Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  “Copper. Short for Copperfield.”

  “Hey, Copper. What a good old boy you are.” The dog stretched his head down and Jake scratched behind the one good ear.

  “Are you ready to go?” Molly asked.

  Jake gave the big dog a final pat. “All set.” He rolled to the passenger door. “If you’ll help with the chair, I can get myself in. A truck’s a little harder because it’s high, but the running board’s a big help.” He reached up and opened the door, wheeling backward to let it swing open.

  Molly came around, feeling awkward and uncertain about how to help. He maneuvered his chair right up to the side and said, “You just hold tight to the chair so it doesn’t move. And stand right there so I can brace myself against you if I need to.” He gripped the arms of the wheelchair and pushed himself up so he was balanced on his stumps. “Okay, now hold tight.” The veins in his arms stood out with the effort of shifting himself to the running board. Then, with one hand on the seat and another on the running board he boosted himself up, off the running board, and onto the seat. It was a lot more difficult to do than he let on. Molly wondered how you built the upper-body strength to do that.

  “Wow,” she said, once he was settled in the passenger seat, “I don’t think I could do that if my life depended on it.”

  He looked down at her. “Sure you could. Being in a wheelchair makes you really strong through the arms and shoulders. Even if you don’t work out, and I do.” He gestured at the chair. “To fold it, just squeeze the arms together. Yeah, like that. Now you can set it in the back.”

  Molly folded the chair, got a tarp from the back seat, spread it out in the bed, and then with difficulty hoisted the chair into the back. By the time she climbed behind the wheel she’d worked up a sheen of sweat. She turned toward him. He was buckling the seat belt. “What’s the best way to go?” she asked. “I-35?”

  “Yeah. We’ll take the 79 West exit toward Taylor.”

  They drove in silence until Molly got them through the downtown traffic. Once they were headed north on I-35, Jake said, “Tell me about the dog—how he lost his ear.”

  “The dog. Well, he was in the canine unit for eight years, with the same handler.” Grady had told her the story—several times. “One Saturday night he and his handler were searching a field in East Austin, looking for a suspect in a 7-Eleven robbery. Copper tracked the suspect and two of his friends to a shed where they were hiding. The three suspects beat the handler to a pulp with tire irons and tried to do the same to Copper, but he managed to give as good as he got. One of the perps nearly lost an arm and the other two required numerous stitches. Copper lost half an ear.

  “When the rest of the cops got to the scene, they arrested the suspects. But Copper went berserk and wouldn’t let the cops or EMS get anywhere near his handler. They had their guns drawn to shoot him when one of the EMTs found a tarp. So they netted him. The handler died that night, and Copper was retired with honors. But APD policy dictates that police dogs can retire only with police families and no one in the department would take him home. No one but my friend Grady Traynor, who has never much liked dogs.” She sighed. “Grady’s been out at Jezreel, he’s one of the negotiators. So he coerced me into taking the beast on for a few days. That’s why he’s in the back of my truck.”

  Jake turned his head to look at Copper in the back. “Is that such a problem?”

  “Not if you remember never to touch anyone in his presence. When you hug someone he panics. He thinks violence is being done and considers it his responsibility to intervene.”

  “Must be hard on your love life.”

  “It would be if I had one.”

  “PTSD,” Jake said.

  “Huh?”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder. Sounds like that’s what he has. Like Vietnam vets.”

  It seemed like an ideal segue. “You promised to tell me about Walter Demming’s vows,” Molly reminded him.

  “Did I? Well, I might make good on that, but I can see you’re someone who always turns the conversation away from yourself. I want to hear some personal contribution from you first. Tell me what you did this morning.”

  She laughed. “Okay. I went to talk to Samuel Mordecai’s grandmother, the woman who raised him.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Molly didn’t answer right away. Finally she said, “When I was about seven, I saw a play of Hansel and Gretel at the local high school. The witch was so cold and evil that I had nightmares for a year. Dorothy Huff reminds me of her.”

  “Oh, God,” Jake said. “Can’t we have any villains anymore? It seems like everybody got abused as a child. I suppose this means I can’t hate Samuel Mordecai anymore.”

  “You can still hate him,” she replied. “I do. But I caught a glimpse of why he’s what he is. Now tell me about Walter’s vows.”

  “Okay. You have to understand these were post-Vietnam vows. Made while he was spending time with me in the Veterans hospital. You can’t imagine how angry we were.” He shook his head. “No one can imagine.”

  “Who were you mad at?”

  “Oh, our lieutenant, who was an idiot. The army, which fucked everything up. The gooks, who were braver and tougher than we were. My father, who raised me on stories of his World War II exploits, the draft board in Milwaukee that delivered me up, the American people, who didn’t give a damn, the whole village of Trang Loi, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyndon Johnson, Smokey the Bear, George Washington. If I’d known you then, I would have been mad at you. We were just fucking furious at everything.”

  Molly glanced over at him. “You’re right—I can’t imagine.”

  “Yeah. Well, Walter made four vows. I told you that obscurity was one of them. The idea was never to do anything or make enough money to get noticed by the government.”

  “Is that why a man who went to Rice drove a school bus?”

  “In part. It also allowed him time to do his real work.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  Molly said, “The second vow was noninvolvement?”

  “Yeah. No girlfriends could stay over more than one night in a row, no kids, no commitments. The third vow was never again to wear a uniform or a necktie.”

  Molly laughed. “For me it’s panty hose. What about the fourth vow?”

  “Oh, that one he’s broken.”

  “What was it?”

  “Never again to look into the barrel of a gun. It must have been an awful moment for him, like a flashback, to have been surrounded like that.”

  “That happened to him in Vietnam?”

  Jake stared straight ahead. “No comment.”

  When they left the Interstate, Molly said, “We’re going to go past the turnoff to Jezreel. It’s right up here on the left.”

  “Yeah, I know. Two miles to hell.”

  As they passed, they looked up the rural road marked 128. Molly had been down that road once, two years before, when she went to interview Samuel Mordecai at Jezreel. Her memory and the nonstop press coverage had since etched into her mind the compound’s distinctive profile. She could draw it in her sleep—the boxlike central portion of the jerry-built wood complex, flanked by two high, round stone towers with crenellated tops and narrow slitlike gunports. Like some cheap Texas version of a medieval castle. She knew if they turned up that road, they’d see the media city, tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and a bunch of fully armed federal agents and DPS troopers at the checkpoint they’d staked out weeks ago.

  “Have you been out there?” Jake asked.

  “Not since I interviewed Samuel Mordecai two years ago.”

  “How come? Seems if you’re doing a story on it, you’d want to go out and see it again.”

  “I see it on the TV news all the time, more than I want to.”

  “It’s not the same thing as seeing it for yourself.”

  “Sounds like you’d like to go.”

  “Maybe so. To see what it�
��s like. Yeah. If you decide to go, can I ride along?”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Walter Demming’s gravel driveway led to a tiny, ramshackle house with stained green siding and warped window frames. A trumpet vine laden with vivid orange blooms grew exuberantly up the side and over the roof. Behind the house stretched a field of wildflowers—the usual bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes, but in the center was the densest stand of white Texas prickly poppies she’d ever seen—huge fluttery white flowers on tall stalks.

  “This is beautiful,” Molly breathed.

  Jake was unbuckling his seat belt. “Yeah. I like it out here.” He pointed to a stone barbecue on the terrace in front of the house. “Walter and me built that, out of rock we collected right around here.”

  Molly studied the fine rockwork and the natural way the grill seemed to grow right out of the stone terrace.

  He pointed to a large white frame house just visible across the field. “That’s Theodora Shea’s house, Walter’s real love. She does the best chocolate cake in the hemisphere.”

  Molly got out and opened the tailgate. Copper bounded down and started sniffing around just like a normal dog would do on an outing to the country.

  She hauled Jake’s wheelchair out and set it up, following his directions. Then she held it steady while he maneuvered himself into it. After he’d caught his breath, he wheeled himself toward the house.

  Molly hadn’t noticed the wheelchair ramp to the side of the steps until they approached the door. Jake propelled himself up it. “Walter and I did this ramp, too.” He pulled a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and spun to the side to let Molly precede him.

  The house was one big sunny room with a bed in one corner and a kitchen in another. The rest of the room was given over to an artist’s studio.

  A long wooden picnic table in the center of the room was covered with cans of brushes, bottles, paints, and colored pencils—all neatly organized. On two of the walls and on three easels standing around the room hung pictures in various stages of completion. All were of birds, most of them brightly colored tropical birds.

  “Lately he’s been doing birds,” Jake said. “In pencil.”

  Molly stood in the middle of the room for a minute to get the feel of Walter Demming’s life. She loved to see the places where people did their work and often asked other writers to show her their offices because that seemed to be more revealing of the soul than the houses they lived in. And sometimes it seemed that just being in the workspace of someone whose work you admired might actually magically transfer to you some of their creative energy. Crazy, no doubt, but she was feeling it now as she surveyed Walter Demming’s drawings.

  She started to wander the room looking at pictures. The birds were all portrayed very close-up and from odd angles. These were not the usual static bird sketches, where you had a complete bird, centered on the paper, neatly grasping a twig and giving the artist its best profile. Instead you saw just part of a bird, as if you were glimpsing it flying through a frame. They were done on white textured paper with bright-colored pencils. The feathers were rendered in a distinctive cross-hatching of colors.

  She’d never thought of birds as individuals before, but each of these birds had about its face and feathers the mark of idiosyncrasy; each was a bird you would be able to recognize if you saw it again. The faces were rendered in precise detail, as if the artist knew each of them intimately.

  Walter Demming definitely had a style and, judging from the number of works he had going here, he was wildly productive. The feel she got was of a man who let the energy of nature swirl through him and flow out his fingertips. How would a man like that endure captivity? she wondered. Where would all that energy go?

  She stopped in front of one of the easels. Arranged diagonally on the paper was the almost finished portrait of a turkey vulture. The bird was shown in profile from about mid-wing and up. The feathers of the wing and breast were rendered in a cross-hatching of brown, black, yellow, and red that shone like a dark mahogany. The naked red neck and head had isolated black hairs, prickly and assertive, growing out of them; the hooked beak seemed huge and translucent.

  She was shocked to recognize the bird as Jake Alesky. Why hadn’t she noticed when she’d first met him that he looked like a turkey vulture? She would never have thought of it, but now that she’d seen the resemblance, she doubted that she could ever get it out of her head. She stole a glance at him sitting across the room. Did he recognize this?

  Jake was sitting in front of a completed drawing of a fluffy, assertive-looking white cockatoo with a few yellow feathers sticking up in a crest. Eyes still fixed on the picture, he said, “That’s Theodora. I wonder if she’s seen this. It’ll make her mad as hell if she recognizes herself.” He swung his chair around so he was facing her. “How do you like Walter’s work?”

  “I like it very much. Very much.”

  “He’s gotten really good. He always drew stuff, even back in Vietnam, but in the past year or two, he’s found … oh, I guess his style, or whatever it is artists have to find. He could make some money at it if he’d get with the program.”

  “What program?”

  “Oh, Theodora has lots of good ideas about how to sell. She got them to hang some of his stuff in the cafe over near the Crossroads up near the 128 turnoff. Occasionally someone walks in and buys one. And she thinks she might get him a show in Austin.”

  “How do you suppose he’s managing captivity?” Molly asked.

  Jake wheeled his chair to the window and looked out at the field of wildflowers. “Hating it. More than anyone I know, he hates having his freedom restricted. He hates bullies. He hates religion. He hates guns.”

  “What about children?” Molly asked.

  Jake smiled. “I don’t think he hates children, but I don’t know that he likes them very much either. Other than driving that bus for a few months, I don’t think he’s ever had much to do with them.”

  “Would he be a cool head in a crisis, if it comes to it?”

  “Cool?” Jake’s face colored suddenly and his lips tightened. “You ask if Walter’s cool? See if this fits your idea of cool—a man lying in the muck at the edge of a stinking river surrounded by seven bloody corpses, pretending to be dead while Vietcong go around checking on their handiwork. The body on one side of him, that used to be Greg Meeks, gets both ears sliced off with a bayonet. Those ears are strung on a necklace of similar objects one of the gooks is wearing. The gook then stands over Walter and looks down at his ears. He pokes at one with his bayonet. Then he moves on to Junior Carlyle, or what remains of him, lying on Walter’s left. The gook leans down and cuts off Junior’s ears.” Jake continued to stare out at the wildflowers. His voice revealed no emotion.

  “I didn’t have time right then to wonder what it was about Walter’s ears that didn’t appeal, but I sure have thought about it since. Walter has small ears, real tight to his head, with almost no lobe. Maybe that was it. But I think it was the color. Both Meeks and Carlyle were black. I think this particular gook was specializing in black ears. While he was adding ears to his collection, Walter just lay there, his mouth and eyes full of muck. No twitching, no whining, no breathing. Is Walter a cool head? you ask me. Lady, the man’s subzero.”

  Molly found it hard to catch her breath. “What happend then?”

  “What happened then was the world ended. This freak Samuel Mordecai says the world’s going to end on Friday. I know that’s not true because it ended on September 2, 1968. The ears were just a tremor in the earth, a warning.” He whirled his chair around. “Anyway, it’s ancient history now, and not much of a subject for a pretty spring day. Let’s go see Theodora. She always makes me feel like the world makes sense.”

  He wheeled his chair back to the door. “Let’s walk on the road. It’s shorter to go across the field and I can do it in my chair, but it’s hard going.” They both went down the ramp and Jake led the way back to the road and down to the next
driveway. The house had a front porch with fat pots of red geraniums on the steps. A large golden retriever with a completely white head lay sleeping on the porch with its paws dangling down to the top step.

  From around the side of the house dashed a brown-and-white spaniel, who started to yap at them. But the dog came to a sudden stop, staring at a spot behind Molly. She turned and was surprised to see that Copper had followed them. The big dog was standing with his fur bristling and his teeth bared. The spaniel turned and ran back the way it had come, disappearing around the house.

  “Probably a wise move,” Jake said.

  The dog on the porch hadn’t even opened an eye.

  Molly watched Copper approach stiff-legged, growling low in his throat. “Oh, God, I left the leash in the truck.” She started forward to grab the dog’s collar.

  Jake raised a hand. “Hold on. It’ll be okay.”

  Reluctantly, Molly stood where she was. When Copper stepped on the first stair, growling, the old retriever opened one eye, then the other, and watched Copper approach. Then, when Copper was almost on the porch, the retriever slowly rolled over and offered its belly, paws in the air. Copper stopped and the growling died away. The erect fur flattened; he approached and sniffed the older dog’s tail and belly.

  Molly had been so riveted by the performance, she hadn’t noticed a woman come out the door. The woman was standing still, watching the dogs with a smile of bemused interest on her face. Now she said, “Maggie could teach us all something. Sometimes pacifism works. Hey, there, Jake Alesky. I’ve missed you, dear heart.” She walked briskly down the steps and leaned over to embrace Jake. A snarling from the porch caused her to straighten up. Copper was starting down the steps toward her.

  “Oh, my,” the woman said.

  Molly felt a flush of embarrassment. She moved forward and grabbed Copper’s collar. Her hand was shaking, but she managed to hold on and say in a firm voice, “No, Copper. Sit.”