The Underneath Read online

  “Jake!” she yelled. “Get the fuck in the house!”

  She clocked Kay’s car. Kay swiveled her eyes straight ahead, assumed a befuddled expression, she was a wayward tourist trying to find the Great Corn Maze.

  10

  OCCASIONALLY, BEN SPECULATED ABOUT SLIM’S private life. He must be rich after 30 years as a dealer, but he still ran the Dirty Ditty, still drove a burgundy ’91 Mercury Grand Marquis. Somehow he got it past state inspection, even with Bondo around the wheel wells. The vehicle was so old it had a cassette player, and Slim still had cassettes: Motörhead, AC/DC, very early Nine Inch Nails. Guns N’ Roses was playing at lullaby volume. Was Slim married, did he have children? A cat, a dog, a fish? Ben imagined he owned a Caribbean island, and one day he’d just vanish from East Montrose. The Dirty Ditty’s gum-eyed regulars would show up, but the door would be locked, they’d wait mewling like abandoned kittens in the stairwell.

  Ben and Slim were parked at a pullout on Diamond Hill opposite the old cemetery, one of Slim’s favorite meeting places because he could see cars coming in either direction and he could peruse the old gravestones. The compilation of loss refreshed his perspective on life’s ephemeral nature, he’d said. But also: time absolved all sins, even drug dealing. The children affected Slim most. “Infant boy, died 1823,” he’d tell Ben. Or, “Ester Rose, 1801–1805, Thou art in Heaven. Tragedy.”

  Slim lit up a Cool, exhaled as he spoke. Nonchalance was important to Slim. “Tried vaping the other day. Thought, ya know, the modern thing, gotta keep up with the times and all. But it’s not the same thing, is it? I slept with a girl with fake tits once. Didn’t realize till I got her home, they looked great but it woulda been like tryin’ to tit-fuck a couple of basketballs and who wants that?”

  Ben nodded, who indeed. But Slim wasn’t looking to parley, he did not care for anyone else’s ideas or opinions. He was not a friend, not even an acquaintance. He was a drug dealer. And, so, by association, was Ben. Ben wanted to excuse himself, he didn’t feel like a dealer, or how he imagined Slim to feel: sly, confident, wary, mercenary. In the beginning, he’d been resentful that he’d had to do this, but people had worse lives, people had cancer, people lived in terrible countries with terrible wars. Now he felt pretty much nothing, he didn’t even try to get his head around the irony of being a heroin dealer. Generally, he considered irony the universe’s most powerful force, stronger than gravity. The most ironic thing that could happen was usually what happened.

  Slim was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, though—Ben noticed—not in time to the music. “We gotta problem, Benito.”

  A car drove past, a ferrety old man in a battered Subaru Outback with a big mutt-dog riding shotgun and Bernie for President stickers all over the bumpers. The dog glanced at Ben and Slim as it drove by and let out a self-important bark. “NPR-listening mother-fucker,” Slim mumbled, then barked back, a sudden wild, manic lurching and Ben smelled the panic smell of Slim’s sweat.

  When the car had gone and silence resumed, he turned to Ben, his voice calm again: “Feds.”

  Slim had endured because his instinct for narcs was exquisite; he could smell them on the wind like a turkey vulture scenting carrion. Ben listened up.

  “Some new task force.” Slim sucked his Cool. “Undercover bitches.”

  Did Slim mean bitches as in women agents, or, in a more purely misogynistic sense, that all undercover agents were bitches?

  “Your friend, Frank,” Slim said.

  “Frank, yeah?”

  “You trust him?”

  “Frank is not going to talk to the cops. I guarantee it.”

  “Guarantee?” Slim snorted. “He dead, then?”

  “I’ve known Frank a long time.”

  Slim merely smoked his Cool, tapping, tapping out of rhythm. “The other guys?”

  “Ed and Moses?” Ben shook his head. “They’re solid.”

  “All I know is this shit is deep undercover. Jacques Cousteau, like.”

  “You want to hold off?”

  “Nah. We’ve gotta shift it now. This week. Get rid of it. No phone calls, no connections. Eyes on, Benito, eyes on. We do not get careless. But we shift it fast.”

  “Gotcha,” Ben said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Slim reached into his glove compartment and handed Ben a brown paper bag. “Per your request. You would not believe the range of merchandise available. You can even get rabbit piss. The internet, eh? They’re catheterizing bunnies. There is some sick shit out there, man.”

  Ben took the bag, made as if to pay. But Slim waved him aside, “It’s on me. It’s got a trace of THC.” He started the Marquis, the engine rumbled, throaty, well-oiled and tended. “Agnes Gillman, 1842–1869,” he went on. “Baby’s buried right next to her. A real heartbreaker.”

  After Slim had gone, Ben waited in his truck—20, 30 minutes, watching the woods, listening. Deer couldn’t stand still for more than five minutes, and a person got shifty before that. Chickadees, squirrels scrabbling in the understory, a downy woodpecker looping over the cemetery. There was no one here, Ben was sure, but he waited another ten minutes, just the same.

  The old man and the dog passed the other way in their Subaru. DEA agents, Ben mused. But that was the point, wasn’t it? You couldn’t tell. They weren’t going to show up here in suits and cheap ties, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some felt-shoed liberal and his dog in a clapped out Subaru, pretending to listen to Fresh Air with Terry Gross: the perfect cover in rural Vermont.

  Grabbing his backpack, Ben got out of the truck and entered the cemetery’s small gate. The stones were lopsided, some had fallen over. He walked among them. Dead babies, dead children, Vermont’s hillsides were their catacombs. They had once died of disease and cold winters; now they were punched in the head, thrown against walls. Or their deaths were slower: spite, meanness, left out with the dogs.

  Ben looked around at the trees, the dappled light, waving leaves, the grass under his boots, tightly woven, newly mowed. Someone kept the graves, trimmed the weeds, remembered the dead. He found Agnes Gillman and her dead baby. He slid his fingers under the gravestone, listened hard for the sound of a car, the crack of twig under-foot. Nothing, silence. He pulled on latex gloves, lifted up the granite, took hold of the first plastic-bound brick, slid it into the backpack, then the next, the next, all six, all six kilos. Why kilos? This was a joke he had with himself: only drug dealers and Canadians used metric, and Canadians used Canadian metric. As he replaced the headstone, he felt the desolation of Agnes. She’d only been 19.

  He drove to Ed’s, he kept checking his rear-view mirror. It was a bad feeling, nervy, like tweeking. He remembered his mother once, after a bad eight-ball, the carpet burns on her face from peeping under the door. The windows of the motel were all blacked out, but there was a quarter-inch gap under the door that let in daylight. She’d been convinced Satanists were coming to get her for their next human sacrifice, so she knelt on her elbows and knees for hours, moving her head back and forth, back and forth on the crusty shag rug, watching every shadow. You watch the shadows, Benben, the shadows coming in here, the shadows moving too fast.

  It was easy to lose the ability to tell fact from fear, and it was easy to see patterns. Patterns felt safer than the random. It was also a matter of self-importance: to put oneself at the center of a scheme just because that felt better than redundancy. Still, Slim’s fear crawled all over him like ants. Cops. Undercover bitches.

  Ed was tinkering with his chainsaw carvings. Seeing Ben, he turned off the saw. “Howya?”

  Ben pulled to a stop, nodded to what might be a giant, angry squirrel. “Looking good,” he said.

  The carvings were an idea Ed’d had to make extra cash. He set up a display at the local fairs carving the sculptures, Indian heads, turtles, and such, attracting mostly lost children and solitary men in camo. He was nimble and quick with the saw, but he had no flair, no “eye” as the arty people called it. He made the bear’s head so big it looke
d deformed; the turtle’s shell too small, a mutant. That didn’t matter with Ben, Ben didn’t need a frigging artist.

  Ed smelled strongly of iodine from cleaning the teats of his dairy cows. It was a smell that never wore off; you couldn’t wash it from your hands. After backing the truck up to the cow barn, they unloaded the drugs into garbage bags as the radio played country and Western for the cows, and they stored the bags deep within a stack of hay bales. It wasn’t hard work, but the afternoon was hot, and they were sweating.

  Ed clapped his hand on Ben’s shoulder, “You want some Newman’s Lemonade? I just opened a fresh tin.”

  “Sure,” Ben replied.

  They turned toward the house as a Ford Focus with out of state plates drove past, heading fast back toward the main road. A woman, Ben ascertained, coming from the dead end, coming from the direction of his house.

  “Lookie loo,” said Ed.

  Ben watched the car until it turned the bend, out of sight.

  11

  Freya and Tom were waiting outside Kamp Wahoo with Phoebe Figgs. Kay was 20 minutes late. “I’m so sorry.”

  Phoebe had been with 60 children for more than eight hours. She was unimpressed. “Pick up is between 4 and 4:15.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  But Phoebe looked like she knew otherwise.

  On the way home, they stopped for ice cream at Foxy’s. Tom, with his Moose Tracks, leaned against her, and Freya, with her vanilla chocolate dip, sat close enough for Kay to place a hand on her thigh. Freya didn’t move away, she softened, put her head on Kay’s shoulder.

  “Mum, when can I get my ears pierced?”

  “When you’re 11.”

  “But Najma already has hers done.”

  “Have we already had this discussion? I seem to remember—”

  “Please, pleeez, Mum, everyone has pierced ears. I’m like a freak.”

  Tom mugged: “When can I get my ears pierced?”

  “I think your nose.” Freya pinched it for good measure.

  Then the phone rang.

  Kay knew who it was.

  “Mum, Mum.”

  She should tell him about Ammon. She should say, “You know that trap? I met the kook responsible.” She should tell him about the basement and Frank and Maria. They would have a chat, a conversation, back and forth, they would wonder, they would puzzle over it, conclude together.

  “Your phone, Mum.”

  Tom tapped her thigh.

  Freya grabbed her handbag, rummaged inside. “It’s probably Dad.”

  The ringing stopped. Freya held the phone aloft. “It was Dad.”

  A car drove past, a dog leaning out the window, smiling and barking, tongue out. Kay watched the dog. Who was to say it was well-treated at home? Only that moment of being mattered, the open window, the smells striating the air, the rush of wind on its fur. The car turned into traffic, abandoning Kay to herself and the dark, oily matter that filled her.

  She smiled at her daughter. “We’d better call him back, then.”

  “Daddy!” They said when he answered. “Daddy!” How complete their delight.

  “I’m learning to dive,” Freya told him. “I have to go up on the diving board and it’s really high, and the first time I got water up my nose, and it was, like, the worst ice cream rush ever.”

  When Tom’s turn was done—a long story about a child at camp who’d choked on a carrot stick and Mrs. Figgs had hit him on the back and the carrot popped out all covered in green gunky stuff—he handed the phone over to Kay. “Dad wants to talk to you.”

  “Hello.” She wondered if the children would note her formal tone.

  “I’m sorry to ask you this.” He didn’t sound sorry. What did sorry sound like from Michael? “But I need you to pay Pearl Street Digital. Take it from the general account. I’ll send you an email with the details.”

  “Of course, no problem.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. We’re all fine. And you?”

  “Delayed in Schipol. Severe winds over the Sahara. Flights canceled.”

  Kay wondered if this was a euphemism for a boutique hotel in Amsterdam, two days with Barbara, wandering the canals arm in arm.

  “I’d better go,” he said.

  She didn’t hang up right away; she was certain there must be something else to say. He was still speaking, but it took her a moment to grasp that he was not speaking with her, his voice muffled.

  Accidentally, he hadn’t disconnected the call. He was saying, “Has Morton got those permissions yet?” to someone else.

  To Barbara?

  Has Morton got those permissions yet?

  His life out there, his Action Man life of permissions, permits, locations, sandstorms in the Sahara. While she groveled on her knees disinterring apple cores from the sofa. Did Barb, in her chic Italian culottes, know what happened to a doll’s hair if you held it over an open flame? Did she know it wouldn’t go nice and curly; rather it would shrink and wad in a stinking mass and the doll’s face wilt like old wax? Did she know how to comfort a child holding this Burn Victim Barbie? The pathos required?

  Kay swallowed hard. Her bitterness appalled her. She ushered her children toward the car. As if there was urgency, purpose. But there was only dinner and the savage mortality of motherhood.

  12

  Sam and I slept together a number of times, we were casual lovers, there was never an obligation. The first time: in the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala, 2001. We’d come back from the north, child soldiers previously employed by General Christmas being returned and reintegrated into their villages. It was a powerful story of forgiveness and redemption: these children, who’d committed atrocities, who’d had atrocities committed against them, trying to navigate their way back to normal life. Their communities were terrified of them. Everyone was deeply traumatized. But the kids just wanted to go to school and play football.

  My whole career had been so steeped in the human propensity for violence that I’d overlooked the equal pull toward contentment. People really do just want to get up and have a cup of tea and feel the sun on their faces and know they won’t be raped today, they won’t eviscerate or behead today, they’ll just hang out with friends and talk about the weather and watch sparrows pecking at bread crumbs.

  We had no desire for each other, Sam and I. Stumbling into the Sheraton’s lobby, we were filled with sadness and hope, utterly polarized emotions. We were used to anger or cynical disgust, but the hope was like a dare. We’d been caught up in the kids’ resilience, as if a nine-year-old really could come home from war and study geometry, and his aunt wouldn’t look at him through the blood-stained filter of her memory: what he’d done—what he’d had to do—to his mother and father, the glint of the machete, the thud and slice of a blade against skin and bone.

  It’s a simple choice, the returning children seemed to say: choose life, choose peace. I remembered a quote from Simone Weil—“Love is a direction, not a state of the soul,” and I repeated it to Sam, that the children of Gulu proved it was all direction, all free will. I could read his mind, how he wanted to say, “Let’s come back next year and see how it’s gone to shit when the kids can’t find jobs and the trauma starts to leach out in its insidious, inevitable way.” But he didn’t, he swallowed the cynicism and took my hand, and we very calmly went to his room.

  *

  Kay stopped herself. Even without shutting her eyes she could see the scene, she and Sam, the hotel hallway with its lurid carpet, its missing light bulbs, the smell of old room-service food—always French fries. The hotel, with its history, so that it was more than a hotel: a shrine, a memorial. It didn’t matter that the carpet was new, the walls repainted, that the country had had two different presidents since. Memory couldn’t be erased so easily, especially here on the top floor, she and Sam, strolling, a little drunk, not looking at the fire door at the end of the hall that led directly onto the roof. Because there was video footage of Idi Amin swimming conten
tedly in the hotel’s pool, surrounded by sycophantic white businessmen. Those men knew Amin threw his victims from the hotel roof. Sitting at the poolside bar, they could hear the screams. One of them complained about the noise.

  She and Sam, opening the door to his room, couldn’t quite pretend that the past had not happened because it had.

  Shall I write about Sam and I? She wrote.

  The sex was terrible. Shall I confess how the story never made it to print, “Too much child soldiers stuff,” our editor declared, because The Sunday Times Magazine had just run a piece about child soldiers in Sierra Leone with sexy black and white photos of ragged, dead-eyed boys carrying weapons that weighed more than they did.

  A photograph of a 14-year-old former Christmas elf learning to sew could not possibly compete. Her gonorrhea-scarred uterus, her nightmares, her tremors, her astounding bravery—these were not visible to the camera.

  So the story—The Truth—remained the stolen children, the violent children, the horror, the exciting, rubber-necking horror of General Christmas and his mirror-shaded cohort. It confirmed and conformed the Africa we created and continue to create with every story.

  Afterward, Sam had tears on his face. We should never have had sex, only held each other, my head on his shoulder.

  Or—Or—I could make up a romance, a daring love affair, Sam and I? Isn’t that the better story? Not a lie, exactly, but a harmless rearrangement of the facts. I should throw in a road block, scary black men with guns, and how we traded Sam’s Rothman cigarettes for our lives. Fear makes you horny, an atavistic desire to fuck, having survived near death, or in the face of it, or in spite of it, or surrounded by it. Someone—name lost, face unremembered, a fellow hack in a bar—suggested this was why soldiers rape. It’s a desperate response to fear, the same force that sent us scurrying to our hotel rooms with bottles of tequila and condoms—the relentless irony of being human: death and life, horror and pleasure, linked together like little plastic beads.