Stuart Woods - Under the Lake

Scotty had gone to bed early, and he had determined to make a start on the actual writing of Lurton Pitts’s book. He had it outlined on tape and in his head. He knew where to begin. But he had not been able to.

The moon was low, making a long streak of silver across the water. It was very beautiful, he thought, and he should know. He had spent enough time looking at it instead of working. He wondered why he could not clear the hurdle of chapter one. Perhaps, he mused, it was because once he actually started to write, he was a hack, finally and confirmed; a man who would ghost write something he loathed, just for the money. He cherished the irrational thought that, until he actually wrote chapter one, he could give Pitts back his expense money and save his self-respect. But the more he thought about it, the more he understood that his point of no return had been reached when he had packed the car, left his wife, and come to this place.

He looked out over the lake. No hallucinations, no spirits, crickets chirping loudly, all normal.

It began to be chilly, and he went back into the living room to retrieve a sweater from the back of his desk chair. As he reached out for it, his eye traveled to the empty monitor screen. It was not empty. It was filled with words.

Puzzled, he sat down and read the heading. “CHAPTER ONE,” it read. “How I Found God.” He pressed the scroll button, and more lines worked their way up the screen, lines that were, somehow, familiar, but that he simply couldn’t remember having written. It was all there, eight or nine pages of it, the fruit of his outline, in a prose style close to the manner of speaking of Lurton Pitts. He read it to the end, then pressed another button, sending the text to be stored on a disk.

Could he have been so drunk that he had written that without remembering it? Was that possible? Maybe, but that drunk, and he wouldn’t have been able to write. Or would he? The last thing he remembered before resting his head on the desk was a totally blank screen, glowing eerily in the dark room.

He tossed back the rest of his drink and lumbered toward the bed, baffled and exhausted.

Scotty sweated out the mail for a week. Each morning, the postman arrived about nine-thirty, dumped the usual load of circulars and letters on the station counter, tipped his hat and went on his way. Each morning, Scotty contrived to be at the counter instead of her desk when the postman arrived, beating Sally and Mike to the mail. Bo never arrived before ten.

On the eighth morning, the postman was a little late, and Bo, inexplicably, was a little early. Scotty looked up from the counter and, to her horror, saw them practically bump into each other just outside the front door. The postman went on his way, and Bo walked in with the mail under his arm.

Scotty’s first impulse was to vault over the counter and wrest it from him. Stifling this urge, she walked back to her desk, to be more in his path as he went into his office. She could see the letter as he came toward her; it was the same watermarked gold of the envelope in which her monthly Neiman’s bill came. She tried not to stare at it, but she knew she was a minute or so from an extremely, perhaps fatally embarrassing moment. Bo stopped at the radio to talk with Mike.

Scotty sat down, then stood up and pretended to go through some papers on her desk. Bo started to walk toward his office. It was time to panic, Scotty thought. All she could think of was to faint.

Scotty had never fainted before, not even in the very worst moments of her life, but she was so frightened that very little acting was required. She simply placed a hand on her forehead, then crumpled in sections at Bo’s feet, falling across his path like an elongated sack of oranges.

Bo’s inexperience with fainting apparently matched Scotty’s, because he reacted as if she had taken an arrow in the chest. He shouted for help from Mike and Sally, swept her onto the sofa in his office, loosened a lot of her clothing, demanded a wet towel for her face, and generally dithered about like a white, male Butterfly McQueen. Scotty half expected him to call for boiling water.

She had time to reflect that she enjoyed the loosening of the clothing; then she stirred, moaned, and went into her routine. “What happened?” she asked, weakly.

“You passed out, sugar,” Bo replied, sponging at her face and ruining her eye makeup. He looked whiter than she did, she was sure.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Bo. I’ve been fasting for a couple of days to lose some weight. I guess I overdid it.” She cast an eye about for the mail. Somebody had put it on Bo’s desk.

“Well, Jesus Christ, Scotty, you’ve gotta eat something, you know. No wonder you’re so weak. Mike, run over to Bubba’s and get a cheeseburger with everything on it and a glass of milk.”

Scotty sat up. “What I really need is to go to the bathroom,” she said. There was a toilet at the back of Bo’s office. She aimed so as to pass as closely as possible to his desk.

“Are you sure you can make it?” Bo was still terribly concerned.

“Oh yeah, I think that was just temporary.” She turned her back to him to squeeze between him and the desk, pinched the letter, and held in in front of her as she walked toward the toilet. She closed the door, sat down on the John lid, and tore open the letter. It was there, a clear photocopy of enough to get her killed. She tore it into the smallest possible pieces and flushed it down the John, doing it twice and checking for pieces that didn’t make it.

When she came out of the toilet, Mike was waiting with the food, and Bo forced her to eat half of it on the spot.

“Come on,” he said, when he reckoned she had eaten all she would. “I’m going to take you home. You need some rest.”

Scotty went meekly with him. Her landlady was at work. The room looked odd to her, she had spent so little time there since meeting John Howell. Bo walked her up the stairs as if she were in the last stages of a difficult pregnancy.

“Really, Bo, I’m feeling great, now,” she said, showing him into her room. “The food is working. That was all it was, just too much fasting.”

“You ought to take better care of yourself,” Bo said, softly. He raised a hand and brushed at her hair. The hand stayed, resting on her cheek. He suddenly bent and kissed her, and Scotty met him halfway. They kissed again, then again. In moments, the action had escalated.

It was wild. There was much heavy breathing and tearing at clothes, then they were on the bed, locked together, moving, moaning, coming together. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than three minutes, Scotty reflected, but she liked it, and so, apparently, did he. They had had this carnal curiosity about each other, and they had both enjoyed satisfying it.

“Christ, I want a cigarette,” Bo said. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t. I mean I haven’t for damn near ten years, but suddenly, I want a cigarette.”

“Some old reflex, I expect,” Scotty laughed.

Bo laughed, too. “Yeah, maybe.” He fingered the framed photograph on the bedside table. “Your folks?”

“Yes. My mother’s dead.”

“You don’t look like either one of them. Who do you look like? Grandparents?”

“Who knows? I was adopted.”

“Yeah? How old?”

“Brand new, I gather. A regular foundling.”

Bo was quiet for a moment. His face seemed filled with pity. “You mean you were left on their doorstep?”

“On the doorstep of the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home in Hapeville, in a cardboard box. My folks were already on the waiting list. I was theirs in a day or two.”

Bo started to get dressed. “Well, I gotta get back,” he said. “Lot to do.”