Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  Molly stopped doing sit-ups and stretched out on her back. She lay silent, feeling frayed and jangled. This wasn’t something she wanted to talk about.

  “Well?” Jo Beth said. “It’s good parental practice to be open with your children about these things. Is Dad going to move in?”

  “Honey, I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? He’s there most of the time anyway.”

  “I know, and I love that. I love it when he comes over. I love it when he stays the night. And I love it when he goes home. It’s unnatural and immature, I suppose, but I like that better than the continual togetherness of marriage.”

  Jo Beth kept on moving up and down. “Mom, you’re such a bad example.”

  Molly felt the familiar rush of parental guilt. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “How am I ever going to get married and have babies when I have in front of me a mother who’s so happy on her own?”

  “Honey, that’s just my idiosyncrasy. It’s not healthy. You are healthy. And when the time is right for you and the man is right, you will get married and have babies. It’s a wonderful way for most people to live, the best, the most satisfying. Having you was the best thing I ever did. I wish I could do the rest of it. But I’ve tried three times and each time I’ve been miserable, just waiting for them to go home.”

  “But I know you love Dad.”

  “Yes, I do. Your father’s the love of my life. But I already tried living with him.”

  “But that was when you were too young. It would be totally different now.”

  Molly felt hot fear welling up in her chest. She felt cornered, pressured. “I really don’t want to talk about this now, Jo Beth.”

  “Mom, this is so perverse.”

  “I know.” She found herself tensing.

  “I think you should rethink this. Dad is—”

  “Jo Beth, stop it.” She couldn’t keep her voice from rising. “You’re pushing me. I try not to do that to you and I don’t think you should do it to me. I’m scared, really scared about this. You need to back off.”

  Jo Beth went silent.

  In the front of the room, Michelle was demonstrating crunches in which she pulled her knees in to touch her elbows while doing sit-ups. Molly and Jo Beth followed suit.

  After a while, Molly said. “I’m sorry I shouted. I’ll let you know when we decide something on this, but it’s best for you not to ask for a while. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jo Beth muttered.

  “How’s work, honey?”

  “Fine, but it’s pretty much all there is. When you work fourteen hours a day, there’s not much time for anything else.”

  “No, there isn’t. This firm seems to demand a lot.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a family tradition, anyway—workaholism.”

  “I think it’s a choice, baby. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

  They finished their sit-ups in silence.

  As they were walking down to the dressing room, Jo Beth said, “You aren’t going out to Jezreel tonight?”

  “No. Wasn’t invited. My part’s finished, thank God.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Tonight? First I’m going to get rid of Officer Valdez, an unfortunate young man who was born with no smile muscles. He’s enough to make me yearn for Bryan Holihan. Then I’m going to wash my hair, read a little, go to bed early.”

  “Oh, sure,” Jo Beth said. “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to sit in the dark and stare at the window all night. I see it coming. God, that used to scare me when I was a kid. Why don’t we go to a movie? We’ll take Officer Valdez along. I bet I could make him smile.”

  “Thanks, honey, but I promised Lattimore I’d stay close to the phone. And I wouldn’t know what to do with the dog. I’ve got to pick him up. Poor Jake’s been stuck with him all day.”

  There were two empty cans neatly aligned at the foot of Jake’s wheelchair; he held another in his hand. The dog was sprawled nearby chewing on the nublike remains of what this morning had been an enormous rawhide bone.

  Molly got out of the police car she’d been driven around in all day. Copper jumped up and greeted her with a swaying tail. She leaned down to pat him.

  “He’s glad to see you,” Jake said, “and you look glad to see him.”

  “Do I? Well, there is a tendency to feel grateful to someone who saves your life.”

  “Is there?” Jake said. “It depends on the circumstances, I think.”

  Molly dragged a chair over and sat down. “What are the circumstances in which you wouldn’t feel grateful?”

  Jake shrugged and looked down into his beer can.

  “You told Lattimore about it yesterday, didn’t you?” Molly asked.

  “I had to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was more to the Granny Duc story than what you heard. It didn’t end there, and I wanted to be sure we interpreted Walter’s message right.”

  Molly leaned down to pat the dog, who’d settled at her feet. He’d gotten some sticker burrs in his ears; she should buy a brush. “So what happened to Granny Duc?”

  “Walter killed her with his bare hands.” He said it in the same tone he would have used to say, “She’s living in Cincinnati with her son.”

  It was like a hammer blow to the chest. Molly felt she’d come to know Walter Demming over the past three days and this didn’t fit. “Why?”

  “I told you when you first came here that I wasn’t going to talk about it, and I’m not. I told Lattimore because I had to. Anyway, he was there. He has the context for hearing it.”

  Molly wanted to shake him. He was so stubborn. Eventually he was going to tell her—why didn’t he just get it over with? She looked at her watch. “It’s almost six, Jake. I’m going to be on the news in two minutes. Do you have a TV we could watch?”

  “Yeah. All the amenities chez Jake. I’ve even got cable.” He looked toward Officer Valdez in the car. “What about him?”

  “He’ll wait out here. I think he prefers it.”

  “Come on in.” Jake wheeled to the trailer and situated his chair on the lift. The dog bounded up the steps and Molly followed.

  The trailer was orderly and compact, with bookcases and a soft-looking sofa. Jake switched the little TV on with a remote.

  Copper went to a dish on the floor and started to drink. He seemed right at home.

  “Channel 33,” Molly said.

  Jake got the channel. “A beer? It’s Shiner, much better than that sissy stuff you drink.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  He navigated the tiny kitchen with efficiency, using one hand to turn his chair, the other to work. He grabbed a can out of the fridge, popped the top, and handed it to her. “Want a glass?”

  “No.” The news was starting. Ellen Sussman, the stiff-haired blond anchorwoman, began: “Today, two new developments in the forty-nine-day-old terrorist standoff in Jezreel, where the lives of twelve hostages have been threatened by an extremist religious cult. In a tragic turn of events, negotiators learned today that eleven-year-old Joshua Benderson has died in captivity.” A photograph of the plump, blond boy flashed on the screen. “According to FBI spokesman Patrick Lattimore, authorities had been especially worried about the boy because of his chronic asthma, which required regular medication. News of the boy’s death was given to negotiators in a phone call from Walter Demming, the bus driver who was taken hostage with the children. Demming told negotiators Joshua had died of breathing problems during an asthma attack sometime last night. The boy’s body, wrapped in a plastic sheet, was carried out of the compound by two cult members and laid at a point midway between the cult compound and the gate. Two television news reporters were allowed to enter the property to pick up the body. Here is that scene at Jezreel at two o’clock this afternoon.”

  Footage aired of the two newsmen entering with their hands in the air. They picked up the small bundle. They carried it out through the gat
es and put it into the back of a waiting ambulance.

  The camera returned to Ellen Susman in the studio. “In another development, Molly Cates, associate editor of Lone Star Monthly magazine here in Austin, says she has learned that Hearth Jezreelite leader Samuel Mordecai was abandoned as an infant and later adopted by Evelyn Grimes. Cates says she’s found the birth mother who abandoned him. In a taped interview earlier today Miss Cates talks about her search.”

  Molly, looking earnest and worried in a black pants suit and prim white blouse, sat in a chair facing Ellen Sussman. The newswoman asked the questions that had been scripted for her and Molly answered, also as scripted. “Yes,” Molly said at the end, “there’s no question the woman I talked to in Houston is his birth mother—his real mother. And she wants very much to see him, talk to him.” Molly supposed that Sussman and her bosses at the station didn’t know the story was a fabrication. Lattimore had set it up, faxed KTAX the questions, and Molly had merely arrived as scheduled and done the interview.

  The news report then went into a summary of the long history of the standoff and ran a few seconds of the previous evening’s briefing with Pat Lattimore. It ended with photographs of the remaining ten children and Walter Demming.

  Molly picked up her beer and took a long cold swallow.

  Eyes on the screen, Jake said, “You’re one hell of a good liar.”

  “I know.”

  “If I thought it would help Walter,” he said, using the remote to turn off the television, “I would sell my soul.”

  “Because Walter saved your life?”

  “Walter didn’t save my life. He made a mistake that ended up getting me injured. Then he forced me to survive as a freak.”

  Molly felt the tears creeping down her cheeks before she even knew she was crying. Then it came over her full force—the torrent of grief and sorrow she’d been holding at bay. Now it simply surged up from her chest, where it seemed to reside, and pushed through her eyes. “The beer was a mistake. It lowered my resistance. I don’t know,” she said to Jake through the tears. “You’d think at my age I’d know something for sure, but I don’t. Maybe the world is ending, dying around us, and we just don’t know it. Have you noticed how everything’s speeding up? Samuel Mordecai sure is right about that.”

  Jake sat quietly, watching her cry. Every so often she took a sip of beer. When she finished it, he got her another, and one for himself.

  Two beers later he told her about it.

  “Geronimo Joe Barbour and me—I never knew why they kept us rather than killing us the way they did the others they ambushed at the river. Three days in a bamboo cage so small I couldn’t sit up. Bowl of water, a little rice. Hot, hot sun. People walking by laughing, poking at us with sticks, like we were zoo animals.” He spoke with no emotion, as if he were talking about a day at the office.

  “One thing got me through—a book, a paperback I’d had in my pocket. For some reason they let me keep it. An old girlfriend from Milwaukee had sent it to me. The whole time, for three days, I read and reread that book. Sometimes to myself, sometimes out loud to Joe.”

  “What was it?”

  In reply, he wheeled to the shelves that lined the end wall of the trailer and went right to the place on the shelf. He pulled a book out and handed it to Molly—an ancient paperback, faded and torn, crinkled as though it had gone through the washing machine. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.

  She opened it carefully, afraid it would crumble under her fingers. “I’ve never read this.”

  Jake took a sip of his beer. “There was this one sentence I memorized and kept saying over and over. It got to be like a prayer, or a mantra. Joe started saying it, too. He was in screaming pain from the gangrene in his foot, and when things got unbearable, we just kept repeating this silly sentence.”

  “What was it?”

  “Page 265,” he said. His eyes closed, he recited, “ ‘The atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside the back door of an Earthling bakery on a spring morning.’ Another one I liked is on the same page: ‘There are three seas on Titan, each the size of Earthling Lake Michigan. The waters of all three are fresh and emerald clear.’ I liked that because I grew up on Lake Michigan, but Joe was a redneck who didn’t even know where the Great Lakes were, and he was a chow hound, so the bakery worked better for him. You’d be amazed how well it works. I got so I could say it twice and I would be transported to that bakery door, Heinemann’s bakery in Milwaukee, on an early spring day just after the snow has melted, and I could smell the kuchen just out of the oven. With Joe, it was cherry pie at a bakery in Memphis, where he grew up.”

  He took a long swig of beer. “That’s where he was when he died, I think. At the end of the second day. Geronimo Joe Barbour, the most gung-ho GI you ever saw. And dumb as a rock—ten months in ’Nam and he still believed we were saving the world for Democracy, winning the hearts and minds of the people. They just left his body in the cage. Didn’t notice he was dead, I guess. The flies sure noticed—two hundred fifty pounds of dead Joe kept them busy.

  “I knew our platoon would come. Trang Loi was in our orders. I just didn’t know when, or if I’d still be alive. My goal was to live long enough to see every person in that fuckin’ village die.” He crushed his empty beer can with one hand. “And I did.”

  “On September 1, 1968. At dawn. Our guys swept in so fast and in such force—that’s the only thing that saved me. The village was overrun before the VC knew what hit them. It was Walter who found me and opened the cage. For a while we just watched the killing swirl around us, but then Walter found me an AK-47 under one of the hootches so I could join in. I could barely walk, but I could kill.

  “The orders were to wipe the village off the map, and by God, that’s what we did. According to the intelligence, there were no civilians in Trang Loi. And really that was right. They were all trying to kill us, even the kids. We just killed them first. Although even that’s complicated, who killed who first.

  “See, in the six days before I was captured, we had nineteen dead and twenty-eight wounded. They mutilated our dead. They set booby traps for us everywhere. They sent small children along the trails with grenades. And their center of operations and supply was Trang Loi.

  “So when we got a chance, we did unto them as they had done unto us, but we did it to them more, worse, longer, harder. There was nothing they had done we didn’t do back that morning. Our blood was boiling.”

  He wheeled to the refrigerator and got himself another beer. “You ever seen those paintings by Heironymus Bosch? Trang Loi when we got finished makes those look like a church picnic. Heaps of bodies rotting in the sun, flies everywhere—more flies than you thought were in the whole world. At the end of the morning, we were too tired to talk. The only sound was that buzz, the flies. We pushed the bodies into a ditch and left them for the flies. That night three old men came out of the tunnels, waving a white flag. We took them to the ditch and shot them.

  “The next morning we set fire to the hootches and their food stores, and we exploded all the weapons that we couldn’t carry with us.

  “It was then she came out. We were putting C-4, this plastic explosive, into the holes to close off the tunnels. So she had to come up. All alone. In this immaculate white ao dai, like a small ghost. She was tiny, not more than seventy, eighty pounds, wrinkled like a prune, teeth brown with betel nut, bowing and praying. ‘GI, you no shoot Granny Duc. No VC, no VC.’ Stanley Jones, Geronimo Joe’s best buddy, the one who had taken Joe out of the cage, aimed his rifle at her, but Walter stopped him. He said we’d done enough and that we had to stop somewhere.

  “But I recognized her. She was old, but a powerhouse. I’d seen her working with the men, ordering everyone around, distributing grenades and AK-47s as the units came to pick them up. I said to Walter, wait, maybe we should kill her. She is VC. She worked on weapons supply. I saw her. I recognize her. And our orders were to wipe the village out.”

  Jake shifted around
in his chair, as if he couldn’t find a comfortable position. He rearranged his pant legs, folding some of the extra material and tucking it under his stumps. “But Walter did some dope in those days, just pot mostly, and he was feeling mellow. He said to let her go. She was an old woman, and we had to stop somewhere. If we killed her, we’d have to kill the whole damn country. And he was right, of course. That’s really how it was. If we were going to win, we’d have to kill them all, every fucking one of them, and the babies, too.

  “Everyone else wanted to waste her. We all stood around arguing about it, while she stood there bowing and whining, ‘You no shoot Granny Duc. No VC.’ It was actually kind of humorous. But Walter’s real persuasive and we’d all done so much killing that the lust had passed.”

  Jake had been looking at Molly as he talked, but his eyes shifted away now. He seemed to be looking into space. “Anyway, Walter carried the day and we ended up not shooting her, even though there seemed to be something messy about leaving her, a nagging loose end.

  “We moved out that afternoon. She was sitting alone on the ashes where her hooch had been, next to a stack of Lurps, this dried food we’d left her. That old lady looked like a lost child. Walter and me were the last ones to leave. I went back for something that I’d forgotten. It was stupid, but I did. Then I was jogging to catch up with the unit.” He paused to take some deep breaths as if he had been jogging. “Granny Duc ran up behind me and tossed something at me.”

  Jake took a long drink from his can. “Who would have thought that old mama-san would have perfect aim? A throwing arm like Nolan Ryan. The grenade exploded right at my feet. Talk about the world ending. That’s what I thought had happened. It felt like the earth exploded and threw me into outer space.

  “Granny Duc was running for the trees. She almost made it, but Walter ran her down, screaming all the way. He tackled her. He got an arm around her neck and he just pulled back and she snapped. She just … snapped. Then he lay there on top of her crying. I saw all that happen. And then I was gone, blessedly out of the world for days.”

  “What did you go back to get?” Molly asked softly.