Under the Lake Read online

  “Second, I’d ask you to do it in three months.”

  “I’ll listen to the tapes first, Lurton, then we’ll talk.”

  “We mustn’t meet again, John. Security, you know.”

  That suited Howell, too. He walked the two blocks to his lunch, sweating in the August Atlanta heat, trying not to think about this. He wanted to hear what Denham White had to say, first.

  He stepped gratefully into the air-conditioned lobby, took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and stepped out into the foyer of the Commerce Club. As he entered the large dining room, he could see his brother-in-law across the room at his usual table. Howell picked his way through the elegant room full of Atlanta’s most important bankers, businessmen, and lawyers, exchanging a handshake or tossing a wave here and there. He had known these people from a distance as a journalist, and now he knew them closer up because of whom he had married. He reached the table, and a black waiter was there to hold his chair.

  Denham White was dressed in a gray, three-piece suit that said “successful lawyer.” Howell knew that Denham was dressed by Ham Stockton, the city’s premier clothier, who each year chose for him a range of suits, shirts, and ties in basic hues of blue and gray that were entirely compatible. All Denham had to do was to choose any suit, any shirt, and any necktie, in the certain knowledge that they would complement each other beautifully. He could do it with his eyes closed, which he probably did. Denham had already started on the bread. “Well?” he asked, his mouth full.

  “Well, what?”

  Denham waved at a waiter and ordered them both a martini. “Are you going to do it?”

  “You mean you knew what Pitts wanted? And you set me up for that?”

  “I only had an inkling. Did he offer you sixty grand?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “It’s what you made on the book, isn’t it?”

  “You sonofabitch. If you knew he was going to offer me what I made on the book, why didn’t you tell me? I would have told him I made a hundred thousand on the book.”

  Denham spread his hands. “John, the man is my client, after all. He pays me a hundred and fifty bucks an hour to look after his interests.”

  “I’m your client, too.”

  “Yeah, but you’re family; you don’t pay. Anyway, where else are you going to make sixty grand in three months? Since this is on the quiet, I can probably get him to pay you in cash. He deals a lot in cash.”

  “So now my lawyer is advising me to evade income tax?”

  “I’m giving you no such advice, boy, I just thought you might find cash more… convenient.”

  A waiter brought menus. “How come you’re being so nice to me, Denham?” Howell asked. “I’m not exactly your favorite brother-in-law.”

  “Sure, you are. You’re my only brother-in-law. Oh, come on, John, you know I’ve always liked you. It’s made me sad to see you screwing up your life the way you have. You had such a flying start.”

  “Screwing up my life, huh? I’m doing what I want to do, buddy. How many people you know do that?”

  “Almost none, granted, but you’re making my sister unhappy, sport, and I can’t have that, not if I can help it.” Denham was looking serious, now.

  “And you think my earning a few bucks might fix things up at home, huh?”

  Denham looked away from him. “I think your earning a few bucks somewhere else might give you both a breathing spell to figure things out,” he said, uncomfortably.

  Howell looked at him, surprised. “Somewhere else?”

  “Well, you don’t seem to get a hell of a lot done over that garage, do you? What you need is some place quiet, out of the way, a place with no distractions.” Lunch came.

  Howell swallowed an oyster. “I have a feeling you have some place in mind.”

  Denham fished a key out of a vest pocket and slid it across the tablecloth. “How about a cabin in the mountains? Nice view over the lake, total privacy, a writer’s paradise.”

  “I didn’t know you had a cabin in the mountains.”

  “Well, ”cabin‘ may be stretching it a bit. “Shack’ might fit better.” Denham leaned back from his oysters and assumed a faraway expression. “It’s up on Lake Sutherland; you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Up in the very prettiest part of the north Georgia mountains. A local power company built it after World War II; they didn’t sell any of the lakefront lots. Instead, they leased them out to friends and other suitables, cheap, on long leases. Kept out the riffraff. I got a lot for a hundred years at ten bucks a year back when I was in law school. My old man knew Eric Sutherland, who built the dam and modestly named both the lake and the town next to it after himself.”

  “Ten bucks a year? Not bad.”

  “You know it. I’d go up there on weekends and buy a load of green lumber at a sawmill and have it delivered to a fishing camp at the opposite end. There wasn’t even a road around the lake in those days, so I’d nail it into a raft and tow it down the lake with a canoe, then pull it apart. I built a one-room shack, then, eventually, expanded it into a three-room shack. There’s power, plumbing, a fireplace, and a phone that sometimes works, and a little runabout with a big outboard. Terribly romantic.”

  “Terribly primitive, from the sound of it.” Howell gazed out over the crowded dining room for a moment. “I’ll think about it.”

  “I hope you’ll do more than think about it, boy. You need a change.”

  Denham was pushing all the right buttons, Howell thought. God knew he needed a change. On the way out of the building, Howell stopped at a phone booth, rang Lurton Pitts and told him he would be his autobiographer, a wonderful word, Howell thought.

  “That’s fine, fine,” Pitts said. Howell could hear him grinning. “I’ll see that you get an advance to meet your expenses, and, I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a piece of a company that makes those new word processors. I’ll send you one of those over, too. You let me know how you like it.”

  Howell hung up the phone and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the booth. The world was suddenly a different place. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

  2

  It would have been easier if she had been a shrew, Howell thought. He looked at Elizabeth across the breakfast table and, as always, was moved by her pert, wholesome, all-American beauty. She looked the part of the well-brought-up young matron, so attractive in tennis clothes, so active on so many committees. It would have been easier if that were all she was. But from a basement jewelry-design workshop, she had built a mail-order business that employed sixty people, grossed some millions of dollars a year and provided the How-ells with a life-style that his own income, even in his best year as a newspaperman and author, could never have made possible. The house was large, comfortable, with a tennis court and pool. There were a Mercedes and a Porsche in the garage, and a giant station wagon for the cook to do the shopping. It was not even as if he was unemployed.

  He was on the board of her business and was in charge of public relations. He had even tried to do the damned job, but he wasn’t cut out to be a flack, especially for his wife. She constantly consulted him about the business, sought his opinion, often took the advice he gave, but he knew she would have done just as well if she had never met him – better, probably.

  Howell had tried once to figure out at what time of his life he had been happiest, and he reckoned it was before the Pulitzer, when he was on the ground – chasing Klansmen in Mississippi; following waning presidential candidates through the hell of grange meetings and barbecues and rubber chicken dinners in cigar smoke-filled hotel banquet rooms; living in rented cars and Holiday Inns and screwing campaign aides and girl reporters for the lack of anything better to do; impaling some grafting state politician on his long-distance records and credit card stubs; flying through thunderstorms in light airplanes toward hot stories that turned cold before the plane touched down; needling nervous governors with embarrassing questions about their relatives
and political appointments; and finally, helping a black police chief in a small Georgia town nail a politically protected maniac who had been burying teen-aged boys in his backyard for more than forty years. On reflection, that had been the one that finished him as a reporter. It had brought him the Pulitzer, it had brought him the book, and it had brought him the most horrible thing of all, the daily column.

  There was a moment when it might all have been avoided. He knew that moment well; it came back to haunt him whenever he began to reminisce like this. The two things had come at once. He had been Atlanta Bureau Chief for the New York Times, when the call had come. It was Vietnam, the executive editor had said, in tones conveying that something rare was being bestowed. As it was every professional soldier’s dream, it was every newspaperman’s: a war. Nearing the end, to be sure, but ahead loomed a glory never before imagined by a journalist: the opportunity to report the chaos accompanying a final American defeat. Reporters had been scrambling for the war correspondent’s mantle since the mid-sixties, but not Howell. There were other, even more important things happening at home, he said, whenever the subject had come up. And now, he was being handed the thing on a platter.

  He didn’t want it. He had a comfortable life, and he didn’t want to live in tents and athe biweekly; he didn’t want to spend his evenings in Saigon bars with tiny whores draped all over him; he didn’t want to get dirty. But there was more: at the bottom of him, undermining all the ambition and aggressiveness, he was, he knew, flat scared. He’d been brave and foolish too often already, and he felt he’d used up whatever luck he might have coming to him. He didn’t want to get shot at, and especially, he didn’t want to get shot. He didn’t want to die in the mud with his belly full of grenade fragments; he didn’t want to scream his way to the ground in a burning helicopter; he didn’t want to turn to jelly, as he knew he would, when the shooting started. He didn’t want to go, and he couldn’t turn it down. That would have finished him; he would never have lived it down.

  And then, when he had said he would go, salvation came. The Atlanta Constitution had called. They needed a name, and he filled the bill. He could do pretty much what he wanted; he told them he wanted a column, and, somewhat to his surprise, he got it. The money was great; he was leaving the Times for something better; and he wouldn’t die in a jungle.

  But he hadn’t counted on what the column would do to him. Shoveling a thousand words a day into the omniverous maw of that page-two killer, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, while all the time eating rich lunches, wearing Ralph Lauren suits and trooping from Kiwanis to Rotary to Lions Club for after-dinner speeches at five hundred bucks a pop – all that had wrung him dry in just under three years, had left him ripe for the editorial arguments and final fistfight that had blown him out of newspapers for good. At least he’d got out with his reputation, before the column had lost its bite. In between the humour pieces and the human interest stuff, there had been enough first rate investigative stories to stamp him firmly in his readers’ minds as a first-rate reporter. Since then, though, in spite of the crutch of novel writing, he had been good for nothing but lunch and tennis every day at the club with rich mens’ sons who couldn’t make it in even their fathers’ businesses.

  “Look,” he said. “It’s only three months.”

  “Can’t you do it here?” she asked, knowing he had already decided he wouldn’t.

  “I think it would do me… do us both good if I just lock myself in up there and get this out of the way.”

  “I’ll miss you so, Johnny.” She meant it, too.

  He shook his head. “I haven’t been much use to you around here,” he said.

  “I don’t mind about the sex, really I don’t. You’ll get over it. Maybe if you saw a doctor… ”

  He flushed, felt cornered. He hadn’t meant to open that particular subject.

  “You don’t have to sleep over the garage, you know. I know I may not be the greatest thing in the world in bed, but…”

  “Oh, it’s not your fault, Liz, really it’s not. Look, it was fine as long as I had work of my own. We had some good years when I was still on the paper, and a good year when I was working on the novel. It’s just been the past year, when nobody wanted the book, when I couldn’t come up with something else. Well, now there’s something else. I just want to go away and get this job done, then I can come back fresh, and…”

  “You’re not coming back, are you Johnny?” Tears welled up and rolled down her face.

  He put a hand on her cheek. “Don’t do that, please, Lizzie. I’m not running out, really I’m not.” He hoped he sounded more convinced of that than he felt. “I’m just no good to you the way things are now, and maybe the time away and the work will put things into some sort of perspective for both of us. We both need the time.” How many times had that line ended a marriage, he wondered.

  “I love you, Johnny.”

  “I know, I know.” He didn’t return the sentiment; he didn’t know whether it would be a lie, and he didn’t want to lie to her.

  “I wish there were something else I could have done, Johnny.” She meant it, she really did, and that made it hurt all the more. “I wish you could have found a way not to feel such guilt about the money.”

  Picking his way through the lovely, suburban streets, he wondered how different things might have been if he had gone to Southeast Asia and lived; if he had married a girl who would have been content to live on a reporter’s salary. But when the Pulitzer and the book had happened, who could have resisted the chance to editorialize, to pontificate in a daily column? And who could have resisted the poised and beautiful girl who had been so drawn to the newspaperman? Not many, perhaps, but a wiser man would have been a better politician in a newspaper empire, would have said less of what he thought, would have been less of a pain in the ass to management. A more temperate man would have thought before chucking it all for the risky game of writing fiction. A less volatile man wouldn’t have burned so many bridges. Downtown in an office building there was still an executive editor with three capped teeth and a permanently bruised ego.

  He drove north on the interstate and watched the hills rise around him. After two hours he turned onto a state road that climbed even higher and turned more sharply. The big station wagon, overloaded with the remnants of his life and the shiny, new word processor, swayed horribly on the bends. God, he missed the Porsche. Three hours from Atlanta he found the southern shore of the lake and, following Denham White’s directions, wound along it toward the town of Sutherland. The lake glistened in the midday sun. It didn’t look manmade, he thought; it was too beautiful. He would have thought a finger of some ancient glacier had scratched it out. Suddenly, looking out over the water as he drove, he felt a tiny knot of dread forming inside him. Three months here pounding out garbage, and then what? Sixty grand in the bank and nowhere to go with it but down. He had the peculiar and very real feeling that he might never leave this place.

  In Sutherland, a man answered a telephone.

  “Yes?”

  “You know who this is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have some information for you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “They’ve sent a reporter up there to do some digging.”

  A pause. “When?”

  “I don’t know. From the conversation I heard, he could already be there.”

  “Well, I’ll waltz him around a little and send him on his way.”

  “You don’t understand. My impression is that he’s not going to introduce himself.”

  “I’m not sure I get your drift.”

  “Well, I only heard a part of a conversation between two editors, but it sounded to me like they were sending a man up there undercover.”

  A snort. “He’ll have to go under ground. There’s no cover up here. I know who comes and goes.”

  “Well, I just thought I’d tell you what I heard.”

  “Thanks, I’ll keep an eye open. You cal
ling from a pay phone?”

  “Of course. If this comes to anything, just remember where you heard it.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Thanks again.”

  3

  As Howell drove into Sutherland a red-brick, white-columned colonial house appeared on the lake side of the road, its back garden rolling down to the water. Near the road a black gardener was being supervised by a tall, elderly man with a fringe of white hair. This had to be Eric Sutherland, the power company owner and, from what Denham White had said, defacto ruler of the town which bore his name. “Better call on the old man and pay your respects,” Denham had advised. “He’ll be your landlord, in a manner of speaking, and he likes to know who’s treading on his turf.” On impulse, Howell stopped the station wagon and got out. Might as well get it over with.

  “Mr. Sutherland?” He approached and offered his hand. The man grunted and took the hand gingerly. “My name is John Howell. My brother-in-law, Denham White, has offered me his cabin up here for a few weeks, and he suggested I drop by and say hello.”

  Sutherland glanced at the heavily loaded station wagon. “Looks like you could be homesteading, Mr. Howell.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it does. I should be here for about three months, and I didn’t want to make any unnecessary trips back to Atlanta.” Howell nodded toward the lake. “What a beautiful setting. I understand this is all your handiwork.”

  “Yes, it is,” Sutherland replied, without modesty, “and God couldn’t have done a better job.” He didn’t seem to take much pleasure in his achievement, Howell thought. “I like the folks who come up here to do their part in keeping it as it is.”

  Howell smiled. “Well, I’ve no plans to change anything.”

  “Yankee, are you?” asked Sutherland.

  “No sir, North Carolina, originally. Chapel Hill. Guess my accent has gotten a little scrambled with my travels.” Shit, the old bastard had him on the defensive already.