Under the Beetle's Cellar (21 page)

“Mr. Demming! Earth to Mr. Demming!” The twangy girl’s voice interrupted his train of thought. Walter looked around. It was Kim, trying to call him back to the story, always there, from the start, to point out to him how responsible adults should behave. “Mr. Demming, are you okay?”

“Oh, sure. Sure. Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Where was I, Kim?”

“Jacksonville was trying to figure out how to use the vegetable peeler.”

“Oh, yeah. He kept looking at it, trying to figure it out. It was an old vegetable peeler—they last forever—it’s a kitchen utensil you only need one of in a lifetime. It had a little rust on the blade part, but it looked plenty sharp. After a while he remembered a friend of his peeling carrots and then he looked at the green bamboo bars, and slowly he got the idea. Maybe he could scrape the bars. Maybe he could peel enough away so he could escape. Maybe he could do it now, in the dark, before morning.”

Josh let out some dry, hacking coughs that sounded ominous. Walter paused, worried the coughs might lead to an attack. After a few seconds, however, Josh recovered, and nodded that he was all right.

Walter continued: “He picked the peeler up with his claw and tried to peel one of the bamboo bars. But the peeler just slid off. It didn’t do anything. See, vultures don’t have strong claws like hawks and eagles because they’re scavengers who don’t usually kill their prey. But their beaks are very strong. So Jacksonville tried using his beak instead to hold the peeler. That worked better. After a few minutes he made some progress. He had a long way to go, but he was a hard worker and he kept on scraping. While he worked, he thought about Lopez. He wondered where he was.

“You kids have probably been wondering, too. Where has Lopez been all this time? Last time we saw him, he’d burrowed into a hill outside the town after eating too many slumber bugs.

“Well, Lopez finally woke up after about twenty-four hours of sacking out. He remembered Jacksonville had said he was going to go into Moo Goo Gai Pan. So Lopez headed on into town. His progress was pretty slow because armadillos tend to shuffle along with their noses plowing the ground. Even when they’re hurrying, armadillos are slow.
They’re even slower than we human beings, and by the standards of the animal world, we are pretty darn slow.”

Conrad laughed. “That’s why you always see them squished on the road. Ugh.”

“Roadkill.” Sue Ellen wrinkled her nose.

“Road pizza,” Hector said.

“Highway hamburger!” Heather called. “Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts!”

“Blasted armadillo butts,” Josh chimed in. “Mutilated monkey meat.”

“Dirty turkey vulture feet,” Walter sang.

They all laughed uproariously. Walter thought the laughter was the most beautiful sound in the world. He hadn’t heard much of it lately. He wished he could sing and tell jokes, make up songs, entertain them, but he couldn’t. His story would have to do.

“On his way to town, Lopez came to this neighborhood where giant anteaters lived. These are cousins of the armadillo—they’re both edentates—but anteaters are much bigger, and they have long hollow noses, really long. And claws that are awesome. And when Lopez set eyes on the female anteaters, well, he just couldn’t believe it. They were so big and glossy. And they had these long, plumy tails that swayed when they walked. He loved looking at them.”

Hector and Kim laughed.

“And the anteaters were all eating slumber bugs—they had camped out next to a huge hill that was just chock-full of them. Also, they were drinking cheap wine from jugs. They had a huge supply of that, too.”

Walter stopped. He kept getting lost, forgetting where he was in the story. His mind kept wandering back to the phone call he was going to make. Martin said it would happen around ten and they would come get him right before that. Now it was almost nine and he wanted to go into a corner and practice some more. He wanted to have some time alone to be silent and get prepared. This was the last chance. He tried to imagine what was going on aboveground, but he had so little to go on.

“Mr. Demming. Earth to Mr. Demming. Go on,” Lucy said.

“Right. Now … Let’s see. Were we talking about Lopez? He knew he should be looking for Jacksonville, but one of the females invited him to visit awhile. And one thing led to another. Lopez ate slumber bugs, he drank wine, he kissed the female anteaters, and he fell asleep again. When he woke up it was dark and he felt really guilty about Jacksonville. So he asked around. Had anyone seen a vulture of Jacksonville’s description? Someone told him about the Tongs capturing a buzzard and dragging him off.

“Lopez didn’t know what to do. He was scared to go into the Tong camp alone, so he got the anteaters to go along with him—for protection. He bribed them. He promised if they came and helped him rescue his buddy, he would buy them some more wine. So they all went to the Tong camp. It was dark and they saw the fire, so they crept up to it and looked through the bushes. In the firelight they saw the big pot boiling and all the Tongs gathered in a circle around poor Dr. Mortimer.

“Now Lopez knew they were going to have to do something right quick if they were going to save the doctor. He had to come up with a plan. What he did was this: He told all the giant anteaters to suck wine up into their long snouts and spray it out. But that plan didn’t work because the anteaters had already drunk all the wine, every drop. So he had to figure out something else.

“Now, it happened that all the anteaters who’d come with him were boys. The girls had all gone to bed. So here’s what Lopez did: He got the anteaters to line up. There were lots of them and they’d all drunk so much wine they were full of it. He counted to five and at the same time they all peed on the Tongs. Long streams of pee.”

Walter stopped because the kids were laughing. It was a cheap shot. After forty-eight days with this age group, he knew how popular bathroom jokes were.

Hector said through his laughter, “That’s great. I thought Lopez had something to do with it.”

“Didn’t the Tongs know it was pee?” Heather asked. “You can smell it.”

“Well, they noticed that it was different from normal rain and that’s one of the things that scared them. But it smelled more like wine because that was what they’d been drinking.” Walter knew he wasn’t making any sense. He was barely able to concentrate now, thinking about the phone call coming up.

“My mom drinks wine,” Heather said, “and even when she says she hasn’t been, I know she has because I can smell it. Was it red or white wine?”

“It was white wine,” Walter told her. “Tongs don’t use alcohol at all, so they really aren’t familiar with its smell the way you are, Heather.”

Walter looked at his watch. He couldn’t concentrate. He was just too preoccupied to go on. His head was churning with anxieties. If only he knew what was happening aboveground. Martin spoke of the negotiators as if they were just a part of everyday life. So maybe there had been ongoing conversation during these endless days. His only contact with the negotiators, the only reason he knew for sure they were out there, had been the half-minute conversation the second day. If you could call
what they’d had a conversation. Walter had read, at gunpoint, a statement Mordecai handed him: “ ‘My name is Walter Demming. The eleven children are with me. We are all safe and being taken care of. Samuel Mordecai is in charge here. He has an important message for the world.’ ”

A voice had said, “Mr. Demming, I’m Andrew Stein of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We are doing everything we can to secure your release. The safety of you and the children is our primary concern. What can we—” At that point Samuel Mordecai had taken over the phone and Walter had been dragged back to the barn through a wooden corridor. Then they pulled the wooden slab aside and shoved him back down into the buried bus. That was the only time he’d been aboveground in forty-eight days. The only time he’d heard a voice from the outside world.

Surely by now the FBI knew that Mordecai was no negotiator. The man had his own agenda and it didn’t include letting them go. Walter had vague recollections of news items about hostage situations and the Waco standoff. There was something in Utah and something in California, he thought, but he couldn’t remember the details. So what were the negotiators thinking of?

Walter had been awake all night thinking about the negotiators, wondering how smart they were, wondering if what he was going to try was worth the risk. He was going to try to tell them they were all underground, in the barn. He was going to try to tell them that they should attack and he would keep the kids down and safe for as long as it took. But it would work only if the people on the receiving end of his message were creative in trying to figure it out, only if they went to the trouble of talking to the important people in his life—Jake and Theodora. Certainly they would locate Jake. But Theodora? He just didn’t know.

“Mr. Demming, are you all right?” Kim asked. “I guess that’s all for today, huh?”

“Yes.” He looked up at the kids. “I’m sort of preoccupied, thinking about the phone call. I could use a little quiet time to get myself ready. I want to give your messages just right.”

“Mr. Demming,” Conrad said, “I want to change my message. Can I do some more?”

“No. Remember, we timed it at one minute. You can change what you’ve got if it’s the same length.”

“Oh, I guess not then. I was just thinking. When we were talking about food, I got to thinking about the fried liver my mom—”

“Liver!” Sandra grimaced. “Barf.”

“Mr. Demming,” Lucy said, “what happens if we get rescued before you finish the story?”

Walter held up two fingers as though he were taking the Boy Scout oath. “I promise you this, Lucy goosey, if we get rescued before I finish, I’ll get you all together and do it later. Maybe when Hector’s mom has us over for tamales.”

Ten minutes later, as Walter was reading over the twelve messages for the hundredth time, the wooden cover scraped back and they all looked toward the pit. “It’s time!” Martin’s head appeared upside down next to the bulb at the bus door. “Come on, Bus Driver. I’ll give you a hand up.”

“Okay.” Walter stood up. He folded his paper and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He glanced toward the empty fourth seat where he’d stuffed the knife inside a rip and deep under the padding for safekeeping. “I won’t be long,” he said, looking around at the kids.

Hector came up close and gave him a little punch in the chest. “Good luck, man.” He stood on his tiptoes and whispered into Walter’s ear, “This is going to work for us, I know it. The FBI’s real smart. I seen it in that movie
The Silence of the Lambs.
They’ll figure it out.”

Walter tried to smile. What he was planning to do seemed so ridiculous. He was taking a big risk for something that seemed impossibly unrealistic, as ephemeral as moonbeams.

As he walked up the aisle to the door, each of the kids except Philip reached out to touch him. Walter stopped and took each hand in turn, engulfing each smaller hand in both of his and squeezing. It was as if he were receiving from each of them a surge of power and confidence. By the time he got to the door, he felt all things were possible.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

“Each time a new cultic prophet bursts to public attention, we dismiss him as a violent eccentric making a guest appearance from the lunatic fringe. But these religious wild men have a long and continuous history in the United States; they speak not to some momentary discontent or aberration, but to persistent American pain and alienation that expresses itself in a yearning for a holy community under the protection of an old-fashioned patriarch.”

M
OLLY
C
ATES
, “T
EXAS
C
ULT
C
ULTURE
,”
L
ONE
S
TAR
M
ONTHLY
, D
ECEMBER
1993

He called just after midnight. “How’s my dog?”

Molly had been asleep for less than an hour. She turned over and looked down at the floor where the dog lay in the pale spill from the nightlight—a huge dark shape stretched out next to her bed. Earlier, she’d closed the door to keep him out of the bedroom, but he’d kept her awake whining and scratching on the door, so eventually she’d relented and let him in.

“At least he doesn’t smell bad,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep. She reached down to pat his head. “I hope he doesn’t have fleas.”

“Not Copper,” Grady said.

“We went out to the country. He made a friend—a senile golden retriever—but he nearly killed her first.”

“Ah,” he said. “You’re bonding with him. I can tell.”

She sat up and leaned against the headboard. “You found something.”

“You sound sleepy. What are you wearing?”

“Oh, so this is one of those calls.”

“Uh-huh. What have you got on?”

“Chanel No. 5 and the radio.” She laughed.

“I think I’ll come over and see my dog.”

“Come. But first tell me what you’ve found.”

“Lots of dust, pill bugs, a few spiders—and you know how I feel about spiders—arggh!”

“Come on, Grady. Don’t toy with me.”

“Molly, you really live right.”

Her heartbeat quickened.

“The officer who made that report about the baby on August 3, 1962, was Patrolman Oscar Mendez. I checked the roster. Mendez retired in ’78 and died in ’91.”

So it was a dead end. Molly felt a pang of disappointment. “That’s living right?” she asked.

“Just wait,” Grady said. “The jogger who found the baby in the cooler and called the police was one Jerry Brinker, who lived with his sister in Westlake Hills.”

“Lived?”

“Yeah. I tracked the sister down. Jerry died last year. Heart attack while jogging on the hike-and-bike trail.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Now don’t forget you are talking to one of the most indefatigable investigators in the history of the Austin PD. With a computer and a telephone there is very little I can’t do. You will recall there was a witness who saw Jerry find the baby. His name is Hank Hanley.”