This Side of Jordan Page 5

  Feeling adventurous, Alvin opened the gate, keeping an eye on the front door whose screen was still closed, and crossed into the yard, staying under the overlapping shade of the blooming magnolia and the old oak. As he moved along the fence to the rear of the house, the farm boy saw more junk thrown about: cushions, shoes, an old lamp, a wicker chair without its seat, a rusted bed frame, torn pillows. He decided that either somebody had been doing spring-cleaning and had forgotten to bring everything back inside or the people living in the house were hillbillies. He came up to the swing and gave it a shove. The rope curled above the tire and twisted into a mean knot where it looped over the branch. Alvin stared at the house. Lace curtains were hung in the window frames, hiding the interior like a shroud. Back of the house, the trashcan had fallen over, spilling its contents all over the walkway between a tool shed and a weed-eaten vegetable patch.

  Now he was curious what the indoors looked like, how high the garbage was piled elsewhere throughout the house. A short porch led up to the back door. If it wasn’t locked, well, he might just take a quick peek inside. He walked up to the door and reached for the knob, then stopped to reconsider. If someone came to the door, how would he explain his presence in the back yard? Thinking on his feet was not one of Alvin’s greatest strengths. All he could say was that he was lost and needed a drink of water and he’d already tried the front door and nobody had answered so he had come around back. Who could get bitter about a fellow asking for help? Alvin reached for the knob again.

  “BOO!”

  He stumbled backward and nearly fell over. Somebody laughed. Alvin hurried down off the porch, took a few steps backward, and stared up at the kitchen window. He listened for half a minute or so, then took half a stride toward the porch.

  “BOO!”

  More laughter.

  The voice hadn’t come from the kitchen, after all. The farm boy stepped back a few feet further and craned his neck upward to a second story window.

  The voice, in a guttural whisper, said, “No! Not there, either!”

  “I see you!” Alvin called out.

  “No, you don’t!”

  Alvin hurried over to the swing and faced the window there above the thick coralberry. Imagining he saw the curtains move, he took a few steps closer. Was that a shadow there behind the glass? He walked close to the side of the house and got up on his tiptoes to see inside. “You’re in there, ain’t you? I just seen you!”

  Laughter echoed into the yard.

  “Nope!”

  “I’m going to come in there and clean you out!”

  “No, you won’t!”

  “How about I give you a good pop in the nose?”

  “All right, you win,” the voice sagged. “I’m down here.”

  Along the foundation below the window box, a patch of coralberry parted, revealing a narrow crawlspace covered by a lattice grate propped open now. Alvin knelt for a look. Divided from the glare of the noon sunlight, the entry was black as cellar pitch. He’d sooner dive headfirst into a brick well than crawl through that hole. As a kid, Alvin’d had a nightmarish fear of the old boogey-man his sister Mary Ann told him lived in the dirt crawlspace beneath his bedroom floor. She said it snuck in out of a storm one night and favored the house so much it decided to stay. It ain’t no wild beast, neither. It’s smart. Real smart. And patient. Boogey-man’ll camp out down there for years, eating bugs and mice, stray cats, biding its time till it gets what it come for: a nice fresh little boy. Boogey-man’ll wait till some poor little boy walks past by hisself and then it’ll snatch him. Take him way down into the earth, so far no human being’ll ever see him again, and make him a slave, or eat him, depending on how hard the boy works. You be careful, now. Wouldn’t surprise me at all to find it’s been working on them boards below your bed, trying to loosen ’em up, so’s it can sneak in one night and snatch you while you’re sleeping!

  “Hello, hello, hello!” the voice called out to him. “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

  “’Course not.”

  “Well then, come on in!”

  A pair of hands and arms became visible in the gloom, small and frail, like a child’s, followed by a large head wearing a smiling face that was not a child’s at all, but in fact a dwarf’s.

  “Don’t be a dilly-dog,” the dwarf urged as pleasantly as possible. “Come on in. It’s nice and cool.”

  Alvin stared at the dwarf, utterly unprepared for this encounter. The only such creature he had ever seen away from a circus was at the sanitarium, a diminutive juggler in clown paint who turned somersaults and chased the nurses about with a wooden paddle. He was shocked. It never occurred to him their sort lived in houses like regular folks.

  The dwarf smiled up at him. “I won’t bite you. I swear.”

  Alvin hesitated, preferring to remain out in the sunlight where it was safe.

  “Oh please,” the dwarf begged. “It’s not half as dark as it seems. Why, I’m blind as a tick and I don’t have any trouble at all getting about down here. What do you say?”

  Alvin looked back across the yard to the street. Except for a pair of birds chirping somewhere up in the magnolia branches, the yard was dead quiet in the early afternoon.

  “How about it?” Squinting in the sunlight, the dwarf thrust his head out of the coralberry. His hair was thin as cobwebs and nearly as white. “We’d have an awful lot of fun.”

  “I ain’t sure I’d fit.”

  “Oh, sure you will. If you don’t mind me saying, you’re awfully skinny. You’re not sick, are you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Please?”

  Alvin shrugged. “All right.”

  What did he have to be scared about? This little fellow was only half his size. If need be, he could probably throw him down in a second.

  “Wonderful!”

  The dwarf backed out of the opening, pushing the tiny grate aside as he went. Leaving Chester’s hat behind in the grass, Alvin got down on his knees and pointed himself toward the dark square in the side of the house. Shoving the bushy coralberry apart with his hands, he crawled forward into the shadows.

  It was a tight fit. His trousers threatened to catch on the latticework frame as he slithered by, while his knees scraped the foundation and his back struck the upper edge of the grate. Once in, though, he was able to sit up without much trouble. A crawlspace roughly four feet high separated the dirt foundation from the floor of the house above him. Plenty of room.

  “Name’s Rascal,” said the dwarf, scrambling over beside him. “What’s yours?”

  “Alvin.”

  “Glad to know you, Alvin.” Rascal sat down in the dirt and crossed his legs. He was dressed in a small boy’s blue one-piece romper with black button shoes. Alvin had never seen anyone like him before in his life, but tried not to stare.

  Ducking a spider web, the farm boy asked, “How long you been under here?”

  “Since I lost my marbles last Saturday,” said Rascal, drawing closer. “It’s black as sin, isn’t it? No trouble at all cracking your head open. Don’t worry, you get used to it. Actually, I think it suits me. I find myself perspiring less down here.”

  “What’s that smell?” asked Alvin, noticing for the first time a distinctly unpleasant odor, sort of fruity and damp, rotting. He thought he might gag from the stink.

  Rascal sniffed the air. “Hmm. My guess would be honeydew melon. Sorry, I’ve been burying the rinds under the porch over there,” Rascal gestured in the direction of the front of the house, “but some nocturnal creature keeps digging them up when I’m in bed. Very troublesome situation. Unsanitary to say the least.”

  “Maybe you ought to put them out with the garbage.”

  “Oh, except for collecting my groceries, I rarely go outdoors anymore.” The dwarf jumped up, his head stopping just short of the support beams. “Do you care to play some marbles? I found a few of my aggies this morning. There’s a place all smoothed out under the kitchen.” Rascal grabbed Alvin
by the wrist. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  “I can’t. Got an appointment downtown in half an hour. Sorry.” He wondered what Chester was doing just then, where he’d gone off to. He never saw fit to tell Alvin anything that mattered.

  The dwarf tugged. “Please? It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Oh, all right. But I ain’t got all day.” Reluctantly, Alvin rose as high as he could without hitting his head, and followed the dwarf on a crooked path between the support pillars and foundation blocks from one end of the house to the other, dodging clots of spider web and gunny sacks stuffed with dirt and assorted broken toys like those lying about in the grass outside. The stink under the house worsened the farther in they went. More than rotted fruit, the stench of a summer outhouse whose wooden walls and damp soil collected and preserved the odor. Alvin shuffled behind Rascal until they came to a narrow hole crudely hacked out of the floor overhead.

  The dwarf stopped and smiled. “That’s my bedroom up there. Would you like to see?” He pulled himself up into the opening and disappeared. Alvin heard his footsteps scrambling across the floorboards. A drawer opened and shut. Something heavy was dragged across the floor. Trying to follow Rascal up into the hole, Alvin only managed to get his head through. He saw Rascal staring at him.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I can’t fit.”

  “How come?”

  “My shoulders are too wide.”

  Alvin swiveled his head to get a better look at the room. It had no window and only two doors, one of which opened to a small closet. There was a small iron bed, a common oak dresser, and a low nightstand with a kerosene lamp. Clothes were jumbled up at the foot of the bed, Post Toasties cereal boxes stacked together beside the dresser, fruit jars filled with preserves on top, six water jugs next to the closet, Big Little books piled on the nightstand. Odds and ends collected beneath the bed: rubber galoshes, mousetraps, used-up pencil tablets, a shoe stretcher, and a pocket spyglass. Rascal dove into the shallow closet and began rummaging through the clothes and assorted junk that had piled up, tossing things out onto the floor behind him. After a couple of minutes, he came out dragging a little old leather suitcase.

  “Maybe you ought to go open the back door,” said Alvin, “so’s I can come in and sit down. This ain’t all that comfortable.”

  Rascal played with the latches on the suitcase, trying to flip them up. “Door’s locked.”

  Alvin bent his knees slightly to ease the pressure on his shoulders. If he were a foot shorter, he could have been standing straight up with his head in the hole. “I know, I tried it. Just go open it from the inside.”

  “I mean, my bedroom door’s locked, too,” said Rascal, pointing over his back. “That’s why I had to pry a hole in the floorboards with a butter knife. Auntie locked me in and took the key before she left. This used to be a pantry until my behavior last year apparently warranted a change of scenery.” The dwarf banged the suitcase hard on the floor. “Dammit!”

  “Can’t you force it open?”

  “I’m trying,” said Rascal, banging the suitcase a second time even harder. The latches appeared jammed shut with rust.

  “I mean your door.”

  “Nope.” Rascal dropped the suitcase and scuttled back across the floor into the closet. More clothes came flying out behind him: shirts, stockings, a fancy pair of riding boots and a big white ten-gallon William S. Hart cowboy hat. Rascal slid out on his hands and knees carrying a pair of pliers. “She’s padlocked all the doors in the house, front to back. So I’m stuck here.”

  “You could crawl out and bust a window,” Alvin told him. “That’s what I’d do if I was you. It’s your house, too, ain’t it?”

  “You mean throw a rock?”

  “Or use a stick. It don’t matter which if you got to get inside.”

  The dwarf shook his head. “No, I’d feel like a crook and there’d be glass everywhere. What if it rained? I’d have an awful mess to clean up and when Auntie returned, she’d throw a fit.”

  “Well, suit yourself.” Alvin shrugged. “But why’d she lock you in here, anyhow?”

  “Doesn’t trust me,” said Rascal, attacking the suitcase latches with a vengeance, using the pliers to tear out the mountings. His face reddened with the effort.

  “Where’d she go?”

  One latch broke and popped free. “To a medicine show in Dayton, Ohio. She’s addicted to brain tonics.”

  Rascal worked the pliers on the other, tugging furiously at the lock.

  “How long’s she supposed to be gone?”

  “Three weeks.” The pliers snapped and fell apart at the joint. “Oh, for the love of Pete!”

  The dwarf spun around and hurled the broken pliers under the bed, then got up and kicked the suitcase against the dresser. When it still didn’t open, he ran back into the closet and began digging through his collection of junk again.

  Alvin let his head drop out of the room and squatted in the dirt. Sunlight flickered into the shadows through the baseboards that encircled the house, but the only genuine entry was the small lattice grate. Listening to Rascal bang on the suitcase latch, Alvin admired the extensive junkyard the dwarf had created within the crawlspace. Whether from anger or boredom, he had strewn garbage into every corner of the underside of the house; a family of raccoons couldn’t have done a better job. It’d take days to clean it all out, digging up what scraps he’d buried and carting it off with the rest of the trash. Alvin wondered what Rascal’s aunt would think when she discovered all he had done in her absence. Maybe that’s why she didn’t trust him alone with the run of the house.

  The dwarf quit hacking at the suitcase. Hearing the latches snap open, Alvin stuck his head back up through the hole in the floor just in time to witness the dwarf tip the suitcase upside down and spill a huge stack of papers out onto the floor. Ignoring the loose sheets, Rascal dug hurriedly into the larger pile, sifting to the bottom. When he came up with a thick stack of postcards bound in string, he leaped to his feet. “Aha! Found ’em!”

  “Found what?”

  “Let me by,” said Rascal, straddling the hole. Alvin slipped back down under the house again and the dwarf dropped through the hole, carrying the postcards. He sat in the dirt and handed half of the postcards over to Alvin. “My Uncle Augustus mailed these back to himself from France during the war. When he died, I inherited them with a box of his old correspondences.”

  “Naked ladies,” said Alvin, shuffling through the cards one by one. He’d had no idea this is what the dwarf had busted open his suitcase to retrieve.

  Rascal giggled. “Grand, aren’t they? If Auntie knew I had them, oh boy!”

  Every card featured a different woman, a different pose. More than a couple gave Alvin that hot feeling down below his stomach. Frenchy had these sorts of photographs once when he was living out back of the barn. Some were belly-dancing girls in lacy get-ups with funny tassels on their tits and belly-buttons showing. Others had colored women from Dixie lying on metal cots, posing without smiles or clothes of any kind, completely naked, hair between the legs and all. Frenchy charged his cousins a penny a peek, nickel for half an hour, and bought a bottle of liquor every Saturday night with the earnings.

  Alvin shuffled through the cards, the stick in his pants getting bigger by the second. Hurried by the dwarf’s stupid grin, he zipped to the bottom of the stack and handed the French postcards back to their owner.

  “You like them, don’t you?” said the dwarf. “Me, too.” Rascal stuck the cards up through the hole and laid them on his bedroom floor. “I used to take them out every so often. Not every day, of course, but I’d have to say three or four times a week. Auntie would say I’m sinning, but what does she know? She’s never married.”

  Feeling an attack of claustrophobia coming on, Alvin looked away from the dwarf toward the exit framed in sunlight across the dark underside of the house. He coughed, and his ears rang.

  “I suppose you’re late for your app
ointment,” the dwarf remarked, sounding disconsolate. “I’d sure hate you to get in trouble for visiting me.”

  Through the grate in the crawlspace, Alvin watched the bottom branches of the white oak swaying in the afternoon breeze. “Yeah, I guess I ought to get along pretty soon.”

  “I wish I had a job,” said the dwarf, sitting down against one of the support pillars. “Something stimulating, yet profitable. Perhaps in a department store or a rollercoaster park. Do you know of anything fitting that description?”

  “Not today.”

  “I suppose I should study the newspapers, prowl the pavement, ring doorbells. How else can I expect to gain employment? Can you read?”

  “Sure.” Scarcely more than labels and street signs, if truth be told, but Alvin didn’t feel like admitting one of his worst shortcomings to a stranger. The year of school he had missed being sick set him back so far that he never caught up and didn’t care any longer. He hated reading.

  “I try to study ten thousand words a day. That’s in addition to the fifteen new ones I memorize out of Webster’s every night before I go to bed. I also read philosophy and the natural sciences. I’ve always believed in bettering myself through learning. ‘Education has for its object the formation of character.’ That’s a credo of mine. Do you have one?”

  Before Alvin was forced to embarrass himself by asking what exactly a credo was, Rascal leaped up and ran across the dirt to a small hiding space under the veranda where the slats between the front steps afforded a discreet view of the sidewalk.