Big Machine

by Victor Lavalle

  The three figures standing on it solidified as we approached. The Swamp Angels were perched on the top rung of the pier’s railing, looking down. On the pier floor stood Solomon Clay. He raised his arms and waved toward Stitch Bridge. He didn’t seem to notice the Swamp Angels. Maybe he couldn’t see them. Maybe he never had.

  “You’ve hurt a lot of people!” I shouted.

  Solomon Clay dropped his hands, looked at Adele and me.

  “I’ll hurt a lot more before I’m through!” he answered back.

  We had to yell to be heard over the noisy shoreline. I already had the gun out of my pocket, but I didn’t know if I could hit him from that far. I had to get closer. If I’d been better rested, I would’ve run, but Adele and I were only being held together by the stitching in our clothes at this point. The best we could manage was a trot.

  Solomon wore a sharp gabardine raincoat, buttoned up and tied off, which made it look like a monk’s robe. The boards of the pier were dark with moisture. Soaked with that explosive formula.

  “We’ve seen what that stuff can do,” Adele shouted.

  Solomon looked down at the pier.

  Solomon climbed onto the first rung of the pier’s railing, and his weight caused the wood to whimper. These planks were as brittle as tinder sticks. He said, “I’m only waiting to see if my flock is in position.”

  He had no fear of us. I was almost there. My boots beat on the concrete.

  Solomon thumped the top rung of the pier with his fist. “That’s their sign.”

  Adele and I followed his line of sight. From the overcrowded upper roadway of Stitch Bridge I saw a series of business jackets flitting through the air. Must’ve been thirty or forty of them, maybe even more. The Church of Clay had dressed for work today, just like anyone else. Their cheap coats floated from the bridge, the flags of a woeful country.

  “Time for mine,” he said.

  I found the energy to run faster with the gun stiff-armed in front of me. But I still wasn’t quite there. Twenty feet might as well be a hundred if you’re not accurate. Solomon Clay undid his raincoat. The suit underneath looked baggy, sagging on his frame because it had been doused. Soaked. He removed a lighter from his pants pocket. Did I see his hands shaking? I wouldn’t reach him with a bullet. I thought maybe I should try something else.

  “I’m pregnant!” I shouted.

  I would’ve expected him to laugh, most anyone else would have. Even in the midst of all this strangeness, what I said had to be the strangest of all. Adele’s reaction was closer to expected. She fell. Tripped and rolled right into the fence running along one side of the concrete pathway. As if my words had come right out and swept her leg.

  Mr. Clay? He didn’t drop that lighter, but his thumb froze on the striker wheel. He looked away from the bridge, into my face.

  “You’re …”

  And, that quick, he knew it was true. He knew. The lighter fell from his hand, clunked on the pier floor. I was close enough now. I raised the gun. I pressed the muzzle to his forehead.

  Solomon said, “Not yet.”

  76

  SOLOMON MOVED JUST HIS EYES, looking up at the barrel of the gun still pressed to his head.

  “When would be better?” I asked sarcastically, as if we were planning a lunch. But really, I wanted to be talked out of shooting him. I didn’t want to kill anyone.

  “First let me understand.”

  I looked at my hand, the pistol, as if they weren’t even mine. It took me a moment to remember I had control over them. Then I lowered my hand, but I kept the gun out. Behind me I heard the rattle of the chain-link fence as Adele grabbed on to it and pulled herself to her feet.

  Solomon squinted at me now, and behind him the Swamp Angels remained perched on the top rung of the pier. Their bodies swayed with the breezes coming off the Bay. Had they brought Adele and me here to kill Mr. Clay or to hear him out?

  “Are you kin to the Washburns?” he asked. “Long lost cousin or something?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  Solomon patted his hands against his suit, and the fabric squished from the explosive liquid. He looked down at himself then and seemed almost surprised to find himself soaked with the stuff.

  “I …,” he began, but he seemed confused.

  Adele clomped closer to us, stopped right next to me. “That was good!” she shouted. “You sure surprised his ass. Mine too.”

  She pointed down at the gun, tapped the muzzle with her pointer finger.

  “Pop him,” she said.

  I looked at her and said, “I wasn’t trying to trick him, Adele. I am pregnant.”

  While Solomon was shocked into silence, Adele took the news a little less stoically. She went batshit insane.

  Spit shot out of her mouth as she yelled at me, drops so big I swore she was losing teeth. If she’d had the gun, she would’ve shot me. Just out of distress, astonishment, and even fear. If she hadn’t had the whole pathological aversion to touch, I’m sure she would’ve strangled me for a few hours. Why did she have to find out this way? she yelled. No damn warning? And in front of Solomon Clay! She’d revealed so much, but I’d held this secret. She had a right to be hostile.

  Solomon stepped backward on the pier, and neither of us followed. Where could he go? He patted his face liked he’d patted his clothes, as if trying to wake himself from a nightmare. He looked at me. Eyed me up and down.

  “I got passed over,” he mumbled.

  Solomon’s quiet confusion, so out of character, actually snapped Adele’s tantrum. She stopped fuming and looked at Mr. Clay. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I got in the mud to dig out my men. To convince them they deserved better lives. I put in work.”

  I didn’t challenge him. I couldn’t. There are people who get neglected, whole generations of them, as if God just leapfrogged over their line.

  “I got passed over,” he said again, quietly.

  He leaned back against the pier, right between the Swamp Angels, who looked down at him still. I thought I saw pity in their expressions, but that might just be what I felt for him. I put my free hand out to him, tilted my head and smiled faintly, the way you beckon a flustered child.

  Solomon set his shoulders back. “Fuck you and fuck your pity.”

  He stepped forward, stooped to reach the lighter that had fallen to the pier floor.

  He said, “The poor will always be with us.”

  He grabbed the lighter. His men on the bridge still awaited their sign.

  “When you drive them out, they’ll run to me.”

  He bashed his chest with a closed fist.

  “And my name will be their war prayer.”

  We were so far from the bridge. That was my logic as I raised the gun. We couldn’t see his people up there, that’s why they’d needed to toss their jackets as a signal. And I doubted any of them had been outfitted with binoculars or spyglasses. So they probably couldn’t see us either. A person doesn’t become a martyr just because he’s died. It’s because those who know of his death speak of its righteousness. They tell the story. But only Adele and I were down there, and neither of us would spread his word. To prevent Solomon from becoming a martyr I’d have to turn him into a homicide. On a day like this, amidst the larger terror, would anyone really investigate some unidentified black male? To be sure we’d even have to strip his suit off afterward. He’d get chalked up as a drug murder of some kind and disappear into the mist of urban statistics.

  Even as I formulated this plan, I couldn’t help feeling ashamed of myself. I knew he had to die, but must I really serve him up to such humiliation? He’d only meant to defend the despised. Everyone else had overlooked them. But I knew where Solomon’s kind of apocalyptic fury led: to a stairwell full of dead children. It wasn’t religion, only wrath. Not faith, but nihilism. I was sick of seeing belief warped this way. And that feeling overcame my sympathy for Solomon.

  I put my hand against Adele’s p
urse and pushed her back. She stumbled on the concrete and fell, shouting, “Ricky, wait!”

  I wasn’t the only one moving. Now the Swamp Angels leapt down from the top rung of the pier. They dug their thin feet into the space between the boards. As I approached, they surrounded Solomon. Why had they waited until now to act? Two years earlier Adele had skipped her chance to stop Solomon. And now, if Solomon had been willing to call a truce, I would’ve let him go too. Maybe they’d waited until I finally understood that Mr. Clay wouldn’t be appeased. To spare him was to condemn others.

  Solomon still seemed unaware of the Swamp Angels, which seemed desperately unfair. All he’d really wanted was to brush against the divine. He’d ached for contact, and even now, inches away, they remained unknowable to him.

  Then the Swamp Angels grabbed him. Each seizing an arm so he couldn’t lift the lighter to his clothes. Couldn’t set himself on fire. Couldn’t transform from a man into a movement. And he looked down at his hands, mystified. No matter how he struggled, his hands wouldn’t rise.

  He looked left and right, searching for the cause. And he fell into these short, quick breaths. Gasping. Then I saw Solomon Clay smile. With his head cocked back he looked directly into the Swamp Angels’ faces. And they looked down into his. He shivered with ecstasy.

  “Oh,” he said. “They’re beautiful.”

  I pressed the gun to his right cheek.

  Then I shot Solomon Clay.

  77

  WHICH IS HOW I BECAME a righty.

  Thank God for shock, that’s all I’m saying. My hand, the gun, his head, they all went to pieces, but because of shock I didn’t feel much of anything. It looked worse than it hurt, at least initially. The bullet hit Solomon Clay, and half his face turned into a mist that floated out to sea.

  The explosion came just a second later.

  I hadn’t intended that part, of course. Only meant to cap him, but the problem was muzzle flash, the release of superheated gases when the trigger is pulled. That’s the same stuff that sparked Adele’s methane explosion down in the Devils’ Well. She understood that, which is why she’d been calling for me to wait. It’s also why she crawled off as fast as she could when I didn’t listen. I might as well have put a lighter to Solomon’s clothes.

  I flew backward, onto the concrete pathway. Collapsed. Wish I could’ve just fainted, but I didn’t. Stayed awake, aware. My left hand, my forearm, they’d simply disappeared.

  Adele was beside me in an instant, pulling the belt from around her coat and tying off my arm above the elbow. She made the tourniquet quickly and expertly, but it wasn’t necessary. The blast had been so hot my flesh had seared. The wound got cauterized.

  At least I wouldn’t bleed to death.

  I blinked my eyes furiously, I remember that. Made this low sound, growling or groaning, one of those g words. Grunting? Let’s say all three. Growling, groaning, and grunting. My throat felt hoarse from the way I’d screamed when my bones turned to splinters. I’d howled louder than the gunshot.

  I heard Adele behind me saying, “Aw, Ricky. Aww, no.”

  “I’m all right,” I muttered. “I’m all right.”

  It wasn’t true, but I felt I should say it. To convince her and to convince me.

  She said, “You gave them the signal, Ricky. You sure did.”

  Too confused to understand, I looked straight ahead and saw the pier burning. To the Church of Clay, Solomon had just become divine. They were too far off to tell the difference between a victim and a volunteer. Maybe they wouldn’t have cared. On the bridge I imagined the Church of Clay opening their briefcases and bags now, slathering their bodies.

  I wonder what the people on Stitch Bridge saw. What they thought, I mean. It must have been so confusing. To see all those men stripping off their jackets and throwing them out to sea. Opening their bags and drenching themselves. By the time anyone might’ve understood what was happening, it was too late. The match flames came next.

  Small explosions ran along the side of Stitch Bridge like holes in a belt.

  And that side, the one facing us, simply collapsed.

  So many girders had been incinerated that the upper roadway slumped violently—south side down. The cars that were jammed up there shook and shifted. Some flipped onto the backs of the cars in the next lane. And those in the fast lane, closest to the explosions, went over the side of the bridge. A dozen cars slipped between the newly broken spaces and splashed into the Bay. The people trapped inside wouldn’t be saved.

  I couldn’t hear any screaming, but Stitch Bridge did enough groaning on its own. The sound only got louder when the girders on the other side bent and snapped too. They weren’t designed to hold all that weight themselves. The upper deck slammed flat onto the lower. This turned out to be good news for the survivors on top—at least they wouldn’t get pitched off the side—but terrible news for those one hundred or so cars below them in the eastbound lanes, crushing news in fact.

  But Adele and I were too far away to experience the immediate horror. The flat-out terror. From Port View Park I saw the upper deck twist and squirm, and when it moved, it caught the sunlight along its metal frame. This caused a powerful glare, but I could still see the flat satin of the San Francisco Bay and the open, bright sky above. Caught between the two this gleaming bridge looked like a second sun, rising. I would’ve put my left hand up to protect my eyes, but my left hand was gone.

  We were witnesses.

  78

  HALF AN HOUR PASSED after Stitch Bridge collapsed, and neither Adele or I could move. It took me that long to understand the damage done to my arm. It wasn’t until I tried to stand up that it really registered. I set my left hand down to help me balance and found nothing there. I fell on my face.

  Shock had helped me, certainly, but even that couldn’t explain my relative good health. I should’ve been laid out or weak from loss of blood. At the very least I ought to have been screaming. But I wasn’t. When Adele had been down in the Devils’ Well, she’d been protected. That explosion should’ve killed her, but she stood here now.

  And what preserved me? Maybe the child?

  When I left Cedar Rapids, I really thought I knew how to make things better. How to balance the scales. Selfishness had been my problem for decades, but it had all culminated with Gayle. So I left Iowa expecting that all I had to do was go out and try again. Meet a woman, get her pregnant, have that child, be a good father. Repair your karma in four easy steps.

  But when I tried, I failed. I impregnated a whole series of women after that, but not one of them ever gave me a kid. A few months into the process and every single woman had a miscarriage. It just wasn’t working.

  Now, though, in light of all that I’d seen and heard, maybe my mistake began when I crawled out of Murder’s basement assuming I knew how to make things right. Maybe the solution wasn’t inflicting my plans on another woman and child. The Voice was going to make me be brave in a way I would’ve never dreamed.

  Because I was dazed, I only heard Garland’s state of emergency. Fire trucks, police sirens, and ambulances making their way to the burned bridge. They were doing their best to shake the world with whistles, but it was open sky out there at the edge of the continent, and those bells sounded feeble trying to fill all that space. Soon the smell of hot tar filled the air, as if the city were being cooked.

  And then we turned our eyes to the water where the pier had been.

  The explosion had shattered the pier’s supports, turned the railing into sawdust. Only about half the flooring remained intact, and it floated in the water. Solomon Clay’s body lay flat on top. Flames traveled across the remaining wood, licking at his gabardine coat. And as the fire consumed him, his body shook and kicked.

  The Swamp Angels remained there with him. Both of them. They held him down even as the fire that scorched Solomon did the same to them. Their bodies quivered, but it wasn’t just the wind. They were in pain. Still they held him there. Sacrificing themselves to se
e the job through.

  Then the Swamp Angels were engulfed in flames, and soon they let go of Solomon’s body. They were dead. Their figures were lifted by the wind and were torn into small pieces in the air. Bits of burning paper, that’s all they looked like now.

  The pier tilted and Solomon Clay’s body slid. The splashing waters of the Bay doused the flames around him. His clothes had practically burned into his skin. I saw his skull peeking through the shattered half of his face. Fire had burned so much flesh away.

  Adele watched him. She gripped and opened her hands. She did this so forcefully that I heard her nails scrape each time they dug into her palms.

  The pier had gone adrift. It bobbled in the water. A current dragged it toward the Bay. It twisted in the current, and the smoke coming off the pier surrounded it in a gray cloud. When the smoke cleared again, only yards offshore, I could see Solomon Clay’s face even more clearly.

  One eye remained, on the right side, but the other had burst or melted out of its socket. Half his face was covered in loose, bubbled flesh, and the other half was his exposed gray-white skull. They say a skull, without skin, looks like it’s grinning. But this one glared.

  It was impossible to look away, even with the horror of the bridge not far off. The pier dipped in the tide. It tilted at an angle and began to sink. Solomon’s body remained limp.

  But his eye shifted.

  I swear I saw it move.

  It looked back to Adele and me and it held a relentless fury. Bitterness and vengeance without end.

  Then his body slid backward, off the pier, into the depths.

  79

  WE BACKTRACKED HALFWAY THROUGH the Port of Garland without speaking or even looking up from the street. My arm throbbed, but nothing worse yet. I didn’t mention Solomon’s eye. Had she seen it too? I didn’t even want to ask.