Big Machine

by Victor Lavalle

  The Dean pressed the brass poker against the floor.

  “I have.”

  The Dean set the poker back in its stand. The brass clanged like a small bell.

  “When I took over, the Library had fallen on bad times. Folks lost hope. One hundred fifty years of failure will do that. The best you could say is that they dressed better than they felt. But when I took this office, I read through all the old field notes, going back to the first handwritten pages Clotel sent her dad. Judah had hoped these pages were more than just details, but he wasn’t meant to learn how true that was.

  “These eerie events, every shadow we investigate, these are the Voice’s attempts to reach us again. It’s just the messages get scrambled on the way from there to here. But I’ve come to find myself blessed with a sacred literacy. When I read these field reports, I see the meaning behind the words. Think of me like an oracle, Ricky. I can interpret the signs.”

  “But how do you know you’re right?”

  He said, “I can only assure you that over the years I’ve been right a lot more than I’ve been wrong.”

  The Dean touched my shoulder so I would look at him.

  “And now I’m telling you the Washburn Library is under threat. From one of our own.”

  “You saw this in the field notes?”

  “I did. And a big moment is coming. It’s been two hundred twenty-seven years since the Voice spoke to Judah Washburn. Two hundred twenty-seven years of us groping around surviving. But is that all the Voice wants for us? I don’t know about you, Ricky but survival is just not enough anymore. Maybe Judah couldn’t hope for more back in 1778, but times change. The era of mere survival is at an end. Now it’s time for prosperity.

  “The Voice will communicate as directly as it ever did to Mr. Wash-burn. A new commandment. A new reward. I want all of us to benefit from that blessing, but this got damn traitor plans to keep the miracle for himself.”

  “If things are so urgent, why are we wasting time looking at another picture?” I asked.

  “Not a waste. The Voice heard your promise. I know this. Now it’s giving you the chance to be brave. Look up.”

  In the painting a thin young man holds a small sword in his right hand and carries an older man’s severed head in his left. The boy’s fingers grip the dead man’s long brown hair, and the head swings free. The head is gigantic. Its veins dangle and drip below the chin while the boy glares with disgust and wrath. He doesn’t seem sickened by the blood, only hateful of his victim. In the middle of the dead man’s forehead there’s one red mark where he’s been struck hard. And that’s what killed the older, bigger man, not the sword. The sword was only for separating the head from its shoulders.

  The Dean said, “This is ‘David with the Head of Goliath.’ You figure out what it means. What the Library needs from you.”

  “We weren’t Jerome in the other painting, so I assume we’re not David or Goliath here.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  I stepped back, trying hard to figure out the tiny little item that would correspond to the quill in Saint Jerome’s hand, but this painting was even sparer than the first. Nothing in the empty black background. I wanted to get it right, but there seemed to be only one, obvious, choice.

  “The sword?” I said.

  “Think of how David beat Goliath,” the Dean said. “At the Library you were the quill.”

  “But out in the field …,” I whispered.

  “You’ll be the stone.”

  3

  Into the

  Lungs of Hell

  25

  OKAY, so we were an organization that embodied the quill of Saint Jerome and the stone that killed Goliath. We might even have been the chosen tribe of a god. But if so, if all that was really true, why did they fly us out to California on JetBlue? I’d been expecting a private plane, but instead we had coach seats. Now, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. They did pay for a whole row. At least that gave me and the Gray Lady a little room, but come on. You don’t expect secret societies to operate on a budget.

  Lake drove the Gray Lady and me to the airport, but there wasn’t much conversation. What could I say to her? She’d watched me crawl to the Dean, seen me beg for his help, and when we finally looked at each other, she only shrugged. I didn’t speak to her, out of embarrassment and pride. And she didn’t speak because, well, she wasn’t interested. Instead we heard a monologue from the driver’s seat because Lake wouldn’t stop talking. He and the Gray Lady seemed to be friends. What was Lake saying? I can’t remember. I was too busy trying to think like a stone.

  I only came out of my haze when the Gray Lady passed me plane tickets. I checked the destinations. First a quick plane ride down to JFK airport in New York and then, from there, a nonstop slingshot to Garland, California. The West Coast. Yet one more part of the world I’d never seen. I tapped the tickets hard against my leg in a quick beat, just a nervous habit.

  “You’re not Max Roach,” she said. “Put those away.”

  I put the tickets in my coat, but moved slowly. The way a kid drags his feet when headed for a vaccination. And she watched me the whole time. She refused to look away until they were in my pocket. I made sure it took a while.

  Once they were put away she leaned toward me and said, “Tell me, Mr. Rice. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Six hours from JFK to Garland, that’s what they told us once we’d boarded the plane. Garland, a small city in the Bay area, Northern California. Imagine one man hauling two trunks of gold across this country. One escaped blind slave with a few hundred pounds of Spanish coins. I gave a silent nod to Judah Washburn’s survival instinct.

  Our seats were in the very last row of the plane, and the Gray Lady took the window, plopped her coat on the middle seat, which left me with the aisle. Good enough. I’d need to kick my right leg out or else the knee would start to cramp after an hour or two. As the stewardess gave us crash instructions, I stowed my fedora in the empty carriage rack above my head.

  We taxied on the runway, and, right away, I went to work. I’d bought a couple of magazines, just fluffy stuff, women half out of their clothes and sliding off a car hood, for instance. But I’d bought newspapers too. The New York Times, New York Post, Daily News, The New York Sun, and before the plane took off, I’d started leafing through them. From back to front, searching for curious news. There was a kind of comfort in this.

  “You don’t have to …,” she whispered, pointing at the papers in my lap.

  “Just a habit by now,” I said.

  “In the field we don’t bury our noses in newspapers, Mr. Rice.”

  “I wouldn’t take pride in that.”

  She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. “Have you ever worked for a woman before?”

  “Plenty of times,” I said.

  “So then you won’t be challenging me every step of the way, is that right?”

  The Gray Lady didn’t wait for an answer. She crossed her hands, set them in her empty lap, and as the plane took off, she snored.

  In the quiet of the flight I thought about why I’d climbed into the van that morning and why I’d boarded the plane. But did I have any real answers? What had been clear in the Dean’s office hours ago seemed murkier that night. I opened the first newspaper in my lap and searched its pages until the familiar routine put me at ease.

  WE’D TRAVELED BACK in time. Three hours’ difference between Garland and Vermont, of course, but also the bland blue walls of the Garland International Airport terminal hadn’t been updated since the seventies. The faded graying carpet could’ve used a wash, and the seats at the gates needed stitching too. But instead of making the airport seem dingy, it only made the terminal feel like a comfy old living room. Which must’ve made the Gray Lady and me seem even more bizarre.

  We looked like ambassadors from the Jazz Age.

  We didn’t even make it to the baggage carousels before other people gawked at us. A teenage girl strode up t
o the Gray Lady and pointed at the fur collar on her jacket.

  “Is that real?” she asked.

  The Gray Lady smiled and touched it with her fingers. “What do you think?”

  “You don’t have an ounce of compassion?” the girl asked. “You really need a fur in a place that’s always eighty degrees?”

  The Gray Lady wore that fur-lined jacket, black stockings leading out from the bottom of her frock, a cloche hat, and a pair of black leather bluchers pounding the ground. And I wore my tweed three-piece. My Yale Brown fedora tilted slightly over my left eye. To cool myself I’d taken off my tie and undone the soft collar of my shirt so it swung open, a Byron collar they used to call it. The pilots in their sharp blue uniforms were just bellhops compared to us, but this kid was less than impressed.

  Having said what she wanted, the girl stalked off triumphantly. Her black flip-flops clicked louder than heels.

  Both of us stood there mortified. Embarrassed, awkward, and sheepish. The Gray Lady had seemed so powerful back at the Library, in the van, even sleeping on the plane. And just like that, snap, the balance changed. It wasn’t that I felt the teenager was right, but both the Gray Lady and I understood that she was right here.

  The Gray Lady pulled the fur-lined jacket off. She tucked it under one arm.

  When I was a kid, I made this same kind of mistake. I thought my family was pretty normal, but the outside world corrected me.

  26

  GENERALLY SPEAKING, you don’t hear of too many religious cults operating out of an apartment building. It just doesn’t happen. They usually live in compounds, or on a ranch, or at the very least they’ve got a private home on some nondescript block. But whoever heard of a cult operating out of a two-bedroom in Queens?

  That’s melodramatic, I’m sorry. The cult had a whole floor of the building. My mom and dad, older sister, Daphne, and me, we operated in a two-bedroom place. A cult within a cult. The other members were our neighbors on the fourth floor.

  We had leases, gave security deposits when we moved in. The building’s super knew what we were, as did many people in the neighborhood, but the owners didn’t. They didn’t live in Queens. And frankly, they wouldn’t have cared anyway. Cult, coven, or think tank, we always paid the rent.

  I’m willing to call it a cult, or a Christian cult, now because they’re only words, but they help other people understand a few things about us quickly. Small. Tightly knit. Set apart.

  We called ourselves the Washerwomen.

  When people asked our religion, I’d explain that we were Christians, but Christianity filtered through the wisdom of three women, three sisters from Jacksonville, Florida. Being a Lutheran didn’t mean you worshipped Martin Luther, and though we followed the Washerwomen, our God remained the same.

  Now try explaining all that to a pack of boys who’ve caught you waiting for your building’s elevator. The kind of boys they seem to make everywhere. Who love kicking the weird kid’s ass. The skinny home-schooled Christian cultist who lives in their building. Imagine dealing with that every time you’re caught in the lobby and you’ll understand why I always took the stairs.

  Ten times a day if I was sent on a lot of errands. Up and down so often that I really came to love that crappy gray stairwell. Half the overhead lights didn’t work, and sometimes garbage littered the landings. The perfume of urine often filled the air, and yet I knew the environment with sweet intimacy. How cold the handrail felt in the winter, the sound of my skin slipping along the metal in a low -swiff- whenever I went down. The chips of a cracked stair sprinkling the ones below it like rock salt on a winter road.

  It seems impossible now, but at that time I thought of that stairwell as a kind of cloister. Where I could find a special quiet. You can’t predict the places where you’ll encounter the unknowable.

  27

  THE GRAY LADY AND I TURNED AWAY from each other after that girl’s rebuke. We walked again but with much less sashay in our steps. I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though. We did still sashay a little. We’d been rattled, but not crushed.

  I passed a rumpled guy at the terminal exit. One of those private drivers holding a handwritten sign: ADELE & LARRY. That’s what it read. Didn’t mean much to me, but the Gray Lady stopped. She didn’t call out to me, though, just coughed loudly a couple of times. When I still didn’t stop, she snapped her fingers. That’s the kind of nonsense you pull on a waiter when you want more bread. But she did it to me. Then just stood there with her arms crossed, waiting. Both she and the driver watched me. The driver waved his ratty cardboard sign at me. “Adele?” he asked as I walked back to them.

  “I look like an Adele to you?”

  “I thought maybe it was foreign,” he said. “Like you’d be French or African.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then you’re Larry.”

  “Ricky.”

  “Maybe I’ve got the wrong two people.”

  The driver wore his belly with a sense of pride. He wasn’t fat, average-size everywhere but the gut. He didn’t stoop to hide it, though. He leaned back to show it off. In order to get inside his pants pocket he had to twist the paunch. He took out a sheet of blue paper and unfolded it.

  “Ms. Henry?” he asked.

  “Claude! Stop playing games with Mr. Rice.”

  That was the loudest I’d heard her get. It was sort of nice to see her irritated with someone other than me.

  “Does that paper call me Larry?” I asked.

  “Just says Ms. Henry plus one. That’s what I mean. I called back as I drove over here and was told that the plus one was a ‘Larry.’ Which is you.”

  “My name is Ricky Rice,” I said.

  His answer? There wasn’t any. He just looked at the Gray Lady and said, “I’ll go and get your bags.”

  It was only when Claude returned, carrying hers alone, that I realized he’d meant the statement literally. I had to cast a line between the passengers crowding the baggage carousel and hook the handle of my suitcase with my finger. Felt better once I held it. I’d packed the heroin in my luggage, all six baggies. But I hadn’t tried bringing the syringe through airport security.

  CLAUDE’S BLACK LINCOLN TOWN CAR IDLED in the arrivals pickup lane, and I couldn’t believe airport security hadn’t called the bomb squad. But when he opened the trunk, one of the security guys walked over and shook Claude’s hand. They were pals.

  The cuffs of Claude’s pants were frayed, bits of fabric dangling. The kind of thing I wouldn’t have noticed a year before. And what was that suit fabric anyway? Not tweed, not flannel, not worsted wool. Not cotton or even polyester. Carpet fibers, that’s what they looked like. A whole cheap suit made of the stuff.

  We left the bright airport and rolled down Garland’s side streets. Block after block of single-family homes, one or two stories tall, with pitched roofs and little front yards. Places that were worn down along the corners and front stairs. They all had a little dirt under their nails. Garland had working-class hands. I became calmer because I recognized this kind of place.

  There were the flatlands, which was the center of the city, surrounded by hills on three sides. I saw slightly nicer, larger homes at the base of those hills. And the nicest houses climbed even higher, at the middle and nearly the top of the mountains, scrambling up the incline like animals escaping a flood.

  I got drowsy as we reached the highway, I-580, going west. Leaned against the car door, my face on the glass, soothed by a light rain that pattered against the windshield. I listened to it and looked into the sky.

  The Washburn Library is under threat.

  I could hear the Dean’s voice now, as sure as the hum of Claude’s tires. It was like the Dean was whispering to me across the continent.

  From one of our own.

  The Town Car rose and dipped as we took the West Street exit off the highway and coasted down a ramp. I saw a small flock of offices on the horizon, downtown Garland, the only buildings in the city that measure
d more than six stories. Downtown looked like a rogue wave on an otherwise calm sea.

  Claude parked the Town Car in front of a hotel called By the Bay, its name in big letters spreading across the third floor. Claude turned in his seat and said, “This is your stop, Larry.”

  I looked at the Gray Lady. “Just me?”

  Claude spoke again. “Ms. Henry has a place at the Washburn estate.”

  She looked at me, took off her hat. In the dark car her white hair looked phosphorescent.

  The Gray Lady said, “I will fetch you first thing in the morning, Mr. Rice. There’s no need to worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” I told her. “I’m pissed.”

  “Don’t get ugly now,” Claude warned.

  He liked bullying people out of their self-respect. That seemed obvious. I wondered what kind of job he’d done before this one. What line of work would suit that personality? Much as I hated it, though, the tone worked on me. I was already getting out of the car before I realized he’d said something that deserved a smack. Funny, but in a way I even recognized this back-and-forth between me and him. Felt as familiar as being fingerprinted.

  “I’m not some dog you fetch,” I told them. It’s all I could muster in my defense.

  “Oh, boo-hoo,” Claude answered.

  I held the door open.

  “Is there anything I can start doing tonight, Ms. Henry? I don’t want to just sit around guessing why I’m here.”

  “I sympathize, Mr. Rice,” she said. “First time in the field can be overwhelming.”

  “I just don’t like feeling left out.”

  She put her hat back on. “I know it feels that way now, but you might regret it more when we let you in.”

  Okay, I thought. What are you going to do now? Pout about it?

  Yes.

  I also slammed the door. When I went to the trunk, I pounded on it until Claude popped it open. After I got my luggage, I left the damn thing open so Claude had to get out and close it himself. What can I say? You take your revenge where you can get it.