Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  There was nodding and okays all around.

  Brandon sat silent with his arms crossed over his chest.

  Lucy took her hands away from her ears.

  Kimberly Bassett knelt on her seat. In her no-nonsense voice that made her sound more like thirty than eleven, she said, “It’s settled, then. Conrad will tell them what we talked about. It’s not really a lie, because we did kind of talk about it just now. Now Mr. Demming can go on with the story, okay, everyone?”

  Most of the kids were nodding, as if a voice of authority had spoken and it was indeed settled. Walter studied Kimberly’s snubby nose and stubborn chin. He was in awe. She was the most self-possessed person he’d ever known. How on earth did parents manage to produce such a child? She helped Walter with the younger children, and had taken Josh on as a special project. She was tender and creative in helping to relax the boy through his asthma attacks. And in a way, Walter thought, her high expectations for how responsible adults should act had been his own guide through this unfamiliar situation. He often took his lead from Kim.

  “So.” Walter hunkered in the aisle where all the kids could see him. “Back to Jacksonville, for those who want to listen.” He paused to give those who didn’t want to participate a chance to settle down where they wanted.

  Several kids moved closer. Even though she didn’t listen to the story, or pretended not to, Sandra stayed in her seat at the front. She had staked it out because it was closer to the light, so she could read.

  Brandon Betts let out a snort of derision. He got up from the seat and stalked the aisle to the back, where he stretched his considerably thinned-down but still chunky eleven-year-old body out on the floor. He seemed to need to get as far away from the story as he could, even though it meant being closer to the stinking hole in the back. He opened his math book and started to page through it.

  Philip Trotman, eyes shut, leaned his forehead against the window. Walter didn’t know whether Philip listened or not. The boy never asked questions or commented or looked Walter’s way during the storytelling. The remaining eight settled back in their seats, ready to listen.

  Walter Demming couldn’t remember having told a story before in his entire life. If he’d been asked, he would have said he was not a storyteller. Circumstances had forced him into it, or it might be more accurate to say, Kim had forced him into it, and the process had carried him along.

  On that first day, after the lights went out, and the trapdoor slid shut overhead, it had been a nightmare. Kids began to scream. Then the others had picked up the panic. It grew to a chorus of sobbing, screaming, and calling out for mothers and fathers. The children milled around, bumping into one another in the dark, crying out. Underneath it all, he could hear Josh coughing and wheezing.

  Walter had groped his way through the door and onto the bus, bumping into seats and panicky children. He tried to calm them with his hands. He tried to soothe with his voice, but no one could hear him over the frenzied wailing. He needed to do something, to take charge, calm them down, but he couldn’t think of anything to do. As the screaming went on, he felt his own panic surging in his chest. His brain wanted to join in the screaming.

  But he was the adult here, he had told himself. The only adult. These kids were going to lose their minds if he didn’t do something.

  “Quiet, y’all!”

  A lilting girl’s voice, a twangy angel-sound, had risen out of the cacophony. It lifted above the other voices and dominated. “Now, that’s enough of that, y’all. Someone’s gonna get hurt if we don’t settle. Quiet down now, everybody. The lights will go back on, but let’s all sit down together and wait. Come on up to the front. Come on. We can hold hands. Come on now. Our bus driver is going to tell us a story.”

  Our bus driver? That was him. He was their driver. He didn’t know any stories. And even if he did, he didn’t think he could tell one in the dark, in the middle of such chaos. But the voice had promised a story. And, miraculously, the promise seemed to be calming the children. They were quieting. Several screamers had stopped. The noise gradually subsided to a few sobs and whispers. There was rustling and the gentle pressure of bodies all around him in the dark.

  A small hand grabbed his and held on hard. The firmness and warmth of it felt comforting. Walter squeezed back.

  He opened his mouth, then cleared his throat. “Okay. Now. Find a place to sit, children,” he said. “Sit down. That’s right. And hold the hand of the person next to you. Good.” He heard them settling down all around him in the blackness. “Everyone needs a hand to hold.

  “My name is Walter Demming,” he said. “I have a story to tell you. But first I’d like each of you to tell me your name and how old you are so I can sort of do a count. Okay? Just call out.”

  The voices came out of the darkness: “Hector Ramirez. I’m twelve, man.” “Heather Yost. I’m ten, almost eleven.” “Conrad Pease. Just turned ten on Tuesday.” “Sue Ellen McGregor, I’m eight. How old are you, Mr. Bus Driver?”

  “I’m fifty-one,” Walter said, “and I’m Mr. Demming. Go on with your names, please.”

  The names came: Kimberly Bassett, age eleven; Lucy Quigley, age ten; Josh Benderson, age eleven; Sandra Echols, age eight; Brandon Betts, age eleven; Bucky DeCarlo, age six. Then silence fell.

  Walter said, “That’s only ten. There are eleven of you. Who hasn’t given their name?”

  There was some murmuring and a voice said, “Come on, Philip, tell him your name.” There was a brief silence and finally a faint voice said, “Philip Trotman. I’m nine.”

  “Good,” Walter said. “All twelve of us are here.”

  It had been his first count.

  Then, still holding on to the small hand, he squatted down in the dark aisle and waited for a story to come to him. They were expecting it. He could sense the anticipation in the air. They were sitting there waiting for a story. That’s what did it, he decided later—their anticipation sucked from him a story he didn’t even know was there.

  “Once upon a time,” he began. “Once upon a time there was a turkey vulture who lived in Austin, Texas. His name was Jacksonville and he had a good friend named Lopez. He worried that because he was ugly no one would love him.” The story began like a weak trickle, but then it flowed, and by the time the lights came back on, Jacksonville and Lopez had been given an important mission by the President of the United States, and everyone seemed calmer.

  But the calm hadn’t lasted long, because, when the lights came back on, Samuel Mordecai had arrived. He had dropped down into the underworld and started preaching. He had strutted up and down the aisle spouting Bible verses and doom.

  Forty-six days had passed and the man was still strutting and preaching.

  But at least the lights had stayed on after his first visit. That first terrifying darkness had not been repeated, though they all worried about it. Every time a bulb flickered or dimmed, they were afraid it was burning out. And there was always the possibility the Jezreelites would just flip the switch again and plunge them back into the darkness and panic of the first day.

  Once he had started telling the story, it spun itself out spontaneously, as if he’d been practicing it all his life. The characters rose up and spoke. Often it felt like the story was telling itself, just passing through him. It didn’t seem to be doing the kids any harm, and it filled some empty time, so he had kept it going with one installment a day, or sometimes two, if it was a particularly difficult day.

  He cleared his throat. “Remember last night after the Tongs caught Jacksonville, they put him in a bamboo cage? Remember how scared he was? He fought. He beat his wings against the bars. But the cage was strong. The bars were made of thick stalks of green bamboo. And it was small—so low that he couldn’t stand up straight. A turkey vulture perching is about two and a half feet tall and this cage was only two feet four inches high, so he had to keep his head bent over to one side. And when he saw what they were doing—building a fire and bringing out that huge cook
ing pot—you can imagine how scared he was.”

  Walter leaned forward as he felt the story welling up. “Now, the Tongs had never seen a vulture like Jacksonville. They have vultures in Tongaland, of course—there are vultures of one kind or another all over the world—but theirs are much smaller, only half the size, and they don’t have red heads or pale yellow feet, so Jacksonville was a curiosity, a freak. Like I told you last night, they put the cage right in the middle of the village where all the people passed by. Word got around, the way it will do in a village, and everybody came to look at him. They all came—old grannies and little children, men and women, even babies who could barely walk—all day long they came by. They stared and poked him with those long forks, and they laughed.

  “Jacksonville was used to people laughing at him. People often found him ugly. Now, it’s real hard to get used to that. None of you would know how painful it is because you’re all exceptionally handsome children, but Jacksonville knew because he’d run into it a lot. People, and other animals even, would see him and say yuck, how ugly. And they would call him bad names: buzzard or filthy buzzard, which is very insulting to a turkey vulture. And it wasn’t just because of the way he looked, he knew that. Lots of people didn’t like what he ate.”

  “Dead things,” Bucky said. “He ate dead things.”

  “Gross!” Heather exclaimed.

  “Yeah. But we eat dead things, too,” Sue Ellen McGregor said. As she listened, she wove thin strands on her string box, the only one that had survived the first day’s confiscation of backpacks and possibly dangerous items. She had made friendship bracelets for all the girls before Walter discovered how strong and flexible the finished products were. Now he had her making long ropelike lengths that they could use for their emergency defense plan. Everyone on the bus envied Sue Ellen’s possession of the string box, even Walter, because it was such a calming activity and actually produced something useful.

  “Let him tell it,” Josh said. “Mr. Demming’s telling it.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said.

  Walter turned toward Sue Ellen. “That’s a good point. Most of us do eat the meat of dead animals, which really isn’t much different from what Jacksonville ate. But some people are grossed out by the vulture’s habit of eating carrion.”

  “What’s carrion?” Sue Ellen asked.

  “Dead animals,” he said, “and they’re often rotting by the time the vultures find them. Of course, you and I know that vultures do a lot of good by cleaning up the roads, but still, some people just—”

  Hector interrupted. “But didn’t you say that Jacksonville had been trying to stop eating meat? That he was trying to become a vegetarian?” Walter had noticed that as they all got hungrier, both his story and the kids’ questions turned more and more toward the subject of food. Just the mention of meat, even rotting carrion, could make his mouth water now. After forty-six days of nothing but cold cereal with a little milk and an occasional peanut butter sandwich, they were all food-crazy. It was one of the main topics of conversation: what each of them was going to eat when they got home.

  “Yes, that’s right, Hector,” Walter said. “He’d been trying hard for several years to change his diet, but it wasn’t working out very well. Jacksonville found he needed meat to keep his strength up. Flying takes lots of energy and his body craved meat even though his mind didn’t like the idea of it.”

  “Maybe we’re all going to get sick ’cause we don’t get meat,” Conrad said. “My mom always talks about protein and how we have to get enough.”

  “Yeah,” Sue Ellen said, “aren’t there sicknesses you get without meat?”

  “Lots of people are vegetarians,” Walter replied, “and they’re healthy. There’s protein in the cereal they give us and the milk. And lots in peanut butter.” He had been surprised at how basically healthy they all had stayed on the limited diet they’d been given. It was boring as hell, but they were surviving on it.

  “So,” he said, getting back to the story, “Jacksonville turned out to be like all the people in the world who go on diets and can’t hack it. He went back to eating whatever he could scavenge.

  “Now, the Tongs were all standing around his cage talking, but Jacksonville didn’t know what they were saying. See, he didn’t know their language, which was Tonganese. When he saw them gathering more firewood and building up the fire under the pot, he was so scared he nearly passed out. What scared him, of course, was that it might be him that was going to get cooked in that pot.

  “Then he noticed the Tongs were bringing baskets of things and dumping them into the pot, things that looked like onions and potatoes and carrots. Maybe in this village they were vegetarians. That was a hopeful idea. But then he remembered what Tong teeth looked like and he was afraid.

  “And something happened that scared him even more. A bunch of Tong warriors were standing in front of his cage looking in and laughing. One of them, a big guy with a huge gut on him, did something really scary. He pointed at Jacksonville, then he stood on his tiptoes and crowed like a rooster—cock-a-doodle-doo. Then he did this with his finger.” Walter stuck out his index finger and drew it slowly across his throat. “This made all the men laugh and pound their spatulas on the ground. Then they all danced around flapping their arms up and down like they were trying to fly and then they all collapsed to the ground laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world. And when they laughed you could see all their teeth, these long pointed teeth that Jacksonville found really scary. He felt like he was going to throw up.

  “By now it had gotten dark and people were gathering around the fire. It looked like the whole village was coming. There was even a parade of old people with fur and feathers around their necks. Something was about to happen. Definitely.

  “Then two big warriors went to a cage Jacksonville hadn’t even noticed. It was on the other side of the fire. And they pulled an old man out. He was naked, and he had a long and dirty white beard. They tried to get him to stand up, but he couldn’t, so they dragged him toward the pot. Jacksonville felt relieved that someone else, not him, was going to get cooked in that pot.

  “But then Jacksonville saw the old man’s face and he felt just awful. The man was Dr. Mortimer. You remember that the reason Jacksonville and Lopez were in Tongaland was to rescue Dr. Mortimer. He was thinner than in the picture Jacksonville had seen, but it was Dr. Mortimer.

  “Jacksonville was very upset. As you can imagine. He hated to see anyone get hurt, and here was the most important person in the world about to get cooked. And you guys remember why he was so important.”

  “Because of the Galaxy Peace Ray,” Bucky said, his thumb in his mouth.

  “That’s right. Dr. Mortimer was the only one in the world who knew how to make the Astral 100 Galaxy Peace Ray. He invented it. That’s why the President of the United States sent Jacksonville and Lopez to find him.”

  “How does it work again?” Lucy asked. “You told us at the beginning, but I forgot.”

  “Well, it looks like one of those old-fashioned machine guns you see in gangster movies. But when you fire it at someone, this wheel on it spins and it looks like a sparkler. It shoots out these tiny little dots of light that land on the person being shot.” He pretended to shoot a machine gun at Hector in the first seat and made a machine-gun noise: “Rat-a-ta-ta! And the person starts to twinkle and they feel this strange thing happening to them—a tingle like when someone tickles the inside of your arm with their fingertips very gently. But you feel this all over your body. And then the sparks die out and they’re gone and you think that’s it. What you don’t know is that it’s changed you and the next time you feel like doing something mean or hitting someone or fighting, you get that feeling again, that tingling, and you find you couldn’t possibly fight or hurt anyone.

  “So here’s Jacksonville feeling awful because he was hoping the person in the other cage would get cooked instead of him and that person turned out to be Dr. Mortimer—the reason Jacksonv
ille came to Tongaland—the man who could end war forever. Jacksonville wanted to do something to save him. But he was too scared to even move. He just watched as they lifted the old man to toss him into the boiling pot.

  “Then something amazing happened. Just as the Tongs were picking Dr. Mortimer up to throw him in the boiling pot, it started to rain. And not just some little rain, pitter-pat. It was like a downpour. And it was a funny yellowish color. It put the fire right out.

  “The Tongs all ran to their hootches and two big ones dragged Dr. Mortimer back to the cage and stuffed him in.”

  Walter stopped talking. He heard the scraping noise of the wood slab over the hole being pushed back. Every eye was focused hungrily on the pit at the bus door. First two dirty white tennis shoes appeared, and then hairy bare legs, then khaki shorts, and then Martin dropped to earth, his skinny chest and narrow shoulders heaving from the effort. As always, his thin face was stony.

  “Conrad,” Walter said, “will you close our discussion with a prayer?”

  “Yessir. Bow your heads, please.” Conrad stood and said in the solemn voice he used only for religious matters, “Dear Heavenly Father, help us to understand the message we’ve been given. Thank you for our many blessings and make us ever mindful of the needs of others. Amen.”

  “Amen,” they all chorused, bringing their heads up quickly to see if Martin had brought a box of food. But he stepped into the bus empty-handed.

  Sandra began to cry, and Hector called out, “Where’s breakfast, man?” All eleven of them sagged in their seats.

  Walter’s stomach felt like it was being twisted and squeezed. He stood and approached Martin, who was the only Hearth Jezreelite other than Samuel Mordecai they had seen since the first day. “Morning,” Walter said, trying to engage the man’s eyes. But Martin kept his narrow, close-set eyes averted. “Any chance for a little pizza or some Big Macs today?” Walter tried to inject some playfulness into his tone. “We sure deserve a break today. It would do wonders for our prayers of praise and thanksgiving.”