The Sky Below (32 page)

It had a splendor to it, the ruined library. The broken shelves were mahogany, elaborately scrolled, and ominously empty, split, and unevenly sheared away. Semiroofless, the library was at the mercy of the sky. The books had absorbed decades of sun, sleet, wind, and rain. In addition to the black marks on white paper that composed them, they bore the marks of the weather, the animals, and the people. Teenage couples from the one-road town nearby sneaked off to the library at night to fuck; the younger kids had their fights there after school. The chickens had fattened on their power over this domain of Eros and Thanatos. They were smug, roosting everywhere on half-decomposed volumes, regarding visitors patronizingly.

However, titans though they were, they were no match for the stray dogs, and casualties were high. Across the front of the library was a bent and rusted length of inadequate wire fence, badly anchored by a few moldy two-by-fours. We needed to rebuild the library walls, because we needed the eggs, to eat and to sell, but there was the unstated sense that we also needed the good will of the chickens.

Sweet, the adobe man, tootled up to the church's iron gate one morning in his adobemobile, a truck full of adobe forms, scrapers, and huge buckets of dry clay, and with a globe—made out of adobe?—affixed to the roof. He hopped out of the adobemobile in red-and-white-striped knee-length cargo shorts
that exposed the machinery and beige plastic parts of his prosthetic leg. He was a short, lithe man with a clever face, big blue eyes, and a singsongy way of speaking.

“
Hola!
” he called out, opening the back of his truck. “
Estoy aquí!
All right, children, let's go.” As I stepped forward from the courtyard with the others to unload the supplies, I noticed that Sweet's hands were scarred as if he'd been in a fire; his hands looked boiled. But he was quite efficient and commanding, and in short order, out by the ruined library/chicken coop, we had become a team: Xolotl trundled a wheelbarrow full of clay and sand to a clear area in the dirt; Helena, who came from the town to do laundry and help us out with various tasks, trundled another, filled with buckets of water; Malcolm X scattered straw on the ground; and I trundled a wheelbarrow filled with trowels, a shovel, adobe forms, scrapers, and hammers. Sweet surveyed the ruined library, squinting. The chickens squawked and clucked inside.

“Holy shit,” said Sweet. “You didn't tell me about the roof.”

“For the books?” I asked, setting down my heavy wheelbarrow. “For the chickens?”

“You're cute,” said Sweet. “Where did they get you? No,
mi amor,
for the adobe. The walls won't last six months without a roof. They'll crack.”

“That's how it got like this in the first place,” said Malcolm X.

“Where are we going to get a roof ?” I asked, thinking: Home Depot.

“We're going to make one,” said Sweet. “God help us.”

Malcolm X sketched an area about two by two feet in the dirt. She handed me the shovel. “Dig there,” she said, and winked. “You know how to dig.”

I gave her a swat on the butt, began to dig away, and before long there was a nice square hole about three feet deep. Xolotl, looking dreamy, brought over a large piece of plastic and
we arranged it as a liner in the pit, holding it down with books at the corners on the ground above. Sweet, leaning back on his prosthetic leg, tipped in about half a wheelbarrow of clay and sand. Helena waded in, waved her hand. Sweet emptied one of the buckets of water into the pit, and Helena sloshed around, plunging her hands in, rolling up her pant legs, up to her knees in muck the consistency of bread dough. “
Más. Más.
Good, good.
Bastante.
”

Sweet handed Helena an adobe form, and Helena quickly, gracefully filled it with the clay-and-sand mixture, troweled off the excess, and turned the adobe brick onto the straw-covered ground next to the pit. “See?” she said to me. Sweet handed her a double adobe form. Like a magician, with a whirl of her long arms she filled the double form, struck off the excess, and turned two bricks out on the straw. Now there were three newborn bricks drying in the sun, oblong and thick and dull red.

“Like that,” said Sweet to me. “Do you get it?”

What was there to get? It was a hunk of clay in a box. “Sure. Okay.”

Malcolm X began applying sunscreen to her arms and face. Xolotl sat down cross-legged at one corner of the adobe pit. I sat down at another. Sweet took off his prosthetic leg, leaned it against a wheelbarrow, and sat down at a third corner. He whacked a form and turned a brick onto the straw. The corners of his brick weren't quite as crisp as Helena's. “Here we go, children,” he said merrily. “Get comfortable.”

“Sweet, how many, do you think?” asked Malcolm X, taking a seat. Helena climbed out of the pit and occupied the fourth corner, shaking adobe off her legs.

He crinkled up his clever face. “I'm thinking, you know, two thousand.”

“Two
thousand?
” I looked at the adobe pit. “You can't make two thousand bricks out of that.”

“Magic is another word for repetition,” opined Xolotl,
slowly trailing the side of his hand along his brick and making swirls in the adobe. Since his sojourn in the sacred tree, his fair skin had deepened to a burnished rose color.

Sweet gestured toward the wheelbarrow. “We will take that technology over there,” he said, “and get some more. You can't make too much at a time or it clumps up and begins to dry in the mixing pit.” He sighed. “You should have called me two years ago. Oh, well.”

Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. I kept trying to crisp my corners, but they came out blunt, ragged, or cracked. Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. The sun moved inch by inch across the sky.

One day. Two days. Three days. Julia joined us. Then Jabalí. Then the twins from San Luis Obispo, the Episcopal guys, who acted like lovers. Maybe they
were
lovers, who knew? Our nursery of dull red bricks grew next to the library. They had to be spread out so they'd dry. In their uneven rows and scattershot groups on the straw, they looked as if they were about to blossom into something else: soldiers, boxers, skyscrapers. We circulated gossip. Sweet produced a few joints from inside his prosthetic leg and we circulated those as well (not to Julia, of course). Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. I got new calluses, in new places on my hands. My elbows ached. My corners still weren't 90 degrees—70, maybe. Helena was by far the fastest, best adobe brick maker. She patted each loaf out onto the straw with impersonal speed and accuracy, humming. Her bricks were identifiable by their heft and elegance. Once the wall was built, we'd be able to see who had made it by the differences in the bricks, like different, repeated notes.

Sweet, scooping up adobe, said, “Did you hear what
happened at Alma?” Alma was a community like ours about two days' drive away, over the next mountain. Alma was larger than the ex-convento, and the people were shaggier, goofier; they ran a little circus. Their thing was making electricity out of corn, astrology, and orgies. “Raided,” said Sweet.

“Jesus,” said Xolotl in his delicate voice. “I was at Alma. Raided?”

“Because of the bus strike.” Sweet scraped off the excess from his brick. “The
Federales
said they were harboring union organizers. Then the barn burned.” He raised an adobe-coated eyebrow.

“Bad days,” said Jabalí. “Did they cleanse the ground?”

“Oh, you know them,” replied Sweet. “They just panicked. They all ran into the caves up there and took peyote, and four days later they came down and said they were leaving. They're going to Amsterdam.” He said “Amsterdam” with a certain amount of disdain.

“Utopians,” said Malcolm X with the same disdain.

“Aren't we utopians?” I asked. “I mean, come on. Look at us.”

Malcolm X, Jabalí, Xolotl, Sweet, Helena, the Episcopal twins, and Julia, who was playing Twister by herself on ripped-out book pages, looked at me. “No,” said Malcolm X firmly. She was covered in adobe. “Utopia is a trap.” She gestured at the field of bricks around us, which had grown to be rather large. “You can make adobe out of just about anything. Any dirt, anywhere. Anyone can do it, with a little patience. We're not utopians. We're teachers. We're trying to be what happens after it all falls apart, if there's anything left.” The others nodded agreement.

“Oh,” I said.

Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. The sun was hot on my head. Could we do that, adobe brick by adobe brick? Rebuild the world? As our pile of bricks
grew, I began to see the shapes of what they might make: a small house, a school, a bench to sit on at the end of the day. The bricks, about as big as shoeboxes, extended in every direction, far outnumbering us. I realized—maybe it was as Malcolm X had said it would be—that I hadn't thought about making one of my boxes in a long time. I hadn't saved any found treasure. I hadn't stolen anything, either, except that feather. It was an odd sensation, not wanting to steal anything, like the idea of never wanting sex again. Though I still did want sex. Though I wanted it with a woman, which was upside down. Was having sex with Malcolm X a form of stealing? Sadly, I had to conclude it really wasn't. She was all too happy to share. A stray dog ambled by and peed on a few bricks. I felt an overwhelming, embarrassing tenderness for the bricks, huddled in irregular reddish lumps in the field, waiting to be born. Form, smack, shake. My corners approached 80 degrees.

“Ah,” said Helena, standing up and stretching. “My back.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the ruined library. The big rooster, on what remained of a broken bookshelf, crowed. What was left after it all came apart, after the sky had fallen and the world was upside down? If I was a shade now, what was my job?

 

That evening after dinner, as the singing and drinking were getting started and the Episcopal twins were hooking up their electric violins, I wandered over to the library in a restless mood. I stepped over the busted, rusted chicken fence. Like the adobe bricks, many of the chickens were sleeping, contented balls of feathers in their straw nests. Others scratched at the mix of feed and scraps on the floor. Two pecked a third, who squawked and flapped up awkwardly to roost on an encyclopedia that was listing from missing pages. In the indigo sky, stars were beginning to appear. The chicken smell was acrid, and the half-open space was warm from their presence. I still
didn't know how we were ever going to make a roof for the library, and once we did make it, how were we supposed to hoist it up? Some kind of crane made out of palapa with an adobe engine? Cast a spell and sing it up, floating through the air on its own?

I stubbed my toe on a large volume. Kneeling down, I saw that it was called
Música Sacra por Todos los Días,
and that there were the remains of what had once been brightly colored notes on the cover. Inside, smiling children in hair ribbons (girls) and caps (boys) romped with lambs and sat in a circle around a snow-white Jesus in equally snowy robes at the tops of scores of hymns in Spanish that I didn't know even in English. The pages were stained, but the book was intact. Underneath that book, face-down and nearly buried in the dirt, was a little one, hand-bound with strong red string, called
Ma Vida.
Embossed on the front was a gold cross; inside, tiny elegant handwriting in Spanish covered the pages. One page had a line drawing of a heart with rays of light coming out of it. Another had a crown of thorns, looking almost whimsical, unattached to any divine head, floating spikily on the page. The paper was near crumbling and several hunks of pages were missing, but this book, I knew, was truly treasure. It was worth something. Not far from
Ma Vida
was a book called
Historia de las Américas,
coated in chicken shit and a little swollen, but otherwise complete. I put all three books under my arm.

The light was fading fast. I rushed to pick up unruined, or only semiruined, books, the way you rush to pick up pretty shells on the beach as the tide is coming in. I was a nuisance to the chickens who were still awake, pushing them aside to grab large books, small books, slender books, thick books—any book that had most of its pages and at least one of its covers. I stacked them in a neat pile on the other side of one of the ruined walls. I could hear the stray dogs barking, but what could they want with books except maybe to pee on them? Dogs eat
chickens, not pages. I clambered over the busted fence, trotted back to the kitchen, and got one of the clunky flashlights, circa 1981. I returned to the library and by the beam of the flashlight rescued book after book, thinking
This is stupid,
but unable to stop myself. What if
Ma Vida
had been written by the little nun with the unfortunate nose whose bed I now slept in? How could I let her book rot away like that, disrespected and unnoticed?

Some of the books were too far gone; I left those to the chickens. But some were half alive. And some were remarkably fit. The stacks against the outside wall grew so high that by the time first light arrived I didn't have to lean over anymore to add to the pile. I dug around in the corners, even checked under the chickens' nests (lots of complaints), until I was satisfied that I'd reclaimed every possible volume. I looked and looked for an edition of Ovid, but there was none. His shape-shifting gods were pagan, forbidden. Adding a book on what seemed to be advanced mathematics to the last stack, I was very pleased with my work. I sat down and closed my eyes, thrilled by the sweetness of the last traces of night air on my face, the library that I'd saved at my back. It smelled musty, also a bit like loam. I felt quite clearly that I understood something, but before I could articulate what it was, I must have fallen asleep.