Crawlspace (28 page)

I made it all sound so melancholy. And mind you, it was. In one sense we were bereft. We couldn’t have been more bereft if he’d been our own child. I couldn’t bear to look at Alice. Nor she at me. No talk passed between us. The only sound was the sad tinkle of our spoons scraping along the bottoms of our bowls. We pretended that his setting wasn’t there, but I rather suspect that Alice, just like me, was waiting for him to come up from the crawl. We were both waiting to hear a footstep on the cellar stair—part of us wanting to hear something, and another part dreading to. Nothing came, however, and it was all—yes—so melancholy.

By the time we were ready to go to bed that night, we’d still heard nothing from Richard. We weren’t even certain whether he was in or out of the house.

Just before turning out the lights, I put the unloaded rifle in our bedroom closet with all the cartridges. I loaded the Smith-Wesson and placed it under my pillow. I did the latter in such a way that Alice might not see, but her quick, sharp eyes caught my fumbling movements, and she made a small whimpering sound and turned away.

Shortly after the lights went out, we had our answer about Richard’s whereabouts, for we heard the cellar door to the garden squeal open and footsteps climbing out from beneath the house into the night. It was, of course, Richard, and he was leaving—going out through his old point of egress, as he hadn’t done for many months.

“He’s going,” Alice said in one of those clipped, breathless whispers.

“Yes,” I said.

“Maybe for good.”

“Let’s hope.”

“Yes,” she said. And we both lay there quietly listening to his steps, neither hurried nor furtive, recede down to the bottom of the garden to the stone wall, the wall that he’d built to keep intruders out, and then beyond that to the woods, where, after a while, we heard it no more.

“Let’s hope,” we’d both said. But even as we lay there and said it, we knew it was a vain hope, and that the real crisis was only just beginning.

That night was a trying one. For sleeplessness and morbid thoughts it took the cake. I kept recalling the incidents of the day—Richard and myself in the crawl; the expression on his face when I asked him to leave; and that moment of sheer despicable pleasure when I snatched the distributor up and told him the car was not his property, that it was my property, implying as much that nothing in our house was his property, or indeed ever had been.

And in the moment that I told him he would have to leave, that was the moment that I felt the most exquisite sense of relief, as if a painful boil had been finally lanced and the heat of infection and the poisonous fluids were all boiling off.

I dropped off into fitful sleep and when I did, I dreamed of him. I saw him towering, giantlike, above me, his face swollen and horrible, the saint’s eyes red and blazing like ingots, his arm cocked above his head to strike, like some remorseless, retributive angel. When I woke I was in a cold sweat with dizziness and the chest pains of the day returning.

I have never paid much attention to my mortality, being content in the past to trust to God on that score. I suppose that in some naive and childish way I believed I was going to live forever and that death is an accident that only happens to someone else. But of course we all think that way.

On this night I lay in bed listening to the beat of my heart, which had been slamming away at the mattress beneath me. Suddenly it appeared to flutter and then stop. I could hear it no longer. Silence such as I’d never heard or ever believed was possible on tins earth of birds and insects and machines—that was the silence that swarmed in upon me. And in that moment I believed I’d died or that I had reached the moment directly preceding death—the transitional moment where a person stands on the threshold of two worlds, not quite in either.

It was a moment of sheer panic. My instinct was to cry out and leap up, to somehow claw my way back into the world of the living. But I was petrified of moving, for fear that the slightest motion on my part would drive me over the precipice.

I can’t recall how long it was I lay that way—eyes open, staring into the darkness of the room, feeling a creeping iciness at my fingertips and toes, and wondering how long the body lives after the heart ceases to beat. “So this is the way it is,” I thought. “It will be like this.”

I must’ve laid there like that for hours, too petrified to move, until I realized that Alice was sitting up ‘in bed beside me.

“Did you hear that?”

I’ll never forget the sound of her voice, shattering the awful silence, and the sudden rush of affection I felt for her.

“Did you hear it, Albert?” she said it again, just like that, a kind of whisper it was.

I sat up feeling the reassuring rush of blood flowing back into me. “Hear what?”

“Outside. Just now.”

I listened for a moment. “I don’t hear anything.” Then, suddenly, just as I’d said that, the garden door squealed open again, and then closed softly.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Alice said.

I looked at the luminous dials on the clock. It said three.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s Richard. He’s come back.”

That week, the one meant to be his last week, he came back again and again. He went out each night at a set time and returned at a set time, just as he’d done months before, when he’d been living in the crawl. Now he’d gone back to that dark, murky place once more.

In the morning when we rose and went down to breakfast, no longer did we find the table set in the breakfast nook, with the vase of freshly picked flowers, and the kitchen warm and full of the comforting smell of biscuits and perking coffee.

We’d eat our breakfast in silence and go out to work in the garden in silence. The garden, too, was a mess, for no longer did Richard go out there each day to look to the picking and weeding and pruning. Everything was tangled and overgrown, and in some curious way Alice and I had forgotten how to cope.

From meal to meal we waited for him to return, waiting for the sound of the footsteps on the stair. But it never came. Instead, we’d hear him coming and going in darkness, like the sounds of faceless transients you hear at night in shabby little hotels moving along the corridors outside your door.

Though he was nowhere to be seen, he was never out of my mind. In the daytime I imagined him squatting on his haunches against a wall in the half shadows of the crawl, just as I’d found him the day I’d gone down to retrieve the distributor. It would be just as he had sat with me in the cave a few months before, stolid and squatting, something a little atavistic about it, as if he had sat the way men sat eons before in the icy ‘twilight of Pre-Cambrian caves.

I imagined now that he had gone back to those grisly little feasts of his—the small wild birds and the field rodents, tearing the fur and feathers from them and eating them raw. I wondered if he thought back wistfully of Alice Graves’s table, of the pink and white bone china and the savory scents, and of friends and easy chatter about a warm, lighted table.

One night early in that week we sat at supper, not eating, not seeing each other, just waiting for time and the week to pass. Steam rising from bowls of soup curled listlessly up between us. Suddenly, a pair of heavy steps thudded on the bottom cellar stair—like the sound of stones dropping. Alice’s gaze locked in mine as we listened to the steps, unhurried and relentless, mount the stair, then pause at the top just outside the library door.

I recall watching my hand reach for a fork, my grip closing down hard on the handle, and the five sharp tines gleaming in the gasolier. I could hear him breathing in the moist, mouldy, cellar darkness just beyond the library door, imagining his hand reaching for the knob and then the door swinging open. My fist closed tighter on the fork handle and, my eyes still locked in Alice’s, I half rose expecting him to suddenly appear before me. But the door never opened. Instead, the steps started back down, still unhurried and relentless, like a tide receding.

There was something calculating and nasty about it. As if he wanted us to hear him—wanted to tease and taunt us. Give us a fright and turn away sniggering. As much as to say, “Not this time. Maybe next time.”

And there was a next time. Several next times. But he never came in. Just paused and waited outside the library door—breathing so we could hear him.

Hate isn’t an emotion that comes easily to me. But I tell you that now I commenced to hate him. Not merely because I feared him. I did fear him. Now much more than even at the very beginning. The unpredictability, the violence—it was all so terrifying. But quite beyond that normal fear, I began to have some deep and horrible loathing for him.

One day, shortly before that week was up, I nailed a heavy plank of wood against the library door, and once again I changed all the locks in the house—except the one on the cellar door.

Alice said, “Why? Why not that one, too?”

Yes—why not the cellar door with the bleached and runny letters GOD nearly all faded now about the lintel? Why not? Why not?

But I couldn’t say “Why not?” then. I could now. But why go into it?

Then Alice said to me around the fifth day of that week, “If you won’t put him out, call Birge. Birge’ll do it.”

“I know Birge will do it. He’d love to do it.”

“Then call him,” she persisted. “If you won’t, I will.” Her face had a nastiness I’d scarcely ever seen there before. There was something petty and vengeful about it. Imagine that! That from Alice. Alice, the gentle and mild; the friend of the poor and defenseless; the protector of lame birds and stray animals; Alice, who had made the Christmas feast and sung hymns in church beside a strange young man she thought of as her own son, attaching to his appearance proof of a divine will. Even succeeded in making me believe he was somehow my son, as well.

Now she was quite ready, eager in fact, to turn that son over to Birge. And, of course, she was right. If I had no stomach for the business, I could easily call Birge. Birge had stomach enough for everybody. Men like Birge exist for just such things—to carry out the will of the squeamish majority. People just like me—mouthing pieties, regurgitating all kinds of rosy, idealistic twaddle, and not for a moment wanting such things to come to pass.

So I left the garden door open. And I didn’t call Birge. I didn’t have to. He called me.

It was strange the way that call came. Almost as if he were thinking of us at the same moment we were thinking of him. Only he’d reached for the phone first, and all I recall, hearing that voice, was the enormous sense of relief I had—the way the appearance of an approaching ocean liner must affect a man stranded on a sinking raft.

“Albert,” came that low, familiar drawl, “I was passing by the other day and almost stopped in. But I didn’t. The place looks a little strange. How are you and the Mrs.?” His voice was oddly compassionate.

For a moment I almost believed he was serious and genuine. I had an urge to fall on my knees before him and weep with relief. But then the old voice came, wheedling and unctuous, confident of its great, persuasive powers. “You’re a good fellow, Albert. A gentleman. No one would question the decency of your motives. But I feel you’re into something way over your head. Some kind of trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“With that boy.”

“No trouble with the boy,” I blustered. “Only with the people who come around here bothering us.”

He paused, letting me hear something like the scratching of a pen on a pad coming from his side.

“I don’t like this boy,” he said.

“I’m sure of that.”

“I’ve got bad feelings about him. My feelings don’t often mislead me.”

“You wanted to hire him once. Make him a deputy.”

“I only wanted to help you out of an awkward spot. This boy’s a drifter. What we used to call a box-car rat.” He paused again, as if he were weighing the effect of his words. “What would you do,” he went on, “if a rat got into your house? You’d smoke him out, wouldn’t you? Or call for the exterminator?” he added with a small laugh. “Well, I’m the exterminator.”

That’s when the anger came over me, just as I imagined him thinking he had me right in ‘the palm of his hand, panting to be saved.

“Tell me, Albert. Has this boy threatened you? Are you afraid to say something? Because if you are, you don’t have to be. I’ll run him off. Just say the word. And you don’t have to worry about his coming back. Once I run ’em off, they don’t come back. I promise you that.”

When, at the end of it all, I said, to my own amazement, and sick to my stomach, “No,” and hung up the phone, there was Alice, standing there, where she’d undoubtedly stood for the greater part of that conversation. She had the look of one betrayed, full of bewilderment and hurt and growing rage.

So we lived that way for several days beyond the week’s time limit I’d set for Richard to vacate the crawl, not knowing what to do next, and barely suspecting even what I wanted to do. Until, that is, the smell came again.

It’s curious the way that started—first faint, barely perceptible, seeming to hover over a small corner of the kitchen. Then, suddenly, it was swift and everywhere, like a plague sweeping across a blighted land. Rising up from one story of the house to the next. That same harsh, fecal odor, like raw sewage. We opened the kitchen windows, and when it spread to other parts of the house, we opened more windows.

Alice cried now every day and prayed every night before going to sleep. Then she’d sit on the edge of the bed watching me check the rifle and the pistol. Now when I stuffed the pistol under the pillow I didn’t even bother to conceal it from her.

“He’s punishing me, isn’t he?” she said one night.

“Only you?” I said with bitter irony.

“Yes. He’s always liked you. It’s me he’s never been able to accept.”

“Oh, Alice.” I rolled over so that my back was to her.

“He’s punishing me,” she persisted.

“What for? What have you ever done to him but shown him kindness?”

“He’s never seen it as that,” she pleaded, and turning over with a pathetic whimper, she cried herself to sleep.