The Best of Subterranean

  “Something weird happened last night in Paris. It’s nothing I want to talk about, but I had to know you weren’t involved in it. I had to see you, face to face, to know for sure.”

  “And now what?”

  I hadn’t even thought about it until that moment, but once I did it seemed inevitable. “I want you to do something for me. Can you call in sick tomorrow?”

  “I just got back from holiday.”

  “Tell them you picked something up in Paris.”

  She laughed, then turned serious again. “Listen. What happened in Paris…”

  “It’s not like that. I need to go to an abandoned airfield about 50 miles north of here. It’s called Twinwood Farm.”

  I called my father and told him about my change of schedule, then I spent the rest of the day arranging a hired car, finding the cheapest hotel I could, and reading at the British Library. Margaret met me at my hotel the next morning wearing jeans and a sweater, and I felt a pang of desire for her that I couldn’t seem to shake.

  We took the M1 north out of London, then the M6 on to Bedford. My head was too full for me to feel like saying much. Margaret talked easily about her boyfriend, her job, how envious her friends had been of her trip to Paris, and I was happy enough for the distraction.

  I stopped at the post office in the town of Oakley and asked a man in his sixties if he’d ever heard of Twinwood Farm. “You’re joking, son,” he said. “Everyone knows of it now, what with the Glenn Miller festival just there in August.”

  We followed his directions and drove due east, through the tiny village of Oakley Hill and onto a well-kept tarmac road. We passed a sparse forest, then restored hangars and outbuildings as we pulled up to the control tower itself, a two story brick cube painted in broad vertical tan and olive camouflage stripes. I parked in front and we got out into a cold wind. Margaret went up to the building and looked in the windows. “It’s some sort of museum,” she called back. She read from a plaque: “ ‘…opened on 2nd June 2002…contains a tribute to Major Alton Glenn Miller, who took his final flight from here 15th December 1944.’ ”

  After a while she came back to where I stood by the car, hugging herself against the cold. “Don’t you want to look?”

  “I thought there might be something left of him here,” I said. “But I’m too late. The myth has taken over.”

  “People need myths.”

  “We need the truth. But all we get is the amusement park version of it. And nobody cares.”

  “You care,” Margaret said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I dropped Margaret at a tube stop near the car hire agency. We had real phone numbers for each other this time, but I doubted we would ever use them. I slept poorly that night, and not at all on the long, long afternoon flight back to the States.

  I went straight to the hospital from the airport and found Ann and my father watching the news. My father switched off the set as soon as he saw me; Ann looked like she was going to protest and then thought better of it. I hugged them both and handed out their presents and we made some small talk about the flight, how my father was feeling, the tepid meal he’d just eaten.

  “So,” my father finally said. “How was the wild goose chase?”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. “I’ve got somebody who says it was Miller on the tape. What you heard is the sound of him being murdered—murdered by somebody working for the US Army.” Apparently, somewhere over the Atlantic, I’d made up my mind about who I was going to believe.

  “You can’t trust the French. They’re all Communists.” He smiled as if he were joking.

  “I want to ask you something, Pop. I want you to tell me about Dachau.”

  “It was horrible. You’ve seen the pictures. You don’t need to hear it from me.”

  “I do need to hear it from you. I want you to tell me what you did there.”

  He saw then that I knew, and that I wasn’t going to let him escape. “I don’t feel like talking about it,” he said meekly.

  “Francis?” Ann said.

  I waved her off. “I learned some things in Paris, and then I read some more things in the library in London.”

  My father said, “I don’t have to—”

  “We have to stop pretending everything’s simple, Pop.” My voice was soft and I kept a gentle pressure on his hand. “Black and white, Greatest Generation and Axis of Evil. We have to take responsibility for what we do, and tell the truth about it. We can start right now.”

  I kept staring until he looked away. “Ann,” he said, “could you leave us alone for a minute?”

  She started to get up and I said, “I’d like her to stay for this.”

  I could feel her glare on the back of my head. “Francis, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Sit down,” I told her, still looking at my father. “Pop, tell me what you did.”

  He was motionless for so long I was afraid I’d given him another stroke. Then the tears started to run down his cheeks. “I’ve never talked to anybody about this,” he said. “Not ever.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “We love you. Nothing you can say is going to change that.”

  “It might. It very well might.”

  I waited.

  He sighed and said, “It wasn’t a death camp, not like Auschwitz. Those were all in Poland. Dachau was a work camp. Not that there was a lot of difference, except they kept the prisoners alive longer. More or less alive. You’ve seen the pictures, you two have known about it all your lives. We didn’t. We were kids, most of us, and we’d grown up in a sane, reasonable world. Until we went in that camp we didn’t know why we were fighting that war in the first place. We thought it was about cleaning up somebody else’s mess. We knew the Germans were brutal, inhuman, but nothing prepared us for what we saw.

  “We went crazy, all of us. You couldn’t look at those starved, brutalized remnants of humanity and feel anything but rage and hatred. Blinding, murderous rage.”

  “You shot the guards,” I said.

  “Lined them up and shot them.”

  “With no trial,” I said.

  “No trial, no questions, nothing. But that wasn’t the worst.”

  “Tell me the worst, Pop.”

  “We had to search all the buildings. I was paired up with a Jewish guy from Brooklyn, a big tough kid named Schlomo. We found one of the guards hiding out in a latrine. Schlomo told me to keep him there, and he went out, and he came back…he came back with one of the prisoners. And we stripped the guard naked and…” He faltered.

  “Go on,” I said, and squeezed his hand.

  “And we gave the prisoner a bayonet. I lost my nerve then, but Schlomo stayed and watched.”

  My father took a long breath and closed his eyes. “He told me later what happened. The prisoner…first he castrated the guard. Then he gouged out his eyes, one at a time. And then he started stabbing him, faster and faster, over and over. It wasn’t until then that the guard finally started to scream, and then they were both screaming, and then it was all three of them, and I could hear them from outside.”

  My father opened his eyes. “I don’t care about the guard. There was no torture, no punishment horrible enough for what he did. But I can never forgive myself for letting that poor bastard prisoner become a murderer too. It’s like I took the last decent thing away from him.”

  I held my father and let him cry for a while. “Did you ever tell Mom about this?”

  “No,” he said. “She would have…”

  “Say it.”

  “Some day, years later, when I was least expecting it, she would have used it against me.”

  “Never,” Ann said, a whisper with claws. “She would never have done that.”

  I slowly let go of my father, stroked his forehead a couple of times, and turned back to face Ann. “Yes, Ann. She would have.” Her eyes burned into me, hating me. “For five years I’ve stood by and let you turn her into a plaster saint. Whenever Mom got scared—like af
ter those huge, screaming fights she and Pop would have—remember?—she would turn cold and vicious and spiteful. You used to know that. Now it’s like you’re turning into her, and I hate it.”

  “Get out,” Ann whispered. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  “Not this time. You ran me off from Mom’s deathbed and I’m not going to let you do it again.”

  “You don’t know how to take care of people, Francis. You’re too spoiled and too selfish. Mother and I made you that way, God help us, by giving you everything you ever wanted.”

  “I don’t have everything I ever wanted,” I said slowly. “I never did. Mom and Pop didn’t have the perfect marriage. We’re not the perfect kids. Neither of us.”

  I watched her anger overwhelm her, to the point that she could no longer speak. She jumped out of her chair and ran from the room.

  “She’s so angry,” my father said. “I’ve never understood that.”

  “Mom’s death hit her hard.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” We sat in silence for a while, and then he said, “What are you going to do with that recording?”

  “I guess I’m going to play it for people. Starting with the Washington Post. If they don’t want to write about it, I’ll go to the New York Times and work my way down. I’ll put it on the Internet and hand it out to strangers on the street. If I get sued, so much the better. The story has to get out. It’s important.”

  “Okay,” my father said.

  It was after midnight in Paris and my body was aching for sleep. “You want the TV back on?” I asked him.

  “That would be great.”

  I fell asleep in the chair almost immediately, and when I woke up the room was dark and silent. I went to the window and watched the stars for a while. My father made a noise and turned over. “Frank?” he said sleepily.

  I sat down next to him and touched his shoulder. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Game

  by Maria Dahvana Headley

  15 September, 1950 Nightfall.

  I write this entry from my tent in Naini Tal, a village in the Kumaon Province of Northern India, shadowed by the snow-tipped Himalayas. I arrived here at 1300 hours, as the sun steamed the dew out of the forest like a laundress pressing an iron on a damp shirt. The whole place hissed, and I closed my eyes to inhale the cypress and cookfire smoke. Much has changed in my old hunting grounds, but were I to depend on my sense of smell alone, it would be as though I’d traveled backward thirty-two years.

  A simple glance, however, reminds me of the landslip passage of time. Three years ago, the country dissolved its colonial status and departed from the reign of George VI. The time of the hunter is done, though I warrant that there is still a place for a man such as myself.

  The children I met here in 1918 are now grandparents, but to them, I’m not the old man who sits before them. I’m an earlier incarnation, a warrior from a picture book, brought here at their request, a man with mystical powers over their enemy. They need me now, here in Naini Tal. I am their last resort.

  My journey originated in Delhi, some four hundred rattling kilometers away. My bones ache despite the care of my porters, and of my colleague, the estimable Dr. K_, but when the Kumaoni greeted me this afternoon, I felt my heart rise to meet my title.

  “Shikari,” they cried, all of them in unison. “Welcome, Shikari!”

  Big game hunter. Usually reserved for the native men. For my kills, covered in international newspapers, my kills which inspired other kills, I was long ago granted an exception.

  My old partner Henry, also a Shikari, and native to the Kumaon province, knew this place better than I ever could, but even I can see the changes. The trees were thicker the last time I was here, and the huts were roofed in woven branches rather than tin. Time has not been kind to this place, nor to me. The village now shines bright as a grub dug up slick and blind from beneath a rock, and another addition, a high fence made from a combination of thorn bushes and barbed wire, encircles it.

  No one seems yet to have tunneled into the mountains, a mercy, nor taken their tops, but roads have been installed everywhere, and the locally manufactured automobiles known as the Baby Hindustan backfire and sputter their way toward the sky. With Henry, thirty-two years ago, I watched hawks wheeling high above these mountains, but now the air is streaked with machines. I notice a subtle depletion of birdsong. As likely caused by the creatures I come to hunt as by machinery, I know, but I imagine the tragedies to come in the near future, ornithologists aiming their glasses at the heavens in order to identify different species of aircraft.

  Given these observations, I will note here that it is immediately clear what has spurred the tigers to their current behavior. Less than a century ago, the cats had limitless forest and limitless game. Now the wild is striated with roads and mines, and armed villagers have beaten the remaining tigers from Nepal into these hills, calling them all man-eaters. Every man and boy in the region has a weapon, a museum’s worth of defenses, rusty swords and axes to rifles, but shooting to kill is a skill that must be learnt. Wounding is easier. A wounded tiger is a hungry tiger. Here in Naini Tal, trouble has been brought into town, all in an attempt to keep trouble in the trees. It is an old story.

  Untwisting wire to enter through the gate today, I experienced a tremor in my thigh, no doubt caused by the climb, as unlike many men my age, I keep myself in fine form. A porter brought me the customary dish of metallic tea, lightened with buffalo milk and copiously sweetened with jaggery. Even as I sipped it, though, my cup chattered. An involuntary motion in my fingers, like that of a treetop in a fine breeze.

  I’ve been softened by civilization, I admit it. It’s been years since I last participated in this line of work, years I’ve spent writing and lecturing, years of domestic comfort in a house in Kenya, trees of my own, a bed, a wife. As I write this, I’m thinking of my wife’s hair, falling straight and black to her knees. Evenings, she sits before me on the floor, and I wrap her tresses round my hands, succumbing, greedy as a nectar-guzzling bat, to this late-life pleasure. I think of how the strands feel running over my fingers, delicate, but when braided together they are strong enough to strangle a man.

  Before her, I’d never thought of marriage. All my previous vows were to the creatures I hunted. I’ve done a good deal of seeing the world at grass level, my universe filtered through golden eyes, my world made of the pug marks of tigers, the tracks of ghooral, the mountain goats of this region, and the creamy camouflaged spots of the chital hind, my ears attuned to the barking of the kakar deer, and the hornlike belling of the sambur, to the chittering of monkeys and the churr of the nightjar. Before I met my wife, I’d never imagined anything of the world through the eyes of another human.

  She’s angry with me now. She doesn’t want me hunting. She certainly doesn’t want me hunting here. As I left our house, she stood in the doorway and shouted: “Old men need not go hunting for tigers! Tigers are already hunting for them!”

  She’s wrong about that. I’m equal to this, and Dr. Andrew K_, my taxidermist colleague, is beside himself with excitement. This afternoon, he sat beside me on a stump near the cookfire, knees bouncing, his uniform crisply ironed and starched by his own wife back in New York City. I’d promised him a hunt. He’d read in his boyhood my accounts of the Monsters of the Mountains who’d dragged entire villages into the darkness, leaving only shards of bone behind for the poor Hindu funerary rites that required something to burn.

  In certain cases, depending on how long the cat had uninterrupted possession of the dead, there’d be nothing left, the man-eater having devoured the entirety: skin and bones and bloodied clothing. On those occasions, I sometimes removed a fragment of ivory from my own baggage and presented it to the bereaved for burning.

  My wife would say that with my substitutions, I’ve sent elephants to the afterlife, along with rhinoceroses and whales. That I’ve populated the sky with things that do not belong there. Therefore, I do not tell her. I c
onsider myself to have been, at some moments in my time as a shikari, a minister of mercy. I spent my career in these forests. I have my own rules of conduct.

  K_, in contrast, has, according to the vitae he supplied me, spent the bulk of his own career in the bowels of New York City’s Natural History Museum, his hands coated in glue, sinew and fragments of stretched skin, refitting the dead for display to the living. Having begged of his institution a paid procurement trip to India, he quivers in anticipation.

  Naini Tal’s man-eater will be taken to Dr. K_’s museum and displayed there as a conservationary tale. The teeth and body will be examined for wounds caused by hunters. No tiger turns man-eater of its own instincts. We are not its natural prey. For one such as myself, who has long struggled to reconcile a history of violence with the world’s shrinking spectrum of carnivores, the offer of any redemption was too tempting to resist.

  Now that we are here in Naini Tal, however, I look at K_, at his too-gleaming weapon, and at his tapping fingers, with no small degree of suspicion. There is something of the town-raised boy visiting the country in him. Something of the tourist. He carries sharp implements, chocolate bars, and gin in his case. I earlier apprehended a small transistor radio in his belongings, about which he hedged. In case of emergency, he insisted, but I forced him to relinquish it. I’m certainly not convinced he should be armed. The nervous man with his finger on the trigger is as likely to shoot the hunter as the prey, but a man without a rifle will likely need to be defended from the man-eater, given any proximity.

  I have less tolerance than I once did. Since Henry’s death, I’ve hunted alone.

  Upon arrival, we were given a feast of roasted ghooral spiced with the local peppers, and warm cola coddled over rough roads from the city, the bottle recognizable even in the dark. I interviewed the villagers about their experiences of the man-eater, and they answered me vigorously. At first, the Kumaoni tried churchgoing, petitioning Christ and country, but prayer is an inefficient weapon, and the people in these mountains are finished with begging for miracles. Something is stalking them, and they mean to have its head.