The Underneath

by Melanie Finn

  “No, you.”

  “Well, if you’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “I might use it here instead, as part of the missile launcher.”

  “Okay.

  “Thanks. I like yours.”

  “Not as good as yours.”

  “I hope not. I’m 37. I’d be pretty lame if I couldn’t make a toy spaceship better than a five-year-old.”

  Jake smiled, the tiniest crack. But Ben was careful not to see it as an invitation. He simply kept building.

  “Boys?” Ben had forgotten Lacey. “The hour is up.” She seemed to loom over them; Ben felt like a child.

  “But I’m not finished yet,” he said.

  “Me not either,” added Jake.

  Ben made a face at Jake, who made one back.

  “Why don’t you go outside? I need to talk with Lacey.”

  Jake obeyed, joining the six other children who ran about in the long grass of what had been envisioned as a lawn. The screen door slapped shut behind him.

  “How are you?” she said.

  “Scared.”

  “Why?”

  “That I’ll lose Jake.”

  She put her hand on his arm. She had so much faith in him. “If there aren’t any further complications, your guardianship should go through. It was Shevaunne’s last wish, so to speak. And there’s no one else. You could even apply for adoption. Would you like to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll get the paperwork ready. DCF likes to get kids into permanent homes as fast as possible.”

  “Thank you.” He put his hand over hers, his warm touch, his blue eyes. He saw her blush before turning away, and out the door.

  From his truck, Ben watched Jake and the other children, bounding through the grass, bending down, then bounding up. He knew what they were doing because he had done the same thing when he was here, somewhere just like here.

  The children were catching grasshoppers and pulling off their legs. Harmless enough. It was how he met Frank, little pale grub of a boy. Frank had found a mouse, trapped it against the side of the house with his foot. He was certainly very quick and surprisingly strong. A couple of the girls screamed, and one of the boys said they should tear its legs off like the grasshoppers, wouldn’t that be funny. Ben had been certain that Frank would harm the mouse—this small, trembling creature in his grasp.

  Frank saw him. “You just got here. What do you think we should do with it?”

  Ben had studied the awkward squad encircling Frank, their eyes glittering with something more lurid than excitement, a certain cannibalistic hunger, perhaps.

  “Dunno,” mumbled Ben.

  “Tear its legs off,” said the hungriest boy.

  “Just step on it,” suggested a girl with eczema. “That’s what my gramps does. Quick as.”

  “Gottave big boots,” clarified another. “Nunuvushas.”

  They all stared at Ben, and most starey of all was Frank, and it chilled Ben, that intensity, to be so visible. He did not want to disappoint. He wanted to make the choice that would impress Frank. It was one thing or the other, there was no happy medium—no “let’s put it in a cage and keep it as a pet.” He took a deep breath. “Let it go.” Frank’s thin body turned, surprisingly supple, as he launched the mouse through the fence into the dense brush of freedom.

  56

  Kay sat on the toilet, turned on her phone. Michael was online. She Facetimed him.

  “Finally,” he said.

  He sat at the table. She could glimpse her kitchen, the oven, the array of cereal boxes, Freya’s Cheerios, Tom’s Rice Crispies. They couldn’t possibly eat the same cereal, could they? Michael adjusted the screen, adjusted his chair, getting comfy. “The kids are over with Mark and Gretchen.”

  “How are they?”

  Michael had complete control of himself. “Okay, fine.”

  “So what did Freya say happened?”

  “Tom did.”

  “Tom?” She kept a neutral tone.

  “He phoned me. He can, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know.” Of course I know. I do know. I clean his foreskin.

  “He said you forgot to collect them at camp.”

  “I was late.”

  “A number of times.”

  “That’s what this is about? My being late?”

  “What do you think it’s about, Kay?”

  “For me, or for you?”

  He sighed, he was a sighing mother-fucker. “If you’re not going to be honest, there’s no point in this conversation.”

  “Honest? And this coming from you?”

  “Here we go.”

  “Okay, here’s what this is about, Michael. It’s about us getting a divorce, and you want to control custody.”

  “Freya said you called her a bitch, and you said ‘fuck you’ to her.”

  “So it was Freya.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’d burnt my hand and they were laughing at me.” Kay held up her hand in its dismantling wrapping. “I screwed up, absolutely. I apologized.”

  “Freya says you smelled of wine.”

  “Really?”

  “She said there was an empty bottle on the floor.”

  “At no point have I put our children in danger. I would never do that.”

  “They nearly drowned.”

  “Oh my God, Michael. If you were around more, you might fail too from time to time. But you get to be the hero, swanning in, swanning out.”

  Suddenly, he held up his phone, a blurry image that took a moment to clarify. It was Ben in the shower.

  Kay felt sick, heat rushing to her face that she hoped the early morning light might hide. Heat bloomed out from her face and down her neck. She could feel it prick her armpits. But she composed herself. “Freya had no right to snoop on my phone.”

  “Some… dude?” Michael raised his eyebrow. “Some plumber guy?”

  “He’s not a plumber.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “You left, Michael. You were supposed to spend the summer with us, a family, that was the plan. And you left. So maybe this is either our kids being manipulative because they are hurt and confused by your abandonment, or—”

  “Are you making an excuse for this?”

  “Or—or—it’s you feeling guilty because of your affair with Barbara.”

  “My affair? I’m having an affair with Barbara? You’re crazy.”

  “I’ve known for ages.”

  “I was coming back, Kay—”

  Coming back because he was summoned by his children. He’d ride in, heroically, to rescue them from their crazy, wanton mother.

  Kay hung up, leaned back against the tank. She wished Michael dead, not a petulant, childish fairy wish, but the hammer-swinging kind. She wished he would spontaneously self-combust, the dry tinder of his hypocrisy igniting with a bang. She hated him, and in the sucking, delirious whirlpool of her hate she hated her children.

  The hate felt good, to finally let it out, embrace it, smear it all over herself, roll around in it. Not pushing it back, not shaming it, not pretending. Oh, no, she was swinging the hammer, swing away, swing away. The hate was delicious. It smelled good. It was like baked goods or sex—it filled her up, filled all the empty corners, all the withered recesses. She was smooth and plump with hate.

  She saw them, how they’d be sitting around the table—the table where she had laid meal after meal after meal and listened to This chicken tastes weird and I don’t like broccoli and Michael working his phone like a masturbating teenager—they’d be sitting there contemplating their mother/wife’s craziness, sad for her, worried, pitying, blaming.

  And their warm puddle of self-satisfied, self-absolving blame would expand out from the kitchen, under the door, out to Mark and Gretchen, to Barb, to friends, neighbors, school parents, a contaminating slick. Did you hear? Whisper, whisper! She was screwing the plumber with the kids in the next room! She had some kind of breakdown,
if people still call it that these days. She was never very friendly.

  But then, like the insistent whine of a mosquito, she heard Michael—what he’d been saying, echoing back to her because she hadn’t been listening: I was coming back, Kay.

  For them, for them! She insisted, as she flipped through the days, how long it had taken him to get to Côte d’Ivoire, how long it would have taken him to get back to Vermont, and what airport he’d been in when he’d Facetimed her two days ago.

  Of course, this was his plan, to lay full blame on her and exculpate himself. I was coming back, Kay. Exactly what he would say. He’d done the right thing. He’d been honorable. And then his daughter sent him a photo of her mother’s lover, a naked man with a large semi-erect penis in the shower. You could see Tom’s dinosaur soap on the edge of the bath.

  57

  ED MET BEN AT THE back door, and they crossed through the dairy to the yard behind where Ben stored his equipment and the logs. He and Ed did not discuss the process. They knew the routine. They pulled on their heavy gloves and helmets. They set to work. Ben climbed onto the skidder. The machine rumbled to life. Nimbly, he selected seven birch, lifting these out of the pile with the grabber and placing them down to the right. A hundred years ago this would have been brutal labor. Ed was down there with the chainsaw, and he began to make regular cuts at specific intervals along the middle of the logs. Ben, meanwhile, maneuvered the grabber, picking up a dozen logs and swinging them to the left and onto the logging truck.

  When he was done, he jumped down and joined Ed. Taking a small chainsaw, he cut horizontally and alternately between Ed’s vertical cuts, so that the logs had castellated grooves of a foot each. Working together now, they took the ejected pieces and carefully sawed out the cores. They made sure each chunk was placed beside the space it had been cut from. This was time-consuming work, taking them about an hour. When they’d finished all seven birches, Ben switched off his saw, lifted his visor, and nodded at Ed. They took off their work gloves, pulled on latex pairs, and Ed disappeared into the dairy.

  Ben took a moment to study the chainsaw sculptures, in particular one of an Indian maiden. The papoose on her back looked like a spinal deformity, but her face was carved with surprising dexterity, almost tenderness. Possibly, Ed had real talent after all.

  He reappeared pushing the wheelbarrow, the bricks of heroin neatly wrapped in waterproof plastic packaging. They counted out a hundred bricks, a kilo each. Carefully, they placed the bricks inside the concave space they’d cut out of the birches. From his pocket, Ben drew out a bottle of wood glue. He squirted the glue around the four edges of the chunks, then fitted these snuggly back onto the log. Up close, the cuts were visible, but from the casual distance the logs looked like any other. Ed tapped a nail into the end of each log, nodded to Ben when he’d done all seven.

  With a surgeon’s precision, he loaded the marked logs onto the truck with the grabber, interspersing them with untampered logs in the very center of the load.

  By noon they were done and Ed invited Ben back into the house for a lemonade. They entered the kitchen. The trash was piled high with packaging for microwave meals and take-away pizza. Some time ago the Mr. Coffee machine had erupted. A lava-like seep of cheap coffee continued to ooze down the pot and over the counter. Ed’s cat crouched under the table, eating a mouse. Ed gave it a kick as he went past. The cat skittered out of the way in time and hissed at him.

  “I prefer to mix it myself,” Ed said, popping the top of a Newman’s tin, carefully measuring the scoops of yellow crystals into an unclean red plastic pitcher.

  “That explains why it’s so good,” replied Ben, taking a seat.

  “I can make it stronger or weaker.” Ed stirred the mix. “Depending.” He poured the result into a coffee mug, handed it to Ben. “I can combine pink and regular, sometimes half and half, sometimes one more than the other.” He poured himself a mug, sat down. “I’ve tried other brands, but Newman’s is the best.”

  Ben took a sip. His eyes began to water. He blinked rapidly.

  “Hey, man.” Ed was looking at him. “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s fantastic, Ed.”

  “Oh, man, am I stupid. Shevaunne, right?”

  Ben was forced to wipe a tear away. He shook his head. “It’s not Shevaunne.”

  But Ed leaned in, needed at last. “She was a nice gal.”

  “She was a lying junkie, Ed.”

  “You loved her. You did right by her and the boy.”

  The cat made a retching sound, then a long few minutes of silence followed. Ben finished his lemonade.

  “You want another?” Ed was already up, reaching for the pitcher.

  “Should we go through with this, Ed?”

  “With what?”

  “Canada.”

  Ed poured them each another glass. He sat back down. He drew a smiley face on the glass’s condensation. “I’ll lose my dairy without it, Ben.”

  58

  The Dirty Ditty was quiet, empty in the hot mid-afternoon; Kay was the only drinker. The tall, skinny bartender slid over. His t-shirt read Lemmy Lives! “What kin I git you, hon?”

  The bourbon came. She drank it slowly. She made it last half an hour. She ordered another, then got up to walk to the ladies’ room. The light was dim. She squinted at the graffiti in the stall, the tepid obscenities. More intriguing was the sign by the sink:

  If you are in here for more than 15 minutes, we will call the cops.

  She washed her hands, peeling away what was left of Ben’s dressing. The plastic wrap came off in soggy strips. Leprosy, she thought, and rinsed the pink flayed skin under cold water.

  Back at the bar, she ordered another Wild Turkey while vaguely aware of a couple of drinkers positioning themselves south of her: men, anonymous in t-shirts and ball caps, one red, one blue. The Wild Turkey coated her mouth, bristly little burn on the way down. She felt marvellously free. She felt daring and in need of a cigarette and a dancing partner. She and Sam, that time in Juba at the Russian Club with the jukebox, Elvis songs in Russian. She and Gina, she and Marco, those times in Kinshasa, in Kigali, in Khartoum.

  When the bartender placed another drink in front of her, she was sure she hadn’t ordered. Jägermeister. He gestured to the two men. So, these boys were not fooling around. Kay raised the glass to them, and tossed it back. Almost instantly, the gluey feeling in her skull thickened, so she finished drinking, it would sharpen her a bit.

  “Hey, Slim,” red hat hailed the bartender. “Another for the lady.”

  “Thanks, but I’m good,” she said to Slim. Slim. What else would he be called? Why were fat people never called Fat? Hey Fat, hey Big, another for the lady.

  Time slackened, time was already slack. Great pillowy hours to fill. And the memory of the tyrant it had been: the reduction of each day to a timeline, a schedule, the pettiness of minutes. The time it took Freya to eat her kale. The time it took Tom to brush his teeth. She was always counting or looking at the clock. Where are your shoes? Where is your coat? Have you made your bed? She was always late. Come on, hurry up, we’re late. She used to feel—considering it now—that her children were eating her time, nibbling it like little rats, so there was never the time she’d thought. And they didn’t understand; they had no concept of time. What is ten minutes to a five-year-old? How do you describe a minute? Kay had had to concoct reference points: as long as it takes to reach the corner, from here to school, from here to Pete’s house and back again. She counted in days, never weeks or months, because a day could be comprehended—24 days until Daddy gets back, 61 days until your birthday, three days until the weekend.

  What day is today?

  Wednesday.

  So when will it be the weekend?

  You count the days, you know them now.

  Everything had to be de-constructed. Everything had to be repeated.

  What day is it today?

  When will it be the weekend?

  Why does water
have no color?

  Do octopuses pee?

  Can we have a hamster?

  Why do we have toes?

  And she would be on her knees before the child tying shoelaces like an acolyte. Please, please, Oh God come on, we’re late, we’re late.

  There was another glass in front of her, and she was very unclear whether she or the men up the bar had ordered it. Kay gave a good impression of a woman who could hold her liquor. She gave a good impression of a woman who could drink a man under the table. Before, before, before, in Addis, in Tabora, in Goma, before the nibbling, not just time nibbled, but her self, so that she was smaller than she was once, her edges marked by the many serrations of little white teeth, children’s teeth.

  “You wanna party?”

  It was the one in the red hat.

  “No.” Kay didn’t bother to look over.

  Blue hat: “We got some nice weed, some E.”

  Red hat: “Where’re you from, pretty lady?”

  She kept her eyes straight ahead, drank. Slim cleaned the bar, dragging his cloth along the far end of the bar. He was aware of her, of the situation; she had the feeling he’d intervene if it got serious.

  Sliding off her stool, she was walking elegantly across the room, she must not wobble or stumble. In the ladies’ room, she knelt in front of the toilet and vomited. From this perspective, she could smell the cleaning solvent, and just below it, like layers in a stagnant pond, the urine, feces, and another layer down, the rusty stench of menstrual blood. She tried to stand, but slammed against the stall. Obviously, she could not drive. She would call a cab, but her phone was in her bag, where she left it, over the back of the bar stool, as if she trusted these people, red hat, blue hat.

  Maneuvering herself carefully to the sink, she splashed her face with cold water. For an instant, she grasped clarity, but then saw her image in the mirror, greenish and unfocused, and the lines across her forehead, around her eyes, the end of beauty, the end of allure, what made men look, made men notice, shriveling. Who was she now, who the hell—