Melissa opened her eyes. “That letter, Hank. He needs to talk to you about it. I’ve been so wrong,” she said, and gripped his hand tighter. “I lost my father to the water,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose Bobby the same way.”
The General had told Hank long ago about Melissa’s father. Hank knew the truth. Her father had jumped without a lifebelt and none of his crew could turn the boat around to get back to him in time. Melissa was never told.
Hank suspected she knew that her father was a weak man, likely a suicide.
Melissa said, “I thought a lot about my father and me when I was down there. I want Bobby to know we love him, to know we’d risk our lives for him.” Her free hand touched her puffed face. “I wanted that for him.”
“He knows that,” Hank said, softly. “You proved a lot going down in the hole.”
Sammy said, “We got to get her to shore.”
Melissa sat up, moving her arms up and down, her eyes like glass.
“She’s delirious,” said a volunteer.
“You think I’m Judas, don’t you, Hank?” asked Melissa.
“We’ll give her something when we get her to shore,” the fireman said to Hank.
Melissa leaned her head back in exhaustion and murmured, “It’s all over though, Hank. You don’t have to try to save him down in that tunnel. You’ll die down there. I don’t want to lose you, too. Bobby’s dead. I know that.”
Hank watched Mudman fastening the descent harness on his legs. Then, Hank said loud enough so she could hear him over the screaming wind, “No, we are not giving up, Melissa.”
As Hank got back to the others, Pete was talking to Sammy outside the tent.
“We’ve got to get those animals out of the way.”
“I can handle it,” said Hank.
“We’ll have to kill them,” said Mudman.
“No,” came a voice from the other end of the mound.
They all turned to see the long row boat which had just touched against the shoreline. A shadowy figure at the back leaned down to turn off his outboard motor.
Pete said, “Jimmy.”
Jimmy Swift stood up from his seat and gracefully walked forward in the tipsy boat, then jumped to the sandbags. He moved along the walkway, stepping around the collapsed bags, steadily coming toward Hank.
When he was close, he said, in the soft knowledgeable voice that Hank and Pete knew so well, “I’m sorry for your boy, Mr. Hank.”
Hank nodded.
Cincy came up to him and embraced him. “The muskrats, Jimmy. Melissa was badly hurt.”
“I know of this,” said Jimmy.
“I realize that for sure. Help us,” said Cincy.
Jimmy closed his eyes and moved his lips.
Hank saw the plywood surrounding the hole out in the top of the mound. He saw the two children perched on the boards, still there, their hands ready to help guide Mudman in his harness down into the earth.
“Stand back,” Jimmy said out loud. Then, his slicker glistening from the rain, he held up his hands and moved his lips again, the rain coming down the sides of his head.
Cathy called out, “The muskrats are coming out.”
“The little critters,” said Mudman.
From the hole, muskrats of all sizes had popped up, their eyes bright spots in the darkness. One by one they scrambled out of the hole and across the plywood. Cathy and Richard stood back at the edge of the plywood, eyes wide open.
“Like they’re in a trance,” said Cathy.
“Yes,” said Cincy.
The animals tumbled down and gathered in the downpour beside Jimmy. He started toward his boat, the muskrats falling in behind him, their paws stepping in cadence with the silent Native American.
Jimmy put a small plank against the side of his rowboat. The muskrats in single file climbed it and jumped into the boat, assembling as a furry, squirming mass. Jimmy waded in water to his knees, holding the side of the boat until all the rats were aboard. Then he clambered in, started the motor, and slowly backed the boat away. A final animal had appeared on the walkway, separating itself from the others and staying behind.
“Cochise,” said Cathy.
“So it was his nest after all,” said Pete. “He was going down there to take care of them.”
“He wanted to attract us to the hole so we would help,” Cathy corrected.
Sammy picked up the harness.
“Mudman, you ready to go down?”
Chapter Twenty
Hank handled the rope for Mudman’s descent. As his friend disappeared in the hole, he listened for the first message. The radio static sounded sharply against the downpour and the shouts of the remaining firemen working with Sammy.
He remembered another time when the roles had been reversed, and Mudman had been security to him, had been holding on to him. Mudman had saved his life, as well as his sanity. They had run to the shelter in the darkness, the explosions going off around them from the incoming mortars. In the back of the shelter, deep among the assembled soldiers, the priest was praying. One of the soldiers had a pocket radio and it picked up part of a song on Armed Forces Radio. The stanzas interrupted the prayers, and the sound was further punctuated as the men choked and coughed in the dust-laden heat. The song was about seeing the green grass of home.
Another blast, closer outside the shelter, disrupted the rest of the music and prayers with its thunder. Mudman stood beside him. He began whispering in Hank’s ear, speaking slowly, bending his face down under the lip of Hank’s helmet so Hank could hear every word, even with the punctuating explosions. He told Hank he was not a coward, that he was sick, unable to stop shaking from the fear of being closed in, of being buried. Mudman said, “You hear that song? Think about the green grass outside.” He had gone on, “Think about the green grass, buddy, think of the blades of grass, millions of them like the baseball or football field at the high school in River Sunday.”
Hank’s mind had remembered Melissa in the grass behind the General’s mansion. He had smelled the scent of her body.
Mudman had continued whispering, “Charlie’s out there in the night, one of him for each one of them mortar rounds, Hank. He’s brought his round all the way from North Vietnam, all the way just to shoot it this night. Just after you hear the incoming, Hank, you think about him running, running fast as he can to get to cover. You smile, Hank, because you know what is coming and you don’t want to be that Charley. His life is over because he has to run as fast as he can out of that rice paddy before the bullets get him.”
Mudman had gone on whispering, “Puff the magic dragon is up there and pretty soon you’ll hear it, Hank.”
“Puff,” Hank had replied. He had forgotten about Puff.
“Puff can knock out every blade of green grass in that field with his burst of machine gun fire. Hank, just think of that. Charlie Cong is running and he isn’t going to get away.”
Then Hank had heard the noise of the propeller-driven cargo plane above them, the noise of the airborne Gatling gun, the noise like a contractor cutting through the concrete of a street with a pneumatic hammer, the steady eerie sound.
Mudman had whispered, “Think about Charlie dying, Hank, not you. He is afraid, Hank, not you. He can’t escape because he is chewed up like green grass.”
Mudman’s voice blared over the loudspeakers, shaking Hank out of his memories. “Hank, keep that rope tight,” said Mudman. He began to describe the shape of the tunnel. He said the walls of the hole were very wet and water was dripping. The water under the mound was approaching the level of the water in the swamp. The muskrat tunnels were flooding, bringing tidewater into the mound and Mudman was descending down into this flood.
Pete spoke up. “Fifteen feet,” he said, reading Hank’s mind.
Hank nodded. Pete meant that the top of the mound normally was about fifteen feet above the level of the swamp water at a high tide. The rest of the island was sodden at most high tides, fairly dry at low tides. With the wate
r at the edge of the sandbags, the water table in the mound must be rising even higher. Certainly any part of the airplane that was below fifteen feet from the top of the mound would be under water soon, and if they didn’t get Bobby out of there, then he’d be dead.
Mudman reported that his sack of dirt was almost full and that he would bring it up to empty it. Then he planned, he said, to come down again.
Hank prepared to start hauling the rope upward.
There was a jerk.
The rope stopped moving.
“Boys, I’m in trouble.” said Mudman. His voice sounded worried, not the normal casual Mudman.
“What happened, Mudman? Come on back,” radioed Hank.
“Broke my arm, I think. Hurts like hell.”
“We’ll get you out,” said Hank.
Mudman continued, his voice shrill with pain. “I put the ceiling beam into place. I hit the damn board too hard and it went back into the mound. I think I have broken into another tunnel beside this one.”
“Just let the rope pull you up.”
“Board came down on me. I was completely covered up, right to my eyeballs. I’ve got on the air tank but so much muck around me, I can’t use it.”
“A little bit more. I can see your boots.” Hank was at the hole.
“That was my good arm.”
“We’re going to pull you out.”
“I’m sure as hell sorry, Hank.”
Hank had Mudman’s boots in his hands. His friend was halfway out of the ground.
“Goddamn,” said his old friend as he tried to grin, his face upside down.
“You got that right,” Hank answered, the rain biting his face.
“It’s up to you,” said Mudman, breathing hard.
“We’re going to get you into shore to fix that arm,” said Sammy.
“No,” said Mudman. “I’m broken but I ain’t going anywhere. I’ll stay here, Hank.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Around him he smelled the odor of wet animal fur mixed with the stink of swamp water. The tiny opening above him, the oval of light from the rescue team against the night sky, disappeared. The dim glare got less as he went deeper. He felt a trickle of fear but only a little. He crawled into the corridor, the flashlight showing little more than four walls of a rectangle. The blood flowed into his upside down head. He felt slightly dizzy but he handled this. He remembered standing on his hands to entertain Bobby when the boy was a baby. He touched the walls of the opening, not much wider or higher than his body. He kept inching forward on the downward slant of the passage, knowing he neared his son.
Captain Steele’s voice crackled on the radio. “The storm surge is raising the water level.”
“We only have time for this trip,” replied Hank into the microphone attached to the side of his head.
“I’m giving you some more slack,” said Mudman.
Hank reached the end of the previous dig. Here a small, almost round hole appeared - the tunnel that the muskrats used. Mudman had made his last cuts in the walls before the timbers had crashed down. Carefully Hank repaired the structure and, after testing the boards, began to scrape away new soil.
Even with the thoughts of Bobby, the fear quickly came over him. He imagined the walls moving and squeezing him. His arms and legs refused to move.
“Why am I so afraid?” he reasoned with himself. He thought of his son.
“Bobby will make me succeed,” he proclaimed, as if his son were a god who granted power. He heard again, deep in memory, the screams of his father’s fear in closed spaces. The images rushed through his mind as he lay there, shovel in hand, afraid to move.
Long ago, on a day when he was eight or nine years old, he was going to the basement to check the daily laundry for his mother. He didn’t like descending into the dark cellar lit by a single light hanging from an electric cord. As he walked down the crude wooden stairs his father had built he smelled the bleach in wet laundry.
“Dad,” he called.
“Here,” his father answered. He had a strong manly voice, a commanding sound. “You helping Mommy?”
“Yessir,” Hank replied.
His father answered, his voice strangely strangled as if he had a rope around his neck. “I’m getting a few bulbs for the greenhouse. I remembered I put them down here last fall.”
His mother was vacuuming a rug in their living room above the store.
The cellar light went out
Hank said, “Mom’s blown the fuse again.”
Two quick crashes followed; heavy things falling upstairs.
In the dark, the plant bulbs fell from his father’s hands, tumbling softly as they hit the concrete floor. His father thumped first to his knees then outstretched on the floor, groaning.
Hank descended toward the older man, his own legs weakening. When he reached his father, there was enough glimmer from the basement windows to see the man. He had fallen flat on the old cracked cement, his face buried in his arms, the position of a person who was trying to penetrate, to hide deep in the stone.
His father whispered, “Why don’t they stop?”
“Who’s they? Mommy blew a fuse and then she dropped something.” Hank kneeled at his side, pulling at his father. “Daddy?”
The man pressed deeper into the floor.
Hank stood up, thinking he should call upstairs.
His father turned on his side and stared at Hank, eyes wet, face red. “I’ll get up.”
Hank’s mother yelled from upstairs. “Hank. Hope I didn’t scare you. I dropped a couple of your father’s books.”
“OK, Mom.”
Hank stared at his father.
His father said, “We have to fix the fuse.”
Hank tried to help.
His father waved him off. “I can stand.”
They moved slowly, holding each other. Hank’s unreasoning fear of the walls started that day. He began trembling in all tight rooms and closed places.
The wet tunnel soil brought him to the present. He thought of the risks taken by his friends on the mound above. He felt shame.
His thoughts raced. That’s a testament to love and to a great child. It’s all being thrown away by me, frozen here in this tunnel. Soon they’ll realize I’m terrified down here. I realize I don’t care about Bobby. Melissa was right to take him away from me.
He panicked. He knew he had to escape. Nothing else mattered. If he escaped he welcomed being a coward for the rest of his life. Anything, only let him get away from this tube of imprisoning earth.
Hank ripped at the walls, trying to make more space. He tried to turn from his downward position. His hands grabbed at the slope until his body squeezed half way upward. He clambered toward the surface.
“Hank,” the radio blared. “The rope’s gone slack. Answer back. Are you all right?”
All right? How about the fear of dying, the fear of being buried? The walls of his grave.
He talked to himself, a murmur. “Father Tom told me that none of us can escape the walls around us. Oh, Jesus, even the Earth is hemmed by its air and the universe. You are in your body, a form of spacesuit, in the middle of eternal universe. You are damn well going to be closed in by your grave and the hereafter too. You got no escape. Running away from closed spaces is never possible. You have to teach yourself and then you’ll be all right.”
Mudman spoke, his voice distant, “Talk to me, Hank.”
The trembling stopped. Hank smelled the stink. He felt water on his knees. He could see it trickling from the side of the muskrat hole below him.
He stopped thrashing against the walls of the hole. Wet air touched his skin. He wiped the caked earth from his face.
Hank realized that his son must be even more afraid, with puddles up his waist if not higher. He might be keeping only his head above in some corner of the aircraft. He kept wishing to hear Bobby one more time.
“I’m making progress,” Hank reported, his voice steadier.
Hank went back to w
ork. He turned and made almost a foot of new depth in following the muskrat tunnel.
The line became taut.
Pete spoke into the microphone. “Worried about you.” The old man did not ask Hank any more.
Hank reached to his left side to add dug earth to his bag. As he did he pushed on the wall hard for balance. His elbow sank into the muck and the earth collapsed. Gritty mire sucked against his face.
He froze, thinking fast, so as to not make the situation worse.
“I’m in a little bit of trouble,” he called in.
“Talk to us,” came back Mudman.
“Sinking into the mound.”
“More line?” said Mudman.
“No, for God’s sake, no. I’ll fall deeper. Steady until I get myself back on track.”
Hank decided to build one of Mudman’s frames and to pray the tunnel held the weight. The bottom tended to be firmer than the ceiling and sides.
“What’s happening?” called Mudman on the radio.
“I’m trying to get myself on something solid.”
As he dug, a clod of earth fell on his head causing sudden pain. He reached up and pushed it away. He looked at the clod. Something was strange about it. He scraped at the mud. A light color appeared against the mud. He stared at it.
It was a skull. “One of the old Nanticoke heros,” he mumbled. As he stared at the bone, he noticed the space for the left eye. It was not circular. Instead it was elongated top and bottom with a broken cleft. He knew. He grunted, “This guy was a hero all right. He got a spear right in the eye. Wonder if he was a good hero or an evil hero. What side was he on?”
Hank worked fast. Every movement caused more pain in his back because of his position, hanging suspended and lifting his arms over his head to work. He stretched every muscle beyond capacity. First he placed the base board of the frame. This two by four was three feet long. He stuck it as solidly into the base of the tunnel as he could. Next went the two short side parts jammed on the first wood. The next step was to set the top. Here he had more trouble because he had to clear the earth which had fallen against his right shoulder and face.
Easter Sunday (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 7) Page 16