Hello Down There

PROLOGUE

Lake Mattamuskeet, North Carolina, October 1950

MIDWAY THROUGH THE MORNING PRAYER, EDWIN rubbed a patch in the pinestraw with his boot toe, shredded his cigarette into the sand. He kept his eyes on the men gathered in the yard, tracked the fit of stretch and yawn spreading among them. Yawns signaled asleep, stretches awake; by the time Byron Teague muffled his amen, the tally was tied, convincing Edwin of something he’d suspected before he’d even arrived at Mattamuskeet: that he was the only one not sleepwalking.

Byron Teague launched into a short history of this hunt, which Edwin’s mother claimed had become as crucial to Tidewater commerce over the years as many of the more prominent annual gatherings: the Terpsichorean Club ball, the Carolina-State game. This was Edwin’s first hunt—he was there only because he was engaged to Byron’s daughter Sarah—and so far the weekend had been both loud and bland, like Byron’s historical sketch. Edwin had approached it with the scrupulous regard given things put off for years, in this case six, as he’d managed to excuse himself from these hunts since he’d turned sixteen. Driving down the day before through the off-white shades of October coastal plain, he’d imagined his father’s friends asking what he planned to do with a degree in European history, guys he’d grown up with ribbing him about his engagement.

Yet so far everyone had ignored him, and he had yet to witness any business negotiations to support his mother’s claim. Perhaps Tidewater commerce was settled surreptitiously: timber deals struck in duck blinds, junior loan officers named while crouched in the rustling savannah. Edwin imagined a back room in the lodge where corporations were formed, marriages arranged, road-paving bids rigged.

At the back of the crowd, Edwin noticed Sarah’s older brother Skipper and Camp Tremont studying the ground as if Byron were still blessing the hunt. The night before Edwin had eaten a late supper with Skipper and this young lawyer friend of his from Richmond named Cary Tremont, whom everyone called Camp. The rounds of brunswick stew and bourbon had continued well past midnight, when Edwin had wandered off to find his bunk. Skipper and Camp looked to have seen the sun rise. Grimacing to hold back snickers, their face muscles tightened, toning beer-bloated cheeks. Tremont leaned over to whisper just as a flock of geese passed overhead, laughter badly camouflaged as cough drowning out most of the honking which Edwin heard for the first and last time that day.

When the crowd dispersed into the marsh, Edwin followed Skipper and Camp down a side trail. Both walked with their heads down, pushing boots through thick sand.

This’ll do, said Skipper when they came to the edge of the marsh. He and Tremont collapsed beneath some pines.

Got the big face today, said Tremont.

Bad, agreed Skipper. He tried to pull his cap off but Tremont snatched it and slid it back on, slanting the bill low like a visor.

Apply pressure to wounded area, he said.

Tremont grinned at Edwin and picked up the thread of stories he’d begun last night: mock hunting tales in which he was the hero hunter and the heroine-hunted was repetitively buxom and willing.

After an hour of Camp’s tales, Edwin gave in and took a drink from the flask of bourbon they passed.

I dub this spot Camp Tremont, said Camp Tremont by way of a toast.

You dub every spot Camp Tremont, said Skipper.

Wherever I happen to be happens to be Camp Tremont.

A few minutes of half-hearted talk about classes and grades—Skipper and Edwin were in their last year at Chapel Hill—was followed by a long silence during which Skipper nodded off and Tremont caught Edwin staring at him.

How’d you happen to catch up to the name of Camp? said Edwin.

Tremont grinned. Edwin sweated, and considered his sentence. Catch up to the name of Camp? Suddenly he was self-conscious enough to analyze every word out of his mouth. Talk for him had always been reflexive. He’d never seen the point in weighing words; thoughtful replies were for sluggards. Now the thought of thinking-it-out intimidated him.

He had hoped to prod another hunting tale. He liked Camp Tremont better when he was talking; during the silences Edwin felt as if Tremont had been appointed by the court to represent him for a crime more embarrassing than heinous. Camp was his reluctant counsel, Camp was just doing his job. As Camp’s unquestionably guilty client, everything Edwin said was both suspect and humorous, and though Tremont refrained from laughing outright, the seeds of his smile remained tucked in the corners of his mouth.

Beats me, Ed, said Camp. One of those things about which the origins ain’t too clear and probably better that way.

One of the many, many things, said Skipper.

This sent them both into laughter dead-ending in coughs and gasps, which they washed away with slugs of whiskey and water. Camp stretched out in the scant shade of a loblolly.

Welcome to Camp Tremont, he said.

Are we going to do any hunting today? asked Edwin.

In the very near future, said Camp. And the very near future is nigh.

Edwin grew aware of his breathing, how wispy it seemed compared to his partners’ vigorous puffing.

I thought you said you weren’t all that big on hunting, Edwin, said Skipper. I believe I remember you saying last night how you just like to walk around in the woods, listen to the birds sing.

Glowing from a shot of bourbon, Edwin had admitted being stirred to an autumnal wistfulness by the sound of geese overhead. Afterwards he’d sipped chaser and hoped it would be forgotten. Things I say can and will be used against me, he thought.

Like going to a whorehouse for the goddamn conversation, said Skipper.

Nope, said Camp Tremont. Wrong. Like going to a whorehouse just to watch.

Skipper’s laughter interrupted reports drifting across still, blue Mattamuskeet.

So you think it’s wrong to shoot animals? said Camp.

Wrong? said Edwin.

Immoral.

Edwin had never thought about it. He didn’t like to hunt because it bored him. Not the hikes through early morning forests nor the endless waits for quarry to emerge from thickets. Not even the hold-your-breath-and-turn-into-a-tree part. It was the company—the men his father hunted with, his cousins back in Trent—who bored him. A lot of activities were like that for him: he loved to swim, but after he joined the school team and had to compete against Jeffrey Register, he’d hated the smell of chlorine.

No, I don’t think it’s immoral.

Tremont smiled and waited, cajoling with his court-appointed patience what Edwin knew to be a pat, if noble, response.

As long as you eat what you kill.

And marry what you fuck? said Skipper.

Don’t think it’s quite the same thing, said Edwin.

No, you’re right, said Tremont. It’s not the same thing, quite. You can get milk free from a moo-cow, can’t you, Edwin?

More shots sounded. Edwin stared across the lake. Morning sun touched Mattamuskeet, turning the water silver and outlining the lone, lightning-scarred trunk of a tupelo gum. Edwin couldn’t think, could not respond. What exactly were they saying here? What exactly were they accusing him of?

Already started shooting at each other over there, said Skipper.

Maybe they’re shooting at their in-laws, said Camp.

Skipper grinned. Edwin’s going to make a fine brother-in-law. Tell you what, some of them that Sarah’s brought home? I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my days sitting across Sunday dinner from them. No, Edwin’s the pick of the lot, Camp.

Already a part of the family, huh? Camp raised his flask. To Teaguedom: may it never, ever take a tumble. He passed Edwin the bourbon, and said, Might as well tell us how Skip’s little sister is in reality.

Edwin dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and looked up at Camp.

In the sack he means, said Skipper.

The sack’s real, said Camp. Sack’s the only really real thing there is.

Skipper scooped a handful of sand. Ain’t this real?

That’s Camp Tremont.

Skipper fanned his fist out, letting the sand drizzle down. He rubbed his palms together and said to Edwin, Don’t just sit there acting uppity. I know goddamn well she’s giving it to you.

Smell it at the dinner table, can’t you, Skip? said Camp Tremont. I swear: the unmistakable aroma of premarital sex. Can’t wash it off until you’re dead and married. He reached for the flask. Tell him the truth, or what you told me anyhow.

I watched y’all once. At the beach that time, in the boat-house? Saw y’all sneak off and followed you down there.

And how would you rate that performance? asked Camp.

Offhand I’d say he’s not a distance man. ‘Course what do I know, could’ve been his first time.

And how she’d do? asked Camp.

None of your business. We’re talking about my baby sister.

You’re the one talking, said Camp. Anyway, to hell with you both. I’ve seen it all before. In 3-D without the movie glasses.

You saying my baby sister has been to Camp Tremont?

All I’m saying’s that your baby sister has tasted reality.

When more shots sounded from the far shore, Edwin turned again toward the lake. The baccharis and juncus shoots surrounding it were thick and waist-high, and from where he sat the marsh looked deceptively solid, as if he could walk out to the water’s edge without sinking into the muck. He imagined walking and sinking, saw himself pulling his boots from the bubbly sludge, heard the sucking noise the marsh would make as his footprints filled with water.

He stood and dusted sand from his khakis. I’m going.

Edwin says he’s going, Skip, said Camp.

Well, hell, Camp, if Edwin’s ready to go, let’s go, said Skipper.

The two rose slowly from the ground and shuffled down the path, loosely cradling their guns. Edwin followed behind again, keeping the backs of their heads sighted as the path twisted through the scrub and struggling against the tug of those feelings he hated relishing: self-pity and rectitude, censure and shame. I don’t have to be here, he thought, but here I am. Suddenly his decision to attend this hunt seemed more significant, more pivotal, than the night in August when he’d proposed to Sarah. He heard his mother talking of how important this hunt would be to him in later life, heard in her enunciation of later and life the fervency with which evangelists spoke of the afterlife. A few feet ahead of him Camp and Skipper snickered. But I am just as guilty as they are, even more because I promised I’d marry her. Because I continue to sleep with her even though I don’t love her.

He thought of how he always gave in, how readily he succumbed to her ambiguous hints. During these times his lack of resistance was as powerful and as consuming as any obstruction could ever be. Here I am at the whorehouse, only this time I’m not here just to watch.

As Edwin fell, dust rose between him and his partners, mixed with a wisp of smoke. Small animals rustled through the scrub as the ringing died down, and from the brush on either side of the trail Camp and Skipper raised their heads. Twisting around to see his boot snared on the root, Edwin pushed himself up off his hands and knees and turned to find them staring up at him, their faces gone thin and quizzical.

Grinning, Edwin reached for his gun. Sorry, he said. I tripped.

THREE DAYS LATER, back at school, Edwin met his friend Will Thomasson coming out of the library. They sat down on the steps to talk, facing the teeming quad. Thomasson asked if it were really true.

What ‘it’? said Edwin.

You shooting at Skipper Teague and his pal.

Camp Tremont is his name and I tripped, said Edwin.

They’re claiming it was deliberate. According to Skipper they’d been teasing you about Sarah. So you took a potshot.

Oh.

Pretty drastic, but I approve in theory.

Thanks.

Yep. Now Skipper’s saying he doesn’t want you to marry his sister. Swears you’re unstable, not to mention ‘superior acting.’ I’m not sure if he meant you act superior or you think you are. The latter I’d guess. Also he says you’ve taken advantage of his little sister. Or did he say compromise?

What exactly is the difference between the two?

Taken advantage of seems the harsher to me, but I think that even if he said compromised, he meant taken advantage of. Compromised suggests some compliance on her part. I don’t think that’s what he means.

No, me neither.

He talks bad about you all the time now.

Changed his tune. He used to like me.

True. Last week he liked you. He liked you before you tried to shoot him. All this from a boy who has never, in the time I’ve known him, changed his mind about anything.

He’s a Teague. His mind was made up for him before he was conceived.

Still, one would think he could forget your trying to kill him. It was all in a weekend of drink and hunt and fun.

Wasn’t that much fun, said Edwin. Besides, I’m telling you I tripped. The damn gun went off. Skipper and Tremont were safe by yards. I won’t deny that I hate Camp Tremont and I won’t say I’ve never been tempted to kill anyone. But I always curb these tendencies, and not so dramatically in the nick of time. Days before my breaking point. Whole months.

Quite a time frame you got there, said Thomasson.

Look, said Edwin. Me shoot Skipper Teague? Shooting him wouldn’t change him. Like you said, he never changes his mind.

Well, he’s changed it, said Thomasson. "It seems shooting at him had more effect than shooting him."

I tripped, said Edwin. The gun went off. I’m no hunter.

What’d you go down there for, then?

For Sarah, said Edwin. And my mother. She’s been bugging me to go since I was sixteen.

For Sarah and your mother you spend the weekend with drunk judges and traipse around the woods with a guy called Camp whom you hate so much you try to shoot and who by the way, while we’re on the subject, is Skipper’s choice to replace you as the fiancé of his kid sister, I hear.

Camp Tremont?

Skipper told me they used to go out and that Tremont was all of a sudden interested again and that, since you tried to kill them and all, he doesn’t really see why he should go around acting loyal to you anymore.

Camp Tremont?

A coed trudging up the library steps looked at Edwin, then quickly down at her shoes. Only when she passed did Edwin realize how he was staring at her, that she was beautiful.

Thomasson laughed and said, You should see your face right now. God, you hate this Tremont guy.

Yes. I do. I hate him, but for no damn good reason. I mean I have reasons, but they aren’t good reasons especially, or any real different ones. And why do I hate him so much and not my father or my uncle or Skipper? The problem is, I do hate him but I can’t say why exactly.

Maybe you ought to try, instead of pointing a shotgun at him and pulling the trigger.

I will, said Edwin. I’ll sit down one of these days and do that. Try to put it in words.

1

August 1952

HE’D BEEN STARING AT BEIGE ISLANDS LEFT BY roof leaks in the ceiling when he spotted the hospital bed rising in the front of the drugstore. Stepping onto the bottom rung of his stool, Roy Green noticed the woman bound by the sheet and the tightly belted straps. Becalmed, basking in the stares of customers, she hovered above the round rack of walking canes hand-carved by the blind while Walter Lehmann, owner of the store, raised and lowered alternate parts of her, forcing her body into long-lost marvels of agility. Lehmann’s sales pitch rose as the bed was lowered, the words comfort and versatile interspersed with the creaking of the hand crank.

This vision arose from that hour which Roy relished, the crack through which the here and now fell daily after his last bite of lunch. As his eyes drifted across the details of this building which after seven years he had come to know as intimately as the body of a lover—paint peels on the walls had become erotic birthmarks, waterspots above the soda fountain freckles dappling the back of a drowsing woman—Roy ignored his work to daydream.

Today’s was a familiar one: his first night here in Trent, North Carolina, which he’d spent at Lehmann’s house out on River Road. Five minutes after he arrived, Lehmann had made a fussy presentation of a set of store keys, calling in sweaty children from far backyards to witness this ceremony which, according to Lehmann, represented his utter trust in his new pharmacist. They’d had a quick drink on the front porch. Skeleton keys bulged in Roy’s pocket, bothering him. He couldn’t get used to them; no amount of shifting in the wicker settee could make their presence fade. I see, said Roy in response to Lehmann’s abbreviated history of Trent, and Is that right? After five minutes Lehmann stood in the middle of a sentence, shook Roy’s hand, and disappeared into a side parlor where his family was waiting. The door sucked shut behind him. For a moment, Roy stood frozen on the porch listening to the focus of radio waves, tuned finally to raucous applause. Above the laughter from a live studio audience rose Lehmann’s self-conscious snicker, the hair-triggered titters of a daughter. It was eight-thirty on an August evening, darkness puddling in hedge shadows to seep across lawns. Roy took a long walk around town, through neighborhoods which he did not then realize would never seem the same once they acquired a context, once transformed into shortcuts to the grocery store, streets where coworkers lived, a route taken to avoid the cotton mill at shift change.

He’d not been back to Lehmann’s house in the seven years since. The next day he’d left before anyone else was awake, had gone immediately to work, encountering on the back stoop the first thing he’d met this morning: a pallid Benson Fann awaiting his morning Bromo. Because Roy was first-day-on-the-job nervous he had given it to him, just as he’d been giving it to him daily since, excepting his week’s vacation and Benson Fann’s brief stabs at sobriety. Later, when Lehmann arrived, Roy had suggested that the soda jerk should serve Bromo-Seltzers, had even questioned the ethics of lacing a Bromo with ethyl alcohol. Lehmann had said only that it wasn’t worth his worrying over, leaving Roy to discover later that Benson Fann’s law office was in a building across the street owned by Lehmann, that for years Lehmann had been performing various pharmaceutical favors to entice him to stay put in the overpriced and undermaintained space.

Down in front Lehmann continued to maneuver the body of the woman into lissome feats.

What he ought to do is give rides on that thing ‘stead of trying to sell it, Ruby McClaurin called to Roy. She’d hiked herself onto the silver curve of the drinkbox to see better. Roy smiled, shook his head in agreement. He’d liked it better when he’d first spotted the woman rising, when she had interrupted his reverie to float upwards through the early afternoon light. He’d liked it better before he’d realized what was happening, before he’d noticed that everyone else was watching, before he understood that this vision was not solely his.

Even after he’d spotted his boss at the hand crank there had remained a hint of the unreal. Lehmann as magician performing two standards at once: levitation and that old crowd-pleasing severance routine. The latter was done without benefit of hand-sawed coffin but just as impressive to Roy since there was a point when the old woman’s neck and shoulders rose slowly above the hair-care aisle, sheet taut across collarbones giving her the fade-to-cloudbank look of a beauty queen’s yearbook photograph.

Now Lehmann had left the crank and moved in close to a man standing by the headboard. The man crossed his thin arms and stared at Lehmann, then down at the woman Roy had decided was his wife. Hair splayed across the striped and caseless pillow, her stiff body a low ridge of dips and knobs, she seemed to have fallen into a coma. An appropriate reaction to Lehmann’s spiel, thought Roy, and he wished he could return to his own post-lunch coma. He longed for that benumbed tingle which he could only compare, poorly, to the slow sensory bubble induced by antihistamines. As Lehmann and the husband haggled over the price of the hospital bed, Roy decided it was time to go back to work.

But after a moment, a few counted pills, he looked up at the ceiling and fell through the crack again, remembered the way the store had seemed to him during his first afternoons there. Almost exactly as it did now: in two years, the building would be sixty years old, but it had not weathered the years well: the chop of ceiling fans shook loose flakes of paint, and sections of the plaster walls were spackled and lumpy.

Still, in warm weather the doors stayed open all day long. Sunlight stretched down the aisles, wavering like light under water, spotting the dusty sundries with a brilliance that seemed to Roy an amazing feat of advertising Lehmann had worked out with nature to highlight what did not sell. Brand names faded on slow-moving merchandise and the gold-tipped walking canes which filled the display rack were hot to the touch. Even when there was no sun, during storms and the truncated arcs of grey February days, there was comfort in the dankness. In shadowed back aisles Roy imagined hearing products with a short shelf life gasping for breath, struggling to stay put past that date when it was decreed that they would go bad. It deepened his connection to the space, this battle for air and light.

There was a flash at the end of his counter. Roy turned to see Speight, the new stockman. Speight propped his push-broom on the counter edge and stood there as if he’d been summoned for a delivery. Since Jones, the delivery man, had quit the week before, Speight had been handling both jobs.

Not got a thing for you yet, Speight, said Roy.

Speight nodded. He rarely acknowledged anything or anyone except with an unreadable nod, so slight that Roy often wondered in retrospect if it was not imagined. He moved through the drugstore without making a sound, moved through the world with not much more than the minimum noises, the requisite words. Several times he had surprised Roy behind the drug counter, a grey blur, brief as a squirrel’s plunge down a tree trunk. Roy would pivot to find him rounding a corner of one of the short aisles where the drugs were stocked, the pushbroom he dragged an inversion of his profile: he was shoulders and thin limbs, in silhouette a coat hanger dangling a suit of wet clothes.

Speight nodded but did not move, only shifted feet, batted the broom handle between thumb and forefinger, stared at a place just to the left of Roy’s right ear. Roy took advantage of this hesitation to study the face of this man who before now had hung about only as long as it took him to nod. He found himself staring at Speight’s jaw: a jut of bone, flesh cracked and brittle as sunbaked mudflats. When Speight looked away once, Roy was struck with the idea that someday only that jawbone would remain. He imagined it resting finally in some ravine, beneath an implacable patch of kudzu alongside other severed parts of things—a sprocket from the engine of an abandoned truck, half of a rusty-hinged shed door—to be discovered by a circle of eight-year-olds choking over first cigarettes.

The phone rang. Speight twitched at the noise and scanned the countertop for the phone; Roy ignored the ring, shuddering over the image he’d conjured. What did he care where the stockman’s bones ended up? When he looked up Speight was still staring at the phone, as if they would both be fired if Roy didn’t pick up immediately.

Somebody else can get it, said Roy. Ruby or Miss lipstick counter. What’s her name now? They come and go so often I just call them all Miss lipstick counter. When Speight didn’t answer—it didn’t seem likely after all that he would know her name—Roy hiked himself up on his stool, saw that the girl was still at lunch. Ruby had a customer but only one, a kid, probably wanted a Coke. Ruby could talk on the phone and draw a Coke at the same time, Roy had seen her do it, a patch of her bobbed hair tamped flat by the earpiece, Coke frothing over the rim of the glass.

Was there something else you wanted, Speight? Roy wanted what little was left of his doldrum, wanted to fill it with things soothing and familiar, not images of decomposing bone, bugs swarming over a skeleton.

About Jones quitting?

Tired of doing his job and yours, too? Can’t blame you.

Not that so much as I got a boy needs work. Heard you say you was thinking of hiring a boy after school to run deliveries. Say you might? ‘Cause my boy needs work bad here.

How old’s this boy? Ruby had mentioned that Speight’s wife had died soon after their youngest son was born, that Speight was father to seven children—five girls unfolding over a decade like a string of paper dolls, sons posted sentry at either end.

Ten or twelve, said Speight. Thereabouts.

And what kind of boy is he? Speight winced, shifted. The phone rang again and he seemed relieved, sure that these questions would be interrupted now, that the interrogation would be forgotten once Roy hung up. But again Roy made no move toward the phone.

He’s average.

Average, said Roy. He was beginning to enjoy this, his one and only conversation with Speight, if this scant back and forth could be called conversation. Don’t worry about the phone. If they want what they want bad enough, they’ll hang on. And Lehmann can’t even hear it, he’s too busy spitting into that poor man’s face up there, trying to get another dollar out of him. So tell me more about this average boy of yours.

Smart for his age but undersized.

Roy slipped his stool up and sat. Tell me this: does this boy talk any more than you do?

Speight pretended not to notice the next ring, though there was hope evident in the way his body tensed at the sound of it, still affected by the off-chance it would change things. This is hard for him, thought Roy; he’s probably one of those people who hates phones, who equate phone ring with siren. Still, he was interested in hearing from