Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  “Who, Richard?” I said. “Mr. Petrie?”

  “I don’t know—one of ’em.”

  “One of the clerks?”

  “Yeah—I guess. Some pimply little bastard.”

  “But who?” I asked again. I was beginning to smoulder. “Will you stop interrupting the boy, Albert! Let him tell it is own way.”

  “I kept tryin’ to get his attention,” Richard went on. “Then he said somethin’ under his breath and started shoutin’ at me. Said, ‘Let’s see your money.’ Just like that. Over and over again, ‘Let’s see your money.’ So I took out that bill you gave me. He took it and went in the back and stayed there a while. Finally he come out again and started waitin’ on other people.”

  “He didn’t come back to you?” I said, growing more furious by the moment.

  “No. Just went over to the others. People who come in after me. And started waitin’ on ’em. Just like I wasn’t there.”

  “But you asked for your money back?” Alice said.

  “I did. And he said I didn’t have no money. Said I had nothin’ and told me to get out—”

  “Did you go?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he replied, as much surprised at my question as I was by his answer. “Which one was it?” I asked, growing more and more livid as the story unfolded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “This pimply little guy.”

  “It wouldn’t be Petrie,” said Alice. “He wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not to us. We’ve given him so much business.”

  “Richard,” I said, “you did mention the fact you were picking these items up for me? You did mention my name?”

  He nodded, his head going furiously up and down.

  We ate our supper in gloomy silence. Richard scarcely touched his plate. Alice had made him a peach Melba that night. It was one of his favorites, but it remained untouched on his plate.

  “Don’t let it bother you, Richard,” I said. “We’ll drive over to Petrie’s in the morning and straighten this whole thing out.”

  Suddenly he stood up. It was a bolting motion that shot him to his feet. It startled Alice so that she dropped a coffee spoon into an empty dessert plate. In the next instant, without a word of parting, he turned and left the table. He went directly to his room.

  Alice watched the peach Melba dissolving slowly in Richard’s plate. “Poor boy. He feels so bad.”

  “He feels he’s failed us.”

  Alice turned a troubled face toward me. “I’m worried.”

  “Worried? About what, for heaven sake? I’ll go down there in the morning and straighten it out.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course. Petrie’s a good man. He’s reasonable. I’m sure there’s a perfectly plausible—”

  “Albert.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he’s telling us the truth?” She’d put her finger on exactly what had been troubling me.

  “At first, I didn’t,” I said without any hesitation. “But now I’m convinced of it.”

  She kissed me and then together we cleared the dishes from the table.

  “Mr. Petrie,” I said after several routine amenities. It was the following morning and I was standing at one of the counters of the nursery, a handful of people drifting about me. From where I stood I could look out into the greenhouse, cluttered with a multitude of blooms. Sun streaming through the glass transoms was transformed into a soft green diffusion of light. The air was moist and heavy with the dungy smells of fertilizer, peat moss, and verdant growing things. From somewhere in the greenhouse, a canary was singing its heart out.

  “What time did you say this was?” asked Petrie after I’d told him Richard’s story.

  “Around four P.M.”

  “Yep,” he shook his head emphatically. “I was here, all right. But I don’t recall no such incident. Leastways I didn’t see nothin’ like that. Tell me again what the boy looked like.”

  Again I gave him a fairly detailed description of Richard.

  “I’d sure remember somebody who looked like that.” He scratched his head.

  “Then you don’t recall him?”

  “Nope. Not offhand.”

  Petrie was not a good liar. His face flushed when I looked at him closely and he showed the strain of trying to affect a look of earnest concern. He could scarcely meet my eyes.

  “Maybe one of the other boys waited on him, Mr. Graves.”

  “Would you call them please?”

  His lashes fluttered like two moths above his eyes. “Ernie,” he called. “George.”

  Two youths converged on us from different directions of the shop.

  “This here’s Mr. Graves,” said Petrie. “He’s got some questions to ask you.”

  The one called Ernie was an oafish, shambling lad whose mouth hung open chronically. The other one, George was a smirking little character in his early twenties with excessively oily hair and bad skin.

  Seeing the two of them there—and with Richard’s vague description of a “pimply bastard” to go on, I put my money squarely on George. Even if I’d had no description at all, I’d have put my money on George. There was a slithering, conspiratorial thing about him, from his toes right up to his sleek, little bullet-shaped head.

  I related the story once again, this time for the two boys, making sure to present the whole tiling in the most innocent light. As if it had been nothing but the most honest sort of misunderstanding.

  When I finished I was staring into blank faces. The mouth of the one called Ernie hung open even wider in a look of total incomprehension. Both of them denied having any encounter such as the one I described.

  “Now, you’re sure,” said Petrie, addressing the two of them with a voice full of fraudulent severity, just for my benefit.

  They both nodded blankly, while all about them was the look of angelic choir boys.

  Petrie shrugged and looked sympathetically at me. “Maybe he went to some other nursery.”

  “No,” I said, “he came here.”

  “Might’ve lost the money someplace, somehow, and was too scared to tell you. You know how boys are—” He laughed.

  I was about to say something rude, but I checked myself.

  “Do you have any other sales help? Part-time people who aren’t here every day?”

  “These are the only two I got,” said Petrie. “Both good boys.” George was beaming unctuously at me.

  “Wait a moment,” I said and marched to the front door. I opened it and called out, “Richard. Would you step in here a moment?”

  He’d been sitting outside in the car. It was still quite early in the morning and there were not more than a half-dozen customers in the store. Richard’s appearance was such as to pull them all together into a small knot of gaping inquisitive people.

  I took him by the arm and guided him to the place where the two boys stood. “Richard, which one of these gentlemen took your money yesterday?”

  He pointed instantly to George. “That one.”

  “He’s a God damned liar!” said George, suddenly red in the face. “I never seen him.”

  Richard stiffened beside me. I now directed my remarks to Petrie, speaking as if George didn’t exist at all. “I’ve known Richard for several months now. I’ve never known him to lie.”

  “He’s the one,” said Richard, once again pointing to George.

  “I don’t know what he’s talkin’ about,” said George. “I never seen him. I don’t have his money. He’s crazy.”

  Richard started to move for George, who quickly ducked behind Ernie. The one called Ernie started to shuffle his feet uncertainly. It was a tense moment when I reached out and checked Richard. A low murmur swept through the store.

  “Mr. Petrie,” I said, “I won’t be able to do any more business with you until my fifty dollars is returned and I have an apology. At that time I’ll consider the matter closed and we’ll never mention it again. Until that time, I’ll take care of all my gardening nee
ds over in Banbury.” Petrie was flushed and a little embarrassed about the other people in the store. As he spoke he made a clumsy effort to appear very calm. But his eyes were more guilty than ever. There was a quaver in his voice. “Suit yourself, Mr. Graves, I’ll be sorry to lose your business.” When he stalked out, George was smiling again more broadly than ever.

  Driving home that morning, I sat fuming at the wheel, too furious to talk. Richard was also silent. But at a certain point, more than halfway home, he suddenly stirred and spoke: “I’ll get your money back.” There wasn’t a trace of agitation in his voice. It all had an icy calm to it. I should’ve heeded those words. I should’ve paid more attention to the almost nerveless, unfeeling quality with which the line was spoken.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “Petrie’s a sensible man. I’m sure we’ll fine a check in the mail in a few days.”

  “No, we won’t,” he said, then clamped his mouth shut as if he never intended to speak again.

  I slowed the car down and look sideways at him. “What did you say?”

  But he didn’t answer. He just sat there staring straight ahead at the road unfolding slowly before us.

  I knew he felt badly—responsible for the loss of the money and thinking that he’d failed us. He’d been gulled by a slick seed salesman and it bothered him. It would’ve bothered me, too—a sleezy, unctuous petty larcenist like George. Just recalling that nasty little smirk as we were leaving rankled me. I can imagine what it did to him.

  That afternoon I thought it was a good time to unveil my surprise. Shortly after lunch I asked him if he’d like to go fishing with me. To my surprise he said that he would. He seemed almost eager about it. But he said that he had no equipment. Whereupon, I went to the closet and produced a long cylindrical cardboard tube wrapped in gift paper, and handed it to him. I had had it sent out to me from town a few days before.

  He was clearly confused. He held the tube in his hand for a while, not knowing quite what to do. I prodded him gently to open it, laughing all the while. Alice came in and watched us. We both teased him until he fumbled with the strings and ties. Finally, standing there with the tube unsheathed and all the wrappings strewn about his feet, he had the look of a man who was defusing a bomb.

  He opened the tube and peered down the long black hole. Then slowly he extracted the new fly rod. At the bottom of the tube, he found a small box full of the finest hand-tied German trout flies. The way he held it and looked at it—all red and flustered and making little yip-ping sounds—was more reward then we’d ever dared to hope for. Alice and I just stood there and had ourselves a jolly good laugh.

  “Have you ever used one of these?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, that’s yours, then, and I’ll show you how to use it.”

  He appeared to be on the verge of speech, but nothing came. Rather than let him struggle any further for words of gratitude, I picked up his new rod and his box of flies, grasped him firmly under the arm and led him out the kitchen door to the drive, where the car was already waiting.

  We spent the afternoon up at a stream far back in the woods. You could drive up a dirt road to within a mile of it. From there on, you had to track out through the woods.

  It was a beautiful day. The forest, full of new foliage, was just beginning to warm up. There was a concert of peepers and crows yawping through the branches and you could smell the earth turning green all over.

  Richard walked several paces ahead, carrying most of the equipment. There was something about the way he walked through a track of wilderness. He didn’t walk so much as he loped, and he gave the impression that he’d been in those woods all his life and knew every inch of them. Although to the best of my knowledge he’d never been through this particular tract, he seemed to know just where he was, and exactly where we were going. It was very much like the day we walked out to the cave. He was in his own element. He owned the land.

  When we reached the stream, I demonstrated for him once the most elementary principles of fly-casting, then turned him loose on his own. At first it was odd and rather amusing watching his arm go up stiffly, and then the awkwardness as he paid out the line. But the awkwardness lasted only a short while. After an hour or so, he held the rod as if he’d been holding it for years. And when he cast, the rod moved as if it were apart of his body.

  I was astonished by his facility. “You’re sure you’ve never done this before?”

  “Just with a string and hook,” he said laconically. “Never with one of these.” He looked at the rod worshipfully, still not willing to believe that it was actually his own.

  We had a wonderful afternoon. At one point while we stood thigh-high in long rubber boots, a stiff, icy current churning the water white all around us, I shouted to him above the roar, “Who’s the man in the photograph?”

  He looked up as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “The photograph in your wallet,” I went on.

  “What about it?”

  “Who is it?”

  “My father.” He flicked his rod and the line arched out in a graceful curve across the stream.

  His answer surprised me. It was hard to think of Richard Atlee as having a father.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Dead I think.”

  “You don’t know for sure?”

  “No.”

  “Ever try to find out?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t care to?”

  “No.”

  All that conversation was conducted at a shout in order to carry our voices above the roar of the flood. But there had been an awful detachment about it, too. Awful, I say, when you consider the nature of the information being divulged. For a moment I thought, “How insensitive.” But that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t insensitivity. It was something else. Something else completely, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  He caught three superb rainbow trout that afternoon compared to my one scraggly specimen that I begrudgingly put back in. There was in him an almost unerring instant for laying down a fly precisely where a fish would rise for it. And most pleasing of all was the fact that he was totally unaware of how good he was.

  But in spite of his uncanny success, it was clear that he felt only the most tepid kind of enthusiasm for the activity. And that enthusiasm, I’m sure, was simply an attempt to please me.

  I can still see that rod of his bending thrillingly beneath the weight of a fish, the red-white bobber skimming frantically along the top of the froth, then going under. The line paying out father and farther—then suddenly, thirty yards down stream, a sleek, silver knifelike shape breaching water poised in mid-air; then the majestic weight of it, flopping back down with a loud, gorgeous splash—

  I was wild with excitement, shouting him instructions he really didn’t need. Then when he had it heavy and heaving in his net and had clapped the creel cover over the great whomping weight of it, he seemed to be standing outside of his triumph, aloof and remote. It was as if someone else had caught the fish. I looked at him a little strangely.

  When we were ready to go, I asked him what he wanted to do with his trout. He handed them all to me, strung on a line.

  “Give them to Missus.”

  “You caught them. You give them to her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Go ahead. Don’t be foolish.” I thrust them back at him, and in that moment I saw something very close to terror in his eyes. I took back the fish and put them into my creel. “All right, Richard, I’ll give them to her. We’ll have them for supper tonight.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Several times in the days that followed, Richard asked me if Petrie had refunded my money. I couldn’t report that he had. Then suddenly, I think it was three days after the affair, he wasn’t around the house any more. I don’t mean that he vanished. He still slept in his room each night, but he was n
o longer nearby in the daytime, nor did he take his supper with us. He continued to do his chores, working in the early morning long before we woke. Then he was gone for the rest of the day, until quite late at night, when he’d let himself in the front door, after we had gone to sleep.

  Alice and I began to feel some concern about his prolonged absences. I suppose that we missed seeing him and were concerned about what he was up to.

  One afternoon I sat with Alice in the kitchen and watched her go about the business of making a cake. At one point she looked up from whipping a batter and said, “You don’t think he’s getting ready to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Away. I mean now that the weather is getting warm and everything. You think he’s got a job, Albert. Maybe it’s a job.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I was tying some trout flies. “I don’t think so.”

  “He acts awfully funny.” She paused from her whipping. “Strange.”

  “Well, he is that,” I laughed a little. “I suppose that’s why we like him.”

  “But I mean stranger than average.” She went on and started to whip the batter again. “He’s very secretive. Have you noticed that?”

  “Yes. I suppose I have.”

  “You don’t think he’s getting ready to leave us, do you, Albert?”

  “I don’t know. Hand me those scissors, will you?”

  She leaned over and passed me the scissors. When I took them I looked up at her. She was miserably upset.

  “Well, he’s going to leave us some day, Alice. You might just as well face the fact. It could be today or tomorrow or anytime. He’s not tied to us.”

  She stared into her batter, as if she were reading an augury there. Then after a moment she said, “I think you’re wrong, Albert.” Her arm swept round the bowl in a circle. “I think he is tied to us. I think he’s very attached. I don’t think he could bear to leave us any more.” I don’t know why, but a curious anger rose within me. “I wish you wouldn’t say that, Alice.”

  “Why?” From the way she said it, I sensed disaster coming. But I was powerless to avert it. I started as reasonably as I could. “Well—for one thing, our whole purpose in this from the start has been to put the boy back on his feet. We agreed to set no time limits, but to let the boy go out under his own power in his own good time.”