Skeleton Crew (28 page)

“How come you never go right out to the middle, Uncle Will?” Hal had asked once.

“Look overside there,” Uncle Will had answered.

Hal did. He saw the blue water and his fish line going down into black.

“You’re looking into the deepest part of Crystal Lake,” Uncle Will said, crunching his empty beer can in one hand and selecting a fresh one with the other. “A hundred feet if she’s an inch. Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker is down there somewhere. Damn fool took it out on the lake one early December, before the ice was made. Lucky to get out of it alive, he was. They’ll never get that Stud out, nor see it until Judgment Trump blows. Lake’s one deep sonofawhore right here, it is. Big ones are right here, Hal. No need to go out no further. Let’s see how your worm looks. Reel that sonofawhore right in.”

Hal did, and while Uncle Will put a fresh crawler from the old Crisco tin that served as his bait box on his hook, he stared into the water, fascinated, trying to see Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker, all rust and waterweed drifting out of the open driver’s side window through which Amos had escaped at the absolute last moment, waterweed festooning the steering wheel like a rotting necklace, waterweed dangling from the rearview mirror and drifting back and forth in the currents like some strange rosary. But he could see only blue shading to black, and there was the shape of Uncle Will’s night crawler, the hook hidden inside its knots, hung up there in the middle of things, its own sun-shafted version of reality. Hal had a brief, dizzying vision of being suspended over a mighty gulf, and he had closed his eyes for a moment until the vertigo passed. That day, he seemed to recollect, he had drunk his entire can of beer.

...
the deepest part of Crystal Gake ...
a hundred feet if
she’s an inch.

 

He paused a moment, panting, and looked up at Petey, still watching anxiously. “You want some help, Daddy?”

“In a minute.”

He had his breath again, and now he pulled the rowboat across the narrow strip of sand to the water, leaving a groove. The paint had peeled, but the boat had been kept under cover and it looked sound.

When he and Uncle Will went out, Uncle Will would pull the boat down the ramp, and when the bow was afloat, he would clamber in, grab an oar to push with and say: “Push me off, Hal ... this is where you earn your truss!”

“Hand that bag in, Petey, and then give me a push,” he said. And, smiling a little, he added: “This is where you earn your truss.”

Petey didn’t smile back. “Am I coming, Daddy?”

“Not this time. Another time I’ll take you out fishing, but ... not this time.”

Petey hesitated. The wind tumbled his brown hair and a few yellow leaves, crisp and dry, wheeled past his shoulders and landed at the edge of the water, bobbing like boats themselves.

“You should have stuffed ’em,” he said, low.

“What?” But he thought he understood what Petey had meant.

“Put cotton over the cymbals. Taped it on. So it couldn’t ... make that noise.”

Hal suddenly remembered Daisy coming toward him—not walking but lurching—and how, quite suddenly, blood had burst from both of Daisy’s eyes in a flood that soaked her ruff and pattered down on the floor of the barn, how she had collapsed on her forepaws ... and on the still, rainy spring air of that day he had heard the sound, not muffled but curiously clear, coming from the attic of the house fifty feet away:
Jang-jang-jang-jang!

He had begun to scream hysterically, dropping the armload of wood he had been getting for the fire. He ran for the kitchen to get Uncle Will, who was eating scrambled eggs and toast, his suspenders not even up over his shoulders yet.

She
was an old dog, Hal, Uncle Will had said, his face haggard and unhappy—he looked old himself.
She was twelve, and that’s old for
a dog.
You
mustn’t take on
now—oldDaisy wouldn’t like that.

Old,
the vet had echoed, but he had looked troubled all the same, because dogs don’t die of explosive brain hemorrhages, even at twelve (“Like as if someone had stuck a firecracker in her head,” Hal overheard the vet saying to Uncle Will as Uncle Will dug a hole in back of the barn not far from the place where he had buried Daisy’s mother in 1950; “I never seen the beat of it, Will”).

And later, terrified almost out of his mind but unable to help himself, Hal had crept up to the attic.

Hello, Hal, how you doing?
The monkey grinned from its shadowy comer. Its cymbals were poised, a foot or so apart. The sofa cushion Hal had stood on end between them was now all the way across the attic. Something—some force—had thrown it hard enough to split its cover, and stuffing foamed out of it.
Don’t worry about Daisy,
the monkey whispered inside his head, its glassy hazel eyes fixed on Hal Shelburn’s wide blue ones.
Don’t worry about Daisy,
she was old, Hal,
even the vet
said so, and
by the way, did you see the blood coming out of her eyes, Hal? Wind me up, Hal. Wind me up, let’s play, and who’s dead, Hal? Is it you?

And when he came back to himself he had been crawling toward the monkey as if hypnotized. One hand had been outstretched to grasp the key. He scrambled backward then, and almost fell down the attic stairs in his haste—probably would have if the stairwell had not been so narrow. A little whining noise had been coming from his throat.

Now he sat in the boat, looking at Petey. “Muffling the cymbals doesn’t work,” he said. “I tried it once.”

Petey cast a nervous glance at the flight bag. “What happened, Daddy?”

“Nothing I want to talk about now,” Hal said, “and nothing you want to hear about. Come on and give me a push.”

Petey bent to it, and the stem of the boat grated along the sand. Hal dug in with an oar, and suddenly that feeling of being tied to the earth was gone and the boat was moving lightly, its own thing again after years in the dark boathouse, rocking on the light waves. Hal unshipped the other oar and clicked the oarlocks shut.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Petey said.

“This won’t take long,” Hal promised, but he looked at the flight bag and wondered.

He began to row, bending to the work. The old, familiar ache in the small of his back and between his shoulder blades began. The shore receded. Petey was magically eight again, six, a four-year-old standing at the edge of the water. He shaded his eyes with one infant hand.

Hal glanced casually at the shore but would not allow himself to actually study it. It had been nearly fifteen years, and if he studied the shoreline carefully, he would see the changes rather than the similarities and become lost. The sun beat on his neck, and he began to sweat. He looked at the flight bag, and for a moment he lost the bend-and-pull rhythm. The flight bag seemed ... seemed to be bulging. He began to row faster.

The wind gusted, drying the sweat and cooling his skin. The boat rose and the bow slapped water to either side when it came down. Hadn’t the wind freshened, just in the last minute or so? And was Petey calling something? Yes. Hal couldn’t make out what it was over the wind. It didn’t matter. Getting rid of the monkey for another twenty years—or maybe

forever—that was what mattered.

The boat reared and came down. He glanced left and saw baby whitecaps. He looked shoreward again and saw Hunter’s Point and a collapsed wreck that must have been the Burdons’ boathouse when he and Bill were kids. Almost there, then. Almost over the spot where Amos Culligan’s famous Studebaker had plunged through the ice one long-ago December. Almost over the deepest part of the lake.

Petey was screaming something; screaming and pointing. Hal still couldn’t hear. The rowboat rocked and rolled, flat-ting off clouds of thin spray to either side of its peeling bow. A tiny rainbow glowed in one, was pulled apart. Sunlight and shadow raced across the lake in shutters and the waves were not mild now; the whitecaps had grown up. His sweat had dried to gooseflesh, and spray had soaked the back of his jacket. He rowed grimly, eyes alternating between the shoreline and the flight bag. The boat rose again, this time so high that for a moment the left oar pawed at air instead of water.

Petey was pointing at the sky, his scream now only a faint, bright runner of sound.

Hal looked over his shoulder.

The lake was a frenzy of waves. It had gone a deadly dark shade of blue sewn with white seams. A shadow raced across the water toward the boat and something in its shape was familiar, so terribly familiar, that Hal looked up and then the scream was there, struggling in his tight throat.

The sun was behind the cloud, turning it into a hunched working shape with two gold-edged crescents held apart. Two holes were torn in one end of the cloud, and sunshine poured through in two shafts.

As the cloud crossed over the boat, the monkey’s cymbals, barely muffled by the flight bag, began to beat.
Jang-jang-jang-jang, it’s you, Hal,
it’s finally
you,
you’re over the deepest part of the lake now and it’s your turn, your turn, your
turn
—

All the necessary shoreline elements had clicked into their places. The rotting bones of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker lay somewhere below, this was where the big ones were, this was the place.

Hal shipped the oars to the locks in one quick jerk, leaned forward, unmindful of the wildly rocking boat, and snatched the flight bag. The cymbals made their wild, pagan music; the bag’s sides bellowed as if with tenebrous respiration.

“Right here, you sonofawhore!”
Hal screamed.
“RIGHT HERE!”

He threw the bag over the side.

It sank fast. For a moment he could see it going down, sides moving, and for that endless moment
he could still hear the cymbals beating.
And for a moment the black waters seemed to clear and he could see down into that terrible gulf of waters to where the big ones lay; there was Amos Culligan’s Studebaker, and Hal’s mother was behind its slimy wheel, a grinning skeleton with a lake bass staring coldly from one fleshless eye socket. Uncle Will and Aunt Ida lolled beside her, and Aunt Ida’s gray hair trailed upward as the bag fell, turning over and over, a few silver bubbles trailing up:
jang-jang-jang-jang
...

Hal slammed the oars back into the water, scraping blood from his knuckles
(and ah God the back of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker had been full of dead children! Charlie Silverman

...
Johnny McCabe
... ), and began to bring the boat about.

There was a dry pistol-shot crack between his feet, and suddenly clear water was welling up between two boards. The boat was old; the wood had shrunk a bit, no doubt; it was just a small leak. But it hadn’t been there when he rowed out. He would have sworn to it.

The shore and lake changed places in his view. Petey was at his back now. Overhead, that awful simian cloud was breaking up. Hal began to row. Twenty seconds was enough to convince him he was rowing for his life. He was only a so-so swimmer, and even a great one would have been put to the test in this suddenly angry water.

Two more boards suddenly shrank apart with that pistol-shot sound. More water poured into the boat, dousing his shoes. There were tiny metallic snapping sounds that he realized were nails breaking. One of the oarlocks snapped and flew off into the water—would the swivel itself go next?

The wind now came from his back, as if trying to slow him down or even drive him into the middle of the lake. He was terrified, but he felt a crazy kind of exhilaration through the terror. The monkey was gone for good this time. He knew it somehow. Whatever happened to him, the monkey would not be back to draw a shadow over Dennis’s life or Petey’s. The monkey was gone, perhaps resting on the roof or the hood of Amos Culligan’s Studebaker at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Gone for good.

He rowed, bending forward and rocking back. That cracking, crimping sound came again, and now the rusty Crisco can that had been lying in the bow of the boat was floating in three inches of water. Spray blew in Hal’s face. There was a louder snapping sound, and the bow seat fell in two pieces and floated next to the bait box. A board tore off the left side of the boat, and then another, this one at the waterline, tore off at the right. Hal rowed. Breath rasped in his mouth, hot and dry, and then his throat swelled with the coppery taste of exhaustion. His sweaty hair flew.

Now a crack zipped directly up the bottom of the rowboat, zigzagged between his feet, and ran up to the bow. Water gushed in; he was in water up to his ankles, then to the swell of calf. He rowed, but the boat’s shoreward movement was sludgy now. He didn’t dare look behind him to see how close he was getting.

Another board tore loose. The crack running up the center of the boat grew branches, like a tree. Water flooded in.

Hal began to make the oars sprint, breathing in great failing gasps. He pulled once ... twice ... and on the third pull both oar swivels snapped off. He lost one oar, held on to the other. He rose to his feet and began to flail at the water with it. The boat rocked, almost capsized, and spilled him back onto his seat with a thump.

Moments later more boards tore loose, the seat collapsed, and he was lying in the water which filled the bottom of the boat, astounded at its coldness. He tried to get on his knees, desperately thinking: Petey must not see this, must not see his
father drown right in front of his eyes, you’re going to swim, dog-paddle if you have to, but do, do something
—

There was another splintering crack—almost a crash—and he was in the water, swimming for the shore as he never had swum in his life ... and the shore was amazingly close. A minute later he was standing waist-deep in water, not five yards from the beach.

Petey splashed toward him, arms out, screaming and crying and laughing. Hal started toward him and floundered. Petey, chest-deep, floundered.