flags. With sage skin everywhere, but their bellies were lighter, almost yellow.

They had faces, in a way. Two tiny milky eyes that looked like pearl onions. And below those eyes two small nose holes, each no wider than the head of a tack. And just below that a wide flat mouth, really just a slit in the skin that curled down at either end so they seemed to be frowning.

This close up I could even see they had tails that hung down and whipped side to side. I heard something scraping the asphalt, and looked down to see sharp nails at the tips of their tails, the nails as gray as old bones. That must’ve been how one of them had stabbed me, how it impregnated me.

These were Angels? In whose creation?

The one grabbing my hand shook me hard again. I stopped fighting. Let go of the gun, and it fell into my coat pocket heavily. I tipped my head back and beheld the Devil’s face again.

Are you the one from the sewer? I thought.

Is one of you growing inside me?

But it didn’t respond, not one word. What do you do with all that silence?

Then it let go, flapped its body once, and flew into the air. It landed again, half a block away. The second one let go of Adele and did the same. We’d come pretty far along Adeline Street, but there were still a few cars on the street, still some adults waiting at another bus stop. But
none of them screamed, none ran in terror. Maybe no one else could see the Devils of the Marsh.

“Yo!”

Adele and I turned around to see a big yellow school bus with young kids sitting inside. Third or fourth graders maybe. Girls and boys had their faces pressed to all the windows on the left side, facing us and the Devils. The bus driver only looked ahead, at the traffic.

The bus chugged as it moved forward. The driver snaked that bus through gaps that seemed dangerously narrow. The kids all opened the windows on the side near us. Some stuck their heads out and gaped. Others crowded the glass door at the back. One boy had an arm out, as well as his head. He pointed at the Devils of the Marsh frantically, trying to direct the eye of any adult nearby. He shouted again. It sounded even louder with his window down.

“Yo!” But that boy wasn’t horrified at the sight. He was smiling.

Swamp Angels. That’s what
he
saw.

The kids kept diligent watch until their bus reached a corner. When it turned, the young faces moved to the right side of the bus. They remained there, rapt, until the bus disappeared.

Is this how Jacob felt when he met the angel? Or Mohammed as he witnessed Gabriel?

I turned back around and found the Swamp Angels still waiting on the asphalt. Two greenish silhouettes rippling in the road.

They turned and moved farther down Adeline Streeet.

“Part of me just wants to kill them,” Ms. Henry said, gesturing ahead with her chin.

But I didn’t answer her, I couldn’t. Suddenly my face burned and my shoulders tensed. To my surprise I’d taken what she’d just said personally. It felt like she’d threatened a member of my family.

IT WAS THE FOURTH DAY
.

I never took so long to move so little, but when you want to avoid the truth, a walk across the room can take a thousand years. As I inched my right hand toward the gray lump in Murder’s basement, the bobtail by my neck never moved. It stayed so still I thought it wasn’t breathing anymore. Murder’s basement took on the damp smell of a coming storm, and I wondered if the room would flood during a heavy rain. Imagine, after all this, if I drowned instead of starved. At least I’d finally get some water.

Then it really did begin to shower out there. I didn’t hear any thunder, only the first few spats of rain against the outside walls. The sound grew into a dull roar, which filled my head and only added to my confusion.

Listening to the rain distracted me so much that I didn’t even realize I’d touched the little gray bundle on my right, until it purred. And a moment after that one began, the other bobtail, the same bobtail, purred into my left ear. The hum of the cats mingled with the drumming rain until the storm seemed to enter the basement and those old cats became as elemental as the weather.

I didn’t have the power to pull away. I couldn’t move, couldn’t stand, and while my weary hand rested against the second cat, the first cat finally moved, uncurling itself from against my neck and shaking when it stretched. It looked past me to its double, still lying under my fingers.

That one woke too.

It stretched and shook and looked across my body.

And I lay there listening to both cats purr, to the steady rattle of the rain, focusing on these sounds rather than the four yellow bobtail eyes.

My neck tickled as the first cat paced along the left side of my body, bumping against my shoulder, my wrist, my knee. It reached the bottom of my left foot and stopped, bumped me there one more time and perched. Then looked at the other.

The second followed, bumping my right thigh, knee, and shin until it sat beside the first. They posted together, dispelling any doubt they were the same. Even their movements were synchronized. How could this be real? I hoped I was insane. That would only mean my mind had broken, not that the world was uncanny, unfathomable.

Squeezing their eyes in unison, breathing the same heavy sigh, the cats denied me the comfort of delirium. They were there.

Together they sniffed the bottom of my left foot, and even though I wore sneakers, I felt their wet noses against my skin. But when they pulled back, I felt my cold sock again, pointed my toes and heard the canvas of my sneaker stretch. It was like they’d passed through my clothing.

They pressed their noses to my right foot now, and instantly I felt their breath again. Even worse, when they licked their lips, the tongues tickled my skin. I even felt a charge in my bones.

The bobtails favored my right foot, put their noses up against it again, and stayed there, prodding. It was like having someone pressing a knuckle against your arch, sharp that way. I felt them against my foot, and soon the pain increased. It became so bad I swore they broke the skin. And still they pressed harder.

My body moved for me, sort of flopping backward, away from them. Was it shock? Do people bounce around in shock? Either way, my body knew the command: flee! But there wasn’t far to go. My head bumped against the basement wall. The bobtails didn’t seem bothered by this. They just crept forward and closed the distance.

They continued devouring me.

Right down to the bones. When their mouths snapped, I felt the stabs in my skeleton. It felt like they’d reached inside me. They ground my shinbone between their teeth and I
heard
the rod cracking. It sounded like the limb of a tree being torn off in a storm. Wild sensations sparked across my body, a flickering light behind my right eye, an ache in the wrist I’d broken as a boy a cool warm explosion above my left ear.

And then they chewed through the bone, down to the sticky middle. They reached the interior. My body trembled and my lungs tickled. I felt them bumping heads down there—
in
there I should say. In me. Smacking their skulls against each other in the tight glove of my skin.

My right foot looked so swollen the shoe could barely stay on. Below
my foot I only saw the bottom halves of their bodies. Their tails rose and slapped against the ground firmly. Rose again and waved in a semicircle, then whipped back against the dirt again. They’d gone through my shoe, squeezed into my flesh, popped past the bone, and got down to the marrow. I figured that was as deep as they could get.

How forgetful of me.

Many bodies will be buried, but not so many do their dying in the dirt. By ending up with these cats in Murder’s basement it was like I’d cut a few steps out of the process already. So why not simply shut my eyes and let the bobtails finish their business? By now my foot burned because they’d dug so far in there. It felt like my bones, my skin, had already turned to smoke and cinders, and the beasts would keep going up and up until my whole body returned to dust.

So just let it, I thought.

I was tired after all, almost ninety-six hours of starvation and thirst will drain you. My body would’ve run out of power even if the cats hadn’t come along.

Let it go, Ricky. Let it go.

But it turned out I was wrong about the cats. They weren’t gobbling their way through my entire body, because it wasn’t my body that interested them. Instead they reached a certain point, just below my right knee, and then they hunkered down, raising their rears while tucking their back legs. And then they started to pull.

I lay there in the darkness listening to the rain and talking myself into oblivion. The best way to avoid massive pain was to just go limp. But when I felt them tugging, it seemed like they were pulling my skeleton out of me. I opened my eyes and saw the basement wall above me get farther away as I was pulled toward the center of the room. Were they going to thrash and tear me into smaller pieces and eat those pieces one at a time? How do you relax yourself through that?

But as the wall got farther away, an inch or so with each pull, I saw that my left arm had flipped up over me, reaching for the receding wall. And yet even as the wall moved farther from view, my hand stayed as close to the wall as it had been a moment before. And again, after another pull took me farther down, my arm remained in the same place. After a few more tugs I noticed the sides of my own face getting farther from me. What I mean is, my eye sockets seemed like two well holes and I was falling deeper into the earth. I was being pulled down inside my own body, and when they finished eating, there’d only be this husk left behind. That’s what the cats were after. Not my flesh. My soul.

The surprise was that I even had a soul to eat.

I don’t mean this in the self-congratulatory way that people with
tough lives usually do, where we talk about all our terrible exploits and how we acted so badly, but underneath it you can hear us bragging.

What I mean is, even though I’d been raised as a Christian, I’d never actually believed in the idea of a soul. People hear that you grew up religious, and they can’t imagine you’d have a complex relationship with faith. If you believe one part, you must believe it all. But who gets more chances to see the absurdities than the devout? An answer that’s satisfying on Sunday becomes contradictory by Wednesday night. Belief is a wrestling match that lasts a lifetime. So I’d certainly been taught about the soul, cautioned to protect it, read relevant verses in various versions of Scripture, including the Washerwomen’s own. And for all that, I must admit, it remained more an idea than a conviction.

But now, in Murder’s basement, it wasn’t my body and it wasn’t my mind. So what else could these creatures consume?

I only found out I had a soul when I was losing it.

That’s when I thought of my father.

THE SWAMP ANGELS USED THE WIND
to move. They didn’t fly, they glided. Sticking their chests out until their upper bodies took on the shape of a sail and trapped breezes against their backs. This lifted them so high they almost floated off, but before this happened, they’d anchor themselves to the ground by digging the tips of their thin feet into cracks in the concrete. They leapt forward from one groove to the next, moving five feet with each step.

When they reached the low fencing around a parking lot, they hopped up and wrapped their feet loosely around the horizontal poles, then curved their bodies forward, puffing their chests to let the wind push them. Sliding along the rail until they reached the end and hopped off, were sucked backward while in midair, and then floated toward the ground. Here they caught at more cracks in the sidewalk and did the same grip-toed tiptoe again. Their tails swayed from one side to the other, keeping their bodies balanced as they soared. It felt natural to be awed.

In the air their bodies fluttered slowly, their tails stiff behind them.

“They look like stingrays,” I told Adele.

“Isn’t that something to see?” she said.

I WAS THREE YEARS OLD
when my mother, Carolyn, didn’t return from her missionary assignment in the field as expected. She’d been in an accident on Route 2 in Michigan, but we didn’t know it at the time. It wasn’t unheard of for a parent to be a day or two late. It might be something as simple as road weariness that slowed a person down if she was driving back to Queens from Colorado.

But Sargent Rice felt eager to go on his assignment and wasn’t willing to wait. For years afterward he justified leaving by saying the Washerwomen were strict about their missionary schedules. We called them commissions. But they’d have given him a little time if he’d asked.

My dad believed in the Washerwomen’s teachings, I know he did, but he also just wanted his full hundred and fifty days away from us. He wasn’t so different from lots of married people. For instance, our mother never lingered when her travel date arrived. Lots of good-bye kisses, all the hugs me and Daphne pleased, but her eyes stayed focused on the front door.

Our parents weren’t getting vacations. They worked hard as they crossed the country, and endured levels of dismissal and anger that I can never imagine. But the other seats in their rented cars were vacant. The motel bed only had to accommodate one. No children demanding. Time alone is pornography for people with families.

So at this time I was three and Daphne eight, Mom still getting a splint put on her arm in Michigan, but Dad’s discharge date arrived, and Sargent Rice had to serve. Other parents did the same thing occasionally,
watching one another’s tykes. They even had a buddy system to help one another out. My father left each of us with a family in the community and asked them not to tell the Washerwomen, who would’ve objected. This wasn’t as impossible to hide as you’d think. People keep terrific secrets from one another even in a one-room shack. You think they couldn’t hide a couple of kids for seventy-two hours? The Dhumals watched Daphne and Ms. Rush took me.