Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  “I got one eight-pounder. Should’ve seen him when I brought him up, Uncle Albert. Head twice as big as my fist.” It was a joy to be in the presence of all that boyish enthusiasm.

  “Get him on a fly rod?” I asked.

  “You might’ve taken him on a fly rod,” Wylie laughed. “I was happy enough just to get him on a rod and reel.”

  “Well,” I said eagerly, “tomorrow we’ll break out the fly rods.”

  Alice’s gloom deepened. Undoubtedly she felt that Richard had been excluded from the conversation. And in fact he had—by his own choice. She turned to him now, making a valiant effort to smile. “You know, Richard, Albert and Wylie have fished together for years.”

  “Oh?” said Richard. He fiddled distractedly with some peas on his plate.

  She went on hopefully, trying to lure him into conversation. “Albert taught Wylie to fish when he was a little boy.” She laughed, but there was a lot of forced merriment to it. “I’ll never forget Wylie. He was about ten at the time, and three feet tall. It was about three feet, wasn’t it, Albert?”

  “Certainly no more.”

  “Well,” Alice went on, laughing in that giddy, desperate way, “you should’ve seen this poor boy struggle up the dock with a pole three times his size. I tell you it was worth the price of admission. Remember Indian Lake, Wylie?”

  “No one ever lets me forget it,” Wylie laughed. “All that snagging and the snarled lines. And all the lures I lost for poor Uncle Albert.”

  I had a sudden vision of a summer’s -day nearly a decade past. I saw myself ten years younger. Healthy and more vigorous. A sound heart in my chest, and Blanche alive then, with Alice and George Crane, Wylie’s father, all watching us from the shadows of a screened porch and howling gales of laughter ringing out over the lake. The moment was alive for me again. Just as vivid as if I were right there. I could hear ice tinkling in a lemonade pitcher from the porch, the rattle of cicada, the barking of an unseen dog across the lake, and the distant buzzing of an outboard motor far out over the water. There was the smell of verbena reaching out across the space of a decade, and the reflection of trees hanging upside down in the water.

  “Do you ever fish?” Wylie’s voice brought me back from where my memory had just taken me.

  “No. I don’t like to fish,” Richard replied with naked antagonism. He followed’ that with a few remarks that set my teeth on edge and ended the meal in shambles.

  We went out into the parlor and tried to have our coffee there. But the air by that time was so thick with hostility and even poor Wylie’s stubborn optimism finally foundered, and we all sat there imprisoned in our chairs, pitched in gloom watching the sparks from the fire snarl and fly up the flue like angry insects.

  We went to bed early that night. There seemed to be nothing much else we could do in such a situation.

  Richard went off to his room and closed the door with a barely smothered bang. Hardly speaking a word to each other, we made up Wylie’s cot in the parlor. When I left my nephew that night, it was with the fixed plan to rise early and spend the morning up at the stream, fishing.

  For all the ghoulish ordeal he’d been put through, Wylie appeared to have taken the whole thing with extraordinary good nature. And when Alice and I went up to bed and the door finally closed behind us, I remarked that Blanche would have been very proud of Wylie tonight, for he was growing into the kind of self-possessed, tolerant human being that she herself always admired.

  Alice cried that night, very softly into her pillow. Several times I tried to solace her. But it was all futile. She wasn’t even angry at Richard. It was herself she blamed for what had happened. She felt, at bottom, that she had failed that night in a very crucial way, and nothing I could say or do was going to dissuade her.

  I rose quite early the next morning and shaved and dressed, in what seemed like a matter of moments. We had an excellent morning—the sky brushed red and rose by dazzling sunrise, the air dry and clear. I wanted to get down to the kitchen and make hot coffee and sandwiches before Wylie was up.

  But when I got downstairs I found Wylie already dressed and waiting in the parlor. He was sitting deep in the Morris chair, his suitcase packed and parked beside him.

  “What are you doing?” I said, sensing something wrong. “Just waiting for you to get up, Uncle Albert.”

  He was dressed in a suit with a shirt and tie. His face bore an unaccustomed solemnity.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” I said. “Aren’t you going fishing?”

  “Uncle Albert?”

  “What’s wrong, Wylie? What’s the matter?”

  “Uncle Albert, I think I’ll go this morning.”

  “Why? I thought you were going to stay a few days.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said, flushed with embarrassment. “But I really should get back. I have work, and—”

  “What is it, Wylie? What’s happened?”

  I looked across at the door of Richard’s room. It was open and empty. “Did he say anything to you?”

  “No. Not a word.”

  He appeared to be absolutely earnest, but even as he looked at me I could tell he sensed my skepticism.

  “Honest, Uncle Albert. I swear it.”

  “I won’t let you go off like this.”

  He wrung his hands futilely. “I want to, Uncle Albert. I think it’s best.”

  I could see that his mind was made up and that there was very little I could say that would change it. I sat down wearily in one of the chairs. “You’re going to break your aunt’s heart. Aren’t you even going to wait for her to get up?”

  He looked very pained. “Just tell her I had a lot of work and that I thought it best if I went.”

  I walked out with him to his car, and after we’d put his bag in and he was settled behind the wheel, we were stuck there with the open window between us wondering how we ought to say goodbye. But I abandoned all that and tried once again to get right down to the heart of it.

  “Tell me honestly, Wylie. Did anything happen between you two?”

  “Nothing. I swear it.”

  Wylie was not a natural liar and what he said seemed to be honest. Still, I couldn’t believe what he said then, nor do I believe it today. I’ve seen Wylie several times since. On those occasions we were never quite able to discuss the incident. Once I tried to pin him down and find out what had happened that night between him and Richard Atlee. But he stuck to his story, and so I can only guess.

  In the days that followed, I nursed a good deal of resentment against Richard. The more I thought about the precipitate way Wylie left, when I knew very well he wanted to stay, made me furious. I imagined all the kinds of threats and intimidation that were used against him. Alice on the other hand was inclined to be indulgent, and as a result of the incident doubled her attentions toward Richard.

  As for Richard, he was sensitive enough to know he’d done something wrong and that he was going to have to make amends. One night he came to me, shortly after supper, meek, flustered, contrite, and stumbling over his words, he invited me to go back into the bog and have a look at his cave. You see, it had already become his cave. His presentation was appealing. Even sweet. Perhaps these aren’t the right words. At any rate the presentation must have been the right one, because I accepted it right then and there. By next afternoon, trudging through the woods with Richard at my side, I was already in full thaw.

  We must’ve walked for two miles or so under a bright white April sun—through the back woods and out across the bogs, trudging north with squadrons of squawking crows pointing our way. It was a desolate and forlorn place—flat and muddy with a good deal of squat ugly brush all around. Wading through it, we were harried by burrs and sticktights that tore at our clothing. The earth was pitchy black, and as you’d go along, it sucked and gurgled at the soles of your shoes.

  Periodically a fat dozy muskrat would wamble across our path, be visible for a moment, then slip silently back into the dense undergrowth
. Or we’d flush a pheasant. You’d hear it before you’d see it. Then suddenly crashing up through the brakes, it would burst out into the open—ascending heavily on a long low incline, its wings drumming wondrously.

  We went on that way for a while. Richard glanced frequently up at the sun until I realized that he’d been fighting his direction from it, using a crude mixture of solar and instinctual navigation. Finally, I sensed we were beginning a long, gradual climb out of the bog and into an area of low, squat hills. Curiously I felt no strain to my heart. The walk was exhilarating, and I was glad to be out there.

  At last Richard came to an abrupt halt at a place I reckoned to be the northeastern point of the bog. He looked around and I thought by the way his eyes were darting here and there that he’d lost his bearings. Ordinarily, in such a wild place as this, that might have been cause for some concern. But there was something about Richard Atlee in a wilderness that inspired a great deal of confidence. Much more confidence than you felt with him in civilized and tamer settings.

  “Are we all right?” I asked.

  “We’re here,” he said, quite matter-of-factly.

  I thought he was joking. I looked around and saw nothing faintly resembling a cave entrance. I’d imagined caves as being in high, rocky, inaccessible places—places more suited to eagles than to men. This was an area of low, almost imperceptibly sloping hills, nearly barren except for sporadic scrub, and covered with a soft, muddy crust of earth.

  He stood a few feet off from me and pointed to a small hole in the earth. It looked no larger than a weasel hole.

  “You’re not serious?” I laughed.

  He smiled one of those private little smiles of his, full of mystery and inner satisfaction.

  Nearby there was a long, pole-like branch of about ten feet. He picked it up and plunged it directly into the small opening until he was holding the very end of the branch with his fingertips. He looked up at me, smiling, then suddenly let the branch go. It vanished instantly. Then he picked up a flap of earth as if it were a bit of canvas or tarpaulin, and pulled it back, revealing a flat slab of schist rock.

  I walked over and stared at it for a while. “What is it?”

  In the next moment he lifted the slab and rolled it back. Suddenly I was standing at the edge of a black, yawning hole into which the pole had disappeared only moments before.

  Whether it had something to do with the exertion of the walk, or whether it was the sudden vision of a chasm yawning just beneath my feet, I don’t know, but I felt a sudden giddiness—a sense of my knees unlocking and letting go. With a small whimpering sound. I slipped softly down on all fours.

  The next thing I saw before my eyes was a square black hole floating up at me through space. But it wasn’t the entrance to the cave that was wavering in front of me. It was the entrance to the crawl, flashing through my head, and suddenly I was back there again, sick and dizzy, and holding on to the lolly poles for dear life. For a moment I thought I was having another heart attack. But I felt no crushing chest pains. There was none of the awful breathlessness, the terrible lack of air. I thought I was dying, and I said to myself, “So this is it. This is what it’s like. Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  But in the next instant it was all past. The sun flooded back in. A finch hopped in the grass several feet from me. Then the flat, dull croaking voice of Richard Atlee came at me from just above my shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, struggling to my feet, lacking a small avalanche of dirt and stones down the hole, while he held me beneath the arms.

  “You okay?” he asked again.

  “I’m fine. Fine.”

  He was peering earnestly into my eyes, which couldn’t bear to meet his, for I’d shown such awful weakness.

  “We don’t have to go down,” he said.

  “I want to go down. Take me down.”

  “It’s a climb,” he said. He knew about my state of health.

  “Very steep?”

  “No. Not steep. About a hundred feet.”

  “Gradual?”

  “About the way the lawn goes in back of the house.”

  “I walk that every day,” I said. “Let’s go down.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” I laughed. “Just don’t tell Alice.” I slapped his back and winked conspiratorially.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take my hand and stay right behind me. It’s pretty dark.”

  His large, wiry hand closed comfortingly over mine, and like a lost child giving himself up to a kindly adult, I put myself in Richard Atlee’s hands and we started our descent.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said, as sunlight faded away behind us and colored pinwheels spun before my eyes. “You’ll be okay.”

  We went down quite a ways following the spool of string that he’d left down there. The deeper we went, the cooler and damper it got. The only illumination we had was a small flashlight that Richard had had the foresight to take with him. He held the light with one hand, and my hand with his other. With my free hand I groped my way along the cold, sweating walls, hearing the high squeaking of bats along the tunnels and the dull roar of a rushing stream from somewhere far below us.

  There was a strong musky odor hanging like a mist over the place.

  “What’s that I smell?”

  “Bear.”

  “You’re sure they’re not here, now?”

  “No. In the winter.”

  “Oh,” I said, quickly relieved. “Surely they don’t come through the same entrance we did?”

  “No. There’s another entrance.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Someplace below, I haven’t found it yet.”

  Our voices boomed as if we were talking inside of kettledrums. We continued to inch our way downward through the tunnel.

  We must’ve gone on for about twenty minutes when the tunnel suddenly ended and we entered a small, chapel-like place. It was a high-vaulted room, semicircular in shape. Here we paused.

  Richard threw the beam of his light around the room. It was a high, dome-like structure at the apex of which hung a good deal of dripstones. In that feeble light they had the look of sharp, jagged teeth, so that standing on the floor of that room you had the curious sensation that you were in the maw of some huge, primordial creature. When you looked more closely at the areas between the dripstones, you could see a number of small, black furry shapes clotted on the ceiling. These were the bats.

  Richard kept swinging the light, pointing the beam, like an accusatory finger, into every corner of the room. “Typical Indian place,” he said suddenly, not so much to me as to the dark spaces around us.

  “Indians?” the word caught in my throat. “How do you know?”

  He didn’t answer, but just kept swinging the light from ceiling to floor.

  By that time I was fully aroused. There had been Indians around this part of the country. But they’d vanished centuries ago. Still, there was something wonderfully mysterious about stumbling onto the dwelling place of an ancient people.

  At a certain point, while in that place, Richard came abruptly to a halt in one of the far corners of the room. He stood there pointing the beam of his light downward, letting it slide slowly across the sandy floor.

  I couldn’t imagine what he was doing, but there was something about his absorption at that point that I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt.

  I watched him for a while until I was suddenly aware that the ground over which he played his light beam wasn’t flat like the rest of the room, but consisted of a number of small, raised symmetrical mounds, possibly eighteen inches high and regularly spaced.

  “What are those, Richard?”

  “Burial places.”

  My breath caught a little.

  “Indians,” he nodded. “The ones who died down here through the winters.”

  “You mean they buried them right where they lived?”

  “Couldn’t bury ’em o
utside. The ground was frozen.” He turned away from the place, then suddenly knelt down and sat with his back against the wall.

  “Let’s go down deeper,” I said. I could hear water pounding below me. “At least to the stream?”

  “No. We’re out of string, and it’s much steeper down below.”

  I had the feeling he was making concessions to my health, and it peeved me. “I can do it. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I know you can. Rest now. We’ll come back another time.”

  For a moment I was furious. I knew that if he were there alone, he would’ve gone much deeper. I toyed with the idea of going on by myself, forcing him to follow me. I knew he would if I’d started. But I’d enjoyed myself too much this far to spoil the rest of the day with an argument. I credited him with having better sense than I did, and inwardly I was touched by his showing that much concern and regard for me.

  Richard flicked off the flashlight to conserve the batteries, and then leaning our backs against the clammy walls, we rested on the floor of the chapel.

  “How’d you find this place?” I asked after a while.

  “I just looked at the ground.”

  “Arid you knew it was here?”

  “Sure.”

  I thought about it for a while and laughed. “You like it down here, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “A bit like the crawlspace, isn’t it?”

  He was silent, and I could hear him breathing. “A bit,” he said, his voice very soft in the darkness.

  “What draws you to places like this?”

  For a moment I thought I’d pushed him too far, and that in his typically private way he wouldn’t answer.

  “It’s comfortable,” he said.

  “More comfortable than my house?”

  “Not more comfortable—Safer.”

  The answer puzzled me. I sat there trying to fathom it. “Aren’t you safe in my house?”

  “Sure. But safer here.”

  “What threatens you there that doesn’t threaten you here?”

  “Things,” he said. We were like two blind men sitting there in total darkness, not seeing each other’s faces—just two disembodied voices talking back and forth in the moist pitchy blackness. And the fact that we were no longer people but voices had the effect of opening him up a bit.