Beatrice turns and turns in the air above Joe. He holds his hardhat to his head and looks upward to a massive hole in the ceiling, though which, Beatrice, chained to a platform, chained to a crane, slowly descends. Like a massive pendulum, she shifts to and fro and spins on the axis of the crane’s cable. For a moment, Joe is worried. She has never been heft like this; it may unnerve her. But then, he remembers his wind-up machines, remembers that he is her soul, and that without him inside her, there is really nothing but parts and ratios. But he also worries about the physical damage that a fall could cause. He sees the cable snap, unwinding itself, as she begins to plummet, her two tons picking up enough velocity—even from only 30 feet—to slam into the ground, the platform shattering under her weight, her wheels bent outward from her engine and cab, and axels mangled, as though she’d broken all her limbs. He shakes his head to release himself from the fear. The fall wouldn’t damage her at all. She is too tough for that. Still, something was not sitting well with him; some feeling that they should not be here. That they were here too soon? As Beatrice pirouetted out from beneath the sun and sky Joe could not distract himself from how alien she seemed in this place. Wreckage and dirt and mud, yes; but darkness? Beatrice, the Beatrice of his mind, the Beatrice of the yellow dress—she was always in the Sun.

To his left, one hundred yards away, through lose rock, setting cement, and stabbing throngs of steel rhubarb, there was the end to the tunnel: a jagged rock-face covered in scaffolding and dampness. Here and there small white streams run down the face of the wall where one or another sandpig is water-blasting toward the goal. Sitting idle (for the moment) before the rock-face, lay a massive tunnel boring machine that the workers affectionately called “The mole.” To his right, the tunnel stretches away, here and there punctuated by brilliant tungsten floodlights and the long shadows of men walking, working. The tunnel runs so far north of the Bronx that it gradually fades into a small black circle where Joe can see no more. As soon as Beatrice is down, he will drive her toward the rock face to assist in cleaning out leftover rubble, and in some cases, collapsed portions of the ceiling of the tunnel. Once cleared, those piles will be replaced by scaffolding and more massive machines to repair and reenforce the ceiling of this new and most crucial artery. Without Tunnel #3, not enough water will feed into New York City, and she will wilt of thirst. Dig, little men.

Beatrice lands with a thud, and though Joe is irked by the crane operator’s sloppiness, it does not seem to cause Beatrice any worse for wear. He hops in her cab while two other members of the crew release her from her chains. When he is given the thumbs up, Joe pulls goggles over his eyes and starts Beatrice up. With her usual shiver of joy, she rumbles and comes to life again. Yes. You are so close, Joseph. Joe takes a moment to close his eyes, to clear his head of the voice. He pats the dashboard of his tractor and says, “C’mon, let’s go.” Shifting into to first, Beatrice waggles her tail and merrily trumbles off the platform, glad to be on the dirt again—in the dirt again—under the dirt again! And nearer her true master—some too hundred feet below ground. The sound of her diesel lungs, rasping, bounce off and around the walls of the tunnel and makes her sound louder than ever. She revels in the reverb as she bounces Joe along toward a pile of rock and a dump truck.

She picks up speed and the feeling returns to Joe that all is not right with Beatrice or where there are. He goes to downshift but misses, distracted, and bumps the joystick lowering the scoop. Beatrice, unabated, pushes forward and slams, hard, into a massive pile of rocks, easily shoving them forward and aside. They roll down the pile, some four feet in diameter and smash into the dump truck; another one takes out a cement mixer. The noise and the glee in Beatrice’s heart is tremendous. Joe is panicked, but before he can recover from watching the accident in what seems to him slow motion, the right back wheel of Beatrice drops a quick six inches and begins spinning in some ditch formerly hid beneath the rubble pile. The wheel stick and spins and pulls the backhoe to the right in a rigid spin, pushing even more rubble aside. It tumbles over again in to the truck, now having buried the left side of the truck in five feet of rock. Beatrice jams, and the front wheels come up off the ground, grinding miserably, her rear shovel slamming into the floor of the tunnel and cracking it. Slowly, her rear right wheel grinds and pulls the crack open and again, Beatrice tumbles back and down, this time another two feet.

Joe grabs on to the support of the cab roof and tries desperately to steer, but with the front wheels coming up off the ground, the action is futile. He thinks feverishly. He can’t push forward, the rear wheel is caught. He can’t reverse. Already men all around him are swarming to the area, but none have managed to do anything. A couple of men have run for chains. Then, Joe realizes, the rear stabilizers. He can lift her out of the hole. Grabbing the gear shift with his right and flipping the stabilizer switch with his left, he tries to put Beatrice in neutral while lifting the wheel out of the hole. But the wheel’s grip had only been coming from it’s spinning and once in neutral, the backhoe lurches once more in to the breech, sending out more cracks searching through the floor, and the stabilizers serve only to mash the floor and break more of it away. Finally, Beatrice growls, as Joe desperately stomps the accelerator, forgetting she is in neutral, and the whole backhoe leans backwards, almost upright, putting her weight on the front side of what is now a quickly widening sinkhole, cracking it, and then, the backhoe buckles and drops, slowly disappearing into the black void, the sandpigs hollering after Joe.

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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