The Underneath Read online

  When Tom had been a baby and they’d had to move to London and Tom did not sleep and so neither did Kay, she had learned about night; not the place you sleep or dream, not the place you leave, but the one you come to, wide awake at 2 a.m.

  As long as Kay had walked, Tom would not cry, so she paced, hour upon slow dripping hour, she walked miles inside the room of night, across deserts, the Arctic ice, all the places she could no longer go. Tears leaked out of her like the milk Tom refused to drink, night’s windows reflecting back to her the hunched, grey-faced woman holding a mewling baby. No one was watching, so no one could see the hunger of the baby; sometimes Kay felt Tom’s tongue slip out of his mouth and into hers, seeking the interior of her, to suck her out like a raw egg. “You chose this,” she heard herself mumbling. “You chose this, chose this, chose this.”

  Even after Tom began to sleep, Kay didn’t. Three, four hours a couple of times a week, sometimes three days passed without sleep. In the daylight, Kay drifted, blurred, uncertain. When she spoke she had to listen carefully to make sure the voice was outside of her, not merely in her head.

  But at night, she sharpened like a cat. Her heart picked up beats, rattling like a castanet. At night, she could see everything, even what wasn’t there, hand-prints on mirrors, how sound rippled the air like water. If she shut her eyes, her heart jolted her with a sharp current; she must remain vigilant.

  And she had sweated, a sour, acrid smell almost like fear; she smelled even during the day, she couldn’t wash it off. She shuffled around the supermarket, smelling herself. Her eyes, contracted in their sockets like shy fish, ached. In the mirror, she looked over-medicated or under-medicated. People stepped away from her.

  Until Sam—not Michael, not her own husband, father of her children—came to say hello, to bring the children toys. He took one look at Kay—“Mary Mother of God, Kay, you look like an aborted baby left out in the rain”—handed over a bottle of Valium and commanded, “Sleep!” And she slept.

  It had been a long time since she’d woken like this, eyes peeling wide, in the middle of the night.

  She locked the bathroom door, clambered up onto the toilet. She waved her phone like a wand to catch the magic airwave. Two bars. She logged on to Google, began a deeper search for Benjamin Comeau Vermont. Scrolling down from the Chamber of Commerce listing, she skimmed over a few random entries with the names Comeau, an antiques dealer, a car dealer, Facebook pages, to a post: STATE V BENJAMIN L COMEAU.

  CASES HEARD BY JUDGE THOMAS A. MURRAY

  DATE/TIME/PLACE

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4

  8:30AM

  COURTROOM 1

  STATE VRS COMEAU BENJAMIN

  203-4-16 CRIMINAL

  PLAINTIFF, STATE (PAUL J. STEINER)

  DEFENDANT, BENJAMIN L. COMEAU

  Criminal could mean anything from murder to trespass. So she created an account with BeenVerified, paid the 20 bucks with Paypal, and within minutes had a full report. There was a bank lien on his house, a finance company lien on his logging equipment, and a scattering of lawsuits over the years—though none, apart from the one brought by Paul Steiner, had gone to court. It was currently under appeal.

  She wrote Paul Steiner in her notebook. Frank, Maria Wilson, Ben Comeau.

  “What are you writing?” Michael would ask, if he had walked in, seen her scribbling in this corner, this midnight. “What are you writing?” he’d asked in London, almost surprised that she wasn’t folding laundry or unpacking groceries. No longer wars or coups but a piece for Parenting magazine about the pressure mothers feel to breastfeed or an interview with an organic egg baron for the business supplement of a fading broadsheet. “Interesting?” Michael would ask a few tepid questions, as if he’d read somewhere—some paint-by-numbers marriage manual—how to attend a wife whose career was now a hobby.

  Ammon, she wrote.

  Ammon, simply Ammon.

  “Whose house was that?” Freya had wanted to know as they’d driven away from Ammon’s.

  “A local man.”

  “It’s creepy.”

  Tom had quieted his sobs: “Were those dead dogs, Mum.”

  “No. They were coyotes.”

  “Did he kill them?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why?”

  “Some people like killing wild animals.”

  “Why?”

  “The fur, they can sell the fur.”

  “But you said they like killing them.” Freya paid attention.

  “Maybe they don’t like or not like. They just don’t mind. I think it’s different for some people, killing things.”

  “Like bunnies.”

  “Yes, Frey. That’s a good point.”

  “How does he kill them?”

  She didn’t answer, and Tom thought she hadn’t heard.

  “Mum, how does he kill them?”

  “Traps. He sets traps and the coyotes get stuck in the traps.”

  “And the trap kills them?”

  Kay had taken a breath. What was she supposed to say? Should she withhold the truth? Is Santa real? The meat we eat, the clothes we wear, the forests we annihilate, the atrocities we commit every day just by breathing, the traps, the hammers, the bunnies. “No, love. They get caught in the trap, their legs get caught and they can’t get away and he shoots them.”

  “How do the traps caught their legs?”

  “Tom, my love,” she had said. “I can’t answer these questions anymore.”

  “But—”

  Freya had put her hand on her brother’s shoulder, and this quieted him. In silence, they’d driven back down Ammon’s rough track, onto the road, and she’d chided herself for taking them there in the first place. She knew Ammon had a gun, people used their guns here.

  She went downstairs and locked the door.

  25

  The land was wild, rough, torn, inhabited by people and their livestock who lived somehow. Eking, I thought at the time. What the word was made for: hungry little birds searching for grass seeds on the rocky soil. Michael and I had been meaning to come to this part of the country for months, but he had been trapped by his work, and me by mine, our many important commitments. And when we finally packed the car, it was as if we were eloping or playing truant from school. We laughed and opened a bottle of champagne when we reached the outer limits of Addis, and he made a triumphant show of turning off his cell phone.

  For hours, shabby subsistence farms marred the landscape, there were people everywhere, walking in columns along the road. Unless you’ve been to Africa, it’s impossible to understand how many people there are, how many children—impossible to even begin to comprehend the scale of a billion people, six billion people, nine billion. Not dollars, not grains of sand, but individuals inhaling, exhaling, eating, shitting, hoping, eking.

  Children defecated in the open, and everywhere was open. There were no trees except for the small groves of mercenary eucalyptus, all that was left, all that hadn’t been hacked down and burned on cookstoves. The eucalyptus survive because their roots are so deep and so aggressive that they suck up moisture for up to 50 yards in any direction. Eucalyptus trees make it impossible for anything else to grow. Eucalyptus trees are an indication that it’s already too late, the land is fucked.

  Further out, five, six hours, the farms ceased, the land was too dry, too rocky even for the most optimistic or desperate farmer, and we had at last the feeling of space and sky—the Africa we were looking for. Arid, harsh, inviolable: where wild things lived by design and not default. We felt happy, then, the windows open, the dust and the heat, sipping from our bottles of water. We couldn’t chat because of the loud rumble of the car’s engine and the rough road. Michael looked at me, I smiled. We didn’t need to speak.

  We drove until late afternoon, and turned off into the bush, several hundred yards. We had imagined camping quietly underneath the acacia trees. We had imagined cocktails and stars, still dawns, trembling with the call of a mourning dove. Cooking brea
kfast on our little camp stove. We had expectations of solitude and nature. But then, but then—the people arrived. Always. The children, in particular, appeared within moments of our stopping, and they could not be persuaded to leave. They stood staring and tittering. When I squatted behind a bush to pee, they followed. After cutting up kindling, Michael left his machete against the trunk of a tree; a moment later it was gone. At nightfall, the crowd dispersed, only to reform just after dawn—a curtain of black faces in ragged clothing that blocked us from any view. We had to retreat to our tent to eat. We had to lock our car, peevish that the Out of Africa fantasy to which we felt entitled was so rudely, thoroughly interrupted. And it was their fault, these ragged, TV-less people.

  As we drove further south into the Omo River Valley, the land became even drier and more desolate. Now, with regularity, spindly goatherds threw pebbles at our car. This began to enrage Michael. We crossed a shallow river bed that must have run fiercely in the rains but was now a remnant trickle. A boy threw a stone that hit the windshield, making a small pit in the glass. Michael slammed on the brakes and bounded out, up the river. The boy ran, nimble with fear, and scrambled up the steep river bank. From his perch, he began to laugh at Michael. Michael stopped exactly where the boy had been standing. There was a large plastic container half-full of water that the boy had been filling. Michael took out his pocket-knife and stabbed it repeatedly. After he had rendered it useless, he came back to the car. “They have to learn,” he said.

  I watched the boy in the rear-view mirror, emerging from the bush to examine his ruined container. It was most likely the only one his family had, the sole means of collecting water—it was an object of immeasurable value destroyed by a white man in a fit of pique.

  Michael hadn’t murdered or tortured. But the act was brutal. It told me something about him that I didn’t want to know. The cruelty was so finely crafted.

  For days I was distraught. We drove on, camping, hiking. But I could barely look at my husband, he disgusted me now; I slept with my back to him. Our marriage had been spur-of-the-moment, a lark, when we were on Lamu for New Year’s Eve, and less than four months later I was considering divorce.

  “Over a kid’s bucket?” He was incredulous.

  “Because that’s all you see it is.”

  I left him.

  But, but—I was pregnant, you see.

  An accident, a broken condom. Michael sat with me for the ultrasound at the clinic in Nairobi. I assumed we’d agreed on abortion, and we saw the kidney bean inside my womb with its sprouting fetal pole, its tadpole heart. It meant nothing to me, that blurred echo from within. But Michael—Michael wept, he begged, so I leaned forward to love him, to agree to the pact of parenthood. Soon the baby who would be Freya made me vomit and abstain from hard liquor and soft cheese and war zones.

  But—

  What if I wasn’t pregnant?

  Not for another year, and I’ve changed the dates, a white lie to make myself look more honorable, and what if I admit that I forgot all about the boy. And what happened was this: Michael and I drove on, I glanced back at the boy, he was soon erased by the dust, just another poor African child, a prop, an extra in a grand set of Africa. What if I felt merely a momentary disgust with Michael, a flash of concern that he wasn’t who he seemed, he was a selfish asshole. What if I didn’t care, really, that he was a selfish asshole, selfishness having value in our white lives; everything we did was selfish so who could call it selfishness, it was merely normal.

  We drove on—didn’t we?—and the boy was erased by the dust, and in camp that night Michael and I made love, what love felt like then, burrowing into the other person, the exclusion of the entire world, and I never thought about the boy again.

  26

  Kay dried her hands. As she turned she had the sensation of Maria turning with her; she was two people, the way she turned and took the dish cloth and hung it over the rung along the stove door, smoothing the wrinkles. Any woman could do this, every woman did, the ritual choreography of the dish cloth. And then Maria would pause and regard the sunny, clean kitchen, how it was ready for the day: a sense of pride at the order of things. She understood that routine was an anchor, routine was putting one foot steadily in front of the other and not running or fleeing or dispersing.

  At some point, in the winter, Maria became afraid, fear at first appearing like a mouse, shyly. The long, deep days, the strange light of the snow, and she began cooking extravagantly—complex dishes with marinades, requiring detailed preparation. Ingredients were difficult to source. She was able to get achiote from the Mexican restaurant; the produce manager at White’s Supermarket obtained pablano chiles for her. She peeled and stirred and chopped, she baked and sautéed as Frank began to remove items from the house. At first, just old books, drawers of junk, she hardly noticed. One day she came home and all the pictures had been taken from the walls. One morning, she woke up and he was piling her summer clothes into the back of the pick-up. She watched him drive away, the bright bouquet of fabric lifting and subsiding as he hit hardened drifts of snow.

  “Kay?”

  She turned again, a slow pirouette.

  “Sorry. I knocked. The door was open.”

  Even when Frank took the boys’ skates and coats, their toys and games, Maria stayed because she believed it was an affliction of the winter, a passing season. She chased the fear back through its little hole, back into the walls. But then, he bought the white paint, not painting. Erasing.

  At last Kay’s eyes focused in on Ben. He was speaking to her. “Is everything all right?”

  “I was—” she made a small sound that was supposed to be a laugh. It took her a moment. “I was not expecting anyone.”

  Ben stood in the doorway, his cap in his hands. She hadn’t realized how tall he was. “I wanted to check that Ammon got those traps.”

  “He did. Thank you.”

  “Okay, then, well, good, problem solved.” Ben put on his cap. “I’ll see you around.” He took a step back toward the door, she took one forward.

  “Wait. Ben. Let me get you a coffee.”

  “Thanks but I have to be going.”

  “You know this house.” The words sprang out of her.

  He paused. “Yeah, I know this house.” And bent down to pick up one of Freya’s hair clips from the floor. He passed it to Kay, pressing it into her hand as if it had value.

  “Maria liked to cook.”

  “Did she?”

  “What’s going on here, Ben?”

  Ben crooked his head, as if he might see her better from a different angle. “What is it, exactly, that you’re after?”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do.”

  He took a moment. “But who are you that I should tell you?” His words were Michael’s, were Sam’s, a hard, masculine backwall against which she might hurl her hysterical self. Ben went on, “I don’t know you. You’re not from here. You start asking questions about people, and those questions have implications, you have some kind of agenda, and I have to wonder, what could it be.”

  “Concern.”

  “About people you’ve never met?”

  “Aren’t you concerned about them?”

  He turned away for a moment, looking around the kitchen with the same attention he’d given her car. “You alone up here?”

  She looked at him. The question was loaded with menace or it was entirely innocuous. Ben was unreadable. “Yeah,” she said. “My husband’s away.”

  “You’re a city person, then.”

  “It’s not that. I’m not scared because I don’t know how to milk a cow or whatever it is I need to prove my toughness here. I’m not scared.” Her arms were folded tight across her chest, so she unfolded them to make the point. “I’ve been a journalist for years, in all kinds of hairy places, and I know something is wrong.”

  There was no recrimination in his voice, just a calm negation: “Frank and Maria—their
lives are none of your business. You’re renting their house, that’s all.”

  Briefly, he tipped his fingers to his cap, “Enjoy your vacation.” He smiled. Beguiling as a woman, Kay thought. For she felt the smile, where he’d aimed it, way down low.

  She listened to the sound of his truck fade. She could hear it for a long time, clanking along the drive, then down the hill, around the bend. Odd how sound didn’t work the other way: you couldn’t, so easily, hear people approaching the house.

  27

  WHEN HE HAD FIRST TAKEN a job logging with Ammon in Victory, Ben had watched in amazement as the machines pawed and bowed and laid waste to the forest with scrupulous objectivity. The machines did not wince, they were the mindless servants of the men who drove them. And most of them were numbed with booze or amphetamine. The noise was incredible—the whine of the blades, the rumble of the engines, the crashing of trees. He’d seen a crow fly out from the trees and alight on a pine, its beak open in terror and confusion. Wild animals are so quiet, Ben had thought, they live their entire lives as silently as possible.

  Then Ammon threw a can of beer at him, shouted above the din, “What am I payin’ ya for, shitstain?”

  Ammon pointed out that the foster system would abandon him at 18: “Who else is gonna employ a high school drop-out for 15 bucks an hour.”

  Back then, Ben thought he’d do it for a couple of years. The money was okay, better than stocking shelves at White’s or working the till at the Gas n’ Go. So he learned to work the skidder and the grabber, he learned the names of every tree, he learned the mills, which mill took what lumber, and who paid the best. He learned to seek out the suckers by reading the annual town reports. Out-of-state addresses meant second-, third-home folks who weren’t around to check up on you. Those delinquent on taxes could easily be convinced to seek relief through Land Use Compliance.

  Divorces, noted in the courthouse records, meant financial hardship for whichever spouse still held the land. Divorces had been Ammon’s particular forte.