Under the Lake

by Stuart Woods

  Leonie nodded and squeezed her mother’s hand.

  Mama Kelly turned back to Howell. “Now, John, I need to talk to Leonie for just a minute. You go up to her room – it’s the first door at the top of the stairs – and lie down and rest for just a bit. It’s better if you’re relaxed, and I know you’re uncomfortable standing up.”

  Howell looked up at Leonie questioningly. She nodded.

  Mama Kelly spoke again. “You go on up, now, and I want you to come and see me again if things seem to get too much for you, you hear?”

  “Yes, Ma’am, I’ll do that,” Howell said, and left the mother and daughter alone. He found the stairs and limped painfully up them, putting as much weight as he could on the bannister. At the top of the stairs he opened a door and found a neat, sunlit room filled with country arts – needlework and quilts – and a fourposter bed. The pain was gaining fast on him; he kicked off his shoes and threw himself onto the bed, panting, and waited for it to subside. It was a feather mattress, and he sank gratefully into it. The pain slowly drained away and with it, the tension that he had brought to this house. He let it go and, soon, fell into a light doze. What must have been a few minutes later he heard the bedroom door open and close and a light footstep on the rug. There was the tiny rasp of a window shade, and the light in the room grew dimmer.

  “Turn over,” she said, softly. Then he felt her hand at the small of his back, just to the right of where his spine ended, at the very epicenter of his pain.

  “How did you know?” he mumbled, half into the soft mattress. “How did you know exactly where?”

  There was a hint of a laugh. “I just knew,” she said. “Undo your pants.”

  He managed to lift enough to get the buckle and zipper loose, then helped her peel away the jeans and undershorts.

  She pushed upward on his polo shirt. “This, too.”

  He tossed it aside and sank again into the feather mattress. The sunlight had warmed the room, and the air felt good on his naked skin. He felt her climb onto the bed next to him.

  She placed both her hands on his back again and held them there, as if feeling for something. She took them away and put them back again in a slightly different position. Then again.

  He had nearly drifted off, but now he became fully alert. Her hands were growing warm. Not simply the warmth of skin against skin, but a heat he had never felt before from another human being. It grew until he thought he would be burned. Then she withdrew her hands. When she replaced them, they were cooler, and she began to gently massage the place at the center of the pain. He felt a deep relaxation coming, of muscles he had not known were there.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Did you mother tell you what to do?”

  “No. She just said I’d know.”

  Howell moved his body gingerly in a way that would have, a few minutes before, caused him agony. Nothing happened.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Don’t move yet. Let me do the moving.” She began to move her fingers up his back, feeling her way, seeming to pull at his spine. She placed the heel of one hand at the base of his skull and the other in the small of his back and pushed in opposite directions. She began massaging his neck and shoulders, then stopped, got up for a moment and returned. She began again, this time using oil, which she warmed in her hands. She moved slowly down each side of his back, rubbing away tenseness, then to his buttocks, pressing hard with the heels of her hands into the large muscles. At one moment, her hand brushed across his anus and made his breath quicken, then she moved down to his legs and eventually, his feet. She stopped and sat quietly for a moment. He lay still, breathing deeply. “That’s all I can do for your back right now,” she said. She seemed to be breathing rapidly. “Lie still for a few minutes and rest. Then get dressed and come downstairs. I want to check on Mama.” She left.

  He lay on the feather bed and tried to recapture what had just happened, but it flew from him. Finally, knowing that she would not come back, he got up and dressed. It was not until he was halfway down the stairs that he realized that he was moving without pain or restriction for the first time in days. There was some soreness in his back, as if he had just played some strenuous game, but no pain. He felt light and easy on his feet. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Leonie came out of her mother’s bedroom. They walked out on the porch together.

  “I’d like to thank her,” he said.

  “She’s asleep. You can see her another time.”

  “I hardly know how to thank you. I’ve no pain at all in my back. I can tap-dance again.”

  She laughed. “I’m glad to hear it. Mama says I’ll have to do it again, to make it permanent.”

  “Well, you won’t get an argument out of me. I could come back whenever you like, or…” He hesitated. “Will you come to the cabin?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Tomorrow night?” He was already thinking of what to say to Scottie. Work, maybe. He would say he could only work at night.

  “Not at night. Only in the daytime, when I can get away.” She laughed again. “Anyhow, you’re busy at night.”

  “I can get free.”

  “Only in the daytime.”

  “All right.”

  Driving back to the cabin, he thought about the Kelly family, why they were the way they were. He pushed the thought away. That was all over. The old man, Patrick, was dead, and there was nothing wrong with Leonie. He wanted her. Elizabeth came into his mind for a moment, but he pushed her away.

  12

  Howell was setting the dinner table when Scotty arrived. She stepped inside the door and stopped in her tracks.

  “You sonofabitch,” she cried, “you’ve been faking all along.”

  “No, no, I…”

  She advanced toward him across the room. “You just wanted to be nursed and have your back rubbed, didn’t you?”

  “No, listen, I’m healed! Really, I am!” He did an awkward, mock soft-shoe.

  She watched him in amazement. “You really went to Mama Kelly, right? You did it!”

  “I did, indeed.” It didn’t seem necessary for him to tell her that he had been ministered to by daughter, not mama.

  “And it worked? It really worked?”

  Howell put down the plates he had been holding, bent over, and touched his toes.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  “Probably. But before that, you’ll be served my famous spaghetti.”

  “Famous for what? Ptomaine?”

  Howell clutched his chest. “You wound me, madam. Before the evening’s over, you’ll apologize.”

  An hour and a half later, she drained her wine glass and put it down. “I apologize,” she said, contritely.

  “Told you so.”

  “I didn’t get ptomaine, just ordinary indigestion.”

  “There’s nothing ordinary about the indigestion you get from my spaghetti. It matches anything you might get in any of the greasy spoons you have to eat in when you’re a reporter. It’s a Pulitzer indigestion.”

  “Say, now that you bring it up, what happens when you get the Pulitzer Prize?”

  “They give you a thousand dollars, and you become a legend in your time.”

  “No, no, I mean, what happens on the day. How do they tell you you’ve won it?”

  Howell leaned back and took a sip of his wine. “I think somebody knows something a little early,” he said. “I got a call from my editor at the Times asking me to come to New York; he didn’t say for what. The news came over the AP wire that afternoon. There were five bells on the teletype, and the thing started to print: ‘The Board of Trustees of Columbia University today announced the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism.” They didn’t keep me in suspense. “The Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting was awarded to John Howell of the New York Times. Then all the others were announced. There was a little impromptu party in the executive editor’s office, and then he
took a bunch of us to ”21“ for the best dinner I ever had.”

  “Wow,” Scotty said, softly. “I want it to happen to me just like that.”

  “Hang in there, kid; you never know.”

  “Do you ever miss the Times?” she asked. “Would you go back?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. God, how he missed it. “I think it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever go back. They say you can leave the Times once for another love, so to speak, but not twice. I’ve only left once, of course, but somehow, I don’t think they liked it very much.” That was an understatement, he thought. They had offered him the best thing going, and he had turned it down. They didn’t like being turned down.

  “Listen,” she said, “is your back really cured?”

  “You bet.”

  “You can screw, and everything?”

  “And everything.”

  “Don’t tell me, show me,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table.

  As she headed past him toward the bedroom, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him. With his teeth he pulled the front of her T-shirt out of her jeans and pushed his tongue into her navel.

  Scotty made a little noise and peeled the T-shirt over her head, exposing the beautifully shaped breasts which had always appealed so much to Howell. He bit the nipples, which leapt out at him. She unzipped her jeans, pushed them down, kicked them off and surprised him by climbing so that her knees were resting on the arms of his chair. He pushed his face into the mound of hair and opened her with his tongue. Scotty was now biting off tiny yells. She was pulling his head into her, and for a moment, Howell thought he would suffocate, but he couldn’t stop. Within less than a minute she was coming noisily, shouting her delight.

  Howell scooped her up in his arms and swept her toward the bed. Then he was out of his own clothes and into her, moving with slow, shallow strokes. He pulled her legs up over his shoulders and, very slowly, slid more and more of himself into her until, finally, she was panting and laughing.

  His arousal had started with Leonie, that afternoon, and now he had an outlet for it. Both women were in his mind as he brought Scotty to orgasm again, then again. Finally, he came with her, shouting with her, rocking the bed until he thought it would collapse. He rolled over, and she lay on top of him, their sweat mingling.

  “Johnny,” she said, “I’ve done my share of fucking, but never in my whole life was it like that.”

  “Me, either,” he said, weakly. “Listen, Scotty, I want to be straight with you…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I’m just coming out of a marriage that didn’t work, and it was my fault, all of it. I feel as if I’m in bed with you on false pretenses.”

  “Listen, sport, there was nothing false about what we just did.”

  “Yeah, well, I feel that way, too, but I just don’t want you to expect too much of me.”

  Scotty turned on her side and put her head on his shoulder. “Johnny, I’ve been stuck up here with nobody, and I mean nobody even to spend an evening with, let alone make love to. I like you, really I do; I think we’ve become friends. But that’s enough for me; is it enough for you? Are you looking for somebody to be in love with you?”

  “Oh, no,” Howell said, with sincerity. “I don’t think I could handle that right now.”

  “You like me? Are we friends? Do you feel close?”

  “Yes, I do. I really do.”

  “Well, then, as long as we seem to have slid into this wonderful patch of screwing, why don’t we just ride it out, so to speak, and see how it goes?”

  He kissed her on the top of the head. “I think that’s a marvelous idea,” he said. Then, drained and shattered, he fell soundly asleep.

  Sometime past midnight, Howell woke with a start, sat straight up in bed. The linens were in disarray. Scotty lay sprawled beside him, face down, naked. He was immediately aroused, wanted her.

  But what had wakened him? He had been dreaming the dream, he knew that, but some sound had interrupted. Had it been inside the house? He got his feet on the floor and made his way gingerly into the living room. He didn’t want to turn on the lights. Anyway, the embers of the fire cast some small light. As his eyes became used to it, he saw the girl again.

  He froze. She was in the same position as before, standing at the window, her back not quite to him. The light wasn’t good, but he had never seen her for more than a second or two, and he wanted a longer look. Afraid even to blink, he studied her dim outline carefully, and this time saw something different. Although she was small and slight, she seemed to have more shape than he had noticed before; there was something more mature about her. He took a deep breath.

  “Kathleen,” he said, softly.

  She turned slightly toward him; her face was in shadow, but she seemed to be looking directly at him. After a moment, she turned back toward the window.

  Howell took a step toward her, then another. She stepped back into a shadow and seemed to become part of it. She was gone. Howell moved to the window; he wanted to see what she had seen. Outside, lit only by stars, was the lake, just as it always was. He pushed open the french doors and walked onto the deck, out over the water.

  There was no moon; the silence was perfect; the crickets had stopped. A chill climbed up his naked skin. Now he knew what had awakened him; not a sound, but a sudden absence of sound. Once before, he remembered, the crickets had stopped.

  He looked about him in the darkness, but he could see nothing, no one. His fingers found the deck’s railing, and he leaned against it, stretching to see further. Then, with a loud crack, the weathered railing suddenly gave way and he pitched forward into the darkness, down toward the black waters of the lake. He grabbed a breath, held it, and waited for the cold shock.

  But there was no water, only grass at his feet. He was standing in another place, and he knew with certainty that he was not himself; he was another man. He felt ill, felt terribly hung over. He looked wildly about him, completely disoriented. It was still night, but there was no cabin in this place. And no lake.

  He stood in a patch of grass and ferns on a forested mountainside and looked out over a valley. There was a house below him, something less than a mile away, with cheerfully lit windows and smoke curling up from the chimney. The floor of the valley was covered with a thick ground fog which reached the steps of the house. Suddenly, the noise of a car engine caused him to turn to his left. An old car, a convertible, sped past him, perhaps twenty yards away, and headed down a road which led into the valley. A childish compulsion to identify all automobiles caused him to say aloud, “Lincoln Continental, 1940.” The voice was not his.

  He watched as the car moved into the ground fog of the valley and approached the house. It stopped in the front yard, and a man got out and approached the house. Someone met him at the door and admitted him. Howell heard the screen door slam, and, a moment later a yell, a scream – a man’s voice. Howell was gripped with a thick dizziness, and time seemed to pass. Then he heard the slam of a car door and heard the engine start. The car turned onto the road and headed back the way it had come, toward where he stood. It was moving fast, and in a moment he would be able to see the driver. Already, he could see a glow from the instruments inside the car. There… There, he could nearly see…

  A blinding white light filled his vision, obliterating house, car, everything, then the light was black, and he was upside down, cold, choking, struggling desperately for his feet and for air. He surfaced, gagging and spitting, sucking air into his starved lungs. He brushed the water from his eyes, saw the dock, and made for it. When he had climbed out of the water, he did not stop to rest until he was up the steps and back on the deck. Avoiding the broken railing, he looked out over the lake. A cloud drifted away from the moon, revealing everything as it was before. The crickets were chirping loudly.

  He moved into the house, found a terry-cloth robe, and poured himself a stiff drink. For half an hour he sat at the table in the living room, looking out over the
lake and trying to shape what had happened to him into an acceptable form. He had nearly drowned, he decided, finally, and in his panic had hallucinated. But the hallucination had been his dream, he was sure of it. He had experienced his dream while awake. He had been somewhere else, had been another person, had seen the car and the house, but not the driver. The hallucination had stopped too soon. He was sure that, in the dream, he had seen more.

  He finished his drink and went back to bed. Scotty was still as he had left her. She stirred as he climbed onto the bed. He ran his hand lightly down her back. She made a small noise and snuggled up to him.

  “What a night,” she said softly into his shoulder.

  “What a night, indeed,” he said back to her, then fell asleep.

  13

  Scotty drove to work feeling pleasantly tired, drained, and happy. With a lover now available, she felt that some lost part of herself had been restored. She reflected that if she ever were sent to prison, she would kill herself. She had tried it with women, and there had been something, quite literally, missing. Scotty liked men, and she was delighted to have one again.

  She arrived at the sheriffs office simultaneously with a furniture delivery van. Two men were struggling with a large, apparently very heavy filing cabinet. She thought that odd, since she usually ordered that sort of thing for Bo Scully, and she had not ordered this. She preceded the two men into the office and was surprised to find the sheriff there ahead of her. He ordinarily did not arrive before mid-morning.

  “Is that for us?” she asked him, waving toward the two men, who were now rolling the thing into the office on a dolly.

  “It’s for me,” Scully replied hoarsely. “I ordered it a while back, before you joined us.”

  He looked a bit odd, and Scotty thought at first he must be hung over. Then, as she brushed past him to get to her desk, she realized that he was drinking. She was astonished. She knew Bo knocked a few back with the boys – she had seen him hung over often enough – but she had never seen him drinking in the morning.