by Thomas Tryon
“You knew she’d left, Mrs. Cooney?”
Mr. Pretty was measuring out the greens under Niles’s baleful stare. “Yep. She come out to say goodbye to me before she went. Reckon how Miz Rowe misses her. I don’t think Miz Rowe’s such a good housekeeper. You can’t believe the smell over there.”
“Smell?”
Mr. Pretty’s eyes were huge. “You’d swear somethin’ up and died.”
“Maybe there wa’n’t nobody to put her garbage out.”
P. C. scratched doubtfully. “Here, here’s a couple cukes for ya. On the house.” He added cucumbers to the mass of Swiss chard he had cradled in her arms. “How’s yore sister?” he inquired solicitously.
“Oh—’bout the same, P. C., thanks for asking. She don’t complain.” Jennie Koslowsky had rheumatic fever and every Friday Winnie used her night off to take the streetcar out Babylon way to visit her. “Niles, angel, fish in my purse for P. C., wouldja?” Niles ran to take from her apron pocket the worn change purse he and Holland had given her four birthdays ago. “You can pay for the corn now.”
“How much, Mr. Pretty?”
“Well, lessee. How many corn, Winnie—dozen and a half ears? Sixteen times five is eighty and a quarter for the Swiss chard ought to do it, no charge for cukes, that’s eighty and twenty-five is a dollar five. Have some parsley, too, it’s on the house.”
“No, that’s your mother’s five dollars,” Winnie told Niles, “give P. C. the dollar bill and find him a nickel, angel.” She marched inside, her plump brown arms garnished like Sunday roasts with the Swiss chard, cucumbers, and parsley. “S’long, P. C., much obliged. Wipe yore feet!” she loudly cautioned as Niles popped in after her. In a moment he reappeared, running to the vegetable man with a frosty pop bottle from the refrigerator. “Here, Mr. Pretty, have a root beer—it’s on the house.”
“Why, thanks, Niles.” As the boy uncapped it with the opener on his jackknife, Mr. Pretty squeezed himself back into the cab of his truck. “I’ll return the bottle when I come back later,” he shouted with a cheery bob of his red face, amid a salvo of backfires, his truck chugging, rattling, swaying from side to side as he circled the pump and coaxed it up the drive, awning flapping, scales banging, and, swinging wildly at the rear bumper, the red kerosene lantern he used as a taillight.
Niles went to move apart several bottles that were touching and might possibly explode in the sun. He kicked aimlessly at the dandelions in the grass, swung his arms loosely in their sockets, shrugged. Took a stick and whacked awhile at the baby horse chestnuts. Traced his finger on the fading rings of the target Father had painted on the trunk. Threw the stick as far as he could. Got bored. Looked around for something else to do.
Phew, it was hot. He ambled over to the pump, pushed the handle, took a drink. He wiped the bitter copper taste from his mouth and hung the cup in its accustomed place. Then he filled the pool under the spout, put his hand over the drain, and watched where the water formed a face for him—not a perfect one, but near enough.
“Niles.”
Ada was calling through the screen door. She pointed at the bike, still in the drive.
“Okay.”
He rolled it under the tree and leaned the saddle against the trunk. Holland’s Reddy Racer, red, black, and chrome, with a kickstand, a wire basket, a rack behind, and instead of a bell, a klaxon. He pressed the heel of his hand on the plunger: Hahroogahr! it sounded.
Where had Holland gotten to now? Where, for that matter, was everybody? Anybody? Torrie wasn’t in the arbor, as Mother said; he could hear her over the way, laughing with Mrs. Joacum. Mr. Angelini? The mower had been abandoned in the middle of the lawn, but of the hired man, not a trace. The heavy air was saturated with the sour odor of grass cuttings. A katydid sang in the elm out front. Winnie had her radio on again. Mr. Crofut’s whistle sounded.
July was a pain. And more than a week of it left. Just plain boring. If you didn’t go to the seashore or to camp, you were bored. Holland didn’t want to go to camp, and with Father dead and Mother the way she was, who, Niles wondered, would take them to the seashore? Meanwhile, suffer. T’ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity. Well, there was one refuge sure to be cool—the icehouse.
He trotted across the drive and under the breezeway. He ran through the granary yard and past the dump heap, where Mr. Angelini had stuck his empty gasoline can. It lay on top of the pile, radiating heat. Taking the slope past the wagon room in a series of bounds, Niles dashed into the buttery meadow, arms flung from his sides in imitation of airplane wings, palms skimming the tops of the grass, golden skin flashing below his shorts. Avoiding the road, he cut through the grass, leaping and whooping and hollering around the blackberry bushes, over the patches of devil’s paintbrush, the clumps of briars, the long whips of wild roses, down to the river.
The icehouse was fronted by big doors, warped and wide enough for a wagon. Leaning against one, he let his weight swing it inward. The interior was cool and dim; sun through the ruined roof sketched in beams, rafters, scaffolding; through the giant hole in the platform flooring, where the blocks of ice used to be hauled up, the river was a lake of murky green. Cattails clustered at the bank, sausages skewered on slender wands. Removing his sneakers, Niles waded knee-deep into the water. A flat bug skittered across its surface, spidery legs tracing intricate geometric patterns behind. Slippery gray mud at the bottom oozed between his toes; he gripped for balance as he edged along a narrow shelf and reached out to break the stalks of the rushes.
With a goodly harvest, almost more than he could manage, he footed his way back along the mud shelf to the loading platform. He dropped the cattails in a heap and lay on his belly beside them, head hanging over the platform edge, eyes staring meditatively down at the water. It was pleasant there in the shadows. It smelled of coolness, like a fern garden; like the well once had before they sealed it up. From upside down, one piling, gloved with green algae and slime, and larger than the rest, seemed to rear back as though resisting the gray mud that mired it. He squinted, looked hard, saw: primordial ooze, spawning strange beings down below, a race of quasi-lunged, half-legged creatures dragging themselves along the bottom; a world sunless, gloomy, nocturnal, where sunken logs lay, sodden and heavy, poor dead drowned things, and with them, hidden in the murk, savage bloated creatures, mouths wide as shovels, thick lips nuzzling threads of water-whitened ganglia, picking clean of flesh skeletons through whose empty eye-sockets coldly glowing eels wound like night trains, while overhead, through the ruined roof, pterodactyls soared the vacant sky.
He drifted, dreamed; and dreamed some more.
Just past the icehouse, where the sycamore trunk tilted out over the water, was a clear deep pool, perfect for swimming. At the tip of the tree a small platform of planks had been nailed as a crude diving structure; girdling its middle was a frayed rope used for climbing onto the platform.
Toes curled around the sawed wooden edges, the sun hot on his naked skin, Niles stood poised for a moment, then dived. The water felt deliciously cool as his body sliced through it. He stayed under and opened his eyes. A shoal of silvery minnows darted by, clumps of weeds danced, pebbles gleamed whitely. Blowing air from his lungs, he left a trail of bubbles as he gradually sank to the bottom. He bent his knees, pushed off, and with a rush shot to the surface, exploding halfway out of the water.
His feet touched bottom and he stood, arms akimbo, looking over at the bank. Something moved behind the bushes.
He whistled a few bars of a tune:
How many miles to Babylon? Threescore miles and ten—
And smiled when, out of the bushes, came the answer:
Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.
Holland stepped around the shrubbery and stood at the water’s edge, a broad smile on his face.
“Hi!”
“Where’ve you been?”
“No place.”
“You been down to the train tracks?”
“Nope.”
/> “Didja go up to Knobb Street?”
“Nope.”
“Packard Lane?”
Holland shook his head and Niles, out of guesses, sighed. He knew where he’d been all right: Babylon, end of the line. “C’mon in,” he called to his twin, standing at the bank. Holland shucked off his clothes and in a moment was leaping at him in the water. Niles threw himself backward out of his path, submerged, then surfaced, his wet hair whipping a fan of sparkling drops about his shoulders. Then he arched casually into the shallows and swam across to the small sandbar just breaking the river’s surface. Holland threw himself after and flopped down beside him. Panting, Niles gave himself up to the caress of the sun, the cool smoothness of the stones beneath his back, the bright dancing spots beneath his eyelids.
“Hot,” he heard Holland murmur. Niles opened his eyes. Against the sky his twin’s face looked saturnine, satanic almost, as he shot Niles one of his oblique looks and then, with a lazy half-smile of contentment, closed his own eyes.
There’s that secret smile again. What was it, this thing that amused Holland so, this past week or more? What is it? Say. Tell me. No, you won’t—you never do, have, will. It wasn’t fair. They had come from the same cell, had lived nine months curled around one another. They should have already learned each other’s secrets. And he had given his up, all of them. Is that the way it was supposed to be with twins? The Gemini, Castor and Pollux? I already told you all my secrets—all of them. But you keep yours, you hide them. Miserly, sly, secretive Holland, angry half the time, indifferent the rest; twins are supposed to be together, aren’t they? Aren’t they?
He felt overcome; the old, sad feeling, that longing for—what? He could not tell. Fugitive tremors ran through his body, along his limbs, vague yearnings assailed him; again the Shadow Hills came to mind. He tried to picture them. Nothing. His brain groped; what was it? Something he had forgotten? Never learned? Was it a taste, a smell, a place? Babylon—end of the line?
What was at the end of the line?
Flinging an arm across his eyes, he slid off the sandbar and floated, while beneath his eyelids an image hovered: a figure lying there in the coffin in the parlor, the bottom part closed, the rest hinged back. Father . . . Father . . . He idled in the water. “What d’you suppose it’s like to be dead?”
“Jeeze, if you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s all. It’s like nothing. They put you in a box, paint your face up to look like you’re alive, but only asleep. Then they shovel out a hole and lay you in it and that’s all.”
“But if you’re dead, you’ve got to go someplace—heaven or hell or some place.”
Holland hooted. “Who believes that stuff anyway? It’s just grown-ups’ talk for Sunday school.”
“But you’ve got to go somewhere, don’t you?” Niles thought some more. He lay back in the water, watching first the sky—clouds scarcely more than a ruffle, like lace on a petticoat under the wide blue skirt—then dropping his eyes to his twin’s face. “What’s the last thing you’d like to see before you die?”
“Hm?”
“The last thing. If there was one very last thing you could wish to see before you died, what would you pick? Like—a sunset? A person? The ocean? What?”
Holland sniggered. “Listen, if I was dying, I’d be too busy doing just that to be looking at sunsets. And so would you.”
Floating vertically, his feet lightly touching the sandy bottom, Niles turned and looked across the water to some cows ruminating in the meadow below the Avalon ridge. “I’d wish to see her,” he said.
“A cow?” Holland had a fit.
Niles shook his head and smiled. No, he meant the Angel of the Brighter Day, he explained, his tone serious. The Angel was the last thing he would wish to see. He conjured her up, her hair hanging about her shoulders, shining white wings gently beating, and her smiling as she offered him the lily . . . bearing him away to Paradise . . .
“How d’you know she wouldn’t take you to hell?”
“Angels don’t go to hell. Only bad people do.”
“The devil was an angel once, and he went to hell.”
“Lucifer? He went to hell because he was evil.” Niles was treading water, his head partially submerged; under a darkened fringe of wet hair on his forehead his eyes shone bright across the glistening water. “You know what that is, don’t you?” he asked mildly.
“What? Evil? Evil is bad, that’s all.”
“And an evil person is someone who does bad things.”
“I guess. I never stopped to think about it.” Holland obviously preferred another subject. “I’ve been thinking about the show.”
“What about, it?” Niles swam back to the sandbar.
“If we’re going to do the trick, we’ve got to get some light down in the apple cellar. Those cattails are too dry now to use matches. We’ll have to get a lantern, hang it somewhere; it’ll give enough light.”
“Where’ll we get a lantern?”
Holland thought for a time, but didn’t reply. Then he said, “Have you thought any more about the trick?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
Niles knew what he was getting at. “Well—” he began lamely.
“It won’t work, will it?”
“Yes it will. The only problem is to make the cabinet—”
Holland chuckled. “Niles Alexander, you’ve forgotten something.”
Had he? What? He was sure he’d figured it all out, Chan Yu’s disappearing trick. He couldn’t think—
“You forgot. How can the two of us get in the cabinet?”
Ohh. Dumb stupid Niles. Well, he hadn’t planned on two. He’d assumed, naturally, since he’d been the one to figure out Chan Yu’s trick that he’d be the one to perform it. But no; Holland had other ideas, was shaking his head again.
“You’re forgetting something else, too—it still won’t work.”
“Won’t? Why won’t it?”
“Because of the Slave Door. Remember? No? C’m’on. Put your clothes on. I’ll show you.”
It was called the Slave Door because, years ago, before the Civil War, when Connecticut had been the first to go abolitionist, Great-Grandfather Perry had passed runaway slaves through it: men and women, children even, sequestered in safety until they could be sent on their way via the underground railway to freedom in Canada. Holland leaned against the wall opposite and said, “Now. Look at me, Niles Alexander. What else have you forgotten?”
Niles didn’t know.
“Think. Suppose we build the platform over the trapdoor, say we drop down into the apple cellar. Say it works fine up to that point. Then what?”
“Then we jump off the mattresses, change costume, go out the door, run upstairs and appear in the audience.”
“What do we do?” Holland was forcing him to think.
“We run—out—the—” He deflated audibly. There it was, staring him in the face. He was looking right at it. The padlock. Because of Uncle George’s orders, a stout padlock and chain secured the hasp and staple, rendering the Slave Door useless. And the key was in Uncle George’s pocket. Without it, there was no other way out.
Holland flashed a triumphant smile. “All right now,” he said, like an officer taking command of a sinking vessel, “come along,” and he ran back up the stairs. He raised the trapdoor and looked down into the cellar. “Listen, I can do it,” he said eagerly. “I know how to work the whole thing. You leave it to me.”
Niles looked down. All that snow. Snow in July, for the Winter Kingdom of the Akaluks. The shredded cattails lay in soiled drifts, sinking into corners, forming a downy carpet underfoot, bits flurrying upward, swirling snowflakes carried by the air currents. Against the cellar’s whitewashed walls the banks of pale stuff made it seem as if a snowstorm had blown in through the trap.
“How? How will we make it work?” His voice was disappointed. “Holland—?”
“Hmm?”
“It isn’t going to be any fun, is it?”<
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“What—the show? Sure it will. I toldja—I’ve got it all figured out. I know where we can get the lantern. All we need is a Chinese mustache, and a hammer and a saw to build the cabinet.”
“Where will we get the lantern?”
“Well,” said Holland with a wicked roll of his eyes, “wait and see.”
And, yes, Niles guessed, not wanting at all to go through with the show, yes, he’d have to wait and see . . .
7
Here’s July in Connecticut. Here’s the whole of Pequot Landing, stupefied in its post-prandial torpor. And here’s the sort of mischief a boy can get into on such an afternoon while folks are trying to beat the heat. Here’s Reddy Racer, black and chrome and red, kickstand, wire basket, and klaxon—hahroogahr!—whizzing along Valley Hill Road. Come on along, up to the corner of Fiske Street. Here’s Mrs. Jewett cloistered under her beech trees, hammock, newspaper . . . A nifty idea would be to sneak into the house and, using the brush and paint left behind by the painter, write something on the fresh walls with the ceiling color, something nasty, something dirty, something fun.
So long, Mrs. Jewett!
Hahroogahr!
Further north, up to Packard Lane; happen upon Mr. Pretty’s vegetable truck, parked behind the Pilgrim Drugstore while P. C. downs a lemon phosphate. Reddy Racer makes a quick stop—then off and away. P. C., kiss your lantern goodbye. Haw haw.
Hahroogarh!
East on Packard Lane to the Thomas Hooker Highway, then south, wheels whizzing, spokes twinkling. There goes Professor Lapineaux in his Hupmobile—Bonjour, Professeur! Au’voir, Professor Rabbitwaters Lapineaux. At Church Street, east across the railroad tracks, take the time to lob a rock at a window in the freight depot when the clerk is out on the loading ramp. Crash! “Hey you, you damn kid—!”
Hahroogarh!
Have a look behind the Congregational Church, where the sexton is laboring in the cemetery. Mr. Swate lifts his sunhat and wipes his brow again. He blinks, can’t believe his eyes. “Hey—you! Fer God’s sakes, kid, not on the grave! Sweet Jesus! Hey—hey you, come back here, you little sacrilegious—” He chases, gives up; takes a closer look at the flowers on the grave; cannot believe his eyes.