This greatly puzzles the gals, for they cannot conceive of such an odd thing. It is an offense to their unimaginative natures to think that anything can escape taxation for that long. They chatter about it amongst themselves as they prepare the paperwork.
Stop talking, he imagines screaming at them. Her secrets are not yours, they are mine, mine, mine . . .
He blinks, realizes that the gals are staring at him. They are staring at him so hard he wonders suddenly if he’s said something aloud that he didn’t mean to. He wipes a hand across his brow, flashes them his sandpaper smile. They wouldn’t understand.
Pulling out his leather-covered checkbook (which they understand completely), Ryan writes a check for the entire amount of back taxes, and just like that, the building is his.
As he’s driving back across town, he is joyful. He is in a state of transcendent bliss. The day is perfect blue, and he has the top down and his sunglasses on. The warm wind is snaking through his hair. Adult contemporary rock blasts out of his speakers. This moment is the absolute peak of his life.
A sudden thought strikes him. He flips open his tiny titanium phone and presses it to his ear. He calls Jose (his locksmith, always on the move) and arranges to meet him at the building.
Arrangements made, Ryan flips his phone closed and taps the steering wheel in time to a Celine Dion song.
When Ryan arrives back at the Windsor Machine Works, Jose is already there, bending over the open trunk of his always-breaking-down Justy. Jose is sorting through picks and tension tools and extractors. Choosing his implements carefully.
Ryan is flooded with inexplicable anger. The thought of another man sniffing around her doorstep enrages him. What if he’d decided to tamper with her before Ryan had got there? What if he’d decided to put his unkind picks into her unwilling locks?
“How long have you been here?” Ryan asks casually.
“Just got here,” Jose tosses off. “‘Bout to leave, though. Bad neighborhood. They shoot you for nothing around here.”
Ryan imagines punching him in the nose.
Jose doesn’t speak as he makes the key. When he is finished, he fits the bright new thing into the old door, and turns. The door swings open, releasing a smell of ancient oil and something else, strange and indefinable, like steel shavings rusting in honey.
“What the hell are you thinking, man?” Jose says. He stands with his hands on his hips, squinting into the gloom. He shakes his head as if trying to shake off raindrops of impending doom. “This place will finish you.”
Ryan snatches the key away from him with a growl.
“Get out,” Ryan says. “Get the fuck out.”
He does not watch or wave goodbye as the Justy clatters away.
He walks past the front desk, pushes open a creaking door, and he is on the manufacturing floor. The gals at the county assessor’s office say that their oldest records indicate that this building was used to manufacture machine parts during the First World War.
That whole area was really hopping during the war, one of the gals had said. Ryan imagines women in hobble-skirts, men in baggy canvas twill trousers, paunchy old managers in vests with watch-chains looped from button to pocket. All gone now.
The manufacturing floor smells like stale urine and pigeon shit. As Ryan walks through the wide door and into the building, the space swells around him, the filtered light through the dust-caked windows cool and blue, the cement floor vast and undulating, like a calm body of water.
His footsteps echo. On the floor there is a pile of repair manuals from the 30’s for a machine of indecipherable purpose. The manuals look as if they’ve been stored in a bucket of old oil. Blackberry vines thread through broken windowpanes. The iron pillars are cobwebbed with ribbons of rust.
He thinks about the dump trucks and caterpillar tractors that will soon line up outside. He thinks about how the weeds will be cut away and the rusted pillars pulled down, and the oil-slicked concrete cleaned with foaming buckets of tri-sodium phosphate. He thinks about multi-use dwellings, white space, windows. He thinks about how everything dirty will be made clean, antiseptic, new, smooth. He closes his eyes and spreads his arms and imagines himself expanding, expanding.
At the back of the room is a set of stairs. He moves over to them carefully, avoiding the puddles and piles of grimy debris. In the rafters overhead, he hears baby pigeons squeaking weakly, and the sound of wings.
The staircase is a jury-rigged affair. Ryan mounts the stairs, carefully feeling each board for soundness.
He stops after a few steps, looks back. The door is still open and the warm afternoon sunlight is inviting him back, calling him to come out. But it is hot out there, and in here it is cool. He notices the smell again, the strange smell of honey and steel. He looks up the stairs. At the top there is a hollow-core plywood door with a jagged-edged hole in the center. He imagines rotting construction, thin-walled offices and empty filing cabinets.
It is dark at the top of the stairs.
He keeps climbing.
The door opens onto a hallway, its linseed lineolum flooring warped and curled. Four doors open off the hallway, two on either side. He opens the first door. There is an office beyond, nothing in it but a mouse’s nest and some chewed-on newspapers.
He looks in the second office. It has a heavy metal desk in it. There is a window that looks over the factory floor, but it is covered with plywood.
There is a woman in the third office.
Ryan jumps when he sees her, slamming back against the door with a rattling thud. She is sitting with her back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling as if expecting it to do something. There is a look on her face, a look that is both empty and full, like she is thinking very deep thoughts about nothing.
“Jesus,” he whispers, his heart pounding in his throat. “Who the hell are you?”
She drops her oil-colored eyes and looks at him, not blinking. She is, Ryan notices, as far from beautiful as a woman can get. She is shaped like a bell; her ass is immense, her waist lumpy, her shoulders strangely narrow. Her breasts poke out through her too-tight tank-top, and they’re small and hard and probably sour, like unripe persimmons. Her arms are thick with muscle.
“Winnie,” she says, lifting a hand. In it, there is a bottle of vodka. She takes a swig of this and holds the bottle toward him.
Squatter, he thinks, with a mixture of disgust and glee. The first secret to be stripped, the first boil to be lanced. He knows how to deal with squatters.
“You’re going to have to leave.” His voice is firm and unshaking, full of money.
“No,” she says.
“I’ve bought this place. It’s mine now.”
Winnie does not move, but stares at him, a grim little smile playing over her lips.
“Yours, eh?” she says.
Ryan thinks about going for the police. But it is hot out there, burning and dry, and in here it is cool. So instead of leaving, he does something stupid. Something he knows he should not do. He reaches out and grabs the strange woman’s arms, tries to pull her to her feet. He halfway succeeds before she wrenches herself backward, pulling him off balance and sending him tumbling to the dirty floor.
She moves quickly, coming up over him. With a balled fist, she punches down viciously, catching his chin. He puts up his arms, shields his face. The world is a confusion of movement and pain as she hits him. Her fists find his softest spots, unerringly, hard. He closes his eyes.
“Yours, eh?” she shrieks again and again, until her voice finally retreats down a dark tunnel.
He wakes up choking.
The woman is pouring vodka down his throat.
He gags, shoving her hand aside. He is lying on the floor. He wants to jump up, but he cannot; he is stiff and sore. He can barely move. She is sitting next to him, legs stretched out before her. In her hand, she has a long heavy piece of wood that looks like it came out of a ruined place in the wall. She is tapping the wood gently against her knee.
He looks at her lap, stretched out beside him. It is vast, doughy, clad in worn-thin sweatpants. He tentatively reaches over a hand to touch it. It is warm, like pudding encased in a heating blanket. Winnie says nothing, but takes a drink of the vodka. Then she hands it to him. He takes his hand off her leg and takes the bottle, drinking from it delicately. She offers him a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke. But he watches as she puts one in her mouth, lights it carefully, exhales the smoke in a thin stream.
“Why are you here?” Winnie asks.
“This place is mine now,” Ryan says, his voice uncertain. “I bought it.”