The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  They found nothing.

  The boy was gone.

  Late afternoon, untangling himself from a patch of briars, Martin ascended a hillside grown with moss and looked down at the slender stream beneath. An old man was sitting on a rock below him watching where the water dropped a foot or so and curved into a sandstone bend. The man was tapping the ground between his feet with a dry hickory limb, and Martin climbed down and stood beside him. His name was Enoch Malcoz, and he wore a cowboy hat fashioned from straw. Blue jeans. A blue western shirt. His silver hair braided and drooped between his shoulders, the end tied with a dark color of twine. The man’s ginger skin creased sharply at the mouth, sagged below the chin, but his eyes were fiercely alert and he seemed never to blink. He had young hands. Young shoulders. The sheriff adjusted his gunbelt and crossed his arms to his chest. The old man didn’t look up.

  “What say, Enoch?”

  “Sheriff,” said the man.

  Martin glanced idly about. One of his deputies and two of the Chickasaw teens working for Enoch were examining a hole in the creek bank about forty yards down.

  “You decide you’d come out and help us?”

  The old man nodded. He knocked the tips of his cowboy boots with the length of hickory. “Should’ve worn my shoes.”

  Martin hiked his trousers and sat. He would see Enoch most days in town. The man was a writer of some repute, an expert on Native American folklore and myth. His books were shelved in libraries across the country. Not that he needed the money. He’d inherited mineral rights from his family. A drilling company. Disposal wells and gas. The Malcozes had settled Perser before the Land Run. They were the city’s first tenants. They’d dug the first cellars and laid the first bricks. A story had it that they’d descended from conquistadores, from a Dominican priest who’d gone native in the New World, abandoned his religion, taken an Indian bride. Enoch acted as mediator between tribal and civic authorities, and Martin had often gone to him to help settle matters that sheriffs and courts could not.

  “How is Deborah?” Enoch asked.

  “Good,” Martin told him. “Real good.”

  “When’s she due?”

  “Late February, they’re saying. Early March.”

  “Girl or boy?”

  “Boy,” said Martin.

  The old man coughed. He turned to brush at something on his shirt.

  They sat a few moments. Martin asked what he thought of all this.

  “Feels bad,” Enoch said.

  “Yeah,” said Martin. “Does to me too.”

  He looked up at the canopy above them, the leaves turned and some fallen, still thick enough to block the sky. You could just see these fragments of blue.

  “Did you know the boy?”

  “I knew him,” Enoch said.

  Martin nodded. He thought the man would say more, but he didn’t.

  The deputies had moved around a bend in the creek. It was just him and Enoch.

  Martin cleared his throat.

  “We first got the call, I kept thinking he was a runaway. He doesn’t turn up in the next couple days things are going to get ugly.”

  Enoch prodded with the stick. He said things were ugly now.

  Martin looked at him a moment. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Ask,” Enoch said.

  As Martin opened his mouth to form the words, the crack of a gunshot came from down the creek. He and Enoch stared at one another and then they stood and began walking. They topped the rise and went down through the blackjacks, past large shapes of sandstone that stood out from the blanket of fallen leaves like ancient creatures curled into themselves, frozen. Below them stood two of his deputies and two of Enoch’s hands. There was a thin hump of fur at their feet that Martin recognized as a dog and then as a coyote. Lemming and Bunker hovered over it, Bunker with his pistol drawn, and the Chickasaw teens—just boys, really—stood back a few feet, grim expressions, tightened mouths. When he saw Martin coming, Lemming began to shake his head.

  “Annie Oakley,” he said, jerking a thumb toward Bunker. “Shoot his way to stardom.”

  The sheriff walked up to the coyote, started to lower himself, then stepped back when he saw her side rise and fall, heaving. There was a dark red circle beneath her right shoulder and a trickle of red pooling onto the dirt.

  “What the hell?” Martin said.

  Bunker pointed. He was a squat man with red hair and pimples. He was twenty-five and his stomach overhung his trousers by several inches.

  “Sheriff,” he said, “it come at me.”

  “Come at you,” Lemming mocked. “Didn’t come at you. You surprised her, and she took off running.”

  Martin was watching the animal. Her ears were pinned back against the skull and you could tell she was trying to move her head, but couldn’t. She kept baring her teeth.

  The sheriff gestured at the Glock forty-caliber in Bunker’s right hand. “Why don’t you put that away,” he said.

  The deputy looked at the pistol as if surprised. He holstered the weapon and then snapped the strip of patent leather across it.

  Lemming stared at the man. He leaned over and spat. He glanced at Martin, raised his eyebrows, and Martin studied the animal a few seconds and nodded. The deputy unholstered his sidearm and the boys turned away. Martin also turned, placed his fingers to his ears. Enoch had his fingers in his ears also but he was still watching. The gunshot came. The report echoed back through the hills. Enoch pointed to her stomach.

  “She’s got pups somewhere,” he said.

  The sheriff glanced back over. Six swollen nodes of pink, fur moistened around them in circles.

  “Shit,” Martin said.

  Bunker began to glance nervously about him.

  “What?” he asked. “We got to look for the kids?”

  Lemming shook his head. The Chickasaws stared.

  “That’s right,” Martin told him. “You can start by going fetching a shovel.”

  “Where am I going to get a shovel?” asked Bunker.

  Enoch told them he had one in the bed of his truck.

  The deputy looked at the ground a few moments. Then he crossed the stream and went up the hill, crunching through the leaves.

  They watched him go.

  “Fucking dumbass,” Lemming said.

  They spent the next half hour searching for the den. Enoch said it would not be far. He said it would be a burrow, a narrow place under rocks.

  He was right. On the far slope coming off the creek bank they found a worn area beneath a sandstone shelf, a groove rubbed into the earth below the rock. The stones there were large and weathered and lodged against each other, broken. Martin thought they might be able to move them, but they were too big. Bunker came back about an hour after he’d left, walking toward them with the shovel, and Martin took it from him and then sent him for their supper. The deputy knew enough not to complain. Coyotes were sacred to the tribe. You couldn’t grow up in Oklahoma and not know it. The trickster, escape artist, Indian folklore was full of his tales. Chickasaws had elaborate rituals for dealing with their burial. They would avoid places the coyote had died. They’d been known to move their homes.

  The old man knelt at the den’s entrance. He’d borrowed Martin’s flashlight and was gazing under the rock. He kept sweeping the beam back and forth until he saw the reflection of eyes.

  “Are they in there?” Martin asked.

  Enoch bent farther.

  “They’re in here,” he said.

  They tried digging out the entrance. They tried loosening one of the stones and going in toward the back. Finally, Enoch had Lem tunnel in the side, move one of the smaller stones, then pry another up. He reached down and began to hand the pups out one by one. Their mother had been gunmetal-gray, but her pups were darker, brown and black. Their heads were belled, the ears small triangles of fur, the snouts yet to elongate, with that almost flattened look. Thick hair. Eyes still closed. Their stomachs swollen with fat. Enoch stood at Lem�
�s elbow with the flashlight. He kept up a kind of monologue as he fetched the animals out.

  Coyotes, he said, they went to ground early. They were alert, nervous creatures. Hunted at night. Rabbits and rodents, fish and birds. He’d known coyotes to eat leather. Their young.

  They could be taken and made into pets. Enoch had known it to work. The thing about them, some you could raise just like a dog. Some would be inevitably wild. Others occupied a liminal space. They would be gentle for a while, docile while they grew. Then they would turn suddenly and revert. Like deep down they were a wild thing and were only biding their time.

  The sun had just dipped below the horizon. Daylight was failing. They sat around the den, each with a pup in his lap, the two boys, and Lem, and Martin, Enoch leaning against the rock and holding a pup to his chest, stroking a thumb along its spine. As if this were no longer a search, but a lecture or outing. Enoch continued speaking. Martin looked up at the man from where he sat against a tree cradling the pup between his knees, listening, the woods going dark. It was like he’d been granted a reprieve from looking and it occurred to him the case had been a sentence, or he’d borne it that way, heavy, hard. It was a sentence because he wanted so badly to find the boy and he seemed to know he absolutely would not. That knowledge and the desire battered against one other and built. With each day of nothing—no details, no leads—the responsibility grew. The guilt.

  Martin sat there, stroking the pup. It was full dark now and they’d have to find their way back by flashlight. Birds called from the tree limbs. Sleek-feathered crows. They would squawk to one another in their lost lonely cries, and then carry their black bodies off into night. You would not see them at this hour, only hear from above you the flapping of wings.

  He left the courthouse the next evening and drove east on 270. The autumn sun had yet to go down and the air outside was crisp and cool, the sky shifting toward a darker shade. A strange cast, thought Martin. The color of veins. He went past the city limits and then past the brick plant. Trees thickened and in the hollows beside the road a mist rose and curled about the oak branches and pines. He began to meet cars with their headlamps shining and in his rearview the clouds blushed crimson.

  Martin drove. He thought about the boy. He’d woken that morning and it was as if something had settled onto his breastbone and begun pressing down. He kept trying to swallow it, but it couldn’t be swallowed. The sheriff crossed the bridge by Tanner Creek, tires clicking over seams in the pavement. Up ahead, 270 turned toward Holdenville, but Martin kept to his left. Another five miles and he entered the town of Wewoka.

  At the edge of the city, on the hill before you descended, there used to be a sign. Ryan’s Pig Stand. Old fashioned barbeque. The sign was now missing and the windows were boarded and all along the west side of the building were gang signs and graffiti and etchings in the cinderblock. Caricatures. Cartoons. A rat spitted on the fangs of a rattlesnake. Martin watched the fresco smear by. He slowed his vehicle and pulled into the right-hand lane.

  He took a left on Mekusukey and then another onto Park. He turned onto Ocheese and went down the street, studying homes. Many boarded up. Others with bars over the windows. Some with lawns choked by garbage, by weeds. He passed one house where a child sat in the fork of an elm. The tree was near limbless and the boy was perched six feet off the ground with his knees braced against the peeling bark. Martin waved to the boy but the boy didn’t wave back. He just sat there, staring.

  He drove the streets for the next half hour. Okfuskee and Jackson. Sasakawa Avenue. Mekusukey was the central thoroughfare and like Perser’s it had been built from brick. This street, however, had seen little maintenance, and sections of it were roped off and blockaded with barrels. It was full dark now and Martin went slowly. Streetlamps glared atop their poles, many of them shot out or shattered. Up there, the building that used to house the theater. Next to it, what had been a pharmacy. The establishment had a full-sized fountain and twelve leather-covered stools. The counter was a one-inch marble slab. He stared at the building, the windows painted over, one of them bricked up and boarded. Convenience stores and supercenters had sent all of it under. Little left to the town. A few bars and pawnshops and a local drive-in at which there were shootings. The sheriff had wanted to see what Perser could come to. As if it might purge him. He hooked a U and went back down the street.

  Back on the highway, Martin thought about the boy. He thought about his brother. Ten years of age, on the banks of the Arkansas, Martin had led Pete into the shallows hunting bait. They had turkey necks tied to pieces of butcher twine and Martin had a gunny sack hitched at his waist. Pete had just turned seven the previous week and he’d begged Martin to take him along. Early that morning they walked to the river and followed it back into the hills.

  They were about ten feet apart and Pete kept trailing. Martin would have to watch to make sure he kept up, that he didn’t walk into deeper water, that he didn’t get caught by driftwood, debris. He’d just glanced back, was going to tell him to come closer, and the boy took a step toward him, and then turned and looked upstream. Water dripped from a tuft of hair that lay lank across his forehead. Crows called in the distance. Pete twisted his neck and stared at Martin. He smiled, edged forward, and then vanished as if through a trapdoor.

  Martin had reached for him, but he was no longer there. Circles rippled from the place where his brother had stood. Overhead, the limbs of a willow arched out and dipped.

  Sunlight.

  A slight breeze.

  Other than this there was nothing.

  Later, their pastor would explain:

  Holes in the riverbank, covered with silt. Just their mouths covered, and beneath them pockets of air. The river swells and in the shallows, sometimes, you will have these spaces, weak patches along the floor. Step onto them and the bottom gives way. You tunnel down, the earth filling in above you, water filling. You are pressed tight and suffocated. In this way you are drowned. They will have no means to find your body. There is no way to look. Sediment clouds the surface and then is swept away. A series of bubbles. A few fragments of loam. In several moments, the river clears.

  Martin didn’t know this. He’d never heard of silt traps or sediment. He’d splashed back and forth through the shallows, screaming. He dove down again and again and when he came to himself, spots swam before his eyes. There was no body to bury and the casket at the funeral was just for show. His brother was down in the earth somewhere, hidden beneath the river. Martin’s mother and father would look at him sometimes and Martin could barely look back. They said it wasn’t his fault. An accident, they said. Beyond his control.

  He made his decision very young, what he would believe of the world, and what Martin didn’t believe were accidents. He didn’t believe the way his parents would have him believe. They said he wasn’t guilty, but Martin, he decided different. He didn’t know enough, he decided. If you knew what was waiting, you could equip yourself to face it. If you knew the effects, you could trace them to their cause. What you didn’t know, what slipped by you, this would only drag you under. Worse: it would sink the people under your care.

  He went into law enforcement for just this reason. His principle was that nothing occurred without motive; nothing occurred without giving sign. He’d seen it time and again. Working in the Marshals Service. Working under Casteel as deputy and undersheriff. Each event trailed evidence like the arrowed ripples that accompany fishing lures across a pond. Track the wave and you discover the thing itself.

  On the Arkansas that morning, there were no traces, and Martin had made his way frantically through the shallows, grasping into the water at likely images, reflections broken in the current. There was a space of time he couldn’t remember, and then he found himself sitting on the riverbank with knees pulled to his chest. Sitting in the sunlight and shivering, staring while water ran and birds called and cicadas buzzed from the bushes. Everything outside him moving as before, everything inside frozen, gone entirel
y wrong.

  THOMAS SPEAKS

  So I went to see Him. I couldn’t stop my thinking. I’d go to sleep and dream Shampe. I’d wake and there He’d be. It might’ve been a story to some people, but it wasn’t one to me. He was under the bushes at my middle school. In the storm drains and cellars. He lumbered in the dark patches of the evenings, slipped from the shadows of oaks.

  One afternoon, I ducked in an alley on the way home from school. I was in eighth grade by then and I had to take the buses. Angelica would get me up around five and make my breakfast. She’d clean and dress me, pack a second meal for my walk. An apple. Some kind of fruit. I’d walk a mile down the dirt road and then another on the blacktop till I got to 99. I know Nana worried about it, but there wasn’t another thing to do. From there I went another two miles along the shoulder of the highway, and then the bus from Harther, a little country school that only went to seventh grade, would take me to the airport on the hill. That was the city limits. A Perser Public School bus would pick me up, take me on in to town. If the driver topped the hill and I wasn’t standing there, I’d have to walk another mile.

  That afternoon, though, I decided to skip the buses. I decided to go ahead and walk. I went up Orchard Street, down the hill by the supermarket, along Malt Phillip until I hit the park. I cut across by the derrick, went down another alley, then on down Main Street toward the square. It was Enoch’s place I was going to and I could already see the tops of his building.

  It’s a big one, Enoch’s. Wide and tall. The sandstones old and faded, some red, all of them cobbled together like a street.

  I went up and went past it, crossed to the post office, and sat my bag on the steps. Then I sat. I sat there and stared.

  Pigeons were perched on stones above the arches.

  Glass in the windows reflected cars.

  I went back the next day, but I didn’t go in. I went back the next and the next.

  Fall went on by. Winter went by. The spring came and the dreams of Shampe wouldn’t stop. Thinking wouldn’t stop. I’d never gotten a grade in school lower than an A. I was on the Superintendent’s Honor Roll and I was in the Merit Club. I was in Math Club, Science Club, History Club.