Swallowing a Donkey's Eye Read online

  “People know City still uses the Old Dump, but like most things, they don’t care. Or they don’t care enough to want to act. That’s where your guy Solomon knows his politics. You can make people accept anything as long as they’re not willing to act. There’s a lesson there, for sure.” Dad cups Melissa’s camera in his hands, forcing the lens to focus on his mug. “Well, do any of you care out there? Anyone keeping score with The Candidate home-game?”

  38

  TUNNEL OF LOVE

  He leads with his gun. “Gotta be careful here. Never know who’s lurking around the door.”

  The chute is behind us and we’re inside that hollowed-out building on the first floor. The carpet has tears and worn spots. The bowed ceiling is up higher than it looked from the street. This used to be the main lobby or foyer of this building. We step through broken and overturned chairs, desks, some torn and accordion-style waiting-room magazines. Melissa’s camera has a spotlight and my father tells her where to point it. The light finds a black metal door, seemingly standing by itself in the middle of the foyer.

  I walk around to its side and there’s more of the black metal, or maybe wrought iron, that tunnels into the floor, and I have to assume below City and into Pier. No sir, I don’t like this door. It looks so final. Someone needs to tell me again how all this is supposed to help me and Mom.

  There are some electronic bleeps. My father is working at a numerical code-box just above the handle. He types in a ridiculously long number. He stops and says, “Shit!”

  “Can’t you just use your special mind powers to open the door?”

  “You’re a funny guy.” He punches at the numbers again. This time there’s a loud click then some pneumatic hisses. He grabs the handle and opens the door slowly for the dramatic benefit of Melissa and her camera. She gets it all. He says, “We’re gettin’ there, kiddies.”

  I take a peek. What I see first is what I see second and third and on and on . . . I see down, City’s maw, the gullet of the giant who wanted to eat that beanstalk punk Jack, a tunnel with no light at the end, the path to nowhere: the City codified and regimented and legalized nowhere.

  My father says, “You are such a drama queen. Strap on some balls and let’s go.” He steps inside and in plain sight of the camera, I give the middle finger to the back of his head.

  Father Psychic Friend says, “Not very Mayoral. If you listen closely you can hear your poll numbers dropping.”

  I step inside. The walls and stairs are made of the same iron as the door. Our shoes click and clack on the stairs. There is light in here. Light bulbs housed in wire-cages hang off the ceiling, one every five feet, an upside-down breadcrumb trail. The ceiling is a foot or so above my head so I don’t have to duck, but my scalp gets flash fried when I walk under one of those bulbs. The tunnel is wide enough for two to walk side-by-side, but we go down single file with camera-Melissa as the caboose. After an initial steep descent the stairs give way to a smooth ramp and the tunnel levels out, the angle of depression almost negligent.

  I say, “Are we there yet?”

  “It’ll take us a solid hour to get to where we’re going.” He steps to his left and stops. “You lead. I got some info to give to our viewing audience.” He slides in between Melissa and me and plants a two-handed shove on my back.

  “We could do without the tour guide spiel,” I say, but he doesn’t listen. He starts flapping his gums. Talks about how his parish and charity efforts raise funds to keep this tunnel, the last of its kind below City, in commission to help serve his mission and blah, blah, blah. I don’t fucking care and I stop listening. I really have a hard time believing that this guy has followers. That he has folks who believe in what he has to say and believe in him enough to give him money. Likely he’s fleecing his sheep somehow. He’s all scam and nothing but the scam, always has been. But I keep going down with no real idea of where I’ll end up.

  39

  CAUGHT CLIMBING DOWN

  I was sitting in the hallway, back against my apartment door. I kept nodding off, falling in and out of sleep while waiting for them to come back. Didn’t sleep much the night before.

  As I was starting to think they wouldn’t come, three other kids who lived in the building ran down the hall right behind Jimmy. Those other kids giggled and whispered. Jimmy had a crowbar tucked inside his jacket, the handle sticking out near his waist. He was always finding things he shouldn’t.

  Jimmy said, “Shut up or we’ll wake his mother.” I doubted they’d wake her up. Like me, she hadn’t slept much the night before.

  We scurried down the hall and to the elevator, tearing away the last of the CAUTION tape. It was the end of summer: one week before school started back up and only a few months after our yellow-web-spider-in-the-shaft games. Nobody was afraid of that spider anymore.

  Jimmy said, “You ready?” I’d grown noticeably taller than him at some point during the summer. I’d mentioned it to him a few days earlier. His answer was to swear at me in Spanish and say that he still had two parents living in his apartment. Back then, everything we said was true.

  He said, “You really gonna do this?”

  I answered Jimmy and the group by pulling the crowbar out of his jacket. That shut up all the whispers and giggles. I pretended to weigh and inspect the metal bar and made a not bad, not bad face, like I was a pawnshop broker inspecting someone’s wedding ring. I placed the curved crowbar tip on the rubber jam between the elevator doors and then I pushed with everything my getting-to-be-not-so-little body (that was what Mom had said about me the night before) had. The crowbar sank between the doors, maybe a quarter of the metal swallowed up.

  Jimmy helped me pull on the bar. There was an awful high-pitched metal sound that bloodied our ears as the doors separated. We let go of the crowbar and it fell down the elevator shaft. It crashed and rang like a tuning fork on the lobby floor.

  I said, “Whoops,” laughed, and tried to shimmy my body between the elevator doors. I only got my left arm and shoulder through. I squirmed back out and we pulled and pushed on the doors, managing to open them a body-width wide, or at least, my body-width wide. I stuck my head in and looked down at the bottom landing, the lobby. The lobby elevator doors had been removed along with the ruined elevator car and the ruined Mrs. Lopez. The landlord had only seen fit to cover the doorway with a nail-fastened see-through plastic tarp. Us kids had undone a flap and had played in there all the time. We’d been in there earlier that morning, climbing up the sides of the walls, using the stilled gears and brakes, cable grooves, and wall studs as handgrips and footholds, daring each other to touch the elevator doors on the floor above us. The climbing had been hard because there was only the light of the lobby and it’d made us mostly blind in that shaft of darkness above our heads. I’d been the only kid who touched the second-floor doors. Then I’d made the bet about climbing down from the third floor. No one had egged me on or triple-dog-dared me. I’d just thrown it out there on my own.

  I’d hoped to see more from up there on the third floor. But I didn’t see anything defined on the walls, just the lobby light at the bottom. I did see the crowbar lying there three floors below me. With its curved tip pointing north, it was a question mark.

  I said, “See you dirtbags in the lobby. And you better pay up.”

  I was still convinced this would be easy. Going down was always easier than going up, no matter what anyone else told you. The only tricky part was how you got down.

  Hugging the door with my right side, I swung my left foot out, then down in search of a foothold. Didn’t find one. I patted the other side of the door but it was as smooth as the outside. Feeling along the door’s top I found the track on which the doors slid. I latched on and squirmed inside the shaft. As soon as I disappeared from view of the third floor, I heard a few whoo-hoos from the kids and then crazed footsteps beating their path to the stairs. I wondered if Jimmy stayed up on the third floor in case I n
eeded help or if he ran downstairs with the rest of them. I almost called out his name.

  I couldn’t see anything and the how of my down was not going to be easy. I groped my way to the sidewall, limbs shaking already. I did find the same metal bars, wall studs, and gears I’d used earlier that morning, but every move was a guess, extending my limbs in every possible direction, usually finding nothing and when I did find something it ended up hurting me. I scratched up my legs and arms pretty good on the studs, and those gears chewed on my fingers and toes. I banged my forehead on a stud near the second floor landing, or where I thought the second floor landing should be.

  Sometime during the climb down, the gang got to the bottom and cheered me on. Jimmy was with them. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to cry or just let go and land on them. This wasn’t what I wanted. I stayed where I was, fingers wrapped around something metal and the tips of toes looking for stable footing like dogs continually sniffing out an area that confused them. Then the kids got louder. I was exhausted and I estimated how far above the lobby I really was, hoping that I wouldn’t break a leg or something if I just let go, hoping I had enough strength to push away from the wall so the shaft innards wouldn’t tear me up some more on the fall down, hoping one of the kids would move the crowbar so I didn’t have to land on it. That was it. I was just going to let go. Let go.

  The kids went quiet. Their plugs pulled. Something clamped around my waist and pulled me down. A nasty cut on my palm opened up when Mom grabbed me. Her hands went from my waist to my arm and she pulled me through the plastic tarp, yanking on my arm hard enough for some familiar burning pain in my shoulder. I stumbled and almost fell.

  She said something I didn’t quite hear, though it sounded plenty angry. I stood there in the lobby, blinking my eyes into focus. Everything was bright again. My shoulder ached and hands bled, and I was embarrassed, hoping Jimmy and the boys were long gone but knowing they probably weren’t. My mother stood there with her hands on her hips, wearing her pink terrycloth robe, not tied all that tightly.

  She saw my bleeding palms. Her face went through so many expressions, I thought she might be having a seizure. Then she rubbed her eyes quick, and came back with an angry look. A Mom look. It’d been months since I’d seen that look. She tried it on and it seemed to fit, and what had happened the night before, I got the feeling that it was a relief for her to still be able to be mad at me.

  She said, “You stay out of that goddamn elevator shaft.” Despite her words, her voice was softer than her look. She tightened her robe and pivoted. Then she walked away, past the other kids cowering in their hiding spots, and to the stairs. She didn’t make me go with her back to our apartment.

  I stepped back into the elevator shaft and kicked the crowbar out. The rattle of metal on linoleum echoed. My injured hands were damp and stinging, but I still wanted to climb back up to my floor.

  40

  HOME IS OVER THERE

  We’ve been silent during most of the trip down. It has certainly been the longest time I’ve had since Farm to be inside my own head without everything and everyone crashing in on me. Hopefully, I’m far enough ahead of him so his ESP vibe, or whatever it is he can or can’t do, won’t work. He hasn’t said anything to me and I’ve tried mentally baiting him, thinking happy thoughts about me giving him a hotfoot, which is odd because I’ve never given anybody a hotfoot, nor do I remember even thinking about giving someone a hotfoot.

  So, after dwelling on the fantasy of toasting Father Hotfoot’s tootsies and Melissa and me and the rest of City having a healthy chuckle at his expense, I’ve spent most of this me-and-my-own-head time thinking that my father orchestrated this whole thing. Everything: me being a patsy candidate, the TV show, the jaunt below City, maybe even the donkey bomb and Farm escape. I’m thinking somebody is lining the pockets of his priestly pants. I’m thinking, despite his protests to the contrary that he’s lying through his pearly white teeth. Really, who can trust a priest with teeth that white? They must be caps. I don’t have his ESP but everything sure feels like a lie. And now I’m thinking about Farm, the Tours, and the voiceless animals again, and I guess I’m trying to figure out when and if dear-old-Dad is using his real voice and when he’s just lip-syncing. The biggest lie is that he doesn’t know where Mom is. She’s below City, living in the Pier, and he won’t take me to her, or maybe he will take me to her but then leave us again. Why not, right? Practice makes perfect. Shit, I probably should give him that hotfoot.

  Okay, maybe I’m better off without all the in-my-head time. I can try and think and guess at his motives all I want, but ultimately it’s a useless exercise. Useless because I don’t really know anything.

  Well, I know this now: he didn’t lie about our trip taking the better part of an hour. I don’t know if we’ve hit the bottom of this metal tube but we are stuck in front of another black, cast-iron door. I don’t like the looks of this door any more than I did the first one. I’m starting to feel like Jonah again, God’s Jonah, not my Jonah. I’m in the gullet of some leviathan and it’s no fun and I want out but I’m pretty sure that I don’t want my out to be the exit on the back end.

  I’m a few paces ahead of Melissa and Dad. I get to the door first and rap my knuckles on it. Shave and a haircut, two bits. There’s a flash of silver down by my feet. A quarter. This likely means something but I don’t know what and it makes me nervous and excited. I pick it up.

  “Hey, I found a quarter.”

  My father slaps my back and says, “Congratulations. A few more bucks and you’d be pulling down City’s minimum wage for this hour. Isn’t that fantastic!”

  Ever the brilliant deductionist, I say, “Hey, why would people need money down here?”

  His face folds in on itself and he snorts. Apparently I’m the dumbest of dumbfucks for asking this question. “Just because they’re homeless and deportees doesn’t mean they’ve stopped being consumers. You’ve got a lot to learn if you’re going to be Mayor.” Then he sets his fingers dancing on this door’s code panel. “I’ve always been told that I had magic fingers.”

  I should ignore him, but the camera is on, and I get the vibe from Melissa that we’ve been quite boring as of late. I pocket the quarter and I say, “I bet that’s what all those altar boys used to say.”

  “Hey, good one!”

  The door opens. I can’t really describe what I expected to see. But what we get isn’t it. We step out into a room with florescent track lighting, blue carpet, and a station of desks with computers. We step out into a fucking office, something you’d see in Farm headquarters, just like the room where BM interviewed me. Except this time there are two guys with guns, their laser sighting painting a nice red hole on our chests.

  One of the armed men says, “Welcome back, Padre.”

  The other one herds the three of us in and makes sure the door closes.

  My father says, “Boys, meet my son.”

  The guards break up laughing, so does my father. Can’t say I enjoy being a living joke.

  The bigger of the two guards says, “Well, then, he’s got my vote.”

  “That’s one,” says my father. “See, your deputy campaign manager is already raking in the votes.”

  There are no windows in the office, which is really just a guard’s station set up to monitor the tunnel, but there is another door: an ordinary, wooden door. Nothing fancy or ominous, and yet the outside, or the Pier and Dump and millions of desperate and suffering souls are just beyond it. All that somehow kept out by an ordinary door.

  The gun-toting guards serve us cappuccino and biscotti. They cross their legs when they sit down and my father makes fun of them. Melissa checks her smart phone for messages and my father chats the CM up on his cell. I’m surprised those phones work down here, hundreds of feet below City. The signal has to pass through all that City blacktop and concrete and then through the Pier’s wooden posts, struts and support beams, and likely throu
gh all the homeless people down here. Isn’t technology amazing!

  My father hangs up and says, “Onward.” He collects our cups and dishes and dumps them in a mini-sink, then walks to the door and simply opens it. Again, nothing fancy; just a knob twist, then a pull, then one foot up and then down, and he’s outside.

  I pause in the doorway. There’s the rush of an ocean breeze. Its coolness and smell and sound hit me. And then I look, really look out.

  I get a taste of vertigo, my knees go rubber, and I latch onto a railing just outside the door. Spread out before me is a living Escher painting. Denuded sequoia trees serve as the giant support posts for City and they are as big as anything I’ve ever seen, or even imagined, thicker than skyscrapers, their height disappearing into a cloudy darkness above. Struts and beams, both horizontal and angled span across the distances between the posts, some are wide enough for four lanes of two-way pedestrian traffic while others are as skinny as a flagpole. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern or reason to the construction of any of it. I see a spider web and then I blink and I see spokes in a bike tire, I blink again and I see the gnarled inner branches of a rose bush. All this I see in every direction, until darkness. And all over everything is humanity and their adaptations and appendages. There is some light down here; a collection of street lamps that stick out from the posts at odd angles like hairs that refuse to be combed down. Bridges made out of rope or metal or plastic or wood or something or anything else and there are ladders shimming up posts like vines of ivy and other ladders are all rungs, pieces of metal or wood or plastic affixed to the posts. There are people climbing and walking on everything. So many people. Clothed in rags or not at all, old and young, healthy and infirm, and everyone has something in their arms or in tow. A few hundred feet directly in front of us is the heart of this anthill and maybe where the queen ant lives, but I certainly don’t ever want to meet this queen; the Dump. Streetlamps mark the perimeter of this sprawling mountain of junk. I smell it now, too. Mixing in with the ocean smell is a tinge of rot and decay that’s too Farm-like to ignore.