Chapter 4 – A Dervish Standing Behind Giant Machines
Abner very slowly opened the door to the weathered barn on the outskirts of his small town. The leaning barn had seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse for as long as he had been sheriff, and he did not trust those who claimed the structure’s standing status promised that the building’s unseen bones remained sound. Nor did Abner ever enjoy hurrying unannounced into the barn. He was always too polite, or too frightened, to interrupt the creative process hidden inside.
“Beth? You in here? It’s Abner.”
Something coughed, producing a wet sound that made Abner flinch before a woman’s high voice shouted in reply.
“I’m over here by the teletype, Abe! You know the way through my press as well as anyone else!”
They had stopped loving one another nearly twenty-five years ago, but Beth Etter never stopped calling him by the moniker she had given him one night of lovemaking in the camper Beth kept at the edge of her grandmother’s private pond, while they had been lusting in a way their marriages never allowed. Neither of their spouses ever learned of the affair before passing from the earth – Beth’s husband to stroke a handful years ago, Abner’s wife from the kidneys that failed after too many visits to the bottom of her bottles. Beth and Abner never returned to that camper that went to rest in weeds and ruins, for the ghosts of their spouses haunted them both before they set a husband and wife beneath the ground. Their burn together had lasted only a season, long enough to scratch an itch, to feel a shoulder and a hip, but its embers had never rekindled for any recurring wind.
Still, Abner felt as thrilled as he ever did to step beyond that frighteningly leaning threshold into the teetering barn. Mystery remained to him despite all the time. Two colossal printing presses crowded the space within that shed, leaving room for hardly shadow. Abner believed the building must have been built around the machines, that the presses had for centuries stood there like parts of the unmovable landscape. Beth had owned them, and the weekly paper those presses produced for nearly forty years, and Abner still held his breath as he ducked beneath the protruding machine parts and squeezed between counters brimming with cases of ink-stained, metal fonts until he found Beth near the shed’s far, opposite wall, preparing still another edition of her weekly newspaper, regardless how antiquated her machines, or her skills, had become.
Beth’s back may have taken a curve in her advancing years, and she might have lost an inch or three from her height, but to Abner, she still looked like the same spinning dervish that always worked behind the presses. Her feet pedaled the presses into locomotion while her hands quickly removed and set new panels upon the platen before the press lowered to claim one of her fingers. The sound was rhythmic. The movement was mesmerizing. And Abner’s heart cracked to think a new world might forget the magic of iron monsters stamping words upon thin and brittle paper.
Beth stepped out from her press as Abner tripped over a stack of newpapers piled upon the floor.
“I hear you’ve found something really special out behind that ruin Dan Blankenship calls home.”
“How do you know I found anything at all?”
Beth chuckled, and even that slight laugh summoned a cough that made her body tremble. “You know it’s because I speak the language of the birds.”
“I hope you’re not already printing it on your machine.”
“Yeah, I figured you’d be worried about that. Think that’s one of the reasons these old presses scare you so much.” Beth wiped a little of the black stain upon her hands onto the front of her denim shirt before pulling a cigarette from her pocket. Abner hardly saw the spark before Beth set the glowing smoke between her lips. “Asking me to hold anything back on what you may or may not have found behind Dan’s trailer would be a cruel thing to request of me. It’s had to be five years since I had anything more to feed my presses than obituaries and casserole recipes. You laugh, but it’s true. A good story would do wonders for my heart.”
“And it would help you sell papers.”
“Damn right it would,” Beth growled. “I don’t do this for charity. Since when did you start talking like a communist?”
Abner winced to see the ire floating to the surface of Beth’s face. “Just give me another week before you print anything. Think of the attention a story like this is likely going to pull into town.”
“You give my paper a lot of credit if you think anything I print’s going to be seen anywhere but in our happy, little community.” Beth rolled her eyes. “Besides, who’s to say we haven’t been left forgotten for too long? Whose to say it’s not time the rest of the world remember we breath on these acres way out in the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s not you talking, Beth.”
Beth shrugged. “Sure. I won’t print anything.”
Abner smiled and withdrew a shining flask from his jacket’s inner pocket, presenting the offering before Beth’s attention returned to her whirling machines of ink, iron and paper. Beth winked and grabbed a pair of funnel, paper cups from a water jug propped against a barn’s corner.
“Those are funny shot glasses, Beth.”
Beth giggled, and that made Abner feel very much younger. “Knowing how quickly you down your drink, Abe, I doubt you’ll have any reason to set your paper cup on the table once you lift it to your tongue.”
To a count each silently kept, they craned back their necks and rushed fire down their throats in a gulp that made their old eyes water. For one brief moment, the world softened. For a second, the layers peeled way to show a peek of what the world had once been. For a moment, his legs regained the strength he had never expected to lose when he had been a younger man.
“Well, Abe, what’ the other favor? You only offer your shiny, silver flask whenever you have a favor coming.”
“It’s something strange.”
“Well, you should’ve thought of that before you filled your fancy flask with cheap bourbon.”
Abner tossed a Polaroid he took of the thing in the swamp onto the counter, watching as Beth removed her bifocals and cleaned their lenses with the sleeve of her ink-stained shirt. He watched her eyebrows lift, and he knew that Beth would do what he asked. She couldn’t refuse the chance to approach a thing so strange, and she knew Abner was her way to get closer to the thing that looked like some dehydrated octopus framed within the Polaroid.
“Are those bombs?”
“I think so.”
Beth bit her lower lip. “But what are they doing here?”
“That’s what I need to find out.”
“That’s a hell of a favor, Abe.”
“You can find anything in a library, Beth.”
Beth frowned. “I’ll have to drive down the highway to the county seat. The one-room library we crowd between the fire department and your police office isn’t going to have what I need.”
“You can take my squad car if your old Cadillac isn’t running,” Abe offered. “And I’m afraid I have one more thing to ask of you.”
“Of course you do.”
“Get the word out there’s going to be a meeting this Monday night in the municipal garage to discuss what we’ve found. Don’t tell them too much, but let folks know we need to hear what everyone wants to do with it.”
“All without putting a word in print?”
“I knew I could count on you.”
Beth handed the flask back to Abner. “You’ve come on a good night to ask it. I can still hurry over to Jack’s bar and let the Friday night lounge lizards know. Word will spread over Saturday afternoon bingo. Anyone else will hear about it come Sunday morning church service. And by Monday night, I’ll find you some answers to go along with your Polaroid.”
Abner wanted to run to Beth and embrace her, wanted to taste the flavor of her lipstick one more time. But such spontaneity was for a moment lost a long time ago, and so he instead winked and retreated back through the machinery. Back upon the roadway, he guided his squad car towards the m
unicipal garage, and he wondered, as his wheels hummed, what he might dream of that strange oddity taken from the swamp that night when he tried forcing his sleep to replay for him the memory of a season spent in a camper perched on the edge of a private pond.
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