The Underneath Read online

  “The moose. I shot her and butchered her.”

  Shevaunne’s scream segued into a coughing spasm, the wheezing protest of her tar-lined lungs. “I need a cigarette, man, I need a ciggie,” and she searched frantically on the sofa, among her nest of covers, for her pack of Marlboro Reds, her green lighter. Her hands were trembling, and he was amazed at her fear, it was the only emotion un-dimmed by heroin, her fear was pure and uncut as truth.

  He left her still searching and jibbering. He ran the shower and watched the water spiral shades of pink and crimson down the plug hole, and he thought about the pumpkin latte and how it came to be inside his home.

  9

  A mile past the town hall, they passed a weathered house with a shed tacked on the side. Freya sung out, “Sad bunnies!” And there they were, rows of cages, stacked one atop the other, little white rabbits, white as Easter bunnies, with pink ears and soft, virginal fur.

  The first morning they had passed this way, Freya had said, “Bunnies! Oh, look, bunnies!”

  And Tom had wanted to know if they could get one.

  “We can’t take it back to England, love.”

  “No pets! That’s the rule,” added Freya.

  But Tom implored, Tom still believed if he asked for something over and over again he would get it. “Just for the summer, then. We could give it back. Oh, please, Mum.”

  Freya frowned, “They shouldn’t put them in such small cages.”

  And Tom: “Just for the summer! Please, please! I’ll take care of it, I promise.”

  “I’m going to sneak out at night,” Freya had stage-whispered, “And let them out.”

  Sad bunnies.

  Today, Tom asked: “What are all the bunnies for, Mum?”

  “They’re for eating,” Freya declared. Kay shot her a look in the rear-view mirror.

  Tom’s eyes flew open. “People eat bunnies?”

  “Yes,” Kay confirmed and braced herself. The next ten minutes would be questions.

  “Mum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you eaten bunny?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it taste like?”

  “Chicken.”

  “How do they cook it?”

  “Like chicken. It’s just meat.”

  What do you do with the fur, do you eat the ears, do you eat the bunnies with vegetables, roasted or what, are the bunnies afraid, why not just eat chicken, does it hurt the bunnies to die?

  Sometimes there were lots of bunnies. Then, a day later, only a few. The shed had a door, and the door was open, a white extension cord leading inside.

  Today there were many bunnies. Tom strained against his seatbelt, trying to see.

  “How do they kill the bunnies, Mum?”

  “They smash their heads,” Freya offered up. “On the edge of a table.”

  “Freya!”

  “It’s true.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Okay. Wow, you’re right, Mum. They cuddle them to death.”

  Kay finally caught her daughter’s eye in the rear-view mirror, a gaze too certain for an eight-year-old. “Your brother’s only five, Freya. Maybe we can just not talk about certain things in such a graphic way.”

  “But I want to know.” Tom leaned forward. “How do they kill the bunnies?”

  “They probably do bash them on the head. It’s very quick.”

  Freya made choking noises and Tom lashed out at her. “Kakakakaaaakka,” Freya continued.

  “Freya! For God’s sake!”

  “Sorry!”

  Tom was mournful. “Sad bunnies.”

  “I wonder when Dad will be back.”

  Kay turned up the radio, the station Freya liked, just to make her quiet.

  Kamp Wahoo was one exit down the interstate, on the outskirts of the small town of East Montrose. There was no West Montrose, no south or north or even Montrose. Perhaps there once had been, when the area was prosperous from wool. East Montrose had four churches along a half-mile strip—the old wealth shown in their brickwork, the height of their steeples. Now, all but the Congregational was shuttered.

  A dozen fine, old homes introduced the town on either end; a few were even now in good repair. Layered back from the main road—the congregants who knew their place—were smaller homes, quaint at first glance, but Kay began to see the shabbiness each time she passed: the peeling paint, the missing roof shingles. This wasn’t disrepute, merely an indication that most people here didn’t have 20 grand to repaint their houses. They were working the low-paying jobs of a rural economy. A few cars were offered for sale in front yards; their wheels had already been traded for something more necessary.

  Railroad tracks hemmed the town on one side; freight trains shuttling up and down the eastern seaboard to Canada only 50 miles north. The Connecticut River bordered the other side, and was famed to Freya and Tom for its ice cream stand, Foxy’s.

  Many of the old brick buildings that comprised the center of town appeared empty, the store fronts blank-faced or FOR LEASE. Aside from two fabric shops selling quilting and knitting supplies, there was a drug store, White’s Supermarket, the Gas n’ Go, and a bar, the Dirty Ditty. Side roads Kay had yet to explore suggested other options, though not many: a thrift store, childcare, various social services, fire and police, perhaps a dentist.

  Past the park, at the other end of town, Kay joined a line of cars funneling down an avenue of cedars. In its term-time incarnation, Kamp Wahoo was a small private school, an old farm house and barn converted into classrooms and a gym. From June through August it was the domain of Phoebe Figgs, an energetic, loud woman who understood the symbiosis of order and chaos. Certain kids wanted to sit and draw pictures all day or make necklaces from only pink beads; Mrs. Figgs never interfered. But she also organized water balloon fights, and then let them play out with borderline Lord of the Flies intensity.

  Freya and Tom, used to the constraints of London, of uniforms and private school, adored her. Every day they ran from the car, forgetting Kay in an instant, hurling themselves at Mrs. Figgs, who expertly rebounded them toward the warm Pop-Tarts and chocolate milk that counted as the inclusive camp breakfast.

  Kay drove home the long way, by Claremont Hill, a narrow, winding road, past fields and dairy farms, where the hills layered into the horizon with perfectly diminishing clarity until they seemed to dissolve, the pixels fragmenting into sky.

  Turning into the driveway, she noted a pick-up parked several hundred yards inside the gate. She slowed down, stopped even with the truck, old and battered, rust like cancer from bumper to bumper. “Hello?”

  No one answered.

  She got out of her car.

  In the truck bed were chains and traps. She glanced through the cab window at beer cans and fast-food containers. There was a gun rack with no gun.

  “Hello? Hello?” She banged her fist on the side of the truck. “This is private property.”

  Kay turned and he was right there, a foot behind her, silent as a fairy-tale troll in a filthy ball cap. She could smell him: old sweat, slept-in sweat. He pushed past her, ran his skinny hand over the side of his truck where she’d thumped it.

  “Who are you?” she challenged. “What are you doing here?”

  His age was difficult to determine, given the unkempt beard, the appalling teeth. He could be 50 or 70.

  Seeming to ignore her, he walked back into the thick bramble. There he collected his bounty, hefting them onto his shoulder: two dead coyotes. Their grey bodies hung limp, crude, bloody gashes across their forepaws where they’d been caught. He’d shot them at close range, a careful bullet through the eye to avoid damaging the fur.

  “What are you doing here?” she repeated.

  He passed her, answering her stupid question by swinging the dead animals into her face, so close that she could see the texture of the fur, matted with burdock, but also flecked in a tweedy multitude of greys. Deeper in, the root fur: a golden hue.

  “I’v
e children,” she protested. “I don’t want guns and traps.”

  He still did not reply, tossed the coyotes in the truck.

  “Do the owners know you’re here?”

  Now he laughed, bearing his speckled gums. “The owners,” he snickered. “The owners.” Then, as he opened the driver’s door, he assessed Kay—a long, slow slide of his eyes that had nothing to do with sex.

  When he’d reached his conclusion, he slammed his door, gunned the engine, the truck jumped forward. Given the narrowness of the track, he nearly side-swiped Kay’s rental car; but he kept one set of wheels high on the verge, mowing down the brambles, and bounced off toward the main road.

  *

  “Hello? Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “Alice, it’s Kay Ward.” Kay stood on the toilet, angling her head against the window to keep reception. Her hands were shaking; she was angry.

  “Oh, yes, hi.”

  “I’m trying to get in touch with the owners of the house.”

  “Is it the kitchen tap? I’m so sorry, Al’s been meaning to get up there, but his arthritis—”

  “No. It’s not the tap. Someone’s trapping coyotes up here.”

  “Coyotes?”

  “Yes, coyotes.”

  “That’ll be Ammon.”

  “I’d like Ammon to stop.”

  “Well, coyote season is year ’round.”

  “Then perhaps he could trap when we’re not here? Next month?”

  “The coyotes do a lot of damage to the deer population if you let their numbers get out of control.”

  “Do they? The thing is, we already had to put down a cat that was stuck in the house with a trap.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “So it’d be great if I could talk to the owners, and they could ask Ammon, you know, to take a break while we’re here.”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Kay could hear Alice cupping her hand over the phone, a muffled exchange, a long silence. Then Alice’s voice, soft and hesitant: “I don’t know where they are right now.”

  Kay shifted her weight on the toilet seat, careful to keep reception. “Do you know who might know?”

  “They keep themselves to themselves.”

  “But surely someone—”

  “No, no one.”

  “No one?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Do you know Ammon?”

  “He won’t be no help.”

  “Maybe I could talk to him.”

  But Alice had hung up.

  *

  In the hall, Kay stood on a chair and unscrewed a light bulb. She grabbed the flashlight from its designated hook and stepped down into the basement. The flashlight in her mouth, she screwed this bulb into the empty socket, jogged back to the top of the stairs and flipped the switch. The basement blasted with light, almost blinding in its whiteness. Now she could see the workbench with scrupulously labeled and ordered drawers. The metal shelving holding only the two Walmart tubs. The floor, the walls, all glossy white, gleaming, clean. The word surgical came to mind.

  Kay ran her hand over the workbench—not a trace of dust—and pulled open the “Screwdriver” drawer to reveal screwdrivers ordered by size, aligned. Another drawer held chisels and files, the same perfection of order for six further drawers.

  There’s something special about tools, she thought. Duct tape, zip ties, chisels; they have their secret menace.

  She shifted her focus to the two plastic tubs: the quilts and “Union Bank 2009–2016.” This was surprisingly heavy—heavier than one would think for five years of bank statements.

  Embracing the tub, she leveraged it to the floor. For a fraction of a second she checked herself. Michael had once said she was the type of person who saw a black garbage bag on the side of the highway and wanted to know what was inside. And at any rate, it wasn’t the financial information she wanted, but names. She opened the tub.

  Inside were recipe books.

  Heavily used, the pages were warped by egg or sauce or flour. Additional recipes from magazines or on notecards were stuffed inside so that the bindings bulged. She began to sort through them; the worn books were oddly comforting, with their patient, objective prescriptions, their luscious photographs.

  Was it the wife who liked to cook? Cakes, cookies, pastries, pies, barbecue; most especially, she loved to cook Mexican, four books, two in Spanish, two in English: La Comida Yucateco, The Best of Tex-Mex, Comidas Nutriciales para La Familia, Beyond Enchiladas.

  Just as Kay was about to put the cookbooks away, The Joy of Cooking burst its seams, disgorging dozens of clippings of recipes. As she stuffed them back into the book, one in particular caught her eye—it was handwritten:

  Hello Maria! You said how much Frank and the boys loved the fudge. This recipe is super easy, just make sure you store it in the fridge. Hope to see you soon! Candice.

  Maria, Frank, the boys.

  The names immediately yielded faces to Kay, as if she’d found photographs. Maria was dark-haired, Frank and the boys blond, sandy complexioned. The boys had freckles, they were lean from running around outdoors. Like Frank. Frank worked in the woods, on the land, he cut the firewood. He was a useful man. Handy. He made things with his tools. Maria was softer-edged, a woman with a name ending in a vowel, whisking eggs in a bowl. Up here on this hill, where they kept themselves to themselves.

  Kay put the note back. She drew a breath. There were pivots, she knew. You didn’t suddenly find yourself in a war zone or a marriage or a basement ransacking someone’s stuff and wonder How did I get here? You got there in increments, decision by conscientious decision, turning left or turning right. You couldn’t be sure where you were going, only that you were going, you were choosing to go. Methodically, then, she searched the house.

  But the closets and the drawers remained empty or ordered, the shelves still had no books, the walls were still bare. She was reminded of the house in Nairobi when she and Michael had left it, emptied, abandoned, just a structure—wood, plaster, glass.

  Looking around her now, Kay wondered if Frank and Maria had moved out and Alice simply didn’t know or was being discreet. Perhaps divorce, those long winters, cloistered in by the snow. Perhaps financial hardship.

  But: why leave the tools? The handmade quilts, the cookbooks? The photograph above the sink? Because these things mattered most? Or because they mattered not at all?

  She thought of the empty villages of northern Uganda, the abandoned towns of her previous life: the extraordinary stillness of the air because the dust, unstirred by humans, had settled so completely. You could tell how much time people had had to flee, days or minutes, by what they’d left.

  At last Kay came to the hall closet. She reached in and took out the phone. It was decades old, the kind with the curly cord attaching the handset to the base. The base contained a voice-mail mechanism. Kay plugged it into the electricity. The phone’s memory-stored menu popped up on the handset: play message, answering system, directory, call log, ringers, settings. There was no recorded message, and the directory was empty.

  Again, she considered the strangeness of absence, it was systematic, like a crime scene wiped clean of every single fingerprint. Except: the call log yielded two numbers.

  She found a pen, scrawled the numbers on the back of her hand. Upstairs, on the toilet, took out her own phone, dialed the first. A woman with an accent—probably Latino—answered, “Guadalajara Grill, how may I help jew?”

  Kay hung up. A Mexican restaurant. She thought about the cookbooks, the plethora of Mexican food, the name—Maria.

  She dialed the second number.

  A man, this time: “Comeau Logging.”

  “Sorry, wrong number,” she mumbled, even as she Googled the name. The Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce listed the address: 5899 Jones Farm Road, Lost Nation; the proprietor, Benjamin L. Comeau.

  Suddenly, the phone rang in her hand. This startled her, not just in the present silence, but
as a sound she hadn’t heard in the weeks since she’d left London. No one had rung her. Summer had flung the few people who might have phoned her to other corners, Ibiza, Provence, Cornwall. She stared at the phone for a moment. Michael. Michael. Michael. The ringing stopped. He didn’t leave a voicemail.

  There was a better part of her that wanted to phone him back. His voice might reassure her: I haven’t left, I’ve only gone away, we’ll work this out. And she might extend to him, I’m sorry, I’ll try harder, come back, I’m here.

  But there was a thick membrane around that other Kay; she was a shiny doll in a package. Her imaginary presence was a rebuke to the Kay who squatted on a toilet like a gargoyle, her hair tangled in a messy bun, lacking the courage to answer a phone call from her husband.

  *

  Jones Farm Road was not on the way to Kamp Wahoo. Kay could not pretend to be taking the scenic route to collect them. She was deliberately driving in the opposite direction into this high, open landscape. Pastures tumbled into woods, rolled up against corn fields, a crazy quilt loosely stitched with old cedar fencing.

  As she drove on, the theme of the landscape seemed to change; or maybe she was paying attention. Here, she now saw, was poverty, not just hard times. Old farms struggled against the elements. A huge red cow barn sagged and slouched amid a debris of farm equipment and muddy cows. Fence posts tilted like drunks and plastic covered the windows.

  Further on a scatter of mobile homes, trailers, and dilapidated houses. Dogs on chains, piles of junk, old cars, tires, plastic toys. Kay was used to African poverty, refugee camps and shanty towns; she’d almost forgotten people could be poor in America. The lushness of the Vermont landscape obscured such despair, made it almost photogenic—rustic.

  Quite suddenly, 5899 flashed up on a fencepost—a mobile home tucked in a birch grove. She braked, then realized she could easily be seen. She drove on, another quarter mile, the road bisecting wide plowed fields, where it dead-ended. A murder of crows shrieked at her from a tree as she turned around. She drove back, slowly, aware that people around here surely knew each other, knew every car.

  From what she could assess on her approach, the home was not well tended. It certainly was not the business office of a thriving logging concern. There wasn’t a vehicle, but the door was open, and a boy of five or six was riding a Big Wheel around the house, all stamina and focus. Then, just as Kay was passing, a woman came out. Kay only glimpsed her, she was slim, wearing pink sweatpants and a pink tank top.