Chapter 9: Been Through the Desert on a Horse with No Paste
They walked side by side down the hallway as Naomi told Sammy what had happened in the house that was not her house.
“… then you knocked the wig off with paste juice!” Sammy laughed.
“It looked like a dead rat laying on the floor,” Naomi said. Sammy swerved as he walked because he was laughing so hard. It felt good to be with Sammy again. Naomi discovered that her fear evaporated when she told Sammy all that had happened. Seeing it through his eyes, she realized how ridiculous the fake house had been. The fake mom was just a wig-wearing clown.
Sammy put it nicely. “Like they thought we wouldn’t realize our people were acting different. My pa was all like, ‘You should sleep in, son. You look particularly tired this morning,’ when he’s normally like, ‘Get out the house.’”
It was Naomi’s turn to laugh. When she finished laughing, something else occurred to her. Sammy seemed to be tiptoeing around a bigger issue.
“Who do you think ‘they’ are?” she said. The two fell silent. Neither had any idea.
“Look,” said Sammy, pointing ahead. The walls of the hallway ended and gave way to a bridge.
“It’s a bridge,” Naomi said.
“Really?” said Sammy. They approached the bridge and Naomi realized it was suspended over a room. The bridge was as wide as the hallway was wide and it had a railing running along either side. As they got closer Naomi noticed that the humming noise kept getting louder, until she could no longer hear their footsteps.
They stepped on the bridge and Sammy leaned over the railing. He turned to Naomi, a look of pale surprise painted on his face.
Machines that looked like spiders laced the room fifty feet below, all connected by a web of pipes that led to a larger machine directly under the bridge. The larger one looked like a tarantula with pipes for legs. Pumps seesawed in and out of its body. A multi-buttoned control panel stared out of its head. Spinnerets spun gobs of raw paste and deposited them onto a conveyor belt. Beetle-shaped machines grabbed the gobs with their pinchers and swallowed.
White people flitted between the machines like ants.
Naomi couldn’t take her eyes away. When she realized how long they had been standing where anyone could see them, she decided they had better go. She said so to Sammy, but he couldn’t hear her over the roar of the machines.
He shouted, “You have to use the bathroom?”
“We should go,” she shouted.
He shouted, “This wasn’t the goal?”
Naomi spoke loudly and slowly, taking extra time to shape her lips for each word. “Let’s leave.”
“Who’s Steve?” Sammy said.
She grabbed Sammy’s arm and yanked him down the bridge. She ducked so she wouldn’t be seen. Sammy ducked too.
“Reckon that’s where they make the paste,” Sammy said. They were tucked in the hallway just past the other end of the bridge where it was not as loud anymore. Naomi nodded. Then she saw something else mysterious farther down the hallway.
“Come on,” she said and they started walking.
As they got closer, she saw there were windows on either side of the hall.
Behind the windows white people sat in chairs, eating paste. They stared at a blinking screen at the far end of the room. Instead of showing a picture of the outside like the screen at the fake house, this one showed pictures of white people watching a screen. White people were watching pictures of white people.
Sammy whispered, “What they doing?”
“I think they’re bored,” said Naomi. “It’s like dinner theater.”
Sammy’s eyebrows stood up. “What the heck does that mean?”
“It’s reality TV,” she said.
“We don’t have a TV at my house,” he said. “We got reality, so we don’t need it.”
“Don’t you get bored?” she asked.
“Sure we get bored, but we got books,” he said. “We read.”
Naomi realized that she probably sounded ridiculous. She was really getting to like Sammy, and she turned away from him so he wouldn’t see her face turn red.
When she turned she saw something through the window. “Ahhh!” she screamed.
A white person stared at her through the glass, its eyes sleepy and hungry. She screamed again. The other white people turned toward the window.
Naomi ran. She could hear Sammy’s footsteps pounding after her. Then she heard a door opening. There was another bridge up ahead. She ran over it but stopped and gripped the railing.
The horses were in the room below her.
Each bigger than the biggest man she had ever seen, the horses thrashed and reared. Their long manes rippled as they tossed their heads. Their knotted tails whipped about the air as they bucked and jumped. Their hair was white and gray, chestnut, piebald, and roan. Their stuttered song filled the air, drowning out the humming drone.
One horse, the largest she could see, was as black as night with a shock of gray mane that shone across its neck like the light of the full moon.
Naomi took the wooden horse from her pocket. The black horse reared. She held the carved figure next to the horse below her. The figure looked small and fake next to the real thing. A plaything.
Footsteps rang on the bridge like a plate full of pennies. She knew she needed to run, but she couldn’t take her eyes from the horses. It was like the promise of heaven’s gates after a long life. She thought, we are nothing in the face of what the world contains.
Sammy pulled her from the railing, but she refused to let go.
“We got to run,” he said.
“No.” Her hands held fast. “Don’t you see?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We found the horses. I didn’t believe they were real, but there they are.”
Sammy pointed down the bridge. The white people were coming. “We got to go or they’ll get us.”
“Do you see that?” Naomi asked. A door opened below them, and the horses around it shied away. White people holding long ropes emerged, spinning the ropes into large coils over their heads. Some horses fled; others thrashed in the air. The white people threw their coils and caught a few horses by their necks. A tug-of-war ensued as the people tried to pull the horses through the door. Another rope cinched the leg of a gray mare. The mare turned. It kicked the white person holding the rope square in the chest. The person rolled away from the horse’s powerful feet. Naomi called to the horse, “Run!” but it was too late. More ropes grabbed the mare and yanked at her. She fell over, and the people rushed in. They dragged the kicking and whinnying mare through the door. The remaining horses rose up, crashing their legs against the door as it closed.
Naomi shuddered in horror.
Sammy caught her when she let go of the railing. “Paste,” she said, but she said no more. Sammy helped her to her feet.
“We got to go,” he repeated. Naomi stumbled. “Please,” he pleaded.
Naomi looked at the white people approaching. They had to find a way to the room below. They had to free the horses. She started to run.
Before she knew it, she was in a hallway. Everywhere there were more corridors, more hallways, more rooms. They were so close. The air around her, the very breath she pulled into her straining lungs, was laced with the energy of the horses.
She came to an elevator. She could either take it down or try to pick her way through the hallways. Before she could decide, Sammy stood huffing beside her.
“What you think?” he said.
“We take this thing down,” she said, nodding her head at the bronzed elevator.
“You take it,” he said. “I’ll wait for them and lead them away.” He pointed down the hall.
“What if they get you?”
“They ain’t going to catch me. They’re slower than a wet turtle on Sunday. Don’t know what they’re even trying for.”
“Okay.” She pressed the elevator button and it lit up like an eyeball. Th
ere was a loud ding, and the doors slid open. Naomi stepped in. She looked at Sammy standing there, his cheeks flushed from running and his forehead moist with sweat. In the distance she could see the people approaching like heavy mist rolling into a valley.
“Be careful,” she said.
He put his hands on his hips. He smiled. “I ain’t scared.”
The doors slid shut and Sammy was gone.