Big Machine (8 page)

Violet had already gathered up the loose sheets from the file and set them back in the green folder. Now she crouched over the newspapers I’d spread on the floor. She looked at all the articles I’d cut out. I’d even snipped some ads.

Violet grabbed one of the papers, the
Arizona Daily Star
, and said, “You been busy.”

I sighed. “I just can’t seem to get it.”

She said, “Maybe we can help.”

And just like that, following her call, the other Unlikely Scholars gathered all my newspaper clippings. Rather than returning to her office, Violet just plopped down on the floor in mine and read through each article, looking to see which she’d choose to send along.

Then Verdelle sat beside her. Peach Tree wriggled his big butt in between Verdelle and the bookshelf. Sunny sat in the doorway, and Grace took the seat at my desk. Euphinia stood in front of me, and when I didn’t step aside, she said, “Think you might offer that seat to a lady?”

Once I moved, Euphinia sat and opened her paper, the
Mohave Valley Daily News
.

Then we heard footsteps in the hall. A heavy tread on the grand stairs. None of the guards had ever caused such booming. So when Lake appeared in the hallway, we weren’t surprised. It had to be him or a triceratops. Lake reached my office and leaned against the clear wall, his body so big I thought we’d see cracks form in the glass. His bushy head poked into the room. We looked up from our places on the floor. To him we must’ve looked like a kindergarten class.

“Violet?” he said.

She raised her right hand.

“The Dean sends congratulations.” He paused. “The rest of you should follow her lead.”

Lake pushed himself off the wall, waved once, and left. The rest of us watched Violet quietly. Violet indulged a proud smile as she picked up the
Arizona Daily Star
again.

EVEN WITH A TEAM
of seven it took a while to go through my stack. Hours, I mean. There were bathroom breaks and trips to have coffee, and debates about whether an article should be disqualified or passed
on. As the pile of excluded articles grew, I got better at recognizing the difference. So did the others. We made progress in small ways.

Finally, when we had two dozen likely contenders, the others had me go through each one and explain why it had made it to the semifinals. I got it wrong a few times, but not often. And together we pared the pieces down to three undeniable favorites. That night, when the guards arrived, I’d send the trio to the Dean. All the others still had the pieces they’d clipped the day before. Only Violet had nothing new to offer since she’d spent the day training us. But she was the star pupil, so no one thought it would hurt her much.

At six o’clock we heard footsteps in the hall. All seven of us were still inside my office, and the steps weren’t seismic enough to be Lake’s. They were faint, someone small. Not one of the guards, but smaller.

I knew it wasn’t the Dean even before I rose up, like the other Unlikely Scholars, and pressed my face to the glass wall of my office. (Sunny had commandeered the doorway.) I knew because the Dean wouldn’t wear shoes that squeaked like that. So loud I thought a duck had snuck into the Washburn Library.

It was a woman.

She came down the hallway, walked to office four, unlocked it, and went inside.

She couldn’t have been older than me. Thirty-eight or thirty-nine. And her thighs were so thick that she wobbled when she walked. Now, let me say that I don’t mean that part as an insult. In fact, I mean it as the highest compliment. She was shaped like a bowling pin. The kind of figure that makes a man like me feel vigorous. And if I hadn’t seen her in the context of the Washburn Library, I would’ve asked that thick little woman on a date.

Her face reminded me of a pinecone, just as brown. And she had these little nicks and bumps on her neck, half a dozen. They were razor scars. The kind you get from fighting, not shaving.

She opened her desk drawers and removed a few spiral notebooks. She stepped into the hall again, shut her door, and locked it.

I went to my toes so I could see her over Peach Tree’s head. I guess you might say I was ogling. Then I caught myself and relaxed. I hoped nobody had noticed.

Right then Violet whispered, “What is wrong with her
hair?
”

If the woman heard Violet, she didn’t show it. Just squeaked herself away. We watched her climb to the top of the great marble stairway and cross over again, into Scholar’s Hall.

She didn’t even look at us once.

After she disappeared, we were left to imagine her story, but we didn’t
even know her name. Instead we made up tales for an hour. None of them were nice. We gathered in the break room and gossiped over coffee.

The only idea that persisted, and thus seemed true, was that that woman had arrived at the Washburn Library years before we had. She was an Unlikely Scholar, but not from our class. We thought this because Grace claimed to have seen her posed in one of the photos in the lobby. We tried to solve the mystery, but didn’t have enough evidence.

Finally, Verdelle, who’d claimed she wasn’t any type of criminal, used a nail file to shred the shoulder off the key to her own office. Within half an hour she’d made it into a decent bump key. Verdelle then worked her bump key into the lock of that lady’s office, and after a few minutes of jiggling she got the door open.

We didn’t find much inside. Those spiral notebooks must’ve been about the last item left behind. She probably did all her work in her cabin, tucked in there day and night. Who knew that was an option? Then Violet found the envelope. At the back of a bottom desk drawer. The name handwritten in a penmanship we recognized from our own envelopes.

Adele Henry.

We left her office and returned to the break room, and Violet asked her question again. What was wrong with that woman’s hair? Of all the strange bits, her hair remained hardest to forget.

Entirely white. Like polished bone.

She kept it short, a close little Afro, so it looked like she wore a swimming cap. A strange sight on a woman so young. And on dry land! When we talked about her, it kept coming back to the hair. As if this summarized the trouble with Adele Henry.

Violet first gave her the nickname. By nighttime, as we left the Library, I doubted we’d ever refer to her in any other way. The Gray Lady, that’s what we called her. The Gray Lady.

My future wife.

OVER THE NEXT TWO MONTHS
the Unlikely Scholars became friends. Forget standing outside in the snow. Now we had one another over for dinner four nights a week. Verdelle and Peach Tree turned out to be admirable hosts; Peach Tree knew how to cook his meats, and Verdelle loved to entertain. They didn’t have dinners, they held soirées.

Wasn’t quite the same with the rest of us, but we did serviceable work. Each week the office staff accepted grocery lists from us, and the guards drove to some nearby town and stocked up. I wasn’t the only one to put beer or wine on my list, but none of us ever got a can or bottle.

Once a week I had the Scholars over to my cabin, so I got into the practice of moving my stash before each meal. If I’d left the baggies and needle under the bathroom sink, then I shifted them to the bottom drawer of my bedroom dresser. The week after that I changed to the top shelf of my broom closet. I couldn’t leave it in one place too long because addicts are better than bloodhounds when it comes to chemical scents.

Violet and I became close. She liked me. And it wasn’t one-sided. She was exactly my type. A bookish little thing. In Cleveland she’d been an assistant librarian
and
a meth addict. She knew how to pack a pipe and carry a conversation. That is a well-rounded person.

And yet I didn’t do more than make time with her. Verdelle and Peach Tree set up house. Euphinia and Grace might as well have been conjoined twins. And Sunny did just fine for herself. She was juggling two young ladies from the office pool. Me and Violet had to boil over eventually. We were isolated too long to avoid it.

Two months, that’s how long it took. A Thursday evening when Violet and I made Hanky Pankies for a dinner at Sunny’s place. Violet brought the recipe from Ohio. Sausage, ground beef, Velveeta cheese, some garlic salt, and Worcestershire sauce. All of that heated and stirred until it became this glorious gloop, which we spread on slices of pumpernickel bread. Then we put them in the oven until they toasted. In a fine restaurant they’d be called tartines.

Violet and I left her cabin. Me carrying the warm cookie sheet, no oven mitts, her twirling a spatula in one hand. The sun had gone down just enough for the snow to turn a faint blue. Our boots on the packed snow sounded like we were walking across cardboard. We were nearly at the cabin, and I could see Grace in the window, setting dishes on the table.

“I feel like an old couple visiting the in-laws,” Violet said.

I nodded. “Well, they must be your relations. Peach Tree’s too ugly to be from my side.”

She slapped my arm with the spatula. “I hope your parents came to our wedding at least.”

Violet’s words, and my own, replayed in my head as we walked quietly. Then she looked up at me and I looked down, and I knew she expected me to kiss her. Our first kiss.

Instead I said, “There’s not going to be no church service.”

“We’re going to elope!”

“Violet,” I said, “I could never mess with a little girl like you.”

Violet dropped the spatula. It landed with its handle upright, the rest lost in the snow.

She had a very wide mouth and such full lips. There were dark patches on her cheeks, which only made her more imperfect and endearing to me. She wore large silver hoop earrings that day, like every day. A truly beautiful woman, in other words.

“Don’t include me in your little fantasies anymore,” I said.

Her eyes bugged wide and her eyebrows arched for a moment before they settled, but then her nose flared and her lips pursed shut as she sucked them in. She looked to the right, down at the snow, shook her head and sneered. Then she reached down and pulled the spatula from the snow.

“Fuck you, Ricky,” Violet said. “Nobody wants your shriveled old dick.”

She snatched the cookie sheet off my palm. Violet walked to Sunny’s cabin, knocked too hard with the bottom of her spatula handle, and when the door opened, she went in alone.

WHEN THE DEAN’S INVITATION FOUND ME
in Utica, I’d been trying to have a child for years. Three years. I’d impregnated a whole series of women in that time, but not one of them ever gave me a child. Weeks into the process and every single woman had a miscarriage. I mean, it just wasn’t working at all. Eventually sex produced so much tragedy that I stopped having it altogether. Hadn’t even masturbated since after my date with Cheryl in Utica. Have you ever known failure so deep it feels biological? If I hadn’t found something else to sustain me, if the Library hadn’t sought me out, I would’ve eventually committed suicide.

People might hear that and say, Commit suicide over not having a child? Come on. To them the idea seems ridiculous. Or it seems ridiculous for a
man
to think that way.

But when Violet gave me that smitten look outside Sunny’s cabin, I knew how it would end. Why do you think I’d kept switching towns over the last three years? I’d start dating some woman at work, we’d get all loved up, family plans followed, and then the miscarriage ruined it all. One of us always had to leave. Me. And where would I find another place like the Washburn Library if Violet and I followed the same path? I hated to hurt her feelings, but I’d rather be alone than expelled.

And I stuck to my cover story: Ricky Rice, asshole. I didn’t admit the truth: that I wanted a child but couldn’t produce one and the frustration about killed me. Why not tell them? Some men might be cool enough to admit such defects to others, but I’m not one.

Of course, I hadn’t always felt this fatherhood desire. Only since 2002, when I made a promise in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. One I had yet to keep, no matter how I tried.

Long before that I had made one woman pregnant. A decade ago. Her name was Gayle.

But we didn’t have the child.

I SKIPPED DINNER
at Sunny’s that night. Violet had stepped into that cabin and repeated our exchange. The group’s reaction hadn’t been hard to predict. To the women Violet was a grandchild, a niece, a little sister. The next morning Peach Tree came to my office pissed, repeated all that was said. Even he’d suffered because of me. Verdelle, hit by a wave of female solidarity, wouldn’t be giving him any butt for weeks.

Still, I refused to disappear entirely. Instead of coming to dinner four nights a week, I only ate with the group a few times a month. No more chummy chatter. Both Violet and I were grumpy for reasons no one would address out loud. As a result the group conversations revolved around the Library, the notes from the field. We talked about work.

We tried to guess who, exactly, was funding the Washburn Library. Indulged a boatload of theories—the Ku Klux Klan, the Federal Government, the New World Order, Corporate America, and sundry Illuminati—but while some of them gave us shivers, none made a damn bit of sense. After two and a half months we gave up that ghost. We asked Lake, but the man remained mum.