Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  “You’re supposed to tell me what y’all talked about,” Martin said. “Then I’ll bring cereal.”

  Walter moved a little closer. “Conrad will give you a report on our discussion. But do you think we could get a new lightbulb? The one in the back burned out last night. And, Martin, we really need some hot water down here. To wash in and so we can steam Josh when he has an attack. Do you have any of those heating coils, or a hot plate, or even an electric coffeepot with an extension cord? Please, Martin, we really need that. And some soap, too.” All the time he spoke, Walter was trying to get Martin to look at him, but the man refused.

  “Okay,” Martin said in his monotone, “who’s going to tell me about your discussion?”

  While Conrad gave a recitation of the theological issues they had touched on, Walter studied their captor. Martin had greasy black hair combed straight back from a narrow face. His nose was beaky and thin, his lips almost nonexistent. Several days’ growth of patchy black stubble dotted his face. His expression was one of constant impatience. If Walter were to draw him as a bird it would probably be a common grackle.

  It occurred to Walter that during their entire captivity Martin had come down at least twice a day, often three times, to bring them food and fresh water. By his calculations, that made well over a hundred visits. In all that time, Martin had never once looked directly at Walter or any of the children. Like a jury never looking directly at a person they were about to convict. It was the one thing, more than any other, that convinced Walter Demming that they had been condemned to death.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  “ ‘Cult’ ” is a term outsiders use to denigrate a religious group they see as unsanctioned and extremist. But cult insiders see themselves as defenders of the one true faith and disciples of the only prophet who has a direct line to eternity.”

  MOLLY CATES, “TEXAS CULT CULTURE,”

  LONE STAR MONTHLY, DECEMBER 1993

  The address for Jacob Alesky turned out to be Piney Haven, a trailer park off Barton Springs Road. The park had often caught Molly’s attention as she drove by because it was a pocket of rural Americana from the sleepy fifties deposited right in the middle of growth-spurt Austin of the nineties. On a busy, commercial strip, flanked by trendy bars and restaurants, Piney Haven possessed an otherworldly aura of dappled light and seedy charm. An unpaved road wound through tall pecans and pines that sheltered rows of trailers which looked permanently settled into the landscape. Today, in the ninety-degree heat, the shade looked particularly cool and inviting.

  She stopped at the ramshackle office and went in. A girl of around twelve was sitting on the desk reading a comic book. Her lips moved as she read.

  “Hi,” Molly said. “Could you tell me where Jacob Alesky lives?”

  The girl didn’t look up. “Like you was going, all the way back. Second from the end, green awning.”

  “Is he in?”

  The girl looked up. “Prob’ly. He don’t go out much these days.” She went back to her reading. Molly thought about asking why Jacob Alesky didn’t go out much anymore, but decided to let that information reveal itself. This was the sort of environment that encouraged you to relax and go with the flow.

  She drove to the end of the road, admiring a cluster of vintage Airstream trailers. There was something about them that had always appealed to her—the friendly, rounded contours, the stainless-steel luster. It made her feel nostalgic for softer, gentler times in the same way that jukeboxes and Chevy trucks from the fifties did. Like most nostalgia, she thought, it was a longing for something she’d never known.

  She pulled up next to a long cream-colored trailer with a green-and-white-striped awning stretching the length of it. Under the awning, three lawn chairs and a hibachi sat on a stone terrace. Molly crossed the terrace to the door, which was propped open. She tried to peer inside, but it was too dusky for her to see anything. “Mr. Alesky,” she called up into the trailer. “Are you there?”

  “Who wants to know?” The deep male voice sounded prickly.

  “Molly Cates wants to know. I’m from Lone Star Monthly magazine, Mr. Alesky. I would have called, but I couldn’t find a number for you.”

  “That’s because I don’t have a number.”

  She glanced up at the telephone line that ran from a nearby pole to the end of the trailer and said nothing. She expected him to appear in the doorway, but nothing happened. After a long minute, she called, “Could I talk to you please, Mr. Alesky?”

  “About what?”

  “I hate to shout. Could you come to the door?”

  She was answered with silence.

  A black cat, long-haired and huge, appeared from under the trailer. It stretched and sauntered toward her. Its fur was matted and full of sticker burrs. The cat rammed its head into Molly’s shin and dragged its long bedraggled body against her. Reluctantly, she squatted down and scratched it under the chin. She didn’t much like cats and found this one particularly unappealing. But it was an old reporter’s trick: paying attention to people’s children and animals was a good way to ingratiate yourself, so she gave the beast a good scratch.

  Then she glanced at the trailer door to see if she had an audience. She did. A man in a wheelchair sat there looking down at her. “Handsome cat, huh?” he said, watching her closely.

  “Affectionate, anyway.”

  “Affectionate, yes,” the man said. “He belongs to my neighbors, who aren’t affectionate and who tend to forget they have a cat.”

  “I’m Molly Cates.”

  “So you said.”

  “Are you Jacob Alesky?”

  “What remains of him.” He answered with a wave of his right arm. “At your service, ma’am.”

  Molly’s first impulse was to look away, avert her head, but she forced herself to look directly at him. He seemed to be little more than a torso propped up in the wheelchair. The doorway where he sat was in deep shadow and there was a jumble of drapery involved in his pinned-up pant legs, so she wasn’t sure exactly what was there and what wasn’t. There seemed to be the stump of a left thigh sticking out, but mostly he was a long torso with dangling arms. “Mr. Alesky, if this is a convenient time, I’d like to talk to you about Walter Demming.”

  “How did you know about me?”

  “From a person who works at my magazine. She knows someone who lives here, and he told her you’re an old friend of Demming’s. She told me because I’m planning to write something about the Jezreel situation.”

  “Well,” Alesky said, “the FBI found me the first week. It’s taken the press somewhat longer. I figured you would eventually since Walter has become something of a celebrity.” He laughed, the deep laugh of a whole man, which took her by surprise. “An unwilling celebrity, for sure. Miss Cates, you can’t know how funny this is. There was never a less likely candidate for fame than Walter Demming.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Walter took vows. When we got back from ’Nam. One of them was obscurity and another was no entanglements. He lived without a phone for twenty years. I bet he’s sorry now he got one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because phones tend to suck you into the world. He got one when he started driving the bus so they could reach him for schedule changes. And now it’s gotten him into what he hated most.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Contention and violence.” There was an edge to his voice. “What sort of world is it where what you try hardest to avoid is exactly what hunts you down?”

  He laughed again. “I’d tell you his other vows, but I don’t know you well enough.”

  “We could correct that situation.” Molly pointed to the lawn chairs. “I could sit down, and we could drink a beer. I have a six-pack of Coors Light in a cooler in my truck. Will you join me?”

  “No Shiner Bock?”

  “Sorry.”

  He tilted his head to the side. “Okay. A beer sounds good right now. I’ll come down. We’ll sit on the veranda.�
�� He stretched out the word “veranda” to make it sound southern and very grand.

  Molly looked at the three steps descending from the trailer door to the ground, then back at the wheelchair. She had no idea how he was going to get down.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Alesky said. “You get the beer and I’ll be right there.” The wheelchair disappeared from the doorway.

  Molly walked back to the truck and pulled her red Igloo out of the back seat. When she turned around, Alesky and his wheelchair were descending as if by magic on a platform she hadn’t noticed to the side of the door. With a whir it lowered him to the terrace. He wheeled his chair off, came to a stop next to one of the three lawn chairs, and turned to watch her approach. With a frankly appraising gaze, he studied her hips as she moved.

  She stared right back at him. He must have been a tall man, for his torso and arms were long and lanky. If his legs had matched he would have been well over six feet. His face was pitted across the forehead and along the cheeks with what looked like old acne scars and his gangly red neck was inflamed with active boil-like lumps, like a teenager’s, though he was probably close to fifty. His nose was scimitar-shaped, off center and lumpy, as if it had been broken many times. His hair was just a fringe of coarse dark spikes.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  Molly sat down in the chair closest to him. She set the cooler at her feet and leaned down to open it. “I think we’ve got us a fine evening for sitting here in the shade and drinking a beer.”

  “I mean what do you think about me—the physical me?”

  Molly pulled a sleek silver can of Coors out of the ice and popped the top. As she handed it to him, she looked directly into his face. Shaded by long dark lashes, his eyes were hazel. They challenged her for an answer. “I think there’s more of you remaining here than got left behind,” she replied.

  He put the can to his lips and tipped his head back to drink. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he drank. When he lowered the can, he said, “Just what is it that got left behind, do you think?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” She looked into the fine hazel eyes. “All I can see is that there’s a lot left.”

  “The glass-is-half-full shit.” He said it pleasantly.

  “Not really. I’m not that positive. It’s just that I keep getting surprised by loss. I see disasters happen—to me, to other people—and I think, well, that’s the end, all is lost. But then people survive and go on, and I see how much remains.”

  “That remains to be seen,” he said with a smile.

  “Mr. Alesky, could I ask you about—”

  “Jake. My name is Jake.”

  “Jake. Good. And I’m Molly.” She reached down into her bag for her notebook and laid it on her lap.

  “Molly.” He looked at her, nodding his head in approval. “I like that—Molly.”

  She thought Jake Alesky was a man who really enjoyed women and she hoped fervently that there were some women who enjoyed him back. “You and Walter Demming go way back—to Vietnam, my friend says.”

  He nodded. “Ancient history. If you think I’m planning to tell you anything about that, just because you brought this beer”—he held up his beer can—“you’re mistaken. Why should I tell you anything about Walter? He’s a real private person.”

  “Not anymore he’s not. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and now he’s, like you said, a celebrity, even if he is an unwilling one. He’s public property, and since I’m going to write something about him, it might as well be accurate. This is a chance for you to tell it straight.”

  He didn’t answer right away. He took a long swig of his beer and kept his eyes on the cat, who had leaped up on a stump and was grooming a paw. Then he said, “Maybe. Maybe I’ll tell you about him. But first, is there anything you want to ask me, something about me, before we move to Walter? Let’s play a game: You get to ask me one free question and I have to answer it. Then I get to ask you one and you have to answer it.”

  “Jake, I don’t—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “That’s my fee. You want me to help you, tell you things you can write in your story. If you want to hear about Walter, you need to play the game.” He pointed at the notebook resting on her lap. “But your question can’t be anything that’s on your notepad, like how him and me got to be friends, or whether he has a lady love. It’s got to be something personal about me. And something real, something that you are sitting there wondering about.”

  Molly sat back and took a sip of her beer, letting it slide down slow to give her courage. He was flirting with her and in spite of everything she found it interesting. “Okay,” she said. “Do I go first?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” she repeated. “Okay. When you lose part of your body, like a leg, do you dream of yourself as you used to be or as you are now?”

  He lowered his head and sat silent for a full minute. It was a long minute and Molly wanted to bite her tongue off. She had gone with the first impulse, what came to mind uncensored, and she had hurt him.

  Finally he lifted his head. “What a fine question. I had to think about it. I dream of myself as I am now, Molly, but with a difference. A big difference. In my dreams I have no legs, but I can do things, remarkable things, that I couldn’t do before. I can fly and I can do flips in the air, and I can stuff a basketball and slip through small spaces with total grace and ease.” He had been looking off into space as he spoke, but now he looked Molly in the eye. “And I can fuck all night long. Anything else you want to ask me?”

  She shook her head. “Now it’s your turn.”

  He studied her, narrowing his eyes. “Okay. Here’s what I want to know. When you see how this freak Mordecai gets off on publicity, don’t you feel a little … sick at your stomach writing about him, giving him more of what he wants, like maybe you’re encouraging him?”

  It was a question that had haunted Molly throughout her long crime-writing career.

  “Let me back up a little,” she said. “Two years ago, after Waco, I wrote a piece on other apocalyptic cults in Texas. Samuel Mordecai was one of the cult leaders I interviewed. I chose to write about that because I’ve always been interested in obsession and I wanted to know what leads a person to believe something so extreme that he’s willing to live and die for it. Anyway, once I got into it, I hated it. I hated him, Samuel Mordecai, and the whole crazy thing he believes in. And, beyond that, I got this crawly, unclean feeling about what was going on there in Jezreel. So in answer to your question, yes, I do worry about giving him the publicity he craves.”

  “So why are you writing about it again if you hated it the first time?”

  “Well, I haven’t taken a vow of obscurity. My boss thinks this will be a big story for me, so I’m doing it. Also, I am obsessed by … obsession, I guess. I don’t know why.”

  He made a low sound of comprehension in his throat. “That sounds like an honest answer. Let me cheat here and ask a follow-up: Since you’ve met this guy Mordecai, you must have a feel for what’s going to happen. What do you think about their chances—Walter and the kids?”

  Molly felt her throat constrict; she hated to give voice to the fears that had been simmering below the surface. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Jake, but I’m scared. Samuel Mordecai is this … well, he’s the sort of man who if he predicts the world is going to end on April fourteenth, he’s not going to just sit around and watch the day pass by uneventfully and say, ‘Oops, I was wrong, sorry.’ That is just not going to happen.”

  Jake nodded. “But he can’t make the world end, now can he?”

  She shrugged.

  “Oh, my. That crazy man made one hell of an impression on you, lady.”

  “Molly,” she said.

  “Molly. That crazy man made one hell of an impression on you, Molly.”

  “Yes. He did. He scared the shit out of me.”

  Jake finished his beer with a long swig, then looked down at the cooler.


  “How about a beer?” she said.

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Molly took his empty can from his hand and replaced it with a cold one from the cooler.

  “Thanks. I’ve been short on groceries,” he said. “What do you know about Walter?”

  She tossed the empty can into the cooler and closed it. “Nothing. I know what he looks like, in a newspaper photo anyway. I know he’s a Vietnam veteran, he grew up in Beaumont, played football, went to Rice for two years, drives a school bus now, does some gardening. That’s it.” She took a long sip of her drink. “Tell me about him.”

  Jake looked down at his beer can for several seconds. “It’s much harder to tell what someone’s like when you know them real well than when you just know them a little. Ever notice that?”

  “Yes. I think it’s because you know all the exceptions and complexities, so it’s hard to summarize. Would it help if I asked questions?”

  “Well, ask a few easy ones to get me going, and we’ll see.”

  “How did he feel about the Vietnam War?”

  Jake laughed. “If that’s an easy one, I’m scared about when we get to the hard stuff. How did he feel about the war? Well, Walter got to Vietnam snorting and pawing the ground. You should have seen him—this beefy, loud high school jock—a real John Wayne, the American warrior. You know. The kind that had a crew cut even before the army did it to him. Couldn’t wait to show his stuff, be a real hero.”

  He let his eyes wander off into the dappled shade. When he brought them back into focus, he said, “Eleven months later, well, my Lord, he looked like the ghost of that warrior, and I looked like this.” He glanced down at where his legs should have been. “And I believe the change in him was more dramatic than the change in me. But to answer your question, Walter started out thinking the war was necessary to teach the Commies a lesson, keep them in their place. But he ended up being the one who learned the lesson.”

  “What was the lesson?”

  “Well, Molly, it isn’t always easy to summarize these things, is it?”