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EPISODE 47

Gee, I'm sorry," Howard melted, sagging on his stick. "Hey sugar... I was out of line, I had no right to say those things I said. It was the champagne talking. Honest! Go on, take those tight shoes off... go right ahead! Nobody's watching. Take them off, please! Don't be ashamed, I'm the one who should be ashamed, if anyone. No, Betty... please! Throw them away... for all that I care."

And the crying shriveled up and disappeared, like desert rivers in July.

"Do you weawwy think I should?" Betty asked.

"Absolutely! Listen," he added, "...I've got something to confess. The other day, well, Tuesday... while you were at your bridge club... well, I did a stupid thing. I bought a pol... I bought one of those, you know... those fire policies from one of those lady Canadian insurance agents that have been working the neighborhood. She came to the house and seemed so kind and understand and interested in the babies... and, of course, I didn't tell her what I did, but only asked her all the questions that she should've known and didn't until she was almost... really, worse than you with the crying and I felt so sorry... dammit, I had to buy one after that. She sold me! And now, I feel like a rat!"

The suggestion of money brought Betty back to the present in a hurry and... as she removed her shoes in the dark... her cold drained away to that place where the tears had gone.

"How much? Howard, how much did you..." she couldn't finish.

"More than we need, I'd have to guess."

"And with Waldo and the policy from Hartford. The company discount, too!" Betty's voice grew as cold as the water at their feet, and considerably clearer.

"I know," said Howard. "Betty, no apologies and no excuses... I must have been outside of myself. No other way! And, just as soon as we get out of here, first thing in the morning, in fact... I'll get on the telephone to Montreal to have it cancelled. Bang! We forfeit the deposit, of course, but I'll make it up myself. No more poker Wednesdays! With what I've been losing, that ought to make it square in, oh, two months or so."

He paused. The thought occurred to him that, with Wayne and Ferdie gone, the poker was just another one of those things that would have to be adjusted... no matter what his financial condition. But he decided not to venture this, out loud.

"Well," he determined, surveying the situation or, at least, those portions of it he could feel and smell and hear. "That wasn't pleasant, was it? But, I had to say it. We've got to air our disagreements, and own up to our mistakes."

'It's like using baking soda to clean out the bottom of a dirty jar," Betty agreed. "And, honey, when the laughter broke out... I have something too... I went out of the room to put away the sour cream and celery. It was me! Not Mimi..."

"What?" responded Howard.

But the question and confessions were absorbed in darkness and in timeless walking, ending only after Spot began to growl.

"Every time he does that," Betty warned them, "things get worse. Owww!" she added, abruptly, "I hit something. Not a bear trap," she added, mentally counting her toes. She transferred the high heels from her right hand to her left and, with her right hand, picked up something slimy from the tunnel floor and passing it to her husband.

"Feels like a tennis racket, doesn't it?" he guessed.

"Uh huh," said Betty. "Unless... unless it's a snowshoe, a Canadian snowshoe... and I don't even want to think about that possibility. Don't waste a match... let's just keep on walking."

And so they did, a little longer, dark and silent, in a silence broken only by Howard's brief attempt to whistle. But the innocent refrains of Disney and the playground of the Modern School reverberated off the walls and bounced back at them, a hollow, distorted mockery.

"You're right," he said to their unvoiced revulsion and the void, and neither Timmy nor his wife questioned his preference for silence.

Again, Spot growled.

"I'd better light a match," said Howard. It burned straight and tall, and Howard lowered it to the floor. No bear traps. He raised the match up along the side of the wall and saw, just before it scorched his fingers, something in the wall.

"Darling... what's that?" Betty noticed.

"It looked like a book!" Howard's fingers scrabbled across the crumbling wall.

"Don't pick it up!" Betty begged. "It's a slave book... bad! Bad! Bad!"

Spot recognized the word. He settled into the mud and covered his eyes with his paws, howling grievously. But Howard would not be turned aside.

"Here!" he exclaimed. "It's all rotting away. Here are the matches, Betty... light another one for me. I'm all wet."

"No. I don't want to! Don't want them... it's dark... I'll drop them. Leave it! It's too dark... it's dirty. Been out of the sun...

"Unhealthy!" she added.

"Now is that any way to behave?" Howard scolded her. "Let's just suppose that it turns out to have a map to show us the way out of here, only you'd rather stay behind? Or do you only want to take the benefits of other people's chances, not the risk? All I am asking of you is to strike a freakin' match..."

"That's not fair," she cried. "I won't stop you from reading, I just don't want to be responsible for having opened that book... and, after all, you were the one who did that... that thing... with the Canadian insurance woman! Timmy can light the match."

"Sure, Mr. Gray!" Timmy volunteered eagerly. "I want to! Let me do it. I like matches!"

"No," said Howard sternly, "you're only a boy. And Betty, if you refuse, we'll just have to leave you here. Me and Spot and Timmy... we'll go on, and you can stay down here forever! Get hold of yourself! And if you drop these matches in the water and I can't find that map and read it, well, then we'll all just have to die here."

Betty took the matches with both hands and knelt in the muck to light one. When she raised it, Howard observed her face to have gone almost entirely gray, as though they had already been underground for years. He opened the book, holding it beneath the match, away from Betty.

"It's old fashioned handwriting," he told them, "and the ink's been running with the dampness, I suppose. Hard to read, but let me try...

"It starts: 'I am Elias McKee'... that must be the author of the book, it feels like a sort of diary... 'late of the dominion of Major Lucius James Foucault, of Barlington, Louisiana. Upon the night of the twenty first of August, I and my wife Althea made our escape, having but a sack of corn, a sack of flour, forty cents American and the clothes on our back... our intent being to reach Free Canada.' Betty, there's more, light another match. Don't burn yourself."

"Do I have to?" Betty asked, and the flame replied by cruelly singing her fingers. A second match was struck.

"On our way," continued Howard, "it became our grave misfortune to encounter Jared and Augustus Slaker, bounty hunters of cruel and infer... infamous repute. That part of it's a little wet. Only through the merest intervention of Providence did we remain ahead of the Slakers and their hell-hound, Caiphas, until that fateful day, when..."

"Owww!" Betty interrupted. The second match whirled downward and buried itself in the slime with a hiss of farewell... briefly revealing a glint of something metallic in the muck.

"Bear trap!" Timmy adjudicated, gleefully.

"Please put that away, Howie, it's an escaped diary."

"Alright, honey," he said meekly. "It's still thick, and we don't have enough matches to look for maps. Timmy... what was that you found?"

"S'not a bear trap after all," the boy replied with keen disappointment. "Just feels like a key, an old, old key. I'll keep it anyway... maybe it's left over from the war. A souvenir, which I can bring to Show and Tell..."

"How nice!" Betty said. "I just hope that there aren't any more souvenirs ahead... like those of the bear-trap kind." She paused. A thought had crossed her mind. "Howie, do you think those bounty hunters came down here to set the traps?"

A faint and indiscernible noise passed, overhead.

"It might be," Howard said, straining his ears. "This is on the way to Canada, you know. But, did anyone hear anything?"

"I did!" Timmy cried. "Fire engines!"

"Yes... that's it... they're coming!" Betty hopped a little hop and stumbled in the tunnel mud and darkness. "Someone must have called the firemen, and they will get us out! Hey... we're down here! Help! Help!"

Howard and Timmy joined in.

"Help! Help! Help!"

And Spot did his part.

"Rrrowff!"

But the commotion and the jumpings up and down began to pale within just moments, fading to dripping sounds and, then, a nervous cough.

"We're just too far down," sighed Howard. "All this dirt and rock... it cuts off sound. We might as well be shouting from the moon."

"I have an idea!" Timmy shouted. "We'll set the book on fire and threw the burning pages up in the air, so the firemen will come and put them out!"

"Nice try, kid," Howard said. "But the diary's wet. Besides, we're underground. They'd never see them... not from up there..."

"Gee, I didn't think of that,"

"That's alright," Howard reassured him. "Everybody makes mistakes. If I'd been thinking straight, I would have grabbed the gun from Harvey. Maybe they would have heard a shot."

"What would you have done for bullets?" Betty asked.

"Let's just keep on going." Howard's footsteps sloshed into the distance, and his voice grew fainter. "Going forward is important for morale."

The others followed and, for some despairing, indefinite time, their footsteps answered one another only in the sodden darkness.

Presently, Betty regained her curiosity. "Timmy," she asked, "do you know anything about the escaped slaves? They must teach you something about them in the Modern School."

"No, that's history," the Gray boy answered. "For the big kids, sixth-graders. Mr. Morris, in the fifth grade, teaches Social Studies. We take field trips to places like the State Assembly, and we watch the politicians... what is it, he said... they exercise the democratic principles. Stuff like that."

"God," Betty said, "numbers on the margin of extermination..."

"What the hell do you mean by that?" Howard roared and she could almost imagine growlings in the walls, a trembling of their dank estate.

"I don't know," she confessed. "Timmy mentioned Mr. Morris, and I thought... I'm sorry... it would be the sort of thing he'd say. If he were here..."

"You're not here to think," Howard responded with an ugly smirk, another gesture wasted in the dark. "You're here to keep on walking. And people like Mr. Morris don't get into places like this stinking tunnel; he ran off with William Blood as soon as the opportunity presented itself to..."

The rest of his comment crumbled into a wet snort of disapproval, and his footsteps began trudging forward towards what was to come.

"Stop!" Betty cried, after another vague interval. "Oh Howie, I've found something. Light a match, it's big... it feels like paper. Maybe it's another book!"

"You were just saying that I shouldn't waste the matches on the other one, and now you've changed your mind... just like a woman, and just because you found it."

Betty steeled herself. "I'm not taking another step until you light that match."

Howard sighed and muttered, then he lit the match and the object stood revealed to be a soggy gray cardboard box of Chinese takeout food, with Chinese writing on it in red, runny ink, with threads of moldy food. Howard, too surprised for anger, began laughing. Betty laughed with him, then Timmy. Spot began to bark. The match died out and they continued laughing, in hysteria and tears in the dark tunnel, for a very long, long time.

"There's another souvenir," Howard sputtered, between seizures, "for your Show and Tell!"

"They didn't have Chinese food in those days," Timmy objected.

"Of course not," Howard said, and his good humor took an abrupt, malicious turn. "It must have been rats who dragged it down here." Howard wiggled his shoe in one of the deeper puddles. "Don't you hear them? I'm not moving, you're not moving, Betty isn't..."

"Spot's not moving..." Timmy added. A faint splashing sound reached Howard's ears, which puzzled him, as he'd stopped teasing the others.

"...so it has to be the rats," he deduced, though with somewhat less conviction than Howard has expressed. Something approached, closer. "Big rats, though... help! Something's got me!"

A wet scuffle followed... with Spot barking, Betty screaming, Timmy flailing out with his scout knife in the darkness. Remembering the tactics of the Civil Defensemen, Howard threw the thing that had attacked him back against the wall, then struck a match. Two human forms, bare skeletons covered with mud and rags, were squatting against the wall. The fire terrified them, and they buried their faces in their hands, shaking and howling...

"Howard... no... the slaves!" cried Betty.

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