Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [37]
Garth was an expert on driving away from danger. On the day of the November Three Bombings, Garth Frierson was driving down Shankaw Boulevard as the third attack of that national bombing campaign went off, right there in Detroit. I’d heard the story only once before, right after it happened, but after we stood there silent, in shock, for near a minute, Garth, wired, started talking about it again as if I had just asked.
“Man, when they went off in Houston and D.C. that morning, I was driving my route thinking how safe I was, right there in Motown. Then boom. Passed the bomb site right on the left side, blew half my passenger area’s windows straight out. Couldn’t hear nothing in my ears for hours. Right then, I drove straight home, dog. I mean straight—didn’t even let the people off the bus, didn’t brake for red lights, didn’t stop till I got to my apartment. Ran upstairs, I don’t know what those people in the bus did. I got to my house and kept going, headed straight to my bedroom. I look up and I got this painting over my bed, Thomas Karvel’s Mississippi Mist, and I look at it, and I stop. First time since the explosion, ears ringing, I stop.” Garth shook his massive head. “But that was it, that was that feeling again. Like the world’s coming to an end. Now you know.”
We stood close to the edge of the crater, and after a few minutes our minds shifted to the lost drill and other suddenly uncertain ground: financial stability, job security. We came as close to the edge as we dared, which was about fifteen feet away from it. The thing just went down. How far down it was difficult to say. The opening seemed to be smaller than the cavern inside of it.
“I hate ice,” I admitted. “I don’t even like ice in my soda.” At the ends of my wrists, my hands were still shaking so bad you could see the movement through the gloves.
“Goddamn global warming.” Garth leaned forward to get a better view. “Ain’t our fault. It was all them Escalades in the ghetto.”
Inching a little farther with one of the portable spotlights from my pack, I caught a reflection inside the crater of something red and metallic—the rifler was still visible. The only reason I could still see it was that the drill was lodged into a snowy ledge about two stories down. The hole went farther below that, but the depth swallowed my flashlight in its darkness.
“They going to stick this on us.” Garth shook his head beside me. “They just going to say it’s on us, dog. They’re going to try and make us pay out our checks for this. You have any idea how much something like that drill costs?” I didn’t, but it had to be a good chunk of what we were planning on earning. The money wasn’t what bothered me. The look of disgust I knew I would see on Angela’s face when we confessed our incompetence, that’s what I was thinking about. And the sight of Nathaniel, right behind her, smirking.
“I’ll go down there, bring it back,” I told him.
“Negro what?” Garth politely asked me, turning to see if I was ridiculing him.
“I’ll go down there, attach the rigging to it, and we’ll drag it up. Hook it to the truck and just pull.”
“You crazy, dog. Out of your goddamn mind.” Garth paused, put his weight on his leg as he grabbed the spotlight and leaned forward, staring down below at the rifler on its precarious perch. He was silent for a few seconds before his reason took control of his desperation once again. “Hell no. You’re bugging.”
“It’s my life,” I insisted.
“It’s my bank account. If you die, they going to make me pay for the whole thing.”
“Or we could just take care of this and pay nothing at all.”
Garth stared at me, then stared back into the hole for a while. Finally, he unzipped his jacket further and lifted off his hood to reveal his unpicked Afro. “Fine. But if you break your neck, I’m going to