Crawlspace (27 page)

Now it was clear. Any possibility of Richard Atlee’s leaving was out of the question. His intention was simply to remain with us forever. We were locked to each other, inextricably. All of us. Like three creatures trapped under a bell jar, peering at the sun shining in and the world outside—‘the world we’d lost and didn’t know how to get back into.

Suffice it to say, we didn’t go north. Richard was un-budgeable, and without him we couldn’t move. There was no further quarreling on the subject. We capitulated, and the only thing that was left was a kind of smouldering resentment that hovered above us like smoke after a battle.

Richard stopped going out. He wouldn’t leave the house during either the day or night. He’d still do his chores around the house, but he wouldn’t leave the grounds, for fear we’d run off without him. Most of the time he remained in his bedroom, coming out only for meals. He refused to permit Alice and me to go marketing by ourselves. Whenever we went to town, he’d come along and sit sullenly in the back of the car, waiting for us to get done and anxious to get back home. But all this was as nothing compared to the days immediately following when we faced with Richard the greatest crisis in our mutual relationship.

There came a day when Richard was not around the house. Not in his room, not around the grounds, not anywhere to be seen. When we discovered it, Alice and I had the same idea at the same time, and that was to get away from the house. Not to flee, not to escape, but merely to get into the car, just the two of us by ourselves and slip off for a few hours, like the old times.

Leaving the house that afternoon, we were almost stealthy, sneaking out the back door and scurrying down the drive to where the car sat. We were desperate to get off before he’d come back and ruin things.

I’ll never forget the dead, dry, choking sound when I turned the key in the ignition, and then Alice’s pale face like a mask painted on the windshield, peering at me forlornly while I fumbled beneath the hood. When I came back and stood beside the car and looked at her through the open window she seemed to know everything. “What’s he done?” she asked pitifully.

“Taken the distributor.”

“The distributor?”

“It’s a part,” I said, strangely calm. “The car can’t go without it.”

She looked so utterly defeated. In the next moment, she opened the car door and started out.

“Where are you going?” I said.

She shrugged and smiled pathetically. “I guess I’m going back into the house.”

“I bet I know where he’s put it.”

“In the crawl, I s’pose.”

I nodded. “Go back in and wait for me. I’ll get it.”

Alice waited upstairs while I went down. I think she sat at the breakfast table having a cup of coffee and possibly one of Richard’s freshly made corn muffins. I imagined her sitting there resignedly, sipping the coffee, nibbling half-heartedly at the muffin, and not believing for a moment that I’d find the part, or if I’d find it, that I could put it back in, or if I put it back in, that he wouldn’t suddenly appear and stop us in some other way.

Standing down there in the shadows, facing the black square of the crawl, I had a sudden sensation that I was in a dream and that I’d dreamed the dream many times before I saw myself entering the square—entering that cold, wet, dark place with the awful smell of sewage and human waste, the dry, hard ground crumbling, sinking beneath my feet, the straw pallet mouldering in the darkness. I saw myself moving directly to the spot where I’d found the cigar box before with the Iron Cross and the cheap bric-a-brac, and the little desiccated bones of birds and rodents. I could see myself reaching for the cigar box and opening it, and finding there precisely what I’d come for.

In the next moment, I was standing directly outside the crawl and peering in against a wall of blackness. I flicked on my flashlight and prepared to enter.

The reality wasn’t quite like the dream. The place had a vacant look, like a dwelling that had been unoccupied for a long time. There was something else unusual about it. It was cleaner and more orderly than I’d ever recalled it. The pallet and all the anonymous debris that had accumulated there over the years were gone. The cobwebs, the dust, the cakings of dirt and mud were all gone. There wasn’t the trace of an odor.

Evidently, he’d cleaned it all out. I imagine the crawl was for him a bad memory and the act of cleaning it out was his act of self-purification. As if he wished to violently expunge the whole wretched period from his mind.

Everything I’d imagined only moments before was wrong with one exception. I found the cigar box in precisely the same spot where I’d found it the first time, many months before. And now as before there’d been absolutely no effort to conceal the box; it simply lay there I inclined at a tilt on a small mound of earth.

I opened the box. The Iron Cross and the other trinkets he’d taken from the house were no longer there. In their place I found what appeared to be old talismans—bits of stone, chiseled and cut into the shape of amulets and scarabs, small dolls cut from small branches, leather thongs I from which hung bits of bone cut into different shapes, rather like charms cut into the shape of different animals, an owl, a deer, a beaver, and so forth. But no distributor. It all had a pathetic kind of childishness about it, like the hiding place of a small boy where marbles, skate keys, and rabbits’ feet are secreted. But there was something ghastly, too, about these toylike figures fashioned out : of the bones of innumerable devoured animals.

I stood there looking at it all, debating what I should do next, when suddenly I heard a small scratching sound behind me.

“This what you looking for?”

I whirled in the direction of the voice, causing the beam of my light to swing in wide arc around the crawl. At first I saw nothing and spun round again and again like one of those small shooting gallery targets that pivot stiffly around when you hit them.

It was the third time—just as my light splashed across the wall opposite the place where the chimney comes down into the crawl—that I saw him. Not him—of course—at least, not all at once. It was just the boot, at first—muddied and disembodied in the dark. Then my light traveled up the leg.

He was sitting there. But not really sitting. Just squatting on his haunches, leaning slightly rearward against the wall.

A strange, choking sound rose from my throat and clogged there. I stood there coughing and clearing it, like a man with a fishbone stuck in his gullet. In my fright I nearly dropped the light. Recovering instantly, I aimed the beam directly on his face and held it there as if I could pin him to the wall with’ it. And so we remained for an interminable second—frozen into immobility, in all that darkness, two figures in a frieze—not speaking, the two of us at two ends of a beam of light, regarding each other.

I can’t imagine what I looked like, but as for him, his face showed not the slightest trace of an expression—not surprise, not fear or anger, not even amusement of the malicious sort he might have indulged in at that moment—just that terrifying blankness I’d come to know so well.

“You lookin’ for this?” he said, holding up the distributor so that my light beam bounced off it and back into my eyes, blinding me momentarily. His voice was nearly as blank as his facial expression.

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at it, dully, as if it were something he barely recognized. “I took it this mornin’.”

“I know you did. You had no right to.”

Suddenly the distributor hit the earth beside his boot with a dull thud. He didn’t drop it or throw it. He merely let it slip to the earth from a limp, open hand.

I picked it up instantly, wheeled around, and started out. As I did, I nearly struck my head on one of the low joists just above me. In the process the light fell and I stooped for it. In that moment Richard rose and started toward me.

I’ll never be certain if he was coming for me or to retrieve the distributor, whether the movement was a gesture of threat or one of assistance. It was that ambiguous. I scrambled for the light and, reaching it first held the beam directly on him as if I could hold him back with that. He stopped dead in his tracks.

“I didn’t want you to go nowhere,” he said.

“You don’t have any right to stop me. And no right to touch my car. That’s not your property.”

I started to turn.

“I ain’t never leavin’!” he screamed at my back.

I hadn’t asked him to leave. I hadn’t even mentioned it. I didn’t have the stomach for it. But now that it was out, now that he’d given me the opening, I charged right in.

“Richard,” I started quite reasonably, trying to suppress the tremor in my voice, “I’ve been thinking. You said you wouldn’t mind working for yourself. What about a little business of your own? A store—or a little repair shop of some sort. Actually I think you’d be terrific in that. What if I set you up in something? Somewhere far away from here where people don’t know anything about—I’d be more than happy to advance the cash—”

I can’t begin to describe the look of contempt on his face. He knew full well that he was being bought off, given a sum of cash on the condition that he quickly and forever disappear. Suddenly it was all clear to me. Clear in a way that it hadn’t been since the very beginning.

“All right then,” I said in a voice that was now quiet and remarkably controlled. “I’m going to give you a week. By that time if you haven’t found a job and a new place to live, I’m going to ask you to leave. And if you don’t go, I’m going to have to have you put out.”

I watched his face for a moment, fascinated by it in the beam of my light. At first the only emotion it revealed with a minor fluttering at a corner of the mouth. Suddenly, something animated the rest of the features, as if some powerful creature chained beneath that mask of impassivity was thrashing around struggling to get out. Then, suddenly, it was loose and charging.

I lunged for the gray square of light just outside the entrance to the crawl. He came after me, and as he did I turned and struck him across the head with my light. The blow caught him high up near the temple. But it was a feckless little thing and hadn’t fazed him a bit.

He made a funny face—an expression I couldn’t quite associate with him. Rather like pity for a man who could strike such a pathetic little blow. Of course, he didn’t believe that I would hit him, and up until that moment I would never have believed it myself. But in that queasy instant of metal impacting on flesh and bone, a strange look came over his features. It went quite beyond pity or contempt. It was simply a face I’d never seen before.

Following that, I knew it was all over. Whatever moments of friendship and trust, however brief and tenuous, we’d shared, were now at end. The cord was severed. There was something unmistakably final in the sound of that dull thud on the head, and even as we gazed at each other I could feel the walls growing up between us.

We stood looking at each other across a small space, both of a us a little breathless and crouching beneath the joists. He tried to speak, but only a hoarse, gurgling sound spilled from his throat. Then for the first time I looked into Richard Atlee’s eyes and saw pure hate.

He was only inches from me when he raised his arm as if to strike. The strength in those arms I knew to be formidable. I’d seen them chop wood and lift rocks. I knew what they could do. And as that arm went up, I’d already begun to recoil under the force of it.

But incredibly it went up, reached its high point, and never came down. It was as if something stayed the arm trembling above me as if he were Indian-wrestling some invisible other hand above us.

When I scrambled through the square and out into the cellar he shouted after me—crouched just inside the entrance—his face framed in black.

“I ain’t goin’. You hear? I ain’t never goin’. Never! You hear? Never!”

When I reached the foot of the stairs his voice was still roaring from the crawl, but somewhat muted now and muffled by distance, like sound filtering through plaster.

I looked up and saw Alice at the top of the stairs, a look of horror in her eyes. She’d heard the shouting and was starting down. I waved her back. Then, clattering up the stairs, I turned to look again at the black square, which appeared blacker at that moment than I could ever recall it.

His face was gone now, and suddenly there was no further sound from the crawl. It had stopped as if at a signal, and all I could hear was the terrible flutter of my heart, banging away at my ribs.

When we got back to the parlor Alice led me to a chair and I collapsed heavily into it.

Her face was white as raw mushrooms. “What in God’s name—”

“He was down there—”

“I heard voices. I couldn’t imagine what—”

“I asked him to go.”

“You did?” she said, looking at the filthy distributor, poised in my lap. “You asked him?”

“I gave him a week—”

“A week?” She was holding her flamed cheeks between the palms of her hands. “A week—?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

“You dare live with him for another week?”

“Yes,” I said. “We owe it to him. It’s all our fault. We misled him.”

She stood there speechless, still holding her cheeks.

“One more week,” I went on, panting like a winded dog. “Seven more days and then, job or no job—out.”

She studied my face for a moment, a small anxious smile flickering across her mouth. “You feel better now?” she said. “Now that it’s over?”

“Yes,” I said, a little surprised by her quick change of mood.

“But nothing’s done yet, Alice. This won’t be easy.”

Suddenly I remembered something. “Alice,” I said pointing to the closet right off the parlor, “go get me the guns now and all the ammunition.”

Somewhat later that day I had dizzy spells and I took to bed with pains in the chest. Alice wanted to call in Dr. Tucker, but I made light of those distinctly ominous symptoms and assured her I’d be up and on my feet again soon. In a short time the dizziness and pain subsided, and by supper time I felt well enough to take a cup of soup.

Of course, Richard Atlee didn’t appear at supper that night, but surprisingly, Alice set his usual place for him at table. I tell you—it amazed me. Even now over the space of time, I can still see that cold bare plate with the pieces of silver and the napkin set beside it, looking so vacant and forlorn, rather like the crib of a child who’s just died.