The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  Martin craned his neck and studied his chair. It was simple oak with a light varnish, but the workmanship was very fine and the frame felt sturdy and he noticed there were no nails used in its construction. It was all slat and peg. Something about that made a lot of sense to him, and something about that seemed impossible. That a man could design such a thing. Everything would fit together and it would perform as it was meant to and last for a very long time. He could hardly even fathom.

  He stared out the window. He watched pigeons walk the edge of the buildings across the street. They had, maybe, an hour’s worth of sun. He glanced over and looked at the wall of bookshelves. On a tattered towel lay one of the coyotes they’d rescued. When they’d first located the pups you could hold them in two palms. Enoch had found homes for the rest and the one that lay sleeping here had grown considerably. Its fur had lightened. Its snout elongated. The sheriff thought about tunneling down beneath the rocks that day to retrieve it.

  “We found a body,” he said.

  Enoch didn’t turn. His eyes were that very light shade of gray you sometimes see and his profile was edged with shadow. His lips were parted slightly. He rocked very slowly with both feet on the floor and just the toes of his boots flexing.

  “In a manhole,” continued Martin. “On the golf course. In the fairway off of Nine.”

  Enoch rocked. Martin thought he would ask if it was the boy, but he didn’t. He didn’t ask anything at all.

  “Looks like a local,” said Martin. “Hickson Crider.”

  Enoch nodded.

  “You know Hickson? Lives in your subdivision?”

  “I know him,” Enoch said.

  Martin watched the man. “They’re going to come in,” he said, “check dental records. Could be anybody.”

  “But you think it’s him.”

  Martin was quiet a moment. He said it was him.

  They sat rocking. Enoch mumbled his lips. He looked into his lap. “I went down and saw him,” Martin said.

  The toes of Enoch’s boots flexed, then flattened. Flexed, then flattened.

  “I didn’t want to go down there, but I did. I squatted there looking at him.” Martin glanced out the window. He watched cars go up and down the street.

  “And this man was killed?”

  “Killed,” Martin said.

  “Murdered?”

  “Most definitely murdered. There was a hole in his skull the size of your fist.”

  The old man nodded. His eyelids closed and opened. “And still we have the boy.”

  “The boy,” Martin said. “He might be the one that did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Hickson.”

  They rocked and watched the fading light. The old man reached over and took an apple off the windowsill, quartered it with a pocketknife, and handed one of the slices to Martin.

  Martin sat there, holding it in his hand. He hadn’t eaten since morning and he didn’t feel like eating now.

  “Deborah’s due any day,” he said.

  Enoch nodded. He placed one of the apple wedges in his mouth and chewed. He sat a few moments.

  Then he said, “I lost my youngest son in Vietnam.”

  “I know,” said Martin.

  “I lost my oldest in Korea.”

  “I know,” Martin said.

  “The middle one missed both wars, and my wife and I were thankful.”

  “I didn’t know you had another.”

  Enoch nodded. “He was a good boy. He was always good in school and he was in college at OU. Finance. He was going to go to work for the tribe. And then we got a call, Mary and I, and Richard had died. He’d been going to this well outside Norman, this little well on an oil lease he’d found. They had a pump came off the main line, had a processor, whathaveyou. Gasoline. What we used to call ‘drip.’ Rich had taken a blanket and he’d lain there with the nozzle off the pump breathing fumes. His roommate told us Rich would do this on weekends. He’d take that blanket and go out there by himself and just lie there, breathing. And then one weekend it was too much.”

  Martin sat there. He opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it.

  Enoch sat beside him and rocked.

  “His mother and I,” said the man, “we had three boys and all of them were taken. Jim and Daniel, people would say they knew what they were doing and had given their lives for something. Or there were others said the government had killed them and we should be angry. And with Richard, people would hear the story and they wouldn’t have anything to say. They’d be sorry for us, and you could tell some of them thought we’d maybe done something for him to end up like that.”

  Enoch broke off. He seemed to be thinking.

  “And maybe we did,” he said. “Maybe there’s things we didn’t do and should’ve. I thought a lot about it. I know Mary thought about it and we talked of it until she got sick. I don’t know why that happens.”

  Martin said he didn’t either. He studied the man for a moment. He felt sorry for him and then he felt worried. He worried the same thing could happen to him and Deb.

  “I had three sons,” said Enoch, “and I lost them every one. I guess I thought of them, at one time, the way I thought of my books. And so what I have now are books. Stories. It’s them I have to father now.”

  Martin thought about that. He looked back out the window. The pigeons stepped carefully. They staggered and pecked. They would walk the building’s edge as if born to it. Then a car would go past, and they’d flutter into sky.

  He’d just reached the highway when the radio started chirping. Martin picked up the receiver and told Nita to go ahead.

  “Sheriff,” she said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Sheriff?”

  “Yeah, Nita.”

  “Sheriff, we got a report on the body.”

  Martin pulled into the right lane and slowed. He hit his blinker. “How do you have a report? Coroner only picked him up a few hours ago.”

  “Well, he just faxed it from the hospital. Dental records. They’re for a Matthew Parks. Lives over on Wallace. It’s just across from Mr. Crider’s—”

  Martin told her he knew where it was. He pulled to the shoulder. He asked where was Lem.

  “Last I talked to him, he was down in some woods.”

  “Get him,” said Martin. “Have him meet me at Parks’s.”

  “Sheriff,” said Nita, “is there a problem?”

  Martin checked his rearview mirror and then hooked a U and went back toward town.

  He told Nita he was going to see.

  NOVEMBER 2006

  Early morning and the sun is shrouded on the horizon’s edge. Hickson stands in the fairway back of Nine, walking up and down, examining the grass. It has turned cooler and there is wind in the branches, leaves sailing steadily down. The sky is clouded. It spits an occasional drop of rain. The grass all around him is beaded with dew. Spider webs. The season’s final green.

  Hickson paces off thirty yards from the manhole, then steps into the woods and makes his way along the creek. He finds the elm they stood behind not twelve hours before and Hickson studies the ground all around it. The bark. He steps out from the trees and walks onto the fairway and searches the rough. Behind him, his footprints are damp ovals against the lighter field. He wanders back and forth, cuts here and there for sign. He finds nothing. He walks to the manhole and on the far side, every four feet, the just discernible chevrons where J.T. had planted his spade. Hickson bends down and studies them. He looks from the shovel marks to the manhole and he kneels for a very long time.

  Later that morning, it begins to rain. Hickson sits behind the desk at the pro shop while a table of seniors puff cigarettes and talk. They are watching a game show on the television perched atop the vending machine and at every opportunity they slap each other and laugh. Hickson looks through the time cards. He finds the one with J.T.’s name scribbled across it and goes over the dates. The rain comes harder and begins to blow against the windo
ws. The seniors consider it a moment and then turn back to their show. One of the men lights a pipe and bellows forth an enormous jet of smoke. Hickson watches. He shuffles the time card back into the pile. He glances out the window and a patrol car pulls into the parking lot. A deputy steps out. The sheriff. Hickson looks over at Dresser. Then he walks from behind the counter and goes down to his shed.

  When he trips the lock that evening, Parks is standing in the foyer.

  “You find it?” he asks.

  “No,” says Hickson.

  “You think someone took it?”

  “No,” Hickson says.

  They walk into the living room. Hickson sits in the recliner and Parks plants himself against the arm of the couch. He leans forward with elbows on his knees.

  “You think it’s still out there?”

  “I know it’s still out there.”

  “You think we can find it?”

  “I don’t know,” Hickson says. “There’s a thousand balls laying in those woods. It could’ve gone down the creek.”

  Parks listens attentively. At the end of every sentence he nods.

  “How much blood you think is on it?”

  Hickson says it’s not the ball he’s worried about. He tells him about the sheriff visiting that afternoon.

  Midnight, they stand above the manhole. Hickson waves his flashlight, then motions Parks forward. Parks kneels; wedges his crowbar; begins to pry off the lid.

  The rain has stopped. Around them, in its place, falls a very fine mist. They wear slickers. Boots. Parks upends the manhole cover and it falls to the grass with a thump. Hickson shines his light down the hole.

  “You first,” Parks says.

  Hickson crouches, puts his legs in, and sits on the rim. He looks up at Parks. The man turns his head. Hickson finds the ladder rungs with the toes of his boots, lowers himself, then eases down one step at a time. He strikes concrete, shines the flashlight around him, and then back up the hole.

  “Fine,” he says. “Come on down.”

  He keeps the beam trained on the ladder as Parks makes his descent, one hand gripping the crowbar, and then, bent double, they slowly make their way. They come to a turn and Hickson shines his light on a twelve-inch drain that snakes in from their left.

  “That one,” he says. “It branches in off Nine.”

  “The walls are cement,” says Parks.

  “Yeah,” says Hickson.

  “How’d he dig through cement?”

  Hickson makes a hacking motion with his arms.

  They round the corner and the passage widens and they walk side by side.

  “Where’s this go?” Parks asks.

  Hickson gestures with the flashlight. “We’re running toward the creek.”

  They walk twenty more feet and the tunnel begins to lighten. There is a pale sphere just ten yards ahead, a gray circle against the black. They hear the sound of water splashing, and then they come to the end of the channel, the water running over a concrete lip and falling into the creek bed below. Sand has collected at the opening, thatches of twig. There are steel bars spaced a foot or so apart. Trapped in the detritus, packed into the branches, there are balls. A hundred or more. J.T.’s shovel stands upright against the bars. They can see where the boy has burrowed into layers of silt. They can see where he has bent back two of the bars, just enough to slip through.

  Hickson stares a moment. He tracks the flashlight over the sides of the tunnel, the concrete smooth and discolored, patches of algae, rust. He shakes his head.

  “He wasn’t down here digging.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was getting balls.”

  “Balls?”

  “Golf balls,” Hickson says.

  “Yeah,” says Parks, “I know that. Why was he getting balls?”

  Hickson sits there. He thinks about the boy’s swing. He thinks about the composure in his stance. He has an image, in his mind, of the boy in sunlight, a crowd around him, watching him tee. They wait for his swing, watch the ball swick down the fairway. In a few moments they begin to clap.

  Water streams over the concrete lip.

  “The fuck were you thinking?” Hickson asks.

  “You came and got me,” Parks tells him. “You got me.”

  Hickson drops the flashlight and presses his palms against his eyes. Parks places a hand on Hickson’s shoulder. The greenskeeper knocks it away.

  “I wasn’t trying to—”

  “Shut up,” says Hickson.

  “I told you I—”

  “Just shut up,” Hickson says.

  They sit several minutes. Finally, Hickson smoothes a hand across his face. He reaches, picks up the flashlight, and shines it down the tunnel behind them. With his thumb and index finger he pulls at the hair beneath his lower lip. He tugs, gently, the hair below his chin.

  “I’m not going to prison,” says Hickson.

  Parks watches.

  “I’m not going to prison, something like this.”

  Parks situates the crowbar on his lap.

  “You hear me?”

  Parks nods.

  “You hear what I said?”

  “Yes,” Parks says.

  They sit there. Hickson glances back and forth from the opening of the tunnel to the way they just came down.

  “People die,” says Hickson. “They get in accidents and you never hear word one about it. You know why you never hear about it?”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t get caught. Because they don’t let themselves get caught. Because they do what they have to not to get themselves caught.”

  Water continues running. Outside, it is beginning, once more, to rain.

  “Fucking hole,” says Parks.

  “What?” asks Hickson.

  “The hole.”

  “What about it?”

  Parks points to the bars beside them, bent in the shape of parentheses. “He didn’t dig it.”

  “No,” says Hickson. “He did not.”

  They sit a long moment.

  Parks begins to weep.

  He tells Hickson he can’t take it.

  “Take what?” Hickson asks.

  “This,” Parks tells him.

  “You’re going to take it.”

  “I can’t,” says Parks. “I could call the sheriff, Hick. Say it was me. I could say that it was all on me.”

  Hickson studies his friend. He says that isn’t going to work.

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s two of us.”

  “I know there’s two of us.”

  “Good,” says Hickson. “It’s good that you know.” He gestures back and forth between them. “’Cause you fucked us both.”

  “I didn’t mean to fuck us,” says Parks.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I can fix it.”

  “Calm down.”

  “I can tell them s’my fault.”

  “You need,” says Hickson, “to shut your fucking mouth. Just shut your mouth and sit there. Just shut up and sit.”

  Parks crouches, glancing wildly.

  “Can you do that?” Hickson asks him. “Can you go fucking calm?”

  “I’m not like you,” says Parks.

  “Not like me.”

  “I’m not a killer,” Parks says.

  A moment passes. Hickson can feel his thoughts narrowing. He feels he is staring through a pin-sized hole.

  “What’d you call me?” he asks.

  Parks looks at him. There is a moment when the noise of the rain diminishes and the tunnel seems to go very bright. It looks like a photograph or still. Then he lifts the crowbar. He grips it in both hands and cocks it like a bat. The claw clangs a patch of metal embedded in the wall behind.

  “Hickson,” he says. “You stay the fuck away.”

  Hickson just stares. He knows Parks will strike him. He knows the man has turned. He’s thinking how people switch on him. He’s calculating the radius of the man’s
swing.

  “I’m done,” Parks tells him. “Want out of it. Just want to go home.”

  Hickson scoots forward a few inches, and then he scoots a few inches back. He feints with the flashlight, and Parks misses with his swing. Hickson traps the man’s arm and pins the crowbar against the wall. He throws a hook to Parks’s liver, another to his ribs, and then turns, flips him, and he is on top of the man, straddling his chest. Parks struggles beneath him and Hickson hits him in the face. He drops an elbow on the bridge of his nose and then twists the crowbar from the man’s grip. Hickson takes it in both hands, and his heart is going, and he forces the rod of metal down on Parks’s windpipe. The man’s teeth part and his eyes widen and a harsh noise escapes his mouth.

  “Home,” he wheezes.

  “You are home,” Hickson says.

  He waits until the garage door closes, then steps out and strips. He stands naked on the concrete floor, studying the knuckles of his hand. One of them is broken, but he can’t say he feels it. What he feels is an energy buzzing his scalp, manic electricity. The hairs along his arms. Everything flexing. He stands a moment longer and then enters the house.

  He walks into the living room. He walks down the hall. He goes into the bathroom and flips on the light. He stands there, studying himself in the mirror. Eyes bloodshot. Pupils swimming. He takes up his beard trimmer and unplugs it from the wall. Holds it in his palm. As if weighing it. Then he puts the guard on its lowest setting and runs it across his cheek. A thatch of blond hair falls to the counter. Hickson watches. He strips the other cheek, makes a pass above his lips. Across his chin. He smoothes everything, evens it up. The humming of the clipper connects to the humming in his head. His blood feels like some kind of fuel. He removes the guard from the shears and runs them across his scalp, along the back of his skull, above his ears.

  He does it over and over.

  He does it again.

  When he’s finished, all that remains is stubble. He leans closer to the mirror to inspect. He reaches up and taps his reflection. He taps it harder, raps it with a fist. He reaches in the shower, fetches up his razor. He turns on the tap and waits for the water to warm and then begins to lather his scalp.