Big Machine (50 page)

In North Dakota, a town called Williston, there were handprints on the window of our motel bathroom. We didn’t see them until Adele ran a hot shower. They appeared with the steam. The way those hands had dragged on the glass made the fingers look like claws.

Neither of us sleeps straight till morning anymore.

Sometimes Adele wakes up shouting out names. Her voice a guilty wail. Once in a while it’s Snooky’s name. But just as often it’s Claude’s.

I woke tonight to find the bed empty, but I’m used to that. It’s two forty-five in the morning, and Adele has snuck off into the bathroom. She sleeps less than me, and when she wakes, she secludes herself for
a little while. I’ve found her in tubs, or if we’ve rented a cheap suite, rocking on a couch in the living room. She’s in our bathroom right now and thinks that by shutting the door she’s shielding her thoughts. But I know what they are.

Is this really my life?

Did I choose this?

Maybe I could run away.

I know that’s what she’s thinking because I’m thinking it too. You’re nearly here, and all my daydreams are about escape. Don’t be too hard on us. We’re just overwhelmed. Unprepared.

Scared.

“You doing all right?” I say to the closed bathroom door.

It’s a windy night outside.

Adele stays quiet. Maybe she wants me to fall back asleep. Let her alone. But I’m not asking that question simply out of concern. I admit that hearing her voice, especially in the thinnest minutes of the night, strengthens me.

“I asked you a question,” I say.

Finally, Adele clears her throat.

“Blow it out your ass, Mr. Rice.”

We’re in a town called Ironwood, I remember now. Not too far from Lake Superior. Our car is parked right outside this room. A gust hits and I hear the windows tremble. They don’t rattle, they quake.

It’s not lost on me that here, thirty years later, I’m following the paths of my parents. Route 2 is the road where my mother had her car accident. Adele and I have been driving all across the United States. Luckily, I remember just about every route there is to know. We’d been farther down, in the Southwest and the South, but then the air-conditioning in the old Mercedes finally conked out so we had to travel north, following the cooler temperatures, and found ourselves here on Route 2.

We actually do all right. Adele and I work temp jobs. We show up in a town and ask around. Usually there’s something to be done. But, I must admit, our real moneymaker remains the cabin back in Garland. We cleared it out, cleaned it up, and now we rent it. Ms. Washburn doesn’t give us trouble. I don’t even know if she ever returned. Maybe Tia Quina and her sisters still occupy the big house. I like to think so.

The lease remains a dollar, though we charge our tenants substantially more. Adele and I pay for these motel rooms with the money we make working, and the money from the cabin is paid directly into a savings account. I’m pretty sure Adele wouldn’t be willing to live as frugal as we do if we weren’t doing it for you. There’s already $9,200 in a Wells Fargo bank, which I think, relatively speaking, is a good start.

Adele just stepped out of the bathroom. She’s closing all the windows in the room because we can hear a howl when the strong winds slip inside.

I stopped writing for a moment and watched her move because she’s only wearing a top, no panties. I like to see her bare butt bop around the room. Juice Booty, that’s what I call her when she jiggles.

“Juice Booty!” I shouted at her, and she wiggled her butt for me, just a bit.

I’m wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, so I pulled the cloth aside and slapped my thigh. It sounded like applause.

Who needs to know this kind of stuff about their parents!

I think some people would say that. But I never did see Carolyn and Sargent so much as kiss during their marriage, and I’ve got to tell you
that
scarred me.

I’ve been thinking about my father a lot. Nothing like a baby to make you assess your folks. He hasn’t come across too well, but that’s why I’m happy to do this. Writing it down is like thinking out loud. It’s easier to hold on to a bad idea if you never share it, and it’s harder to defend one if you let it out.

Sargent Rice grew up in Syracuse, son of a secretary and a grocery clerk. I never met them because Sargent never allowed a visit. My mother’s folks came around here and there, but my father’s didn’t. I don’t even know their names.

Sargent’s parents liked to drink so much that they never brought home their paychecks. Instead, on payday, both his mom and dad returned with cases and cases of beer. For thirteen days Sargent would come home to an empty fridge, and on the fourteenth evening it was stocked with Labatts. It got so bad that eventually he petitioned both their jobs to make his parents’ paychecks out to him, and when he turned sixteen, the employers actually complied. His parents went along with it because they were embarrassed. That was the start of Sargent Rice’s thrifty ways.

But well before that, when he was younger, his parents would make a sandwich he could have for dinner, then head out to drink until last call. Leaving Sargent alone in a house that often didn’t have heat or lights. They were always being shut off for nonpayment. My mother used to tell me this story because my father never would. Sargent Rice, eight years old and sleeping in his winter coat when the Syracuse chills hit. A boy alone in a darkened house. His family an institution that had failed him. In bed he’d make a quiet wish for the power to come on. Something to kill the shadows. A modest wish, really. Grace manifested as a little electricity.

It’s good to keep in mind that your parents felt powerless too. You can’t forgive them unless you do. And I forgive them now.

WE PAY FOR ROOMS
with our work and save money thanks to the cabin, but we tend to eat in other people’s homes. Not panhandling, we don’t do that. It might be someone we work a day job with or a couple we meet while doing laundry. I can be pretty sociable. Also, people see my arm and want to know what happened. They usually think I lost it in the war. The number of folks who’ve been kind enough to have us in their homes? I can’t tell you exactly, but we rarely eat alone. There are generous people in this world. Less than some might hope, but many more than you can imagine.

Three months ago we found jobs off Interstate 40, cleaning rooms at a Comfort Suites hotel in Oklahoma City. Only three of us were new and non-Spanish speakers, me and Adele and a guy named Ravi Arapurakal. He told us to call him Ronny He could wiggle his long nose in a way that looked both funny and sexual, and even with the language barrier a couple of the older women on the cleaning staff loved him.

At the end of the shift he, Adele, and I decided to eat dinner there in the hotel break room. Adele and I because we hadn’t found a cheap place to sleep yet. We sure weren’t going to pay to stay at the Comfort Suites. At worst we’d sleep in the car. I suspected Ronny hadn’t lined up a place to crash either. The break room was warm, a place for the three of us to rest.

So we ate, and then Adele broke out the Old Grand-Dad. She always has some in her big green purse. Ronny was happy to imbibe. We poured shots into our plastic cups discreetly. Ronny liked to joke around when he was sober, but he gave confession once drunk.

He had a brother named Ranjit who was a heart specialist in Milwaukee. Ranjit had done well and took good care of the parents, that kind of thing. But Ronny, the youngest boy had less interest in caretaking. He felt a greater devotion to gambling than graduate school exams. He’d worked managing a parking garage in Gary, Indiana, but he couldn’t save a quarter. Not with the Majestic Star and Casino Aztar and the Blue Chip within driving distance. Ronny even borrowed money from the heart specialist when his home threatened to go into foreclosure. Blew it in three days. Ronny’s wife left him and returned to her family in Toronto. The heart specialist actually bought Ronny’s house before the bank could seize it, then kicked Ronny out so some cousins could move in. Ronny didn’t fight the arrangement. By then he knew he was a bad bet.

By the time Ronny told us this much, he was blubbering. He snorted, trying to hold in his cries, which only made his nose run. His round chin quivered and he could hardly breathe.

“My brother threw me out,” Ronny said. “Everyone just tossed me away.”

I don’t know how I would’ve reacted to Ronny’s stories a few years earlier. Not too sympathetically. We all got troubles, as Peach Tree once said to me. But by that time, in that break room, I wasn’t the same man I used to be. I’d never shaken the image of that nut standing on the side of the highway after we’d kicked him off our Greyhound bus. We’d sacrificed him. And there, sitting with Ronny, I felt I was on the verge of that choice again. Sacrifice this guy, or … And just like that, snap, the Voice’s commandment made sense to me.

Invite them back in
.

How long would it be before Ronny told this story again, in another break room or a run-down bar, and after he was done, the folks listening would commiserate, pat his shoulder, lean in close, and ask if he’d ever heard about a man, a martyr, named Solomon Clay.

Or who knew if the Dean might not become less of a race man in the future, and sometime soon Ravi Arapurakal gets a mysterious invitation in the mail.

This was our moment.

But what to do? How to invite Ronny back in? It’s not like we were going to have him move in with us. Or, even if we did, what would we do for the next Ronny? The next woman or man we found teetering at the edge. Even the Washburn estate couldn’t house them all. Maybe what Ronny needed right then, in the depths of his own turmoil, was just the possibility of relief. The hope that he might climb out rather than keep falling. In his warped way that’s all Solomon had been offering his followers. I wondered if we could redeem the best aspects of his message.

When Judah heard the Voice, he couldn’t really be asked to do more than survive. A black man, back then—who could really demand much more of him? But Adele and I weren’t Judah and it wasn’t 1778. Maybe the Voice knew it could, it should, demand more of us than mere self-preservation. We were strong enough to lift others.

So I told Ronny what had happened to Adele and me. Everything. Me getting the note, the work at the Library, and how we ended up there in a break room in Oklahoma with an Angel on my shoulders. It was the first time anyone had ever heard it. Adele seemed to figure out why I was telling it pretty quickly, and we told the tale together. At the end neither Adele or I knew how Ronny would react.

But you can’t predict people. He swallowed the wildest stuff as easy as aspirin. He accepted the existence of the Library, of the Voice, of both Judah and Adele hearing it down in the Devils’ Well, Solomon Clay, his ragged army, he even accepted my pregnancy. In the end it wasn’t the events that left him skeptical. It was the idea.

He was distraught. “Can people really change like that?” he asked.

I grabbed one of his hands there in the break room, under the humming fluorescent light.

“Yes,” I said.

“I mean people like me,” he clarified.

“Yes,” I said again.

Ravi Arapurakal looked at me, still clutching his hand, and shook his head. Between Adele and me it was clear who was the believer. So he turned to Adele Henry, the pragmatist, the working person.

“This is crazy, Ms. Henry. Right? Second chances … People like us don’t even deserve them! Do we?
You
tell me. Yes or no?”

Adele’s palms were flat on the orange break room table. She looked down at her fingers. She shut her eyes and breathed in deeply. She slid her palms across the surface. The wall clock ticked and ticked. Adele took Ravi Arapurakal’s trembling hand in both of hers. She held him steady. She looked him directly in the eye.

Guess what she said.

WHEN WE TELL PEOPLE
about our four days in Garland over plates and bowls, most people seem happy for the tale. Even when they don’t believe us, they say it’s worth a meal. And it’s not one-sided. All these folks have reminded me of something I knew as a boy tapping maps in the Washerwomen’s living room. My country is my family. I like America.

I’m not going to say
love
. Forget about love, not because I don’t feel it but because love’s easy. Lots of people say they love their families, but still treat their families terribly. So I’m purposeful when I say this. I like America, where believers eddy around one another like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don’t have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.

THE TREES BEHIND OUR MOTEL
are groaning. I can hear their bark twist and stretch. A storm is cracking their branches. There’s a madness in the woods tonight.

One story that people like to retell a lot is the story of Jesus Christ. I can understand why, but the retellings never have much impact on me.
A guy is born divine and grows up to be diviner. I might admire him, but how can I really aspire to that?

The story that actually moves me, as a grown man, is the story of Joseph and Mary. And it’s because, for all this talk of them being holy and righteous, they were just human beings. No matter how many visions and dreams and visitations, they were still just folks at first. They didn’t
know
if they were right. They could only hope. I can try and aspire to that.

The hardest part of faith is the silence. It’s difficult to face that quiet and remain patient. Waiting on your child seems like the same test. Each day, each hour, you don’t know if you’re passing the exam. You can only hope.

The wind outside has reached our door.

It hacks with so much force I swear the wood bends. I wonder if it’ll break.

In case I don’t survive, I want you to know this is
my
voice. Ricky Rice. Your father.

Look at all this business I’ve been through. There are times when I feel like I survived because I’ve been blessed or chosen or preordained. That kind of messianic hoo-hah. Other times, when the days are terrible, I think that no one’s ever had it worse than me. I’m doomed. I’m cursed. I’m wretched. It’s easy to become vain. And, for me, this is why my faith has always been valuable. Strip away all the magic and what does religion teach? There’s something greater than you in this world. I don’t know about other people, but I need to be reminded of this. And when I get too puffed up, when I invest too much in my own powers, I rely on what the Washerwomen taught me. Doubt grinds up my delusion. It makes me humble. And that’s a gift.