Crawlspace (36 page)

I was kept under heavy sedation. The doctors claimed that it was a miracle that I was still alive, considering the amount of heart damage I’d sustained from previous seizures coupled with the kind of massive cardiac arrest I suffered this time.

All the while I lay in the tent, I kept thinking of Richard. I had no way of knowing if he was alive or dead, if my bullet had hit or missed. I kept hoping that I’d missed and that he was alive in prison somewhere, awaiting sentence. For if that were the case, I planned, lying there in the oxygen tent, to hire lawyers and seek an immediate appeal. If that was the case I’d consider myself lucky, I told myself. But down deep, I knew that wasn’t the case.

All the while I was in the hospital, I never actually learned what Richard’s fate had been that night. In one respect I was too weak to ask and—in another—not well enough to be told. But then Alice and I had reached an agreement. We had reached it by mutual and tacit consent and neither of us sought to violate it.

I knew that at a given moment which she would deem both appropriate and safe, I would be told everything, and against that time we would keep our lips sealed.

The day I left the hospital was a gray, dismal time in early November. Small flurries of snow swirled meanly around, then disappeared while the sun lay flat against the sky like a great, white disk.

As we stepped out of the hospital doors, a car drew up at the entrance. I thought it had come to drive us home but when we got in I saw our suitcases strapped on a luggage rack in the back, and I knew we were leaving there forever.

Once in the car and out on the road with the meadows and the low hills sliding past us and small hard flakes of snow whispering on the windshield, Alice told me that she had sold the house. The news neither surprised nor displeased me. I felt a twinge of sadness and then a long sweet breath of relief.

Alice had conducted the entire sale herself with the assistance of brokers and our lawyer. In all that time she had returned to the house only once, to supervise our packing. The rest of the time she stayed in a small hotel in town within walking distance of the hospital.

Doctor Tucker recommended a warm climate for the winter, and so Alice, recalling my wish to visit there, rented a small house on one of the more remote Keys. The car in which we now drove was taking us to an airport.

Once on the plane and underway I felt an urgent need to have my unanswered question about Richard Atlee put finally to rest. Alice sensed this great agitation, and after we’d been aloft for an hour, she handed me a crumpled envelope. It was addressed to me at the hospital, and its postmark was dated several weeks earlier. It was from Mr. Washburn. It was rather a touching letter full of illegible and misspelled words in which the poor man blamed himself for not having done more to avert a tragedy that he knew was inevitable.

Then Alice told me how Birge broke into the house that night and found us—she upstairs in the bedroom in a dead faint, and Richard sprawled on the floor face down beside the bed—a small hand-made hatchet beside him, and shot through the heart. But I was nowhere around. She told me how they searched the house from room to room and finally found me below, in the crawlspace. I don’t know what I was doing there, or even how I got there, but Dr. Tucker claims that that’s where the coronary struck me and it was a massive one.

Alice told me how in the days that followed Birge tried to make himself helpful. Several times he had come to see her at the hotel, shamefaced and contrite, putting himself at her disposal, offering all kinds of assistance. But she would have none of it.

When we reached the Keys, even before we settled into our new home, I drafted a letter to the governor and the attorney general’s office of the state we’d just left, detailing all the facts leading up to Richard’s death, and pinpointing clearly the role I believe Birge played in it.

We never had an answer. Not even a form letter by way of small acknowledgment. But of course you know how these things go. They’re sticky business, politically, and once a touchy matter disappears beneath a cloud, no one appears too anxious to go and dig it up again.

I was told by several people, acquaintances in high positions that if I could substantiate any of the story—the nocturnal attacks on our house, the daily harassments, Birge’s refusal to come to our aid—that I should give the story to one of the state newspapers. I tried that with several papers, none of which would consent to investigate the story, regardless of how much of it I could substantiate. I’ve applied to Washburn to tell what he knows to high state authorities. But he hasn’t done so. He didn’t say he wouldn’t. He simple hasn’t done it.

There is something about injustice. Once it starts, it spreads like contagion. First, you have one small injustice; then a whole conspiracy of subsequent injustices are required to support and sustain the initial injustice. And so very quickly the whole atmosphere of a place is irreversibly polluted.

Our life in the Keys is very quiet. It has to be for my sake. I spent most of the first few months on my back sunning myself in a beach chair beside the ocean, which is in our front yard. We went virtually nowhere, sought no friends or lively diversions. All of that was now apparently forbidden to me. Instead, Alice and I stayed alone with ourselves, locked in our silence and grief, trying to find our way back to each other.

Our house here is built up on the dunes. The land around us is desolate and sandy. Alice couldn’t bear to see so much space without vegetation, and very soon her horticultural passion drove her to resume gardening. In no time at all we had sweet peas, hibiscus, and mariposas blooming all around the house. And in a curious way, when her garden started to bloom out of that dry, sandy earth, she herself started to come back to life.

Gradually I was encouraged by an engaging young cardiologist in that area to start on a regimen of short but daily exercise of a mild sort. Much to my great delight he recommended swimming. Each morning and each afternoon I was permitted for short periods of time to bathe in the warm, clear waters of the ocean.

Eventually I grew stronger, and as I did my taste for sporting activity increased. Soon I was fishing the lagoons and shoals near our house for bonito, yellow jack, and bonefish.

So our lives went for several months—routine, uneventful, and not at all unpleasant. But still the thought of Richard Atlee persisted in my mind, lingering like a bad taste in the mouth, that cannot be scrubbed away. I have a strange need to return to it over and over again in my mind. I relive our Christmas feast with him and all those Sunday mornings singing hymns beside him in the sun-filled parlor. Sometimes I even think I can smell his coffee and buns cooking on the stove. Over and over again I go back to that last day in the bog with him. I play the whole scene back, hearing it ring clearly in my ears as if it were on a tape recorder. I dredge up out of my memory everything I said that morning. And then what he said. Sometimes I try to change the words to make things come out differently—better. But when I do, the scene blurs; the clarity of my memory fades, and I’m left alone. So I go back to the scene, exactly as it was, examining and reexamining my words for every possibility and nuance, as if in doing that I may discover some clue to the mystery of Richard Atlee. He knew that by coming back to the house that night he would die—not necessarily by Birge’s hand (that was obvious), but by mine. He seemed to have known that I was going to be the one who would kill him. He seemed to have wanted that; indeed, to have set things up in such a way that I would have to be the one to kill him. Why? I keep wondering, and sometimes I think I almost know. But not really. There’s so little we can ever hope to know about things like that.

I keep telling myself that what I offered him that morning was a real alternative. And not merely courageous, when you consider Birge’s vengefulness, but even quite generous, when you consider what he had done to our lives. After all, expert legal counsel is not inexpensive. But the money was the last thing in my mind. And then to offer him the thing he wanted most of all—another home—well, I call that downright handsome.

I did not want him to die, I tell myself over and over again. I wanted him to live, and if he’d listened to me at the start, and got away from there as far as possible, and laid low for just a little while, he’d still be alive today. And he knew that, mind you. He knew it. So what made him choose the other, knowing full well how the other would end, as if what I’d offered him was so absolutely worthless?

. How I regret what I said to him in the crawl that awful day about our not wanting him any more. Possibly those words cut too deep, tore too much of a breach, and left unhealable scars.

Sometimes I think that when I made my offer to him that last day, he heard something in my voice that I myself wasn’t even aware of. And that was undoubtedly insincerity. Yes, I’m sure of that now. And what I ask myself is “How is it that he knew it, and I never did?” All the time I was saying it, painting rosy pictures of our future together, I believed—or I think I believed—every word of it, and yet he seemed to know it was so transparently—so pathetically—a lie.

One afternoon I was drowsing in a beach chair in the yard when Alice gently nudged me. I looked up at her through squinting eyes and she told me I had a visitor. She ushered in a tall, swarthy man with ramrod posture. He was lean, and all of him sinewy muscle. He wore a plaid sport shirt open at the collar, a pair of chino slacks, and light sandals over bare feet. The impression he gave was that of a man who had spent all of his life out of doors, working close to the soil. He had, too, that likable shyness and awkwardness you find in big, physical men.

Then as he started to speak I had the curious feeling that I had seen him before.

His name was Jimmy Graycloud, he said, and then he added, “I come to thank you for takin’ care of my kid.”

At first I didn’t know what he meant. I looked at him blankly while he studied me. I had the feeling he knew everything about me in the first ten seconds or so.

“Your kid?”

“Richie.”

Then suddenly it was all there—Richard’s wallet, and the photograph of the man Richard called his father.

“Graycloud?” I said, with the inflection of a question in my voice.

“His mother’s name was Atiee,” he said.

I must have sat there blank and stunned for a while, staring at him. I could see Richard’s expression now in the cut of Graycloud’s eyes. They had that same stony impassivity, as if they were gazing far off into the distance. The face, too, had that flat, slightly brutal quality you associate with primitive people.

“He wrote me all about you once,” said Graycloud. “Said you was good to him. I’m grateful to you.”

He said it just like that, without batting an eye. Not a tinge of emotion about it. Just as you or I might remark about the weather.

And so I met Richard Atlee’s father, or Richard Graycloud, or whatever. And this is the story he told me.

Jimmy Graycloud had been in the army for twenty-five years. He was at the time I met him just retiring on full pension, having achieved the rank of master sergeant. He was a full-blooded Cheyenne Indian who had grown up on a Cheyenne reservation in Wyoming.

At the age of twenty, while in the army, he met Emily Atlee, a woman ten years his senior who was employed as a barmaid in one of those sleazy little saloons that proliferate around military posts.

Graycloud met and married her all on a weekend pass. The marriage, of course, was a disaster from its inception. They lived together for a month, and then sporadically for two months after. Their relationship centered around drinking and the act of love, in which time he took to periodically beating her. She, in turn, would call the police and they would come over and jail him for the night, then release him to the military authorities.

After three months their marriage was dissolved by mutual consent. But at that time she was already pregnant, and Graycloud eagerly volunteered to give Emily half his monthly salary as contribution toward the support of her and the child.

The child was born prematurely four months later and christened Richard Graycloud. “He used her name, though,” Graycloud said. “He was ashamed of being part Indian. By that time I was in Asia and after that Europe. I didn’t set eyes on him once till he was five or six. But all that time I kept sendin’ money for her and gifts for him. Then I got transferred back to the States and one day I decided I wanna go see my kid.

“I drove up to Cheyenne to see Emily so’s I can see my kid. I find her livin’ in a trailer camp outside an army post. The place was filthy. It stunk. Beer cans and unmade beds. You could see a lotta men been there.”

When he said it he had to lower his eyes as if he were overcome by the shame of it.

“I went up to the post,” he went on, “and found her workin’ at the PX. I asked her where my kid was. She told me she give him over to the Indian Reservation outside of Cheyenne. When I left, she never even asked me once where I been or what I been doin’.”

“I drove over to the reservation right then and there. When I got there, I asked the people for Richie Graycloud. They told me he wasn’t there just then. Told me he run off someplace, but not to worry, that he’d done it at least a dozen times before. At first, when his mother gave him to the reservation he kept slippin’ off at night and runnin’ back to her. To get back to that trailer camp it meant crossin’ thirteen miles of hills and deep woods at night. How he did it I don’t know. He was only five or six, and that’s a lot of miles for a kid that age—and the woods at night are pretty scary and all that. But anyway, he’d do it. And when she’d wake up in the momin’ she’d find him sittin’ out there on the step of the trailer waitin’ for her. So she’d give him breakfast and drive him right back out to the reservation. He’d do it over and over again. And no sooner would he show up than she’d pile him right back into the car and run him back out to the reservation. Until he finally got the idea she just didn’t want him.