Big Machine

by Victor Lavalle

  In the seconds it took to walk up to the counter, a man had settled into the chair next to hers. Just appeared out of nowhere. Adele scanned the shop for another table, but no luck. She put her drink down, took off her coat, sat, set her purse between her feet, and started her research. She scooched her chair another inch away from the stranger.

  “Yeah,” the guy muttered.

  Adele didn’t respond. She only went into her purse for the brown paper towel.

  The man beside her had a newspaper, a good sign (he could distract himself), and while he opened a section, she searched … for what? Was there going to be a business called the Devil’s Well? Maybe. So she checked, but that was a bust. Was it a park, a gully, a mountain? Nope.

  “Personally, I think you’re right to wear those gaiters out. I’m pretty sure it’ll rain today.”

  Adele ignored the man, even if he was complimenting her boots. She set the coffee cup on one end of the paper towel so it wouldn’t blow away as people opened the front door.

  “When I get out to hunt, I like to wear something similar. I wear those rubbers, you know, the slip-ons? Sometimes you’re standing in six inches of mud. You don’t realize it, but that environment can really abbreviate the lifetime of your footwear.”

  Well, what about a community group? A theater? The Devil’s Well. Adele’s ideas were crusty. A gang? Why the hell would a gang be listed in the phone book? Well I don’t know, she snapped at herself, but let’s just check anyway!

  “Mushing around for an hour or two seems worth it if you get a few good hits on your detector, though. Most days I find nails and bottle tops, but I dug up a watch two weeks ago.”

  Other people at the table huffed to try to shush the man’s patter, but he wouldn’t be deterred. He didn’t require responses. Probably held conversations with the shampoo bottle in the shower.

  Adele slumped in her chair, but didn’t sit back. There had to be something she could do.

  “Say. Are you a teacher or something?”

  Adele sipped her coffee.

  “A reporter?”

  She picked at lint that had gathered on her pants.

  “An archeologist?” he asked, but without hope of a reply. Now he sighed and snapped his newspaper, lifted it to his face.

  Adele decided she’d at least finish the coffee before crawling back to her cabin.

  He muttered. “Why else you bothering with the Devil’s Well?”

  She turned to him quickly. “What did you just say?”

  He lowered his newspaper.

  “Well, hello! So nice of you to notice me.”

  She pointed at the phone book. “I was so busy.”

  “Oh, of course you were,” he agreed.

  He gloated, but didn’t seem angry. His gray hair exploded from his head in all directions, wild and windswept even indoors. He looked like a dandelion. His body as thin as the stem.

  “I thought you were ignoring me because I’m white,” he said as he folded his paper neatly. “Crazy old white man in the coffee shop!”

  Adele looked at her hands. “That’s not true,” she said. “I would’ve ignored you no matter what color man you were.”

  He nodded faintly. “I guess I can live with that.”

  She put her hand on the paper towel. With the letters written in her hurried script the thing looked like a scroll.

  “So these words, you recognize them?”

  “The Devil’s Well? I sure do.”

  “Will you tell me?” she asked.

  He leaned forward and widened his eyes. “Do you work for a museum?”

  “I’m really not sure what I’m doing,” she said. “But if you could just tell me …”

  He smiled. “I can’t really explain that much. My powers are limited. But I know where you could go. Someone you could talk to. She can answer anything.”

  Adele lifted the green purse from between her feet. This time she had a proper pen instead of a liner pencil. “I’m ready” she said.

  “You know what I’d love?” the man asked, leaning back. “One of those prosciutto bruschetta sandwiches.”

  He grinned.

  She looked at the register.

  He winked playfully.

  Adele put the pen down and took out her coin purse, turned away from him and swiffed a twenty-dollar bill from the roll. “You want anything to drink with that?”

  He lifted his mug. “I’ve already got the coffee, thanks.”

  Adele Henry, diplomat, traded food for information.

  THE GARLAND FOLKLORE SOCIETY KEPT ITS OFFICES in the last Victorian home on the shore of Laguna Lake. Even without the directions Adele would’ve noticed it. The rest of Laguna Lake’s architecture spoke of late twentieth-century prosperity, high-rise luxury condos and high-rent apartment buildings. It was like the skyline on Garland’s postcards. And tucked down amid those titans stood one cream-colored two-story home.

  She walked her big bike up the little driveway that led to a porch and, having no lock, hefted the silver monster up the steps. As she did, she heard someone inside, coming to answer the knocks and rattles her bike made.

  “Can I rest this inside?” Adele asked when the door opened.

  The woman at the door sighed. “I don’t care.”

  She stepped backward to let Adele and her steed in.

  They entered a long hallway, and Adele propped the bike against a table covered with local history brochures. Then the woman went to the right, into a parlor that had been restored to its original beauty. A warm room, though a little crowded. Three settees, one against each wall, and a dozen parlor chairs, six of them huddled around the fireplace. Five walnut marble-top parlor tables were scattered around. It was as if they’d tried to fit three parlors into one.

  “Welcome to the Garland Historical Society,” the woman began. Her tone was flatter than Formica tile. “While you are standing in the last Victorian home along Laguna Lake, it wasn’t always alone. The lake was once surrounded by houses just like this one.”

  “I’m not here for the tour,” Adele said, realizing this woman had a lot more lecture left.

  “Oh, thank God,” the woman said, and rubbed her tired eyes, but then she hopped back like Adele had pulled a gun. “Are you a process server?”

  “I promise,” Adele said. “I’m not from the courts. A friend of yours sent me over. I have questions and he said you could answer them.”

  The tour guide’s long black hair hung across her face and over her shoulders. Her eyes were entirely hidden. Adele just saw a full nose and the thin lips beneath it. The woman pulled her hair back to expose her whole face and laughed quietly.

  “No friend of mine would send more work my way.”

  “White guy. Older. Loved talking about his metal detector.”

  “Barry Sometimes!” she yelped.

  Adele looked over her shoulder as if the man had suddenly appeared.

  “I call him Barry Sometimes because he makes appointments for my tour, but then he only shows up for half of them. I never know which ones. Sometimes he shows, sometimes he doesn’t. He feels so guilty that he sends people over to me. He thinks I want to help people.”

  She had a deep voice, husky, even sensual. She didn’t sound like a smoker, more like a smoky room.

  “But you don’t want to help people?” Adele asked.

  “God, no,” she said. “I’m an academic.”

  Adele nodded and tried to smile. That was meant to be a joke, but she couldn’t understand what part of it was funny.

  “Listen to me,” the woman said. “Pissing and moaning. Sorry. I’m Joyce Chin. The least professional historian in America.”

  “I’m Adele Henry, the world’s most clueless detective.”

  Joyce clapped. “That’s the spirit.”

  “I thought this was the Folklore Society. That’s what Barry said.”

  Joyce pointed to the ceiling.

  “We just took over from the Garland Historical Society last year. We
got the top half of the building, but the first floor is still theirs. We’re shuffling things around, as you can see. A lot of this furniture used to be upstairs, but now the Folklore Society is on the second floor.”

  The two of them shrugged and seemed awkward. A third party, some kind of translator, might’ve helped.

  “Listen,” Joyce finally said. “My office is up there too. It’s the only place in Northern California where I can smoke without being called a murderer. Do you mind if we go up?”

  Adele nodded and stepped aside.

  “Your outfit belongs down here,” Joyce joked as they walked down the main hallway. At least Adele thought it was a joke, but the lack of affect in this woman made it hard to tell.

  Finally, they reached the stairs and ascended from history into folklore.

  ONE OF JOYCE CHIN’S OFFICE WALLS was covered with crude drawings, and a second with college degrees. While Joyce smoked, Adele looked at all these decorations. Seeing the bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the Ph.D. certificate, turned Adele into a calculator. She saw the dates when each had been issued and tried to think of what she’d been doing while Joyce studied at school. The doctorate read 1997. Where had she been then?

  That’s all you charge for your little flower?

  You make me want to go and start a garden.

  “It’s a myth,” Joyce said. “The Devil’s Well. Just a story. Are you Native American?”

  “No.”

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  Adele’s paranoid streak ran through all two hundred six of her bones, so she avoided specificity.

  “I overheard a man I work with talking about it.”

  “And what did he say?”

  She paused. “I guess he said he knew where it was.”

  Joyce sipped at the filter of her second cigarette and leaned back in her seat.

  “Well, so what?” she said. “People claim they know where Atlantis is. It’s just talk.”

  “My coworker isn’t a man I trust,” Adele admitted. “He’s planning an expedition.”

  “To where? Jupiter?”

  “Underground,” Adele whispered, tapping at the arm rest of her chair.

  “You think he might be putting others in danger?”

  See that. Adele knew she’d make a mistake. Now Joyce Chin would ask names, maybe call for police, who would detain Adele, and soon enough she’d have to face a very disappointed Snooky Washburn. She didn’t want to be known as a blabbermouth.

  “We work for a library, Ms. Chin. The greatest danger we face is paper cuts.”

  Joyce puffed and laughed. She blew the smoke out from the right side of her mouth.

  “Then, what do you think may happen, Ms. Henry?”

  Adele feared she couldn’t outthink Joyce Chin, so she told the truth elusively.

  “I’m just afraid of what may happen if my coworker doesn’t get his way.”

  “A man reacting badly because he’s been denied? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  Joyce and Adele laughed harder at this than anything yet.

  Finally Adele said, “The head of our library seems like a good man.”

  Joyce completed her thought. “And you’d like to protect him.”

  Watching Joyce with that cigarette only made Adele want to drink. She thought more clearly with a tumbler in one hand.

  This large room was crowded with books. Some in stacks on the floor, many more on the metal shelves. From her seat Adele could see some of the books were upside-down, others with spines turned in. Well-used and dog-eared. These weren’t display items.

  “Take a look at this,” Joyce said, rising from her seat. She dropped her lit cigarette into an empty metal garbage bin, then pulled an oversize book from one shelf. Its covers were stiff, forest-green, somewhat new, but the pages inside were so old they’d gone yellow and brittle. Joyce set it down on her desk and opened it. Adele leaned forward in her seat.

  “Garland, the city as it is now, began when a Spanish general named Gabriel Pereyra was given 44,800 acres of land in recognition for his lifetime of service to the Spanish king.”

  Adele brought her fingers to the page and touched it very lightly. It showed a map of these 44,800 acres. The date in an upper corner read 1774. The illustrated land looked unpleasant, uninhabitable, excessively natural to her urban eyes.

  Joyce walked over to another bookshelf, leaving Adele by the map.

  “One of Pereyra’s cooks, a drunk, kept a journal. Mostly just a listing of the kitchen’s diminishing resources. But he does have one entry, just one, where he claims he stumbled onto a path that led underground. Not far from here. Back when Laguna Lake used to be nothing but marshes. Hundreds of tunnels. That’s what he describes. Filled with water. Like canals.”

  Joyce Chin returned to the desk, carrying another large old book.

  “The Devil’s Well,” Adele said.

  Joyce Chin grunted. “A myth. A myth begun by these guys, the Heurequeque Indians.”

  Joyce tapped the page of the open second ledger. Adele expected to look down and see photographs. Like a few hundred years ago these Indians might’ve taken a few snapshots to preserve their special moments. Instead she saw a series of sketches, a couple on each large page, sketches so rough that few people today would call them maps. More like tracings, only vaguely recognizable as Garland’s boundaries.

  “They were nomadic people who’d been going up and down the California coast for at least a thousand years before the Spanish arrived. And this sunken bowl of marshland? Here. The one that used to stretch for miles, from Grand Avenue all the way to the San Francisco Bay? That’s what they called the Devil’s Well. So it’s like the Bermuda Triangle, in a way. Your coworker might know where it is, but that doesn’t mean the magic is real.”

  Adele nodded. “But why did the Indians give it that name?”

  “Because the Devil lives there.”

  Adele looked up at Joyce, who couldn’t stop smiling. She’d been indulging cigarettes, but truly enjoyed this.

  Joyce Chin corrected herself. “Devils. Plural.”

  She turned three brittle pages in the second book and swept her thin hand over one huge drawing, all curving lines and dots. This was a map too, but on a grander scale, not a sliver of land but a constellation of stars.

  Joyce said, “The thing about cities, about what we call civilizations, is that they blind you. We evolve for the better in some ways, but lose sight of other things. Ms. Henry, I want you to imagine this land long before there were any streetlamps or headlights. Nothing brighter than a small fire where people gathered round.”

  Adele stood and walked with Joyce to one of the windows of the office. They looked down on placid Laguna Lake.

  “When you looked up, you could see the sky clearly. You could see stars by the hundreds. Thousands. The Heurequeque used to sit together and witness the night. They mapped whole star charts. Observed galaxies.”

  Now Adele leaned forward until the tip of her nose brushed the cool glass.

  “The sky was so clear that the Heurequeque’s ancestors were able to see directly into the eyes of their Creator. That’s the story. And their Creator basked in its children’s attention. In return it would sing to them. But so quietly that they could only hear it in the breezes or the rustle of marsh grass. So they called their Creator the Whisper.”

  It wasn’t hard for Adele to imagine that the Heurequeque’s Whisper was also Judah Washburn’s Voice.

  Adele looked up at the ceiling now, as if she would see through it if she concentrated.

  “The Whisper created suns and planets, insects and beasts, right before the Heurequeque’s eyes. A single breath from the Whisper’s lips, and deer appeared in the world. Venus was created with a hum.”

  “It’s the brightest planet,” Adele said, which she’d learned from a children’s science supplement in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  “But all this work takes its toll, even on a god. The Whisper was bus
y. It needed help.”

  “It needed scouts,” Adele said.

  “So the Whisper pursed its lips, blew out, and just like that, poof, twelve attendants appeared. They set the clouds in the sky. Churned rivers. They did the Whisper’s bidding in the world.”

  Adele opened her purse now, reached inside, and grabbed the brown paper towel. She didn’t take it out, but felt the need to touch it.

  Joyce said, “And after all the rest was done, the world in order, the Whisper cast them to earth, to this land we now call the East Bay. And gave them one last task.”

  “What was that?” Adele asked quietly.

  “To teach the Heurequeque!” Joyce shouted. This story animated her like nothing else so far.

  “How to live right,” Joyce said. “How to earn the divine rewards.”

  Adele tapped the window with a knuckle. “But they didn’t live right?”

  “No. The Heurequeque saw the Swamp Angels and were disgusted. They looked vile to human eyes, so the Heurequeque ran in terror. They despised the Swamp Angels, turned their backs on the Whisper’s emissaries. Called them ‘the Devils of the Marsh.’ Hunted and killed as many as they could. The Heurequeque fell from grace. Myths and folklore try to remind us of truths like this. That’s their purpose.”

  “Truths like what?” Adele asked.

  “That the face of goodness may surprise you.”

  Adele Henry and Joyce Chin stood over the desk again. Joyce lit her next cigarette. The pair looked down at the two open books. Joyce touched the pages and smiled at the maps.

  The face of goodness may surprise you, Adele repeated to herself.

  “This is really what you do?” Adele asked. “Digging through these freaky things?”

  Adele waved at the bookshelves. They reminded her of the shelves in her own cabin, even though Joyce had a lot more. It felt like seeing your favorite dress on another woman and wondering if you looked that good.