“We have to turn around,” Monday whispers.
I am about to shout incoherent protest, but Mab gets there first. “We’ve come this far. We can’t go back now.”
“I am not saying go back, One. The hammer is behind us.” They both turn and look. “The hydraulic attachments go on the stick which is on the boom which is on the back. We have to turn around.”
Monday reaches down and releases something under our seat, turns us in a slow circle, and suddenly we’re facing the other way. Out our new front windshield, the hammer looks like a giant metal finger at the end of a giant metal arm, elbow pointed at the sky, finger pointing to the ground, more twisted than I am, also waiting. We can still make out the plant on the shore we came from, in front of us once again.
“How do we work that thing?” Mab breathes.
“Joysticks.” Monday points to them. There is one apiece on little pillars on either side of us.
“Do you know how?” Mab’s voice climbs, and I will her to lower it. I do not know how delicate our balance is. I do know shouting will not help Monday.
“The books say all it takes is training, practice, and a careful touch,” Monday says confidently.
“You have no training! You have no practice!” Mab’s voice goes the wrong direction. “Your touch is not careful!”
“They are yellow!” Monday yells back.
“It takes more than being yellow!” Mab is shaking, rattling the entire cab, rattling me where she grasps my chest and shoulders.
“I am an expert in all yellow things!” Monday is indignant. She needs to get out and run laps around the backhoe, but it is as possible for her to do so at the moment as it is for me.
I am tapping One One One on Mab’s arm as hard as I can, but she is numbed by cold and terror and cannot feel it. So I muster all my energy and concentration and shout into the frozen night, “Maaa!”
Not Mab. Not Monday. Me. I have had sixteen years of practice. My touch is fine as cobwebs. I am Miracle Mirabel, a maestro on the joystick. Even in the dark, I can see their faces light with comprehension, then giddy, dizzy relief.
“Hah,” I say. Tell me how.
“The left joystick swings us side to side,” says Monday. “You have to position the hammer between the front wheels.”
The left joystick is on the left side, which makes sense, but it might as well be on the moon for as much as I can reach it with my left hand. Monday swivels the seat around so I can reach it with my right, but then I am looking out the side of the cab. Mab squeezes into the space behind me and braces me upright and still and breathing. I stare out over black Bluebell Lake, take the joystick in hand, and gently move the stick to the right while Mab calls, “More, more, little more, back a little. Stop. Okay. Good. Now what, Monday?”
“The left joystick also pushes the stick in and out and makes it shorter and longer.”
“That doesn’t help her, Two. What should she do?”
“Push the joystick away from you to push the stick out in front,” she says and I do. “Press up on the button on top to lower it down,” and I do that too. It is better that I can’t see what I’m doing I think. It is better to be gazing out over a dark, still lake. I can hear motors purring, though, gears engaging, the knock of metal against stone, the machine responding to my touch, but so far, it’s all prelude.
Then Monday says, “Okay, now the boom. You need the other joystick.” And that joystick I can play as it was meant to be played. Right hand, facing front, watching what I wreak. She turns our chair. We all three gaze at the upcrooked elbow and its pointing finger, the dam before us, the plant out beyond, the lake bated above.
“Side to side on the right joystick controls the curl,” Monday quotes at us. “Away lowers the boom down. Back toward you lifts it back up.”
“What should she do?” Mab has her teeth clamped so hard together—to keep them from chattering or to keep herself from yelling, I do not know—it is hard to understand her. But Monday does.
“Lower the boom, right into the wall, perpendicular—that means a ninety-degree angle,” she breaks off to tell me. I nod. “And press down.”
I do. Suddenly, our front wheels are lifting off the dam. We are levitating. We are falling. Mab is screaming. I am screaming. “No, no, do not scream!” Monday screams. “That is what is supposed to happen. That is how we know we have the angle right and the attachment seated.”
I try to breathe deeply. I try to calm down. I try to calm Mab down too.
“Lower us,” says Monday, and I do, only too gladly. And then she says, “Move the hammer to the edge. And go. Fifteen seconds. Go.”
Fifteen seconds does not sound like very many, but count it off in your head, one number at a time, a breath in between each one, and imagine while you do the very earth shaking into pieces all around you. It is a long, slow time. It is an eternity. It is the end of the world.
One. Two. Three.
There is a crack and a crash we hear over the hammering and feel in our bones and feel in our souls.
Four. Five.
Mab is counting off, slow and even, defiant, behind me, against me.
Six. Seven. Eight.
She gets to fifteen, and I stop. We are panting. We are waiting.
“Now move it over to a new spot nearby and do it again,” Monday says.
“Why a new spot?” Mab shouts.
“I do not know!” Monday shouts back.
I don’t either, but I do as Monday directs. She has got us this far. We will all go down together. I turn on the hammer. Mab counts to fifteen. I stop. I move the boom again. She counts and I move. She counts and I move. Again and again and again, and soon the whole world is shaking shattering shuddering convulsing-like-to-break-apart, and I am certain, as certain as I have ever been of anything in my life, that we are about to fall to our death, my sisters, our backhoe, and I, and I think of our mother and how heartbroken she will be and how proud, and suddenly, finally, there is a crack that must be what they mean when they say the crack of doom, and Bluebell Lake is water flowing faster and faster over the dam now, but there is so much debris, and I start to use the finger to poke it out of the way, to drag the rocks and stones and mud and cement and broken concrete and wood away from the hole we’ve made, and Monday screams, “Stop!”
“What?” Mab pants. “What’s wrong?”
“Using the hammer to hoist, pry, sweep, or move large objects may result in premature wear on the tool or poor long-term performance.”
“No one gives a shit about long-term performance, Monday! We need this thing to last for another thirty seconds. Can it do that?”
“Naaa,” I say. No. Look. And we all three do. And we all three see that there is no way back the way we’ve come for we have made a hole too large to cross, filling and spilling over now with water, and the only way we can go is forward, away from the plant and the river, home again.
“Pull it up! Pull it back in!” Monday directs, and I do, and she turns our seat around so we face front again, our backs to Belsum, to the hole we have made, to the hole we have left behind.
What I feel is free, no longer shattering, no longer rattling, the pulsing hard but only my own. I clench and unclench my hand, clench and unclench, working blood back in, relishing its sting. For no doubt the first time in my life, my body is exultant. My body worked and obeyed, complied and triumphed, saved us all. Monday pulls forward one breath at a time over the rest of the dam we have destroyed the middle of, over the barrier we have all but removed, over a past which has not been kind but which is ours and which made us, back to mud, back to grass, back to Bourne, back home.