“Everything going all right besides your ball glove?”
“Yes.” Wally tossed the bulb over his shoulder and into whatever was back there. Then he picked up the steel tricycle, lofted it with a loud supremely satisfying crash into a pile of whatever was at the back of the garage, and turned toward his visitor. He stared at Lowell from the middle of his upside-down life. “How does that soccer goal look to you?” He looked around for something else noisy to heave. A rake. Holding it at the end of its handle, he wheeled around once, three-sixty and very fast, and slung it against the back wall, plenty of bam and rattle. He could feel his face go red, but he laughed anyway, too loud, and Lowell hesitantly laughed, too, but he didn’t flinch. “Did Carol tell you to look in on me?”
Now Lowell was inspecting the goal’s bad post. “This one we can’t blame on the rats,” he said.
“Did she?”
Lowell stood looking at Wally, like he was considering whether to answer the question or not, which meant the answer was “yes” as far as Wally was concerned.
“Veronica’s got pizza for lunch today,” Lowell said finally. “Smelled real good. Why don’t you get out of your garage malaise and come on over.”
Wally went back to stirring around, didn’t answer. This wasn’t a friendly visit. Carol must have phoned Lowell and asked him to come by and make sure things were okay.
“Little food wouldn’t hurt,” Lowell said to him.
The invitation hung there and died. Good enough for it, Wally was thinking.
“Okay, well—anything I can do?”
“How about you make like a tree and leave,“Wally offered, and though he regretted the wording immediately, it did make them both laugh.
“That’s a really old one,” Lowell said. “Look, actually it’s probably a good time for somebody to be here. But okay.” Lowell headed down the driveway, calling back, “Give me a call if you want some pizza this afternoon. Veronica and I are just hanging out. You’d be welcome to come over. Let’s talk this week and we can coordinate the Arcola thing.”
“Thanks for dropping by,” Wally muttered in his direction, too quiet to be heard. “What a pal,” he said, though Lowell was completely gone. “Have a good day, Lowell,” Wally said to himself. “Thanks for caring, Mr. Perfecto.”
On the side of the house, Wally kicked in the window-sized plywood piece that covered the opening to the crawlspace. Down on his hands and knees, he looked in. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. What was the first thing he saw? The flashlight! The one that worked! It still did! It was under the house! What a weird day! He wondered if he could remember the details. With the flashlight, he could see the extra lengths of PVC pipe. There were plenty of pieces but the size was wrong and, besides, if he had to go to the store for the glue, why not get the exact length and size of pipe, the connector joints, and do this right. Of course. Wally was feeling better. There was not a chance in hell he’d find something to measure the goal with, but it was okay. Finding the missing flashlight was his reward for patience and for not losing his temper very much.
He replaced the crawlspace cover and went inside. He checked messages; there was one on the answering machine. Margie had called to say she was going to keep the kids overnight if Wally didn’t mind. She’d be in touch tomorrow. Ah. Carol was working the system from a remote location. He sat in the leather chair in his study. The iron horseshoe was on his desk but he didn’t remember putting it there. Probably had, though. Before long it was evening, and he realized he’d been reading. He looked at his watch. It was almost dark outside. He felt okay but sometime in the past hour he’d sweated down his shirt. Where were the kids? He went in the kitchen. A burner on the stove glowed bright red. No harm. Do no harm. He turned it off. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. He’d lost some hours, he knew that. He looked in the backyard. Had someone smashed everything back there with an ax so that it looked like there’d been a Viking raid? No, everything looked fine except the soccer goal, and that was an act of God. The garage door was still gaping. From the enclosed back porch, right at dusk, he watched the garage door, pushed the little button on the remote, and the door obediently dropped down on its rails and closed. This was a torment and a mystery, one of the many. Another was that when Wally went back to the front of the house, he noticed through the front window a police car parked at the curb. He backed away from the window along the wall and slipped unseen into his study. He kept the lights off. The policeman was out of his car and standing at the front of the house staring in the study window. From his desk chair in the dark, Wally stared back.
•
Only the Lord knew what time it was when the next phone call came. Pitch black was in him and over him. The sudden noise of the house phone didn’t faze him, nor did he move from his chair. It rang many times; he wasn’t going to pick it up. What he might do, he was thinking, was stroll down the front sidewalk and have a chat with the constable. Do you know what was on his desk? His ax. Do you know when he found it? Neither did he. Do you know what was in the front yard? A stump. He should go out there and deal with it. The porch light would reach that far into the yard. He could chop out that stump, and maybe while he was at it he could go down and talk to the police officer at the curb. He could settle everything so that when the sun came up he could mow the lawn in front and the stump wouldn’t hurt the lawnmower, if he ever got the lawnmower fixed one of these days, because of the horseshoe. Sleep was helping him see things clearly and in a more positive way.
The phone stopped ringing, and almost immediately his cell phone started squawking in his pocket. He writhed about in the leather chair trying to get at it. As he peered at the screen, he realized again that he was feeling better. Amazing how sometimes the weight could just be lifted.
The register said “Unknown Caller.”
“Hello, this is Wally Brown.” He tried to sound authoritative and business-like, even though most people who knew his cell phone number knew better about him.
“Hi, is this Wally? This is Rachel Crowley.” How nice. Rachel, the beautiful neighbor across the street.
“Hi.”
“You didn’t sound like you, sorry.”
“Well, I’m the one who’s sorry. I’d like to always sound like me when you call, which is rarely.”
“Is this Wally, really?”
“Well, is this really Rachel Crowley from across the street?”
“Haha.”
“Nah,” Wally said, trying to sound as friendly as he could.
“Hey, is Carol home? I wanted to talk to her for a second if I could catch her.”
“Me, too.” Wally looked at Rachel’s house through the blinds of the study window. “Rachel, I was just thinking about you. I’m dazzled that you called right when I was mulling you over.”
“Whatting me over?” she laughed.
“Mulling. Thinking, you know.” He sat up straight in the dark. “It’s a very surprising thing that you called right now. No, Carol’s in Ohio at her mom’s.”
“Ah. Is her mom doing okay?”
Wally found he couldn’t speak for a moment. Words were wedged and stuck.
“Hello?”
“She’s slipping, Carol’s mom is—but holding forth.”
“Holding forth, or holding her own?”
“Yeah, holding her own.”
“Listen,” she said, “I can ask you this just as easy as I can ask your wife. I wanted to know if everything is okay, because there’s a policeman out front and he’s been parked there for quite some time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Maybe something’s up at the Fosters’.”
“Lemme look,” Wally said. And he went through the motion of looking.
He could tell somehow that she was looking, too—movement, maybe the sound of a blind at the window being moved. Finally, she said, “Maybe he’s just parked there to slow people down. They go down Van Allen like bats from Hades.”
“Did you just call on the other phone?”
“Yeah, but I know you don’t pick it up. I got your cell from the campus directory.”
“Why didn’t you call Carol’s?”
“Who says I didn’t, smart boy? She didn’t answer.”
“Ah.” Wally stood up. “Rachel, tell you what. I’ll put on a shirt and go out and see what Sherlock Holmes is up to, and I’ll call you back.”
“Oh you don’t need to do that. I can do it as easy as you can. I was just wondering if you knew anything I didn’t.”
“No, no, I’m going. I was going out there anyway. Some yard work.”
“Very funny. It’s two in the morning.”
“Well, I’ve been planning on doing it for a long time.”
“I see. The better the day, the better the deed sorta thing.”
“What?” He had no idea what she was talking about. “Look, Rachel, I’m going out there. I’ll call back after I find something out.”
“Deal,” she said. “Okay, I’m off then. Hope Carol’s mom is okay.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
He went upstairs without turning on a single light and got his blue denim shirt and put it on. He loved this shirt. It was the best shirt he ever had. He went in the bathroom and, using the nightlight above the sink, wiped his face with a cool wet cloth, combed his hair a little with his fingers, washed out his mouth. Rachel was very pretty, everybody thought so. Sometimes it did one good to be in touch with the outer world. It was a fresh perspective on things. He wondered why his ex-wife intentionally got fat and wouldn’t make love anymore. Even if she started hating him, still, that seemed like an extreme and self-destructive tactic. Life could be real convoluted first thing you know it. Back in the bedroom, he slipped into his top-siders. In the dark, he walked out the front door of the house, ax on his shoulder like a rifle and he was a soldier, down the front sidewalk to the mailbox, which was about fifteen feet from the front end of the parked cruiser. He hoped the mere presence of the large double-edged ax would send the message that he was out there to work on the stump. He looked up, as if to notice the police car for the first time, with the intention of walking over to the driver’s side window and saying hi. But no one was in the car. From the foot of his driveway, Wally looked up and down the neighborhood, house by house, both sides of the street. Nothing, nobody. There had been some mail, though. Hands full of envelopes and papers, he turned toward Rachel’s house and gave the “beats me” shoulder shrug in her general direction, figuring she was watching. On the front porch, he leaned the ax against the doorjamb, and then he walked back in the house.
In the dark he put the mail on the piano without giving it so much as a once-over, and went back into the study where his cell phone was. He sat down, and as he was redialing Rachel, he happened to glance out the front window in her direction. The police car was gone.
“Did you see that?” he said when she answered.
“See what,” she said in a pleasant tone.
“Did you see Sherlock pull away?”
“No,” she said. “I’m watching a tape in the bedroom. Why, d’you chase him off?” Rachel was a night owl, that’s for sure.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She laughed. “Well, good work. He needed to haunt somebody else’s curb, not ours. Glad everything seems okay in the ’hood.”
After he hung up, he went upstairs and thought he might get in bed. Surely it was time. Instead he found himself taking another shower. He got all cleaned up. He was feeling okay. He was glad the policeman had shoved off. It was Saturday night, for God’s sake. Didn’t he have anything better to do than watch an empty house?
THE UNDERLIFE
Rachel had been staring across the street for some time. She had seen Wally leave for work at dawn, his usual habit, and then later Rachel’s daughter, Hattie, had ridden off to school on her bike in a throng of raincoated neighborhood kids. Normally Rachel would have headed to the college shortly after that. But today she’d lingered at her kitchen table, in a kind of sleepy daze, looking out the bay window into the drizzle. She had the window cracked, and for a while she was noticing how the rain sounded different in each ear. In the left, it had a hushing, meshing sound, like wind in a dried cornfield. In the other, she could hear the sparkling, speckling, pecking sound of the individual drops of rain on the windowsill. Then she was looking out across the cool gray of the morning street, comparing distance vision with each eye. She would cover one eye, looking only with the other. She could see distance just a shade sharper with the left than the right.
It was during this experiment that she noticed Carol Brown cutting between her house and the Fosters’ next door, bending down at the crawlspace entrance, climbing through the small window-sized opening into the area under her house. Watching this strange activity, across the street through a haze of damp, misty, morning air, Rachel was struck by how Carol moved. It was somehow obvious that she was on a private mission. In order to get in and out of this hole, a person had to get on all fours, push headfirst into the dark, leaving a blue-jeaned butt out in the daylight, then ease through the hole taking care not to scrape one’s back or shins. Carol carried a flashlight and, after having disappeared through the little window, apparently turned around so that she could reach out and get the wood crawlspace cover and replace it.
This awkwardness was not Carol Brown’s style—she was a lovely, graceful woman from New York, from a family tied to opera and politics. Before Carol remarried, she and Rachel were close friends for a couple of years. Back then, there wasn’t anything they couldn’t tell each other—they talked on the phone deep into the night, and they took care of each other’s kids. Rachel wondered if enough of the old friendship still existed that she could ask Carol about the crawlspace thing. It was an idle thought and it passed. She locked up the house and went to work and eventually forgot about the whole episode.
A few months later—in fact, it was shortly after the first of the new year—Hattie came home ill from school, and Rachel left work early to be with her. After making her comfortable on the couch, with 7-Up and chicken soup and the well-worn DVD of The Princess Bride, Rachel ran out for groceries. As she backed out of the driveway, she noticed a movement in the corner of her eye (it was two in the afternoon, the winter shadows short and dim). Over at the Browns’, the plywood crawlspace cover suddenly dropped open; then there was the long thinness of Carol’s blue-shirted arm reaching out, next her head with her hair tied up in a red bandana, all this in a flash, in the moment of shifting gears. Rachel drove on up the street before she thought much of it.
•
Around that same time, over at the college, another scenario involving the Browns was unfolding. Wally—an emotional man known for his wit and wisdom, a history Ph.D. from Notre Dame who was past president of the faculty senate—had had a couple of episodes. In one he’d yelled “get out of here” at a student so loud that the classroom building, Faculty Hall floors three through five, had fallen silent in the various classrooms and offices, as teachers and students waited for the other shoe to drop. In another incident Wally had shoved the registrar, a white-haired old man who was defenseless. It was at about the time of the thing with the registrar that Rachel had noted Wally began seeing Lowell Wagner—the chair in the Department of Psychology, the wellloved psychological counselor for half the community. Wally wasn’t seeing Wagner professionally, but he was a project of Lowell’s and they did play racquetball, which had gone on for years. Rachel was going to Wagner. From time to time she’d see Wally in Lowell’s waiting room. They never exchanged words. Both just looked down in deference, like fellow citizens encountering one another in the vestibule at Saturday evening confession.
•
But life went on. Winter passed, and with it Hattie’s cold weather illnesses, real and imagined. Spring came and went, and with it Rachel’s annual spring blues. In May a feeling kept coming in on her, that she needed something, needed it. She had a fondness and affinity for cops, historically. This t
ime she bought cognac and started dating a chiropractor from Arcola. She looked forward to school being out and over the summer having the hottest affair she could muster.
In her last session with Wagner (they’d decided to give it a rest at the end of the academic year), she took the liberty of telling him about Carol and the crawlspace. It felt to her on the one hand like gossip, but on the other hand she seemed to have a need to say something.
“Do you know her fairly well?” she asked.
“Not too well, no,” Lowell said, ever guarded. Rachel noted something in the eyes.
“She’s an old friend of mine,” Rachel said. She offered that Carol was a lovely woman, a pianist and artistic sort, and politically active deaver with the League of Women Voters. She was aware that Wally would have discussed Carol in his unofficial sessions with Lowell and surely Carol would have discussed Wally in her actual sessions. She watched Lowell’s eyes for some sign she was bringing him new information. “She’s quite lovely, actually,” Rachel said.
“Yes. People always say that about her.” Wagner asked if Rachel ever socialized with the Browns, and she said that since her own divorce from her husband, Ken, she’d not socialized with many couples at all and hadn’t been asked much, but in the past, before Carol married Wally, she and Carol had been pals. And Hattie still often played with Carol’s kids, Stephen and Becky, and rode to and from school with them. Rachel offered that Wally and Carol as a couple were one of the handsomest pairs around and had been known to have great parties. It gave her a sense of warmth and expansive happiness to tell Wagner good things about the Browns. Like she was indirectly saying this to Carol herself.
And Wagner answered with his usual measured nod that seemed to be the opening to close the subject unless Rachel insisted, which she did.
“But I’ve noticed something,” she said. “I feel bad telling you this, in a way. I mean, we both know you see Wally, right? But after all you’re also my shrink.” She laughed, watching to see if he’d laugh with her. Unreinforced, she soldiered on. “There is something kind of odd—Carol goes under her house sometimes. Crawls under. Mind you, I never see her working in the yard, in the garage, or doing anything outdoors with the place—yet there she is, on a nearly regular basis, crawling through this little window thing under her house. I keep wondering, what’s going on?”
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