Through the Hidden Door (10 page)

Snowy struggled silently for a few minutes. “Only if you make him promise not to tell. And I’ll be listening from the lab to everything you say, even with the door closed and the dehumidifier on,” he added sulkily.

“Snowy, how come you don’t trust anybody? Even me? Even the Finneys? I’m your buddy, Snowy. I mean that.”

Snowy said nothing. Peter Mellor was dead right about the rubber ice cube tray. That’s exactly what Snowy was. A rubber ice cube tray.

“Rosie’s going to have babies,” he announced suddenly. “Dr. Dorothy’s going to breed her to the big fat black-and-tan pig, Charles. I get to keep one of the babies if I want.”

This little trinket of information touched me in the heart. Snowy strode on beside me over the ice-pocked field. He held his head high, looking at the drab clouds and sniffing from cold now and then.

My imagination had hopped far away to the sands of the cave and the people who had built the white stone road, who had carved the imposing man-serpent statues, and who had written a message on a piece of marble no bigger than my thumb.

D
ON’T MIND ME, PENNIMEN,”
said Finney. As usual he’d settled himself into his armchair in front of the fire. He rubbed the side of his face deeply with his fingers and explained he was having an attack of neuralgia. My father did the same thing when he was thinking of income tax, or when he was afraid he’d bought a fake.

I sat in the opposite chair, drawing one of the black man-serpents in pencil. Later I finished it in ink.

A quiet fifteen minutes passed. Finney massaged. I drew.

“I understand you’re quite an artist,” he said. “Are you doing a cartoon of me, by any chance?”

“No,” I said. “This is something different. We’ve found something.” I glanced up anxiously toward the lab, where Snowy and Dr. Dorothy were fussing around. At dinner they’d said they were going to conclude a series of tests on sound perception in two different strains of guinea pigs. I wanted to talk to Finney alone because I was afraid, no matter what I said, it would go too far for Snowy. “We’ve found three or four things, actually,” I added.

“Have you?” asked Finney gently, but his eyes began to light up.

“Do you know much about the Indians who were here long ago, Mr. Finney?”

I kept sketching as he talked. He lit his pipe and stopped working at the side of his head. “A bit,” he said. “Wampanoags, some Mohicans from the north. None of the more famous tribes like the Apaches or the Mohawks. These were peaceful people. They were hunters. They grew some corn, and they were set upon and lost everything to our white ancestors. That was a great shame because they were far ahead of our ancestors in some ways. They were not greedy, and they did not make war. It was the end of them. Our ancestors were greedy, and they did make war, and that will be the end of us. What an irony!”

“Did they write in symbols?”

“No. They did some painting. Animals on hides. But no native North Americans had any written language whatsoever. They didn’t need it,” said Finney, puffing great fumes of smoke straight upward.

“Need it?”

“They didn’t trade. That’s why writing started. Did you know that?”

“No.” I stopped drawing.

“The earliest bits of writing ever found are bills, receipts, and orders. If people trade things and pay for things, they have to keep records. I’ve seen clay tablets dating back to three thousand years before Christ. You know what they are? Arguments between a copper merchant in Sumeria and some ship’s captain who delivered a load of rotten grain.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Sure. After people learned to keep accounts, then they started writing history and decorating tombs with messages about gods and kings and so forth. But it all started with business. Money. The original occupants of this continent did not trade in volume, in other words run businesses like the Egyptians or the Greeks. They never started any written languages whatsoever, although some Missouri Mound Builders came very close. Pennimen, what—”

“How about stone carving?” I asked.

“Nope. Why should they? There have always been so many forests around this part of the world. Much easier to carve wood. You find stone carving in other civilizations. Not here.”

“Never? No tribe? Ever? Were there different Indians before the Wampanoags?”

“Not that I know of. Now it’s my turn to ask questions, Pennimen. What have you found?”

But I kept going. “Did they have roads?”

“Roads! No! What on earth would they need roads for? They didn’t have wheeled vehicles. No regular going from town to town. No towns. Pennimen, what have you found in that cave?”

I showed him the picture of the man-serpent.

“What on earth is this?” he asked.

“There are two, made of black stone. Nearly two feet tall. They’re on a road made from tiny stone blocks cut exactly to fit in perfect rectangles. This is a rubbing from a stone marker next to the road. That’s all we’ve found except for a set of white stone steps leading down to the river, and the bone, of course. We figured ... we figured that long ago some Indians made a big scale model of a village. Snowy’ll kill me for telling you,” I added, lowering my voice, “but he did say I could ask a few questions.”

Finney looked from my drawing of the statue to the rubbing from the marker and back again. I sat and waited, time prickling me, hoping he wouldn’t quash our discovery with some adult explanation that would make perfect sense and wreck the whole joy of it.

“This has nothing to do with Native American history, early, late, or in between. They did not make this. They did not know about roads. And this is a primitive language, hieroglyphics ... you know what that is?”

I’d had ancient history in sixth grade. “Yes ... the Egyptian writing.”

“Exactly. Picture-symbols. But look at the beard you’ve drawn here. Did you get it right, you think?”

“That’s how it looked.”

“This man or god has a curly beard. Every American Indian ever born had hair as straight as a die. Everything about the face, the eye, the nose is wrong. American natives migrated here thousands of years ago from the Orient when the Bering Strait in Alaska was a land bridge. This is not Indian. How big did you say this statue is?”

“A foot and a half high maybe. The stones in the road are about two inches long and the steps maybe half an inch high and two inches wide each.”

“Pennimen, what have you found?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, Mr. Finney.”

“Find more.”

S
NOWY AND I DID
our best to find more, working hours a day until Christmas vacation was at an end. We bickered about how much I had told Finney. We argued about whether we were digging in a wrong direction again. We tried more random soundings with our boathook, but because the road curved and changed direction, we stuck it down blind and came up empty each time. The road was now more than fifty yards long. The cave went on beyond, infuriatingly smooth and clueless.

When school began in the new year, I had almost no time to dig because of midterm exams. They loomed at the end of January. Unless I did well, all chances of getting into Hotchkiss would be lost. Snowy didn’t care about studying.

He made slow progress by himself during the middle two weeks of January. Every evening before he left campus, he reported to me in the library. First he talked about his Rosie. He was teaching Rosie a complicated series of mazes. I wished Rosie a long, long life for Snowy’s sake. He tried sounding scientific about Rosie but didn’t succeed.

Only after he’d described the little guinea pig would he go on about the cave. More road. Endless white road. Endless splash holes beside the road. He had dug up several more, but there was nothing in the holes and no explanation for their odd splashed shape. I told him to give up and wait until my exams were through and I could help him. He didn’t.

I crammed for exams like a biblical scholar. I read
Macbeth
three times through, memorized the Cliff notes, learned by rote the declensions of every Latin noun in our book, and took my list of the atomic weights of the elements to bed with me. The battles of the Civil War raged in my dreams, General Sherman and Stonewall Jackson leapt around on isosceles triangles while I strained to figure the area of overlapping trapezoids.

I was prepared. I was completely prepared to handle anything any of my teachers could throw my way.

Then, the night before exams, Rudy and Danny strolled into my room at nine in the evening.

Rudy jerked his thumb at Peter Mellor. Mellor bounced out of his bed and vanished through the door like a bunny. So much for a roommate.

“Hey, man. How about a deal?” asked Rudy.

“What deal?”

“Class notes. History, Latin, English,” said Rudy.

“And science,” added Danny. “Just like old times, man!”

“You know something, Barney?” Rudy went on. “We figure Finney and Silks probably threatened to bust your lights out after that thing with the collie. So no hard feelings, okay? We’ve talked about it and we understand. Sometimes these things happen. We won’t bother you again.”

“If I give you my class notes?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s all, buddy, then everything’s gonna be real sane.”

I was tempted to do it, but some spring inside me quivered and gave out. To help them cheat again would be to throw dust in the eyes of some unseen god. That god would surely trip me up. To help them cheat would do other boys out of the best grades. Not to mention the fact that if I were caught, I’d be thrown out and never see east of the Mississippi River again. “I can’t,” I said.

“Why?” they both asked at once, sitting down on the end of my bed like two huge doctors.

“If you get caught, guys, that’s it. I’m in it as deep as you. I’m on probation. You get caught and Silks’ll yank my toenails out.”

“Come on, Barney,” said Danny. “Greeves is proctoring. He wouldn’t know it if the whole class showed up naked.”

“Besides,” Rudy put in, “you don’t use the notes. It’s only us. We’ll take our chances. No skin off you, you’re clean.”

“If I do it,” I said, “and you guys get hauled in, I’m a part of it, and it’ll get out somehow. You’ll tell Silks. You’ll drag me in, and I’ll deserve it. If I do it, I will be part of it. And I’ll get thrown out of here without a hope in hell of any other school even looking at me. Come on, guys. The same goes for you. Three swimming pools won’t get you off the hook if you get caught, Damascus. Your old man’ll set all ten of his Doberman pinschers on you if you don’t get into Choate. Forget it.”

Danny’s eyes began to burn, but he let Rudy talk.

“My butt is my problem,” said Rudy. “I’m taking the chance. I’ve gotta get at least a B plus to keep my scholarship and get into Lawrenceville.”

“I swear to God, Barney,” said Danny, “you give us the notes, we get caught, we don’t tell. Swear.”

I laughed. “You think I’d believe that? You think I’d take Swoboda’s word for it after he nearly put me in the hospital with his elbow? You really think I’d believe you?” I stood up. “Sorry, guys. I can’t do it. I gotta watch out for my own butt.”

“You’re gonna watch more than your butt if you don’t, Barney,” said Danny, kneading his big hands.

“Go to hell,” I answered him.

“What did you say?” barked Rudy.

“You heard me.”

“Oh, boy, did we hear you,” Danny whispered.

Mellor crept back into the room a half hour later. He didn’t say boo.

I tried to sleep. I kept reasoning with myself that without a decent night’s rest I could easily fail Latin and English. I fell asleep sometime before dawn. When I dragged myself out of bed, I glanced, bleary-eyed, at my Latin notes. Hadn’t I put them under the English book the night before? I was sure I had because English was the last thing I’d studied. Had someone messed with my notes?

The Latin exam was at eight. I could think about nothing but the warm heaven of bed. Breakfast with three cups of strong tea hadn’t woken me up. Every little hair on my body screamed at me that it had been yanked. I waded through a few easy declensions and a Caesar translation as if they were in Bulgarian.

That afternoon English was worse. Lids drooping, I picked over my essay on
Macbeth,
certain I had confused large parts of it with
Arrowsmith
and
Gulliver’s Travels.

Mr. Greeves was everybody’s favorite proctor. Stone deaf when he turned his hearing aid off, he was pushing ninety. For half an hour he’d been daydreaming out the window, gazing at one of the big old elms, and looking with love at his collection of bonsai trees along the windowsill.

Greeves was the art teacher. He owned a master’s degree in Japanese painting and was fond of telling us about his years spent painting stones in the gardens of Kyoto. My first year at Winchester, when he had still trusted me, he had taken me in hand. He had tried to teach me to draw and to paint, to see in the Japanese way. At that time, if I had done what he asked, I would have been labeled a weirdo, so I didn’t. “Why should I?” I asked him. “I’m American. Why should I draw in the Japanese way?”

“Because,” Greeves had said, “you are in the country of the blind. And in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!”

I followed the old man’s eyes to the winter branches outside the window. I guessed he was imagining them in Japanese watercolor, where they would be beautiful instead of bleak.

He turned from the window and gazed with sleepy pleasure at the boys’ bowed heads. A roomful of cramped bodies wrote feverishly in front of his desk. Then, very suddenly, Mr. Greeves put on his glasses and squinted fixedly at something on the floor, mid-room.

Pass or fail, there was not a syllable more that I could write about
Macbeth.
I picked up my blue book and dropped it on Greeves’s blotter. Since no talking was allowed during exams, I scribbled Greeves a note on an empty page, asking for permission to leave. He shook his head and pointed for me to sit down again.

I’d just drifted to sleep, head on my desk, when I heard the snap of a ruler hitting a book in the front of the room. Fifty-three bodies jumped like bees on a griddle.