The Digging Leviathan (6 page)

He awoke with a sudden shout to find Giles Peach on his way out the door, Dr. Lassen pulling on an unlikely, floor-length overcoat, his father asleep in his chair, and Uncle Edward poking through a cigar box full of iridescent beetles with Squires and Phillip Mays. He could hear Ashbless and Professor Latzarel talking furiously in the kitchen. Jim lay in bed that night with the lingering suspicion that something peculiar had occurred, that he hadn’t merely drifted into a dream. But he fell asleep almost at once, and when he awoke in the morning it was to the earthbound smells of coffee and bacon and to the sound of a lawnmower. His father and uncle were in the kitchen.

“Peculiar business, wasn’t it, them finding the squid?” William asked, shoveling a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

“Absolutely,” Edward responded.

“What do you make of the amphibian? He’s damned intriguing if you ask me. Worth pursuing. I’ll write Woods Hole today. Use Dr. Lassen’s name. He won’t mind. Damn that lawnmower!”

The roar of the mower drew up toward the kitchen window, grinding and growling louder until, smiling and nodding at the surprised William, an Oriental man in a snap-brim hat and loose white trousers sailed past, edging away around a rose bush.

“Who the devil is that?” William asked quietly, as if the man might overhear him. “The gardener. Yamoto. He’s been at it for six months now.

Absolutely dependable. Shows up like clockwork, rain or shine.”

William watched him disappear from the kitchen window, then hurried into the living room to see where he’d gone—what route he’d taken through the grass. He returned lost in thought. “I don’t like it,” he said.

Edward tried to change the subject. “I had the strangest feeling last night. Just for a moment. I believe it was when I was reading that business about the squid. It felt as if a wet tentacle slid across my cheek, or a strand of seaweed. It even smelled like it, just for an instant. I was just barely aware of it, you know, like when there’s a fly buzzing for minutes before you notice it. Then the droning sort of filters in and you look around. Try to spot him. But he stops, lands somewhere. There’s no more buzzing, no fly, and you can’t swear, finally, that there ever had been. Do you follow me?”

But William wasn’t ‘following anything but the advancing Yamoto, who had returned and angled in toward the window, grinning hugely and waving once again at William whose face hovered an inch from the glass. The roar of the mower crested and then fell away as Yamoto retreated, following the snaking path of the flowerbed toward the front of the house.

“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.

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 pieces 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.”