Crawlspace (34 page)

I was haunted by the fear that Birge or one of his men was following me. Every snapping twig and rustle of grass became magnified in my mind, until I conjured up a swamp filled with Birge’s bogus deputies crouched and leering all around me.

A curious thing about my heart in those desperate days; considering the stress and strains, it was better rather than worse. When I think of it all now—the long treks across the bog, the climbing in and out of the crawl, the endless scurrying up and down the cellar stairs, I realize just how foolhardy I was. But necessity appeared to have improved me. I felt none of the old ominous symptoms—no chest pains, no dizziness, no noticeable shortness of breath. The organ appeared to be serving me nobly, and the effect of that was to make me more foolhardy. I began to develop a sense of indestructibility. I seemed to be doing more each day, pushing myself harder, challenging the organ, and ever testing my faith in its ability to sustain life no matter what the emergency.

After about an hour I reached a place that I calculated was the northeastren corner of the bog. But when I looked around, my heart sank. None of it looked the least bit familiar.

Of course, this was a different season from when I’d first been out there. Landscape has a way of changing when the foliage goes.

I started up a shallow slope looking for the slab of schist rock that marked the entrance to the cave. When I found I was climbing and getting nowhere, I went back down and started off in a different direction.

I made three or four different attempts—all to no avail. Then I thought of calling his name out loud, but the possibility of Birge’s people lurking about kept me hushed.

I was wearing a hat—a soiled and battered thing for which I still have a lingering affection. It was chilly that morning, but the sweat band was already thoroughly drenched. I recall yanking it off and drawing the sleeve of my jacket slowly across my brow. It was at the completion of that movement, just as my hand moved past my eye, that I saw what I thought was a short chapparal pine. It was about twenty feet off, all shrouded in mist. In the next moment the pine moved about a yard to the left Then I saw him. He was the pine.

I took about five steps forward and stopped dead in my tracks. He was just standing out there in full view regarding me quietly across a narrow ribbon of land. I could see only the top of his body. The lower half of the torso was shrouded in curling mist.

“For God’s sake,” I said in one of those whispered shouts. “Don’t just stand there!”

He scarcely moved. I waded toward him through a clump of hip-high bushes like a bather walking through surf, the marshy earth sucking at my shoes, burrs and nettles tearing at my trousers.

“Don’t just stand there,” I pleaded when I reached him. “Birge’s men might’ve followed me. Get in the cave!”

I tried to tug him, but of course I didn’t even know where the cave was. And he was unbudgeable.

“At least get down,” I said. He let me push him to the ground until we were both crouched in concealment below the level of the bushes.

Suddenly I saw him as he really looked. His hair, dirty and unkempt, had grown out even further. The beard, several shades lighter than his hair, was mangy and wild. Little bits of unsavory things clung there, tangled in it. His clothing was torn and covered with burrs; they were lice-ridden from sleeping on the dank earth underground. He had the look of one of those medieval hermits who’ve wandered in the woods for forty years or so, subsisting on grubs and locusts.

“Richard, I want you to forget about what I said the other day,” I blurted out. “It was stupid and cruel. And moreover, it was a lie. Mrs. Graves and I have been very fond of you, but what you did was wrong.”

He was sitting now in a small cavity in the ground, his knees drawn up hard against his chest and his arms locked over his knees so that he appeared to be hugging himself for warmth. There was a small muddy puddle of water all around him. He was sitting directly in it, oblivious of the fact, with his face, stony and impassive, set westward toward a low range of mountains in the distance.

“You’re going to have to face the legal authorities,” I went on. “But this is not the place to do it. We’ll go someplace where you’ll get a better chance—”

He continued to gaze off into the distant west as if I weren’t even there.

I rushed on now a little desperately. “It’s not a crime to protect yourself from arsonists and vandals. What these people were doing was an act of violence against not only Mrs. Graves and me, but you, as well, since you live in that house. What you did was in self-defense, ft won’t be very hard to prove that, and no jury will ever convict.” He didn’t speak. His face was still set firmly westward in the direction of the low hills. He sat erect and rigid, his shouders thrown back as if he were in a deep trance.

In the next moment I withdrew from my pocket the thick brown envelope containing two hundred dollars in cash.

I thrust the envelope at him. “Take this.”

He didn’t stir, and the envelope fell with a thud between us. I picked it up again. “Take it and get out of here. As far as you can go. When you get where you’re going, write me. By that time I’ll have a lawyer. We’ll arrange for a trail. Somewhere far from here, where there’s not so much feeling against you. Take it!” I poked the envelope at him, going a little red in the face. “Take it. It’s your only chance.”

Just looking at him, I felt something sink inside me. The tension in his spine appeared to stiffen even more. The shoulders flung back even farther, like a bird about to take flight. Then, without even looking at me, and still gazing off at the hills, he spoke. “I’m comin’ home tonight.”

“We’ll talk about coming home when this is all over. Right now, you’ve got to get out of here.”

“I’m comin’ home tonight,” he said blankly, unemotionally. It was stated as a firm, incontestable fact, like the date of the Battle of Hastings or the discovery of America.

“After this is all over,” I said, trying to blot out his words—to shout over his voice—“we’ll go up north to the place I told you about. You and Alice and I. All together again. Just like it used to be.”

I tried to make it sound as rosy as I could, the way I knew he’d like it. But even as I was saying it, I could hear it all coming out empty and heartless.

“We’ll buy a camper,” I went on, caught up in my own momentum. “I’ve always wanted—”

“I’m comin’ home tonight,” he said again.

Something snapped inside me, and the next thing I knew I’d flung the envelope at him. He took it right across the face like a slap, barely flinching. I struggled to my feet while it floated down between us. The pistol handle was icy to the grip, and as I waved it at him, my hand trembling wildly.

“Go!”

He didn’t budge.

I picked the envelope up again and tried to stuff it into his hands. But it simply floated right back down to earth.

“Pick it up!” I said. “And go!”

Still he didn’t budge. In the next moment I was pressing the cold barrel to his temple, my finger curling around the trigger. “Go!”

“I’m comin’ home tonight.”

“Go!” I said it again, and by that time I was shouting so loud I could hear my voice floating far out across the (bog. But his voice was even softer than it had been before. “I’m comin’ home tonight.”

That’s when I first consciously wished him dead. I closed my eyes and tried to pull the trigger. But in the next instant I could see the pistol, silver and glinting, arching high in mid-air over the brakes and scrub. I never saw where it landed, only heard a dull, squishy thud about fifteen yards off. And then I felt the awful shooting ache in my arm from having flung the thing so hard.

“You can’t come home tonight!” I shouted. “You can’t ever come home!”

Then I was wading out through the hip-high bushes, the nettles and thorns ripping at my trousers, my eyes filling idiotically. I turned around and shook my fist at him and shouted through the mists to where he was now standing, looking once again like a solitary pine.

“Don’t come back. I warn you!”

I got back home just as I’d predicted, shortly after noon. The skies had lowered, and great black blotches of rain clouds scudded swiftly overhead.

Alice was waiting for me at the door. She just looked at me—then led me in without a word. My appearance told all. My pants leg had a great gaping hole at the knee, and every part of me from head to toe was studded with small, prickly burrs. Alice said later that I looked “sickish” and “white in the face.”

“Go upstairs to bed,” she said instantly.

“No.” My answer was empahtic, but that’s where I dearly wanted to go.

“Lie down. You look as if you’re going to drop.”

“I’ll sit right here.” I sagged into a chair and sat there panting and crumpled like a lot of old rags.

She watched me eying the telephone. There was a look of pure hate on her face.

“Yes—I am going to call, Albert.”

“I know you are. The moment I lie down somewhere and close my eyes.”

“Well, you won’t. You won’t do what has to be done. He’s coming back here, isn’t he?”

“Tonight, he says.”

“Then I’m calling Birge, now.” She started for the phone.

“Don’t!” I shouted after her. Something in my voice brought her up short.

She looked at me uncomprehendingly, a look of profound hurt in her eye, like a child who’s been punished for something she doesn’t understand. “Albert—Please—”

“Just let me think a while.”

She looked at me pityingly while I sat there, crumpled in the chair with my chin slumped down on to my chest.

She left me alone for about an hour. When she came back I was still slumped in that chair, precisely as she’d left me, and there was no more pity left in her eyes.

“Call him!” she said. She was standing framed in the parlor door, her arms crossed and her eyes the color of dry ice.

I sat there with my moist hands folded in my lap, kneading them together until the bones groaned and cold white crescents glinted on the knuckles.

“Call him!” This time it was a hoarse shout that filled the room, filled the house, and spilled out all over the earth around us.

I stood up a little shakily and started out across the parlor. I didn’t stop when I reached her. I simply pushed past her toward the kitchen door while her body fell easily aside.

“Where are you going?” she shouted when I’d reached for the knob.

“I don’t know,” I said, and slammed the door behind me.

It was true. When I got in the car I hadn’t the slightest idea where I was going or what I was up to. When I got out of the car I was in town and on my way into a drugstore.

It was strange—the effect my appearance had on the people there. I was still in the clothes I’d worn into the bog. I was covered with burrs and a great white patch of bare knees showed through my trousers where they’d been torn. But by strange I don’t mean mysterious. I mean funny—the way they all stopped and looked up, the people at the drug counter, the clerks, the pharmacist with his chaste, rimless glasses and his rat-like frightened eyes, the people at the fountain with their spoons of ice cream and their sugar doughnuts and cups of coffee—all paused midway between the counter and their lips—all frozen still and mute in time.

I recall eyes following me to the phone booth and then yanking the folding glass doors aside and entering that musty, coffin-like cabinet. I can still see the cheap, black leatherette seat with its gaping puncture and the dirty cotton wadding bubbling out through it. And the gum and candy wrappers strewn on the floor. And the catalog of obscenities and phallic scribbling etched into the walls of the booth by means of keys and penknives.

The came Birge’s voice strong, calm, and self-assured through the receiver, followed by the timorous peeping of my own. I didn’t even bother identifying myself, and when I finished, I slithered out of that coffin feeling wormy as the grave.

There was nothing left to do except wait. And when I got home that’s what we did, waited from late afternoon until shortly after eight o’clock. That’s when Birge and all the cars came back with the men and the dogs and the fiery torches, all gathering at the foot of the drive, funneling into that point like a confluence of streams, moving and shifting about—a turbulent eddy—in a fierce glow of light.

Then suddenly the skirmish line was moving again, looking like a fiery bracelet spread out across the dark line of woods, and the hoarse bark of the dogs echoed far out across the chill, clear, moon-filled night.

We waited until shortly past midnight. That’s when we heard the first shots booming up out of the bog. There were four of them in rapid order. Then four more. Then it was silent.

A short time later we climbed the stairs and went to bed. We didn’t speak. We just lay there in the dark, the moon streaming through the casements, a naked branch scratching along beneath the eaves, and listening to each other breathe.

I tried to think of him as he’d looked that day, that wraith-like figure swaddled in mist. But I couldn’t reconstruct his face—not a feature of it—not even those icy blue eyes staring determinedly westward.

At a certain point I heard Alice sob. It was brief and over in a moment. She turned and stifled the rest of it into her pillow. Then there was nothing but the trembling of the mattress beneath her.

I don’t know how many hours were spent that way, and though we never spoke or touched each other, we were curiously together that night—more together than we’d been in a long time. Together with our guilt and cur self-disgust, with our hate for each other, and with our pity.

What came next is hard to say. Alice has her version. I have mine. We both agree that it started with the sound of footsteps. You could hear them coming at a run from the direction of the woods and churning heavily up through the garden in the back. Then they were outside the door, and the next thing we heard was the well-known jiggle of the key and click of the bolts in the cellar door, the hinges squealing open, and then the dull thud of the door closing.

Alice was sitting bolt upright in bed, the whites of her eyes glowing in the dark. I recall lying there, wanting to say, “He’d dead. He’s dead. Don’t worry. He’s dead,” but finding no voice with which to say it. Instead, a sour little puff of air rose from my throat, and I just lay there panting and winded on the pillow.