The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  I knew that this was ready to change.

  And this is how:

  I’m the kind of guy, I could get all A’s.

  I’m the kind of guy, I could get all F’s.

  I could get all one thing.

  Or I could get all of the other.

  What I couldn’t do was mix.

  So the grades slipped. I slipped. Everything started falling. Because of Mr. Enoch.

  Shampe.

  It was May and school was almost out and instead of going to the bus that morning, I cut across the fields. The sun was coming over the trees and I remember the grass still had slivers of ice. It was cold for that late in the year. My breath like fog. I went along the east end of the golf course, down the street, over onto Main. I walked up to Enoch’s building. It looked different in the morning pink. There was a glass door on the north end and I opened it and stepped inside.

  It smelled old. Everything molded. There was a steep staircase that went up and up. A threadbare carpet. Wood-paneled walls. I climbed the steps and came onto a landing.

  To my right was a hall with doors on both sides.

  To my left, a man standing.

  Mr. Enoch.

  He said, “Follow me.”

  I didn’t answer. I stepped right in behind him and we went down the hallway, up another flight of stairs, past several doors, and into a room with tall windows and rocking chairs and a half-finished painting on one of those stands. I don’t remember what it was a painting of. I didn’t ask. He pointed to a rocker and down I sat and my heels just touched the boards. I scooted forward in the chair. I scooted back and put my feet on the rungs. I couldn’t get comfortable. Enoch sat in the rocker beside me and looked out the window. You could see the post office down below.

  “Thomas,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say back. I didn’t know he knew me, or how he knew to call me Thomas.

  He did, though.

  I just sat.

  He leaned over and took an apple from the windowsill. He pulled a knife from his pocket and began to slice it into quarters. He didn’t remove the seeds like Nana. He didn’t even remove the stem. He made four quick cuts, wiped the blade along his pants leg. He handed across a slice.

  I took it and nibbled the edge and we sat a few moments, chewing.

  Then he asked me what did I want.

  I looked at him. I opened my mouth to talk. I didn’t really know how to say it. I didn’t know where to start.

  And so the first thing I told him was that my father was dead and the next thing I told him was that I wanted Shampe. To know about Shampe. More, at least, than what I knew. I said I’d heard him talk at Powwow and he’d spoken of Shampe and that this was why I was here.

  He turned to look at me.

  His eyes were gray.

  His mouth a thin slit.

  “Why do you want this?” he asked.

  I sat there, trying to think.

  I asked how he knew my name.

  He smiled. The only time I’ve seen him do it.

  He put a slice of apple in his mouth. He brushed his palm along his thigh and stood and walked across the room. He took a leather book down from a shelf and then he came back over. He sat and began thumbing through.

  Then he said—a question, almost: “You are Chickasaw?”

  I told him my father was Chickasaw. I told him my mother had been Spanish. Or she spoke Spanish, rather. That she was Mexican. I said that I was half of both.

  This time it wasn’t a question.

  “You are Chickasaw,” he said.

  I sat there. I felt my hands begin to sweat. I felt like I was floating. As though it wasn’t even me.

  He said he’d known my father. My father and his father before.

  And then he said I was a special kind. Or I’d had special things create me. He used an Indian word I can’t remember. Very old word. Very odd. He translated it for me, said it was no surprise I’d be drawn to Shampe, for finally, I was one of him.

  I stared out the window.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “It means,” said Enoch, “it is not the fault of your father or mother. It is not the fault of your grandmother or aunt.”

  “Why?” I asked him, my voice going thin.

  “It is a calling,” Enoch said.

  I sat there and thought about that. My panic was growing.

  A few minutes passed.

  I put the apple in my mouth.

  Finally, I turned to him. I asked if he could make it go away.

  “The calling?” he asked me.

  I told him the pain.

  He nodded. “This suffering of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “This hurt?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You feel as though there is no place for you. As though you will never find a home.”

  I am ashamed to say it, but then I started weeping. I wept out of fear and panic, because I’d known there wasn’t a home for me, and now here was Enoch, and he said the same thing. Or his words said it. I’d wanted this man to show his secrets and all that came out were my own.

  An Underchild.

  This awful calling.

  I could feel my heart running faster and that buzzing in my temples.

  He was right. There was no way out of it. No over, across, or through.

  There was always this thing inside me.

  And now I knew its nature.

  I even knew its name.

  “What do I do?” I asked him.

  “Go under,” Enoch said.

  NOVEMBER 2006

  The next morning Hickson wakes to find his pickup egged and the tires let out. It is a few minutes after six and the sky in the east is a pale shade of rose. Hickson circles the vehicle in his bare feet and sweatpants, pausing to scratch his thumbnail against dried splotches of white. He walks in the house, changes into his boots and jeans. He starts the coffee and goes to the bathroom. On the vanity, next to his toothbrush and razor, a small plastic container with seven compartments, the days of the week lettered across. Hickson opens THURSDAY, fishes out two salmon-colored capsules, and downs them with a palmful of water. He stands there staring at himself in the mirror. His blond hair thinning in its crew cut. His beard growing darker. Dark circles beneath his eyes. He turns and strikes the wall with the heel of his hand. He strikes it five times in quick succession. A picture rattles crooked in one corner. A light winks out above the sink. Hickson presses his hands together and brings his fingers to his nose. The thing that rises up and feels as though it will split the skin. Then fading. The fall-off and sink. He wipes the wet from his eyes and goes back into the kitchen.

  Outside, he wheels the compressor from the garage and fills the tires. He checks the pressure and then fingers the tread for cuts. He goes back through the front door, fills his thermos, drives to the car wash. It takes thirty minutes and five dollars to spray the egg off, but off it comes without taking paint. He spends another dollar on a wax cycle and then goes in to work. Seven-thirty by the dashboard clock. Hickson walks up to the clubhouse, starts the coffee, then sits at a table by the window watching the day compose itself, trying to force himself to breathe.

  Fog is evaporating from the hollows.

  Sunlight filtering through the limbs.

  Evening, he and Parks drive to Lowe’s and wander the aisles. It is a large store with massive ironwork shelves, a warehouse with aproned employees and concrete aisles. Smell in the air of sawn lumber. Paint thinner. Steel. Hickson tells Parks about the egging and Parks looks at him a moment and shakes his head.

  “Reptiles,” says the man.

  “Yeah,” Hickson says. “I got to empty the garage and see if I can fit in my truck.”

  Parks runs a hand over his stubbled chin and reaches to slap Hickson on the shoulder. Hickson rebounds a couple steps.

  “Brother,” says Parks, “you are having a time of it.”

  “I am.”

  “Way t
hey treat heroes these days.”

  “I guess.”

  They shuffle by a few aluminum structures, checking prices. An employee passes them wearing a back brace and matching suspenders.

  “Speaking of,” says Parks, “you going next week?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Come go with me.”

  “I’m not going down there.”

  “Only take a couple of hours. Dallas.”

  “Dallas,” repeats Hickson. “I didn’t like those people when I was marching alongside them.”

  At the end of the row is a smaller shed, dark gray in color, a wide door and tented roof. The building kit is on sale for eleven hundred dollars.

  Hickson looks over at Parks. “You going?” he asks.

  “I’m planning on it. I talked to Captain Morley. You believe that? Captain?”

  “Been at it long enough,” says Hickson.

  “What is it now, ten years? Eleven?”

  “Well, you count it from ’90, ’91, ’92, ’93—sixteen,” he tells Parks. “No. Seventeen. It’ll be seventeen, December.”

  “Seem that long to you?” Parks asks.

  Hickson lifts the price tag dangling from the handle of a shed door and examines the writing on its back. He says it seems to him like yesterday afternoon.

  They purchase the gray shed and a broad-backed teenager loads the boxes into the bed of Hickson’s truck. They turn onto the interstate and Hickson accelerates to a mile under the speed limit and then sets the cruise. I-40. Semis passing in the left-hand lane. Bull-haulers. Cattle trucks and the occasional tanker. At the exit to Earlsboro, gas is three dollars a gallon. Hickson points to the sign and asks Parks does he see.

  “I see it,” Parks says.

  “How much higher you reckon it’ll go?”

  “I hope five dollars before it’s over.”

  “Yeah,” says Hickson. “I hope it does too.”

  He stares down the highway. Off to the side. New production. Lights, in the distance, of new drilling sites. Derricks surrounded by blackjack and pine. Hickson thinks theirs might be the last state that benefits. The rest of the world needs oil to feed it. Oklahoma continues to pull it from the ground.

  Parks turns and looks through the slider window at the bed of the pickup. He offers to assemble the shed while Hickson’s at work.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “No,” Parks tells him. “Give me something to do.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” says Parks. “Unemployment’s about to kill me. Wait too long, mess around, have to go back to work.”

  Hickson shakes his head. “I appreciate it,” he says.

  “Course.”

  “We’ll get settled tonight, I’ll show you where I was thinking.”

  “Over the hole, right?”

  “That’s the idea,” Hickson says.

  The following afternoon, Hickson is raking the sand trap on Sixteen when his walkie-talkie begins to shudder. He stares, a moment, at his hip, then picks it up and answers.

  “Come up here,” Dresser tells him.

  “What is it?”

  “Come the fuck up.”

  Hickson massages the space between his eyes and then clips the walkie-talkie back on his belt. He climbs in his cart and starts up the path. All day long it has been raining, the sky gray and pillowed with cloud. He turns up the trail by Three, makes his way across the bridge, then pulls into the lane and heads for the clubhouse. He sets the brake and puts the key in his pocket. He takes several steps, and then goes back to the cart and moves where he can see it from the window.

  Dresser has a five-iron yoked across his shoulders when he walks inside.

  “You’ll never believe what the fucker did now.”

  “What fucker?” asks Hickson. “What’d he do?”

  Dresser points to the window. He motions for him to follow.

  Outside, Dresser’s car is parked at the curb. New RX-7. A dark shade of cream. Tinted windows and chrome wheels and a personalized tag. From the front fender to the taillight someone has spray-painted crooked black lines. Curlicues and circles. The number 13.

  “He’s history,” Dresser tells him. “Done.”

  Hickson studies the car a moment. He shakes his head.

  “I had my truck egged night before last,” he tells the pro. “Some kids in the neighborhood—”

  “Fuck kids,” says Dresser. “You see that? This is gang.”

  “What gang?”

  “MS-13,” Dresser says. “CNN had a story on it. Mexican. Bad as it gets.”

  “You think a gang would—”

  “You know anything about this kind of shit?”

  “No.”

  “This is how they are,” Dresser tells him. “This is what they do. They’re the ones down here selling meth to first-graders.”

  “How do you know all this, David?”

  “I told you,” screams the man, “I saw all about it!”

  Hickson runs a hand through his beard and brings his fist to his mouth. He watches Dresser kneel in front of his vehicle and inspect the paint.

  “When’s he on schedule again?”

  “Monday morning. Monday afternoon.”

  “You going to wait and talk to him?”

  “Fuck, no,” says Dresser. “I’m calling the cops. I got to be in Tucson Sunday night.”

  “I hate someone did that,” Hickson says.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want me to see if I can try and get it off?”

  “Leave it,” says Dresser, “I’ll need pictures for the insurance.”

  Hickson nods. He stands there watching as Dresser squats at the front fender, licks a thumb, and begins to rub it across the paint. His reflection on the vehicle is an inverted smear.

  Hickson tears a sheet of paper from his tablet, writes the word well.

  He sits a few moments, writes the word hole.

  He writes shaft

  mine

  water

  coal

  He crosses out coal. He scribbles over mine. He begins drawing a picture, a diagram of sorts. He draws ground, in it a cavity, all sketched in profile, viewed from the side. A—what do they call it—silhouette. He draws for ten minutes and then he puts down the pen.

  In his picture, the hole extends beyond the bottom of the page. It looks like it keeps going.

  It can’t keep going.

  Everything has a bottom.

  It’s something Hickson believes. To know there is an end to things. At a certain point, boundaries. Things separate and divide.

  So everything has conclusion.

  Things don’t just appear.

  They have an origin.

  Cause.

  Hickson sits there and tries to think. He looks out the kitchen window and he can see, in the moonlight, the scaffolding of his shed.

  When he first came back from the Gulf, things seemed good. Karen said that they were good. It was a blur then, what happened there. He’d received the Silver Star for his troubles. Hickson didn’t need it. Being back was enough. Real showers. Real food. Many nights, he and Karen would lie in bed and talk.

  Then one day, driving to the store, his heart started racing and he broke out in a sweat. He pulled to the side of the road and something about the noise or the trucks passing, it felt as though he would leap from his skin. He scooted across the cab, opened the passenger door, and began to retch.

  The feeling passed. It looked, to Hickson, like it was just the one time. And then he was out with Karen, and he’d had, maybe, two and a half beers, and his eyes, of a sudden, began to twitch. The lights started to smear. They were sitting in a booth, laughing and chatting, and then something in Hickson separated, and he stood and walked from the room. He went outside. He thought he was passing. Karen was there by his shoulder, and she helped him to the pickup, and they never talked about the night again.

  It got worse. Hickson couldn’t sleep. Had no appetite. He couldn’
t stand to be touched. Karen, she’d want them to go do things, but Hickson didn’t want to do things. He didn’t want to be away from the house. She convinced him to see a doctor, and the doctor said he was having panic attacks. Anxiety. Depression.

  He prescribed Lorazepam for Hickson. Xanax and Paxil.

  The pills helped for a while.

  Then they didn’t.

  He began to retreat. It was like watching the world recede. Karen would be at the end of the bed, trying to talk with him, and Hickson would sink further and further behind his eyes. If he spoke with her, it was like having to ascend a flight of stairs.

  She said he needed to see someone, but Hickson wouldn’t do that. He was done seeing people. He sat in his den with a ray of sunlight slanting across his leg and looked at the yard. He sat there and sat there, losing track of his days. He was thinking of desert. Heat and windburn and scorpions the size of crabs. Burning pumpjacks. Burning flesh.

  And then he looked up one afternoon and she was standing in the doorway.

  She said that she was done as well.

  Karen left, and for two years, Hickson felt himself dropping. Parks was back by then, and the man would come over, bring him movies, beer. When Hickson attempts to recall the period, he can remember almost nothing. No conversations. Nothing you might hear or see or smell. A lost time. As if that section of his life had been clipped from the reel.

  And then one morning he woke and stepped onto his mower and cut a fresh swath of grass. He plied the brakes and looked back, studying the lines and angles, the perfect trail behind him, the world sliced into a rhombus of living felt.

  He sat staring at it.

  Then he levered the mower into first.

  He took a job at the golf course. He began to work in his yard. Crossing the greens, crossing his lawn, Hickson felt himself gradually balance. He felt, were he to stop moving, he would forever sink. It was not quite living and not quite dying. It was treading water to keep yourself afloat.

  Staring out the window, Hickson thinks about that.