Big Machine (22 page)

“I really don’t
know!
” The frustration in her voice was actually convincing.

Now she looked back at the other books on the mantel as if some grand power lay in one of them, the rest of the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown. But I doubted we’d find answers in Volume 12:
Mysterious Creatures
or Volume 16:
Phantom Encounters
.

We weren’t part of a high-end organization. I just had to admit this. We had money but not limitless amounts. Access to information, but not the top secret kind. These “research manuals” could be ordered by phone. We weren’t calling in any special strike force for support. We faced the extraordinary armed with the subpar. I looked at Adele Henry and finally accepted an obvious fact. If she or I served up any heroics, we’d be baking them from scratch.

I WANT YOU TO PICTURE THIS:
it’s a lovely Sunday in your town or city. You’ve actually roused the family put on the formal clothes, then sat through a service that lasted an hour, maybe more. Time served, you shamble out of your pew, open the front doors, and find a man or woman on your church steps reading the Bible aloud. You don’t recognize this person and he or she is blocking your path, if not with her body then with the volume of her voice. You might even try to parse out which passages are being recited. They sound familiar enough, but the specifics escape you. It must be from one of the books you’ve hardly cracked. Maccabees or Hosea or Geritol.

You figure this is one of those super-Christians, here to tell you the good news that Christ died for you (as if you hadn’t just heard).

Finally you actually listen and ask yourself, Was there really a woman named Josephine in the Bible?
Malik
and his coat of many colors? Luther parted the
Mississippi
?

Do you know who hated to hear this stuff? Everyone. White churches and black churches. Korean churches, Puerto Rican and Dominican churches. Presbyterians and Methodists, and any other denomination you might name, always chased the nutballs off. Those nutballs were my parents.

The Washerwomen directed their followers to go out into the world and preach that every church was broken. But we had the repair manual. This meant traveling. That was quite a shock, since most of their followers had been born and raised in the five boroughs. And you can
fool yourself if you’re raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn’t true. We’re rubes too. For us a trip to Scarsdale is a safari.

Our parents were gone for eight months every year. Moms for three and dads for five. The Washerwomen were the only adults who lived with us all year long. Our parents traveled the continental United States delivering this cockeyed gospel.

Your church is broken! The Washerwomen are here to rebuild!

The Washerwomen didn’t proselytize to people of other religions, or those without any beliefs. There were two billion Christians to reach first. Then we could move on to the rest of the planet. And they meant to do exactly that. Faiths aren’t founded by modest types.

But none of this is why our folks remained loyal. Not really. The proselytizing was a task, and the ambitions a dream. So why, honestly, did we swear by the Washerwomen?

Gina, Karen, and Rose called themselves “priests without a parish.” Local clergy discussed the Washerwomen the way you discuss a calf born with two heads. Like, Can you believe that? Isn’t the world bizarre! The cult on Colden Street. Once, a visiting Anglican priest even gave the sisters a nickname:
episcopi vagantes
, the “wandering bishops.”

It was a title the sisters liked (the English, not the Latin). They embraced it, whether it was intended spitefully or not. They used to call each other by that name. Even had fun with it. Once, I was in the hall and Gina waited at the elevator while Rose stood at the door of the apartment the sisters shared. Rose yelled, “Hey bishop! Wander over to the store and bring me some mustard greens!” Gina had to come back to the apartment to get a few more dollars for the greens, but Rose wouldn’t hardly move out of Gina’s way. I bear witness. They stood there grappling, foreheads pressed against each other, two sisters, a lion and an ox. They seemed to shine like beasts of prophecy, their vitality more persuasive than any words.

That’s why we believed.

THE GRAY LADY SET HER BOOK DOWN
on the table, then warmed herself some tea. Once the water boiled, she came back with her cup and found me touching that silly book cover. All black, the words in silver lettering. Mysteries of the Unknown.
Angels & Demons
.

Below that title was a large illustration. An angel in silhouette, exactly as you’d imagine: bird wings extended and the body in flowing white robes. Light streamed from behind so you couldn’t see its face.

“Well?” she asked, and sipped her tea.

“On the way over here, I saw they were holding some kind of rally,” I said.

“What?” She gulped from her cup.

“There was a whole crowd over by the water.”

“Probably Laguna Lake,” the Gray Lady said. “What made you think of that?”

“I was thinking I’d probably feel safer around them than I do around you and Claude.”

“Don’t lump me in with him,” Ms. Henry said. She took both teacups into the kitchen. I hadn’t even sipped mine. She ran hot tap water, and it made a hurried splash against the sink. A gurgle came out of the drain.

“Well, what would you need?” she called out.

I went to the kitchen doorway.

“To cure all this mistrust,” she continued.

“I could use a doctor,” I said.

She dropped the teacup she’d been handling, then picked it back up
and ran it under the water. Squeezed dish soap onto a sponge and started cleaning.

“You’re feeling that bad? You don’t seem like it.”

“I don’t
always
complain, Ms. Henry.”

When she was done with the first, she started on the second. She smiled to herself. “No?”

She meant to be lighthearted, but I couldn’t oblige.

“I need a doctor, Ms. Henry.” I rolled down my shirt sleeve and redid the button.

I stepped into the living room, grabbed my jacket off a chair, and pulled it on, slid the belt loop back around my middle. I touched the back of my left hand to my forehead, but I couldn’t be sure if my fever was worse or better, because all my skin felt hot.

“I can give you some medicine if you’re feeling weak.”

“More aspirin?”

The Gray Lady stopped running the water.

“There’s a mobile health screening truck. Actually, they park it right by Laguna Lake on weekdays.”

“You talking about one of those vans that check your blood pressure? Because I don’t think that’s the problem.”

“No, Mr. Rice. There’s a heavy homeless population near the lake, so the truck caters to them. It offers more comprehensive care.”

I grabbed the back of one dining chair and squeezed the wood until my anger drained. Really, I wanted to kick over the table but didn’t have the strength.

“So I tell you I need to see a doctor, and you tell me to get in line with a bunch of bums?”

“Claude and I have to go to Contra Costa County. It’s urgent. But I’m sending you to Laguna Lake to get care. They’ll look you over, help you out, then you take a cab and wait for me here. That’s the best I can do on short notice. You’ve been getting your per diem?”

“Nobody told me there was one.”

“Fifty dollars per day. I gave a hundred fifty to Claude this morning. He was supposed to put it in your hand when you finally came out.”

“Claude and I have had trouble ever since we met. He hates convicts and I hate cocksuckers.”

Ms. Henry opened a counter near her fridge. “He’s not charming, but he works. Anyway, I’ve got some cash here. Take these phone cards too.”

“Phone cards!” I laughed. This was only getting worse.

“How about food stamps?” I asked. “Can I apply through you?”

She laid the money, the cards, and her phone number on the counter-top, and I picked them up. I walked back into the living room, and it
seemed even larger than it had just minutes before, nearly empty, cavernous. Hollowed out.

I asked her, “What’s the point of all this space if there’s nothing inside?”

She ignored me, took up her cell phone, flipped down the mouthpiece, and extended the wiggly antenna. She said, “Claude and I will drop you off.”

But I was already at the door. My pride wouldn’t let me get into that Town Car just now.

“I’ll walk,” I said.

Even slammed her door as I left.

NOW, IT WAS QUITE DRAMATIC
that I told the Gray Lady I’d walk all the way to Laguna Lake, but it was a bluff. Walk to Laguna Lake? With my knee? And a fever? Maybe even some kind of poison running through me? Forget that. I just said it because I’d seen a bus stop right in front of the Washburn estate when Claude first drove me in.

When I got to the bottom of the steep, winding perimeter road, I found the guard station and the stone front entrance. The guard on duty warned me that I’d have to wait, though, that buses around there ran slow.

Coal becomes a diamond in less time than it takes to catch a bus in Garland. I waited so long that I saw Claude and the Gray Lady leave in the Town Car. Felt so foolish that I stepped back and blended into the fence as best I could. Once the car reached the far bend of MacArthur Boulevard, I stepped out again. Still no bus on the horizon.

Well, damn.

I really
would
be walking.

I REACHED LAGUNA LAKE
in about two hours. Yes,
hours
. Feeling both cold and feverish, dragging my right leg, and a fire running up my left arm. The burning sensation had traveled a little higher now, from the forearm to the upper half. A slow-moving toxin. I was practically crawling by the end. Leaning against walls, people’s fences, cars, streetlamps. I wouldn’t have blamed the police if they’d picked me up for public drunkenness. The idea of that screening truck only became more attractive as I moved. I’d scorned the thing when Ms. Henry mentioned it, but I’d curl up in its wheel well to get a shot for the pain. So I pushed on and pushed on.

Three buses passed me along the way, but I was never at a bus stop when they did. I’d figured I could hail a cab, but they didn’t do that in Garland. You couldn’t just wave and have them stop. You had to call their dispatchers or catch one idling at a train station, which was just the last aggravation for me. At that point I decided I’d walk all the way or die. That would really teach Garland a lesson. Needless to say I wasn’t in a tender mood when I reached Laguna Lake.

Turned out those people I’d seen, the ones gathered at the base of Laguna Lake, were there for a protest. Their signs displayed words like
preserve
and
respect
. A small crowd of people, a multiethnic congregation, the kind of gathering you don’t tend to see in real life, only in bad films.

We got to watch television in moderation when I was a kid. The Washerwomen didn’t consider it unholy. For instance, they followed college football (Bethune-Cookman Wildcats!). And I remember all those
flicks from the eighties, like the Death Wish series, where you’d see street gangs with members from every racial group. Asian and black and Latino and white, maybe even a Native American guy. (You could tell because he wore a headband and had long, straight black hair.) Those gangs were meant to be menacing on-screen, but they always made me laugh. What crew was this? I’d wonder. Had gangs really figured out racial unity as the rest of us failed to grasp it? Those were some very enlightened thugs! I guess the directors didn’t want to offend anyone, but as a result they told everyone a lie.

But here at the lake I’d finally come across a multiethnic crew in reality. A Bay area church led by a preacher who clearly emulated Mr. Jim Brown. The preacher had that stern firmness you find in the brothers who broke their backs in the sixties but survived. This preacher was all shoulders. Bald as a stone. Wearing the kind of black leather trench coat they stopped making in 1985. Somewhere in that man’s wardrobe lay a matching black leather baseball cap. For sure.

He spoke to his congregation under a colonnade at the base of the lake. They held candles, raising palms over the flames when a strong wind blew, and dropping their hands a moment later even as the wind continued. But the lights never went out, which seemed like the kind of tiny miracle that can fortify one’s faith. They listened to the preacher, and I walked closer to hear him, but reached a woman at a small folding table first. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in decades, but by choice. Devoutly healthy, fervently fit.

“Want to buy a candle?” she asked. “The money goes to our food bank.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you’ve got. Most people are giving five.”

I had one of those in my wallet now, and she handed the candle to me after I paid. But when I tried to walk off, she grabbed my slacks near the waist, and I hopped back because the only other touch I’d had in a month was way down in that sewer.

“You’ll need this,” she said.

She handed me an AAA battery about as thin as one of her fingers. The candle wouldn’t work unless you popped a battery into the handle. I looked back at the folks under the colonnade, reflexively cupping their hands over the plastic flame when a breeze started. Then letting go when they remembered the light was fake. Hard to tame certain instincts. I slipped the battery in my candle and it lit. I waved it at the lady.

“Electricity,” I said.

Passing her, I reached the sermon. The preacher had a surprisingly nasal voice. He spoke quickly, breathed heavily, and radiated the frantic energy of a boxing coach.

“What you have to understand, see, is that this is the last straw. This is the last straw’s last straw!”

“Yes!” a man in the crowd yelled.

The preacher said, “The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do.”

“Yes!” a woman screamed.

“But what if the worst off are never even counted? I mean, how long do you put your faith in the census taker if the census taker never comes to your door?”