Complete Short Fiction, page 133
“Aline?” I said. I hadn’t thought of her in years either, though she had sent me a Christmas card once.
“Who else? Aside from a bit of the shakes where water is concerned, doing okay too, as far as I can tell. That’s the only response she’d give me. But Pete’s been poking around, about what happened.”
“What’s it to you?” I said.
“Are you kidding? He may have helped you out, but that guy kind of messed up my life.” He slapped his bad right foot with the postcard. “And I never did really understand what happened. Did you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well now’s your chance. Because Pete blew into town yesterday. Funny he never called either of his oldest friends, isn’t it?” Myron paused. “Is there any more beer?”
Pete and Myron worked closely together on all the plays at school the year after the failure of Pete’s magic career at the Candybox. Pete’s tech work and set design always set off Myron’s direction and performances. It was a great partnership. Even the events at the Candybox didn’t seem to affect that, even though Polly started dating Myron.
But things came apart on Founder’s Day, late spring of our senior year.
The main event of Founder’s Day is a performance of the big play about the founding of Masonville. It has as many roles as there are people who want to take part, with pioneer wives, Indians, evil robbers who live in a cave, politicians, balloonists, hobos, antiwar activists, and even a villainous English Duke who had fled the Battle of Saratoga, leaving his troops in the lurch.
Myron played a settler named Amos who got betrayed by his companions, almost killed, and found himself poling a raft across the deadly Black Swamp. Amos didn’t really have anything to do with the founding of Masonville, but he was more interesting than most of the people who did. Polly played Lady Penelope, discarded mistress of the evil Duke, who had settled for the love of a decent American adventurer. She made up her own costume for the role, which included an elaborate hat with a feather in it and a visible corset, covered in embroidered velvet.
In Amos’s big scene, poisonous serpents swarmed out of the dark water and tried to kill him and Lady Penelope. Previous years, it had been staged with lights and wiggling rags on strings that were supposed to be snakes but actually looked more like the dust bunnies under your bed had suddenly come to life.
One day Pete came to rehearsals with a giant snake head he’d built, way bigger than anything anyone had ever seen. He’d been doing some research, he said, in the old diaries at the historical society and late-nineteenth-century stories from the Masonville Sentinel. He said there had been a serpent in the Black Swamp. No one knew what the Indians had called it, but the settlers had named it Black Murray before they drained the swamp and it disappeared. There were many stories about the name.
Making fun of it, Myron said, “The thing looks like a brontosaurus or something.”
But his comment backfired, because people thought that might be kind of cool. Maybe something from the deep past had indeed survived here in the Masonville area until the coming of white settlers. So there got to be a substantial constituency for using the thing, and eventually Myron was forced to give in.
And Black Murray did make a dramatic appearance the night of the performance. As our hero Amos was lying against a barrel, looking out for the safety of the sleeping Lady Penelope, the head rose up in the shadows and loomed over him. The more nervous women in the audience shrieked.
But something had gone wrong. Pete had built it to show a lot of facial expressions. It could look irritated, startled, angry, even despairing. It had gotten a lot of laughs and applause during rehearsals, pretty much stealing the scene from Myron.
Anyway, the head was totally stiff when it pushed its way up over the raft. Myron tried to act like he was improvising to make up for the device’s failure, but you could pretty much tell he’d worked out a few jokes, like “why the poker face?”, ahead of time. Jokes that didn’t mean anything to the audience, who were looking at their watches, “isn’t it time for intermission by now?” and didn’t much care about a missing special effect.
Then the thing shook like it was having a fit, too full of all the things it just hadn’t gotten to say, and fell over right onto Myron and knocked him onto the black plastic sheet that represented the Black Swamp—and almost off the stage completely, into the brass section of the orchestra in the pit.
Polly as Lady Penelope moved with incredible speed and grabbed him before he could impale himself on a music stand. The lights caught her, dark hair streaming out from under the feathered hat, silver threads gleaming in her dramatically tight corset, and she said, “Hold on, my darling, and we will found a kingdom!”
Melinda Cibber, who I was trying to kiss just then, because she had to go get into costume as a settler woman in the first scene after intermission, snorted. “She’s always coming up with what she thinks are smart lines.”
I pretended I had not been paying attention to what was happening on stage. “Who?”
“Polly Deschutes. She’s so full of herself.”
Then she kissed me, and I forgot all about Polly Deschutes.
The lights cut, the scene ended, and, after a moment’s hesitation, the audience applauded heartily.
Pete always thought Myron had sabotaged Black Murray to avoid being upstaged. Myron said it had to be just a technical failure. The thing was just too complicated, he pointed out. Too many cables, pulleys, eyelashes, eyebrows . . . had Pete really expected the thing to work perfectly? And what was with the mean trick of trying to dump him into the orchestra? It wasn’t about Polly, was it?
Somehow, a lot of hostility that had been held in check for most of our high school career came out then. I never got the full story, but Pete and Myron didn’t really talk after that. In fact, they might well not have gotten together again until our last cruise through Ali Baba’s Cave, late the summer after our senior year.
When I got back with the beers, Myron was gone. I had expected that, and it was okay, because there was really only one way he could have gone: into what was left of Ali Baba’s Cave.
I peered in, feeling the cool coming out of the ground and hearing the distant drip of water. For an instant, it took me back, and I heard the cackling of the clown head on the top of the High Striker challenging manly men to take up the big mallet and test themselves against the Strength-O-Meter, and the shriek of kids as the Red Dragon dropped from its first high point.
Then I was looking into the dark at the bluish glow of Myron’s headlamp. He probably figured I would be reluctant to go in after him without light. But I always had my flashlight on my belt. Security, after all. I clicked it on and followed him.
After a few minutes, Myron’s own light vanished. I paused, listening for a fall. Nothing.
But there was another glow beyond where he had blinked out, yellower and more diffuse. I saw Myron’s silhouette as he made his way toward it.
We were in what had been the Magic Cavern, with its underwater lights and statuettes of mermaids in the alcoves. The floor, filled with the muck of a dozen big storms over the years, was pretty flat, and the top of the cave was high here, high enough that I wouldn’t brain myself. I turned my own light off too, and followed Myron.
I heard a scraping, and the sound of an electric motor, a drill or something. The sound thrummed in the enclosed space.
Then I was squatting down next to Myron, where he hid behind a rock.
Beyond us was the deepest part of the cave, what we had called the Bottomless Pool. Someone was in there, a light above him on a tripod, as he excavated the dirt with a shovel, sometimes using an electric drill to loosen rocks.
“Do you think he’ll find it down there?” Myron whispered to me.
“What?”
“Whatever he thinks he lost back then.”
The man down there was our age, a pudgy guy with thinning hair and a nice shirt, the collar turning up at the ends. He paused and wiped his forehead.
“A little to the left, Pete.” Myron’s voice could carry to the back rows of a big theater, so it boomed through this space.
Pete jerked. Myron had timed it perfectly, and he smacked his head against a low part of the ceiling. He yelped. “Dammit!”
Myron started laughing, like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen.
It was funny. Just not that funny.
Pete adjusted his glasses and looked up at where we hid. “Myron. You alone?”
“No way I’d do that. Wouldn’t be complete, would it?”
“Cliff? You there?”
“Yeah, Pete. I’m here. How you been?”
“Good. Great. You?”
“Can’t complain.”
Then there was some serious silence.
“Cliff has beer,” Myron announced.
“And Myron knows where it is.” I climbed down and handed Pete the beer I had been carrying for Myron.
Myron chuckled and went out to get himself one.
“What are you looking for, Pete?” I said.
For a couple of seconds, it looked like he might refuse to tell me. But then his shoulders fell, and you could tell what he was thinking: what would be the point of that?
He held up a dirt-encrusted brass pulley, worked it back and forth, then spun it with a finger. “I did nice work back then. All down in Dad’s workshop. Every night, sometimes all night. I could rotate 3D shapes in my head, see how they fit together, and then how they would work. I’d think of an effect, and then immediately come up with the right cause. My head hasn’t really worked that way since. I can’t even remember how I achieved some of the effects I did. . . .”
“You want to find the version of Black Murray you used that night?” I said it before I really understood it. “You think that will explain something to you?”
I’d startled him. Hell, I’d startled myself. He was looking for parts of his brain that still worked, and here it seemed that some of mine still did too.
“Um, yeah,” he said. “I do. You know, I worked on this version of Black Murray for months, from the night of Founder’s Day through the summer. It sucked me right up. No one saw me. And now I don’t remember how it worked. But imagine it, an electromechanical swamp serpent, all cables, pulleys, gears, motors, Wheatstone bulbs, and hinges. The kind of thing an ancient Greek priest would have used to fool worshippers. I want to remember how I did it, Cliff. I want to see that boy again. And I want to figure out how I got it to do . . . what it did. That night. Because I really can’t remember designing it that way.”
The clank of bottles behind us, and Myron stumbled in, dragging his right foot, exaggerating his limp, with a bouquet of beer bottles in his arms. Even I was surprised by how many of them there were. I’d have to tell my boys to drink more, or confiscate less.
Myron popped a couple more bottles, handed one to me. “Here’s to . . . survival.”
That was a toast we could all get behind.
Anger and hurt feelings aside, all of us came to the Tunnel of Love for what Pete told us would be an interesting show. I’d kind of stayed out of the squabble between the two of them, mostly trying to finish out the year with decent enough grades to get into college, and see as much of Melinda as I could.
Summer ended with a hot night that came after a couple of rainy weeks. As a result, the park was incredibly busy. I closed Ali Baba’s Cave and did my clean up. The heat was like a wet blanket wrapped around me.
I miss those nights. It seemed right for the body I had then, the feel of the air, the rustle of late-summer leaves, the chittering of cicadas, the wail of the shift horn over at the stamping plant, which always came a few minutes into my close-up routine and feels now like a bolt that held time together.
I had no fat on my gut then. Not an ounce. Not that I had one of those attacked-by-an-alien-insect sets of abs like the guys in the magazines do now. Just flat, with maybe a little ripple like it was water coming out from under my ribcage. That lean, quick boy was in love with the heat and didn’t even know it.
Pete had brought a date, a cute girl named Aline who I knew from English sophomore year. I had to have a conversation with her, mostly about long-forgotten people from that class, while Pete messed with some equipment.
Then someone cleared her throat. Melinda. I dropped Aline like a hot potato, embarrassing to think about now, and turned my attention to her.
She deserved the attention, I have to say, in a tight red dress with a plunging neckline.
Then Myron showed up with Polly, who looked like she was on stage, though it was hard to tell what the play was. Part of her costume was that Founder’s Day corset, but she’d combined it with a short skirt, fishnets, a hat with a veil, and elbow-length gloves. She carried a huge purse that looked like a decorated Mexican saddlebag.
In response to a seemingly friendly question from Melinda Polly said the stays were real whalebone, “though it’s not bone at all, it’s actually baleen, the stuff whales use to filter krill out of the water.”
Melinda came over all ecological, gasping in outrage at the thought that someone would murder a defenseless whale for fashion. She’d never before shown any sign of caring about animals or ecology.
Polly and Pete said hello perfectly normally, as if they were just regular friends. There wasn’t anything weird or stressful about it. In retrospect, it was probably the most adult thing that happened that evening.
Melinda brushed past me, and I smelled her perfume, a clean smell she’d stolen from her mother’s bureau. “L’Air du Temps,” Polly told me, long afterward. I was surprised she even remembered Melinda. “A nice floral. Her mother had good taste. It came in a pretty bottle, with that glass dove.”
I had the boats ready. Both guys had run the boats, at one time or another, so they knew what to do. Pete and Aline got in the front boat, Myron and Polly in the second, and I handed Melinda into the third, and set off after the other two into the dark caverns.
I gave the spiel I always gave on the ride. Sure, they’d all heard it, but it was the last time. So I told them about how robbers had once made their headquarters in the cave, how they lured stagecoach parties in, partied with them, then, late at night, when everyone had finally passed out, would fall on their guests, kill them, and scalp them. About the way bootleggers would sometimes bring a business rival in and sink them to the very bottom of the deepest pool. About how nuclear waste illegally disposed of here had affected the blind cave fish, turning them vicious, able to sense the electricity of your beating heart and send a bolt of lightning through your chest. All the greatest hits.
Then Pete took over.
He talked about the great black swamp and how people said it was impenetrable because of the tangled trees, the dense mud, the insects, and the diseases. But the real reason the swamp took so long to be drained was . . . Black Murray, a prehistoric serpent that could drag a horse and rider under before anyone could call for help, and who stove in the bottoms of flatboats and drowned their crews.
Black Murray, according the Pete, was not a “serpent,” but instead a kind of huge freshwater moray eel. It seems that morays have a second set of jaws deep in their throat. When they grabbed something in their main jaws, they would shoot that second set out to pull the prey deep into their throat. This biological detail risked losing us, and even he could tell that.
He got back to his story. Eventually engineers drained the swamps, turned the mudflats into farmland, and built towns like Masonville along drainage canals, canals that were themselves now gone. But, Pete said, Black Murray was not gone. It had survived and hidden itself—in the deep caves right under us. “And when there is enough rain, as there has been these past weeks, it comes out, to check on the world above . . . and to see if there is anything to eat.”
The girls squealed satisfyingly and moved closer to me and Myron. There was a reason I pulled some great tips out of this particular ride.
When we got to the Bottomless Pool, we found it glowing a mysterious blue, with streams of brighter color shining out here and there. He’d worked hard, and it looked both beautiful and ominous.
Myron and Polly kept leaning toward each other and saying things that made the other laugh. You could see Pete was a bit irritated because it interfered with his spiel.
Now Pete was lowering the lights, though not so you’d notice right away. I could see what he was planning. He’d make it almost dark, all the while talking about that sinister Black Murray, and then would have something happen that would make everyone jump, yelp, and turn to each other for safety. From what I had seen, I figured it would be kind of a jack-in-the-box thing, with a head popping suddenly out of the water. It was a great plan.
Finally over her snit, Melinda now pushed closer to me, soft shoulder, hip, and thighs all along me like a line of fire. There wasn’t a single spot where her skin touched mine, and yet it was like I could feel every square inch of her aromatic body.
Myron said something particularly funny to Polly, and she laughed out loud, a silvery sound, something she still has. It irritated me. It was disrespectful to Pete. I took my oars and moved our boat a bit ahead. I had gotten really good at maneuvering the clumsy things. No one else had quite the same talent with them.
I barely kissed Myron’s boat, so he didn’t even notice it. His boat slewed sideways, first just a tiny bit, then scraping against the wall.
I backed water and was right where I had been when he glanced around.
Myron pushed his oar against the wall. That got him away from it. But he’d pushed a bit off-center, so his boat turned in the opposite direction and got jammed up against some rocks.
He now moved too quickly, splashing his oars, grunting, sending water flying.
“Can we be a bit quiet?” Pete finally said in exasperation.
“Oh my God, I see it!” Myron yelled, trying to make what he was doing seem like part of some plan, and tilted his and Polly’s boat so far that water slopped into it.
Polly pulled her foot back from the water. “Come on, Myron.”
He jerked as if poked. He hated having his actions judged. He grabbed the oars and pushed his boat backward. I’d warned him, more than once, not to mess around like that down here. There just wasn’t the room for it. In the dark, the cave looked like an underground lake. It was really about the size of a swimming pool, if an avalanche had dropped a lot of rocks into your swimming pool.
