Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  When I got back into the house I found Alice in the darkened kitchen, seated at the table amid the wreckage and debris.

  “Albert,” she said very gently.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was.”

  “Did they wake you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Can you put the light on?”

  “I’d prefer not to. He’s sitting out there watching our every step.” I looked at her a little anxiously. “Did you hear?”

  “Everything. I was standing right at the door. He’s still here, isn’t he?”

  There was nothing accusatory or harsh when she said it. It was just sad.

  “I’m going to get him out right now,” I said, bolting for the library door. “Birge’ll be back with a warrant very soon. What a mess. What a Godawful mess!”

  “Albert,” she called out from behind me. “Why didn’t you just let them come in and take him?”

  “I don’t know why,” I snapped angrily. “How the hell should I know why?” I lunged for the door.

  “I’m going down there with you.” She started after me. “You stay right here and watch Birge out there. If he moves out of that car, you call down and let me know.” She started toward me again. “Albert, tell them. Just tell them and let them take him away.”

  “Let’s not discuss it any more.”

  “Albert—I’m begging you—”

  “Never mind!” I snapped and started down the cellar stairs. “What a mess,” I muttered as I went. “What a Godawful mess!”

  “Richard!” I shouted into the dark. “They’ve sent a man to town for a search warrant. He’ll be here in less than an hour. Birge is sitting out front in a car. You’ve got to go now.”

  Of course no answer came. I didn’t really expect one. But I could hear the breathing—harsh and rapid—that horrible trapped animal sound.

  “All right—it’s your funeral. Once these people get their hands on you, just forget about justice or any kind of fair play. It’s no holds barred.”

  I started out in a huff as if I were leaving. But it was only an act, and he knew it. I took about ten steps, then turned, barged right back to the hole and started shouting again, “I’m coming in.”

  The moment half my torso was through the hole, I felt him spring toward me in the dark and land in such a way that he was right beside me, coiled above the hole. For a moment I was sure he was going to strike me, and I was already flinching, awaiting the blow. It never came, and after I huddled there a bit, my neck retracted turtlelike into my shoulders, I dared to look up. He was still there beside me, poised like a serpent, waiting. Finally, I dragged the rest of my body through the hole.

  The transition was too abrupt, moving out of a warm dry cellar into the moldy chill of the crawl. And of course there was the smell. It was like death. Like something had died in there. At first I lay there on the cold earth floored by it—all the sensibilities outraged. Then I just lay back and succumbed to it—the way a man struggling against a tide finally consents to go with it.

  I lay there on the ground, slightly winded, my face inches from his boot, ransacking my brain for the right words with which to get through to him. But then suddenly, amazingly, he was speaking. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt him. Never meant to hurt no one. Sorry. I was only thinkin’ of you and Missus, I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

  It came out a long, grievous lament which he kept repeating over and over again. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” All the while he said it there was a dull, hard, thudding sound directly above me. At first I couldn’t imagine what it was. Then I realized—it was his head. He was banging it violently against one of the wooden joists.

  “I seen him start to whirl that fire,” he said. “And I went crazy. I seen that fire and all them rocks and dirt they was flingin’ and all I could think was that new coat of white paint, and you and Missus inside. That’s all I kept thinkin’. Sorry. Sorry.”

  “You don’t kill a man for throwing rocks at your house any more than you wreck his store because he cheated you out of a few dollars.” The venom in my voice appeared to stun him, and that awful chanting of his came suddenly to a halt.

  “You’ve got to go now,” I snapped.

  “Never leavin’. Can’t. Can’t.” The awful thudding resumed once more overhead.

  “We don’t want you here any more!” I shouted at last, at the limit of my patience. “It’s been nothing but trouble since you’ve come. You’ve messed up our lives. Our house is a shambles along with all of our possessions. We’re wiped out. We don’t have a single friend left in town. It’s enough now. Enough. We don’t want any more. We want you to go. Do you understand, Richard? We don’t want you here any more.”

  It had all come out of me in wave upon wave. Like steam escaping from a valve under great pressure—with a long, sibilant hiss.

  But having said it, after so long, it brought no relief. Only a kind of curious aching from somewhere deep inside me. At the end of that tirade I lay back against the wall, spent and overcome. An immense weariness had overtaken me. I was full of a sense of terrible defeat and trying to muster enough strength to crawl back out of there when the sound started.

  At first it was a long, low wailing from somewhere in the crawl. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Once it commenced, it didn’t stop. It didn’t rise; it didn’t fall. It merely persisted on a single tone and filled the place. It was an inhuman sound. The kind of thing one associates with mourners in wild strange lands. Primitive and aboriginal. It wasn’t weeping, either. It was a deep, inconsolable grieving of a most profound and heart-rending sort.

  What I did next, I barely recall. Only in a general way I recall squirming through the hole, struggling back toward the light in the cellar, and then running. But I wasn’t running from him. I was running from the sound. When I reached the top of the stairs I could still hear it behind me. Then I slammed the library door shut on it.

  I slumped for a moment against the door, looking at Alice across the parlor in the kitchen sweeping up glass and debris. Suddenly she looked up and saw me. She didn’t say a word. She could see it all in my face.

  She crossed the parlor, coming toward me, still holding the broom. “Did you hear it?” I said when she’d reached me. “Did you hear it?” I was about to ask her again when we heard the click from downstairs. When I looked at Alice I saw that she heard it, too. We stood there holding each other, listening to the squeal of the garden door, faint but unmistakable, and after that the dull thud of it closing.

  It was Richard Atlee. He had left the house. “He’s going,” I said. Hopefully, I told myself, forever. I hoped that he would start running now and not stop until he’d placed a continent between us. There’s a part of me that thinks like that, that has a kind of childish faith in all things turning out well. But there’s another part of me harsher, more fatalistic—and that part told me that Richard had only vacated the crawl temporarily. He was heading out across the bog, probably to the cave, and would lie low there for a while, like a wounded creature. But, sooner or later, he’d be coming back to us.

  All this I thought as Alice and I went back to the kitchen and once again resumed the job of cleaning up the awful mess.

  Shortly after, we heard Birge’s steps coming up the drive and halting just outside the kitchen door. He stood there peering in at us, his large red face framed in shattered glass, smiling mockingly and dangling a sheet of official-looking paper through the gaping hole.

  “I got that warrant for you now, Mr. Graves.”

  I continued sweeping, not even bothering to look up. “Fine,” I said. “Go search to your heart’s content.”

  The only place he looked was the crawl. He went directly down to the basement followed by several other men. They stayed down there for nearly half an hour. We heard them rummaging around, their muffled voices seeping up through the floor boards.

  Then they came back up.<
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  “Where is he?” asked Birge.

  “I told you I don’t know,” I said. “I hope he’s a thousand miles from here right now.”

  “You know that if you helped him, you’re an accomplice. That’s punishable by law.”

  “I didn’t help him,” I said, suppressing a desire to laugh. “I tried to, but he wouldn’t let me.”

  He looked at me coldly for a moment, clearly stumped.

  “But if he’d asked me to,” I went on, “I would’ve. Without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “He ain’t no thousand miles away,” he said. “I got the feelin’ that if I just look under a few rocks in the general vicinity here he’ll come squirming out.”

  “I wish you luck,” I said.

  He nodded and smiled, then flicked his trooper’s hat to Alice. It was done with an idiotic flourish which I’m sure he thought of as very dashing.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and started out. When he reached the door he turned. By then I’d resumed my sweeping, and just as I looked up he was standing there smirking at me.

  “What the hell you s’pose he’s been doin’ in your crawl?” he said. “Smells like a Goddamned zoo down there.”

  We didn’t go back to bed at all. It was nearly dawn, so we stayed up trying to clean up as much of the mess as we could.

  Sometime, shortly after Birge left, a large black car came out from town and picked up the body in our driveway.

  After the sun had been up at least an hour I called the glazier in town and told him to come up. Then I called an exterminator and told him that some kind of an animal had died in my crawl and that I wanted to have it fumigated.

  Then Alice and I went back to work, picking up the debris, trying to salvage things and mend those other things that had not been completely destroyed.

  We spoke very little but worked on with a grim, almost obsessive, determination. I knew she was thinking about Richard just as I was—wondering if he was out in the bog or in the cave, or if he’d been smart enough to clear out of the territory completely. Of those three alternatives I fixed on the second, then preoccupied myself with the awful question of how long he would stay in the cave before he’d try to get back into the house. Then, too, there was the question of Birge. What would he do next? But there was really no question there. I knew exactly what he’d do next.

  Shortly after, we heard a car pull up in the driveway. I imagined it was the glazier or the exterminator and simply went on with my work. The doorbell rang, but when I looked up, I saw neither a glazier nor an exterminator. Instead I saw Ezra Washburn at the kitchen door. He was standing there stony and awkward in his mackinaw, his funny hat with the ear laps folded up and his face partially thrust through the bar broken frame of the door, waiting to be acknowledged.

  I opened the door and let him in. He stepped over the threshold stiffly, yanked off his cap, and peered around. He seemed to understand at a glance what had happened the night before.

  “I come to tell you to get the boy out of here,” he said.

  “He’s gone.”

  “You sure? Not just hangin’ around the woods someplace, is he?”

  I shook my head, playing dumb, not certain how candid I could be with him.

  “If he’s just hidin’ out back someplace,” he went on, “they’re gonna get him. And if they do, they’ll kill him.”

  A short, quiet moan escaped from Alice. Washburn looked at her and then at me. “A bunch of them is over to the jailhouse with Birge right now. Deputies he calls ’em. Drug’m all out of the tavern early this mornin’.” He made a face of pure contempt. “He’s issuin’ rifles. They don’t like nothin’ better than rifles, that bunch. Killed three young fellers here a couple a years back for break-in’ into the hardware store. Never was a trial or inquiry. Nothin’. Not a question asked.”

  I was on the verge of telling him all. He sensed it and before I could, he headed me off.

  “Don’t tell me nuthin’,” he waved his hand at me. “I don’t wanna hear it. Just get him out of here. As far away as you can. They’re comin’ out here now. If they find him, they’ll kill him and ask questions later.”

  He reached for the door, and it fell off in his hands. He struggled with it for a moment doing a little dance with the teetering door while Alice and I flowed toward him. Then finally he leaned the thing back up against the corner of the jamb and clapped his hands as if he were cleaning them off. When he had done that, he turned back to us. “I liked the boy. He was a good boy.” Then he was gone.

  The first cars arrived about ten-thirty, gathering at the foot of the driveway and alongside the road. Almost immediately there was an awful excitement—brakes screeching, doors slamming, dogs barking. In fifteen minutes there were nearly fifty men out there with nearly as many dogs howling and straining on leashes. All the men had rifles and wore troopers’ hats, although none of them were actual troopers—just a lot of scum and unemployed riff-raff coming out for the fireworks.

  Alice and I kept on working and tried very hard not to notice them. But it was almost impossible to blot them out. At one point I simply went to the kitchen door and looked down at all the noise and confusion at the foot of the drive. There was almost a festive air to it—jesting and merriment—a lot of gentlemen come together for a fox hunt.

  Birge’s car was the last to arrive. I could see the roof of the station wagon glide slowly through the milling throng and come to a halt. When the car door opened, the top of his hat suddenly appeared above the mob of converging men. I learned a little later that road blocks and checkpoints had been set up all along the Bog Road.

  They huddled there and conversed for nearly half an hour, Birge’s immense figure soaring like a totem pole above all the others—giving directions, coordinating movements and final instructions to lieutenants. Then, quite suddenly, as if at a signal, they all fanned out in a wide skirmish line, and with the dogs barking and straining at their leashes, the men shouting and waving to each other, they entered the field alongside the property and started down toward the woods.

  We watched them from the window until the woods swallowed the last of them up. But even hours later we could hear the barking of the dogs many miles off.

  I don’t recall what Alice and I did during that time. I suppose we continued working—or pretending we were working. Actually, we were waiting—almost rigid with fright—and coiled to flinch at the first crack of a rifle shot. But there were no shots.

  Late in the afternoon they were back again, streaming out of the woods behind the house, scrambling over the stone wall and moving down to the cars in small, weary knots of two and three. The dogs, free and off the leashes, nosed along the turf in front of them. All the straining, noisy enthusiasm of the morning was gone, and in its place was weariness and surly dissatisfaction.

  Alice and I looked at each other. She gave a long sigh which I took to be relief. But at the same time, there was a look of sickish apprehension in her eyes. I suppose that same look was in mine. Evidently Richard Atlee had managed to elude his hunters, for which I was profoundly grateful. But at the same time we had to face the disquieting fact that he was still alive.

  They gathered down by the road again, and from the window we watched Birge give new instructions. Gradually, one by one, we heard engines turning over and we could see cars starting to drive off. This continued until only one car with several of Birge’s fake deputies was left. This car remained behind.

  Both the glazier and the exterminator came. They arrived together—a look of bug-eyed disbelief on the glazier’s face as he stared around at the place. It was his second trip out there in a little over a week. They did their work quietly, and as it struck me then, a little nervously, anxious to finish and be gone, as if they were afraid to be caught collaborating with the enemy.

  By dusk the door was back on its hinges and glass back in its frame. Most of the windows, too, had been repaired, and the glazier promised somewhat ruefully to be back the following da
y to finish the job.

  Sometime shortly after supper the cars returned. At first Alice thought it was the bunch who’d tried to burn the house down. But it wasn’t. It was Birge’s men. They’d had their dinner and a couple of cans of beer and were rested. Now they were back again with the dogs and torches, their troopers’ hats set at jaunty angles, and thrashing back into the woods.

  That night Alice and I lay in bed, sleepless and scarcely breathing, waiting for the sound of a rifle shot.

  At one point she said, staring at the ceiling above her, “He’s in that cave, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  “They’ll never find him, will they?”

  “I’d be very much surprised if they did.”

  She was silent a moment. “You know where it is?” she asked.

  “The cave?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a general way,” I said after a pause.

  “Where is it?”

  “Why?”

  “Shouldn’t I know?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “It’s not important,” I said again and rolled over, turning my back to her. She was quiet then, but she knew perfectly well why I wouldn’t tell her.

  We heard no shot that night.

  They were back the next morning quite early. And that night they came back again. On the third day the dissatisfaction of the men deepened into an all-pervasive gloom. You could see it in the weary slump of their shoulders, in the way those once cocked rifles, carried smartly at the port, now dangled limply at their sides, and in the way their boots scuffled and dragged along the dry hard earth. Even the dogs ambled along now with a kind of sleepy disinterest, perking up only at the scent of a raccoon or a flushed partridge.

  But down there amid all those drooping spirits, I could see the figure of Birge soaring high above all the rest, ramrod erect and barking orders, his arms cocking here and there like a piston.