Scrapper Read online

  Also by Matt Bell

  In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

  Copyright © 2015 by Matt Bell

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bell, Matt, 1980–

  Scrapper / Matt Bell.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-521-2

  eISBN 978-1-61695-522-9

  1. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. 2. Criminal investigation—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.E64548S37 2015

  813’.6—dc23 2015009877

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Against all those who would make us afraid

  And now the answer batters the sky:

  with fire there is smoke, and after, ashes.

  You can howl your name into the wind

  and it will blow it into dust, you

  can pledge your single life, the earth

  will eat it all, the way you eat

  an apple, meat, skin, core, seeds.

  —Philip Levine, “Ashes”

  And God shall say God did it.

  —Inscription inside St. Agnes Church, Detroit, Michigan

  .

  DETROIT

  SEE THE BODY OF THE plant, one hundred years of patriots’ history, fifty years an American wreck. The remainder of a city within the city, a fortress of squared buildings a mile long and five blocks wide. Three million square feet of interior. A century of reinforced concrete and red brick and steel crossbeams still standing despite injury, of parking lots stretched around miles of emptiness, their lights long ago darkened, their torn and opened fences made an invitation to the gutting.

  See the factory roads left open to an incurious public, see the once-famous sign stuttering in broken glass across the bridge between buildings, hung high over the dregs of opposing traffic. And in each last windowpane see a letter, together reading mo_or city in_u_tr__l park.

  See how names were not just markers but promises. See how the first name the sign had cried had been gone even longer. How in the city the advance of history displaced what it could not destroy, erase, unfinish: an American exclusion zone. There were sights here few strangers would see again. Except in the photographs of urban explorers. Destruction porn. Except through the window of a bulldozer. Destruction.

  See the unsteady structures of the plant’s surface, their danger multiplying with every floor climbed above the street, every movement there a possible cascade of effect, complicating last solutions against gravity and entropy. Find the limits of bravery at the threshold of ground and underground, entrances inside the plant where if you knew where to crawl you could get beneath the piled rubble to gaze into basements, cellars, long-locked storage buried beneath factory floors, miles of tunnels for insulated electrical wire and telephone cable, copper pipes for water and steam.

  Everywhere you look, everywhere see the barely imaginable past. Imagine anyway. Rewindow the walls. Patch the roof with period-appropriate tar and shingle. Whatever you make simply a confabulation, an illusion of history.

  See the high discard of the room where the engines had been tested prior to installation. See the one hundred tables once arrayed here, and on every table see an engine mounted, flush with leaded gasoline and oil, running hot, each machine designed for the same task. See the engineers moving table to table in their dirty suits, grease staining their cuffs, the first generation to work under electric lights, born into the gap before the calculator, the computer, robotics. Before this room they used to test an engine by driving it until it failed. Every machine was a marvel but you could push anything until it broke.

  See the room where seamstresses wove plush interiors, stitched and fitted without a sewing machine, using only human hands, human skills. A luxury made of ten thousand stitches. See the parts warehouse, four stories tall and a block long, where the company kept a spare part for every fallible inch of every model they’d made, in 1910 or 1913 or 1925, other good years. All those parts a catalog of promise. If it was broken it could be fixed. They had the parts, they had the expertise, they believed they had the will to keep their cars on the road forever.

  See the newer workshops raised between existing buildings to maximize the space. As if every inch of earth were necessary to contain this industry. See the long rooms built for the first modern assembly lines, and when the war came remember how the company volunteered for the high commerce of patriotism. Then the peacetime arrival of the freeways, the newer machines the new roads demanded destined to be designed by other companies, made to devour those newest miles, carrying their drivers fast from coast to asphalt coast.

  See the assembly lines at max capacity for the last time, run on this singular idea, the century’s founding innovation: one man assigned one function, the fundamental principle of mass production. The promise of a car for every man and the roads to drive it on. Each man a unit of work here in the fastest-growing city in America, amid the explosion of neighborhoods, schools, theaters. Nearly two million citizens in 1950 but then fewer in every year after.

  See the half-life of every man and machine and place. See the plant closing. See the halfhearted inhabitations, the long vacancy that followed, the future lack. The slow crumble to here. Time passing, allowing failures of reinvention, squatters and thieves, until everything valuable had been carried away, leaving behind only concrete and brick and wood, the last looted structures waiting for the blow.

  See the steel beams holding but the roof fallen in, wide banners of tar paper hanging between the beams, their black tarps flagging in the wind. Watch the walls for signs of life. See the word sky written in sky-blue spray paint, in a pretty cursive long untaught. Painted names photographed but uncounted, curses everywhere, in modes both artful and artless. The new pride in slurs, their late variants. See cartoon eyes staring, an orgy of distended genitalia, cars and crowns, pitchforks and skulls. Context is king but what if the context were demolished. Every facade a surface flattened, readied for the image and the word, a conversation coming down: bad tempr written in consistent font, leveled stenciling. struggle buggy across the fluorescent glow of a starlet’s eyes, the perforation of her mouth. A pasted optometrist, a gloved hand. sleep written in bubbled lettering and below it the same word in a simpler script, a subtitle or a translation. greedy little bastard scrawled in white paint below a stairwell, the phrase young wild and free arced so high its writer must have had nothing left he was afraid to lose.

  Read the walls, and hear on the wind the other names of the dead: Welch, Rainier, Elmore, and Marquette, all extinct. Scripps-Booth, Viking, LaSalle, extinct. Sunbeam, Humber, Singer, extinct. The ancient unremembered, the more recent dead: Imperial, Valiant, Eagle, extinct. Edsel, Merkur, Oldsmobile, Geo, every one of them extinct or nearly so.

  Saturn, Mercury—they named a car after a god, but only after they killed the god.

  Hear the name Packard, whispered closest to where you stand.

  Now see an early dusk beginning, its reddening glare recasting the plant’s brick and rust in deeper reds, brighter orange. See across the golden glare a distant plume lifting from one far corner of the plant. The plume nothing but dust, loosed from the buildings and the dirt.

  See the plume lit too as it finds its upper limit. See its heights starting to collapse even as new billowing supports its base.

  See the dust and the dust’s cause: scrappers somewhere
in the black avenues of the plant, taking their own last chance.

  See history rising by their hand, the dust of a century cast into the air, mote by uncountable mote, becoming a dark tower twisting from the ruin.

  See each particle a part of a whole disturbed, see the exponential increase of surface area wherever an object was broken down, the way a thing split might ignite faster than its inert whole. All the broken mess of steel and wood and brick rising, each particle alighting, each floating particle eventually coming to touch another, each touch a whisper of contact.

  See how in its minute softness each contact makes a microcosm of agitation, together becoming a million tiny firestarter universes rasping, chafing, scraping smaller than sight. All these particles no longer separated by even one matching bead of distance—all these millions of spaces collapsing and reopening and collapsing again—and into every such space a lick of oxygen moves. See the impossible silence of atoms touching atoms. See the cold mathematics of their possibilities, the way air is also fuel, how every contact carries the potential for heat, wanting only a sufficiency of friction, a single arc of electrostatic discharge—the dust could get in your lungs and kill you three decades from now or it could choke you dead today or it could explode without warning—and when one pair of rubbing particles ignites, the whole cloud goes, a booming conversion of matter to energy, the rumble and the blast filling the air with black sound.

  See the entire plume becoming a pillar of flame leaping into the sky, looming high over the plant. See how in its hunger the fire pulls some portion of the sky back down, the back pressure sucking the fire out of the air and into the shivering building at the base of the flame, past the trucks and chains used to tear down the steel, past the wheelbarrows meant to carry it away, back over the scrappers crying out, as in every reachable room the quickening fire finds every other bit of fuel, every wooden thing hung thick with nettings of cobwebs and more dust, dust everywhere set in motion until a second blast ignites, thrusting new heat and pressurized air against the bounds of the building, concrete and mortar and brick shattering, steel warping, every surface radiant, until the walls burst, until the imploding pressure pulls down the ceilings and collapses the floors, until the crashing structure traps within it every man who came to tear it down, to take it away, every man but the lucky last. And if there is a better motor to thank than fear then as the last man flees into the fugitive night he thinks he doesn’t know its name.

  PART ONE:

  THE ZONE

  1

  WHEN KELLY SAVED THE BOY he was not yet again living any real life, just wallowing in the aftermath of terrible error. Later he would say he’d lived that year by his hands and by his back and by his shoulders and his wrists and his legs and his knees. The year of the body, he’d say, showing his opened fists, the thick white blistering of his calluses—and forget the head, never mind the heart. After the collapse began he’d barely thought, barely spoken, tried for a time to slow his thoughts to silence, or else to bury them with effort, exhaustion. He’d worked past the pains he’d known, found deeper places to lodge a throbbing, but then in the zone the incompleteness of every building became an inkblot for the subconscious. Whatever was missing would be supplied.

  The farther he moved toward the center of the zone the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered the cliffs of the state from off the land, shaped the dunes he’d dreamed of often after he’d left the state. The streets here were empty of traffic and in some neighborhoods the grass overran the sidewalks. He parked his truck, got out, walked the paved lanes instead. On trash days he could tell whether a house was occupied by whether or not a container appeared at the curb. There were other methods of determining inhabitation: the sound of televisions or radios, the presence of cut grass. But some men cut the grass for their neighbors to hide how they were the last ones living on their block. A way of pretending normality, despite the boarded windows, the graffiti, the other front doors never opened. Despite the absolute absence of other cars, other human voices.

  Mostly it was easier. Mostly there was no question where there were people left behind. The only questions he had to ask were about opportunity, risk, metal.

  Whenever Kelly entered an uninhabited house he understood he entered some life he might have lived, how the emptiness of every room pulled him inside out. A furnishing of the self. He opened the front door and the house ceased its stillness. If it had ever been inert it wasn’t now. No structure was once it held a human consciousness. In the South Kelly had worked construction, had seen firsthand how a house unlived in wasn’t a house. It was so easy to awaken a place. The way a doorknob awoke a memory. The way the angles of a room recalled other rooms. There were blueprints etched across his memories, and in some houses those memories activated: the bedrooms of his parents, the bedrooms of his parents’ friends. An angle of light like one he’d lain in as a child, reading a book on birds. The deep dark of a basement, the other dark of an attic. How the fear of the dark hung at the lip of a basement stairs, how it hesitated at the foot of any stairs leading up, toward whatever was below or above the house, outside its public space.

  With his smartphone he could check the prices of what he salvaged: the amounts offered changed day to day but he couldn’t wait days to sell what he’d dug. At the salvage yards the workers weighed the truck loaded and then they weighed the truck empty, paid him a price multiplied against the difference. The salvage men photocopied his ID, took an inky thumbprint. This was a legitimate business, they said. They asked where he’d gotten the scrap and he lied. They asked again and he took a lower price per pound.

  Whatever the salvage yards wouldn’t take he took to other men, brokers running scrap out of a backyard or an idle warehouse. There was no trouble with space. There was space everywhere. The unofficial yards kept unofficial hours. You could show up in the middle of the day and find the place deserted, show up at midnight and find three guys playing cards, getting high, cutting scrap. They paid a fraction of the price, the price of no questions asked. Whatever was suspect they’d break until it was sellable. There were scrapyards where no one asked these brokers questions, contractors who would mix the questionable stuff with more honest trade.

  Once he’d arrived to find a man cutting a copper statue with a power saw. The man shirtless, skin gleaming, working without eye protection, a stub of a cigarette clamped in his mouth. The statue’s arms sawed at the elbows. The head on the ground. The saw working its way through the torso at a steep diagonal. The kerf of the cut wide like a wound from a sword. Then the smashing the hands with a sledge. Then the mutilating the head into unrecognizable shards.

  Broker: a ridiculous word for such a man but everyone self-justified. Everyone wanted to be more than what they were.

  The salvage men reminded him: it wasn’t the function they sold but the form. It didn’t matter if he broke a broken refrigerator. What mattered was getting it to the truck without straining his back. There was more steel and iron than anything else but they paid the least of anything. A hundred pounds of copper pipe paid more than double a truckload of steel. Same for copper wire, copper cable. You could ransack the rooms of a house but the best stuff was hidden behind the walls. It wasn’t the metal that held the house up but you wouldn’t want to live there with it gone.

  Kelly could picture the city’s glory days but it took a certain imagination. On the television in his barely furnished apartment he watched a blonde reporter say the collapse was still in progress but now it was down to the aftershocks. Sometimes the news interviewed one of the l
eft behind. Once this man or woman had been an autoworker or a grocery clerk like anyone else. What mysteries they were now, the blonde reporter said, these unemployed men and women with their forlorn streets, their locked doors nested behind locked doors.

  Why didn’t they leave, if things were so bad.

  Why didn’t we understand why, if we had homes of our own.

  Inside a rotting duplex, he opened a refrigerator long unplugged and pulled its bulk away from the wall, found a carton of milk dated more recently than he’d expected. A house stayed intact as long as it had inhabitants but after they left the decay began. Wires lost their hum, pipes went dry. Doors and windows could be covered or replaced with plywood but their protection would not last and then the inquiries of thieves exposed the inside of the house, then the upper floors filled with wind and rain, the changeable weather of the Midwest. Soon every carpeted room turned to molder and rot, roofs fell through, the rats and cockroaches had their way.

  A howl of wind came banging through a front door, the repeated slamming of a thrown bolt against a doorframe shivered his skin. He knew it wasn’t human voices that held back the fall of cities. It wasn’t any number of people sharing a room, wasn’t the presence of family meals. Everywhere he went he saw the quiet creep of falling down, falling in. A contest of wills, the agonies of architects against the patience of nature.

  Opened to the elements the inside of a house smelled mostly like the outside. There was everywhere more emptiness than he’d imagined. The surface was void of anything valuable and so he had to go deeper. There were inferences to be drawn from the locations of outlets, junction boxes. A house changed after he saw its walls as containers. He began to understand the arcane layouts of the worlds behind walls, learned to find the bathroom before he went looking for the pipes. He opened the walls with a sledge and the older the house the more copper he found. He wrapped his gloves around the jacketing of wires and leaned back, leveraging his weight toward the snap. Or else he took a hacksaw to a piece of pipe, catching it before it fell into the wall.