The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  The man stopped cold. He backed a few feet. Then he backed a few more. The silence in the chamber was like the silence of a tomb. The sheriff struggled to his knees. There was blood running down in his boot and he could feel it filling that hollow place in his arch. In interrogation, they’d get everything out. Learn about Parks. Learn the boy’s location. Martin could sleep finally, put it all to rest. He steadied his hands on the pistol and looked down its sights. Between them, he could see the man clearly for the first time, eyes staring back at him like black buttons in dough.

  Martin cocked the hammer.

  “Hickson,” he said.

  There was no reaction. He seemed unfamiliar with the name. Martin moved a few inches closer. Something was settling down inside him, even with all the blood. Relief, partly, but it was more than just that. There was a sense the world was working, its contours coming straight, and he knew, whatever the circumstances, Hickson, now, was his.

  “There,” rasped the sheriff, “get on the ground.”

  The man responded by lifting his palms. The left side of his face hung loose, the tear extending up his cheek in half a savage grin.

  “Get on the ground,” repeated Martin. “Interlace your fingers.”

  The man didn’t. He curled his arms to his chest instead. He curled his arms to his chest, crossed and composed them, one atop the other. He glanced at Martin and then he closed his eyes. Martin was about to repeat his instructions when the man dropped suddenly backward, tucking himself, forehead to knees. Martin knelt there, watching Hickson fall, mute, serene, as though plunging into waves. Hard as the floor was, Martin thought he’d break his back.

  The man didn’t break anything. He didn’t strike the floor. He fell like this away from Martin, past shadow and clay. The light strobed his body a final time and then he vanished down the hole.

  The sheriff dove to reach for him, but he was already gone.

  EPILOGUE

  MARCH 2007

  She went into labor the next week. Martin was driving back from a visit with the county commissioner, and he’d just made the city limits when the call came through.

  “Sheriff,” Nita told him, “it’s time,” and Martin flipped on his siren and lights.

  When he got to the hospital, Lem was already waiting. Deborah was in delivery, and Martin sat beside his deputy, getting reports from the nurse. He’d seen, on television, husbands who went into the room with their wives, but this was Perser Memorial, and that didn’t happen here. He sat with head drooped and knees bouncing. He glanced up at one point and looked at Lem. The man backhanded him in the arm.

  “Both of us here,” he said. “Probably come a crime spree.”

  Martin nodded. He looked at the floor.

  He didn’t have long to wait. The doctor came through the double doors, pulling off his gloves.

  “Congratulations,” he told the sheriff. “It’s a girl.”

  Martin sat, staring.

  Beside him, Lemming released a laugh.

  They ushered him back to the room. It smelled of iodine and iron. On the bed, Deborah lay with hair damp and her face bone-white. She held, in her arms, their daughter. So small. They’d just cut the cord and swaddled her and her skin was a bright shade of red. Martin limped up, leaned his cane against the bedside, and placed his hand on Deborah’s shoulder. He looked down at the silent form, his likeness. The baby shivered, then opened her eyes.

  Deborah looked up at him.

  “Janice,” she told him. “Janice Therese.”

  “Yes,” said Martin.

  And Janice it was.

  The doctors explained about misreading the sonogram. They xeroxed an article from the Journal of Modern Medicine. An obstetrician and two gynecologists talked to them and gestured. It never, to Martin, made any sense. Somehow, Martin didn’t need it to. Evenings, he’d come home, and they’d be there in one of the recliners, rocking. She sang to her. She sang “Wildwood Flower,” and “Babes in the Woods,” and another song she didn’t know the words to and just hummed. Sometimes, in the middle of a chorus, she’d transfer Janice to Martin’s arms, and he would gather his daughter against his chest and gently palm the back of her head. She never seemed to cry. Deborah would sing, and Martin would rock, and Janice would look up at him, blue eyes blinking. She’d stare straight into him and smile.

  It was spring, and then it was summer. The county brought in backhoes to the house on Scrimshaw Lane. They tore down the fence and moved their equipment into Hickson’s backyard. They removed the shed and began digging. They went down, thirty feet, forty, found what the foreman called the entrance to a well, began to try and recover bodies. Hickson’s body. Perhaps even the boy. They didn’t find anything, and Martin drove out twice a day and urged them to keep digging. The man operating the backhoe would stare at him a moment and then lower the machine’s metal claw.

  Then came the day Martin drove to the addition and saw a pickup pulled into Hickson’s driveway with Malcoz Petroleum lettered across its doors. He parked, went around the side yard, and found men standing by the pit with clipboards, mumbling.

  They sank the first shaft within the week. A derrick went up, right in the middle of the housing addition, and neighbors complained constantly about the noise. Martin and Lemming took calls of grievance, and then, the next Monday, the Perser Chronicle printed the story.

  Malcoz Petroleum, in concert with another firm, had discovered a new formation. It was deep, deeper than the wells that had been drilled in the thirties. They said oil had seeped in from other formations, pooled beneath the suburb just north of the course. The find was mammoth. The largest since the Boom.

  Folks in Perser said it was a godsend. The Corporation Commission said it would revitalize their economy. Give Perser a new beginning. Hickson Crider had no will, and his only living relative was a grandfather who was an Alzheimer’s patient at the nursing home. His estate went to the county, the mineral rights as well. The city of Perser sold them to Malcoz, and the company began buying the homes in the subdivision, every house that sat on the hundred and sixty acres. One by one they were bulldozed, trees cleared, and Martin sat in his cruiser, watching the work. As soon as oil was mentioned, the notion of finding Hickson or the boy’s body was dismissed as an impossibility, and the sheriff brought up the issue to be met only with stares. The mayor took the sheriff aside at a town meeting and explained how those folk were gone; they weren’t coming back. It was suggested to Martin that if he hoped for reelection, he might drop the issue entirely.

  He caught Enoch coming out of his building one evening. If the man was surprised to see him, he didn’t show it. The sheriff told him of the problems they’d had retrieving the bodies. He said he knew Enoch’s firm had purchased the subdivision, that more drilling would commence. He begged the man to give them time.

  Enoch stood there. He wouldn’t give an answer. He wouldn’t look away.

  Martin studied him a moment and cleared his throat. He looked behind him at the cars going down Main and then glanced over at the post office. He asked him was it just about the money.

  Enoch shook his head.

  “It is not what I wanted,” he told the sheriff. “It is not the way the story goes.”

  Then he turned and started walking.

  Martin watched him out of sight.

  By the end of summer the subdivision was leveled, and there were eight wells in its place, gravel roads, rows of holding tanks and disposal units. You could stand on the property line between the golf course and the former addition, and it looked like something from science fiction. On one side, greens, the grass immaculate. On the other, cracked clay and pumpjacks and dark patches where the oil had run. The Malcoz Estate standing in the midst of this wasteland like a fortress at the edge of the world. There were always men working, but they were brought in from out of state, mostly, and very few of Perser’s citizens were given actual jobs. Property values around the golf course plummeted, more folks moved away. In two years the to
wn had lost another thousand residents. Martin would study the figures on reports sent to them by the Senate. He’d show Lemming and the man would shake his head.

  Martin went out, one evening, to speak with J.T.’s grandmother, his aunt. He pulled into the drive and went up the steps. He later learned the family had relocated. Shreveport, Louisiana. The house sat as they had left it. Shuttered. Locked. Much of the furniture left behind and draped with sheets. It was on Indian land and the tribe would reassign as they saw fit. Martin stood there. He went around to the back, let himself in through the cellar, came up into the kitchen from the basement stairs. He walked about from room to room. Silent. A smell of must. The electricity had been turned off and the only noise was the sound of the floorboards creaking beneath his weight.

  He walked into the living room. He walked into the den. He stood, looking around. The house reminded him of a mausoleum. He couldn’t envision the boy having lived there at all.

  He walked back into the living room and then up the carpeted steps to the second story. There were pale rectangles along the cedar-paneled walls where pictures had hung. He went down the hallway to the grandmother’s room and the bed was bare of its blankets and mattress. Other than this, everything as it had been. Martin walked over and parted the shades and looked out the window, down to his car. Then he walked back down the hallway and opened the door to the boy’s room. Stepped inside.

  The mattress and pillow remained on the bed. The pillowcase and sheets. The quilt had been removed, but the walls were still papered with the boy’s clippings. The row of shoes lined before the dresser. Martin went over and opened the drawer. A few pairs of jeans. A small stack of shirts. There was a bandanna that had been folded into a headband. He could tell it hadn’t been washed. Martin lifted it from the drawer, stood there and held it. He brought it to his nostrils. Then he went over and sat on the bed. He began speaking, though no one was there. It felt like he could do that. Like a visit, somehow, to an altar or shrine.

  The sheriff talked for a long time. He talked of what had disturbed him, what, he thought, no longer would. He talked about what he’d learned down there, how he’d let go. There were people, he said, who required his attention, living people, present. He wanted to keep searching, but he was sorry, and things now were different. There were some things, he said, beyond understanding. There were things absolutely beyond his control.

  When he finished, he wiped his face on his shirtsleeve and stood to his feet. He looked around at the clippings, the golfers and equipment and clothing and greens. Then he walked over, opened the dresser, and put back the bandanna. He closed the drawer, went to the door, and then he went back. He opened the drawer and fetched the bandanna and placed it in his pocket. Then he left the room and went down the stairs.

  He returned to the house several times. The house was always the same. A little staler. A bit more decayed. He’d walk up to the boy’s room and just sit. It was comforting, somehow. A place he could dream. One evening, he arrived and found a family unloading from a U-Haul trailer. Martin pulled the cruiser around the circle and a man coming down the steps studied him with a puzzled look. Martin lifted a hand, made the loop, and went back down the drive.

  Janice was a year old. Then she was two. The sheriff would walk down sometimes after dinner, pick a path through the oak grove, and stand by the pond. There were no lights in the country and on clearer nights you’d look up and the sky was filled with stars. Orion. The Dipper. Cassiopeia and other constellations Martin didn’t know. He’d stand there, staring at all that. It was November and Deborah was pregnant once again. He’d have the bandanna in his left pocket. He’d slip his hand down and rub it between his thumb and forefinger, think about the boy, the way he imagined him. He was older now, taller. He’d gone back to high school in Martin’s thoughts, graduated. He’d been accepted at the University of Oklahoma on an athletic scholarship and had begun to make himself a name. His short game kept getting better and better. People all over would talk of his drive. Martin saw him in the PGA. He saw him on television. The Masters. He stood there in the starlight with the pond like a mirror giving back a vision of the sky, the sky doubled, countless reflections. He waited a few moments, going further into dream. He’d go a bit further the night that followed. The night after that. Then he nodded to himself and zipped his coat higher. He turned and walked back through the woods, up the path, up toward Deborah and Janice and the child they’d be having, the angles of lamplight spilling from his home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank to my agent, Nat Sobel, and my editor, Jill Bialosky. Thanks also to Judith Weber. To Emily Russo and Adia Wright. To Paul Whitlatch and Adrienne Davich: of greater assistance than I can even say. Love always to my brother, Clint. To Stephen Morrison and Adam Schnier. This novel is inscribed to my grandfather and dedicated to Lance Corporal Scott Sparks (U.S.M.C. ret.).