Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Couple of weeks. I just clean up the mess every morning.”

  “For God’s sake. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Saw no need,” he shrugged. “Just a pack of fools.”

  “You know who they are?”

  “Sure.” His voice was faintly mocking. “Don’t you?”

  “Should I?”

  He looked at me skeptically and shrugged again.

  “Who are they?”

  “The fellas I run up against in town.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure. I seen ’em. They come right up here to the door one night. It’s them three and a few others.”

  I started for the phone. Just then Alice called down. “Is everything all right, Albert?”

  “Everything’s fine, dear. Go back to bed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m coming right up.”

  When I reached the phone he was standing right behind me. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to get Birge out here.”

  He smiled at me. It was the first expression of pure cynicism I’d ever seen on his face.

  I felt myself blushing red. “What do you mean by that?”

  He looked away to spare me any embarrassment. “Oh. You know.” He shrugged and started slowly back to his room.

  Of course, I was the offending party. Again I’d promised him justice through Birge, the established instrument of justice. And now the very people whom Birge promised to put the fear of God into were out there scot-free and taunting him again.

  I tried to reach Birge that night. Of course he couldn’t be reached. But I spoke to a deputy who promised to send a patrol car out immediately.

  Shortly after my phone call I heard the motor of the car at the foot of the drive being gunned. Then a couple of wild Indian-like shrieks tore through the darkness, followed by the sound of shattering glass, and the car roaring off into the night.

  We went back to bed. If a patrol car ever did come, I can’t say. I tend to doubt it, however.

  The following morning I went down to the foot of the drive to see what I could find there. What I found was about a half-dozen smashed beer bottles and a few obscenities scrawled across the face of my picket fence. There was also a crude drawing of a skull smeared on with what appeared to be a black, tar-like substance.

  When I turned, I found Richard standing behind me. He was staring quietly at the skull on the fence, a pail of warm, soapy water dangled from his hand. In the next moment, without so much as a word, he fell to his knees and began to scrub the vile words and the ugly little skull from the fence.

  Later that morning I stood in Birge’s office, panting above his desk, telling my story. He pretended to be deeply concerned.

  “You promised you’d talk to these boys—”

  “I did, but in all fairness, Mr. Graves, we don’t know if this is the same bunch—”

  “I told you it was. He saw them from the window.”

  “Oh, he did?” Birge said and made a little sneering expression with his mouth.

  “How many did you say they were?” he asked.

  “A carful. Four, at least. But I’d guess from the racket they made, more likely six.”

  He nodded. “And they just sat out there drinkin’ beer and smearin’ up your fence?”

  “That’s right.”

  A mean little smile crossed his face. “Why’n’t you go out there and run ’em off?”

  “That’s not my job.”

  “ ’Course ’tisn’t.” He laughed. “This sounds to me more like that bunch come over here regular from Batson.” Batson was a small hamlet about twelve miles north. “What cause would they have?” I snapped. “They don’t even know us.”

  Birge leaned back in his chair and swung his feet up on the desk. “Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure. You folks are pretty famous ’round these parts.”

  He looked at me and saw I was clearly upset. It pleased him, and that made me dislike him all the more. He must have sensed what I was feeling, because suddenly he was once more all care and professional concern for our safety.

  “Well, that’s out-and-out vandalism, Albert, and I won’t tolerate nothin’ like that in my county. If a man can’t lay his head down on his pillow at night without fear for himself and his family, a place ain’t fit to live in. I come down special hard of vagrants and vandals. I got a reputation for it. And that kind of trash knows enough to give this county a wide berth.”

  He said all that with a straight face. I could’ve laughed out loud. Instead, I nodded mutely while he walked me to the door, his huge bear arm around my shoulder.

  When I left I muttered some tepid threat about calling the governor if I had no satisfaction. He nodded his big head and gave me his assurances that the next time we were bothered by that “Batson trash,” all we had to do was call and he’d have someone out there in a patrol car within a half-hour.

  Nothing happened that night or the night after. Undoubtedly because we sat there waiting for something to happen. I don’t mean with the lights on fully clothed and ready to evacuate; I mean we just lay in bed listening to the crickets and the bullfrogs and each other breathing, straining our ears to hear some suspicious sound in the night. All the groanings and creakings of the house were magnified a hundred times by our anxiety. We didn’t sleep.

  The third night we relaxed a bit, and that’s when they came—two carloads full. This time they didn’t bother parking down at the foot of the drive. Instead, they pulled right into the driveway and roared up to the kitchen door, where they turned their lights out and then sat.

  Alice heard them first—the brakes squealing to a halt, then catcalls and ugly laughter.

  “Albert,” she whispered. “They’re here again.”

  I was up in moment and struggling into a robe.

  Alice followed me out of bed in a kind of frenzy. “Don’t go down there.”

  But I was already at the door, leaning into the darkness of the hallway. “Call Birge’s office,” I called over my shoulder. “Tell them they’re back and to send someone out immediately.”

  Groping downstairs in the darkness, I kept thinking something dreadful was going to happen. Perhaps I’d be killed, or I’d have another seizure or some such thing. But oddly enough those thoughts didn’t stop me for a moment.

  Richard was already at the foot of the landing when I reached there. At the bottom step we nearly collided.

  “They’re here,” I said.

  He muttered some inaudible reply.

  “Don’t be frightened,” I went on trying to assume an attitude of complete command. It was a superfluous remark. He appeared totally collected—almost detached. And yet he was fully aware that the object of these repeated and ugly nocturnal visits was himself. The potential danger to himself—to all of us—seemed scarcely to faze him.

  Suddenly there was a loud, jeering sound from outside—then something resembling an Indian war whoop. After that came a loud crash of shattering glass from the kitchen.

  We made our way through the darkened living room to the kitchen, where the first thing I saw was the large picture window over the sink with a sliver of moon gleaming palely through the jagged spikes of glass, hanging like icicles in the demolished window frame.

  I crossed the kitchen and started for the door with Richard right behind me, a little surprised that my first instinct was to march directly out there and confront them. I had nothing with which to defend myself, however, and it was for that reason that I paused. There was in the broom closet, I recalled, for I’d put it there, a heavy garden rake with steel tines. Several of those tines had broken off in the course of years of heavy use, and I’d put the rake in the broom closet, where I intended to keep it until I could get it to a hardware shop for repair.

  It was that rake I now groped for in the dark. Having found it, I armed myself and made my way back to the kitchen door. The catca
lls and jeering had increased in ugliness and intensity.

  “You wait here,” I whispered to Richard over my shoulder. The next moment I flung the door open and stepped out into the night.

  It was a disquieting sight that lay before me. First of all, there was the darkness with the driveway cut through it like a long strip of silver in the quarter-moonlight. Some fifty paces off I could see the squat, hunched silhouettes of two automobiles—.their headlights out now, and the orange tips of cigarettes glowing from within.

  Appearing the way I had, with unexpected suddenness had a salutary effect. I imagine I looked slightly demented in my bathrobe, brandishing a rake—a bit like something rising out of the grave—a vengeful spirit come back to earth to right old wrongs. It threw them off balance. The catcalls and war whoops suddenly died, and once again the silence and the crickets and the scent of lilac floated in.

  Feeling the advantage was now mine, I made my next move—a bold ten strides or so out into the center of the driveway. Imagine it. This timorous and aging man, with two coronaries already under his belt and all the scar tissue to show for it, surging into battle with a broken rake, jaunty as all get-out.

  I still don’t know what demons possessed me that night, because in past emergencies I’d always acted like a craven beast. But that night with my broken rake and my tattered robe I felt I had a touch of true and divine madness in me. Perhaps it had something to do with my need to show Richard that I wasn’t completely spineless.

  I wasn’t alone, I should added. Richard had disregarded my warning at the kitchen door and followed me out. Now, barefoot and dressed in pajamas, he armed himself with two large rocks and shambled along behind me.

  So we stood out there in the dim moonlight, in the darkness of the driveway, staring down our tormentors, a thin space of taut, eerie quiet between us, while we took the measure of each other.

  I waited, considering the next move, while Richard strained like a leashed dog behind me.

  “Go back in,” I said to him over my shoulder. “Go back in.”

  His voice came back at me through the darkness, calm and firm and strangely comforting. “I’m fine.”

  “All right, then,” I said, “follow me.” And I surged out further into the drive with Richard at my heels, the two of us marching inexorably toward the cars.

  The moment I reached the first, its headlights went on. I stood there momentarily stunned by the glare, pinned like a deer in the beam. Then the horns started—jeering at me—first those in the lead car and then taken up by the rear car, which had also put its lights on. Suddenly the driveway was flooded with noise and light. The effect was total havoc.

  I don’t know how it happened, but in the next moment I’d rushed the lead car and before I’d realized it, the rake was over my head and starting down. I must’ve looked like the wrath of God.

  The first blow struck the hood full on with a loud, rattling crash. I could feel the metal shiver and buckle beneath the rake. I raised it again and brought it down. This time I bashed out one of the front headlights.

  The sound of Alice screaming above the blare of horns tore across the night. Suddenly Richard shuttled past me—a shadow and a puff of air hurtling through the dark. I caught a glimpse of long hair flowing out behind him. All the while he was moving, a hoarse bellowing boomed from his throat, and he was flinging rocks at the rear car; I heard at least two find their target and rumble like thunder over its hood.

  Again I raised my rake and surged forward toward the lead car. But this time a fearful commotion was going on within it. Apparently its occupants had had a change of heart. I heard the ignition whine and an engine turn over. Then the lead car started slowly backing off down the driveway, teetering a bit in blind retreat with moths diving madly into the beam of its single headlight.

  In his haste to get out from under my rake, the lead man backed into the second man. Flustered and panicked, he gunned the motor instead of braking and the two cars smashed bumpers. Still they didn’t stop, but continued to lurch back down the driveway, intermittently banging bumpers as they went, under a hail of blows from my rake and Richard’s stones.

  At the end of it we stood at the bottom of the drive panting and watched the red taillights of two fleeing cars streak off down the road until they vanished in the night.

  When we got back into the kitchen the lights were all burning and Alice was waiting there—ghostly white. She looked from Richard to me and back again, not quite believing we were actually there. Several times she started to say something, but each time she failed. Instead, she cried.

  “It’s all right, dear,” I said, and put my arm around her. She huddled against me. “They’ve gone now. Haven’t they, Richard?” I looked over my shoulder at him. He was in a pair of oddly incongruous pajamas—palm trees and coconuts—that sort of thing. It struck me suddenly very funny, and I started to laugh. At first my laughter confused him. Then apparently he understood, for then he was looking at me in my tattered robe, still clutching my broken rake—more broken than ever as a result of this night’s work. Then suddenly, standing there in the wreckage and debris of the kitchen, we were all laughing.

  But that ended quickly. Alice was gaping at the floor near Richard, a look of horror on her face.

  “Your feet!” she said to him.

  We looked down at once. He had come out in bare feet, crossed the kitchen floor, strewn as it was with shattered glass, and cut his feet to pieces. He was bleeding profusely on the kitchen floor.

  In a matter of moments Alice had boiled a kettle of water. I sponged the crusty gore from his feet and started the bleeding freely again. Then with tweezers and a magnifier that Alice held for me Richard’s leg propped up on my knee, I extracted all of the glass, and dressed and bandaged his feet.

  When I’d finished, she suddenly turned to me. “Albert—are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” I laughed. “Never felt better.” And, in some curious way, that was the truth.

  Alice was still horribly frightened, and while making hot milk at the stove for us, she sobbed softly to herself. A short time later, with Richard hobbling on bandaged feet and leaning against me, I helped him back to his bed. It was nearly dawn when we all got back to sleep, tired and exhausted, but curiously pleased.

  Of that night I need mention only one additional point. Birge’s deputy, whom Alice had reached, and who assured her that he was at that very moment starting out for the Bog Road, never arrived.

  The following morning was a Sunday. Despite our exhaustion from the night before, we rose early and went down to the living room to conduct our services. We prayed and sang and gave thanks to the Lord for delivering us from the dangers of the night. After that we had our breakfast. Then I called the glazier and asked him to come out and repair the window.

  It was clear to me now—abundantly clear—that I could expect no help from Birge or any of the four other men who comprised his force. As of the night I just described, I realized that any plea for assistance I might make would fall on deaf ears. Birge was part and parcel of the system that deprived me of my right to worship at church. Why, then, should he bother to extend me the simple courtesy of protecting me and my family from vandals and hoodlums?

  The next morning Richard and I set out for town. We arrived there by careful design shortly before lunch hour, when working people are setting out for the noon meal and housewives are flooding the small shopping area.

  I made a special point of taking Richard with me, knowing his appearance in town would cause a mild sensation. For some curious reason, he seemed taller to me that day. Perhaps he carried himself more erect than usual, as if to flaunt his own sturdy durability right in the heart of the enemy camp. His hair was thicker and longer. Since his stay with us he had fleshed out, though he was still lean and knotty with muscles. And from constant work in the out-of-doors, his skin had b
een burnished a rich coppery bronze.

  Our path took us, also by design, directly past Birge’s office in the Town Hall and down the Main Street where people peered at us out of car and shop windows, and turned to gape after us in the streets.

  It was a proud and foolish march we made that morning. By it we wished to advertise the fact that we’d survived the night and intended to continue surviving whether they liked it or not.

  Our path came to an end at the local hardware store where we entered and strode assertively up to the gun racks. I know something about guns, having served as an infantry officer in the Second World War. At the completion of that war I gave up guns and swore never to touch one again. Up until that day I had kept my oath and could never bring myself to respect people who found guns indispensable to their existence, for whatever reason.

  Now, with Richard standing beside me, I felt the weight and balance of a number of rifles, and worked the bolts of several rather convincingly, putting on a show such as I’d never thought I was capable of.

  Richard, too, hefted several of the guns while the salesman, a small, nervous individual by the name of Fletcher, regarded us anxiously.

  Richard’s facility with the guns was frankly astounding. In his hands the ugly things took on a quality of grace, and he could make them behave as if they were adjuncts of his body. His hands flashing over the bolts gave him the look of an extremely adroit magician doing marvels. Several people in the store paused in spite of themselves to watch him and gaze in frank admiration.

  “Which one do you think we want, Richard?” I asked, after a moment. He paused, silently regarding each, checking their sights and peering down their barrels. At last he held one of the guns out toward me. “This is the one.”

  He chose a 30/30 with an automatic load of six cartridges. I chose for myself a Smith-Wesson .45 pistol. When we left there that morning we had our weapons and a full supply of ammunition.

  That afternoon Richard and I went down to the bottom of the garden. We set up a row of empty tin cans and commenced our educations. That education lasted for a period of nearly three days, during which time we worked steadily at perfecting our use of each weapon, both of us alternating between rifle and pistol.