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.