Under the Lake

4

Howell’s response to the hammering was panic; he didn’t know where he was, and when he remembered, he wasn’t sure what had happened during the night. The events seemed curiously remote, and he would have thought he had been dreaming, if he had not remembered everything so clearly. Finally, his muddled brain focused on the front door as the source of the noise, and, cursing, he struggled into a bathrobe and got going, shivering in the damp chill of the uninsulated cabin. It was still raining. He yanked open the door.

A young man stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, rain dripping from his slicker and from his hair. It seemed immediately obvious to Howell that he was probably retarded. His eyes were not coordinated, and he seemed to be looking out across the lake as he spoke to Howell.

“You want some wood?”

The fellow was oddly handsome, Howell thought. His features were regular, chiseled, almost patrician; he had excellent teeth. Only the eyes and a slackness of the jaw made him seem other than normal.

“You want some wood?” he asked again, smiling a little this time, revealing the beautiful teeth. “Mama said you needed some wood.”

Howell looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a battered pickup truck with tarpaulin covering its bed. He finally got the picture; the fellow was selling firewood. Benny Pope had said he couldn’t come until Sunday, and it was only Tuesday. “Yeah, sure,” Howell managed to say, finally. “Just put it right there.” He pointed to the shed next to the stairs.

“Yessir,” the fellow said. He ran to the truck, pulled back the tarp, revealing a random pile of split logs, and began bringing four or five at a time to the shed. It occurred to Howell that he hadn’t asked a price, and he wondered if he would get bitten, but what the hell, he’d burned all the wood he had the night before. When the truck was empty and the shed full, the man tossed a burlap bag of kindling into the shed, waved, and started for the truck again.

“How much do I owe you?” Howell shouted at him.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he yelled back. He got into the truck on the passenger side, and Howell realized that someone else was driving.

Howell was too surprised to shout his thanks until the truck had turned around and was headed up the hill toward the crossroads. A woman was driving, but the truck window was too misted over to get a good look at her. He dashed down to the shed in the rain, grabbed the gunny sack of kindling, and a couple of logs and, stepping gingerly in his bare feet, ran back up the stairs. He had a fire going and was half way through his first cup of coffee before he remembered what the fellow had said. “Mama said you needed some wood.” Who the hell were the young man, the woman driving him, and, above all, Mama? And how did she know he needed wood? Some friend of Denham White’s, he supposed, who had seen the empty woodshed and was being neighborly. That was all right with him, Howell thought, basking in the glow of the fire. He’d have to call Denham and ask him who the people were so he could thank them. Then, as he warmed his hands, a thought struck him. A few minutes before, when he’d been waked by the fellow at the door, he’d felt terminally hung over; certainly he’d had enough to drink the night before. Now, oddly, he felt perfectly well – no headache, no fuzziness.

The phone rang. As he picked it up, he hoped it wasn’t Elizabeth. It was Denham White. “How you doing, sport?”

“Okay, I guess. The place is nice, Denham. You made it sound like the pits.”

“It’ll do, I guess. You’ll have to lay in some firewood. It can get chilly at night up there.”

“Funny you should mention that.” He told his brother-in-law about the arrival of the wood. “Who are your friends?”

“Beats me. Nobody ever gave me anything up there. I never had much truck with the locals. Weird bunch. They know how to make a buck out of the summer folks, believe me.”

Howell knew how aloof Denham could be with people he considered his social inferiors. He was perfectly capable of not knowing who his neighbors were.

“You meet old man Sutherland, yet?” Denham asked.

“Yeah, right off the bat. Something of a shit, I’d say. He seemed to take an instant dislike to me.”

Denham laughed. “Keen judge of character, Mr. Sutherland. Now, listen, John, I’ve got to go on living with the guy, so don’t piss him off if you can help it, okay? Just stay out of his way.”

“I’m out of everybody’s way up here. You seen Elizabeth?”

“We had dinner last night. She’s okay; in the middle of getting out the Christmas catalogue; that’ll keep her busy for a few weeks.”

“Listen, Denham, something strange happened here last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I… uh, woke up in the middle of a thunderstorm, and there was a girl in the living room.”

“Some people have all the luck.”

“No, listen. It was a young girl, a kid, really. Maybe eleven or twelve.” Howell told Denham everything he could remember. He didn’t mention the shotgun.

Denham didn’t say anything for a moment. “John,” he managed, finally, “how much did you have to drink last night?”

“Well,” Howell replied sheepishly, “I had some wine with dinner and a couple of bourbons, I guess.”

“I guess you had a lot more than a couple, the way you’re talking. Look, why don’t you try to lay off the sauce completely while you’re up there? I expect the work would go a lot faster without bad dreams and hangovers.”

“Yeah, all right, Denham. I don’t need any lectures.” Howell couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Take care, sport, and work hard. Lurton Pitts is used to getting good value for his money.”

They hung up. Howell wondered again who Mama was. Then he had it. It must have been the sheriff, Bo Scully, who sent the wood. He was the only person besides Benny Pope who knew he needed it. Not a bad fellow, Bo Scully. He’d have to buy him a bottle, or something. Maybe Scully would have some idea who the girl was, too.

It rained for four days. Howell ranged about the cabin like a caged cat. He got up late, ate canned and frozen food, read everything he had brought with him, drank too much, got to bed late, and dreamed a dream, always the same dream. Then, when morning came, it was gone. He could not recapture it, but he didn’t think the girl was in it.

He unpacked Pitts’s vaunted word processor and played with it. Howell had never been much for following directions, but after a day or two of snarling at the thing, he had it up and running. After poring through the manual and going through the drills of commands over and over, he began to get the feeling the machine was training him. By the fourth day, all was in readiness. The machine sat, waiting, just as his typewriter had before it. A box of continuous-form paper was fed into the printer; a stack of floppy diskettes waited to record his output; the twelve boxes of recording tape waited next to the tape recorder. Howell threaded the first tape into the machine and pressed a button. The voice of Lurton Pitts came at him just the way Pitts himself had from behind his desk. “Chapter One,” Pitts boomed out. “How I Found God.”

Howell stopped the machine and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. It was the first time in his working life that he had not been able to convince himself that what he was doing was worthwhile, the first time he had tried to write something just for the money. He didn’t like it. He didn’t know if he could do it. He felt the weight of the old depression, the one that came with feeling useless, burnt out. It lay upon him like some heavy, stinking garment whenever he was unexpectedly faced with the prospect that he might really be used up, worthless to anyone.

It held his shoulders slumped, his hands pinned to the arms of his chair; it made him immobile for long minutes, caused nausea to eat at him and sap his energy.

He sat that way for a few moments, and then he felt a sudden warmth. He looked up to see the desk dappled with sunlight. The rain had stopped, and he could see patches of blue between the scudding clouds. His depression lightened a bit; he pushed back from the desk and walked over to the piano. He pushed the pedals, but got no response; he played a few blues chords, wincing at the sour sound. He jumped about a foot as a loud knock came on the door.

Howell leapt to his feet. There had been no visitor to the cabin except the man who had brought the wood, not even any mail. He would be happy to see absolutely anybody. He walked across the room to the door and opened it. A man and a dog stood on the porch, both wet. The man took off his hat to reveal a shock of perfectly white hair; his skin was a bright pink. Howell knew that behind his dark glasses there would be pink eyes; he was an albino. “Good morning to you,” the man said. There was something strangely, strikingly familiar about him, but Howell didn’t know any albinos. And there was something peculiar about the dog. He sat patiently next to his master, panting, his eyes closed. “I’ve come about the piano,” the man said, looking out across the lake. He didn’t seem to want to look at Howell.

“The piano?”

“Don’t you need a piano tuned?” the man asked, still not looking at Howell.

Howell noticed a leather case at the man’s feet. “You’re a piano tuner?”

“That’s right.” The man stood, waiting.

Howell stood, gaping at the man. He had been thinking about asking around for a piano tuner in the town, but he hadn’t done anything about it. Or had he? Had he been that drunk in the afternoons? “Oh,” he said, recovering, “come on in.”

The man picked up his case and stepped into the room, stubbing his toe lightly on the sill. The dog, got up, walked straight past him a few feet, bumped head-on into the sofa, retreated, turned right, knocked over a small pedestal table, reached the hearth, sniffing, flopped down in front of the fire, fell over onto his side, then turned on his back, all four feet in the air, and emitted a long sigh. He seemed to be instantly asleep. Howell stared at him. The dog was blind.

“Didn’t do any damage, did he?” the man asked.

“No,” Howell replied, righting the table.

“Riley will remember where things are. Where’s the piano?”

“Right over there,” Howell replied, pointing. The man didn’t move. Suddenly, Howell realized that he, too, was blind. “Oh, sorry, straight ahead.” He took the man’s elbow, guided him across the room, and placed his hand on the piano.

The albino shucked off his raincoat, put his hat on the piano, sat down, and ran loudly up a C scale with both hands. “Whew! I didn’t come a moment too soon, did I?”

Howell laughed. “No, I guess you didn’t. The player mechanism isn’t working, either. Can you do anything about that?”

The man slid back the doors that covered the player roll and felt around with his hands. “Look behind the piano,” he said.

Howell looked between the piano and the wall and saw an electrical cord. He squeezed his hand behind the instrument and plugged it in. Instantly, the ghost of George Gershwin began to play a wildly-out-of-tune “Strike Up the Band”. The albino switched the piano off. “Fixed that in a hurry, didn’t we? That’ll be two hundred dollars.” He laughed.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Howell said.

“Right.”

Howell walked out onto the deck of the cabin, the first time the weather had permitted. The woods around him were heavy with moisture from the days of rain. The lake flashed moments of blue at him as the new sun struck its surface in places. The light was warm on his face. The sounds of sour piano notes turning sweet drifted out from the living room as the albino tightened strings. Occasionally, a whole chord sang out. Howell felt his spirits lifting with the changing weather. It was as if he were being tuned, like the piano. He took a folding canvas deck chair from under the deep eaves and flopped down in it. He felt good for the first time in weeks, maybe months.

As he tuned the piano, the albino began to play little fragments, a few chords, of a tune Howell couldn’t quite pin down and was too drowsy to care much about. It was mixed in with runs and other chords and octaves. Three quarters of an hour later, Howell was stirred from a doze by the sound of tools striking other tools and the clasps of the toolcase being closed. Then, unexpectedly, the albino played a few chords and began to sing, in a high, clear tenor voice:

By the time the albino finished, Howell was practically in tears from the beauty and sadness of it.

“Your piano’s tuned,” the man called out.

Howell roused himself from the deck chair and returned to the living room. The dog, Riley, was still lying on his back in front of the dying fire, snoring softly. “You sing and play very well,” Howell said to the albino.

“Oh, God gives everybody some sort of talent, I guess. Mine’s making music. I play the guitar and the mandolin and the accordion and fiddle a bit, too. You ought to come down to one of the Saturday night dances at the community center sometime. Want to try the piano?”

Howell sat down at the keyboard and played a few bars of “Lush Life”. “You like Duke Ellington?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the albino replied. “That’s Billy Strayhorn’s tune, though. It’s hard to separate Ellington and Strayhorn; seems like one takes up where the other leaves off.”

“Right. Say, I didn’t call you about tuning the piano, did I? I mean, my memory has been a little spotty lately, but…”

The albino laughed. “Oh, no. Mama sent me. She said you needed the piano.”

Now Howell knew why the albino looked familiar. “That was your brother who brought the firewood, wasn’t it?”

The albino nodded. “That was Brian. Brian’s a little…” – he made a gesture – “but he’s a good lad. He liked bringing you the wood.”

“He wouldn’t let me pay him for it. I wanted to…”

“Oh, no, Mama wouldn’t have that.”

“Now, look, I want to pay you for the piano tuning. You do do that for a living, don’t you?”

“Yes, that and playing at the dances. Well, all right, I usually get twenty dollars for a tuning.”

Howell pressed the money into his hand. “Listen, I don’t quite understand about ‘Mama’. Who is she?”

“My mother.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Dermot Kelly.”

Howell shook the hand. “Glad to meet you, Dermot. I’m John Howell. But how did she know I needed firewood and the piano tuned? Did Bo Scully tell her about me?”

Dermot Kelly picked up his case and began to move toward the door. He didn’t seem to need assistance finding his way. “Mama and Bo Scully don’t have much to do with each other,” he said. “No, Mama just knows things other people don’t know. She’s been sick for a while, now, but she still has her moments.”

Howell walked with Dermot to the door. “I’m afraid I don’t really understand this, but I’m grateful to her for sending you and Brian around. Will you thank her for me?”

“Thank her yourself,” Dermot replied. “She wants to meet you, anyway. She says she’s been waiting for you for a long time.”

Goose flesh rose on Howell’s skin. “Well, I’ll drop by and see her if she’s well enough. You said she has been sick?”

“Yes, but she’ll be well enough when you come. We’re just a ways up the hill from the crossroads,” he said, pointing. “You’ll see the mailbox. Come any time.”

“Thanks, I will. And thanks again for the tuning.”

“Don’t mention it. Riley!”

The dog, who had never stopped snoring, was instantly on his feet. He walked quickly to Dermot’s side, neatly avoiding the furniture. Together, the two of them walked down the stairs, down the short drive, and started up the road. Dermot moved slowly, but with some confidence.

Howell watched them for a moment. Before they went into the trees, Dermot Kelly raised a hand and waved, as if he knew Howell was watching them. When they were gone, Howell went back into the house, still amazed at the pair. “Talk about the blind leading the blind!” he said aloud to himself.