"Henry," Aunt Lena said once, her voice unaccustomably sharp with warning,"quit filling those children's heads with tall tales."
Uncle Henry had straightened up, shifted the wad of chewing tobacco to his other cheek, and said, "Aren't tall tales, Mother. That cave's out there somewhere."
It had been all the promise the kids needed. Over the years, Uncle Henry's easternmost pasture-used just for grazing the bull when he had one-began to look like the hillsides around Slitter's Creek circa 1849 as Dale and Lawrence and friends poked into every dip and shallow and grassy overhang, certain that this time they would find the entrance. Dale had often dreamed about how that last shovelful would feel as they broke through-the dark cave opening before them, perhaps with a gas lamp still burning in there, the odor of bathtub gin wafting out on a current of air that had been stilled for thirty years.
Duane arrived about six o'clock-his father dropping him off on his way to the Black Tree-and he passed half an hour talking to the adults on the shaded lawn before heading back through the barnyard to the back pastures. No one noticed it, but he had dressed up for the occasion in his newest tan corduroy trousers and a red flannel shirt that his Uncle Art had given him for Christmas.
In the last pasture, he found a circle of dirty and tired boys huddled around a hole dug three feet into the hillside. The slope below them was littered with large rocks they had pried out.
"Hi." Duane sat on one of the larger rocks. "Think you found it this time?" The shadows were growing longer and this part of the hillside was in shade. The stream was little more than a trickle twenty feet below, just beyond the flattened area that Dale had always been sure was the 'bootleggers' road."
Dale mopped his forehead and left a trail of mud. "We thought so. Look… we found this old rotted wood in there behind that big rock."
Duane nodded. "An old log, huh?"
"No!" Lawrence said angrily. His t-shirt was a mess. "It's one of the log tilings over the cave entrance."
"Pilings," said Mike.
Duane nodded and nudged the log with his black sneaker. There were stubs of branches on it. "Hmm-hm."
"I told them they were full of shit," said Jim Harlen happily enough. He shifted so that his cast was more comfortable. It was obvious that his arm still hurt him, and there was a bandage wrapped around his head that reminded Duane of Crane's Red Badge of Courage. He tried to imagine Jim Harlen as Henry Fleming.
"You been digging too?" asked Duane.
Harlen snorted. "I never did. My job's to sell the booze when we find it."
"Think it'll still be good?" Duane's voice was innocent.
"Hey, it ages, doesn't it?" said Harlen. "Wine and that stuff's worth more money after a while, right?"
Mike O'Rourke grinned. "We're not sure gin's the same way. What do you think, Duane?"
Duane picked up a twig and drew designs in the mound of fresh dirt they'd excavated. The hole was deep enough that when Lawrence poked his head in, only his legs from the knees down stayed in the open air. Duane noticed that it wasn't really a tunnel, though-there seemed no chance of a cave-in-merely a gouge in the hillside. The most recent of many.
"My guess is that you'd make more money selling the old cars that're in there," he said, joining in the game. After all, what harm was there in imagining this well-stocked cavern just a few yards away through soft soil? Was it any more fanciful than the 'research' he'd been doing for two weeks?
Only now Duane knew that there was nothing fanciful about his research. He touched his shirt pocket, then remembered that he'd left his notebook at home with the others in their hiding place.
"Yeah," said Dale,"or make a fortune just giving tours of the place. Uncle Henry says that we can fix it up with electric lights and keep it just the way it was."
"Neat," said Duane. "Oh, your mom said to tell you to come on up to the house to get cleaned up. They've got the steaks on the grill."
The boys hesitated, pulled between their fading fixation and growing hunger. Hunger won.
They walked back at Harlen's pace, shovels over their shoulders like rifles, talking and laughing. The dairy cattle ambling back to the barn looked at the group quizzically and gave them a wide berth. The six boys were still a hundred yards away from the last fence when they smelled the aroma of sizzling steak on the evening breeze.
They ate on the stone patio on the east side of the house as shadows swallowed the golden light on the lawn. Smoke rose from the barbecue pit Uncle Henry had built beyond the pump near the wooden fence. Despite Mike's protests that the corn and salad and rolls and dessert would be more than enough dinner, Aunt Lena had pan-fried two catfish for him, breading them until they were extra crispy. Along with the fish and steak, the boys received two huge baskets of onion rings to go along with the vegetables that had been picked from the garden an hour earlier. The milk was ice cold and creamy, separated and stored in Uncle Henry's dairy barn that day.
They ate as the heat of the day dissipated. A breeze had come up to give relief from the humidity and rustle the branches above the lawn. The endless cornfields on the west side of the road and to the north seemed to sigh in some silken language.
The kids sat somewhat apart, perched on stone steps and flower planters-Aunt Lena had landscaped three acres of yard with flowers at all strategic spots-while the grown-ups sat in their circle, plates on their laps and on the broad arms of their wooden chairs. Uncle Henry had brought out a keg of his homemade beer and the mugs had been pre-cooled in the freezer in the garage.
The voices were a medley so common to Dale's ear that he could not imagine a time when all or some of them would not be there as background: Kev's rising chuckle and excited tones, Harlen's drawled sarcasms that sent them sprawling with laughter, Mike's soft asides, Lawrence speaking high and shrill, as if he had to speak quickly to be heard at all, and Duane's rare comments. The grown-ups' tones were equally familiar: Uncle Henry's rasp as he told about the 1928 Pierce Arrow hood ornament that he'd found in the back pasture just last month-a sure sign that some gangster had driven back to the Bootleggers' Cave and come to a bad end; Aunt Lena's husky laugh-simply the most sensual and unique human sound Dale had ever heard; his mother's and father's voices, familiar as the breeze that touched the trees, his dad now more relaxed than usual and telling humorous stories of life on the road; Harlen's mom's somehow adolescent giggle, rushing, excited, as if she had already had too much to drink or, like Lawrence, felt that she had to hurry to be heard.
Their knives made pale red patterns on the paper plates. Everyone went back for seconds, most for thirds. The huge bowl of salad dwindled; the foil-wrapped ears of corn on the barbecue were snatched up; Uncle Henry laughed and bantered even as he put more steaks on the grill and stood there beaming at everyone in his Come "N' Get It apron, long fork in hand.
After dinner, the boys took their desserts of homemade rhubarb pie and chocolate cake-none chose just one-up to the deck.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had added on to their house over the years, never completing the remodeling, merely moving on to the next project: Dale remembered a four-room white frame house when he had come down from Chicago for his grandmother's funeral when he was six. Now the house itself was brick, with four bedrooms on the first level and a finished basement. Uncle Henry had added the garage the first year the Stewarts had moved to Elm Haven; Dale remembered playing in the framed skeleton of it as Uncle Henry raised cinderblocks to the right height. Now the garage was huge-holding three cars and another vehicle-built on the south side of the low hill the house was on so that one walked from the garage directly into the basement workroom, while above it, connected to the large guest room and larger master bedroom, was the deck.
The kids loved the deck in the evening, and they knew that sooner or later the adults would stir themselves from the stone patio and come up here. As large as a tennis court (although none in the group but Dale and Duane had ever seen a tennis court), set on several levels of built-up platforms, catwal
ks, and steps, the deck commanded a view west to the road and Mr. Johnson's fields; south it looked out over the driveway, the swimming pond Uncle Henry had built, the woods, and even offered glimpses of Calvary Cemetery when the trees began to thin in the autumn; to the east one looked down at the barn and barnyard from the level of the hayloft, and Dale always imagined himself a medieval knight, watching from the ramparts and seeing the maze of pigpens, feedlots, chutes, chicken coops, and barnyards as the battlements in his fortress world.
There were more Adirondack chairs on the deck-massive, strangely comfortable constructs of wooden planks turned out in Uncle Henry's basement workshop every winter-but the kids always opted for the hammocks. There were three on the southernmost platform: two on metal stands and one hooked to wooden posts which held the security lights overlooking the driveway fifteen feet below. The first ones there-Lawrence, Kev, and Mike-piled into that hammock and swung perilously over the railing. Mothers hated to watch them in that hammock, fathers raised their voices in warning, but so far no one had fallen out… although Uncle Henry swore that he had dozed off in that hammock one summer evening, awakened to Ben-the biggest rooster-the next morning, taken one step toward what he thought was the bathroom, and had ended up on bags of Purina chow stacked in the back of the pickup parked below.
They piled in their hammocks and rocked, and talked, and completely forgot that they were going back down to work some more on the Bootleggers' Cave. It was too dark anyway. The sky still held some pale blue, but several stars were visible and the line of trees south of the pond had faded from separate trunks to a black silhouette. Lightning bugs began to blink against that dark background. From around the pond and farther down the hill, frogs and tree frogs began their sad chorus. Swallows fluttered unseen in the barn and somewhere in the deeper woods an owl hooted.
The coming of night seemed to quiet the adults' conversation on the back patio to a friendly hum, and even the kids' babble began to slow and then stop altogether for a while so there was nothing but the creak of the hammock cords and the night sounds down the hill as the sky opened with stars.
Uncle Henry had turned off the automatic security lights and had not turned on the deck lamps, so Dale could imagine that they were on the poop deck of a pirate ship under tropical night skies. The rows of' corn across the road made a soft sound much like the whisper of a ship's wake. Dale wished he had a sextant. He could feel the heat of the day's sun and exerted energies as a sunburn glow on his cheeks and neck, aches in his upper arms and lower legs.
"Look," Mike said softly,"a satellite."
All of them craned back in their hammocks. The sky had darkened perceptibly in the last half hour, the Milky Way was easily discernible here so far from city lights, and some thing was moving between the stars. An ember too high and fast and faint to be an aircraft.
" "Probably Echo,” said Kevin, using his professorial voice. He told them all about the huge reflecting balloon that the U.S. was going to orbit to bounce radio waves around the curve of the earth.
"I don't think they've launched Echo yet," said Duane in that diffident way he spoke even when he was the only one who knew the facts. "I think it's scheduled to go up in August."
"What is it then?" said Kevin.
Duane moved his glasses up his nose and looked skyward. "If it's a satellite, it's probably Tiros. Echo will be really bright… as bright as one of those stars. I'm looking forward to seeing it."
"Let's come back to Uncle Henry's place in August," said Dale. "We'll have an Echo-watching party and do some digging on the Bootleggers' Cave."
There was a chorus of assent. Then Lawrence said, "Look! It's fading away."
The satellite's glow was dying. They watched it track in silence for a moment. Then Mike said, "I wonder if we'll ever get people up there."
"The Russians are working at it," said Duane from the depths of the hammock he had to himself. Dale and Harlen sat opposite him.
"Hah… the Russians!" snorted Kevin. "We'll beat them by a mile."
The dark bulk that was Duane shifted, tapping sneakers against the deck. "I dunno. They surprised us with Sputnik. Remember?"
Dale remembered. He remembered standing out in the backyard on an October evening three years before-he'd been taking the garbage out and his dad and mom had come out when they'd heard on the radio when the Russian satellite was supposed to pass over. Lawrence, only a little first grader then, had been asleep upstairs. Together the three of them had watched up through the almost-bare branches until that tiny light had moved among the stars. "Unbelievable," Dale's dad had whispered, although whether he meant that it was unbelievable that mankind had finally put something into space, or unbelievable that it was the Russians who had done it, Dale never knew.
They watched the skies for a while. It was Duane who broke the silence. "You guys've been checking out Van Syke and Roon and the rest of those people, haven't you?"
Mike and Kevin and Dale exchanged glances. Dale was amazed to find that he felt guilty, as if he'd been slacking off or had broken a promise. "Well, we started to but…"
"That's OK," said Duane. "It was sort of silly. But I've got some stuff I want to talk about. Can we get together tomorrow… in the daylight?"
"How about the Cave?" said Harlen.
The others hooted him down.
"I'm not going backfire," saidKev. "How about Mike's chickenhouse?”
Mike nodded. Duane said OK.
"Ten o'clock?" said Dale. The cartoons he and Lawrence liked to watch on Saturday mornings-Heckle and Jeckle, Ruff and Reddy-would be over by then.
"Let's make it later," said Duane. "I've got some chores in the morning. How about one o'clock. After lunch?"
Everyone agreed to be there except Harlen. "I've got some better stuff to do," he said.
"I'll bet," said Kevin. "Like having Michelle Staffney autograph your cast?"
This time the grown-ups did have to come over to join them before the laughter and punching stopped.
Duane enjoyed the rest of the evening. He was glad he'd put off talking about the research on the Borgia Bell-especially Mrs. Moon's revelations-since the kids and grown-ups started talking about stars and space travel and what it would be like to live out there, and the hours had passed with them chatting and staring at the night sky. Dale had told his father their idea for a watching party in August when the large satellite would be visible, and Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had endorsed the idea immediately. Kevin promised to bring a telescope and Duane heard himself offering to bring his homemade one.
The party began to break up about eleven and Duane had prepared to walk home-he knew the Old Man wouldn't be home until the early-morning hours-but Dale's dad had insisted on them driving him the mile and a half. It had been a crowded station wagon that dropped Duane off outside his kitchen door.
"It looks pretty dark," Mrs. Stewart had said. "You think your father went to bed already?"
"Probably," said Duane. He kicked himself mentally for not remembering to leave a light on.
Mr. Stewart waited until Duane turned on the kitchen light and waved to them from the window. He watched as the red taillights receded down the drive.
Knowing that he was being paranoid, Duane checked the first floor and locked the back door before going down to his basement. He got out of his good clothes and took a shower in the corner downstairs, but rather than pulling on his pajamas, Duane tugged on old corduroys, slippers, and a patched but clean flannel shirt. He was tired, the long day lay on him like a weight, but his mind was very active and he thought he'd work on his writing for a while. With the door locked, he'd have to wait up for the Old Man anyway. He tuned the radio to WHO in Des Moines and went to work.
Or tried to work. His word sketches and notes looked childish and empty to him now. He wondered if he should try to write a complete story. No, he wasn't ready. His time line did not permit him to attempt a complete story until next year at the earliest. Duane looked at his notebooks full of
character sketches, exercises in describing action, exercises in which he imitated various writers' styles-Hemingway, Mailer, Capote, Irwin Shaw-his heroes. He sighed and put it all away in his hiding place and lay back on his bed, slippers on the iron footboard. He'd outgrown his bed during the previous winter so now he had to sleep diagonally, feet against the wall, or curl his legs. He hadn't told the Old Man yet. They couldn't afford to buy a bed right now. Duane knew that there was an extra, unused bed on the second floor-but it had been his father's and mother's bed when she was alive. Duane didn't want to ask for it.
He stared at the ceiling and thought about Mrs. Moon, and the Bell, and the literally incredible web of fact, fancy, suggestion, and inference it all added up to. Uncle Art had seen the outline of it. If he'd known about the events of January 1900, what would he have thought then? Duane wondered if he should keep it from the other kids.
No, they've earned the right to know. Whatever's happening is happening to them as well.
Duane was on the verge of dozing off when he heard the Old Man's pickup coming up the drive.
Sleepily, Duane shuffled upstairs, walked through the dark kitchen, and unlatched the screen. He was halfway down the basement stairs before he realized that he could still hear the pickup's engine; the sound with the missing cylinder was unmistakable. Duane walked back up and went to the door.
The pickup was parked in the middle of the lot, its driver's-side door open, headlights still burning. The cab light was on and Duane could see the truck was empty.
Suddenly there was a roar from the barn that made Duane take a half-step back into the kitchen. He watched as the combine came rumbling out of the big south doors, its thirty-foot cornhead pushing ahead of it like a bulldozer blade with sharp extensions. Duane saw the gleam of the pole light reflecting on snapping rolls and chains and realized that the Old Man hadn't replaced the red metal shields on the eight units.