The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 13

"Now you're catching on. Hey!" he yelled out over the room. "Riggs is developing a brain! He's coming up out of the swamp! Go ahead, kid, give me your best shot."

"Like y'all ought to change your name. I mean, West Virginia's not a state, it's a direction. It makes you look small."

"It ain't ever hurt West Consin none, has it?"

"So what were you planning to dynamite?"

"Meek, I done told you. I'm going to dynamite his a.s.s into the middle of next week."

"You're going to blow up Meek?"

"Naw. h.e.l.l naw! A hunnerd times better than that. This here's a variation on your cla.s.sic cherry bomb in the toilet, except we'll probably need a couple of sticks of C4 on account of we want him riding a geyser right after he flushes."

Willie T. gave a piercing whistle and yelled, "Bring 'er on in for a minute, boys. This is going to get good."

When he had his audience, Pardue said, "We'll need to cut off the water for most of this section of the mill, you know, to build up the pressure pretty good, and then reinforce the pipe at the actual point of detonation. I want it to blow an eight-inch column of water through his b.u.t.t. I want it to rocket that son of a b.i.t.c.h through the ceiling tiles so that his head will come through the next floor and somebody will step on him. I want it to look like he's riding Old Faithful to the moon. You understand what I'm saying? I hate that cracker! I want him to pull down his pants, take a seat, pull that d.a.m.n handle, and think that he accidentally launched the s.p.a.ce shuttle. That's what I want. And I'm telling you we can do it. It's a matter a teamwork."

"Have you ever done anything like this before?"

"Not me specifically. But I witnessed something similar back in high school. It was sad, really. Kind of tragic in a way. And it caused an international incident that you boys may have heard of, which should teach you the value of careful and strategic thinking and also something about the fragility of human life. So I reckon I'm going to have to tell you about it."

"I thought you might need to."

"Okay, there's this one old boy name of Pruitt who hated the a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al the way I hate Meek and who came up with something of the same plan but without careful thinking. What I'm telling you is they forgot to reinforce the sewer drain pipe at a vital point. It makes me sick to this day to think about it, and, well, you can probably already imagine what happened. Pruitt and his boys stopped up most of the toilets on the third and fourth floors and waited for the crucial moment right before the a.s.sembly where the genuine Boys Choir of Wales, I'm not making this up, was going to give its international Christmas concerto for the backward children of West Virginia, you know, on account of they thought that would be a likely time for the son of a b.i.t.c.h to visit the toilet. And sure enough he did. Everything was going to plan. The little Wales children was warming up backstage. Pruitt and his gang was hulking over several toilet bowls like vultures with a couple sticks of dynamite and a Bic, waiting for a miracle. And, by G.o.d, it happens. The a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al comes in with one of the singers, a little tiny p.i.s.sant of a Wales kid name of Cardiff Glendenning it turns out, showing him where the bathroom is. Well, Pruitt and his gang are in this one stall, feet up off the floor hulking on the rim of the commode so the place looks deserted. And they hear their guy. Then they hear the stall door next to 'em close and the little lock go snick, like that; and they figure it's a go for liftoff. So Pruitt gives the nod, and ffftt goes the fuse and flush goes the charge. Fifteen seconds later there's this dull, distant boom like thunder rolling down the mountain. And, oh, sweet Jesus!"

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened," I said. "He's making this up as he goes along."

"I'm going to tell you what happened as soon as I get a grip on my stomach because it gives me the dry heaves to this very day. It makes me want to puke just thinking about it. There was a tragic miscalculation. And what happened, boys, is that one hunnerd yards downstream the pipe blew. It couldn't take the blast, see, and it was like one of them submarine movies except it was blowing high pressure sewage through that cafeteria and it was like the u-571 taking the entire eighth grade to a watery grave."

"I thought you said the entire school was in the a.s.sembly listening to the boys choir of some d.a.m.n place you probably made up."

"I'm telling you they was in the cafeteria, and they was fouled, fouled something terrible. But that ain't the worst part. Because ... oh my Lord, that poor little boy. You see, it was him in the toilet and not the a.s.sistant. It was horrible, just horrible."

"It blew him up?"

"No! A hunnerd times worse. In fact, the exact opposite. When that pipe blew four stories below and every drop of water in the entire system headed toward the center of the earth, what the h.e.l.l you think happened? It created a suction like a hurricane blowing through your empty head. I can hear his screams to this day. And I can imagine the horror. Just think of it yourself, poor little Cardiff looking down between his legs and seeing what? A tiny ripple and then, all of a sudden, a whirlpool like the d.a.m.n t.i.tanic was going down. And the force of suction? Good G.o.d Almighty, boys, Superman couldn't pull himself out of a force like that. It threw his legs together and formed a perfect seal so d.a.m.n fast it was foregone before it was foredone; and that ill-fated child was bent in the shape of a V and singing soprano for sure, fighting for his life, and praying 'Sweet Jesus, if you love a sinner, get me out of this American toilet.' In fact, those might have been his last words."

"His last words?!"

"That's right. What I'm trying to tell you, boys, is that young Cardiff was never seen again. And I believe to this very moment it was the tragedy that turned my life in the direction that it eventually took, ruining me for medical school or one of the higher professions. That little boy's story is in many ways identical to my own. It's why I stand before you today a broken and humble man."

"That's a d.a.m.n lie!"

"It's no lie, boys. I swear on my sweet grandmaw's grave."

"It's a gah-d.a.m.n lie on account of you never been inside a high school in your life."

5.

When the layoffs began again, they started in the weave room and worked their way through the departments. The weavers were replaced by automated looms, inspectors by scanning machines. And the weave room went from being as noisy as a field of crows to being as silent as the grave. And the dye house lost its steam. Then I guess they sent the carding and spinning operations overseas where they weren't as particular about brown lung and wanted to share the opportunity with folks making twenty cents an hour. That's what Pardue said. He said, "Boys, you better read the handwritin' on the s.h.i.thouse wall," meaning, I suppose, that we were as obsolete as John Henry's hammer. Still, I took pride in the fact that binners and pickers were the last to go, though when they came for Willie T., he simply said, "Fellas, I lost my job." Never suspecting that it may have been lost for him.

When they came for me, it was like I had done something wrong, which I guess I had in a way. I should have tried some college after all. For a time I worked security at a country-western place called Boots, where they let me try my hand at a few stand-up routines, but it never clicked. You got to make the crowds go wild if you want to do real comedy. You got to leave them gasping for air. Which I guess I never did. Within two years the mill was down to half production and only one shift. Businesses closing on Main Street while the p.a.w.n shops flourished. I got reports from my sister, who was a photographer at the local paper. She told me the mayor was applying for federal grants. Within two and a half years everyone was gone from the picking room except Murtaugh.

In my mind I could see him working alone, in his world where he had been shaped by the acc.u.mulated weight of years, dark and threatening as a thundercloud. Muscles corded under that white T-shirt like bridge cables. Hands and arms, G.o.d, like he could catch a Volkswagen if you could throw him one. Sometimes I think he had just been waiting for the rest of us to leave. Which is the way, I believe, that monsters are made. He stayed until the mill itself closed, about the same time I moved to the mountains and took up carpentry. My sister Emily sent me a picture of the picking room when it had been emptied of cloth, but it had no human perspective. It was just a photograph of a junkyard, like you could go searching the aisles forever and find nothing but the dry emptiness of canyons. And after that I tried to imagine Murtaugh walking the streets of our little town at night. Up and down, across and back, following the grid.

Jimmy John Pardue went into the movies and was arrested within a year for making the wrong kind. He bought a used video camera and a Volkswagen bus, which he drove through the mill village, offering money to girls who would accept a ride.

"Hey, sweetie, where you headed?"

And they would tell him downtown or to the movies or none of his business.

Then he would ask them, "You need a ride? Cause we can give you a ride and even give you a little money if you'll answer some questions, me and Patty here."

"What kind of questions?"

"Hop in, I'll give you forty dollars to tell us the first time you ever kissed somebody."

"What's she need a camera for?"

"That's Patty. And, Patty, I want you to meet the love of my life, the most gorgeous and most talented girl without a ride on this street whose name I want recorded right now on account of she's got the best-looking little legs I've ever seen and a smile that would stop a train. Are you Sarah? Because that's what somebody told me and you sort of look like a Sarah, you know, in a real fresh and perky kind of way. Why don't you hop in, and we'll give you a ride down to the shopping mall. I mean, if that's where you want to go. And you don't need to worry a bit. Ain't n.o.body going to make you take any money that you don't want to take, no sir, not one dime of this fifty dollars."

In the film that they used for evidence, there is no sound, only unsteady images of the girl herself and the occasional hand or foot of the person holding the camera. Jimmy John is at the wheel, and you can see through the windows that they are driving through the country, trees and pastures spooling by in a blur. The girl is adjusting her skirt and pulling her hair behind her ears and touching the b.u.t.tons of her blouse as she answers questions from the front seat. She is smiling, handling the interview well. Relaxed and talking to the camera. At one point she giggles and leans forward, planting a mock slap on the side of Jimmy John's head. He cringes in pretend fear. And they all laugh some more. You can see the camera jiggling.

A few minutes later the girl covers her face in mock embarra.s.sment and then answers cautiously, looking out the window at ta.s.seled rows of corn. There's a shrug and a few more words from the front seat. Some folded twenties that get handed to the girl who stuffs them into her backpack and sits meditatively until the scene goes blank. When the light and motion resume, she is on her knees in an impossible position, her rump in the air and one shoulder and the side of her face on the floor in the middle of the van. She's smiling and talking to the camera as she lifts her skirt and tugs at the elastic of her panties. Everyone seems to be laughing and having a good time.

6.

I did not marry Patty the commissary girl or play professional baseball or become a big star, but my life is all right. Today I am a wood turner in a furniture shop in the mountains where the guys say things like "Hey, Riggs, run outside and get us a tree" and I feel like I am at home. At night I lie down in a bed that I made with my own hands beside a woman named Elise who gave me the one thing that I love most in this world. And she is so tiny. Normal and perfect like her mama and as light as a snowflake in my hand. At least that is what it feels like to me.

Sometimes I tell her stories. I am still pretty good at that, and as I tell, I remember. Like how you got there by following the yellow line. One foot wide, repainted twice a year by men who never got off their knees because for them it was a never-ending line that wound through the carding room like a country road on a map. Then across the metal bridge and into the weave room where you dodged air cleaners drifting above you like jellyfish, tentacles hanging all the way to the floor and sucking up the cotton fibers so it's like the cleanest floor you've ever seen, weavers bustling around in hairnets and masks like surgeons. Then you took the yellow stairs down. Punched through two sets of swinging doors and went down some more until you smelled vinegar or maybe heard the dyer himself slamming at a bolt with one of his wrenches. And pretty soon there he would be, sweating on account of the steam and not even wasting a glance in your direction. Most of the time you only knew him as a pair of legs and a leather ap.r.o.n there in the blue fog, but it would be him all right. He never left the dye house. It was like the laundry room of a prison, the air a roiling thundercloud of blue steam. But sometimes you could see him in one of the aisles between vats, where he'd be roasting like a pig, arms absolutely blue to the elbows and where, if you came close enough, you would notice the one startling fact that stayed with you all the years. That his eyes were perfectly matched to his arms, the cobalt blue of new blue jeans.

Those are the things I remember because there was no direct route into the picking room. You had to follow the painted pathway. You had to take the yellow stairs down. And once engulfed in that fog, you simply held you breath until you reached the freight elevator, which, everybody said, was a one-way drop, like the canary cage dangling from some miner's hand as he takes the long ride down. And I do not know how I got out alive.

Now I look back over my life trying to see where it went right, and I find someone four years old climbing into my lap, there in the big chair, on nights when the wind rushes up through the valley. And I try to think of what to tell her when she asks where the monsters come from.

TWO WHO DROWNED.

Refiner's Fire.

So many things at once. Like this.

The woman I live with is white, which for some people, I suppose, counts as an accomplishment. While for me it suggests that they must have been desperate down there, at the church. Someone must have had a vision. And someone else must have decided they needed a delegation. So you see what I mean. None of this story makes sense when you tell it straight. I'm guessing they prayed for a month before reaching the bottom of their barrel, and then they prayed some more and sent elders up here to my house, sc.r.a.ping and shuffling like a bunch of plantation darkies, asking me what they've just been asking, blaming it all on Jesus. Maybe the only truth is this one-that I don't have any idea of what their jumbled lives are like. Maybe somebody really did have a vision. I mean, how desperate do you have to be before you start seeing things?

That's not cynicism. I'm just tired, tired of living on the edge of chaos, images coming at you like flash cards. I'm just tired. And so I see things too.

Like it's been raining all morning. I can see that. There are puddles and rivulets. I can see that too, though now the sun sharpens every detail along our street. Parked cars are shining like new Lego blocks. And the one tree in my yard, a live oak as big as my house, is shimmering with diamonds. I just don't see the angel. I suppose I could have said Jesus doesn't give a s.h.i.t about the weather and I don't believe that an angel sent you either, but that would have hurt their feelings, asked them to step outside their scope of understanding. And G.o.d knows we don't do that.

So here we are, the peculiar couple, standing on the porch watching the delegation waddle down my walk like pachyderms. Karen's holding on her hip a thin black child named Lamont, who is not my son, and she is saying to me, "Maybe you could just give it a try. For a few weeks. Until they've found a new minister."

While I'm still burning up inside. Trying to sound calm.

"Did you ever notice," I say, "that church committees-black or white, it doesn't make any difference-all look like fat, greasy beggars? Except there's not a white woman in town as fat as Hula Cole. Did you ever notice that?"

"Quinn," she says.

"You could have dragged those people straight off the streets of Calcutta, added a few tons, and got exactly the same effect. I mean, Jesus Christ, John Powell Baity looks like that fool who played Uncle Remus in the ..."

"Quinn, n.o.body came here to insult you."

"Don't be so sure."

"I think you would do a wonderful job."

"I like the church the way it is, all singing and no sermon."

"They need a minister."

"They need a touch of reality. Far as I'm concerned, that pulpit can stay vacant till they find somebody from the Ku Klux Klan who'd be willing to take over for a while. What are we doing about dinner?"

"You weren't very polite while they were here."

"Look, polite to these people means yes. And in case you don't remember, I already have a job. Which is the only reason they showed up here in the first place."

"I don't think that's the only reason."

... and on and on and on for the next half hour until she finally smothers the flames. Like she's walking through the house turning out lights one by one, that kind of woman, who might one day save your life, or drive you insane. So let me tell you again. I'm not cynical. I'm just trying to protect what I own.

And what I'm talking about right now is a woman named Karen. Who lives with me. Wears a silver comb in her hair on most days and takes it out at night in a comforting ritual of gray-black strands shaken loose and brushed long. She does it in a way that suggests we are growing old together. And then, as she plucks off silver rings, turquoise bracelets, whatever jangly thing is around her neck, she places them in some solemn order upon her dresser as if praying for grandchildren. So I tease her. Every night. Because that's the way we say it, by looking together into the same mirror and searching for a silver comb that seems suddenly, inexplicably lost in perfect camouflage. And the long dresses, I think, simply mean that she owns an art gallery, although they still remind me of the year we met. Back then we were a revolution. Now we are only an oddity. And the sweaters? I don't know. I suppose she's just cold.

So this is a story about us. No matter what happens in between.

You should know that there are crayons scattered over the floor because the porch of my house, which is really a veranda, is wide enough and deep enough to look like an invitation to every untethered child in town. There are crayons and piles of paper, chalk and the remnants of someone's homework. There are two books fluttering like wounded birds. A pair of pink flip-flops. There's a basketball. A stack of Monopoly money in green, yellow, pink, and white but no Monopoly board and no Monopoly tokens. Only a lingering argument over the money-isn't that a surprise? And one of Karen's hairbrushes and a knotted hair band. But there's also a momentary calm, broken soon enough by one of the older boys, maybe eight or nine, with a mouth full of sa.s.s and that accusatory tone that they use to disguise hope.

He starts in on me, just after the d.a.m.n committee leaves.

"How come," he says, "how come you don't never tell a story 'bout a black man?"

"I do," I say. "I've written stories about ..."

But he looks at me like I'm the white princ.i.p.al.

"Look, I already have. Aesop was a black man. So was Lemuel Hawes. Jackie Robinson. So was Abram White."

"How come you don't tell no stories 'bout a black man living right now? That ends happy. I ain't no turtle."

"Hush now. Hush," says Karen. Patting the big one's back. Pulling little Lamont into the comfort of her, his legs dangling on either side of her hip. "Hush now." This time to Lamont. "You're not hurt anymore." And her own hair falling loose in places and the full sway of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she walks among the other children and the dangling jewelry and the smell of her. Do you see what I mean? I have no idea what their quarrel was about, and yet she's there among them, like the shepherd, and I am here on the edge, like the dog, looking for direction.

So I adjust my gla.s.ses and tug tight the cardigan she gave me for Christmas, the way I do in cla.s.s when they ask impossible questions. And I put myself where I can look over the heads of the children and down the street where another, entirely different crowd is gathering, suddenly and inexplicably. It's like the echo of the turmoil already around us. And I'm wondering if you understand yet. Because my stomach, already tightening, realizes that there is another story, a real and urgent one, unfolding farther down the hill and that I am being drawn into it at a most inconvenient spot. I'm being pulled in again because one silly, senseless event is always tied to another, that's what I've learned. And this new one at the end of my street, at the bottom of my hill, on a Sunday afternoon is far more serious than the commotion on my porch.

"How come you don't just make up a story?" says the same boy.

"Listen," I say. "There's something happening."

"Quinn ...," now she's trying to sound like my wife. "Do you think you ought to go?"

And I give her the same glare that the kid gave me.

"I just thought you might go look. I mean, if the police ... Maybe you could talk to someone."

"I'm not the mayor of Coloredtown," I tell her. "I just live here, same as you. And besides, whatever it is, they don't want me in the middle of it."

Which is more than enough to send her inside with little Lamont and two of the girls, saying thin-lipped the way she does, "Come along now," like she thinks I can do something about every drunk who smacks his wife on the weekend. Seventeen years and she still doesn't realize I have a history with these people. That I wear cardigan sweaters for G.o.d's sake and steel-rimmed gla.s.ses. That I teach literature, Karen, the first black man at Baxter College who doesn't push or pull something. And so of course they don't trust me. I don't even speak their language. I've grown used to the money. I sit on committees. How can she live with me for seventeen years and not realize?

But here I am, aren't I, on the damp sidewalk looking back at my empty porch. The children have scattered like biddies, and here I am looking back at a wide, smiling veranda that makes my house look like a plantation house. Rattan chairs big enough for kings. And ferns on either side of the door set like African headdresses on white fern stands. And a brick walkway that leads up to gray porch steps. So we say out loud that it's a porch, but we've made it, after all these years, into the one untroubled crossroads of our town where once, long ago, I sat jamming with a group of musical men who laughed and played half the night. That's what I'm mad about. She can slam the d.a.m.n door all she wants.

Because who you are determines where you live in Baxter. And I mean where you sit and stand. Professors in one part of town, businesspeople in another. Black folks over here on the hill. Which is how I've come to be walking down toward my neighbors who are gathering around the echoes of gunshots and the sound of a distant siren and now, suddenly, another. Because something has happened again. At first it doesn't seem real to me without television commercials and the cool, flat flickering images. But here I am walking down my own street beneath the bare dripping limbs of willow oaks, wiping my gla.s.ses with a handkerchief and muttering to myself like a tourist lost in some insane, chattering marketplace. Even though I live in a hundred-year-old house. As close to the campus as you can get without crossing tracks.

So I walk, and it's like descending into a dream. The Jamaican lawn ornaments, the painted doorways. Like she sent her voice to follow me into dreamland, only an octave higher; and I know before I look. It's that boy who can't keep himself from beneath my feet or shut his mouth long enough to breathe. Saying, "How come you don't be the new preacher?" Just out of reach and as insistent as a mosquito. "You could preach, couldn't you? Ain't that what you already do?"

"I try not to."

"Why not?"

"Why don't you tell me what your name is."

"I stay with my aunt sometimes, Lamont's mama." The inflection rising as if this were a question. "I watch him till supper time most days."