go, see ya bye. So he sat down in the rocking chair opposite her and got used to feeling damn uncomfortable.
“What are you listening to?” he said, soul of naivete.
But Lily shook her head. “Oh, it’s not what I’m listening to, but what I’m listening for.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m not sure,” Lily said.
Deke wasn’t liking this. Uncomfortable? No, that was listening to your best friend talk about his penis or overhearing your parents discussing their sex life. That was uncomfortable, this was just spooky. And in his mind he could hear Chrissy’s voice, I know I’m a rotten person and a worse daughter, yada, yada, but my mother is totally wigged out. You touch her and she’s cold, she looks at you and her eyes are even colder. She’s like a mannequin pretending to be mom, you know? At the time, Deke had not known, no. He was sixteen and maybe sixteen-year- old boys weren’t known for the level of their compassion, but he had thought that Chrissy was being a little harsh about her mother. After all, her sister had killed herself and all, you had to feel sorry for her.
But now?
Oh, he felt pity still, but Lily also made him feel…crawly. Like maybe she was nuts or about to go that way. And those eyes, damn, like there was something hiding behind them, something tensing that wanted to scream hysterically at you.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Barron? Are you all right?”
He said this and meant it, because deep down he was very concerned. Maybe it was because he knew tragedy when he saw it and maybe it was because he was in love with Lily’s daughter. Regardless, he was concerned. Had his own mother seen it, she wouldn’t have believed it. Once upon a time, before Deke’s little brother had died and ripped the guts out of the family, his mother would have said: Deke? My Deke? His whole world is his stomach, his karate lessons, and that awful music he listens to that sounds like a soundtrack to hell with singers that always sound like Cookie Monster’s deranged brother trying to vomit all over the microphone, she would have said. Are you sure we’re talking the same Deke here? He has no compassion, un-huh. He laughs when his little brother hurts himself, calls the kid “Butt-Wienie” on a good day and simply “The Discharge” on a bad day. As in keep The Discharge out of my room, mom. No, you’re talking a different Deke here. That’s what she would have said. But therein lay the rub. Children could often be callous beasts at home, but perfect angels around strangers. Because at home they were always accepted. Parents might shout and stomp their feet, but in the end they never turned their young away. But with strangers you had to prove your worth. You had to show them you were not selfish and immature, that you actually had a heart beating in your chest.
And particularly the mothers of girls you were wild about.
So Deke, who was as sixteen as any boy ever had been, was worried. Creeped-out maybe, but worried, too. Sitting there in his Slipknot T-shirt with his shaven head, the piercing in his left eyebrow, and the little goatee under his lower lip, he was worried.
When he didn’t get an answer, he said, “I mean, I know this is none of my business and all, but you don’t look real good, Mrs. Barron. You been eating okay?”
She stared off into space. “Last night I dreamt that all the people that ever died were living underneath us,” Lily told him. “That there was a world beneath us. A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. Down there, down in the sewers and drains.”
“Wow,” Deke said, knowing it was stupid, but at a real loss for words.
“Down there, Deke, they’re all down there waiting for us. That’s what I dreamed. Down below.”
Deke wasn’t up to this noise.
Maybe Chrissy was right and Lily should have been renting rooms upstairs on account of all that extra space in her head. He knew it wasn’t nice thinking shit like that, but how could you not? A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. That was not just disturbing, it was just this side of freaky. And especially for Deke. And especially because almost two years before his kid brother Nicky went through the ice on the Black River and drowned. When she said that, Deke immediately thought of Nicky down there, pictured him as he’d looked in the silver casket with the little gray burial suit and tie on. And why in the Christ did they bury kids looking like that? Nicky had never worn that suit but once a year at Christmas Mass…they should’ve buried him in a baseball cap and that fruity tiger-striped Frosted Flakes shirt. That was Nicky. That was what he had been about, not suits and ties and all that nonsense.
Lily had been talking right along, but Deke had tuned her out. “…down there, I think of them down there. It’s a nice thing to think about.”
Deke just stared at her until common sense told him to look away. He tried to think of something to say and this is what came to him: “There’s lots of room down there, Mrs. Barron. I know because we had to do a report on it a couple years ago in school.”
Lily was interested now. There was a wet mist in her eyes. “Really? What’s it like below, Deke?”
And then he was telling her, even though a voice told him that she was terribly distraught and possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He told her about the elaborate system of drains beneath the city that were for the most part a combined system of sewage and rainwater. That much of it had been designed back in the mid-19^th century and updated and added to as the population of the city grew until nobody was sure what led where and the maps were outdated and it was anyone’s guess where all the tunnels led. Then in the 1970’s, he explained, Witcham had gotten a federal grant to install the Deep Tunnel system which was a series of interconnecting tunnels two-hundred feet down. Lot of people didn’t even know about it. Deke had interviewed a guy from public works about it. He said the tunnels went on for miles and were like thirty feet deep and forty feet wide. Like a sea down there. It was connected to the regular drains by a series of vertical shafts and controlled by a series of pumps and valves and flues.
“They did it because Witcham sits on the flood plain and it’s been flooding for years,” Deke told her, finding it easier to talk about these things than the nature of her problems.
Lily seemed interested. “Can you go down there?”
Deke swallowed. “Um…you mean the regular sewers? Sure, you just go down the manholes in the streets. I went down there with the public works guy. Lots of pipes are only big enough to crawl through and some even smaller than that, but they all connect up with the main drain lines that are big enough to walk around in.”
“But what about those Deep Tunnels? That sea down there?”
Deke knew he should stop right there, because where this was leading was nowhere good. “Yeah…I mean, there are shafts that connect to the Deep Tunnel system. They’re in the main drain lines, a whole bunch of them. Sometimes guys in special wet suits go down there to clean blockages and work on the pumps.”
“Is…is there anything down there?”
“Lots of water.”
“Anything else?”
“The public works guy said the sewers are full of rats. Sometimes they find bodies down there. Bums sometimes pry a manhole cover off or yank the grating off an outlet pipe and go live down there.”
Lily got up and went to the window. She stared out into the drab streets at the water bubbling at a storm drain. “They’re down there now.”
“Who?” Deke said, brushing sweat from his brow.
“All of them. All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.” Lily turned from the window, her face as colorless as the streets outside. Just as cool, just as damp. “I dreamed I saw my sister, I saw Marlene, but she didn’t look like she did before she died. She didn’t look sick and worn-out with gray in her hair and that awful hollow look in her eyes. She looked different, she looked younger, like when we were teenagers. When she was Chrissy’s age. She said I should come below. That everyone was below. That mom and dad were down there. And Grandpa Joe and Gramma Bridgette and Aunt Helen and even Joey Spalten who drowned in the quarry when we were kids. They were all down there and they were asking about me, when would Lily come down, when would Lily come down. Marlene said there were places down there, seas and rivers and creeks to swim in and hidden ravines to run through. She asked me…she asked me if I remembered the story Aunt Ilene had read to us. The Ray Bradbury story where a woman’s lover went down into the sewers and how he was dead down there, waiting for her. And you know what, Deke? I did remember! And that story was true because now it’s happened here, hasn’t it? All down there, all down below waiting for me and I suppose I’ll have to go, too, because I shouldn’t disappoint them.”
