The Digging Leviathan Page 5

  “What are this man’s credentials?” asked William suddenly.

  “I haven’t any idea,” Edward replied. “He was recommended. All he does is cut the lawn. Say, I’ve got a fine idea .…”

  But whether he had a fine idea or was frantically trying to dream one up to lure William away from the window was immaterial; William ignored him.

  “I know this man.”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “He was groundskeeper at the Manor. I’m certain of it.”

  “Orientals,” said Edward with a placating wave of his hand.

  “Don’t humor me!” cried William. “I won’t be humored. There’s trouble here. Frosticos is behind this. Things are becoming clear. Very clear. Who put you up to this?”

  Before Edward could sort out an answer, here came Yamoto again, grinning around a night-blooming jasmine, leering in toward the kitchen window, the grinding of his mower seeming to take on a slow cadence like the distant marching step of an approaching but unseen army, or the convolutions of an immense, inexplicable, and possibly unnatural machine churning into the earth beyond a concrete wall in deadly, suggestive rhythms.

  William was aghast. He could picture quite clearly an infinite succession of approaching Yamotos, peering in at him. Edging out of sight. Reappearing suddenly from beyond a bush or the trunk of a tree. Now drawing a bit closer, then, without William’s being aware of the exact moment, flickering away, receding again, shrinking to a speck like the fossils of Basil Peach, encased in blue ice.

  The drone of the mower grew louder. William was certain that if he waited in the silent kitchen, it would not be Yamoto, finally, who would appear behind the machine. Perhaps not on this pass or on the next, but soon, very soon, the white-haired doctor would come smiling toward him, reaching out a gloved hand. He had only to wait. The white of billowing trousers appeared briefly beneath the limbs of a low tree, as Yamoto swung round toward them. Edward looked helplessly at Jim who stared at a plate of broken fried eggs. Yamoto slanted past. William, vexed into motion, stormed into the living room, out through the front door and onto the porch. Yamoto sailed across the grass, his trousers alive in the breeze, and mowed unhindered onto the lawn of the Pemblys, making a turn around the perimeter and heading back toward where William stood. Shaking. Unable to speak. Edward waved a coffee cup at him, but William was oblivious, collecting himself perhaps, or just the opposite.

  “The Pembly lawn too?” he croaked.

  “What?”

  “He cuts the Pembly lawn too? He works for them?”

  “Well, ‘works’ is hardly the word ….” Edward began. But at that moment Mrs. Pembly, a nightmare of pink plastic hair curlers and voluminous robe, wandered out onto the walk to have a word with Yamoto. The gardener nodded and very unfortunately pointed briefly toward William and Edward.

  “By God!” shouted William, leaping off the porch. “We’ll see! We’ll filthy well see who it is this Yamoto works for. By God, he doesn’t work for me!” Mrs. Pembly threw one hand to her mouth, turned, hiked up the hem of her robe, and skipped into the house. Yamoto, who no doubt hadn’t heard William over the roar of the mower, made a little half bow, waiting politely.

  “Who are you?” shouted William.

  Yamoto shook his head, smiling.

  “Damn you! Was it Frosticos that sent you? Where is he?” And William spun around, as if suspecting that the ubiquitous Frosticos was behind him, and took a swipe at Mrs. Pembly’s juniper bush. Poor Yamoto, not yet understanding that something had gone wrong, hastened to encourage William. He too took a swipe at the juniper. The horrified face of Mrs. Pembly, ringed by hair curlers, watched from the window. William, in a passion of suspicion, flailed away at the juniper for another moment with the flat of his hand, then turned on the hapless Yamoto. Mrs. Pembly was gone. Edward rushed across toward them, fearful of violence.

  William began to kick at the still roaring machine, but effected nothing. Yamoto protested. William pushed him into the juniper, bent down, and grasped the spark plug wire, intending, doubtless, to pull it out. He yowled and stumbled away, waving his hand, and collided with his brother-in-law. William dodged past, mouth working, dashing for the Pembly garden hose that lay coiled like a serpent beneath an acacia. He twisted the crank atop the spigot and hauled away on the hose, spraying Yamoto, squirting Edward in the eye, training a blast against the window where Mrs. Pembly watched in renewed horror, then drowning the mower into blubbering silence. The hose, at that point, went almost dry, a kink having shut off the flow of water. William yanked at it, accomplishing nothing. Not a drop flowed from it. Edward prayed that the uncooperative hose would give William the time it would take him to collapse, but he wasn’t, apparently, in a collapsing mood. His loathing had merely been transferred to the garden hose, which leaped suddenly forward like one of those East Indian snakes, spraying a quick jet of water up and down William’s pant leg and shoe. Howling in surprise and chagrin, William cast the offending hose onto the lawn and ran toward the heap of Yamoto’s tools that lay on the parkway. He dashed back across the yard with a garden shears, and, to the startled amazement of a dozen neighbors, hacked the offending hose into damnation. He cast the shears into the juniper bush, then, very slowly and deliberately, hung a six-foot section of hose across the beaten top of the same bush—perhaps as a warning, just as the governor of Jamaica had left the heads of pirates impaled atop poles on the outskirts of the city of Port Royal.

  He looked about him with his teeth set, and began to step across the ruined hose, as if toward home. But the wailing of a siren drowned his intentions, whatever for one brave moment they might have been, and he sat down woodenly in the little rivulet of water that played out of the end of the reduced hose and ran down the driveway into the gutter.

  A van arrived in the wake of a police car. Dr. Hilario Frosticos stepped out, gathered William up, and with an arm around his shoulder as if to support him, led him away. Jim clumped down the two stairs from his front porch to the walk, watching the van turn the corner and disappear. On the lawn next to the defeated garden hose lay a thin cork washer, three quarters of an inch across. Jim bent over and picked it up along with a little crenelated bottle cap, the inside of which was flecked with rust.

  Chapter 5

  The maze shed, as Edward St. Ives had come to call it, was a clapboard lean-to, one of two sheds affixed to the back and side of the garage. The other was filled with musty, humming aquaria. It was in the maze shed that Edward and William had undertaken certain experiments to encourage aquatic habits in mice.

  The maze itself was built of redwood painted over with asphaltic varnish. A series of locks allowed for the filling of one section or another while the rest remained dry, and there was a little avenue along which mice could be run from a succession of wire cages into the mouth of the maze. It had grown more grand and intricate over the years, like one of those toy train sets that starts out as a little oval track on a half sheet of plywood and develops itself a bit at a time into a multilevel expanse of railroad, running along through papier maché hillsides and past miniature farms alive with cardboard chickens and tin pigs.

  Tilted bookshelves hung along one wall of the shed, stuffed with a ragtag and water-eaten collection of the Journal of Amphibiana and Aquatic Evolution and a forty volume set of the vivisectionist Dr. Ignacio Narbondo’s Illustrated Experiments With Gilled Beasts which William Hastings had found on a high shelf at Bertram Smith’s Acres of Books for twenty dollars. Open on the table was a recent Scientific American discussing the experimental injection of water into the lungs of rats and subsequent failure of the rats to exhale it, the whole crowd of them drowning, finally, out of their own stubbornness. Edward thumbed the pages idly, thinking about his brother-in-law.

  There in a heap on an old mission oak desk lay twenty or thirty little plastic replicas of aquatic plants, thin strips of lead wrapped around the base of each to prevent their floating in the water of an aquarium. Cleverly carved p
ieces of driftwood and a half-dozen shards of petrified wood had been placed along the avenues of the maze in order to trick the mice into supposing that they’d gotten into a particularly pleasant and reasonable stream for a swim. William had gone to great trouble to tie the plastic waterweeds to the end of a piece of driftwood with fishing line before being interrupted in his endeavors the previous weekend. It was vital, he’d insisted, that the subjects suppose themselves to be paddling through an authentic river. The failure of the experiments reported on in Scientific American were due, he was sure of it, to the rats having been unprepared, psychologically speaking, for the devolutionary leap from land mammal to aquatic. They could hardly have been expected to do anything but drown, given the circumstances.

  Edward was only about half convinced. He routed a speckled axolotl past a chunk of petrified wood, the lumpy beast paddling happily and displaying a perfect lack of interest in the mouse that swam with frantic little strokes ahead of it. Whether the litter of mice had developed a maternal regard for the amphibian was impossible to say, although Edward conceded that such a bond was unlikely. The mice and axolotl remained unfortunately aloof from each other. And there was the vague possibility, of course, that they would achieve results entirely opposite from those intended—that the axolotl would be tainted by fraternizing with the mice and would insist on sleeping in a bed of shredded newspaper and shavings of aromatic cedar. Edward admitted to himself that the experiment was a failure. In fact, their three years of mouse experiments had yielded nothing but failures.

  Edward became aware, as he swept the plastic seaweed into the drawer of the desk, of a distant jingling bell playing a double-time version of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” over and over again. He watched through a dusty casement window as a white panel truck slowed almost to a stop in front of the house, the driver’s face lost in the shadow of the cab, then rumbled off again, jingling into the distance.

  Edward didn’t half like the look of it. “Something’s up,” he said aloud, then stopped himself with the thought that he was beginning to sound overmuch like William. He plucked the Jell-o-y axolotl out of the maze and returned him to a big aquarium, then rescued the hapless mouse, dabbed at him with a tea towel, and ran him back up the corridor and into his cage,

  A muffled snickering erupted into a snort of nasal laughter behind him, and Edward turned to find the meaty face of Oscar Pallcheck leering in through the open casement. Oscar’s eyes were too small. Pig eyes, it seemed to Edward, that were almost lost in the pudding of his cheeks. He wasn’t particularly fat, but was stupidly beefy and had a strange sort of Midas touch for breaking everything he handled. He couldn’t take his eyes off the half-filled maze.

  “Jim out here?” he asked, forcing back a snicker.

  “No.”

  “What’re you doing to those mice?”

  “Nothing,” said Edward. “Experiments.”

  “What was that big turd thing with the feathers in his neck? Another experiment?”

  “An axolotl,” said Edward. “If you must know, it’s a sort of salamander. A very pleasant creature, actually.”

  “Sure it is,” said Oscar. “What did you do to him?”

  “Do to him? I didn’t do anything to him. That’s the way God made him. Inside out. I can’t say why. There’s a lot of God’s inventions that I don’t half understand, and that axolotl not the least of them.”

  But Edward’s irony was lost on Oscar who was far gone in his snickering, and who turned at the sound of Jim and Gill coming up behind him. The three of them wandered away talking among themselves, Oscar emitting a snorted guffaw and commenting aloud about a “turd thing” that Jim’s crazy uncle was chasing a mouse with. Edward sighed and mopped up, then pulled down the third volume of Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts and sat at the desk, thumbing through until he came to the lengthy section on mermen. He began to read, for the tenth time, the account of a gilled corpse taken in the seventeenth century from the Sargasso Sea, tangled among the rubbery purple stalks and bladders of floating kelp. There was an unlikely drawing of a peculiar toad man on an adjoining plate, no doubt long dead, but with a wistful and tragic look in his eye, as if he wondered how he’d fallen out of Paradise and in among monsters.

  “Pay me for it,” Oscar Pallcheck said, waving a notebook full of looseleaf pages at a silent and saddened Giles Peach. Jim waited and didn’t say anything. He wondered, though, whether he’d have to take Gill’s side against Oscar. The thought terrified him. If he kept silent perhaps everything would work out. Oscar would tire of the game and give Giles his journal. Jim plucked a tuft of grass from Gill’s front lawn, affecting nonchalance, watching the man across the street—Mr. Hasbro—crawling around the ground on his hands and knees, peering beneath an old, orange Metropolitan at its ruined muffler. Beside him was a new muffler, a chrome wonder of tubes and rivets and obscure oval boxes.

  “Listen to this,” said Oscar to Jim, involving him in the fun.

  Giles snatched at the notebook, a wild grab that missed its mark by a foot when Oscar, with a burst of laughter, yanked it back out of reach. “Listen.” He cleared his throat theatrically and, waving his free hand at Giles as if to ward him off, read:” ‘My father has gone away. I think to the center of the Earth. Why didn’t he take me? Has he turned entirely into a fish?’ “ Oscar guffawed. “A fish! Your old man’s a fish gone off to the center of the earth! Kee-rist! Talk about nuts. Wait, wait.” He ducked around behind the curb tree as Gill grabbed again for the journal, tears leaking from his eyes. He swung wildly at Oscar, managing to hit him weakly in the shoulder, and for a few moments the two of them circled the tree, Oscar shouting with laughter and Giles sobbing and lunging, the gills along his neck flaring and collapsing, something Jim watched half fascinated, half in fear, but which Oscar, in his mirth, was blessedly oblivious to.

  Mr. Hasbro tugged the new muffler toward his car. From the altered angle the thing appeared to have metamorphosed into something almost magical. It glowed silver in the sunlight which played in rays off a sequence of bright wires stretched between two curved porcelain masts like strings on a harp. The whole thing, impossibly, seemed to be hovering a few inches off the ground.

  Jim couldn’t contain himself any longer, fear or no fear.

  “Give it to him, Oscar,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got to read this other part. I told you I’d show the whole thing to you anyway, didn’t I? Is that what your beef is? You’d have stole it first if you had any guts. Your uncle ought to swim Gill through his nut mazes. But listen to this.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Jim, pushing himself to his knees and standing up. He hadn’t any idea what he was going to do, but the situation called for action. Giles stood shaking almost imperceptibly, having given up his pursuit and withdrawn. There was the clatter of tools across the street: the banging of a hammer, the crank of a ratchet, and a muffled curse as Mr. Hasbro yanked his hand out from beneath his car and shoved a finger into his mouth. Nothing could be seen of the wonderful device but two glowing pinpoints of light, one an emerald green and the other an indescribable arc of lavender and blue mixed together in a luminescent swirl. The emerald dot seemed to bleed out into the surrounding air, tinting the street and the trees and the sidewalk a pale and watery green, like sunlight leaking through the back of a breaking wave. And for one eerie moment Jim was sure he smelled salt on the air—the ocean and seaweed smell of barnacles and mussels clumped onto sea-washed rocks. But the air was still and silent. No breeze blew. Mr. Hasbro stood back, hands on his hips, gazing at his vehicle with obvious satisfaction. The old rusted muffler, pockmarked with nickel-sized holes, lay on the parkway beneath a camphor tree.

  “ ‘I’ve developed anti-gravity today. I’m sure of it,’ “ Oscar I read, to himself now since Jim wasn’t a willing audience and Giles would no longer be baited. “ ‘It’s a simple business, actually. Far simpler than it seems. I came across a copper coil at Sprouse
Reitz, and along with a box of a hundred large paper clips and a penlight …’ Kee-rist!” shouted Oscar again to emphasize his disbelief. ‘This is crazy. That’s what it is. Is this a joke or something?” But Giles didn’t respond even though the question was aimed at him. Jim was vaguely surprised to see Oscar so angry. Perhaps it was simply that he was playing to an unappreciative audience.

  But he was even more surprised when Mr. Hasbro, wiping away at his hands with a blue rag, slid in behind the wheel of his Metropolitan, started it up, raced the weirdly humming engine for a moment, and sailed away into the sky, the little Metropolitan reflecting the rays of the noonday sun until, just for an instant as it angled away toward the Hollywood Hills, it looked like nothing more than a bulbous orange fish—an immense garibaldi, perhaps—darting toward the shadows of a submarine cave. Then it was just a speck in the blue-green of heaven.

  Jim felt suddenly nauseated. He pointed a trembling finger at the disappearing automobile and croaked out the single word, “Look!” Oscar spun around, set off by the appearance of Jim’s face, and was treated to the sight of a rusty muffler on a half-brown lawn.

  “You’re nuts,” Oscar proclaimed, spitting through the gap in his front teeth. “You’re as nuts as he is.” He slammed Gill’s journal shut, tossed it contemptuously into the street, and strode off down the sidewalk, shaking his head about twice as hard as was necessary. The notebook landed on edge, fell open, and a half-dozen loose pages blew out, breezing away merrily down the road as if chasing Oscar Pallcheck. Jim ran them down, retrieved the notebook from the street, and handed it to Giles. Giles, however, seemed almost catatonic—obviously unseeing. Jim was powerfully tempted to flip open the journal and read it—to stuff the loose pages into his shirt and go home. But he didn’t. He sat on the lawn with his friend, pretending that they were both being silent by choice, and watched a bank of dark, wildly roiling clouds come surging up over the San Gabriel Mountains.