The Digging Leviathan (7 page)

But Edward’s irony was lost on Oscar who was far gone in his snickering, and who turned at the sound of Jim and Gill coming up behind him. The three of them wandered away talking among themselves, Oscar emitting a snorted guffaw and commenting aloud about a “turd thing” that Jim’s crazy uncle was chasing a mouse with. Edward sighed and mopped up, then pulled down the third volume of Narbondo’s
Gilled Beasts
and sat at the desk, thumbing through until he came to the lengthy section on mermen. He began to read, for the tenth time, the account of a gilled corpse taken in the seventeenth century from the Sargasso Sea, tangled among the rubbery purple stalks and bladders of floating kelp. There was an unlikely drawing of a peculiar toad man on an adjoining plate, no doubt long dead, but with a wistful and tragic look in his eye,
as if he wondered how he’d fallen out of Paradise and in among monsters.

“Pay me for it,” Oscar Pallcheck said, waving a notebook full of looseleaf pages at a silent and saddened Giles Peach. Jim waited and didn’t say anything. He wondered, though, whether he’d have to take Gill’s side against Oscar. The thought terrified him. If he kept silent perhaps everything would work out. Oscar would tire of the game and give Giles his journal. Jim plucked a tuft of grass from Gill’s front lawn, affecting nonchalance, watching the man across the street—Mr. Hasbro—crawling around the ground on his hands and knees, peering beneath an old, orange Metropolitan at its ruined muffler. Beside him was a new muffler, a chrome wonder of tubes and rivets and obscure oval boxes.

“Listen to this,” said Oscar to Jim, involving him in the fun.

Giles snatched at the notebook, a wild grab that missed its mark by a foot when Oscar, with a burst of laughter, yanked it back out of reach. “Listen.” He cleared his throat theatrically and, waving his free hand at Giles as if to ward him off, read:” ‘My father has gone away. I think to the center of the Earth. Why didn’t he take me? Has he turned entirely into a fish?’ “ Oscar guffawed. “A fish! Your old man’s a fish gone off to the center of the earth! Kee-rist! Talk about nuts. Wait, wait.” He ducked around behind the curb tree as Gill grabbed again for the journal, tears leaking from his eyes. He swung wildly at Oscar, managing to hit him weakly in the shoulder, and for a few moments the two of them circled the tree, Oscar shouting with laughter and Giles sobbing and lunging, the gills along his neck flaring and collapsing, something Jim watched half fascinated, half in fear, but which Oscar, in his mirth, was blessedly oblivious to.

Mr. Hasbro tugged the new muffler toward his car. From the altered angle the thing appeared to have metamorphosed into something almost magical. It glowed silver in the sunlight which played in rays off a sequence of bright wires stretched between two curved porcelain masts like strings on a harp. The whole thing, impossibly, seemed to be hovering a few inches off the ground.

Jim couldn’t contain himself any longer, fear or no fear.

“Give it to him, Oscar,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got to read this other part. I told you I’d show the whole thing to you anyway, didn’t I? Is that what your beef is? You’d have stole it first if you had any guts. Your uncle ought to swim Gill through his nut mazes. But listen to this.”

“I don’t want to,” said Jim, pushing himself to his knees and standing up. He hadn’t any idea what he was going to do, but the situation called for action. Giles stood shaking almost imperceptibly, having given up his pursuit and withdrawn. There was the clatter of tools across the street: the banging of a hammer, the crank of a ratchet, and a muffled curse as Mr. Hasbro yanked his hand out from beneath his car and shoved a finger into his mouth. Nothing could be seen of the wonderful device but two glowing pinpoints of light, one an emerald green and the other an indescribable arc of lavender and blue mixed together in a luminescent swirl. The emerald dot seemed to bleed out into the surrounding air, tinting the street and the trees and the sidewalk a pale and watery green, like sunlight leaking through the back of a breaking wave. And for one eerie moment Jim was sure he smelled salt on the air—the ocean and seaweed smell of barnacles and mussels clumped onto sea-washed rocks. But the air was still and silent. No breeze blew. Mr. Hasbro stood back, hands on his hips, gazing at his vehicle with obvious satisfaction. The old rusted muffler, pockmarked with nickel-sized holes, lay on the parkway beneath a camphor tree.

“ ‘I’ve developed anti-gravity today. I’m sure of it,’ “ Oscar I read, to himself now since Jim wasn’t a willing audience and Giles would no longer be baited. “ ‘It’s a simple business, actually. Far simpler than it seems. I came across a copper coil at Sprouse Reitz, and along with a box of a hundred large paper clips and a penlight …’ Kee-
rist
!” shouted Oscar again to emphasize his disbelief. ‘This is
crazy
. That’s what it is. Is this a joke or something?” But Giles didn’t respond even though the question was aimed at him. Jim was vaguely surprised to see Oscar so angry. Perhaps it was simply that he was playing to an unappreciative audience.

But he was even more surprised when Mr. Hasbro, wiping away at his hands with a blue rag, slid in behind the wheel of his Metropolitan, started it up, raced the weirdly humming engine for a moment, and sailed away into the sky, the little Metropolitan reflecting the rays of the noonday sun until, just
for an instant as it angled away toward the Hollywood Hills, it looked like nothing more than a bulbous orange fish—an immense garibaldi, perhaps—darting toward the shadows of a submarine cave. Then it was just a speck in the blue-green of heaven.

Jim felt suddenly nauseated. He pointed a trembling finger at the disappearing automobile and croaked out the single word, “Look!” Oscar spun around, set off by the appearance of Jim’s face, and was treated to the sight of a rusty muffler on a half-brown lawn.

“You’re nuts,” Oscar proclaimed, spitting through the gap in his front teeth. “You’re as nuts as he is.” He slammed Gill’s journal shut, tossed it contemptuously into the street, and strode off down the sidewalk, shaking his head about twice as hard as was necessary. The notebook landed on edge, fell open, and a half-dozen loose pages blew out, breezing away merrily down the road as if chasing Oscar Pallcheck. Jim ran them down, retrieved the notebook from the street, and handed it to Giles. Giles, however, seemed almost catatonic—obviously unseeing. Jim was powerfully tempted to flip open the journal and read it—to stuff the loose pages into his shirt and go home. But he didn’t. He sat on the lawn with his friend, pretending that they were both being silent by choice, and watched a bank of dark, wildly roiling clouds come surging up over the San Gabriel Mountains.

Lightning flickered in the east—great long forks of it that touched the foothills like the tongues of electrical snakes. A black veil of rain approached in an even sheet, illuminated by the lightning flashes, and a scattering of hailstones clattered on the street even though the sky overhead was clear, as if they’d been cast from the distant storm by a great wind. And just before the rain began to fall, when the sharp and wonderful smell of ozone rose from the street and sidewalk, a man came riding over the housetops on a bicycle, pedaling like a whirligig, as if the very fury of the revolving wheels was keeping him aloft. Jim watched in silence as the flying bicycle and its surprisingly familiar rider drew toward and then past them, sailing above Hasbro’s chimney, beneath swaying telephone wires, and arcing skyward to disappear into the dark wall of rain that swept over them, almost obscuring the street, blotting out the rest of the world. Jim shoved Gill’s journal under his jacket, his mind racing, thinking of Hasbro’s impossible flight,
thinking of Roycroft Squires pedaling past in defiance of gravity—in defiance of sanity. And why Roycroft Squires? He thought of the look in his father’s eyes as he had watched Yamoto through the window, of his obvious certainty that “things are becoming clear.” Were they? Or was the opposite true? Or was he infected by his father’s lunacy?

Giles seemed to wake up suddenly, as if he’d been startled out of sleep. The two of them bent toward the house through huge drops of rain. When Jim handed Giles the notebook, he put it away along with a dozen others without saying a word. Jim didn’t dare refer to it, although its contents were whirling in his mind like the pedals of Squire’s bicycle. It must have been a hallucination. Something he’d eaten. He remembered a story he’d read once in which a man had seen a luminous pig after eating three dozen raw oysters. But he hadn’t eaten any oysters.

The tinkle of a bell sounded faintly through the rain, and a white panel truck drew toward the house. Jim and Giles watched through the kitchen window as the bell fell silent and the truck wheezed to a stop.

John Pinion stepped out. He was dressed in the white duck pants and bluejacket of a Good Humor man, and he hoisted a foolishly small and ribby umbrella before setting out up the driveway. Jim supposed he’d be asked to leave, being associated, as he was, with the competition. He didn’t entirely like the looks of John Pinion, not so much because he was squat and pale, but because he was perpetually shaking your hand in a fishy sort of grip, as if he weren’t so much being pleasant or polite as obsequious—worse than that, as if he wanted to touch you, to feel your skin. Jim wasn’t fond of being touched. He determined to “freeze Pinion out” as Oscar would have put it.

Pinion rang the doorbell, looking furtively over his shoulder, then peering in at the window, shading his eyes, staring straight in at Giles and Jim for ten seconds before he made them out. Then he straightened up and smiled with an embarrassed look. Giles opened the door.

“Odd weather, what?” said Pinion, who sometimes affected a sort of comic book English accent and jargon. “Wet out here.” He pumped Gill’s hand, probably the only hand in miles as cold and fishy as his own. Then he went after Jim’s hand, but Jim, who was large for his age and who had learned a few hand-shaking tricks from Uncle Edward, was ready for him.

He got his in first and grasped the finger end of Pinion’s hand, so that Pinion couldn’t get anything more than a thumb on him. He gave it a hearty squeeze to show he meant business, then let it flop floorward. Pinion grinned foolishly. “Have you got a few moments?” he asked Giles in a plonking, final sort of tone, entirely avoiding looking at Jim.

Jim was damned if he’d leave. He was buoyed up by his run-in with Oscar Pallcheck, such as it was. There was no telling how valiant he might have been if it weren’t for the business with Mr. Hasbro. He was half inclined to suppose he’d imagined it. He must have. Oscar hadn’t seen a thing. Nor had Giles, apparently. But if there was one man who might have had something to do with it, Pinion was that man. In fact, Pinion’s timely arrival was packed with suspicion. Jim wasn’t about to leave. Things were afoot.

Pinion, however, was silent as a clam. He smiled at Jim, but it was a malevolent smile now. There was no mistaking it. He wasn’t about to reveal himself, not to the nephew of Edward St. Ives, Russel Latzarel’s associate. Pinion would wait him out.

Jim was struck with sudden inspiration. He mumbled a quick goodbye, ducked out through the rain, angled around the side of the house into the back yard, and slid silently through the back door, a thrill of fear and intrigue sweeping him toward the living room where Pinion’s voice muttered along. Jim collapsed to his hands and knees at the sound of a shout: the word “yes” exclaimed by Pinion as if in response to a question. Jim picked himself up, cursing himself for having reacted as if he’d be invisible on all fours. His blood rushed along in a fever behind his ears. He needed a plan. Sailing in like this wouldn’t do. He was certain that farther along the hallway was a door—a closet door. He edged up toward it, holding his breath, calculating the time that Velma Peach was likely to arrive home from the bakery where she worked on Saturdays until four—several hours away yet. Pinion laughed aloud and made a peculiar swatting sound, as if slapping his fist into his open palm to emphasize a point. What if Velma Peach drove home for lunch? It was almost noon. If Giles caught him crouched in a coat closet, Jim would simply shriek and leap out at him, like Oscar would do, and pretend it was a gag. But if Velma Peach opened the closet door to shove her raincoat in—he didn’t want to think of it. It would be the end of both of them. He
eased into the closet, shoving past an immense fur coat—the skin of an ape, apparently, that smelled musty, like the blue fungus that grows on leather shoes that have sat too long in the dampness of a dark closet floor. He pressed his ear to the wall. There was silence. He couldn’t hear a thing above the sound of his own heart. The sudden sound of Pinion’s voice directly beyond the wall nearly pitched him into the hairy coat. He stood still, breathing through his mouth, listening.

“Naked Eskimos. That’s what I said. And the north wind: there’s no doubt at all it gets warmer in the Arctic as one sails north. Latzarel, remember, hasn’t been to the Arctic. He pretends to be an explorer. Pshaw! He’s a boy scout, a tiny tot, a back yard scrabbler. Have you considered this: If rivers
don’t
flow out of the center of the Earth—and I, for one, know they do—then why are icebergs made of fresh water? And why, for the love of God, does the musk ox migrate north? Where is
he
going? To spend the winter on an ice field? You tell me!”

Giles apparently didn’t know, or at least he didn’t answer. He mumbled something about gravity, however, concerned as he naturally would be with physics.

“Fascinating business,” Pinion said. “Perfectly fascinating. You see, gravitational pull is immense, relatively speaking, around the curve from the exterior to the interior of the Earth. We’d roughly double our weight when sailing in through the polar openings along one of the rivers. But inside! Inside we’d halve our weight. A one-hundred-fifty-pound man would weigh about seventy-five pounds. He’d have to—centrifugal force would require it. It doesn’t take much to hold a body to the inside of a hollow, rotating ball.