In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  I had not given up on Matilda, but she had taken an active field command in the far-flung ice cream empire she devotedly served. When not with the dude in the powder-blue Olds ’88 with faux-crushed-velour interior, of course. Almost every time the ice cream truck went out on a sales offensive, Matilda was at the wheel, a one-woman ice-cream-truck-drivin’, bringing-soft-ice-cream-to-believer-and-unbeliever-alike dynamo. And every time she pulled out, that fucking powder-blue Olds ’88 rode escort. My increasingly frantic thoughts were also occupied trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing with my life. What had once been a realistic (if loathed) option of following my father into the bowels of Toledo Transmission, now, with the economy being what it was, seemed like a taunting, impossible memory. Finally I just said “fuck it” and got a job breaking rebar out of concrete for a demolition company, and tried by sheer force of will to forget about Matilda.

  To be fair, America had begun the process of completely giving up on itself well before 9-11. Even my father, just a generation before me, would talk about the “good old days”, before automation and surveillance cameras when a guy could sleep off a drunk in some secluded part of the plant while his buddy worked both their jobs and covered for him. But it had been going on a lot longer than that: GM downsizing, rightsizing, lean-practicing, on-demand supplying its way to a smaller and smaller and smaller work force. And with every reduction came that awkward moment where GM could not grasp that there was nowhere for all its ex-employees to go. They would have preferred them to vaporize, or possibly be crushed into bricks and recycled, sold to China as scrap.

  Every city in America has that part of town where all the old brick factories of the past generations are, and sometimes, a couple blocks over, the houses of everyone who stoked, carried, hammered, sorted in the brick factories lived are now being busted up and dragged off in dumpsters: soil, scrap, wire, masonry, etc. You usually see its broken- tooth windows on your way into any American city by train. It slouches there, an embarrassed, broke, and shabby relative no one really want to talk to or acknowledge. The usual tack is to pretend it never existed: haul it away quietly piece by piece, building by building, implode it, bulldoze it, promise a convention center or casino. The summer after 9-11 I took a job busting, stacking, and hauling all that shame in brick and masonry form. It was a few buildings on a street in a shitty, forgotten part of Toledo, and I kept wondering if my ancestors had lived there once: two-story brick boxes, tarpaper roofs. Physically the work did me good. I found I enjoyed it—the violence of swinging the hammer in a cloud of dust, learning to balance it to let the sledge do the work. I got a permanent job with the demo company, and soon we were scheduled to work on the destruction project to end all destruction projects: the Willow Run Manufacturing complex. I began to take on more responsibilities at the company, feeling good. All my life I’d been a strange, chubby, asthmatic kid, both petrified of, and fascinated by, girls. All the swinging a sledge and pushing wheelbarrows rounded my shoulders and within six months I was proud of my body. I even managed to get my father a job, which he badly needed after the latest round of GM’s looking over its shoulder with a shocked expression of “the fuck you guys still doing here” layoffs at Toledo Transmission. Insulting enough after ten or twenty or thirty years of service. But why they always had to insist that now everyone was free to pursue their real dream in life (“brain surgeon! billionaire entrepreneur! Apple computer was founded by a high school dropout!”) was always the kick in the taint that let everyone know this was no temporary circumstance. That fire hoses and attack dogs for those who refused to mournfully slink away after a lifetime’s service and wrecked backs and shift-work-stoked heart attacks was the next step. I got my father a job with me: wrestling the enormous canvas fire hoses that knocked down the dust from the back end loaders tearing down America’s former “You really wanna mess with this shit?” industrial might. I think the job did him good. It was tough work for a man in his late forties, but being outside brought back his color (every man in our town, from shift work, booze and drugs seemed to have skin like old plumbing putty) and while he was making nowhere near what he would have made at GM (and, of course, no benefits), he was just happy to have a job.

  From the moment we even knew Willow Run was a possibility, we were excited, albeit in a confused, guilty way. This wasn’t a few abandoned townhouses or a derelict block-long wheel-hub assembly factory in Toledo. This was Willow Run. Toledo Transmission was a respectable-sized factory. Willow Run was a fucking Death Star. They had built the B-29 Liberator bombers there during the Second World War. Now we were destroying it. Almost everyone in our part of the state had some connection to Willow Run. It was almost impossible not to. Fathers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, some lifers, some cycling in and out through college and on to better things. But it was always a simple fact of industrial mass, a metal-stamping black hole. Its destruction was an undeniable admission of defeat. And the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver even wrote it into their gospel as the final sign on the end-of-the-auto-industry apocalypse. Which is why they didn’t take it so well when they found out the Church of Our Lady of the Monster Truck Rally had been hired to destroy a part of it.

  We had been working with the survey party when the Church of Our Lady of the Monster Truck Rally showed up. It was easy work: walking around the endless factory in our high-visibility vests, moving fallen beams or cinder blocks as needed as the surveyors set up sight lines and marked the floors with cans of Jamaica orange spray paint, numbering and coding and divvying it up like a side of beef. It was far too big for one company to handle, so everyone involved would get a section of their own to go to work on. It was a warm spring day and we had been laughing and joking the whole time. For the first time in a long time I could see my father’s spirits picking up. I thought working together would be a pain in the ass, but I soon found out we were much better at being work buddies than father and son. Which was fine with me. We had even taken to practicing our demolition derby moves on the vast airstrip outside Willow Run where the B-29’s had taken off on their journey to air combat over Europe. To my great surprise the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver had given me a car, without prompting, the first week I started going to services with my father. It was a 1987 Ford LTD Crown Victoria Country Squire station wagon complete with jump seats in the back, luggage rack on top, and fake wood veneer on the sides. It was both a thing of beauty and the automobile equivalent of a Nazi V2 rocket. But the congregation was insistent I only use it in the true spirit of Jesus. That I had to truly, deeply feel the spirit of God move within me, and only I would know when that moment would arrive. It arrived, of course, like an atomic blast, with the coming of the Church of Our Lady of the Monster Truck Rally.

  Like I said, the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver saw the Church of Our Lady of the Monster Truck Rally as amateurs, johnny-come-latelys, and publicity hounds. But they had undeniably managed to capture the public imagination with their methods, particularly the imagination of that vast swath of mouth-breathing believers who felt strongly that God himself had a deep and personal interest in who won the Super Bowl or the Indy 500. We had just finished a few emergency hand brake stops and bootlegger’s turns and were quietly eating our lunch, knowing we had found favor with our Lord, when we heard their arrival.

  Willow Run had this enormous airstrip of basket-weave runways that looked like a cross between the Nazca Lines and a place for the Titans to play tic-tac-toe, like the concrete tentacles of the enormous mechanical squid of Willow Run. All the companies contracted to take down Willow Run were arriving, looking like an invasion force suitable for the Normandy invasion. In addition to all the actual demolition machinery (backhoes, bulldozers, front-end loaders) were all the support machinery: flatbeds piled with metal barrier fence and portable toilets, semis hauling mobile office trailers and modular buildings, steel shipping containers with valuable tools and cutting torches, water trucks and teams of environmen
tal assessment eggheads. And bringing up the rear, the unearthly roar of the Church of Our Lady of the Monster Truck Rally.

  I could see the color drain from my father’s face the instant he saw them. We would learn later that they had managed to insert themselves into the demolition as a cheap publicity stunt: smashing and roaring and crashing into the thin steel-sided buildings that used to contain the B-29 assembly line. But my first reaction was one of awe. There was every conceivable size and shape: a fire truck, an ambulance, a school bus. One made to look like a steam locomotive. Another made to look like a shark. Dinosaurs. Tanks. An F-14 fighter. And there, right out in front, leading this end-of-the-world convoy, the Tasty Scoop truck, on top of forty-eight-inch tires, fiberglass ice cream scoop still revolving on top, Matilda behind the wheel. And there, following after her, that powder- blue Oldsmobile 88. And the power of the Lord did come upon me. And I did toss my lunch aside and jump in my Ford LTD Crown Victoria Country Squire station wagon. And I did find favor in the eyes of our Lord that day.

  The Lord does move in mysterious ways. Sometimes (as is the case in 9-11) he just moves like a fucking asshole. But I had come to believe the Lord helps those who help themselves, so when I hit the rear quarter panel of the powder-blue Olds going reverse at forty miles an hour, I knew somehow the spirit of Jesus was smiling down upon me. I hit him with such force that the front of his car came spinning back against me, like someone closing a jackknife, and for a brief instant we locked eyes before the greater mass of my Ford carried me past him, leaving him spun completely around three hundred and sixty degrees, the back of his car now simply a tangled mess. After that all hell broke loose. Most of the crew my father and I worked with were members of the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver, and when they saw what was going on they jumped in their cars and raced to help me. They had no clue what was going on besides the fact a bunch of Monster Trucks, their sworn enemy, had shown up, and I was madly careening in and out of their ranks trying to get close to the Tasty Scoop truck. In an instant we were swarming in and out of their ranks, but there was nothing we could really do to them. Their giant tires served like enormous rubber bumpers, like tires hung around the outside of tugboats to cushion their impact when pushing ships. Before long both sides wore down in confusion and we arrived at an uneasy stalemate.

  Management knew they had to rectify the situation, so they called an impromptu peace conference the next day inside Willow Run under a protective amnesty, which is where, for the firs time in three years, I saw Matilda. All the Monster Truck drivers were huddled in an uneasy knot, all wearing clothing thematically tied into their vehicles: bus driver, fireman, fighter pilot, so they all looked like a cross between cut-rate, blue-collar superheroes and a group of male strippers. Matilda stuck out, both because she was the only female in the group and because she was, despite the fact she drove around all day in a fully functioning ice cream truck, still smokin’ hot. After the obligatory short speech about getting along sprinkled with veiled threats about what steps management would take if we chose not to get along, we formed two lines and began to shake hands like hockey teams after the final game of a playoff series. I could feel my heart beating faster and faster the closer Matilda came to me in the line, and I think it took my father about eight seconds to figure out what was going on, and to project into the future about what was going to happen.

  “Does it still make ice cream?” was my opener. Lousy, but that was alright. I was no longer a chubby asthmatic. I was tall, with wide, round shoulders and a flat stomach. Wide, round shoulders and a flat stomach forgive a lot of lousy openers. Or at least my opener.

  “Yeah, wanna see?” was Matilda’s response, seeming to forget about the dude in the powder-blue Olds, who I could only assume was somewhere either in traction, or at the very least (hopefully) a comical neck-brace. From then on I started working on my end-game, casually strolling over to Matilda’s Tasty Scoop truck every day at lunch for free ice cream (that was the flimsy excuse I’m sure my father saw through it instantly anyway).

  Our little internecine war had set back Willow Run’s demolition date, and in that time me and Matilda grew closer. And the ghosts of Willow Run seemed to visit us. For me it began with a spooky feeling that everyone that had worked at Willow Run was ashamed of us and our complicity in destroying the vast facility. Maybe I just over-romanticized it. I was too old to ever really know what it was like to be a part of the system at GM. To have your life totally determined by the groans and tectonic shifts of a place like Willow Run or Toledo Transmission. That was all long gone by the time I was old enough to walk through those gates. Its vast silence seemed a noble recrimination against the horde of termite-like men and women who were about to tear it up for scrap. But any chance to protest it had passed a long, long time ago. This was no Battle of the Overpass. It was just embarrassing. I’d had enough of tearing things down that other, harder-working people than me had built up. It came to a head the night before work was supposed to start. Me and Matilda were sitting in a pair of lawn chairs on the runway beside her truck. She had managed to build a substantial business with her truck selling to all the workers who were from out of state, and was camped out waiting for work to start. I had started helping her out, and it felt good. Better than seeing your entire blue-collar history disassembled brick by brick. I told her I wanted to quit, leave Willow Run, and see something of the world outside the Ohio Valley and southern Michigan.

  “Everybody loves ice cream,” I said. Checkmate.

  It’s five years later now, and I couldn’t tell you if we won, or the terrorists won, or it ended in a draw. From what I’ve seen through the serving window of the Tasty Scoop truck, American looks pretty much the same as it did pre-9-11. It’s been at least a generation since the military became the new Toledo Transmission: the place you went after high school if you didn’t have either the brains or the money to go to college. Luckily, I had Matilda and her Tasty Scoop truck, or it probably would’ve been the Marines or tooling around in the Navy on some Godforsaken aircraft carrier in the Middle East for me too. I write my father postcards whenever I can, and send him pictures of me and Matilda in whatever state we’ve decided to explore. I’m happy. I think she’s happy. And it’s true: peace, war, stock market collapse, housing bubble burst, everybody does love ice cream. Things seem to be turning around. There’s even a rumor they’re going to start up Toledo Transmission again, which, to be honest, I don’t think most people know whether to shit or go blind over. The jobs may be there, but the pension and benefits have been successfully cannibalized by management. I read about it in the papers, but mostly I just want to forget about the whole thing.

  Kelly Robson has been published in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Tor.com. She is a rising star in the world of science fiction and fantasy and, after studying with Connie Willis and Walter Jon Williams at the Taos Toolbox writing workshop, has hit the ground running.

  “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” is a disturbing tale about the inner life of a brutally victimized hitchhiker and how she saves humanity.

  THE THREE RESURRECTIONS OF JESSICA CHURCHILL

  Kelly Robson

  “I rise today on this September 11, the one-year anniversary of the greatest tragedy on American soil in our history, with a heavy heart . . .” —Hon. Jim Turner

  September 9, 2001

  Jessica slumped against the inside of the truck door. The girl behind the wheel and the other one squished between them on the bench seat kept stealing glances at her. Jessica ignored them, just like she tried to ignore the itchy pull and tug deep inside her, under her belly button, where the aliens were trying to knit her guts back together.

  “You party pretty hard last night?” the driver asked.

  Jessica rested her burning forehead on the window. The hum of the highway under the wheels buzzed through her skull. The truck cab stank of incense.

  “You shouldn’t hitchhike, it’s not safe,” the ot
her girl said. “I sound like my mom saying it and I hate that but it’s really true. So many dead girls. They haven’t even found all the bodies.”

  “Highway of Tears,” the driver said.

  “Yeah, Highway of Tears,” the other one repeated. “Bloody Sixteen.”

  “Nobody calls it that,” the driver snapped.

  Jessica pulled her hair up off her neck, trying to cool the sticky heat pulsing through her. The two girls looked like tree planters. She’d spent the summer working full time at the gas station and now she could smell a tree planter a mile away. They’d come in for smokes and mix, dirty, hairy, dressed in fleece and hemp just like these two. The driver had blonde dreadlocks and the other had tattoos circling her wrists. Not that much older than her, lecturing her about staying safe just like somebody’s mom.

  Well, she’s right, Jessica thought. A gush of blood flooded the crotch of her jeans.

  Water. Jessica, we can do this but you’ve got to get some water. We need to replenish your fluids.

  “You got any water?” Jessica asked. Her voice rasped, throat stripped raw from all the screaming.

  The tattooed girl dug through the backpack at Jessica’s feet and came up with a two litre mason jar half full of water. Hippies, Jessica thought as she fumbled with the lid. Like one stupid jar will save the world.

  “Let me help.” The tattooed girl unscrewed the lid and steadied the heavy jar as Jessica lifted it to her lips.