Big Machine (49 page)

The population of this whole embattled city moved at a similar pace. In hopes of escaping downtown Garland, a great number of refugees had migrated here. This barren zone had to be safer than the city center. I didn’t see the National Guard or the army. Those troops were all stuck on the other side of Stitch Bridge, protecting the stuff, the people, who’d been deemed important. We were on our own.

Attention Garland: chaos has been declared.

Prepare to see an American city tear itself apart.

But this was a funny kind of anarchy. A mood unlike earlier, when we’d biked through the panicked traffic. Different from the frenzy in the people who’d beaten that bum in front of the burger stand and the other one farther up Adeline Street. Now the drivers were more careful and the pedestrians held hands.

Cars on these roads filled fast. Groups of people climbed inside any passing vehicle with room, and they were welcomed in. On the next
block two teenagers had a big red cooler open. They passed out bottles of water to anyone.

Couples, trios, and quartets of people walked together on the streets. Holding each other up. Some of them crying, others still shocked. But no one seemed abandoned. Someone grabbed you up if you were alone. They pulled you close.

We’d been left on our own, but Garland held itself together.

Adele and I made it another two blocks before she finally spoke.

“Where is it?” she asked.

I looked up and down the street. Unsure of what she meant.

“The …,” she said.

Then she cupped her small hands into a bowl.

“My back. Up by the shoulder blades.”

She slowed and looked, checking for a baby bump. Her face drooped with disappointment when she saw that it wasn’t there.

It was a cobalt blue morning, which looked as though it would turn into another warm afternoon.

We reached Market and 3rd Street. A triage center had been set up in the parking lot of a self-storage building. By triage I just mean that someone had come from a local pharmacy with bags of aspirin, ointment, and bandages. A small table carried bottled water and crackers. The folks on one side of the table looked as bewildered as the folks on the other.

“Can I touch it?” Adele asked.

We were across from that parking lot, in the shadow of a low brick building. She had her arms crossed and her eyes focused on the wall behind me. I didn’t answer until she looked at me.

“Let’s go around the corner.”

“Do it here,” she said.

“You see all those people right over there?”

She stepped between me and the curb, her back to them. “No, I don’t,” she said.

I pulled my shirt out from my waistband, and warm air snuck underneath.

I had to undo a few of the lower buttons if she was going to feel the spot, but that was difficult on my own, one-handed. I couldn’t get the buttons open. She saw this and stepped closer to help, but she couldn’t do it either. While I tried and failed at one, she tried and failed at another. We were both too busy shaking.

Finally we stopped and put our hands down to let them settle.

When I tried again, I had an easier time. I just sort of pinched them open, one by one.

She watched me.

The lowest button first. Then the next. Until I’d opened my shirt most of the way.

Adele looked at my exposed stomach. She lifted her right hand and spread the fingers wide to press her palm against my belly.

But she couldn’t do it. Her body fought her mind. Or vice versa. I didn’t interrupt.

Finally she rubbed the back of one finger, the pointer finger, against me. Not even the whole finger, just the knuckle. Right above my belly button. That’s all she could do for a while.

When she turned her hand around and touched my side, I didn’t even notice right away. Her caress sent me into a trance of my own. Her hand slid inside my shirt now, moving to the small of my back. Her arms weren’t long enough to keep so far away. She had to step closer.

Adele’s cheek rested against my chest.

She reached up my back, and the skin felt warm, both hers and mine.

“Is this the spot?”

“A little higher.”

“Here?”

“There.”

The fluttering began as something light, but then it grew stronger. It felt loud inside me. I thought, She might even
hear
it if she keeps this close.

I looked at the top of her head.

I said, “Adele. I’m going to put my arms around you now.”

SO WHY TELL YOU ALL THIS?
Any of this.

It’s a fair question. Let’s call this my testament, then. After all, it’s been five months and you’re nearly here. I can’t say that as a fact—who knows exactly how long it takes a child like you to be born—but I feel it’s true. You’re coming out.

You’ve grown. I know that much, because I can barely walk anymore. I’m so stooped over that I’ve been looking at nothing but the tops of my shoes for three weeks. That’s when Adele put me on bed rest.

And I’m worried, let me admit that. Suppose I don’t survive the birth? I’ve been trying to keep healthy. No junk at all and I’m eating better food. I still have a few drinks now and then, which I hear American doctors don’t like, but I doubt they’d have much good advice about you.

What will you know about your father if I don’t tell it? That’s why I’ve written all this business down. Maybe you’d only know what other people say. I’m not sure how many, besides your mother, would be kind.

You have five grandparents on my side of the family alone, that’s how I think of it. Carolyn and Sargent Rice, naturally, but I’m including the Washerwomen too. Having that many grandmothers means you’re a lucky baby.

But if you ever do get curious about my family, assuming you do grow up and that you can read, or even walk among human beings—wow, so many “ifs” to worry about … If you get curious, you’ll find a handful of notices about the Washerwomen. And only two about the Rice family. One lists Daphne Rice, nothing more than a name and age, as a murder
victim from that night in the stairway. She was buried in Nassau Knolls Cemetery out in Port Washington, the service paid for by an Episcopal church. The second lists the jail time both Carolyn and Sargent Rice were given (seven and twelve years respectively though neither served half that).

And the last article about the Washerwomen will explain that all three sisters hung themselves on the same night, at the same time, in their cells. This despite the fact that they were incarcerated in three different prisons and never allowed to communicate.

BUT LET ME TELL YOU
about when Adele and I reached the corners of MacArthur Boulevard and Fruitvale Avenue, a busy intersection where people stumbled around trying to figure out how they’d make it home. A hundred people, maybe more, waiting at the bus stop, watching the road, as if something as ugly as a city bus would reassure them.

Adele and I had stopped across the street from the crowd, in front of an empty bank. We acted as if we just needed to catch our breath, but maybe we wanted to see the bus roll up too.

The people across the street clapped and shouted now, and when I looked to my right, I saw a bus at the top of the hill. A bus covered in dust. This dirty, gray bank safe came crawling down the block, and folks nearly went to tears. There were passengers inside it already, too many, in fact. Even the bus driver sat at an angle, tilting to the left, her face pressed against the glass.

But the bus stopped. A few people got off, which meant there was room for a few more.

A debate started at the bus stop, who from the crowd would be allowed on board? There were mothers with tiny children, which was one good argument. A few very pregnant women who huffed and held their bellies from underneath. I felt a special sympathy for them. But finally everyone agreed: a quartet of senior citizens walked to the bus door. Each climbed inside slowly. Those left on the sidewalk glumly watched the bus go, then looked back to the horizon.

I pushed myself off the hot brick wall.

“Give me your phone,” I said.

“Who are you calling?”

“The Dean.”

She didn’t like the idea, but I must’ve been grinning so hard she knew I wouldn’t be deterred. I felt good. I felt righteous. She opened her purse and recited the number as I dialed.

“Ms. Henry!” the Dean answered.

“This is Ricky Rice.”

“Mr. Rice! It’s only been four days, but we miss you.”

The way he said it, so casually it nearly made me faint. Four days!

“I just thought I better call you.”

“I’m glad you did. We’ve got to bring you home. What’s all that noise?”

“That’s the aftermath of your plans,” I said.

“Oh, my. Was it bad?”

“Yes.”

“Very bad?” he asked. The Dean’s joy registered in sharp little breaths.

“Just turn on the news,” I said.

“I certainly will do that. I certainly will.”

“Ms. Henry drowned in the Bay,” I said.

“And what about Solomon?”

“He’s dead too. I’m pretty sure.”

The Dean laughed into the phone. “How mysterious!”

“Thousands of people died!”

The Dean stayed silent on the line for a breath or two.

“That’s unfortunate, Ricky. I’m sure it is. But the sooner you come back home, the sooner you’ll forget them.”

I couldn’t believe this mug! If he’d said that claptrap in front of me, I would’ve dropped him into a mortar and used my left arm like a pestle.

“I’m not coming back,” I said.

“Is that right?”

Adele mimed the “hang up” signal, but I turned my back.

“So what you going to do?” the Dean asked. “Get another sweeping job?”

“If I have to.”

He growled into the phone, “How you going to raise a baby on that kind of money?”

The big phone trembled in my hand. “What?”

His voice changed, lost the playfulness and found the gristle.

“You listening to me now, junky? I’m like an oracle. I told you that. Did you think I was just jawing? I knew what was going to happen. That’s why I sent
you
.”

“You sent me because I did good work,” I whispered.

“Are you stupid, or just dumb? Violet had you beat, straight up and down. But what if that thing kills you coming out? I’m going to risk my best Scholar on that chance? Hell, no.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“Want me to swear on a Bible?” He laughed. “Now you come back to Vermont
today
, or I’m sending Violet to tear it out.”

“Violet won’t do it,” I said.

The Dean sucked his teeth. “Violet’s
grateful
to the Library. She knows it saved her life. You really think she’d hesitate to show her appreciation? You sure didn’t.”

I didn’t want to get into chest-bumping with this man. What were we really going to do to each other besides shout? Maybe I could make this conversation more useful to me.

“So you know what it is, then?” I tried to make it sound like I was testing him, but really I was just looking for some corroboration.

“It’s an Angel, Ricky.”

“But why put something like that in me?”

“Because their numbers are dwindling! And like any other species, they want to survive.”

“How many are left?”

“Just two, Ricky. Now imagine if something happened to them.”

Once again I saw their bodies burning down to ashes as they held Solomon on the pier.

“You’d be carrying the last Angel on earth,” the Dean said.

“Why do you want it so bad?”

He hissed into the phone, “Imagine how powerful the Library would be with an Angel as our servant.”

“That sounds like slavery to me.”

Before I could say any more, the phone fell out of my hand. Adele had smashed me with her purse. The big plastic phone popped against the ground, but it was too sturdy to break.

“How long you want to chat with him,” she shouted. “Maybe he’s tracing the call!”

“He already knows we’re in Garland!”

She slapped her purse against the concrete. “But now he knows we’re not coming back,” she moaned. “We could’ve used that extra time to run.”

The big phone made a few noises then. Sounded like static, but I picked the phone up and heard the Dean hissing with laughter.

“Adele,” he shouted, “is that you? Sounds like you survived after all.”

She looked at me then, and her big cheeks sagged. Her eyelids drooped. I finally turned off the phone. I felt so angry that I cocked my arm to throw it into the street, let a passing bus crush it. But Adele grabbed the top of the retractable antenna and slipped the cell from my palm.

“You have the kind of money to be throwing phones away?” she asked.

She made a big show of looking into her purse. Into her purse and not at me. What were we supposed to do next? This wasn’t much of an army. Adele and me. And you. Not compared to the Washburn Library or the Church of Clay. What the hell were we supposed to do now?

“Tell me what the Voice said to you, Adele.”

She didn’t have the energy to withhold anymore, so she just said it. Four words. And when she was done, I laughed bitterly. “What the hell does that even mean?” I asked. “You see what I’m saying?” She shook her head. Adele was right. The command made no damn sense at all.

THAT’S WHEN OUR NEW LIFE BEGAN
. I write this in the bed of a rented room off Route 2, a two-lane road that runs along the brim of the United States. My right-handed penmanship might even be called legible these days. It’s late and I’m tired, but I always feel that way now. We might be in Montana—but, no, that’s wrong. We spent time in Montana a month ago. After a few days we have to move.

We settled in Oregon for a hot minute, figured it was a good place for disappearing, but one morning we woke to find footprints in the gravel around our rented cabin. Was it the Washburn Library or the Church of Clay? I don’t know, but I’m afraid both are after us. Maybe the Dean has read the right field notes by now and figured out the last two Swamp Angels died. That’ll only make you more valuable to him. And the Church of Clay? We murdered their prophet. That alone is a good enough reason to hate us. We never did find those other thirteen men we saw from the highway overpass. That’s enough apostles to found a faith.