Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  Walter walked to the back, where Philip was still kneeling on the seat. He sat down and reached his arms around the boy. He pulled him in tight and held on to him, rocking him slightly from side to side. Philip’s slender body was rigid in his arms. Into his ear he whispered the only words that seemed to make sense. “Philip, it’s so good to hear your voice again. Keep on talking. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You could be right. But keep on talking. Whatever happens, we’ll all be together in it.”

  The raspy sound of Josh’s tortured gasping drowned out Philip’s muffled sobs. Walter closed his eyes. He pictured the yellow inhalers sitting on top of the file cabinets, four of them lined up, smiling at him, full of promise, false hope.

  He let go of Philip when Josh let out a wheeze that was so high-pitched it was almost a scream. The sound was so full of distress and panic that Walter knew this would be the worst yet.

  “Philip.” He moved back and held the boy by his skinny shoulders. “We are in this together. I promise you. Keep talking. I’ll be back right after I check Josh.”

  He strode up the aisle. Josh was leaning forward, his hands pressing down on his knees, his shoulders hunched up. Kim was sitting next to him, humming softly, but not touching him. Walter didn’t touch him either because he knew from experience it was best not to when things got this extreme. “Josh, honey, would water help?” It was all he had to offer.

  Josh made an annoyed shake of the head. He was engaged, heart and soul, in trying to get enough air through his lungs. By now they had weathered probably ten of these really bad spells, and Walter knew that Josh was already past the point of being able to speak or do much of anything other than struggle for breath. At all other times he was a kid full of goofy good humor. But when he was in the throes of an asthma attack, he was like a creature possessed. He refused to waste even a scintilla of energy on anything except drawing the next breath.

  The other kids all stayed where they were, hushed and still. They’d learned, too. Crowding around him or trying to help only made it worse. Kim was still valiantly humming out of tune, her voice shaking badly.

  Walter spoke in a very low voice. “I’m here, Josh. This will pass. You know what to do, how to get through it. We’re all right here.”

  Josh gasped and threw his head back. His face was dotted with sweat and even in the dim light Walter could see that his skin had gone dead white around the nose and mouth. His eyes were wild with panic.

  It was horrible to watch. Walter had seen men die in Vietnam. There had been pain and screaming, rivers of blood, limbs blown off—horrors that still haunted him. But this was worse. Watching this kid slowly choking, starving for air, drowning inside himself, was the absolute worst. Maybe because Josh was so young. Maybe because Walter felt so responsible, so completely, unforgivably responsible for allowing it all to happen. For not being able to take care of him.

  Josh was panting, gulping, as if there were not enough air in the world. In the next seat Sue Ellen, whom he’d never seen cry before, was weeping quietly, her forehead pressed against the black window.

  Walter felt his fury building to a hot boil. Goddamn all this—Samuel Mordecai and his Apocalypse, goddamn this bus, this pit, this grave. Goddamn Martin, that weasel who treats us like we’re already dead. Goddamn these kids. Goddamn the telephone he should never have gotten. Goddamn Josh and his faulty bronchial tubes. Goddamn those yellow inhalers. Goddamn the God who lets this happen to children. Goddamn that feckless, useless negotiator he had talked to on the phone—Stein from the fucking FBI. Why the hell didn’t they do something? Forty-eight days! What the fuck were they waiting for? Why didn’t they come in with force? If they didn’t do it soon, there would be nothing to rescue but corpses, or those goddamned blood statues Mordecai kept babbling about.

  Walter hadn’t allowed himself to think about what the end would be, but he’d been listening. He knew what Mordecai intended. He knew what was waiting for them when that last Band-Aid got scraped off the window.

  Even if they did live through this, which seemed increasingly unlikely, they’d be damaged beyond repair. His anger was boiling over. He felt like smashing the windows, ripping up the seats. He felt like tearing Samuel Mordecai apart with his bare hands, taking the Bible and stuffing it into his mouth page by page.

  The raspy desperate sounds coming from Josh were nonstop now, full of panic. They drowned out Kim’s feeble humming.

  Walter paced the aisle and found the children looking up at him with round, frightened eyes. God, you couldn’t do anything here without it upsetting everyone.

  He grabbed the towel from Kim and soaked it again with water. Desperate for something to do, anything, he held it above Josh’s head and twisted it gently so water dripped on his head. “Imagine it’s a shower, Josh, steamy and hot. That’s what it is. Yes. Yes. Feel it. The steam is rising. Breathe it in. Into your throat. Into your nose. Way back in your head. It’s so warm. Opens everything up.” He twisted harder, making rain. “You’re soaked. In the shower. Steam’s rising, all around you, hot water pouring down.”

  Kim was looking up at him wide-eyed, terrified.

  Now Josh was gasping, his head flung back. His chest had grown big and barrel-like, as if it were ready to explode. He had air, lots of it, but he couldn’t get it out. His hair was plastered to his head, and he was trembling all over. He was going to explode.

  Walter wanted to put his mouth on Josh’s and breathe for him, to suck the trapped air out and breathe new air in. He wanted to take hold of him, work him like a bellows, force him to breathe. He’d asked Josh after one of the attacks if it might help for him to try CPR. Josh had just laughed.

  Now he was making a sibilant rasp that didn’t sound human.

  “Josh, listen. Can you smell the bread? The bread you and your dad make in his machine. That white bread, all hot, with butter and sugar melting into it. Mmmm. Let the smell come in. Open your nose. It’s right in front of you, honey. Open up for it. Take it in. Smell it, Josh. Let it flow.”

  Josh was making a rattling way in the back of his throat.

  God, who could tolerate this?

  They had to have help.

  He dashed to the front of the bus, out the door, and into the pit of black earth. He looked up at the wooden slab covering the hole. He reached up and beat his fists on it. “Help! Martin, we need help down here. We’ve got an emergency.” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “Martin,” he called louder, “Martin, come here, please. Pull the slab back. Please!” He looked back to the bus to see if he was panicking the kids, but without his glasses, he couldn’t see that far.

  “Open up,” he called. “Prophet Mordecai, come here. Please.” His voice was rising in spite of his efforts to control it. “God would want you to. At the end of the world or any other time. Josh is real sick. Please come help. We need you down here. Help! Help!” He found himself screaming, his throat raw with it.

  He stopped to listen for a response.

  Nothing.

  He looked back to the bus. Now they knew. The situation was hopeless. And he was worse than useless. A man with a long history of letting people down in the crunch, a man of no use to anyone, a man who made mistakes when it really counted. Images fired through his head—Jake, long-legged and whole, as he had been before Trang Loi, before Granny Duc. Before their lives got ruined. The kids getting on the bus that morning laughing and singing that ditty he hated—“the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.”

  Tears spurted from his eyes. He couldn’t hold them back anymore. They poured out of him—twenty-seven years of stored-up remorse.

  He reached up and beat against the wood again. “Please, please, come down here!”

  From the bus, he heard Kim calling. “Mr. Demming! Mr. Demming!”

  He raced back.

  When he got close enough to see Josh, he felt like screaming in horror. The boy’s head lolled back. His eyes were twitching and popping out of his head. His lips had darkened to
navy blue. His mouth was wide open, his tongue protruding. A dark wet spot was spreading outward on the front of his jeans.

  Sitting next to him, Kim was shaking, her arms wrapped around herself.

  Walter Demming could think of nothing in the world to do.

  His lips started to move. From the past came some words that had once given comfort to friends of his. “ ‘The atmosphere of Titan,’ ” he said aloud, “ ‘the atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside the back door of an Earthling bakery on a spring morning.’ ”

  The kids were all staring at him, their wet eyes wide with shock.

  “Say it along with me,” he said. “Come on. ‘The atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside the back door of an Earthling bakery on a spring morning.’ ” Several of them joined in the third time, falteringly. “ ‘The atmosphere of Titan,’ ” more voices joined, “ ‘is like the atmosphere outside an Earthling bakery’ ”—they were all in chorus—“ ‘on a spring morning.’ ”

  He looked down at Josh. His head lolled back on the seat. His face was pale blue, his eyes closed. He’d gone silent.

  Walter fell to his knees in the aisle next to the boy. He started to say it again: “ ‘The atmosphere of Titan …’ ” but he stopped. It was inadequate. Utterly inadequate.

  A prayer he didn’t even know he remembered came to his lips instead. “Our Father”—the words forced themselves out like a groan—“which art in heaven.” He didn’t believe it, any of it, but it seemed to be coming from somewhere beyond him. “Hallowed be Thy name.”

  The children joined in: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

  He had forgotten the next line, but the children took it over. He listened and then joined them at the end: “But deliver us from evil, for thine is the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.”

  He leaned over and rested his forehead on Josh’s leg. The wetness had spread down. Walter felt the warmth of the soaked denim on his forehead.

  Deliver us from evil. Please.

  And then he tried Jake’s old mantra one more time, very low, just for Josh and for himself: “ ‘The atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside an Earthling bakery on a …’ ”

  He stopped because he imagined he smelled, not urine, and terror, and death, but fresh bread baking somewhere.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  PROSPERO, THE TEMPEST

  They arranged to meet Sandy Loeffler Hendrick at six-fifteen in the snack bar at her health club on San Pedro. Bryan Holihan had done the talking on the phone, saying it was an urgent and confidential FBI matter. He suggested they meet someplace other than her home. Before they went into the spa, Holihan called Santa Fe to tell the agent there that they were about to make contact.

  Molly spotted her right away, sitting at a table with a lipstick-stained coffee cup in front of her—still blond and lithe at fifty-two in a shiny black Lycra sports bra and tights. She greeted them warily and, when Bryan Holihan flashed his ID, she took it and laid it on the table in front of her. She stared at it for such a long time Molly wondered if she’d gotten stuck. Eventually she stood and asked them if they’d like juice or coffee. Both declined.

  “This seems very strange,” Sandy Hendrick said. “The only really private place to talk is one of the personal exercise rooms. We might as well do that.” She picked up her cup and headed toward the door. They followed her upstairs, through a huge room carpeted in purple and filled with shiny chrome-and-black machines and no people. She showed them into a small room. One wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling and the opposite wall had a ballet bar. Sandy Hendrick closed the door, turned on the overhead fan, and unrolled three plastic mats. “Sorry there are no chairs, but you said this required some privacy and this is really the only place.” In one graceful, continuous motion, she lowered herself into the lotus position.

  Molly assumed an identical position.

  Bryan Holihan looked down and turned around once like a dog looking for the right position. Then he went down to one knee on the mat and stayed like that, looking as if he were going to make a proposal of marriage.

  “Does this have anything to do with my latest DWI?” Sandy said, looking at Bryan.

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

  “Mrs. Hendrick,” Molly said, “this is a most delicate and difficult matter. I believe in a woman’s right to privacy around matters of reproduction, but we have some extraordinary circumstances here. I’m going to tell you something that only a few people in the world know and, except for me, all of them are in law enforcement. Whatever you tell us will be shared only with those few, very discreet people.

  “Thirty-three years ago, in the summer of 1962, when you were in summer school at the University of Texas, a newborn baby was abandoned. A male baby. Now a grown man. He needs to know the identity of his mother.” Molly paused and watched the woman’s face. “I have reason to think you might be his mother.”

  Sandy Hendrick’s face had lost some color, but her expression remained totally impassive. Not a muscle twitched anywhere. Her skin had suffered the ravages of the years, the Texas sun, and alcohol, but her features had survived intact: her full lips, slanted blue eyes, and her delicately sculpted nose, which rose at the tip and seemed to pull the upper lip along up with it, revealing even white teeth.

  “That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you came for?”

  Molly nodded.

  “I’m sorry y’ll have come all the way from Austin for this,” she said. “I could have told you over the phone. This has nothing to do with me.” Under her black jog bra, her breast heaved as if she’d just run a marathon. “I was in summer school in 1962. That’s a matter of record. I failed French III, and”—she had to stop for breath—“I had to take it over. I had nothing to do with any baby. This is all so bizarre.” She picked up her coffee cup, but her hand was shaking so violently she had to bring the other hand up to help hold it steady. Even using both hands, she was unable to get the cup to her lips. She set it down.

  “Mrs. Hendrick,” Molly said, feeling a stab of compassion for the devastation these questions were causing, “you and your roommate, Gretchen Staples, moved out of the sorority house even though you’d both paid through the summer and couldn’t get a refund. Why?”

  “That’s none of your business. This has nothing to do with me. Let’s finish up here.”

  “Mrs. Hendrick, when I was nineteen, I got pregnant. I wasn’t married and my parents were dead. I remember the panic like it happened this morning. It can happen to anyone, and it’s very scary. I still find it difficult to talk about.”

  “I’m sorry for your misfortune, Miss …” She shrugged.

  “Cates. Molly.”

  “As I said, this has nothing to do with me.” She started to get to her feet. “And I’m going to be late for—”

  “Wait a minute,” Molly said. “Please sit down for a minute more. I want to tell you about this baby—who he is now.”

  The woman remained standing.

  “Please sit.”

  With a grimace of annoyance that was the first real expression she’d shown, she sank back down to the mat.

  “Now I’m going to tell you something that you may find upsetting. The baby that was abandoned that summer is now the cult leader who’s holding a dozen people hostage in Jezreel.”

  Sandy Hendrick kept her expression frozen, but her face paled, making the black eye shadow and liner around her eyes stand out like soot smudges on parchment. She looked like a woman who’d just had all her blood sucked out.

  Molly moved in for the kill. “Have you been following that situation in Jezreel, Mrs. Hendrick?”

  The woman spoke, barely opening her mouth. “Yes. Of course.” Her breath was coming raggedly. Molly was fascinated by the contrast between her attempt at impassiveness and the upheaval her body was caught in. We thi
nk we have our bodies in check, but our breath and blood, our tears and tics—those involuntary functions have a life and will of their own, Molly thought. They betray us every time. All the exercise in the world will not bring our bodies under control.

  Sandy Hendrick was saying, “Everybody knows about that. I think about those children all the time.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s terrible, just terrible.”

  “He’s planning to kill them. The negotiators have not gotten anywhere. If they knew the identity of his birth mother, they might be able to use that information to bargain with him. When Samuel Mordecai was twenty-one he searched for his real mother, desperately, but he never found her. It’s very, very important to him.”

  “I’m sure it is, but there’s no reason to be telling me this. You’re wasting your time, and mine. I’m not the woman you think I am.” She turned her head and looked at herself in the big mirror.

  Molly studied the woman’s profile, giving special attention to the finely molded uptilted nose and the upper lip that pulled up slightly to reveal her teeth. Molly had spent two hours watching Samuel Mordecai, and she’d had ample opportunity to admire his profile. She had always found it astounding when a genetic code imprinted itself on an offspring in some exact reproduction of a parental feature: mother and daughter with identical tufts of hair between their eyebrows, father and son with indistinguishable chin clefts. What bad luck for this woman that she had produced and abandoned a child whose upper lip was the mirror of her own, an undeniable link between them.

  The resemblance took your breath away.

  “Have you seen photographs of Samuel Mordecai?” Molly asked.

  “Yes. I suppose. In the paper.”

  “I wish I had a good, clear photo to show you, Mrs. Hendrick. No one could miss the resemblance. I believe you could tell us the date you gave birth that summer and where you left your baby and what he was wrapped in. Mrs. Hendrick, have you listened to what he said on the radio? He talked about being wrapped in the mantle of the Beast. I think you could explain that.”