“What is it?” I asked. I was no longer cold or weirded out by the look he had given me. I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
“Come and see.”
It was awkward to get into, that much he admitted once we were both inside the hole. But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn’t even on my mind. You could add to that that escape wasn’t a concept I had any real experience with. The worst I’d had to escape was Artie, a strange-looking kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend he was carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him. On his notebooks he would draw needles spilling dark drips.
“This is neato!” I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I didn’t care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our day-trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he’d fallen in love with the huge skeletons on display. I hadn’t used the word neato in public since elementary school.
“Like taking candy from a baby,” Franny said.
I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a perpetual yesterday for us. It was the size of a small room, the mud room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He’d created a bench along the sides of it by the way he’d dug it out. He immediately sat down.
“Look around,” he said.
I stared at it in amazement, the dug-out shelf above him where he had placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent lamp that cast the only light in the room – an eerie light that would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.
There was a mirror on the shelf, and a razor and shaving cream. I thought that was odd. Wouldn’t he do that at home? But I guess I figured that a man who had a perfectly good split-level and then built an underground room only half a mile away had to be kind of loo-loo. My father had a nice way of describing people like him: “The man’s a character, that’s all.”
So I guess I was thinking that Mr. Harvey was a character, and I liked the room, and it was warm, and I wanted to know how he had built it, what the mechanics of the thing were and where he’d learned to do something like that.
