After the Plague (40 page)

His tongue ran ahead of him, even as he sprang down from the carriage and scurried to her side to assist her in alighting. “This is what I have want for to show you, and so long, because—well, because I am making it for you.”

He studied the expression of her face as she looked from the disreputable shack to the hummock of the well and out over the heat-blasted scrub to where the crown of his avocado tree rose out of the ground like an illusion. And then she saw the ramp leading down to the cellar. She was stunned, he could see it in her face and there was no denying it, but he watched her struggle to try on a smile and focus her eyes on his. “This is a prank, ain't it? You're just fooling with me and your house is really over there behind that hill”—pointing now from her perch atop the carriage—“ain't it?”

“No, no,” he said, “no. It's this, you see?” And he indicated the ramp, the crown of the avocado, the bump where the inverted cone of a new atrium broke the surface. “Twelve room, I tell you, twelve room.” He'd become insistent, and he had his hand on her arm, trying to lead her down from the carriage—if only she would come, if only she would see—and he wanted to tell her how cool and fresh-smelling it was down there beneath the earth, and how cheap it was to build and expand, to construct a nursery, a sewing room, anything she wanted. All it took was a strong back and a shovel, and not one cent wasted on nails and lumber and shingles that fell apart after five years in the sun. He wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn't come, and he tried to articulate it all
through the pressure of his hand on her arm, tugging, as if the whole world depended on her getting down from that carriage—and it did, it did!

“Let go!” she cried, snatching her arm away, and then she was sobbing, gasping for breath as if the superheated air were some other medium altogether and she was choking on it. “You said … you said …
twelve rooms!
”

He tried to reach for her again—“Please,” he begged, “please”—but she jerked back from him so violently the carriage nearly buckled on its springs. Her face was furious, streaked with tears and dirt. “You bully!” she cried. “You Guinea, Dago, Wop! You, you're no better than a murderer!”

Three days later, in a single paragraph set off by a black border, the local paper announced her engagement to Hiram Broad-bent, of Broadbent's Poultry & Eggs.

An engagement wasn't a marriage, that's what Baldasare was thinking when Lucca Albanese gave him the news. An engagement could be broken, like a promise or a declaration or even a contract. There was hope yet, there had to be. “Who is this Hiram Broadbent?” he demanded. “Do you know him?”

They were sharing a meal of beans and vermicelli in Baldasare's subterranean kitchen, speaking in a low tragic Italian. Lucca had just read the announcement to him, the sharp-edged English words shearing at him like scissors, and the pasta had turned to cotton wadding in his throat. He was going to choke. He was going to vomit.

“Yeah, sure,” Lucca said. “I know him. Big, fat man. Wears a straw hat winter and summer. He's a drunk, mean as the devil, but his father owns a chicken farm that supplies all the eggs for the local markets in Fresno, so he's always got money in his pocket. Hell, if you ever came out of your hole, you'd know who I'm talking about.”

“You don't think—I mean, Ariadne wouldn't really … would she?”

Lucca ducked his head and worked his spoon in the plate. “You know what my father used to say? When I was a boy in Catania?”

“No, what?”

“There's plenty of fish in the sea.”

But that didn't matter to Baldasare—he wanted only one fish. Ariadne. Why else had he been digging, if not for her? He'd created an underground palace, with the smoothest of corners and the most elegant turnings and capacious courtyards, just to give her space, to give her all the room she could want after having to live at her uncle's mercy in that cramped walkup over the drugstore. Didn't she complain about it all the time? If only she knew, if only she'd give him a chance and descend just once into the cool of the earth, he was sure she'd change her mind, she had to.

There was a problem, though. An insurmountable problem. She wouldn't see him. He came into the drugstore, hoping to make it all up to her, to convince her that he was the one, the only one, and she backed away from the counter, exchanged a word with her uncle, and melted away through the sun-struck mouth of the back door. Siagris whirled round like some animal startled in a cave, his shoulders hunched and his head held low. “We don't want you in here anymore, understand?” he said. There was the sizzle of frying, the smell of onions, tuna fish, a row of startled white faces staring up from pie and coffee. Siagris leaned into the counter and made his face as ugly as he could.
“Capiche?”

Baldasare Forestiere was not a man to be easily discouraged. He thought of sending her a letter, but he'd never learned to write, and the idea of having someone write it for him filled him with shame. For the next few days he brooded over the problem, working all the while as a hired laborer, shoveling, lifting, pulling, bending, and as his body went through the familiar motions his mind was set free to achieve a sweated lucidity. By the end of the third day, he'd decided what he had to do.

That night, under cover of darkness, he pushed his wheelbarrow into town along the highway and found his way to the vacant lot behind the drugstore. Then he started digging. All night,
as the constellations drifted in the immensity overhead until one by one they fled the sky, Baldasare plied his shovel, his pick, and his rake. By morning, at first light, the outline of his message was clearly visible from the second-story window of the walkup above the store. It was a heart, a valentine, a perfectly proportioned symbol of his love dug three feet deep in the ground and curving gracefully over the full area of what must have been a quarter-acre lot.

When the outline was finished, Baldasare started on the interior. In his mind's eye, he saw a heart-shaped crater there in the lot, six feet deep at least, with walls as smooth as cement, a hole that would show Ariadne the depth of the vacancy she'd left in him. He was coming up the ramp he'd shaped of earth with a full wheelbarrow to spread over the corners of the lot, when he glanced up to see Siagris and two of his children standing there peering down at him. Siagris' hands were on his hips. He looked more incredulous than anything else. “What in Christ's name do you think you're doing?” he sputtered.

Baldasare, swinging wide with his load of dirt so that Siagris and the children had to take a quick step back, never even hesitated. He just kept going to a point in the upper corner of the frame where he was dumping and raking out the dirt. “Digging,” he said over his shoulder.

“But you can't. This is private property. You can't just dig up people's yards, don't you know that? Eh? Don't you know anything?”

Baldasare didn't want a confrontation. He was a decent man, mild and pacifistic, but he was determined too. As he came by again with the empty wheelbarrow and eased it down the ramp, he said, “Tell her to look. She is the one. For her, I do this.”

After that, he was deaf to all pleas, threats, and remonstrations, patiently digging, shoring up his walls, spreading his dirt. The sun climbed in the sky. He stopped only to take an occasional drink from a jug of water or to sit on his overturned wheelbarrow and silently eat a sandwich from a store of them wrapped in butcher's paper. He worked through the day, tireless, and though the sheriff came and threatened him, even the sheriff couldn't say with any
certainty who owned the lot Baldasare was defacing—couldn't say, that is, without checking the records down at the courthouse, which he was going to do first thing in the morning, Baldasare could be sure of that. Baldasare didn't respond. He just kept digging.

It began to get dark. Baldasare had cleared the entire cutout of his heart to a depth of three feet, and he wasn't even close to quitting. Six feet, he was thinking, that's what it would take, and who could blame him if he kept glancing up at the unrevealing window of the apartment atop the drugstore in the hope of catching a glimpse of his inamorata there? If she was watching, if she knew what he was doing for love of her, if she saw the lean muscles of his arms strain and his back flex, she gave no sign of it. Undeterred, Baldasare dug on.

And then there came a moment, and it must have been past twelve at night, the neighborhood as silent as the grave and Baldasare working by the light of a waxing moon, when two men appeared at the northern edge of the excavation, right where the lobes of the heart came together in a graceful loop. “Hey, Wop,” one of them yelled down to where Baldasare stood with his shovel, “I don't know who you think you are, but you're embarrassing my fiancée, and I mean to put an end to it.”

The man's shadow under that cold moon was immense—it could have been the shadow of a bear or buffalo. The other shadow was thinner, but broad across the shoulders, where it counted, and it danced on shadowy feet. There was no sound but for the slice of Baldasare's shovel and the slap of the dirt as it dropped into the wheelbarrow.

He was a small man, Baldasare, but the hundreds of tons of dirt he'd moved in his lifetime had made iron of his limbs, and when they fell on him he fought like a man twice his size. Still, the odds were against him, and Hiram Broadbent, fueled by good Kentucky bourbon and with the timely assistance of Calvin Tompkins, a farrier and amateur boxer, was able to beat him to the ground. And once he was down, Broadbent and Tompkins kicked him with their heavy boots till he stirred no more.

When Baldasare was released from the hospital, he was a changed man—or at least to the degree that the image of Ariadne Siagris no longer infested his brain. He went back home and sat in a bent-wood rocker and stared at the sculpted dirt walls of the kitchen that gave onto the atrium and the striated trunk of its lone avocado tree. His right arm was in a sling, with a cast on it from the elbow down, and he was bound up beneath his shirt like an Egyptian mummy with all the tape it took to keep his cracked ribs in place. After a week or so—his mourning period, as he later referred to it—he found himself one evening in the last and deepest of his rooms, the one at the end of the passage that led to the new atrium where he was thinking of planting a lemon tree or maybe a quince. It was preternaturally quiet. The earth seemed to breathe with and for him.

And then suddenly he began to see things, all sorts of things, a rush of raw design and finished image that flickered across the wall before him like one of Edison's moving pictures. What he saw was a seventy-acre underground warren that beckoned him on, a maze like no other, with fishponds and gardens open to the sky above, and more, much more—a gift shop and an Italian restaurant with views of subterranean grottoes and a lot for parking the carriages and automobiles of the patrons who would flock there to see what he'd accomplished in his time on earth. It was a complete vision, more eloquent than any set of blueprints or elevations, and it staggered him. He was a young man still, healing by the day, and while he had a long way to go, at least now he knew where he was going.
Baldasare Forestiere's Underground Gardens,
he said to himself, trying out the name, and then he said it aloud: “Baldasare Forestiere's Underground Gardens.”

Standing there in the everlasting silence beneath the earth, he reached out a hand to the wall in front of him, his left hand, pronating the palm as if to bless some holy place. And then, awkwardly at first, but with increasing grace and agility, he began to dig.

After the plague—it was some sort of Ebola mutation passed from hand to hand and nose to nose like the common cold—life was different. More relaxed and expansive, more natural. The rat race was over, the freeways were clear all the way to Sacramento, and the poor dwindling ravaged planet was suddenly big and mysterious again. It was a kind of miracle really, what the environmentalists had been hoping for all along, though of course even the most strident of them wouldn't have wished for his own personal extinction, but there it was. I don't mean to sound callous—my parents are long dead and I'm unmarried and siblingless, but I lost friends, colleagues and neighbors, the same as any other survivor. What few of us there are, that is. We're guessing it's maybe one in ten thousand, here in the States anyway. I'm sure there are whole tribes that escaped it somewhere in the Amazon or the interior valleys of Indonesia, meteorologists in isolated weather stations, fire lookouts, goatherds and the like. But the president's gone, the vice president, the cabinet, Congress, the joint chiefs of staff, the chairmen of the boards and CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, along with all their stockholders, employees and retainers. There's no TV. No electricity or running water. And there won't be any dining out anytime soon.

Actually, I'm lucky to be here to tell you about it—it was sheer serendipity, really. You see, I wasn't among my fellow human beings when it hit—no festering airline cabins or snaking supermarket lines for me, no concerts, sporting events or crowded
restaurants—and the closest I came to intimate contact was a telephone call to my on-and-off girlfriend, Danielle, from a gas station in the Sierra foothills. I think I may have made a kissing noise over the wire, my lips very possibly coming into contact with the molded plastic mouthpiece into which hordes of strangers had breathed before me, but this was a good two weeks before the first victim carried the great dripping bag of infection that was himself back from a camcorder safari to the Ngorongoro Crater or a conference on economic development in Malawi. Danielle, whose voice was a drug I was trying to kick, at least temporarily, promised to come join me for a weekend in the cabin after my six weeks of self-imposed isolation were over, but sadly, she never made it. Neither did anyone else.