Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  As they crossed Eighth Street, she felt the urge to hold on to his arm, to protect him, so precious was he—the only living link to that old event. It was hopeless, of course. This wreck of a man was unlikely to remember his own middle name, let alone the details of finding a discarded infant more than three decades ago. Even if there was something to remember that wasn’t in the police report.

  Inside the pancake house, the hostess took one look at Hank and bristled. She was slow in seating them, and when she leaned over to hand him a menu, her nostrils flared in protest.

  After the waitress slapped down two mugs and poured them some coffee, Molly got down to business: “Hank, how’s your memory?”

  He gave a creaky-sounding chuckle. “My memory, ma’am? Like a piece of Swiss cheese.” He took a long, loud slurp of his coffee.

  “So’s mine,” Molly said. They both laughed, that rueful, knowing laugh people tended to reserve for the frailties of their own aging. “But there are some things that happened to me many years ago that were so unusual, so striking, that I will never forget them.” Molly tried to look into his dark eyes for a response, but they looked blank. “I bet there are things like that for you, Hank.”

  “I remember my mama real good. And the day of my seventh birthday.”

  Molly smiled at him. Maybe, just maybe. “Hank, a long time ago you were down by Waller Creek when a man found a baby. You remember? A baby boy floating in a beer cooler.” She watched his face.

  Slowly his mouth opened, as if in wonderment. The few teeth left to him looked as if their days were numbered.

  “I’d like you to tell me about that,” she said.

  “A long time ago,” he said.

  “Yes. Thirty-three years.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “You mean that you were there?”

  He nodded.

  “From the report the patrolman wrote, the officer who came and took the baby. You remember that? He took your name down.”

  Hank nodded.

  “Hank, please tell me about that day.”

  “I didn’t do nothing wrong. I was just down there by the creek.” He set his dry lips into a firm line.

  “I know,” Molly said. She paused, feeling herself inching out onto some thin ice. She needed to give him a reason for her questions, something to calm his anxieties. Of course, she couldn’t tell him the real reason. If she told him that the baby found that day had grown up to be Samuel Mordecai, it would be public within hours. She’d seen it happen before. This man sitting across from her would be selling his story to national magazines; he’d be an instant celebrity, get a new suit, go on Oprah and Hard Copy. If this lead was to turn into something with some bargaining power, it needed secrecy.

  Molly Cates tried not to tell lies. She’d been reared by a father and an aunt who came down hard on the side of truth. When she did lie, she tried to be careful to tell only lies that would not be found out later. She also tried to restrict herself to lies she could rationalize as having some good purpose. As she concocted a story to tell to Hank Hanley, she was aware of how lie leads on to lie, and that this one was likely to be only the first of many.

  “The reason I’m asking,” she said, “is that the baby grew up and now he’s a friend of mine and he wants to find his parents, his real mother. He asked me to help him.”

  Hank licked his lips and said, “He grew up. How is he?”

  “He’s good. A fine young man.” She was tempted to elaborate, but she stopped herself.

  “What does he do?” Hank asked.

  “He’s an accountant with a wife and two daughters. But you know how it is—he’s thirty-three now and he wants to find his real mama and papa.” She thought about telling how he’d worked his way through college and played soccer, but she made herself quit there.

  Hank’s eyes began to water. “An accountant. He was just a tiny little baby, so small.” He cupped his trembling hands to show how small the baby was. “He was wrapped up in this real shiny red blanket.”

  “Yes. I have that blanket. Actually it’s a silk bathrobe.”

  “Is it now? How about that. Just how about that …” Hank seemed to be coming to life, getting some animation in his voice. Maybe it was the coffee. Maybe it was remembering the event.

  The waitress arrived to take their order. Hank, his eyes still watering, ordered eggs, hash browns, and a side stack of buttermilk pancakes. Molly ordered French pancakes with no orange sauce.

  “Hank, would you tell me how it happened? Everything you can remember.”

  “This ain’t gonna get me in trouble, is it? I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Well, if it’ll help that young fella. An accountant, you say?”

  Molly nodded.

  “I never seen such a tiny baby, so small. I think he was just born.”

  “That’s right. When the policeman took him to the hospital, the doctor said he was only a few hours old.”

  “So. Well.” Hank shook his head. He seemed to have forgotten he was telling a story, so Molly prodded him. “What were you doing down at the creek?”

  “Oh, sleeping, I was sleeping there. See, it was early in the morning. I was just sleeping, that’s all. Just sleeping.”

  Molly could see that if she was going to get anything out of him she was going to have to drag it out, word by word. “Tell me about finding the baby. Did you see it first, or did the other man?”

  “The other man, the runner. He saw it first.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “See, I got up to … uh, use the rest room. And he was running by. You know this is real clear. I remember this part real good. He was running by, black shorts and no shirt.” He looked up at Molly. “I wonder what happened to him.”

  “He died last year, while he was jogging.”

  “Died? Oh, he looked so … healthy.” His eyes watered again and this time some of it overflowed and ran down into his beard. He seemed not to notice. Molly couldn’t decide if they were tears or the product of some rheumy eye condition.

  Warmed up now, he went on talking without any prodding. “That man, the jogger, he stopped and made this little noise. Like ‘Ooh.’ And then he stepped into the water—it was real shallow there—and he grabbed up this white cooler. I remember what he said exactly. Isn’t that something? After all this time I can still remember the exact words. Like you say, there are some things that happen to you in your life that are real unusual and this was real unusual. It sure was.” He shook his head in amazement.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Holy Jesus, it’s a live kid in here.’ Then he said, ‘Who would leave a kid like this?’ and he picked the baby up and held it against his chest. He was all wet from sweating and the baby was all wet from, I guess, wetting himself. That baby didn’t cry or nothing.” Hank stopped and stared into space. “Didn’t make a sound.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, I came up and the two of us decided we needed to find some help. So we walked up to the road. He kept that baby held tight to his chest with both hands, and called out to some people at one of the university buildings to call a policeman and he got there in just a few minutes. When the cop saw that baby, he called on his radio for a lady officer to come help and she come and took the baby off. To the hospital, I guess.”

  “Then what?”

  “Let’s see. Gets a little cloudy for me here. I think we took the cop back down to where we’d left the cooler and showed him where we found the baby. That’s when he wrote our names down, I think. And then he drove off.”

  Their plates arrived and Hank fell on his pancakes with vigor. After a few bites, he stopped. “You know something? That baby never cried once. An accountant, huh?”

  Molly drizzled some maple syrup on her pancakes. “Hank, before the jogger came by did you see anyone else around?”

  “Don’t believe so,” he said with his mouth full of pancakes. “No. Just
the jogger.” He gave a little laugh. “And the baby.”

  “But you’d been sleeping near there, you said.”

  “Yeah, but I was … you know, sleeping. You don’t see nothing when you’re sleeping.”

  “Was there anyone else there with you?”

  “No. I stay alone ’cause these other bums, they always want something.”

  “What about during the night? Did you hear anything?”

  “You know, ma’am, I drank a bit back then. When I went off to sleep nothing much could wake me up.”

  Molly felt the dull ache of a dead end approaching. There are some questions that never get answered. Sometimes you just had to accept that.

  Hank devoted himself to breakfast with the single-mindedness of a bird going after a worm, and Molly, inspired, did the same. She paid and they left with the hostess scowling at their backs.

  As they walked through the parking lot, Molly was feeling the old desperation that accompanied dead ends. “Shall I drop you back at the Sally?” she asked Hank as she unlocked the truck.

  He climbed in. “I’d rather go up to the blood bank over on Twenty-ninth Street, if you’re going that way.”

  Molly did not ask him about the blood bank; the idea of selling blood, let alone the idea of him selling blood, was just too much for her to tackle. As she drove up Trinity, she got to thinking about the baby floating in Waller Creek and she wanted to be able to visualize it. That gave her an idea. It was probably desperation, mixed with her usual oxlike resistance to giving up something she wanted. “Hank, before I drop you off, will you show me the place on Waller Creek where you found the baby? It’s not too far from here, is it?”

  “Not far. I go there sometimes. I’ll show you.”

  He directed her up Trinity to just past MLK. “Here,” he said. “Right here.”

  It was on the edge of the university campus, where parking was always impossible. Molly pulled into a G permit place, wondering if she should start deducting her considerable parking fines as business expenses.

  Hank led the way across the street to a stone bridge. They passed by Santa Rita No. 1, the old drilling rig that had first hit oil on land owned by the University of Texas. The rig had been moved from West Texas to the campus as a reminder of where the steady stream of money that supported the university came from. What Molly loved about it was that it talked. From a little speaker mounted on top emanated a continuous narration—the story of the miraculous gusher in 1923. This memorial was such a good idea, Molly thought, everyone ought to have something similar set up as a continual reminder of one’s origins and source of revenue. It was like her keeping her daddy’s old typewriter and Webster’s dictionary next to her computer to remind her of where her respect for words came from.

  Hank didn’t even glance at the oil rig that talked. He led her to one end of the bridge and slipped between it and a dense growth of trees that hid the path there. It was a muddy incline, steep and rough. Hank navigated it with the ease of a frequent traveler. Molly followed, sliding and grabbing tree branches for support. At the bottom, a clearing dipped downward to the creek, which was bubbling along under the arch of the bridge.

  “This way.” Hank turned and disappeared under the bridge. Molly hesitated when she saw how dark it was underneath, but she followed along on the gravel ridge that ran next to the water. Flattened cardboard cartons, brown bags containing empty whiskey bottles, and discarded rags indicated human habitation there.

  They emerged into a bucolic scene of tall trees and dense foliage on both sides of the creek. Way below street level, they were invisible to the people passing above. It felt as if they’d dropped into some secret underworld, totally separate from the bustle of campus life above them.

  Like the area under the bridge, this clearing was littered with debris. “Used to be cleaner,” Hank informed her, with the air of a tour guide. “Everything used to be cleaner.” He led the way to some flat white rocks jutting out into the creek. He stepped onto the rocks and pointed to an area about three feet away. “Right there. That cooler was right there stuck on some rocks.” He looked up suddenly, his attention caught by the sound of laughter up at the top of the bank across the creek. Two girls in shorts and T-shirts stood laughing in a gap in the trees. Molly was surprised to see through the opening a running track and, in the distance, picnic tables and basketball hoops. It was a recreation area for students.

  Hank licked his dry lips.

  “Has this always been a running track and recreation area?” Molly asked him.

  He was so riveted watching the girls, he didn’t respond. Molly reached out and touched him on the arm. He jumped as though he’d been stung.

  “It’s fun to watch them, isn’t it?” she said. “They’re so young and full of life. And from down here you can watch without them knowing it.”

  He did something she’d never seen anyone do before. He took his lower lip between his teeth and pulled at a loose piece of skin there, tugging at it until he’d ripped it loose. It left a raw place on his thin lip that began to ooze a drop of blood. He licked the blood away and said, “I come here sometimes. If they’re there, I look. Of course, I never … you know I wouldn’t never …”

  “I know, Hank. There’s no harm in watching.”

  “No,” he said. “They’re sorority girls.”

  “Oh?”

  “You can tell by the writing on their shirts.”

  Molly squinted and saw that both girls had Greek letters printed on the front of their T-shirts.

  “Those foreign letters mean they belong to a sorority.”

  “Ah,” Molly said.

  “I see those letters around here all the time.”

  “Do you?”

  “Uh-huh. And you know, that day you was asking about?”

  “Yes?” Molly asked it carefully, not wanting to stop this flow.

  “I never told this to no one, but I seen two girls with them foreign letters.”

  “You did? Like those two?”

  “The letters were different and they weren’t laughing.” He nodded toward the top of the bank where the girls were still talking. Their laughter drifted down.

  “They weren’t laughing?”

  He shook his head sadly. “One was bawling.”

  Molly’s scalp was tingling. “One of the girls was crying?”

  He seemed lost in the memory. “And they had letters on their shirts, but not the same as those. I should’ve told you before, I guess.” He made a sound that strained to be a laugh. “That Swiss-cheese head of mine …”

  “When did you see this girl crying?”

  “Before we found the baby.”

  “How long before?”

  “Just maybe a few minutes. When I got up to do my business that morning.” Hank licked at his bloody lip again. “They was climbing the hill. One was crying and moaning, leaning on the other. That’s when I saw their shirts had them foreign letters. I didn’t know they left a little baby or I would’ve called them back. Doing something like that leads to no good for no one. You say your friend is doing good, an accountant and all, but I don’t know. If he was doing so good, why does he have to send you to do this for him? And I can tell you them girls was doing poorly that day. No good comes from that. Secrets and feeling shame.”

  Molly was amazed by the length and emotion of the speech. “No. You’re right, Hank. Do you remember what they looked like?”

  “It was so long ago. And I seen so many girls since then.”

  This was impossible, like trying to squeeze juice from a stone. “You remember anything about them?”

  “Just the letters on their shirts.”

  “The letters on their shirts? What were they?”

  “Oh, I can’t read them. I don’t know no languages but English.”

  Molly had a sudden inspiration. “Can you draw them?”

  “Well … sure.” He squatted down and picked up an oval stone. He used the edge to draw in the dirt. “Both the same.
Here’s what them letters looked like.” He drew slowly: ΠAΩ. Pi Alpha Omega.

  “Are you sure those were the letters?” Molly asked.

  “Oh, yes. I still see the same shirts around. It’s a sorority the girls join. When I see them letters it reminds me of that day.”

  “Did you ever see the two girls again?”

  “No. Just that one time, that morning.”

  “Do you think one of them could have given birth down here?”

  He thought about it. “No. I would’ve heard. That’s a noisy thing to happen. I remember when my mama had my sister and she yelled and panted and thrashed around. I would’ve heard. And it would’ve left some mess. No. They must’ve brought it down here after it got borned.”

  Molly nodded.

  “This won’t get me in no trouble, will it?”

  “No. I promise it won’t,” Molly assured him.

  She offered to drive him back to the Salvation Army, but he said he thought he’d stay and sit by the water a bit. His eyes kept darting back to the girls who were still talking up on the bank.

  Molly asked him if he needed anything.

  “I sure did like that breakfast,” he said.

  She opened her purse, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to him. “For a few breakfasts.”

  She knew she shouldn’t, and that it wouldn’t do him any good, and that he would probably use it to buy booze. But she did it anyway, because it made her feel better. It made her feel she wasn’t just using him and discarding him. It made her feel better about having lied to him. It made her feel better about not having asked about his mother and his seventh birthday. It made her feel that she wasn’t just turning her back and walking off.

  Then she turned her back and walked off.

  The Pi Alpha Omega house was huge, red-bricked, and white-pillared, a formal reproduction of a southern plantation. It felt as though it were designed to intimidate, as if the architect’s intent was to make everyone who wasn’t a Pi Alpha, or whatever they called themselves, feel insignificant and unworthy, like field slaves with muddy shoes.

  Molly stood on the sidewalk, in the throes of doubt. She’d tried the library and the university registrar to see if they had listings of Pi Alpha Omegas who were in summer school in 1962. They didn’t, and time was wasting. If she was going to follow this lead, she was going to have to take some shortcuts. And it was going to be harder than usual, much harder. She was about to tell some lies that could jeopardize her job and her reputation. And it probably wouldn’t work anyway. It all hinged on her ability to concoct the right lie and act it out convincingly.