The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  A few miles outside town, he turned onto a narrow blacktop that took him back to the east. He passed brick homes on one-acre properties, their driveways done with white shell and gravel, and then he passed the drives to oil leases, the occasional farm. There were fields of winter wheat and cattle, and then the woods thickened and there were dense stands of blackjack and pine. The blacktop changed to gravel and then to red dirt, and the limbs of the oaks stretched above him, making of the road a tunnel or arch. Things were different out here. The people were different. They had the feeling of another time.

  Martin slowed and began checking the numbered stakes that had been hammered alongside mailboxes, two or three per mile. The county had just implemented a 911 program, and workers had to assign each residence a number. He passed 1302 and 1303 and then he drove down farther and the next stake he saw read 1305. He pulled into a driveway, backed out, and began going back the way he’d come.

  He saw the marker this time on the north edge of the road. The drive was dirt and the mailbox alongside it was just an aluminum rectangle and a length of two-by-four driven into the ground. No flag. Fuentes lettered across it in a back-slanted scrawl. He pulled in and went slowly back into the trees, two ruts worn by tires and between them a thatch of dead weeds. There were brambles and sumac bushes standing high on both sides of the drive. There were potholes he’d come up on quickly and have to jerk the wheel to dodge.

  A quarter mile down he emerged into a clearing and saw the house. It was a dark two-story, covered in sandstone and mortar. A Canadian Valley yard light was mounted high atop an electrical pole and it bathed everything in an acetylene glow. The dirt drive made a circle in front of the residence and he pulled around it and turned off the engine. He checked in with Nita, confirmed location, and then he just sat. Up on the second floor, the windows blushed yellow against their blinds. Trees surrounded the home. Their branches fingered its eaves and awning. On the front stoop a calico watched him from slanted eyes. Martin took a notepad from an overhead cubby and placed it in the pocket of his shirt. He tripped the door handle and got out. He stepped a few feet from the cruiser and then he stepped back. He opened the door, reached in, and fetched his radio. He shook his head. Since Deborah’s pregnancy, he often found himself forgetting. It was a matter of anticipation, nerves, and it violated Martin’s principal rule. Negligence was an extreme thing.

  There was a row of sandstone steps leading up to the door, twenty of them, twenty-two. They were worn at their center, beveled at the edge. Martin walked up and rapped twice with a knuckle. He waited a moment, knocked again. He could hear muffled voices that might have been a television, though he’d seen no antenna on the house, no satellite or dish. He lifted a hand to knock a third time and the door opened and there was a Latina woman standing on a woven cloth rug, clutching to her shoulder a very young child. She nodded to Martin and motioned him inside.

  He followed her through a foyer and into the living room. He followed her up a flight of carpeted stairs, past rows of photographs, across a landing, and down a hall. It was cold in the house and the walls were paneled in cedar. Everything seemed to carry that smell. At the last door on the left, the young woman stopped. She shifted her child to the other arm, tapped the doorframe, and muttered something in Spanish. Then she opened the door and looked back at Martin.

  “This is Nana,” she said.

  It was a small room, immaculately kept, and inside it was an antique dresser and rocker and a king-sized bed with a canopy and spiral-carved posts. It made the room seem smaller than it was. On the edge of the bed sat an elderly matron in a polyester dress, black hair pinned atop her head in an intricate bun. She was a thin woman, very short. Her feet barely brushed the floor. She had a handkerchief clutched in one hand and she was rocking slightly, shaking her head. The young woman went over and said something once again in Spanish. She spoke softly, and pointed at Martin, but the old woman looked at the floor.

  Martin placed his hat atop the dresser and pulled the tablet from his shirt pocket. He removed his pen and gave it a click.

  At this, the elderly woman looked up. She blinked several times and then began to speak. As she talked, her voice pitched higher. She spoke faster and faster, the words liquid, aggrieved.

  Martin waved briefly the pen and tablet. He told her he couldn’t understand.

  “No comprende,” he said. “No habla Español.”

  The young woman reached and placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder. She said something in a low voice, and then she said, “Shhhhhhhhhhh.”

  Martin stood there feeling awkward. Like a man broken in on a lovers’ quarrel or brawl.

  “What,” he heard himself asking, “is your name?”

  “Angelica,” the young woman said.

  “An-hey-lee-ka,” said Martin, writing.

  She palmed the back of the child’s head. Stroked it. The baby watched Martin with widened eyes.

  “Your mother’s upset,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “She gets like this?”

  The woman nodded.

  Martin smiled. He motioned for her to go on.

  Angelica glanced at her mother, and then back at Martin. She lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “It’s Thomas.”

  Thomas, Martin wrote.

  “He’s Nana’s grandson. We haven’t seen him. It’s been since Thursday night.”

  Martin wrote, Thursday.

  “Where are his parents?” he asked.

  Angelica shook her head. She removed her hand from her mother’s shoulder and made an ambiguous gesture.

  Martin wrote.

  “About how old?” he asked.

  “He turned fifteen in June.”

  “What’s his school?”

  “He doesn’t go.”

  “He doesn’t go to school?”

  “No,” Angelica told him, “he works at the course.”

  “The golf course?”

  “He helps with the greens.”

  Martin wrote this as well. He smoothed a hand across his chin. He asked the woman could she give a description.

  Angelica sat there a moment. She leaned over and whispered something to her mother. Her mother nodded. She blotted her eyes with the handkerchief, then climbed from the bedside, walked to the bureau, opened the drawer, and began shuffling through it. She took up something and turned and handed it to her daughter. The way you might present a thing made of glass. Angelica walked to Martin so he could see.

  It was an eight-by-five photograph, probably done for school. The picture was a headshot, cropped at the shoulders, but you could tell the boy was small for his age. He had dark hair and eyes. Fine features. Light brown skin. He was wearing a white T-shirt and he was smiling broadly.

  Martin studied the boy. His eyebrows and face. He looked at Angelica and tapped the photo against his chest. The aunt nodded and he slipped it inside his shirt pocket.

  “How long ago was it taken?”

  Angelica told him last year.

  “He look any different?”

  “No.”

  “How tall?”

  “Five-four,” said Angelica. “Five-five.”

  “About what would you say—hundred-twenty, hundred-thirty pounds?”

  “Maybe.”

  “He goes by Thomas?”

  “No,” said the woman. “He goes by ‘J.T.’”

  “J.T.?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  Angelica shook her head.

  “His last name,” said Martin, rolling a hand in the air. “His name name.”

  “Fuentes,” she said. “Javier Thomas. His father was a Harjo. He goes by our name now.”

  Martin wrote this on his pad. He asked what the boy was wearing when she’d seen him last. Angelica turned and asked her mother and at this the elderly woman began to weep. She went over and sat on the edge of her bed. She rocked slightly back and forth and smoothed her dress across her lap. Angelica t
old her not to cry. She said, “Shhhhhh, Nana,” but the woman didn’t stop. Her voice was coming louder and her shoulders shook. Martin stood watching. He wanted to say something, but it just felt wrong. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, stared down at the pad. Then he nodded to Angelica, picked his hat off the dresser, walked out of the room, and closed the door behind him. He went down the hallway toward the stairs. One of the doors he passed was cracked several inches and a light came from just inside. Martin stopped and pushed it back on its hinge.

  It was the boy’s room. There were pairs of sneakers in a row by the dresser. A small bed. A bedside table with a banker’s lamp and pull chain. The walls were covered in magazine clippings. The ceiling as well. One vast collage. Martin stepped in to better see. Clippings of golfers, equipment; of courses, sand traps, flags. There was a poster above the headboard of an oversized hole, shot from inside looking up—a circle of blue, and at one edge, the shadow of a ball on the cusp of the rim, ready to eclipse the ring of cloudless sky.

  Martin studied it for several minutes. He thought it must have taken years. He walked over to the wall and brushed his hand across its surface. There was a plywood table there serving as a desk. A lamp and a coffee cup of pencils. A dictionary balanced on end. It was an old dictionary, dog-eared, a hundred markers jutting from its pages. Martin opened it. He began to flip through. There were checkmarks beside words, some pages filled with checkmarks, definitions underlined. He went from the front of the book to its back. Then he sat it on the desk and went downstairs.

  On his drive back to the station, he rehearsed what Angelica had said. Once she’d calmed her mother and come back down to talk. She told how her nephew had fallen in with a rougher crowd. How his friends were older, larger, and Thomas wanted so badly to impress. He was a good boy, she said. It was his circumstance. No car, no money. It was being half Chickasaw, half Latino, always in between.

  “He doesn’t have nothing,” said Angelica. “All he got is us.”

  Martin took down the names of J.T.’s friends. One of them he knew. Christopher Herring. He’d had to call his parents one time, issue a warning. And he thought what Angelica told him was true. Perser was a dying town. Sixty-nine hundred people. It had boomed to thirty thousand back in the twenties, but then the petroleum market fell and the jobs along with it. The only industries were the oil patch and a factory outside the city limits that made blue jeans and boots.

  It was easy to see why a teen might run from that.

  Harder for Martin to see how he could not.

  It was after midnight when he unlocked the front door, stepped quietly inside, and hung his keys on the peg. The hallway flickered with a cool electric light. Martin took off his boots and placed them on the tile next to Debbie’s. He walked onto the carpet in his socked feet and rounded the corner into the living room. The television was on and the sound was muted and Deborah lay stretched in her recliner. She had two blankets, but she’d kicked them off in her sleep, and her T-shirt was pulled up, exposing her stomach. Beside the chair, on the craft tray, her newest model—this one an F-4 Phantom she’d painted camouflage and gray. Martin could see she’d finished the cockpit that evening, begun applying decals, final touches of paint. It looked, to him, very good.

  He picked up her sweatshirt from the floor and draped it over the back of a chair. He stood there, watching her sleep. She had black marks on her fingers from where she missed with the brush, black marks on her chin. Martin doubted she’d even notice. Some women would not have liked it, but Debbie, she was more concerned with the planes. She’d served in the Navy aboard an aircraft carrier during Desert Storm, and in the third month of her pregnancy she’d begun to build models and hang them in the baby’s room. There was the F-4 and an A-6 Intruder. An F-14. A tank-killer with a fifty-caliber gun, though Martin couldn’t recall its name. They dangled around the crib from pieces of fishing line, an entire squadron. She’d done two models in the past week, sitting in her chair eating ice cream and watching movies on HBO. Martin saw a stack of Styrofoam bowls on the coffee table. He smiled to himself and leaned down to kiss her navel, which had just begun to pucker and point. He found the remote next to a row of model kits from her most recent trip to the store. Martin tried to buy them for her, but he only got the wrong ones. He once bought her a kit for a commercial aircraft by mistake. It was a 747 and Debbie wasn’t interested enough to even take it from its wrapping. She only gave him a kind look and shook her head.

  “I don’t like it if it doesn’t shoot,” she said.

  He woke in the night from a dream he could not recall and sat up in bed with a start. There was no light in the house and he could hear his wife sleeping beside him, the rise and fall of her breath. Martin rubbed his eyes. It was warm in their room and he was sweating. His T-shirt was soaked. He struggled out of the garment and let it fall to the floor and then he sat there, studying his feet. In his dream, something had been threatened, but he couldn’t remember what. He still had the feeling, though. Used to be, it was with him all the time. About his brother. Martin had lost him very young. He sat there, thinking. An image of willow leaves and cicadas and morning on the Arkansas River. Pete’s head disappearing beneath the surface. The sheriff marveled. He hadn’t pictured it in quite a while.

  He took a clean shirt from the drawer in the nightstand and slipped it over his head. Their bedroom window looked onto the east side of the property, down through the oak grove toward the pond. You could see water now the leaves had fallen. The reflection of moonlight. He lay back against the mattress and thought about the boy and it seemed the creep of something was out there in the dark. He started to get up and go down the hallway, but then he reached out and placed his hand on Deborah and found her stomach. He touched it lightly, not wanting to wake her. Beneath that layer of skin and fluid, his son. He’d seen his ghost image on the sonogram two weeks before. Martin thought about that. He leaned and placed his ear very close. He’d do that sometimes. Lean over while she was sleeping and listen. His first marriage had ended with a stillborn boy. Martin moved closer. He listened for a while and tried to recall his dream. Deborah stirred and mumbled something, but he didn’t understand. He meant to turn and ask her, and then he was asleep.

  THOMAS SPEAKS

  I had this feeling then my father was underground. I don’t know why, exactly. I think because of Nana. Something she said. I think when I first asked she told me this thing in Spanish. I can see her talking: her lips dry and her eyes moist, her mouth, when it moved, like the jawbone on a dummy. Hair dyed black. Norteño skin. She smoothed her palms across her lap and called me Thomas. I could smell her perfume. My love for her was a fierce, hurting love. That was how she taught me. She pulled me close and said my name and pressed me against her. She is a small woman, but she can seem so large. She spoke of my father and his death. And the way she said it, I knew it was to make it softer. Try and make it right. She didn’t want to say he was dead, exactly. She didn’t want to say buried.

  And so he was subterráneo, she told me.

  Underground.

  The truth is he died in prison. It was after Mama passed. He was out West working a pipeline and he was accomplice in a triple murder. I don’t know what they mean, “accomplice.” If it maybe means he helped. He went to prison, though, and he had diabetes, and he went into shock one morning, and that afternoon he died. I was a baby. Nana says we got a letter and his belt buckle and a check for one hundred thirty dollars. I never knew what for.

  When I was five I came home and asked Aunt Angelica. I didn’t know what a father was. I thought he was something to do with school. She was standing at the counter, slicing tomatoes for supper, and I asked her, and she stood there like she hadn’t even heard. Then she finished slicing and wiped her hands on her apron. She wiped her knife on a towel. She coughed a couple times, cleared her throat. She went up the stairs and talked to Nana.

  And then Nana talked to me.

  Maybe I listened wrong. Maybe it was
because I was young. She sat me down and talked to me and that night I dreamed about him and the next day was when I knew.

  That my father was beneath things.

  That he was underground.

  I walked around the rest of that year. I was in kindergarten and I didn’t like to talk. They sent me home with notes about it, but still I didn’t change. There were gopher tracks on the schoolyard, all these humped little trails. You could step down where the earth was bubbled and put your foot into their cave. Tunnels. I didn’t know it was stupid. What I knew was my father, and I decided he lived down there and he’d made himself small. I’d walk the playground, around by the fence where there was barbed wire, and all the other kids would be on the monkey bars or seesaws, or they’d be playing tetherball, or football, or maybe even tag. But me, I was following the tunnels. I was dropping down and digging with my fingers. I was tracking burrows, pawing the earth, finding not my father, but dark that kept going. And every time I dug, I thought I would find him, and every time I didn’t I was maybe a little glad, because that meant I still could find him, and it was like he was always there.

  OCTOBER 2006

  Early autumn sunlight. Leaves edged in amber. Hickson reaches between his knees and levers the mower into first. He makes a pass along the fence at the rear of his property, lowers the deck, and comes by the flower bed on the yard’s east side. He cuts another swath, two feet in width, then brakes, shifts into neutral, and steps off the rumbling seat. The air has a crisp scent to it. It smells, to his mind, of clover or cane. Hickson kneels in the grass, making a tripod of his fingers, pressing them into earth. The green blades scratch the webbing between his knuckles and Hickson tests again. Uneven patches. Dips in the ground for which he’ll have to adjust. He rests a moment, then places his palms on the ground. He brings his temple within an inch of the lawn and sights carefully toward the house.