“Get down!” Zelda pleads.
Zelda signs the order, too, and Elisa suffers a wallop of love for the woman. She realizes she is, indeed, still standing. The door opens, striking the wall as loudly as a fourth gunshot. Zelda recoils as if she took the bullet, toppling to a hip and crossing her arms over her face. Elisa’s entire body jerks once, and then she’s frozen by the size, speed, and force of the humanity gushing out.
Fleming is out in front. His grimace is familiar to anyone who’s seen him overreact to a clogged toilet or a hallway puddle, the difference being the bloody handprints tracked up both of his sleeves. Coming third is Bob Hoffstetler, and he’s the most upset of any of them, spectacles akimbo and his thin net of hair in an upright thatch. He carries a red, soaking wad of cloth that could be anything—towel, smock, undershirt. His eyes, usually so kind, shoot like darts into Elisa.
“Call an ambulance!” The accent, usually so delicate, is husky under hardship.
Between these regular-sized humans is Strickland, his deep-valleyed eyes ablaze and his lips peeled back, gripping with tourniquet tightness the wrist of his left arm, which ends not in the expected hand but a bouquet of fingers arranged at hinky angles, baby-breathed with blood, and vased in loose peels of skin. Blood drops to the floor as loudly as ball bearings. Elisa gapes at them, the ruby beads; they will be hers to clean.
Empties burst outward, kicking the blood beads. The guards break off on either side of Strickland, coming at Elisa and Zelda with rifles thrust out like dancers’ canes. This is crowd control. This is clearing the scene. Elisa grabs her cart, wheels it around, and knows by its yawing swerve that the back wheels have been fully slickened.
17
ANTONIO IS THE first to make it to the cafeteria to ask if everything’s okay. His crossed eyes pose the question to both Elisa and Zelda, but Zelda knows full well she’s the one who has to answer. All this time and the crew hasn’t bothered to learn so much as the sign-language alphabet. Zelda’s tired of it. She doesn’t want to be in charge here, or at home, or anywhere. It’s too hard. Look at her hands—they’re shaking. She conceals it by turning to face the Automat, scanning the geometric sandwiches and gamy fruit like it’s just another three-in-the-morning dinnertime.
Duane arrives next, toothless as a newt and just as squeaky. Yolanda makes up for their timidity, cycloning in and honking on about how it sounded like someone was shooting up the joint, she can’t work like this, she has half a mind to blah, blah, blah. Zelda lets her eyesight blur until she can only make out the Automat’s nickel-operated compartments, each one an itsy-bitsy Alice in Wonderland doorway. If she could become small, she might crawl through one and get the heck out of here.
Instead, she’s trapped to relive F-1’s gory eruption in her mind, over and over. She tries to generate sympathy for Mr. Strickland. The next time he visited a men’s room, would he even be able to undo his zipper? This stab at sympathy is like trying to chop ice with her hand. There’s no way that man couldn’t guess how it might feel for a black woman to be cornered by a white man with a cattle prod. She looks up and notices Lucille; her albino coloring cloaks her against the cafeteria wall.
“Look, even Lucille’s upset,” Yolanda cries. “¿Qué pasa?”
Zelda turns around. She’s been avoiding it. She doesn’t want to look at Elisa right now. She loves the skinny little lady so much, yet can’t shake the certainty that this is her fault. She’s the one who insisted they follow the questionable QCC directive to enter F-1, which grounded them on Strickland’s bad side, and Zelda can’t help but think Elisa purposely lingered outside F-1 tonight, which put them in the worst spot imaginable when the gunfire began.
Elisa wilts in her chair, like Zelda is stomping her chest. Zelda feels terrible, then tells herself to quit feeling terrible. Elisa’s a good person, but she’ll never get it. How could she? Things go wrong at Occam, and it won’t be the white woman who gets blamed. Hell, Elisa goes around pocketing loose change from labs like it’s nothing. What if it’s a trap? Elisa would never even think of such a thing. What if a scientist left it there to test the night janitors, and when it vanishes, and Fleming is told, guess whose neck is on the butcher block?
Elisa lives in a world of her own devising. That’s obvious from the shoes. Zelda imagines Elisa’s perception as one of those dioramas she saw in a museum, perfect little realms, breakable but not if you walk softly. This is not Zelda’s world. She can’t turn on a TV without seeing black people marching, stabbing signs into the anger-stirred air. Brewster sees footage like that, he changes the channel, and Zelda, in her heart, is grateful, even if it’s spineless. Anything racial goes down anywhere in the USA, and the looks she gets at the punch clock the next day are murder. All over the country, men like David Fleming are looking for reasons to fire women like Zelda Fuller.
What other work could she do? She’s lived in Old West Baltimore since birth, and the row houses haven’t improved much since then. Today, the neighborhood is more crowded, more segregated. Zelda gets the concepts of blockbusting and white flight, but doesn’t give a damn. She dreams of the suburbs. She can taste the air, like pine and marmalade, feel it flushing Occam’s toxins from her body. She won’t be working at Occam when she lives out there—it’s too far away. She’ll be running her own cleaning business. She’s told Elisa about it a hundred times, how she’ll bring Elisa with her, hire other smart ladies, pay them square like no man would. She’s waiting for Elisa to take it seriously. She never does, and it’s hard to blame her. How would Zelda make enough dough with Brewster only working at whim? What bank would cosign a business loan for a black woman?
Zelda imagines the cafeteria is a white man’s paradise of horseplay and joviality during the day, but at night it’s as bare and clangorous as a cave. Footsteps resound down an adjacent hall, coming closer. It’s Fleming, every last one of his promotions evident in his unfaltering stride. Zelda looks at Elisa, her best friend, her potential ruiner, and feels her dreams of getting out of Old West Baltimore, and out of Occam, start to drip down like blood off the prongs of Strickland’s cattle prod.
18
“WE HAVE OURSELVES a pickle, girls. A real pickle.”
The scene of the crime still vibrates from the ordeal. Without being asked, Elisa dips her mop into soapy water, wrings it in the vise, and swabs it at the tusk of blood. Fleming, meanwhile, issues the orders to Zelda. He always does. Zelda, at least, can verbally indicate comprehension.
“I need both of you inside F-1 right now,” Fleming continues. “Emergency work. No questions, please. Just do the job. Do it well, but do it quickly. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“What do you want us to do?” Zelda asks.
“Zelda, this will go faster if you just listen. There’s… biologic matter. On the floor. Maybe the tables. Check around. I don’t need to explain this to you. You know how to do your job. Just make it all go away.”
Elisa glances at the door. There’s blood on the knob.
“But… will we be…”
“Zelda, what did I say? I wouldn’t send you in there if you weren’t perfectly safe. Just stay away from the tank. That’s the big metal object you saw Mr. Strickland bring in. Do not go near the tank. There should be no reason at all for either of you to approach the tank. Is that understood? Zelda? Elisa?”
“Yes, sir,” Zelda says, and Elisa nods.
Fleming starts to say more, then checks his watch. His terse parting words divulge a troubling loss of orating acumen.