The Tambinder Engine (part fourteen)

 

 

 

The Tambinder Engine 

A McAlley Story

(part fourteen)

 

 

A wooden rocking, passing the barn, what Ondine would do in her stall when her ears told her Deenie was near.

Deenie, missing person to the barking dog indoors, and the cat, tail swinging up the walk. She bent and pulled him into her arms. “Bobbo. Was the bad lady here?”

Being within earshot, she gave a look back to Mr. Karl.

“Your papers, there,” he said.

She set Bobbo down. “We can walk around the rooms. Then if you want to leave, it’s fine.”

Should she feel this? She felt an unwonted peace, even power.

“Is there a basement?”

A pantry faced the kitchen door, louvered, another door fitted at a right angle. Short landing, stairs, laundry space, nothing else. Karl went, and Deenie decided he would like most to be at home, had just offered her a cola, could live without one offered back.

She popped lids on pet food cans, for Jyff, for Bobbo.

“Nothing below. Attic?”

“Top of the stairs. Small door and a ladder up.”

A maniac might lurk inside that door, but the attic was only beams and insulation. She checked the sofa back, the TV cabinet. Lifted the drapes. Looked in the dining room, spare for lack of use—table, chairs, built-ins.

Karl came down. “Nobody under the beds. Nobody in the closets.”

“I can’t thank you enough.”

“Well, I’m down the hill.”

Did Lynn have a key to this house? Of course she did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

21

 

 

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What people want most to know about Bitterroot

Or what they ask me, is the name, why Bitterroot, they think we’re a brewery, we make ale or herbal teas

It requires steam, and clouds of steam rise off the stacks

A thing mfg’d, the onlooker feels confident, seeing busyness, such busyness

But the tea place has its perimeter fence, a double row of fencing

Not razor wire, black tidy metal bars

Six feet high, three feet apart, maybe shy of that

I don’t know

I have not gone out to measure

But you’ll see that the object is to make scaling them impossible

doable (?)

I’ve mimed it to myself, tried to picture

But I am not athletic and can’t balance on a rail

Doable but against laser sensors and guards

And screens taught to zero in on faces

Tedious, defeating, struggle-making

Struggle-making? That, I might tell questioners, is the business of Bitterroot

The Chamber has its own building, a vast round thing, where the engine sits

The engine sits sunken, under a housing, a wellhead

Not seeming so, it is truly a wellhead, and the drilling they did was monumental

Tambinder also designed a piece of equipment, specified to fit the space

A very deep drilling, and they wanted it under cover of the Chamber at all times

Most of the steam a product of the engine drawing up the waters

The pit of the engine lies below the river, and the river, we know, fills and ebbs with the tides

But the pulse of the Tambinder Engine, that draws such a fine sieved stream, and with such magnetism, and with such speed

 

The pulse. The phrase was annotated by an editor’s hand, the hand of a third party. The note said: Deenie, this. The writer was not Victor…

But, Tambinder, who had designed the engine, was Victor’s ancestor. Victor might refer to his ancestor as a weighty scientific name. Dustin wasn’t the annotator, calling her Deenie. Was the writing Dustin’s voice? Not, or just that his diary pages had been eighteen, nineteen, and Dustin was twenty-six now.

They wanted him at Bitterroot. He was sackable, her poor son, but Bitterroot hadn’t sacked him. Responsible work, an ironic heart…

Even that wasn’t it. She did not want to feel despair and purpose, the combination of a suicide testament, in these lines. But she felt it.

 

 

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The Tambinder Engine

The Tambinder Engine (part one)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)