The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  He sits, for a while, at the edge of the porch. Tries to think about options. With every option, there is the face of the boy spread prone on the tarp. Hickson sits there rubbing his palm back and forth across his scalp. If he goes to the police, they might make him a deal. Manslaughter, maybe. Reckless endangerment. He can’t be responsible. All he did was put him down the hole. It was a hole the boy had dug for himself. Hickson looks at the shed and wishes he hadn’t done it. That he could climb down some way, retrieve the body, bring it back up.

  He sits a moment. Perhaps he’ll get in the truck, drive to the courthouse, inform the sheriff. He looks over and he can see, through the glass door, Parks lying there on his couch. Hickson stands. He starts to walk across the deck, go back through the door, grab his keys, and get going, but something old encroaches, and he finds he cannot. Surrender is not a Ranger word. He sits back down and he can’t decide if it’s protecting his friend or protecting himself. Fear of police or fear of prison. He’ll go, in the space of a moment, from hero to monster. Worst kind of monster. The killer of a child. Whatever the case, he’ll do time. He knows what they do to child-killers in prison. They won’t care he didn’t swing the club. Everything in his life will be chaos and noise.

  Hickson won’t take that.

  He knows that would be the end.

  They didn’t mean, he thinks, to do what they did. It was J.T. who had vandalized; J.T. who’d provoked them; J.T. who’d dug the hole. It could just as easily have gone the other way. He or Parks could have fallen in. Who, after all, was under attack?

  It was Hickson.

  It was Parks.

  And thinking this, Hickson realizes. The problem is not the problem of should-have-been. The problem is the problem of now. It’s not fantasy. It’s not some other time. The boy is dead, his body gone, there isn’t any bringing him back. Hickson can ruin two more lives. He can wreck them over an accident, or he can use what his country taught him.

  He can stand up, dig in, defend what’s left.

  Or he can decide to give up.

  Go under.

  There isn’t, when he thinks of it, much of a choice.

  The tunnels are lit by torchlight, candles. The walls are of clay, clay packed beneath his feet, clay ceilings tapered and flickering in the flare of his torch. He holds one in his right hand and then he doesn’t. He is barefoot and he pads his way down the channel encountering, every several yards, hardwood braces embedded in the walls. He stops and runs a hand over them. The lumber is smooth to the touch, oily, almost teaked. There are thousands of bottle caps pressed into the hallway, rusting and dented, murals of some kind, portraits. He presses his fingertips against them and through the metal he can feel the vibration of voices, a tin can murmur that grows louder the farther he goes. The path widens. The walls extend. He passes branches that lead to the left and the right. He stays his course and continues walking.

  The tunnel broadens into a low-ceilinged room. Around the walls, like a Byzantine mosaic, broken bits of glass. Green and brown, all sizes. Bottle necks and bases, shards of window, fragments of jar. The light plays off a million serrated angles. The chamber smells of coal oil and clove. There are strings of white between the patterns of glass, enamel fault lines. They give back a curious gleam. He walks closer. Careful of the glass, he reaches out to touch one of the ivory threads. It is composed of pebble-sized marbles, but it seems they are not marbles. They are teeth. Human molars. Incisors. The teeth of rabbits and dogs. He retreats a few steps, and then slowly he turns. In the hall’s center, a hole opens in the floor. Symmetrical. Perfectly round. He skirts its edge, walks to the far side of the room, then comes back, crouching on his elbows and knees. He approaches the hole a centimeter at a time, clenching shut his eyes. He is on his forearms and shins; he is on his stomach. He leans his head over the rim and feels a breeze against his face. He opens one eye. Then the other. He awakens reversed in bed, head to footboard, vomiting.

  FEBRUARY 2007

  They drove east toward the town of Wewoka, this time to retrieve Ramrod from his home. The boy they called Ramrod. His real name was Herring. Dresser claimed the teens were responsible, and Martin thought he could be right. That he’d missed something. It was painful to think, but he had to think it. It’s what people would remember, that he’d let a murderer walk among them. Any good he’d done would be forgotten. A high standard and a hard one, but Martin thought it was correct. He would’ve had the same reaction if positions were reversed.

  They turned off 270 and took the lake road south. The last time they’d driven this way, leaves were falling. In several weeks they’d be coming back. Martin looked out his window and then he looked out Lem’s. The sun was bright and the oak limbs hanging across the road webbed it with shadow. Shadows crossed his deputy’s face.

  He thought if he was wrong about Charles, about Chris and J.T., if they were perpetrators and not victims; if a man died because of his mistake; if he, through sheer blindness, allowed such a thing to happen—Martin didn’t know. How you could take responsibility for such a thing. You could say you took responsibility, but what would that mean? My fault, you could say, and there would still be a corpse laid prone on its slab. There would still be the family grieving. An official could step forward and say it was on him, but that would only be partly the case. His office was a political office, but Martin couldn’t think of it that way. What it amounted to was real people, real lives, not your presentation to a reporter or a jury. It was how he’d spent his time as sheriff and it was how he’d continue to spend it, whether it got him reelected or whether it got him fired. Martin shook his head. It didn’t revive Hickson. It didn’t put eyes in his sockets or skin onto his bones.

  Up ahead was the clearing where the Herrings had their trailer. Martin slowed and pulled in. He thought he’d have to go through the routine of knocking and waiting, but the boy was out in the yard with the doors of his Camaro sprung open, cleaning the carpet. The hood was up and the trunk was up, and he had an extension cord running from the trailer, connected to a hand-vac. When Martin stepped from the car, the boy turned off the appliance. He sat it down in the grass. He took a rag from his pocket, wiped his hands, stared at the sheriff and his deputy a moment, and then he turned and began to run.

  “Shit,” Martin said.

  Ramrod was seventeen and skinny and he looked very fast. Martin chased after him. He’d played basketball in high school, but that was a quarter of a century ago, and now he followed Lem, huffing. The deputy hadn’t even broken a sweat. His expression hadn’t changed. He outstripped Martin and Martin was trying hard to keep up. He couldn’t. The boy made the tree line and then scrambled through the brush. Lemming was ahead of the sheriff, ten feet, twenty, and Martin tramped across the field in his cowboy boots, trying not to trip. He saw Lemming enter the woods and vanish. He clenched his teeth and ran.

  By the time he reached the black oaks, he was winded. The ground sloped a hundred yards or so, then kept slanting down. Martin weaved himself among the branches and spider webs, gasping for air. He stopped and leaned against a pecan tree to catch his breath. The air smelled of wet wood. Smoke. Someone nearby burning his trash. It’d been a dry season and you weren’t supposed to do that. Martin wondered should he stay here were the boy to slip Lemming and double back. Then he took his palms from the tree and began walking. He went downhill, breaking into a jog.

  The ground fell sharply. It led to a creek. Martin could see it running below him, the waterline visible on the rocks just above. He picked a path down to the stream and started to look for a way up the opposite bank. He reached for his radio, but he’d left it in the car. He shook his head. He stood there, trying to listen.

  Nothing but the sound of water.

  Birdcalls.

  The rustling of leaves.

  Then Lem shouting his name.

  Martin climbed the far bank and looked around. He began shuffling alongside the creek, calling back.

  “Over here,” said
the deputy. “I’m down over here.”

  Martin ran along the creek bank, and then, right in front of him, there was a sink where a smaller stream trickled down and the ground fell sheer. It was a gulch, maybe eight feet across, fifteen deep. At the bottom, Lem straddled the boy. He looked up at Martin and waved.

  The sheriff knelt.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Fast little booger,” Lem panted.

  “You get back up?”

  “Yeah,” the deputy said. He stood the boy to his feet—arms cuffed behind him—and walked him toward the creek. At water’s edge, the narrow ravine opened. They crossed the creek bed and started back up the hill. The boy walked in front of them. All along one pants leg, the side of his shirt, his left arm and his face, there was a streak of wet clay. Martin thought he must have slid through it. It was an almost perfect swipe.

  At the courthouse, Lemming cuffed the boy to the table in the room they used for interrogation. There were two chairs and the table and a window looking toward Main. There was a closed-circuit camera in the corner that ran to a twenty-inch television in the room adjoining. You could sit there and watch. A VCR would allow you to record. They didn’t use the rooms often. Martin was pleased they didn’t have to. He walked up the stairs with his coffee, crossed the room, passed the boy, then went over to the window. He stood awhile, watching late afternoon traffic. There was some sort of event down at the Lions Club, a cluster of vehicles along that side of the street.

  The sheriff blew into his coffee.

  “Why’d you run from us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the boy.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No,” the boy told him. “I don’t.”

  Martin turned and looked at him. He had straw-colored hair, pale skin. He’d taken off his sweatshirt and there was a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, graffiti letters, so run together Martin couldn’t read. He turned a little and then he could.

  Ramrod, they said.

  He shook his head. You’d get kids like this more and more. Farm kids, basically, pretending to be black. What they thought of as black. This amounted to what they thought of as tough, and tough, in Oklahoma, was currency of a special kind. In five years, the boy would be stealing, running crank. And if he lived long enough, he’d end up in the pen. There, in prison, he’d join the Aryans, and he’d emerge blaming culture for the waywardness of his youth. Martin saw it entirely too often. They didn’t want to take responsibility. It wasn’t, they decided, their fault. It was the Blacks, or the Indians, or the Immigrants, or the Feds. The Corporations. Oil Companies. The Ongoing War. It was everything. Anything. It made Martin sick.

  “Do you know,” he asked, “why you’re under arrest?”

  The boy looked up. “’Cause I ran?”

  “Right,” Martin told him. “That’s part of it.”

  “What’s the rest?”

  “Obstruction of justice.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That,” said Martin, “means you’re a liar. It means you’re a suspect in a murder.”

  “What murder? Whose?”

  “Hickson Crider.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Greenskeeper at Hesston. He was J.T.’s boss.”

  “J.T.’s boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know nothing about J.T.’s boss.”

  “Charles says you guys tagged him.”

  “Charlie is a lying sack of shit.”

  “You can tell him that,” said Martin. “My deputy’s on his way to pick him up.”

  The boy sat there. He shifted in the chair and then reached and scratched at his wrist. Martin studied him. He didn’t look like a killer, but the sheriff had been wrong before. Teenage boys. They behaved differently in groups. He’d trusted Charles. Had a feeling about him. Hickson’s death would be bad for people. A war hero. Decorated veteran. If Dresser started talking, and he most certainly would, Charles and Ramrod were going to have to be in protective custody. Whether they’d done anything or they hadn’t.

  “Come on,” said Martin. “You need to tell me.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I can’t prove it.”

  “Tell me about Hickson. You tag him?”

  “Yeah,” said Chris. “We tagged him.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “J.T. wanted.”

  “You did Dresser too?”

  “Yeah, we did Dresser.”

  “Dresser and Hickson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because J.T. wanted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why,” asked Martin, “did J.T. want that?”

  Chris dropped his head and shook it.

  “I can’t believe this,” he said.

  “What can’t you believe?”

  “This is America,” the boy told him. “It was just a prank.”

  “America,” said Martin. “Prank.”

  “Yeah. They were riding J.T. They were going to fire him. We just wanted to—”

  “What?” said Martin.

  “That’s it,” the boy said.

  “You realize that’s motive.”

  Chris fetched at his forehead.

  He told Martin he didn’t do it.

  “Didn’t do what?”

  “Kill anybody.”

  Martin moved from the window and sat at the other side of the table. He asked what about J.T.

  “J.T.,” Chris blubbered.

  “Go ahead.”

  “How do I get out of this?”

  “Out of what?”

  “This,” the boy said.

  “This interview?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell the truth.”

  “I told you the truth.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it,” the boy said.

  “Why’d you kill Hickson?”

  “I didn’t kill Hickson.”

  “Why’d you kill J.T.?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Didn’t kill anybody?”

  “No,” said the boy, “when’s this over?”

  “I told you when it’s over.”

  At this, the boy collapsed onto the table and began to sob.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. Don’t I get to talk to somebody? I didn’t kill anyone. Don’t I get a lawyer?”

  Martin stood. He felt old. Very tired. He slid his chair beneath the table and turned to walk out the door.

  At this, the boy quit crying and glanced up.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home,” Martin said.

  “What is it?” the boy asked him. “What’d I do?”

  Martin turned in the doorway and looked back. “You said ‘lawyer.’”

  “Do I get one?”

  “It’s America,” the sheriff said.

  On his way home, the sheriff hooked a U and went back up the brick streets toward Main. He took a right and then he took another. He drove down the alley alongside the bank, pulled the cruiser into a narrow space beside the Dumpster, and parked.

  He went down the sidewalk to the Malcoz Complex. He pitched his coffee into a nearby trash can and opened the door. The lettering read Rick Bell, Attorney, but Rick had been dead for a decade now. His partner had handled Martin’s divorce. Before that the glass had read Sheriff’s Department, and before that, something else. Martin closed the door behind him and crossed the foyer. There was a row of old mailboxes and Martin read the names and wondered how many of the people were still alive. He thought maybe none. The sheriff would be forty-five in August and that hadn’t used to seem old. Something was changing. He went up the flight of stairs smelling that stale institutional odor he remembered from grade school, a scent like detergent and sweat. He reached the carpet at the top of the stairs and then
went down the hallway, past doors with pebbled-glass windows, many still bearing names from the mailboxes below. Some were open. Martin could see bookshelves stacked with leather-bound volumes. Maps on the wood-paneled walls. He passed one room where there was survey equipment and then another where, on a walnut conference table, someone had built an elaborate scale model of Perser. The sheriff paused in the doorway to study it. The materials looked like the same materials used in railroad kits: miniature houses and trees, water tanks and buildings. Creek beds. Streets. There were even automobiles, figurines for tiny humans. The post office had been made of actual stone and there was an American flag the size of a paperclip flying from its dome. There were other flags on the model, larger, all black. They looked less like scenery and more like markers. The sheriff thought about the eccentricities of the rich. Then he thought eccentric didn’t say it. He shook his head and started back down the hall.

  At the sixth door on the left, Matthew Gables had been stenciled in an arch, and Martin paused here and knocked. He thought that much of his life as sheriff was knocking and waiting for folk to answer, wondering if they ever would.

  The door opened and Enoch was standing there in the light of the tall windows. He waved Martin in. The old man was wearing jeans and boots and a western shirt and his hat rested on a nearby table. Martin didn’t often see the man without it. His silver hair was parted down the center and pulled tightly into braids. The man pointed to a couple of rocking chairs that sat by the windows. You could see the street below, you could glance over and see the traffic. Across was the post office, people going up and down the marble steps. Martin went over and sat down and took his hat off and situated it on his knee. Enoch took the chair opposite. Martin had these things he was going to say and ask, but something about the view and the sunlight and Enoch sitting there beside him—Martin just sat for several minutes and rocked. Enoch sat beside him, rocking as well.

  “I need to get one of these,” Martin finally said.

  Enoch nodded. He lifted his palm and gently slapped the chair’s arm. “These,” he said. “My grandfather made them.”