The Underneath Read online

  His finger poised mid-air, he sighed.

  “What are we going to do, Michael?” Michael. His name was hard on her tongue. It was what she called him now, not Babe or Love. They’d gone full circle back to the formality of Christian names. Only it meant something entirely different now.

  He looked ahead, a long moment, then down at his phone. Kay could see his finger twitching; he was in the middle of a text. “I’m arranging a cab,” he said, and with two more taps, pressed send.

  They sat. Kay did not start the car. She watched the light sifting through the maples, the yellow drifting butterflies. She and Michael hadn’t come here to save their marriage, they’d come to end it.

  *

  The taxi driver was a grizzled man who smelled of cigarettes and wheezed as he tried to lift Michael’s heavy black Peli case. Michael took it from him, easily swung it into the trunk. He was physically strong. He used to lift Kay like that and toss her on the bed and fuck her.

  “Daddy!” Tom lurched forward again, wrapping himself around Michael’s leg. Kay glanced at Freya, her dark and judgemental eyes, and felt relief that it was Michael letting her down. Freya, who stored the wrongs done to her like candy during Lent; she’d binge on it one day, all that injustice, all that blame.

  Afternoon was tilting into evening, a powdery apricot sunset. The looming maples slowly lost their dimension, turned inky and solid against the darkening sky. There was no wind, and far, far off, the sound of the interstate, a murmur upon the air that you had to listen for. Kay pried Tom away from Michael, lifted him into her arms because she still could. “We’ll Skype as soon as we can.”

  Michael got in the taxi, he waved, blew kisses to his children. For the briefest moment, he looked at Kay, and Kay had no idea what she saw in his eyes or what he intended her to see. The taxi moved off, down the drive, and Kay could discern Michael’s head, already bent and intent on his phone.

  5

  BEN TOOK JAKE TO THE lake.

  “I’m taking Jake to the lake,” he sang, his hands on the wheel, the boy beside him, now early July and three months of good food and clean clothes and a Big Wheel.

  But still Jake did not speak. He had no voice. For so long no one had listened.

  Ben took his hand, enfolded it like a small, soft mouse. They walked toward the water. It was a perfect afternoon. The hills curled around the lake, a green embrace. The water held the sky, as if a piece had fallen. Sky was somehow liquid, the elements all merging into one—air, water, light—even the trees seemed aqueous in the heat. Only the earth beneath their bare feet remained solid, dark, what held them to this place and time.

  They reached the water. Jake hesitated. He stuck out a white toe, not quite touching the water, so it seemed accusatory, like a pointed finger. Ben stepped forward, the water up to his shins, smiled, “Feels good.” Jake followed; ankle deep, his grip tightened. They eased out a few more feet, and he stopped.

  Ben bent down and picked him up. “I’ll hold you. I won’t let you go.”

  They waded out, the boy clinging to his hip. “It’s not so deep. You can still stand here. You want me to put you down?”

  A shake of the head. So Ben held on, squatting down in the water, submerging the both of them to their chests. Jake gasped at the cold, squeezing Ben’s shoulder, both panic and delight. In the water, he became weightless, he might float away, so Ben held him tighter. He could smell the boy’s skin, his dark hair. He felt an odd punching in his chest, almost like lust, and he wondered if this was what pedophiles felt, the beauty of the child, the ease of destruction—a kind of terror at one’s own power. What have I done, he thought, this is what I have done, and he was clear again, as the boy began to smile, to laugh, a foreign sound, like a migrant bird blown off course.

  6

  How quiet the night. Tom and Freya had spooled in all sound, they sucked it up, hoarding it in their cells. Sound slept with them now, needing its rest, so that in the morning, it might again reverberate with force: singing, arguing, things dropping, breaking, feet always running, questions firing, Mum, Mum, Mummy. Kay could almost feel the pressure of silence upon her ears, like a plane descending. She had her own silence now; she was not pleading or nagging, admonishing. She did not hear her own voice rise with the words, Where are your shoes hurry up we’re late pick up your towel. She did not have to find the way to say Michael that did not accuse or accost or echo.

  She tidied away the last of the dishes, wiped down the sink. Two small lights winked in the valley below. The darkness made distance immeasurable, irrelevant. There became here, hills and stars in atomic continuity with the lawn just beyond the window. A plane’s lights blinked overhead, and she imagined Michael, 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. He would have had his meal. He would be working on his laptop in the halo of his overhead light. Barbara was beside him, her arm touching his, the unfussy touch of their intimacy. Or she was waiting for him in Amsterdam or Dublin, wherever his flight hubbed through. She was issuing a flurry of ardent texts. She was shaving her legs.

  And Michael was moving away, away. Kay had a strong impression of this separation, of the white house around her and the steel plane around Michael, the movement of the plane, the counter movement of the earth and the house upon it, so that she, too, was moving away from him.

  She stood still, observing the kitchen around her, the true house barely visible beneath the chaotic, sticky overlay of her family. The people who lived here lived here impeccably. If things were noise, then they lived silently. In Michael’s absence, she began to notice; for it was as if their marital arguments, both spoken and furiously internalized, had created a white noise, filling the space.

  Now she saw the bookless, dustless shelves. The effort to empty the rooms, not just of things but of their selves seemed more than was necessary for a summer rental—though Alice had assured her that the owners lived here year ’round. But how they lived: traceless, immaculate, mute, tidy as white mice, ceaselessly washing their neat pink paws.

  For instance, there was no crap drawer of mystery keys, desiccated rubber bands, scratched sunglasses, an odd sock, batteries of indeterminate charge. Nor was there a closet piled with hurriedly folded bedding, nor bags of clothes long intended for Goodwill. The cutlery was arranged, the plates stacked, the towels arrayed. The flashlight had its hook by the door. The aesthetic was of rigid order.

  The walls were bare but for a fading photograph thumbtacked above the sink: a cabin by a blue lake in a bowl of green hills; a perfect summer day. And in the back of the hall closet, Kay had found an old phone, dusty as a relic. There was a jack in the wall, but no connection.

  She switched off the downstairs light and turned for the stairs. When Michael was here, she’d been the last one up, and she had done this—the turning off of the light. Now she hesitated, considering the lock of the door. She had never locked it. She had liked the feeling of not locking it. They were living where they did not need a lock. They were safe. Safe as houses, safe as unlocked houses. Wasn’t that what country people smugly asserted: we don’t need to lock our doors.

  For who would come this way, so far out, along the pitch-dark dirt road to a house with nothing in it. Nothing but warm blood, she thought—she thought as a little joke, like watching Jaws before swimming in the sea, and so she did not lock the door.

  7

  “I want to strangle you and hang you off the balcony.” Marco’s idea of sweet nothings. He’s behind me, in me, twisting my shirt around my throat. I lean forward to do another line and he grabs my hips and thrusts hard. The feeling of him deep and the hit of damn good coke are like I’ve imagined God: an absolute and precise sensation of being alive.

  And we are alive, handsome Marco Morales and I, we are most definitely alive.

  Three hours before, we were dead, face down in the earth with guns to the back of our skulls and the smell of fear and everything extraneous ceased. It was like being in a tunnel, the most focused I’ve ever been. Three hours before,
we’d been in the heart of the North Pole. General Christmas was certainly good for jokes. He kept us laughing, oh ho ho ho. The Nightmare Before Christmas; here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane; he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake; etc, etc. Marco and I, nosey, nosey journalists, were chasing a story about how the Museveni government was supplying his archenemy with arms to perpetuate the war. As long as General Christmas was a threat—stealing children, hacking off their limbs if they were naughty—the US government would continue to supply Museveni with money and weapons to fight him. My sources had told me that the Christmas elves were armed with new American AK-47s. They could only have gotten them from the Museveni government.

  And, indeed, they were armed with AK-47s. These AK-47s were pointing at us, as we sprawled on the ground.

  Fear is many different sensations. It is being in an elevator that suddenly drops a few feet; it is your jeans getting tighter around your thighs as the muscles swell with the adrenaline you might need to run away; it is absolute clarity and complete occluding panic. You are certain you will survive; you hope their knives are sharp. You are afraid and incredibly brave; you are accepting of death; you will do anything to stay alive.

  As I lay there, my sound and vision narrowed in. The excited voices of the Christmas elves muted and I heard the faintest stamping, little marching. It was a trail of ants, moving to the left of me, between Marco and me. He was watching them, too, marching through the dry, red earth.

  Suddenly he made a coughing noise. I realized they’d kicked him or hit him, and they were still doing so. I watched the ants and considered the millions of years that had gone into their design, the trick of evolution to produce something so deceptively simple as the ant. A leopard or dolphin you could see the effort. But an ant was a child’s drawing, three little dots and six little legs.

  Someone started tugging at my jeans, trying to pull them down over my hips. I had never been raped and I wondered now how you died from rape, as women do. If ten men fucked me one after the other, how was that different from ten lovers in ten weeks, men whose names I couldn’t remember and maybe had never known. How can ten penises kill you?

  Some of the ants were carrying bits of litter. Ants clean up, they keep the planet clean. Ants will be part of my cleaning, when my body is done. The ants and the flies and the scarabs. I felt my body, then, like a cloak, my flesh upon my bones, my skin firmly encasing my flesh. Mine, I thought, all that I ever owned.

  My jeans were down by my ankles now, exposing my bottom, just this part of me, reducing me to this. But also the men reducing themselves. All we are is machines fucking each other to reproduce. They were scared, too, these boys, these boy-men of General Christmas—these Christmas elves could die any day and they probably would. They were like salmon who ejaculate upon dying.

  The first one clambered on me, putting his knees between my legs and spreading them. What if I lived? What if I had his child? My stomach contracted hard, as if I’d been punched, and my legs tried to draw back together, my vaginal muscles clenched. It was all instinct. I breathed out, I breathed in. Did the second one care that he was putting his dick in another man’s cum? And the third and the forth, weren’t they disgusted by all the fluid?

  But the improbable happened: they ran away. They just left us, Marco and I, and when we looked up they had vanished back into the bush. They’d taken our bags and our shoes and our sunglasses. There was a little trail of peanuts and raisins. The stash of GORP I kept in my bag must have burst open.

  Marco and I sat up. I pulled up my underwear, my jeans. They were immediately itchy, as bits of dust and dried grass had become embedded in the fabric. We avoided eye contact but I could see out of my peripheral vision that Marco had blood on his face. For a few moments—minutes? seconds?—we just listened to the sound of the bush, the cicadas, weaver birds twittering inanely. Then, the sound of a vehicle, coming fast. We stood. Should we run and hide? The old axiom—the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is complete bullshit. The enemy of my enemy is simply the more ruthless motherfucker.

  But we didn’t move; a mutual, unspoken decision. Hiding seemed futile and would put us in a vulnerable position. No one wants to be found cowering in the bushes—you can’t help but look furtive, suspicious.

  Three military Land Rovers pulled to a stop. Twenty Ugandan government soldiers unpacked themselves and surrounded us. The commander, thin and tall with scholarly wire-rimmed glasses, appraised us, asked a few brief questions. We didn’t mention the attempted rape, we simply said we were journalists. He ordered his men into the bush, leaving four to guard us or protect us—we couldn’t know. Within minutes, there was shouting and shooting. The government soldiers ushered us to cover behind the Land Rovers.

  I longed for a cigarette. Not a mere craving, but bone-squeezing need, almost like that moment before orgasm when you think it won’t happen, the sensation begins to recede, and you feel a great angry need for it. Marco was uneasy, too. I saw him dabbing compulsively at the gash on his head. Without his camera, he had no way to interface with the situation.

  After ten minutes or so the shooting stopped. There were shouted commands, scuffling, grunts of pain. The commander and his soldiers ushered six of General Christmas’s men—boys—into the clearing. One was clutching his stomach where blood bloomed like tie-dye over his yellow t-shirt. Obediently, they knelt down. Very quickly, very professionally, the commander unholstered his side-arm and executed them. The last—a teenager, maybe 16 or 17?—looked at me in confusion, as if he did not understand what dream he was in and how he might get out.

  “Mama,” he said—not imploring me, as a generic mama, but the word drawn out, softly, as a child addresses his mother: “Mama.” PAP! He fell face first into dust.

  8

  THE MOOSE HAD BEEN THERE for three days, ghosting among the birches. Ben watched her through the kitchen window. Her great head hung down as if weighted; from time to time she gave it a slow shake. When she’d first appeared, she’d walked in circles, stumbling, falling to her knees then hefting herself back up. She had stopped moving now, her legs braced out, like those of a saw-horse, stacked ergonomically on her bones. The coyotes knew she was here. Ben had seen them slinking across Ed’s fields, yellow-eyed and sly; he’d heard them calling out to each other in the evening. She was waiting for them. They’d tear the velvet of her muzzle. They’d eviscerate her, coil by coil.

  Ben grabbed his .30-06 from the top shelf of his closet. He walked past Shevaunne asleep on the sofa, the TV mumbling and our next contestant, her mouth open with little snores coming out. Even the hot noon light blasting through the bay window and heating the interior of the mobile home like a convection oven didn’t wake her, merely raised a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Shevaunne slept like a cat, an opportunist, at all hours and on numerous surfaces, sometimes even the floor, and she woke up with the imprint of the bath mat on her cheek. He stepped over an empty 16oz Dunkin’ Donuts pumpkin spice latte and out the back door.

  The moose acknowledged Ben but did not move away or flinch, and he could have gone right up to her, put the rifle right up against her skull. But she was a wild thing dying a wild death, he did not want to belittle her. He shot her from 50 yards, a clean shot through the heart, and she went down on her knees with a kind of relief. She was dead by the time he got to her.

  It took several hours to butcher her, there was so much meat. When he cut off her head and sawed open her skull, he knew what he would find: the smooth brain sprouting clusters of worms, like a potato left in the bottom of the box too long. The worms had laid their eggs in deer excrement and the moose grazed on the grass nourished by the deer scat; the worms traveled from the stomach to the tender, soft brain, and, relentless, voracious, they ate it. Nature was not benign.

  The meat of the moose, however, remained untouched, and she was a gift to Ben: a winter’s supply of free protein. He’d teach Jake to enjoy even the liver coo
ked with onions, the heart and kidneys in a stew. Some nights he’d go over to Ed’s, beers and a couple of flank steaks for the barbecue; there wouldn’t be much to say, the honey-combed conversation of men: trucks, huntin’, the cocksuckers in Montpelier who made up new regulations for dairy farmers.

  When at last the moose was fully stripped, when she was the essential arc of her ribs, when she was joints and hooves and pelvis and the flies were a veil around him, Ben felt the weight of himself, his lumbering, earth-rooted body. He envied the animal’s transcendence.

  He walked back into the house. Now—again—he saw the Dunkin’ Donuts cup. He picked it up, considered it carefully. There was no point in asking Shevaunne. She would lie. She lied without even knowing she was lying. She lied when there was no point—what she’d had for lunch or if the sky was blue, lying not merely from habit but as the state of her being. She was a sack of lies, bloated with lies, even her snores were lies.

  He put the cup on the counter where she would see it, and she would know that he’d also seen it, his bloody handprint upon it.

  She opened her eyes and screamed.

  She continued to scream, hyperventilating, scrambling up the back of the sofa, a panicked animal, her eyes on him and full of horror, and, at first, he did not know why. He imagined she could no longer tell the difference between sleep and dream; the lying had so infused her that a door was not a door and a nightmare was real.

  Then he realized he was covered in blood. “It’s from the moose.”

  Did she think he’d killed someone? But she would not listen.She kept screaming, so he stood immobile, his hands raised and open-palmed in surrender.

  Her own hands covered her face, and she gulped air. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Ben. Mother of fuckin’ God, Ben.”