River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  A party boat was making its way south on the river. It was a hulking, ungainly craft, filled with merrymakers getting drunk, dancing. The old tub was decked out in red, white, and blue lights. The Bee Gees singing “Nights on Broadway” was amped up so loud that it sounded as if it was playing right there on the patio.

  “I can’t bear those party boats,” Tony said.

  “Oh please,” said Parker.

  “It just breaks my heart,” Tony said. “Such a craven, greedy misuse of the river.”

  “I know, baby,” Parker said in her Comforting Voice. She frowned sympathetically. “I just hate to see you get yourself worked up.”

  “We have to find my keys,” Donna shouted. “I can’t leave those dogs in the hot car. They’ll die.”

  “Get off my river!” Tony shouted out at the passing boat.

  “Excuse me,” Hat said. “Is that old army flashlight still in the kitchen? It throws out a pretty fair beam.”

  “I meant to get batteries,” Tony said.

  Kenneth and Donna’s car was off to the side of the driveway, under an old locust tree, which, inasmuch as they had given the matter sustained thought, was meant to shade the backseat of their light blue Impala, rented from Hertz in the city. Donna ran around the house, with Kenneth and the Boyetts following, and with Hat and Jennings walking quickly behind them.

  “This is not going to be good,” Jennings said to his father, and Hat glared at him momentarily. Despite all of his learning and the galaxies of facts and figures that illuminated his mind, Hat still had trouble making a distinction between someone saying what they thought might happen from what they would actually want to happen. He thought, for instance, that predicting Carter was going to win the election basically meant you wanted Carter in the White House.

  Donna pulled on all four of the door handles hoping that one of them was somehow unlocked. Her dogs, butterscotch-and-white King Charles spaniels, were curled up in a heap; which one was which was indistinguishable. It was a tangle of ears and legs and tails. Donna pounded the heels of her hands against the left-back window, shaking it in its frame, but the dogs, usually so quick to react to the slightest sound, or even changes in the light, gave no sign of sensing her presence, and no sign of life.

  “Kenny,” Donna said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “They’re not just dogs. You understand that, don’t you? They’re life! They’re everything. Please.”

  “We need one of those crafty little car thieves who know how to open a car door with a coat hanger,” Kenneth said.

  “They’re going to die,” Donna said. The car was hot to the touch.

  “They’re fine,” Kenneth said. “They’re in the shade.”

  About 120 years ago, when Orkney was completed, and this driveway was suitable for horses and carriages, the borders were marked by white and gray stones, each about the size of a medicine ball. Consulting no one, Jennings picked one up and calmly walked with it to the car. The sun blazed in the chrome bumpers. Jennings lifted the rock and cocked his arms so that the rock was behind his head and—after looking from face to face, giving anyone who wanted to stop him a chance to do so—he brought his arms forward quickly, and heaved the rock onto the windshield.

  “Hey, man, it’s a rental,” Kenneth said.

  The rock did not break through the windshield, but created a sudden concave at the center, a deep nest of spidery cracks. Jennings scrambled onto the hood of the car and donkey-kicked at the weakened window, with his back to it. At last, his foot went through. His shoe filled with little shards, his ankle was aflame, and he knew, dimly, that he was bleeding.

  “Your face!” cried Hat.

  Jennings pulled off his shirt and tied it around his head so that his face was somewhat protected. He had gone from looking like someone serving wealthy people their dinner to someone in a street riot who does not want to be identified. He pushed his way through the windshield that had by now been beaten into submission, but the opening was not large enough. The glass pierced him everywhere—his scalp, along the curve of his spine. A couple of large shards stuck out of him like the plates on the back of a stegosaurus as he made his way to the backseat. Despite the dappling shade of that lovely old locust tree, the car was stifling. He knew the dogs had not made it before going in. But you couldn’t just leave them there.

  There was barely any weight to them. It was like picking up three gloves. He treated them gently, cradling them in one arm as he unlocked the door. He yanked his shirt down, and took a deep breath. The dogs were a mélange of floppy ears and dark protruding eyes. Their lips were white, covered with thick saliva.

  He stumbled out of the car, and Donna stared at him. Her face was red, as if the grief she swallowed in one horrible gulp now scalded her from the inside out. “Are they dead?” she asked in a small voice.

  Jennings didn’t reply. He set the dogs down on the grass, gently, one at a time. He put them on their side, stretched out their forepaws, their back legs.

  “Heat stroke,” Hat said. “If it’s eighty degrees outside, inside a car it can get up to a hundred in no time. Hundred and twenty, thirty.”

  “Didn’t you leave the windows open?” Parker asked. She was frowning in an extreme way, like a character in a Japanese woodcut.

  “A little,” said Donna.

  “Those dogs are so damn small and slippery,” Kenneth said. “Anything more than an inch and they get right out.” He put his arm around his wife, who was silently weeping. “What a waste,” he said. “And that car. I don’t know what the fuck we’re supposed to do about that. You know, I must have had a premonition. I swear to God. I must have. I never go for all the insurance they try to sell you, but this time I went for the whole package. I knew we were going to be having a little party and I didn’t want to take any chances. Lucky thing.”

  “Luck?” echoed Donna. “You talk to me of luck?” Her sobs began as a kind of breathlessness and increased in volume and intensity, until it seemed she might be dismantled by them. Kenneth shushed and patted her and she pressed her face into his chest and held on to his shoulders. He lifted his chin and pursed his lips and gazed at the Boyetts, wanting them to witness what he was able to do for his distraught wife. Whatever they may think and whatever they may have heard, he was Donna’s Rock of Gibraltar.

  The Boyetts were reluctant to have guests spend the night, but there was really no alternative to inviting them to sleep at Orkney and deal with matters in the morning. In the meantime, there was a bit more dope—actually, quite a bit, if one counted the two dime bags Tony had secreted away—and enough hamburger to carry them through the night.

  “Once more unto the patio!” Tony called out in what Parker called his Most Shakespearean Bellow. They walked in single file and disappeared into the darkness that had settled over Orkney.

  When they could no longer hear the Boyetts and their guests, father and son went to the equipment shed. Hat finished plucking out the windshield shards from his son’s back and when that was done they both grabbed a digging shovel and a spade. “Get one with a D-grip,” Hat said. They walked about a hundred yards away from the house, to the small orchard Hat had planted with his own father right after the end of World War II. The ground in the orchard was soft and offered little resistance, and the dark moist smell of good soil rose into the night air, blending with the smell of honeysuckle, pine, and the distant, ever so slightly brackish smell of the river. Father and son prepared a ditch for the dead dogs. They worked quickly. Hat was always fast and Jennings was trying to burn off his fury.

  “When I was a boy we used to think you could dig a hole all the way to China,” Hat said.

  “I heard that, too,” Jennings said.

  “The things we didn’t know,” Hat said. “Your crust, your mantle, the whole lithosphere. Even if you could dig your way through it, you’d have your core to contend with.”

  “These poor fucking dogs,” Jennings said.

  “Language,” Hat said, without much
conviction.

  “I guess they’ll just get new dogs,” Jennings said, as they patted down the loose earth with the backs of their shovels.

  “I suppose they will,” Hat said. He stepped back to inspect their work, though it was barely visible with only a quarter moon to counteract the darkness.

  “Looks all right,” Jennings said.

  “We can check again in the morning.” Hat jammed the tip of his spade into the earth and leaned on the handle to take some of the weight off his legs. He’d been debating saying something since they’d started digging and now he decided he’d go ahead and say it. “You’re a good worker, Jennings. It’s . . . it’s good to work with you. I’m glad you got out of Saratoga. That’s a city run by the racing syndicate and the Skidmore bunch. And I must say I never thought much of your lady friend up there.”

  “You never met her.”

  “That’s right. She never made the effort to come down here and see me. Anyhow, it’s water under the bridge. The important thing is, you’re home.”

  PARKER HAD BOUGHT AN ICE-CREAM cake at the supermarket, but Hat had forgotten to take it out of the freezer to let it soften. His distress was unnecessary; by the time he and Jennings were in place to serve the desserts, the Boyetts and their guests were deep in their opium dreams, half-dozing in their Adirondack chairs, except for Donna, who was completely unconscious, with a film of saliva on her lips, quite like the dogs.

  “Jennings, you’re so strong,” Parker said in a desiccated voice. “We need to get poor Donna inside. Do you think you could carry her up to the Rose Room on the second floor? I believe the bed in there is decent.”

  Jennings glanced at Hat, who nodded yes. Donna’s head lolled back and her hair streamed behind her as he carried her across the patio and in through the French doors, into what had once been the dining room and now was called the observatory, a large, high-ceilinged room devoid of furniture except for an upholstered piano bench, and, in the center of the room, a long white telescope on a five-foot-high tripod, perched like a praying mantis on the bare parqueted floor.

  As Jennings carried Donna up the stairs, her head lolled from one side to the other and he let it. Sweat trickled down his spine. He stumbled momentarily and Donna’s eyes opened suddenly and wide—it was unnerving, like someone in a horror movie come back to life. Her eyes, glassy as a doll’s, seemed to register nothing and a moment later she closed them.

  He moved through the second-floor hall, a portrait gallery, where Orkney’s original owners reigned, the Wohls, with their muttonchop sideburns and unruly brows, their stiff white collars, their enigmatic smiles. Parker was barely a Wohl herself, but the portraits were precious to her, as was the knowledge that moldering beneath Orkney’s sod were Wohl bottles and spoons and the bones of servants and pets. Hat often spoke of the Wohls as if he had known them, but Jennings could not recall a single thing his father had ever said about them, could not remember how they had made their fortune or what had become of them.

  Jennings looked down on the face of the woman in his arms. His bet was that she was the one in the couple with money. If the husband had his own money, he would have chosen someone prettier. Jennings had been with many girls and women, and his ability to attract females was the cornerstone of his pride, but he had never been with anyone rich. What would it be like, he wondered, to be with such a woman, to be her lover, to know the world as she knew it? What would it be like to be able to have whatever you wanted? You see something you want in a store window and the only problem is, do you have enough time to go in and get it, or do you have to come back some other time and pick it up? Those were the kinds of problems you had! What would it be like to never ever be the one who lifted and carried and fried and scraped and cut and stacked and dug the grave and did without? He lifted her up so her face was closer to his and breathed deeply.

  “Donna.” He whispered her name. He lowered her onto the bed, and stood back for a moment. She rolled onto her stomach, but quickly rolled onto her back again, breathing heavily, as if that moment with her face pressed into the mattress put the fear of God into her.

  “You dumbass,” Jennings said, softly. He waited to see if she would respond. “You killed your little dogs,” he said, somewhat louder. “Very careless, Donna, you dumbass.” Donna’s lips parted, as if she might reply, but all that came out were her slow exhalations.

  She rubbed the side of her face with her right hand, the hand with the sapphire ring, reminding Jennings of its existence, this small piece of polished stone dug out of some hole somewhere in—what? a jungle? a riverbed? Some hidden spot. He’d overheard what the husband said about the ring’s value. Its worth. Jennings did not like that word. Worth. Who decided? It was all so arbitrary. Gold, diamonds—none of them as beautiful as a ripe apple.

  Donna stopped rubbing her face and placed her hand on her stomach and seemed to fall deeper still into her doped-out state. He placed his hand on top of hers and kept it there. He lifted her pinkie, higher, higher, almost bending it, keeping it up, letting it go. It fell with a little thump. Her lips parted but other than that she did not stir. He lifted the finger with the ring, the hundred-thousand-dollar finger, if her husband was to be believed, held it, held it, bent it so far back that her entire hand lifted for a moment. He let it go and it landed on her stomach like a hat tossed onto a bed. He covered her entire hand with his, with a kind of tenderness, and when he lifted it again he had her ring.

  He walked slowly down the stairs, and through the house. The leafy sour smell of cigarette smoke came from the patio. He stood in the darkness, wondering if it would be better, smarter, to be seen walking across the patio. That way they’d remember Jennings had had nothing to hide, didn’t go sneaking off like a thief but said his good nights and left whistling a little tune. He ran his hand over the pocket of his proper pants, the trousers Hat had insisted upon, and felt the shape of the ring. He pulled it out. What was the deal? How could it be worth more than ten cars? More than the men who dug it out of the earth. He had an impulse to throw the ring into the darkness of the house, where someone would come across it in the morning. He did not decide to do otherwise. He let his body do what his body was going to do and his body put the ring in his back pocket and after that his body pulled his shirttails out, hiding his pocket beneath the cotton blend of Hat’s Oleg Cassini white shirt.

  “She’s asleep,” Jennings announced, and bid the Boyetts and Kenneth good night. His voice was relaxed, and as far as he could tell his face was, too, but he could not slow down his gait. He was across the patio in six long strides. As soon as he was away from the house, darkness swallowed him up and he felt such a surge of relief that he pounded his fist into his hand. Dog killer, he said to himself, repeatedly. Dog killer.

  He strolled back to the equipment shed for the shovel and he strolled even more slowly toward the orchard. Though he and Hat had patted the earth flat, he knew exactly where to dig. The dirt was loose, it was like digging through a pile of peanut shells. In no time, he had exposed the dead spaniels. He dropped the ring onto the patch of fur, and moving quickly now, he refilled their grave. He heard the distant sound of music. One of the party boats that Tony raged about, trespassing on his river, pirates hijacking the silence of his night. Jennings walked back to the shed to the beat of the music and put the shovel away, locked up for the night. He faced the river as the party boat drifted south. The Mamas and the Papas, an oldie but a goodie. A breeze was blowing. More than a breeze, really, a good stiff wind. The ring would stay right where it was. One day, Jennings would take it far away and try to sell it. In the meantime, it was under—what did Hat call it? The crust, the mantle? The ring was back where it had come from, the part of the world nobody sees. Well, not nobody. Those with the tools and the willingness to dig and get dirty, they saw it.

  Chapter 3

  Lessons Learned

  NOVEMBER 3, 1977

  * * *

  Dear Thaddeus,

  How do you like this ca
rd? I bought it on the fifth floor, first-time use of employee discount. I’m having a birthday party Friday, but no presents. Your presence is my present. Bring your lady.

  Your humble servant,

  Gene

  * * *

  IN COLLEGE BACK IN ANN ARBOR, KIP’S FRIENDS USED TO SAY he looked like Franz Kafka, with his deep, dark witnessing eyes; curvaceous lips; and sunken cheeks. But now the resemblance was less pronounced. He’d put on a bit of weight, his gaze no longer seemed wounded, but mocking. He was two years ahead of Thaddeus in college, a comparative literature major, and now worked as a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton. His life was bicameral. By day, working the phones at his little desk on Worth Street, by night in all kinds of trouble—cocaine trouble, tattoo trouble, blackjack in Chinatown trouble, party until dawn trouble. Even his ostensibly wholesome enthusiasms could lead to disgrace—he was an avid collector of first editions, and had been caught stealing a pristine copy of Glenway Westcott’s The Grandmothers from Bilbo and Tannin’s, escaping arrest by promising never to set foot in the store again.

  It was Kip who’d urged Thaddeus to move to New York after graduation. More than anyone else Thaddeus knew—with the possible exception of Grace—Kip believed in his talent as a writer and exuded a certainty that one day Thaddeus would publish and be able to secure for himself a modest reputation among the discerning. “You’ll be poor but admired,” Kip said. Poor but admired? Did those two things even go together anymore? Grace’s theory was either that Kip had a secret source of money or that his job at E.F. Hutton was paying a lot more than he admitted to. In support of this either/or theory Grace noted that the chair Thaddeus so admired was a genuine Eames chair, worth thousands, and had as much to do with Sam Kaufman’s BarcaLounger as a brioche had to do with a wad of Wonder Bread. She also recognized that the threadbare carpet in the living room was a Sarouk, made in Persia before it became Iran, and was also worth thousands. Thaddeus would have liked to own at least one suit like Kip’s, and it fell to Grace to wise him up to the fact that anything from J. Press was out of their range, and shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser were so far out of their range that he should do himself a favor and stop fondling the fabric.