Hal said nothing. Hal was pale and silent, only picking at his supper. And that night he dreamed of the monkey again, one of its cymbals striking the Philco radio as it babbled out Dean Martin singing Whenna da moon hitta you eye like a big pizza pie ats-a moray, the radio tumbling into the bathtub as the monkey grinned and beat its cymbals together with a JANG and a JANG and a JANG: only it wasn’t the Italian rag-man who was in the tub when the water turned electric.
It was him.
Hal and his son scrambled down the embankment behind the home place to the boathouse that jutted out over the water on its old pilings. Hal had the flight bag in his right hand. His throat was dry, his ears were attuned to an unnaturally keen pitch. The bag was very heavy.
Hal set down the flight bag. “Don’t touch that,” he said. Hal felt in his pocket for the ring of keys Bill had given him and found one neatly labeled B’HOUSE on a scrap of adhesive tape.
The day was clear and cold, windy, the sky a brilliant blue. The leaves of the trees that crowded up to the verge of the lake had gone every bright fall shade from blood red to schoolbus yellow. They talked in the wind. Leaves swirled around Petey’s sneakers as he stood anxiously by, and Hal could smell November just downwind, with winter crowding close behind it.
The key turned in the padlock and he pulled the swing doors open. Memory was strong; he didn’t even have to look to kick down the wooden block that held the door open. The smell in here was all summer: canvas and bright wood, a lingering lusty warmth.
Uncle Will’s rowboat was still here, the oars neatly shipped as if he had last loaded it with his fishing tackle and two six-packs of Black Label yesterday afternoon.
Bill and Hal had both gone out fishing with Uncle Will many times, but never together.
Uncle Will maintained the boat was too small for three. The red trim, which Uncle Will had touched up each spring, was now faded and peeling, though, and spiders had spun silk in the boat’s bow.
Hal laid hold of the boat and pulled it down the ramp to the little shingle of beach.
The fishing trips had been one of the best parts of his childhood with Uncle Will and Aunt Ida. He had a feeling that Bill felt much the same. Uncle Will was ordinarily the most taciturn of men, but once he had the boat positioned to his liking, some sixty or seventy yards offshore, lines set and bobbers floating on the water, he would crack a beer for himself and one for Hal (who rarely drank more than half of the one can Uncle Will would allow, always with the ritual admonition from Uncle Will that Aunt Ida must never be told because “she’d shoot me for a stranger if she knew I was givin you boys beer, don’t you know”), and wax expansive. He would tell stories, answer questions, rebait Hal’s hook when it needed rebaiting; and the boat would drift where the wind and the mild current wanted it to be.
“How come you never go right out to the middle, Uncle Will’?” Hal had asked once.
“Look overside there,” Uncle Will had answered.
Hal did. He saw the blue water and his fish line going down into black.
“You’re looking into the deepest part of Crystal Lake,” Uncle Will said, crunching his empty beer can in one hand and selecting a fresh one with the other. “A hundred feet if she’s an inch. Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker is down there somewhere. Damn fool took it out on the lake one early December, before the ice was made. Lucky to get out of it alive, he was. They’ll never get that Stud out, nor see it until Judgment Trump blows.
Lake’s one deep sonofawhore right here, it is. Big ones are right here, Hal. No need to go out no further. Let’s see how your worm looks. Reel that sonofawhore right in.” Hal did, and while Uncle Will put a fresh crawler from the old Crisco tin that served as his bait box on his hook, he stared into the water, fascinated, trying to see Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker, all rust and waterweed drifting out of the open driver’s side window through which Amos had escaped at the absolute last moment, waterweed festooning the steering wheel like a rotting necklace, waterweed dangling from the rearview mirror and drifting back and forth in the currents like some strange rosary. But he could see only blue shading to black, and there was the shape of Uncle Will’s night crawler, the hook hidden inside its knots, hung up there in the middle of things, its own sun-shafted version of reality. Hal had a brief, dizzying vision of being suspended over a mighty gulf, and he had closed his eyes for a moment until the vertigo passed. That day, he seemed to recollect, he had drunk his entire can of beer.
… the deepest part of Crystal Lake… a hundred feet if she’s an inch.
He paused a moment, panting, and looked up at Petey, still watching anxiously.
“You want some help, Daddy’?”
“In a minute.” He had his breath again, and now he pulled the rowboat across the narrow strip of sand to the water, leaving a groove. The paint had peeled, but the boat had been kept under cover and it looked sound.
When he and Uncle Will went out. Uncle Will would pull the boat down the ramp, and when the bow was afloat, he would clamber in, grab an oar to push with and say “Push me off, Hal… this is where you earn your truss!”
“Hand that bag in, Petey, and then give me a push.” he said. And, smiling a little, he added: “This is where you earn your truss.” Percy didn’t smile back. “Am I coming, Daddy?”
“Not this time. Another time I’ll take you out fishing, but not this time.” Petey hesitated. The wind tumbled his brown hair and a few yellow leaves, crisp and dry, wheeled past his shoulders and landed at the edge of the water, bobbing like boats themselves.
“You should have stuffed ’em,” he said. low.
“What?” But he thought he understood what Petey had meant.
“Put cotton over the cymbals. Taped it on. So it couldn’t make that noise.” Hal suddenly remembered Daisy coming toward him not walking but lurching and how, quite suddenly, blood had burst from both of Daisy’s eyes in a flood that soaked her ruff and pattered down on the floor of the barn, how she had collapsed on her forepaws… and on the still, rainy spring air of that day he had heard the sound, not muffled but curiously clear, coming from the attic of the house fifty feet away: Jangjang- jang-jang!
He had begun to scream hysterically, dropping the arm-load of wood he had been getting for the fire. He ran for the kitchen to get Uncle Will, who was eating scrambled eggs and toast, his suspenders not even up over his shoulders yet.
She was an old dog, Hal, Uncle Will had said, his face haggard and unhappy he looked old himself. She was twelve, and that’s old for a dog. You mustn’t take on now old Daisy wouldn’t like that.
Old, the vet had echoed, but he had looked troubled all the same, because dogs don’t die of explosive brain hemorrhages, even at twelve (“Like as if someone had stuck a firecracker in her head,” Hal overheard the vet saying to Uncle Will as Uncle Will dug a hole in back of the barn not far from the place where he had buried Daisy’s mother in 1950; “I never seen the beat of it, Will”).
And later, terrified almost out of his mind but unable to help himself, Hal had crept up to the attic.
Hello, Hal, how you doing? The monkey grinned from its shadowy comer. Its cymbals were poised, a foot or so apart. The sofa cushion Hal had stood on end between them was now all the way across the attic. Something—some force—had thrown it hard enough to split its cover, and stuffing foamed out of it. Don’t worry, about Daisy, the monkey whispered inside his head, its glassy hazel eyes fixed on Hal Shelburn’s wide blue ones. Don’t worry about Daisy, she was old, Hal, even the vet said so, and by the way, did you see the blood coming out of her eyes, Hal. Wind me up, Hal. Wind me up, let’s play, and who’s dead, Hal? Is it you?
And when he came back to himself he had been crawling toward the monkey as if hypnotized. One hand had been outstretched to grasp the key. He scrambled backward then, and almost fell down the attic stairs in his haste—probably would have if the stairwell had not been so narrow. A little whining noise had been coming from his throat.