The Keep Page 2

Let’s show Howie the cave.

  Rafe had said this softly, looking sideways at Danny through those long lashes he had. And Danny went along, knowing there would be more.

  Howie stumbled in the dark. He had a notebook under one elbow. They hadn’t played Terminal Zeus in more than a year. The game ended without talking—one Christmas Eve, Danny just avoided Howie and went off with his other cousins instead. Howie tried a couple of times to come near, catch Danny’s eye, but he gave up easily.

  Danny: That notebook’s messing up your balance, Howie.

  Howie: Yeah, but I need it.

  Need it why?

  For when I get an idea.

  Rafe turned around and shined the flashlight straight at Howie’s face. He shut his eyes.

  Rafe: What’re you talking about, get an idea?

  Howie: For D and D. I’m the dungeon master.

  Rafe turned the beam away. Who do you play with?

  My friends.

  Danny felt a little stunned, hearing that. Dungeons and Dragons. He had a kind of body memory of Terminal Zeus, the feel of dissolving into that game. And it turned out the game hadn’t stopped. It had gone on without him.

  Rafe: You sure you’ve got any friends, Howie?

  Aren’t you my friend, Rafe? And then Howie laughed and they all did. He was making a joke.

  Rafe: This kid is actually pretty funny.

  Which made Danny wonder if this could be enough—them being in the boarded-up cave where no one was allowed to go. If maybe nothing else would have to happen. Danny wished very hard for this.

  Here’s how the cave was laid out: first a big round room with a little bit of daylight in it, then an opening where you had to stoop to get through into another room that was dark, and then a hole you crawled through into room three, where the pool was. Danny had no idea what was beyond that.

  They all got quiet when they saw the pool: creamy whitish green, catching Rafe’s flashlight beam and squiggling its light over the walls. It was maybe six feet wide and clear, deep.

  Howie: Shit, you guys. Shit. He opened up his notebook and wrote something down.

  Danny: You brought a pencil?

  Howie held it up. It was one of those little green pencils they gave you at the country club to sign your check. He said: I used to bring a pen, but it kept leaking on my pants.

  Rafe gave a big laugh and Howie laughed too, but then he stopped, like maybe he wasn’t supposed to laugh as much as Rafe.

  Danny: What did you write?

  Howie looked at him: Why?

  I don’t know. Curious.

  I wrote green pool.

  Rafe: You call that an idea?

  They were quiet. Danny felt a pressure building in the cave like someone had asked him a question and was getting sick of waiting for an answer. Rafe. Now wondering why Danny’s older cousin had so much power over him is like wondering why the sun shines or why the grass grows. There are people out there who can make other people do things, that’s all. Sometimes without asking. Sometimes without even knowing what they want done.

  Danny went to the edge of the pool. Howie, he said, there’s a shiny thing down there at the bottom. You see it?

  Howie came over and looked. Nope.

  There, down there.

  Danny squatted next to the pool and Howie did, too, wobbling on the balls of his big feet.

  Danny put his hand on his cousin’s back. He felt the softness of Howie, how warm he was through his shirt. Maybe Danny had never touched his cousin before, or maybe it was just knowing right then that Howie was a person with a brain and a heart, all the stuff Danny had. Howie clutched his notebook against his side. Danny saw the pages shaking and realized his cousin was scared—Howie felt the danger pulling in around him. Maybe he’d known all along. But he turned his face to Danny with a look of total trust, like he knew Danny would protect him. Like they understood each other. It happened faster than I’m making it sound: Howie looked at Danny and Danny shut his eyes and shoved him into the pool. But even that’s too slow: Look. Shut. Shove.

  Or just shove.

  There was the weight of Howie tipping, clawing arms and legs, but no sound Danny could remember, not even a splash. Howie must’ve yelled, but Danny didn’t hear a yell, just the sounds of him and Rafe wriggling out of there and running like crazy, Rafe’s flashlight beam strobing the walls, bursting out of the cave into a gush of warm wind, down the two big hills and back to the picnic (where no one missed them), Danny feeling that ring around him and Rafe, a glowing ring that held them together. They didn’t say a word about what they’d done until a couple hours later when the picnic was winding down.

  Danny: Shit. Where the hell is he?

  Rafe: Could be right underneath us.

  Danny looked down at the grass. What do you mean, underneath us?

  Rafe was grinning. I mean we don’t know which way he went.

  By the time everyone started fanning out, looking for Howie, something had crawled inside Danny’s brain and was chewing out a pattern like those tunnels, all the ways Howie could’ve gone deeper inside the caves, under the hills. The mood was calm. Howie had wandered off somewhere was what everyone seemed to be thinking—he was fat, he was weird, there was no blood tie, and no one was blaming Danny for anything. But his Aunt May looked more scared than Danny had ever seen a grown-up look, a hand on her throat like she knew she’d lost her boy, her one child, and seeing how far things had gone made Danny even more petrified to say what he knew he had to say—We tricked him, Rafe and me; we left him in the caves—because that handful of words would change everything: they would all know what he’d done, and Rafe would know he’d told, and beyond that Danny’s mind went blank. So he waited one more second before opening his mouth, and then one more, another and another, and every second he waited seemed to drive some sharp thing deeper into Danny. Then it was dark. His pop put a hand on Danny’s head (suchagoodboy) and said, They’ve got plenty of people looking, son. You’ve got a game tomorrow.

  Riding back in the car, Danny couldn’t get warm. He pulled old blankets over himself and kept the dog in his lap, but his teeth knocked together so hard that his sister complained about the noise and his mom said, You must be coming down with something, honey. I’ll run a hot bath when we get home.

  Danny went back to the caves by himself a few times after that. He’d walk alone up the hills to the boarded-up mouth, and mixed in with the sounds of dry grass was his cousin’s voice howling up from underground: no and please and help. And Danny would think: Okay, now—now! and feel a rising up in himself at the idea of finally saying those words he’d been holding inside all this time: Howie’s in the caves; we left him in the caves, Rafe and I, and just imagining this gave Danny a rush of relief so intense it seemed he would almost pass out, and at the same time he’d feel a shift around him like the sky and earth were changing places, and a different kind of life would open up, light and clear, some future he didn’t realize he’d lost until that minute.

  But it was too late. Way, way too late for any of that. They’d found Howie in the caves three days later, semiconscious. Every night Danny would expect his pop’s sharp knock on his bedroom door and frantically rehearse his excuses—It was Rafe and I’m just a kid—until they ran together in a loop—It was Rafe I’m just a kid itwasRafeI’mjustakid—the loop played even when Danny was doing his homework or watching TV or sitting on the john, itwasRafeI’mjustakid, until it seemed like everything in Danny’s life was the witness he needed to prove he was still himself, still Danny King exactly like before: See, I scored a goal! See, I’m hanging with my friends! But he wasn’t one hundred percent there, he was watching, too, hoping everyone would be convinced. And they were.

  And after months and months of this faking, Danny started to believe in it again. All the normal things that had happened to him since the cave made a crust over that day, and the crust got thicker and thicker until Danny almost forgot about what was underneath.

  And when Ho
wie got better, when he could finally be alone in a room without his mother, when he could sleep with the lights off again, he was different. After the traumatic incident his sweetness was gone and he got into drugs and eventually bought a gun and tried to rob a 7-Eleven, and they sent him away to reform school.

  After Rafe died three years later (killing two girls from his class at Michigan in his pickup truck), the family picnics stopped. And by the time they started up again, Danny wasn’t going home anymore.

  That was memory number two.

  So now back to Danny, walking with his arms up and his cell phone on through the basement or dungeon or whatever it was in a castle that belonged to Howie. He’d come a long way to meet his cousin here, and his reasons were practical: making money, getting the hell out of New York. But also Danny was curious. Because over the years, news about Howie kept reaching him through that high-speed broadcasting device known as a family:

  1. Bond trader

  2. Chicago

  3. Insane wealth

  4. Marriage, kids

  5. Retirement at thirty-four

  And each time one of those chunks of news got to Danny, he’d think, See, he’s okay. He’s fine. He’s better than fine! and feel a bump of relief and then another bump that made him sit down wherever he was and stare into space. Because something hadn’t happened that should’ve happened to Danny. Or maybe the wrong things had happened, or maybe too many little things had happened instead of one big thing, or maybe not enough little things had happened to combine into one big thing.

  Bottom line: Danny didn’t know why he’d come all this way to Howie’s castle. Why did I take a writing class? I thought it was to get away from my roommate, Davis, but I’m starting to think there was another reason under that.

  You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are. My teacher, Holly, told me that.

  I started the class with a bad attitude. For the second meeting I wrote a story about a guy who fucks his writing teacher in a broom closet until the door flies open and all the brooms and mops and buckets come crashing out and their bare asses are shining in the light and they both get busted. It got a lot of laughs while I was reading it, but when I stopped reading the room went quiet.

  Okay, Holly says. Reactions?

  No one has a reaction.

  Come on, folks. Our job is to help Ray do the very best work he can do. Something tells me this may not be it.

  More quiet. Finally I say: It was just a joke.

  No one’s laughing, she says.

  They were, I say. They laughed.

  Is that what you are, Ray? A joke?

  I think: What the fuck? She’s looking at me but I can’t make myself look back.

  She says: I bet there are people out there who’d tell me Yes, Ray’s a joke. Who’d tell me you’re trash. Am I right?

  Now there’s muttering: Ow, and Shit, and What about that, Ray-man? and I know they expect me to be pissed, and I know I’m supposed to be pissed and I am pissed, but not just that. Something else.

  There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?

  I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.

  What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.

  I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks—she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.

  She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.

  She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.

  You can wait outside, she says. It’s only ten more minutes.

  I think I’ll stay.

  We look at each other. Good, she says.

  So when Danny finally spotted a light in that castle basement and realized it was a door with light coming in around it, when his heart went pop in his chest and he went over there and gave it a shove and it opened right up into a curved stairwell with a light on, I know what that was like. Not because I’m Danny or he’s me or any of that shit—this is all just stuff a guy told me. I know because after Holly mentioned that door in our heads, something happened to me. The door wasn’t real, there was no actual door, it was just figurative language. Meaning it was a word. A sound. Door. But I opened it up and walked out.

  There was a connection between this new Howie and the one Danny remembered as a kid, but it was a distant connection. For starters, this new guy was blond. Was it possible for hair to go from brown to blond? Blond to brown, Danny knew all about—half the girls he’d slept with claimed they were so blond, you wouldn’t believe how blond I was as a kid, which is why they spent half their paychecks on highlights, trying to recapture their rightful and original state. But brown to blond? Danny had never heard of it. The obvious answer was that Howie bleached his hair, but it didn’t look bleached, and this new Howie (except he wasn’t Howie anymore, he was Howard; he’d told Danny that first thing this morning, before he’d even clamped him in a bear hug) didn’t seem like a guy who would bleach his hair.

  The new Howie was fit. Built, even. Love handles, girly pear shape—gone. Liposuction? Exercise? Time passing? Who knew. On top of which he was tan. This part really threw Danny, because the old Howie had been white in a way that seemed deeper than not getting sun. He looked like a guy the sun wouldn’t touch. And now: tan face and arms, tan legs (he was wearing khaki shorts)—tan hands, even, with blond hair all over them that had to be real, right? Because who the hell would bleach the hair on their hands?

  The biggest change wasn’t physical: Howard had power. And power was something Danny understood—this was one of a slew of skills he’d picked up in New York after years of study and training and practice, skills that combined to make a résumé so specialized it was written out in invisible ink, so that when his pop (for example) took a look, all he saw was a blank sheet of paper. Danny could walk in a room and know who had power the way some people know from the feel of the air that it’s going to snow. If the person with power wasn’t in the room, Danny knew that, too, and when the person turned up Danny could usually spot him (or her) before he opened his mouth—before he was fully in the door, sometimes. It came down to the other people in the room, how they reacted. Here’s who was in the room with Howard:

  1. Ann, his wife. Shiny dark hair cut in a pageboy, triangular features, big gray eyes. She was pretty, but not the way Danny expected a bond trader’s wife to be pretty. She had no makeup, and her jeans and brown sweater were the opposite of sexy. She was lying on her back on the gray stone floor, letting a baby in pink pajamas (which Danny figured meant a girl) pretend to take steps on her stomach.

  2. Workers. They were young, they wore dust masks, they were busy doing something, somewhere, and in between whatever they were doing
they churned into the kitchen through a couple of swinging doors. Sometimes they carried tools. Howard had told Danny these were graduate students from the MBA program at the University of Illinois and also from Cornell’s hotel school. Howard’s renovation was their summer project—in other words, they were doing this for credit. But it looked to Danny like what they were mostly learning was carpentry.

  3. Mick, Howard’s “old friend.” Danny had met this dude last night—he was the one who finally turned up after Danny yelled Hel-lo-ooo for God knows how long inside that circular stairwell, where it turned out none of the doors had handles. There was something threatening about Mick. He had a slingshot body, strong but borderline gaunt, just bare muscles soldered together. Mick didn’t smile once the whole time he was leading Danny to his room, and when he reached up to pull away a velvet curtain from around the big antique bed, Danny noticed a mess of old track marks on his arms (you couldn’t see these now, he was wearing long sleeves). Mick was Howard’s number two; Danny figured that out the second he was in the room with both of them. Powerful people either had a number two or needed one or both—meaning they needed a different one from the one they had.

  That was everyone in the room.

  Except the room is still a blank. These people were in a big medieval kitchen. It had a walk-in brick fireplace with a pot the size of a bathtub hanging from a hook. It had a tapestry on the wall that showed a king spearing someone’s idea of a lion. It had a couple of long wood tables with benches where some of the graduate students were starting to take off their dust masks and lounge. It had a state-of-the-art German range where Howard was scrambling a massive pan full of eggs.

  A breeze came in through four small windows full of glass in the shape of diamonds. Danny opened one of these wider and leaned outside and a smell of plants rolled up into his face from a few floors down, where that black he’d seen last night from the top of the wall had turned into green so thick he couldn’t find the ground underneath it. Rising up out of that green maybe a hundred feet away was the tower Danny had spotted last night. It was square and straight and weirdly majestic.