Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  Bucky, who was a Bong Tong, had the job of getting the water to the back of the bus when the alarm was given, and making sure everyone soaked his shirt in it. In case of tear gas.

  As he watched them going through the drill on the forty-ninth day, Walter knew this would be their last practice. It needed to be a damn good one. Every move had to be automatic so they could do it in the dark if they had to, even with the noise of combat going on above them. This time they were doing their jobs with their eyes closed. They had done this many times before, but it had never gone well.

  “This is impossible,” Heather complained, eyes scrunched closed, getting ready to unbolt the wrong seat. “It makes me dizzy.”

  Walter took hold of her hand and moved it to the correct seat. “Keep your eyes closed. Your seat, old number R-nine, has this huge rip in the top of the seat back. Feel it. That’s how you’ll know if we have to do this in the dark. Then you’ll run your hand down the back and the leg to the bolt. Good. Yeah, that’s real good. Now unscrew it fast. Yeah. It’s possible they’ll turn off the electricity or it will just go off. We’ve got to be as quick in the dark as in the light.

  “Kim,” he said, “where is your team keeping its ties? Will you be able to find them in the dark?”

  Kim was sitting on the floor with a belt in her hands. She seemed not to have heard him. She had spoken little in the twelve hours since Josh’s death. The life force seemed to have drained out of her.

  He leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder. “Kim, honey, where are your team’s ties kept?”

  She looked up. “Oh … They’re in this plastic bag under the seat.” She reached under and got the bag. “We’ve got”—she dumped them out—“three belts, two sweaters, two long bracelets, and a jacket. Oh, and Josh’s belt makes four belts.” She looked up at Walter. She and Walter had taken the belt out of Josh’s pants before the Jezreelites took his body away. “His is best because it’s longest.”

  Walter smiled at her. “He’d be happy to be of service.”

  Kim’s eyes filled with tears and Walter found his doing the same in response. He fought it because they needed to work. They couldn’t afford to mourn.

  He looked at the belt she was holding. It was thick, strong leather, but flexible, with a sturdy brass buckle. “Kim, let me have that belt. You have enough without it and I might need it.”

  She handed it to him.

  He made a loop and slipped it around his forearm and then jerked it tight. “They should all stay in the bag under the seat from now on, so they’re ready. Your tyers are Sandra and Philip, right? Let’s see you two do it in the dark. Come on.”

  Philip was quick with his hands and eager to catch up since he had not participated in the earlier practices.

  They all ran through the drill twice more, both times with eyes closed, until they had it down pat.

  “That looks good,” Walter told them. He glanced at his watch. Both Mordecai and Martin had made their morning visits, but he worried Mordecai might come back because he had not done his usual marathon sermon. Instead he’d scraped off one of the two remaining Band-Aids and said it wasn’t worth worrying about death since they’d all be reunited tomorrow at sunset. Death was nothing more than a pinprick in the great scheme, an earthly inconvenience. Then he had left quickly, without his usual fanfare.

  Walter put a finger in his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. “Okay, Bong Tongs, let me see you all in position now.”

  The five Tongs knelt down in the back on the right side, behind the last seat. With their heads pointing to the back they assumed the yoga pose of the child, their torsos folded up on their bent knees, their backs curved and their foreheads resting on the floor. “Good, Tongs. But get a little closer so you’re touching each other. Good. Arms crossed over your heads. Yes. Now tell me, Bucky, when do you get out of this pose?”

  His voice muffled against the floor, Bucky said, “When you say, ‘Tongs, fall out,’ or when someone shows us an FBI badge.”

  “Good. Nothing else will get you to move. Nothing. What do you do if you hear shooting and explosions, Heather?”

  “Stay in position,” she said with a giggle.

  “Right. What do you do if you hear someone outside telling you to get out of the bus? Hector?”

  “Stay right here in position.”

  “Good. What do you do if something happens to me, if I’m injured, Philip?”

  “Stay in position, like this, no matter what.”

  “Exactly right,” he said. “Okay, Jacksonville Six, assume your positions.”

  The five children knelt down in the back on the left side and folded up.

  “Okay. Get a little closer together. That’s perfect. And remember, we’re all going to be really scared. It’s normal—being scared happens to everyone. But what are we going to do when we get really, really scared?”

  Lucy said, “Pretend we’re armadillos and roll up tighter.”

  “Yes! What else are we going to do when we get scared? Sandra.”

  “Sing,” she said. “ ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ ”

  “Good selections, Sandra, and you’re going to lead the singing. How are we going to sing, Brandon?”

  “Loud!” Brandon barked out. “Loud as we can.”

  “Loud is the most important thing—so they can hear us aboveground. So they can hear us in Austin. Okay, fall out, Tongs. Fall out, Jacksonville Six, but stay here a minute. There’s one more thing we haven’t talked about.”

  He hunkered down in the back. “I have to tell you this. Martin or Samuel Mordecai or some of the others may come down here to get us. We won’t go. We will refuse to go. I may have to fight them. I have a knife. And this—Josh’s belt. And I’ve done this before when I was in the army. So I don’t want you to worry. I can do it. Now if I should be hurt or knocked out or something, you are to keep on doing the plan. Your team leaders, Hector and Kim, will take over. This is going to be difficult, but we can do it. We can do it because we have to. You guys have any questions?”

  “You forgot to ask about the wet shirts,” Bucky pointed out.

  “Oh, thank you, Bucky. When are we going to cover our heads?”

  “After we do the stacking and tying. Before we get into the child pose. We all take our shirts off”—he giggled—“even the girls, and we soak them in the jug and we put them over our heads.”

  “Good. Do we wait for gas to appear first?”

  “No. We just do it.”

  “Yes. All right. That was a terrific practice. I think we’re ready. Let’s put everything back to normal. It’s too neat. We need to mess up our areas a little. We don’t want Martin getting suspicious. When you’re finished, we’ll do a set of push-ups, and then we can have some story.”

  “No more push-ups!” Heather howled.

  “I agree,” Kim said. “They hurt.”

  “You guys are getting soft,” Walter said. “We’re soldiers now. We’ll do the push-ups.”

  While they were putting things back to normal, Walter played with the larger of the two knife blades on Hector’s Swiss Army knife. It was small, only three inches long. He wished it was much, much longer. He caught sight of his reflection in the knife blade. It was the face of a stranger, an old stranger, with a scraggly gray beard and dry flaking lips. He snapped the blade shut and looked around to see if any of the kids were watching him. Then he pulled the belt off his arm and slipped the loop over his head. From behind he pulled it tight around his neck. That might be useful. He took it off and slipped it into the back of his pants.

  It was time to think about the story. He hadn’t really decided how it was going to end, and he was worried about it. He didn’t want it to end on a downer. That was the last thing any of them needed. Things were bad enough. On the other hand, kids as brave and resilient as these kids would not be satisfied with a facile happy-ever-after ending.

  So he just wasn’t sure. He hoped the answer wou
ld come to him as he was telling it, when he got into the flow. So far it had worked like that. He hoped it would continue.

  He put the knife in his pocket.

  The kids were in their seats, watching him expectantly, hoping he’d forgotten the push-ups. Out of habit, he did the head count. When he came up one short, he could have wept. But he stayed silent, watching the ten faces in front of him, waiting for the story to be pulled out of him.

  “So,” he said. “So Jacksonville was out of the cage. Free. And the rooster was crowing. The sun was starting to come up. He was ready to motor. But first he had to get Dr. Mortimer out. He couldn’t leave without him. So he crept across to the other cage. The old guy was lying all curled up. Jacksonville tried to open the door, but it had a big padlock on it. There wasn’t time to use the vegetable peeler on the bars. It had taken Jacksonville all night to peel through his own bars. He had to try something else. But he didn’t know where the keys were kept.”

  “Where’s Lopez?” Hector asked. “He was there before. I hope the guy’s not off boozing and drugging again.”

  “That’s a good question, Hector. And I’m afraid that’s just where that armadillo is. After he got the anteaters to make rain, they insisted he had to keep his promise right then. Remember, he said if they helped him, he’d buy them some more wine. So Lopez kept his promise, and one thing led to another and before he knew it, it was almost morning. He managed to talk two of the anteaters into going back with him. Just as they were sneaking back into the Tong village, Jacksonville was getting out of his cage.

  “So when Jacksonville was trying to figure out how to unlock Dr. Mortimer’s cage, here comes Lopez and the two giant anteaters. Jacksonville’s happy to see them, but they don’t have time for a reunion or anything. They all know they have to get out real quick, so they take a look at Dr. Mortimer’s cage door. The lock is pretty big. One of the anteaters gets a thick stick, and he tries to pry the lock open. But it won’t budge. Then Lopez has this idea. See, Lopez is pretty bright when he’s not eating slumber bugs or drinking wine. And even when he is drinking wine, he’s pretty bright.”

  Walter paused because he hadn’t figured this part out yet. “What do you kids think his idea is to get the lock open?”

  “Maybe they could try to find the guard who has the key,” Lucy said.

  “Yeah, but they’re in a hurry,” Sandra said, “and they’d have to look inside all the—what do you call them?”

  “Hootches,” Philip contributed, surprising everyone. “Maybe they could wake old Dr. Mortimer up and ask him, since he’s the genius.”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. “That’s good, Phil.”

  “I think they use the vegetable peeler to pick the lock,” Conrad said.

  Walter pointed at him. “Yes. That’s exactly what they did. And one of the anteaters had done some burglaries back when he was younger, and he knew exactly how to do it. He had that lock open in less than a minute.

  “Now, during all this, Dr. Mortimer hadn’t moved or said a word. Jacksonville was afraid he might be dead. But they pulled him out and they could see he was breathing. He was pretty weak, but he was alive. And he could even walk—kind of—with an anteater on each side to support him. As they were leaving the village, Dr. Mortimer got real upset. He said he couldn’t leave yet because of the Galaxy Peace Ray. He’d buried the model, the only one there was in the world, right near here.

  “The problem was, it was really getting light now and the roosters were crowing all over the village. Jacksonville asked Dr. Mortimer why not just make another peace ray when they got back home.

  “Dr. Mortimer said he couldn’t make another one. He’d lost his instructions and it had taken his whole life to make this one. It was his lifework. And it could make the whole world peaceful. He had to go back for it.”

  “They should split,” Hector said. “I don’t think the peace ray works anyway. People are not going to suddenly get all sweet and peaceful.”

  “Hector,” Lucy said sternly, “they have to stay. They promised the President. They need to finish the mission.”

  “Well,” Walter said, “Jacksonville was thinking they should split. They’d found Dr. Mortimer, and they could escape if they left right away. And those two anteaters were not about to stay around. They saw the sun coming up and said they heard their mothers calling and off they ran. That left just the three of them—Dr. Mortimer, Lopez, and Jacksonville.

  “Both Lopez and Dr. Mortimer wanted to go for the peace ray, so Jacksonville agreed. They helped Dr. Mortimer walk and he pointed the way—back across the town square, then to the right near the pond where the Tongs took baths. They walked about halfway around the pond to some woods. Dr. Mortimer took them to a big tree and started looking around. He scratched his head and said, ‘It’s somewhere around here, but I’m not sure quite where. My memory is not what it used to be.’

  “You might think that the situation was kind of hopeless. But remember, Lopez is an armadillo and armadillos have some unusual abilities. Now here’s one you may not know about. Armadillos can smell things below the ground. They can smell things as far as eight inches below the ground.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sue Ellen said, “is that really true or are you just making it up for the story?”

  “It’s really true,” Walter said. “They can smell things below the ground. Often animals can do things, have these special abilities, because it helps them get food. And that’s true here. Remember what armadillos like to eat best?”

  Philip said, “Beetles, ants, and worms.”

  “Right. And those all live below the ground. So it’s really useful for armadillos to be able to smell them down there. Then they know where to dig. So what Lopez did now was to start sniffing, his long pink nose snuffling along the ground. He went back and forth, up and down.

  “Of course, Jacksonville was jumpy as a cat standing there waiting as it got lighter and lighter. A dog barked and he could see the sun. And there was some noise coming from the village. Any second the Tongs were going to discover that their prisoners had escaped.

  “Then Jacksonville had a real scare. He heard someone coming. Around the pond—someone in white was coming. It was the old lady Tong who had given him the vegetable peeler. She was carrying something. It was a shopping bag. And when she got closer, he saw that it said ‘Bloomingdale’s’ on it. Now he didn’t know what—”

  Walter stopped because the wooden slab was scraping away from the hole and he heard voices above.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  “I have trouble believing in what I can’t see. But I have trouble not believing in it, too.”

  MOLLY CATES

  “So, Mom, how does it feel to lie your head off on national TV?” Jo Beth Traynor was a little breathless from doing fifty push-ups.

  “It was just the local news.” Molly had stopped at twenty-five. She was stretched out watching her daughter. She’d been trying to keep up a pretense of normal life on the afternoon of the forty-ninth day, but with the news today of Josh Benderson’s death, she felt despair nibbling at her. More disaster was right around the corner. “Anyway,” she added, “it was taped.”

  “Yeah, but it will get picked up nationally.”

  “I suppose.”

  “So how did it feel?”

  “Honey, I’ve never spoken words that felt more sincere, more on the side of the angels. Those lies just rolled out of my mouth smooth as velvet. I’m sure I could have passed a lie detector test.”

  “Scary.”

  “Yeah.” She rested her chin on her hands and thought about trying a few more push-ups. But she couldn’t make the effort, even though the song playing was “La Bamba,” which usually energized her, and even though she knew that sweating hard was an antidote for depression, and even though there was nothing else in the world she wanted to do.

  “Okay,” Michelle screamed out over the deafening beat of the music, “we’re going to work those abs now! Turn
it over. Lower backs into the floor. Squeeze your glutes, pull your abs in tight. If you don’t suck in, you’re just doing all this work to make it pouch out. So suck it in. Ready? Up, up, up!”

  “Depressing,” Molly gasped. “To do something this painful, and end up with pouchy abs.”

  “What if he doesn’t take the bait?” Jo Beth asked, moving her upper body up and down with ease.

  “If he doesn’t call by seven-thirty, they’ll call him and ask if he wants to see her.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  Molly paused, head and shoulders up. The queasiness sit-ups always produced flooded her with a vengeance, worse than ever. “Then they’ll just go ahead with the maneuver and hope for the best.”

  “Oh, Mom. All that work and it comes to this.… Poor Dad. It’s such a defeat. Losing little Josh Benderson, giving up on negotiating.”

  “It’s been excruciating.”

  “They could just as well have stormed the place on the first day and saved us all an ordeal.”

  “Not really,” Molly said. “The theory is the longer you can stretch these things out the better. The longer a perp holds a hostage, the less likely he is to kill him. And this new development is worth trying.” She paused to catch her breath and fight down the nausea. “I think they’ve done the right things all along, honey. But it may have been impossible from the beginning.”

  Jo Beth’s eyes narrowed, skeptical at twenty-four that anything was impossible. They continued their sit-ups in silence.

  “How’s your dog?” Jo Beth asked, as they stretched out.

  “Copper? The same demented creature. The Terminator of the canine world.”

  “I hope you’re treating him like the hero he is.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. On your recommendation I went out and bought him a bag of Science Diet, and some rawhide bones. And a chew toy, which he devoured, squeaker and all, in fifty seconds flat.”

  “Sounds like he’s moved in. Now how about Dad? Is he moving in, too?”