Big Machine (7 page)

Violet, Verdelle, Peach Tree, and Sunny. Euphinia, Grace, and me. We stood under Jerome’s portrait and studied our saint as intensely as he studied his page.

WE WERE SO SERIOUS!
Examining that old man so closely that we might’ve stayed there all morning if the guards hadn’t showed up with our work. Three teenagers came down the marble stairs carrying boxes in their outstretched arms. They moved with the same lazy disdain that I’d used when mopping bathroom floors. The sound of their shoes on the steps was what knocked us out of our dream state. They stamped and jostled. They cleared their throats. They sighed and rolled their eyes. The boys went into each office and set out the materials they’d brought. Then, just as casually they wandered back down the hall and climbed the grand stairs. Up and away.

Our office numbers corresponded to our cabins. I entered mine, number nine, and Sunny entered hers, number one, across from me. Each Unlikely Scholar did the same. My office had an oak desk and one of those knockoff Aeron chairs, one empty oak bookshelf, and an easy chair in the corner. A big gray computer sat on the desk, but it wasn’t new. I saw little white tags on the side of the monitor and the hard drive. Both read
REFURBISHED
. I didn’t mind that much. How many computers had Trailways made available to me? Absolutely none. As soon as I sat down, I got up again and walked into the hall, just to see if the others were as unsure as me.

Violet went through all the drawers of her new desk—just curious, I guess—while Euphinia and Grace couldn’t even turn their computers on.

Meanwhile Peach Tree sat in the office across from Verdelle’s and
flirted with her through the glass, smiling wide. She must’ve been two feet taller than him, but he didn’t care. “I like a lean woman,” he’d told me as we’d walked behind her the day before. And Verdelle? Well, she did keep finding excuses to get up and sashay across her room.

I looked at Sunny again. There wasn’t any point in me casting charm her way. She must’ve made some woman a very nice boyfriend back in prison, and that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.

The guard had left a stack of newspapers next to my keyboard. I set them in my lap and read each masthead.
Mohave Valley Daily News, Daily Dispatch, Arizona Daily Sun, The Kingman Daily Miner, Today’s News-Herald, East Valley Tribune, The Daily Courier, Herald, Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Citizen
, and
Yuma Sun
. Seemed like every daily paper from the state of Arizona.

Here was my first real job as an Unlikely Scholar and I had no idea what to do.

I leafed through each paper, looking for some mention of the Wash-burn Library. When nothing appeared, I hunted around for mention of the Dean or Unlikely Scholars or even Lake. Maybe the Northeast Kingdom. But not a damn thing stood out. I knew there must be some reason I’d been given these papers, but I didn’t understand the motive. I felt lost.

The day before, Lake had led us to these offices and explained that the guards would deliver newspapers in the morning. When we asked about the step after that, Lake said, “I can’t tell you.” We tried to wheedle clues out of the big man, but he just repeated those four words. He didn’t take any pleasure in our confusion.

I assumed the Dean had instructed him to be so vague, part of this larger pattern of leaving us to our own devices. I appreciated the practice of throwing us into the deep end, but this felt more like having our heads held underwater.

Now me and the other six Scholars floundered and gasped. I spent the rest of the day at my desk. Hardly even got up to use the small and well-maintained bathroom. The others were as committed. The others were as confused. In the morning we leafed through our newspapers enthusiastically. The sound of seven people turning pages quickly snapped like rifle shots. But by afternoon we’d run out of energy. The squawk of seven bodies leaning back in their chairs, a creaking chorus of personal defeats, that’s all you heard at the end of our second day.

BY THE NEXT MONDAY
, day ten, well, we weren’t racing for the Library’s side door anymore. We still went over together each morning, but the
march had lost its urgency. Another day of being vanquished by handfuls of paper? No thanks. This started to feel too much like a real job. Something you hate to do and you don’t know why you’re doing it. I’d even tried to quiz a guard and two members of the office staff about the secret of these newspapers, but if they knew, they weren’t telling. They answered phones, they delivered more printer paper. At the end of each day one guard came to our offices asking if we had anything for him. All we offered were questions.

So I sat in my easy chair, holding a page of
The Daily Courier
to the overhead light as if a message lay hidden in the paper stock. That’s the point I’d reached. I’d have tried reading tea leaves or conducting a séance if I’d known how to do either one. At least they didn’t bring us new papers every morning. We were left to sniff through our original stack until we caught the scent.

I looked across the hall at Sunny, who sat at her desk. She had a newspaper rolled into a tube and kept bopping it against her forehead as if she could knock an idea loose. Sunny saw me and unfurled the paper, showing me the front page of the previous week’s
Journal & Courier
, a paper out of Lafayette, Indiana. A headline about the war in Iraq. She rolled it up again and returned to tapping her forehead.

Then a crash came from down the hall.

It was so loud that the newspaper pages flapped from my hands to the stone floor of my office. Sunny jumped to her feet, and her rolled newspaper echoed against the ground like an empty cardboard tube.

Sunny ran into the hall, and I wasn’t far behind. Peach Tree and Verdelle peeked out of her office while Euphinia and Grace came out of the break room, Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. And we all stopped at Violet’s place. Her chair lay on the ground, two of the four wheels still spinning from when she’d knocked it over. Violet’s glasses dangled off one ear, but she hardly noticed. She stood over her desk, paralyzed.

Finally Sunny knocked lightly on the glass wall of Violet’s office.

She looked at us with surprise. “I got it,” she said, pointing at her desk. “I figured it out.”

All the papers Violet had been given came out of the northwest, Montana and Idaho. But those dozen or so papers were folded and piled in a messy stack on top of her keyboard. She’d torn through every page, just like us, but then she’d refolded the dailies and set them aside.

A single green folder sat on the left side of her desk, with a two-inch stack of papers inside it. Violet opened the folder for us and took out the contents. There were typed notes and handwritten memos, faded receipts for meals and travel, and a series of Polaroid photographs.

Snapshots of a small mountain, taken from a distance. Then closer. And closer still. Until the shots were taken on the mountain, moving up a vague, overgrown trail. At the base of the mountain the camera caught thin tufts of grass and clusters of trees on all sides. The next shot moved farther up, and the grass went from green to a dried brown. The trees became thinner, even sickly. And the last picture was taken at the summit, but low to the ground, as if the photographer were crouching. In the distance I made out the gables of a decaying home.

No more pictures after that.

Alongside the photos Violet showed us the notes of a woman named Merle Waters. “Pimentel Hill, off Hollow Road, Onondaga County, New York state.” These words were printed in block letters on the back of each photo. As well as the date: 1992.

Now I understood where this file had come from, those shelves in Scholar’s Hall. This woman, Merle Waters, must’ve been an Unlikely Scholar too. One who’d been sent out to take pictures and make notes about Pimentel Hill. Why hadn’t I thought to go through those old files? As Violet spoke, I watched her with admiration, but envy too.

Violet said, “I used to be a librarian,
assistant
librarian, at East High in Cleveland. And while I was looking at these papers, I thought about when we helped some of the kids practice for the SATs. You don’t score well by learning everything there is to learn. You score well by learning what the
test
expects you to have learned. And how did we teach that to the kids? We showed them the old tests. That’s what the prep schools do.”

Violet set her glasses back on her face. She turned the sheets of Merle Waters’s file.

“Instead of sitting here trying to
guess
what the Dean expected of me, I figured I’d go back and see how the Unlikely Scholars before us did it.”

She got to the very end of the file, and there, flattened and yellow, lay a small newspaper clipping. Violet held it up for us to read. We huddled around her like she’d just invented fire. Five words were written in ink at the top of the page: “Daily Star, Oneonta, NY, 1991.”

The headline of the article read:
FAMILY CLAIMS TO HEAR MOUNTAIN SING
.

At the bottom of the page, in the same handwriting: “Filed by Andre Dupree.”

Violet set the old clipping back into the file, then gathered all the loose pages back into a pile. She stacked the Polaroids on top and shut the folder again.

She said, “This guy, Andre Dupree, found an odd little item, a weird story they stuck in the back of
The Daily Star
on a slow news day. But he
clipped it and he passed it on. To the Dean, I guess. Then this other Scholar, Merle Waters, is sent to check it. And she finds this house there.”

I pointed to the file. “Did she make it back? Does it say what happened to Ms. Waters after that last photo?”

Violet dropped her eyes. “No.”

Peach Tree said, “But
our
part is just finding the news, right?”

Violet pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows. What answer did she have to that?

Peach Tree crossed his arms. “I’m not climbing no singing mountain. That’s all I’m saying.”

Violet turned and lifted her chair. She said, “I think we’re like the scouts, gathering information. Remember what the Dean told us at our dinner: there’s a voice crying out in the darkness. Our job is to listen. I’m going to look through my stack of papers and see if I find any more news like that. And when those guards come by this evening, I’m going to pass it on to them.”

“I like that,” Verdelle said. “We’re
scouts
.”

This struck us dumb. I think we were just trying to process all that we’d been introduced to in the previous week. Voices and cabins and this god damn library in the woods. Was I frightened or excited? I felt overwhelmed, but rather than admit this, I just got sarcastic.

I said, “They brought us all this way to cut newspapers? That’s your big theory?”

Violet sat and rolled toward her desk. “You’d be happier if they gave you a mop?”

Peach Tree pointed at me and smiled. He said, “Burnt.”

I returned to my office, but I had trouble. Like, what constitutes weird? An article about the alarmingly high rate of peanut allergies in today’s children? The profile of a local car dealer who went to and from work on a ten-speed bike? If I looked at any article long enough, I imagined an unwholesome angle. Maybe the kids weren’t allergic to peanuts. They were just being poisoned by their parents. Maybe the car dealer preferred a ten-speed because he’d stripped all the cars on his lot to sell for meth. Neither scenario was supernatural, but they would both be creepy.

Things only got worse as I heard others—Sunny, then Euphinia, then even Peach Tree—hollering about what they’d found. I felt like a dupe. Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to do this. That fear only got stronger when Verdelle and Grace eventually cried out in triumph too.

My sister, Daphne, used to tell me to act like I was sure of myself and eventually I’d come to believe it. But she was wrong. It’s hard to fake
faith, in yourself or anything else. At the end of the day Violet handed her articles to the young guard who appeared. If she’d done anything right, he didn’t show it, just took the pieces of paper and shuffled away. The others held on to theirs, hedging, just in case Violet got it wrong.

After that they all went back to their cabins, but I stayed, working through the night.

I WOKE UP
at eight-thirty in my easy chair, six Unlikely Scholars staring down at me. A green Scholar’s file sat in my lap. I’d gone into Scholar’s Hall the night before and grabbed one as a study aide. Mine had the notes and photos and original article. Even audiocassettes. My ration of newspapers spread across the floor and my desk. The Unlikely Scholars gazed down at me and my mess.

I’d experienced those looks in the past, but back then it was because I’d nodded off in the middle of a subway train or nodded off in the middle of a supermarket or nodded off in … the middle of a sentence. In fact, their expressions were so familiar that, for a moment, I actually felt high. I couldn’t get a sentence past my tingling jawline, and my eyes felt like they were sliding off my face.

Peach Tree leaned closer than all the others and said, “This boy is zooted.”

I had to rethink my night in a millisecond. Had I gone back to my cabin, found my six bags of dope, shot them up, then come
back
to work? Stress certainly made it easier to relapse, but I felt sure I hadn’t done it this time. And as soon as I felt sure, the drowsy memory of a dope high left my face.

“I’m not zooted,” I said, trying to sit up, which only made the folder fall to the ground, its contents landing on the newspapers with a plop.

“I’m
not,”
I said again.

Euphinia and Grace stepped back and watched me. They both squinted their left eyes, tilted their heads, and pronounced judgment.

“I believe him,” they said, nearly in unison.

Peach Tree sighed because he’d been outvoted. “Well, if he’s going to look this bad, he might as well shoot up.”

Verdelle slapped Peach Tree’s shoulder lightly. With her other hand she helped me stand. She took my left and Sunny took the right.