The Underneath

by Melanie Finn

  “There’s blood on it,” she said.

  The pig sniffed Kay’s leg. She could feel its hot breath. Ammon drank his beer, considered her. “Where’re yer kids?”

  “What?”

  “Ya heard me.”

  “They’re safe.”

  “Every parent hopes so.”

  Kay held his gaze. “Did Ben do this?”

  “Murdered Frank, ya reckon? Carved him up into little pieces?”

  He seemed about to laugh, either because the idea was ridiculous or because killing was amusing. The pig licked her leg.

  “Ya been askin’ around about Frank,” he said.

  “Alice. Alice told you.”

  He shrugged. “So concerned ’bout Frank ya should go to tha cops.”

  “Shouldn’t you? He’s your son.”

  Ammon took another long draft of his beer, then threw the can at the pig. It hit him in the head, between the ears, and the pig backed away from Kay. “Ya want me to take you to him?”

  He didn’t wait for her to open her mouth or nod her head. “I’ll just get my jacket. Back in a moment.”

  66

  IT WAS AMMON’S VOICE. BEN didn’t remember the ring of the phone, did not remember lifting it to his ear. For a moment, he felt as if Ammon was—at last—inside his head.

  “This gal,” he was saying, “She’s askin’ questions about Frank, Benny. I’m gonna take her ta tha cabin. Ya arrange for her ta meet him.”

  Ben hung up.

  He lifted Dinko over his shoulder—he was barely the weight of a sack of grain—and, outside, flopped him into the back of his truck, and drove to Ed’s. He and Ed tossed the body into the shit pit behind the barn. For a moment, Dinko floated in the cow slurry. He looked small and vulnerable. He might have gone away with his kilos and never come back. He might have been no further trouble. The shit blubbed gently, enfolding him.

  In East Montrose, Ben swung into Kamp Wahoo. The kids were massed around the pool, they swarmed, interconnected by hands, by laughter. Water arced into the air in silver drops, water gleamed on their bodies, they were bejeweled with water. A boy did a somersault off the diving board, a trio of girls jumped in holding hands, screaming. Why had he never had this, why only the bitter late autumn, the motel pools always empty?

  Frank had given him summer.

  He saw a woman with a whistle and a clipboard.

  “Hello, ma’am.” He tipped his hat.

  “How can I help you?” She appraised him objectively, a good-looking guy, a man, a stranger among small children.

  “I wanted to find out more about your program for my son,” he said.

  She softened, the clipboard lowered, she extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Phoebe. I run the camp. We’d love to have your son. How old is he?”

  “Five.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jake.”

  “Five is a great age for Jake to start with us.” She rattled off the activities, arts and crafts, field trips, all-inclusive lunch, the swimming lessons, the storytime, did he want to come this year—there were still a few places.

  Ben nodded, attending. He took the flier she gave him that contained all the necessary information and an application form. “My friend’s kids go here, and they just love it.”

  “Oh? I’m sure they do! Who are they?”

  “Kay Ward’s kids.”

  The woman looked back at him. “I’m sorry. We don’t have them here.”

  Ben lightly tapped his open palm with the flier. He gave her his warm smile. “My mistake. But it looks like a great program. I’ll definitely keep it in mind.”

  67

  I’d prefer if ya didn’t smoke in my truck.” Ammon thrust his chin at her cigarette. She ignored him. She smoked on, the luxurious feeling of nicotine coating her throat, entering the delicate fronds of her pulmonary capillaries, her blood, her heart and brain. Maybe what she’d needed, all along, was just a cigarette.

  Ammon drove her north, a road almost mindless in its calendar-photo prettiness, the farms, the cabins, the white houses, the patchwork fields, and rolling hills. The mild-mannered red barns.

  Only the high-rise granite slab of the Willoughby Gap surprised her. With Nordic severity, the 1,000-foot cliff face plunged into an electric blue glacial lake. Here, summer continued, unperturbed: kayaks and canoes, flat-bottomed fishing boats, the scent of barbecue when they passed a nest of lake-side cabins.

  After Willoughby, the land flattened, as if those bold high thrusts of rock had taken all the seismic energy. The woods, now without geological relief, created a viewless channel, trees and more trees, the occasional cabin or trailer popping up road-side. At last, Ammon turned off the main road onto a graded dirt road, and then another, each road diminishing so that they were turn by turn siphoned onto a narrow track, the overgrown trees and brush slapping and scratching the side of the truck.

  Kay continued to smoke, one cigarette after the other. Fear had quite gone; something heavier had taken its place, leaden and dense, as if her mind knew it was pointless to be afraid. She must not waste what was left on fear.

  The track broke out into a clearing at the edge of a lake, a cabin hunkering to the right of the scene. It was a beautiful spot, the blue water, the emerald green grass under a clear summer sky.

  Ammon turned off the engine. “Here we are.”

  There would be a trick, Kay knew. Ammon would pull a dead bird from the magic hat, instead of a white rabbit or a bright scarf. She got out, her ribs aching, her legs uncertain beneath her so she braced herself against the truck’s sun-hot flank. Even if she wanted to run, she couldn’t—not far, not far enough into the seamless flow of woods.

  “In the cabin.” Ammon flicked his hand toward the low wooden structure, slightly more than a shack with a porch and windows, forlorn and dilapidated. The grass had grown up around it. Rust smeared the tin roof like cancer. The light reflecting on the glass in the windows made it impossible to see in.

  Regardless, Kay stepped toward the cabin. She’d been moving toward it for some time, since she’d seen it in the photo above the sink. She’d been moving toward its peace, its menace.

  She climbed up the wooden steps, carefully, as they were loose, unpinned and rotting, details she hadn’t seen in the photograph. Across the porch, until her hand was on the door. She was here, here we are, here we are. So she opened the door.

  The shift from light to dark blinded her for a moment. She blinked as her pupils adjusted, seeing only outlines, a table, cabinets, a person. At that moment, she heard Ammon’s truck start up, she turned to see him pull away, giving her a cheery wave. When she turned back, she could see Ben sitting at the table.

  68

  IT HAD BEEN MARCH BUT nowhere near spring this far north. Impossible even to imagine earth and warmth. The snow rose into drifts six feet high; the trees were structures, frames. Ben loved their stark, dark lines against the white.

  Out on the ice, a few locals had cleared trails out to their fishing holes. On weekends you could find them here, hunkered over the perfect circles they’d cut in the ice. They had thermoses of stew and battery-operated socks to keep warm. They came for the church-like solitude as much as for the thorny pike who lurked a dozen feet down.

  Once, summers and summers ago, he and Frank had tried to reach the bottom, diving down, but the thick reeds frightened them—they seemed animate, reaching out for the boys with greedy tentacles, and they had twisted back to the surface, translucent and wavering, so clear they could see dragonflies on the other side, and laughing, broached the air, tossing the water from their hair. Summers ago. The summer of Otto.

  The sun had not yet topped the encircling mountains, so the land lingered in inky shadow, reluctant as a sleepy child. Frank must have heard Ben coming. Sound traveled on such still winter mornings—the tapping of a woodpecker might seem close but was half a mile away.

  Frank was standing on the lilac-colored ice.

  Ben had stopped the
truck. He got out and stood.

  Frank smiled. “Helluva morning for fishing.”

  But Frank wasn’t fishing. He was holding a large rock, so heavy he struggled to carry it. Heavier than Otto. The rock was tied to Frank’s waist.

  Ben had put his hands deep in his pockets. The air was crisp. He’d taken a step forward, then stopped as he saw that Frank had also taken a step forward. He could not run the distance between them, and he should not.

  “It’s all right,” Frank said. “I’ve done my best.”

  “No.” Ben shifted his gaze to the ice. To the fishing hole just past Frank, a black spot in the white. “Please.”

  Frank took another step out. The rock was heavy and awkward in his arms, he cradled it. “Maria isn’t coming back.” He shifted the weight of the rock. “I’m just tuckered out, Ben.”

  Ben had wished he could fix it, somehow. He’d closed his eyes. He was not so bold as to imagine he was dying with Frank, but he was afraid of living without him. Please don’t leave me, he thought. Frank was his friend, his brother, all he had, and that was the reason he wanted to run across the ice and pull him back. It was also the reason why he did not. Frank had lived for all these years with what Ammon had done—he had borne the burden, he had done his best. Ben thought of the basement and how Frank had lived above it. He had sat at the kitchen table and eaten his huevos with Maria and the children, while right there, under his feet, below the floor boards and the rafters, was dark and remembering.

  The beginning and the end was Ammon. Ammon had done this. Ammon’s work upon a boy, the concerted application of that fucker’s dark polluting spite for years and years. And the yield was a man who could not sustain himself.

  “I’ve signed a couple of forestry reports for you, left the dates blank. They’re in the cabin.”

  “Frank—”

  The hole in the ice was like a mouth, rounded in surprise. O. It was a portal to another world, it was a socket, it was a fishing hole, it was the period at the end of a sentence.

  “And I gave them Wilder. They said it wasn’t enough. But I wouldn’t give them you. I couldn’t do that. They don’t have you, Ben. You’re clear, you’re in the clear. So, you know, go clear.”

  Ben had neither stepped forward nor back. He had not been able to leave the spot on which he stood. He had been fearful. This moment ended some way of living and began another he did not yet know the shape of, could not imagine.

  When Ben had opened his eyes Frank was gone. For a time he wondered if Frank had lost his nerve and cut the rope. Maybe he’d survived hypothermia and swum under the ice to the other side of the lake, to a warm getaway car, and was on his way to Juarez with Maria. Ben toyed with this particular fantasy, and how he may be called to corroborate the suicide—“Yes, I saw Frank Wilson drop through the ice and he did not come out”—and therefore collude in his friend’s escape. Frank was going clear, not Australia, but a hacienda in a sleepy Mexican village, a rooster on the fence, a dog asleep in the dust, Maria and the boys eating ripe oranges from a red tin bowl.

  69

  Kay takes a step inside the cabin. She is an actor following a set of stage directions. Or, it is as if she’s planned this herself months ago. She’s been completely true to herself, and she’s brought herself here. She wonders if Ben, too, has wheeled himself along the tracks he has laid with his own hands. It’s as if they were supposed to be here, the Universe kept bumping them up against each other.

  And here, right here, they collide.

  “Why didn’t you go? Why didn’t you go, Kay?” Ben takes off his cap, smooths his dark hair, his voice is familiar but not quite his own. “I told ya to go, I gave ya the chance.”

  But she has nowhere to go, not the woods, not the lake. She sits down across from him. Her hands splay out on the table, she feels the rough grain. She wonders how Ben will kill her. She thinks he will either strangle her or drown her. There is a dog leash on the table between them. She thinks of the nape of Freya’s neck, the way the fine pale hair curls in the deep dent of her atlas bone. She thinks of Tom’s breath against her cheek, his kisses like butterflies. She remembers the rain on the tin roof, and the war coming closer to Gol, but Tom was sleeping, little naked rabbit, little pip, against her breast, and the wind and the rain, and the girl in the bed next to her bathing her own baby, a boy. He had hydrocephalus, his head like a melon wobbling on the vine of his neck. He would die within days, but his mother was smiling and cooing, pouring warm water over his smooth black body. Such tenderness in the broken world.

  Ben can do anything he wants to her. He has become her death; he has become her life. She will simply disappear, she is already disappearing. Women disappear all the time—read the papers—no bodies are ever found in these woods, these lonely roads. “Nosey, hey,” he says, he hears himself say in this other voice, this voice echoing back at him. “What ya wanta ask s’many questions for?”

  I was on my way back. She hears Michael, only he is not angry, but anguished—she hears the difference in tone; and she lets him finish what he’d begun to say. I was on my way back to you. To you, Kay, to you. Those are the words, all of them. I was on my way back to you, he is saying to her, and she is listening. What if Michael isn’t having an affair with Barbara? What if he has forgiven her for Gol because he knows her, the person who sees garbage bags on the side of the road and wants to look inside—she is still the vain, brave, curious woman he fell in love with. The kitchen is behind him, around him, where they live, the row of cereals—Cheerios, Rice Krispies waiting for her. What if she has forgiven him for the bucket, such careless cruelty, and the uncomprehending face of the child who owned it. But it’s not enough to apologize, sorry-sorry; she and Michael need to sit at the kitchen table. They need to accommodate each other in some new way not just the old lie of marriage. They must raise two fine children. It’s not as simple as it looks. It’s a life’s work.

  She begins to cry. She’s no longer pretty, her face contorting into itself. She doesn’t want to die. But what choice does Ben have? The vicious narrowing and winnowing to this point, this time and place, this table between them. He and Frank planned to steal the dogs of rich people. They were going to run away to Australia. And his mother’s mouth agape, she’s trying to explain or apologize—I’m sorry, Benben—but he didn’t know what for. Hunger was normal, fear was normal, what Richie-Dinko-Honeybaby-Bob did with their hands, boots, fingers, words was normal. There’s a boy in the back seat of a Pajero who has never eaten a summer peach or been swimming in water sun-sparkling like champagne under a blue sky. He will not grow straight and tall but stooped and grey, a fungus child in the cellar. Every moment of Ben’s life is happening concurrently, an unrelenting, crowded, shouting present, shouting so he can’t hear himself, he hears Ammon, Come on down, boy, come and join the fun.

  Her own death seems obscure, a date on a calendar that is suddenly at hand. There were many times she could have died. Life is not owed her. She has wasted, she has squandered. She doesn’t want to die, of course not, but what she is realizing is that the not wanting to die is only part of it—not wanting; while there is this other pull, far stronger, this deep pulling riptide, this wanting. Her body fills with wanting—a howling deaf and blind wanting—longing for her children. Wanting, longing. She can see the street where they live, the steps to the front door. She goes up the steps, she peers through the window on the door, she presses her face against the glass. She would crawl through fire, she would cut off her own arms just for that last glimpse.

  Here we are, right here. The past rushing toward us along steel cables, binding us to what has been done to us and what we have done, forcing us to this intersection, this particular nexus. Here, the future blooms outward, it frays or radiates.

  Kay puts out her hand, her hand a fist that she opens, finger by finger, exposing the soft, vulnerable palm, the skin still raw and burned. Why is it so difficult to stop being selfish? Disappointed? How completely and wilfully we misunde
rstand each other.

  *

  “Ben,” she says. “Let me.”

  Margot’s clavicle. He had watched the bone move beneath her skin and she had turned and smiled and he fell into her, shining and clean.

  He finds killing easy; this has surprised him, and he could keep on killing. Shevaunne, Dinko, this woman, they just disappear, he’s tidying them away. He remembers Dinko’s struggle, as if he really cherished his life after all. Why do you want the boy? Dinko asked. Why do you want the boy? The answer stirs in the corner of the room. Ben turns to see it, there, in the dark corner, the seam, the joist of the house. He keeps his eyes sharp, and after a moment, the shape emerges, trembling. He hadn’t known that pigs tremble with fear. He’d come looking for Frank and heard noises he didn’t understand. He opened the front door and heard noise in the basement, voices, and so he stepped down, and Come on down and join the party, Ammon said, and he slipped on the blood. He couldn’t see, his eyes could not understand what he was seeing, the pigs, humpbacked, squealing, two or three other men and Frank on the far side holding up the electric knife, the kind used to carve the turkey.

  Pig fights, Ammon said, Ammon grinned, teeth flashing. The blood gets them all riled up.

  Frank turned on the blade. He looked at Ben and Ben said Please in his mind, he tried to send the message to Frank, he was thinking so hard. Just come with me, we’re faster than these men, let’s just run away, up the stairs into the woods, we’ll hotwire a car and drive up to the cabin, we’ll cross the border, Canada then Australia, but Frank plunged the whirring blade into the back of a pig.

  Why do you want the boy? Dinko is looking up from his bed of slurry. Why do you want the boy, Benny?

  Jake is standing with Lacey. She has brought him a suitcase. She hates how the kids have to use garbage bags to move their things, their second-hand clothes, their donated toys, greasy with the film of other children. She smiles at Ben, she walks toward him with Jake, “Are you ready?” There is kindness, there is grace. He wants to breathe it in and breathe it out; he wants to be this kindness. Ben kneels down, as if at an altar, to embrace this boy, this lost son, lost self.