‘Take the River,’ said Abbott.
The hand dragged Klein backwards, turned him and gave him a shove towards the steps at the edge of the jetty. Klein walked sideways, looking back. Abbott propelled Galindez after him. Where before Abbott had been hidden behind the glare of the flashlight he was now silhouetted in all his towering magnificence, the cap perched eccentrically on his massive skull making him look like some monstrous king of the beggars in a medieval debauch. The Bloods saw him for the first time and stopped in a hesitant semi-circle.
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Fuck.’
Abbott stooped and grabbed a brick hammer from the pallet. He held both hands aloft, a hammer in each.
‘Be forewarned: The River is mine.’
His voice pealed back and forth from the enslimed, glistening walls of the tunnel like the rage of a pagan deity.
The Bloods wavered, unsure whether to plunge forward or retreat. As Klein descended the steps he kept the beam in their faces. Tepid water sloshed about his ankles. He felt down for the next step, then another, then found the floor of the sewer. He waded out into the channel, stinking water up to his knees. Galindez was halfway down the steps. Klein heard a mumbled exchange amongst the blacks. One of them darted forward, crouching low. A blade glittered. Abbott’s arm carved a blurred, whiplash arc and a splintering crack reverberated through the gloom. The man piled forward into the stone without a murmur.
‘The River is mine.’
The hairs on Klein’s neck tingled at the resounding thunder from Abbott’s lungs. The semi-circle of assailants backed off a pace, hovering, muttering. Galindez waded past Klein and into the mouth of the tunnel. Klein backed towards him. He held out the gun again, hoping the Bloods could see it.
‘Henry!’
Abbott slowly lowered his arms. He seemed to stare at his opponents for a long beat. Suddenly, or so it seemed because the semi-circle took a collective jump backwards, Abbott walked over to the jumble of building materials. He stopped and shoved the handles of the hammers into his belt. None of the blacks moved. They seemed as mystified as Klein.
‘Henry!’
Abbott stooped and grabbed a bag of cement and folded it over his left shoulder as easily as he might have put his cap on. Klein was convinced: Abbott’s mind had finally gone.
‘Henry, move your ass!’
Without haste Abbott turned his back on the gang and clomped towards the jetty with the bag balanced easily on his shoulder. No one followed him. He trod down the steps and into the water. His face betrayed not a trace of fear and in his eyes, it seemed to Klein, was a supernatural light.
‘Follow me,’ said Abbott.
Abbott strode into the tunnel, the water but a trivial resistance to his shins. Klein looked back at the yard. The Bloods were crowding towards the edge of the jetty.
‘We gonna fuck yo’ ofay ass, muthafucka!’
The brilliant disc of a flashlight, incredibly bright after the minutes of gloom, blazed into Klein’s eyes and blinded him. A brick hit him full square in the chest and he grunted and staggered. He slipped on the slimy bricks below. He felt his legs vanishing from beneath him, teetered, said goodbye to the point of no return. He had just enough time to mutter ‘Balls’ before foul water engulfed him and swilled over his face. A series of frantic thoughts shrieked through his mind. Keep your fucking mouth closed. Don’t breathe. Don’t swallow. He rolled over, his feet and knees scrabbling for purchase on the treacherous bed of the channel. Just keep your mouth closed. Don’t breathe. Hands seized his arms and hauled him to his feet, dragged him through the water. As he felt air against his face he threw up, saliva and scalding gastric juice, dry retching. Light glittered on the turbulent water beneath him, moving, he was being carried forward. He scrabbled his feet underneath him, started walking, still leaning into the hands on either side. He shook water from his eyes. He imagined a vile potpourri of malignant micro-organisms feasting on his conjuctivae. His hair was plastered in foul strands clotted with faeculence across his face. He heaved for breath.
‘I’m okay,’ he gasped.
He shook the supporting hands away and staggered forward under his own power. The flash was still in his left hand, the gun still in the other. He hadn’t breathed or swallowed the turd-infested water, a fear vastly more intense than that of death. He stopped and turned. They were twenty feet into the tunnel. Abbott and Galindez were watching him, Galindez concerned, Abbott with what looked like serenity. What the fuck was wrong with the guy? Klein suddenly felt like an asshole, but at least that was an approximation of normality. Klein shoved the gun back into his pocket and scraped the hair from his face. His breathing steadied. He drew himself up to his full height with what he hoped was a semblance of dignity.
‘Follow me,’ said Klein.
They ploughed forward through the sewer. Here and there they passed blind alcoves with dead wire-grilled bulbs. The bulbs put Klein in mind of Dennis Terry and he hoped the old man was making better progress in his mission to C block than they were in theirs. Behind him Abbott, the cement bag still folded over his shoulder, started to hum in sepulchral tones. The tune had a sacred character, vaguely familiar. A hymn. Klein recognised the melody but couldn’t place it. A line offered itself: ‘And did those feet in ancient time . . .’ It fitted with the melody but Klein could remember no more. He wondered how far the sound would carry down these tunnels but he didn’t ask Abbott to stop. As he sloshed on Klein pondered on the change in Abbott over the past few hours. People with schizophrenia often relapsed into acute psychosis when under severe pressure. Abbott’s speech patterns had changed, become more fluent, in their own way perhaps even more coherent. He couldn’t judge what passed for logic in Abbott’s alternative universe. Where The Word held sway. It occurred to Klein that The Word was taking over and a chill ran down his back. He glanced over his shoulder. Abbott hummed on, the hammers swinging by his sides. Klein remembered uneasily that Abbott had been found singing a hymn while he watched the bodies of his family burn. Klein did not doubt the affection and esteem in which Abbott held him and he valued it. But so, he imagined, had his family too. When they reached an intersection in the tunnel Klein was glad to give Abbott the opportunity to go in front.
Above their heads were two cylindrical intersecting cross vaults. The channel they were standing in emptied into a new conduit that flowed across them at right angles. The new conduit was of greater diameter by two feet or so and flowed more quickly. On the other side of the intersection the continuation of their own tunnel also emptied into the bigger channel which flowed from left to right. Klein hoped they wouldn’t have to wade against the current.
‘Which way?’ he said.
‘West,’ replied Abbott.
‘I left my compass behind,’ said Klein. ‘I only know up from down.’
‘Down,’ said Abbott.
‘Listen,’ said Galindez.
Klein listened. From the tunnel behind them came the distant sound of voices and splashing feet. Klein wasn’t surprised. The guys they’d rumbled were young Bloods, veterans of the street gang wars in Deep Elem and San Antonio where the violent theorem of a life for a life was obeyed with the remorselessness of mathematical law. They weren’t going to let three ofays get away with humiliating them.
‘After you,’ said Klein.
Abbott stepped down into the new channel. The water came halfway up his thighs and Klein grimaced at the depth. He held onto the wall of the intersection for balance and jumped. He landed up to his waist but his feet didn’t slip. Galindez followed. A dark object floated towards him and Klein sucked his belly in to let it pass. He reprimanded himself for his squeamishness. He was a goddamn doctor, it shouldn’t matter to him. He pushed from his mind the thought of the microbes bathing his genitals.
‘We got a three to one chance they’ll miss us,’ said Galindez.
‘No,’ said Abbott. ‘They will follow the River, as they must.’
Klein knew he was right
. Going with the flow was the natural choice. Abbott waded out in front of them.
This tunnel had a six-inch platform running down one side just above the water level. Here and there rats scurried along it. Unlike the bugs he couldn’t see but could imagine, the rats didn’t give Klein a problem and he was cheered. He was a tough guy after all. This sewer was longer than the last, and Klein lost all track of distance and time. They passed one intersection after another, three, four, five, each one emptying from either side into their channel, deepening the water and increasing the pressure against their backs. Maybe Abbott had missed his turning and the tunnel would suddenly empty into the Gulf of Mexico. It couldn’t be that much further. The idea appealed to him. Sorry, Devlin, sorry guys, swimming to New Orleans instead. Vera Cruz. Rio. The going got hard and Klein found himself panting, sweating torrentially, blinking away the leached filth that trickled down from his scalp and stung his eyes. Up in front Abbott was still only waist deep and gaining distance with each stride. At times Klein lost sight of him in the torch beam he held waveringly above the water and the fear seized him that The Word would instruct Abbott to abandon them, or simply forget about them, and leave them fuck knew how many feet underground, up to their necks in sewage with a pack of Bloods on their tail. Heading west for Christ’s sake. An intense claustrophobia seized him. He glanced backwards. Galindez’s sweating, pockmarked face toiled a yard behind him. The claustrophobia waned. He wouldn’t die alone then. The water was halfway up Klein’s chest and each step sapped more of his strength, made it more likely that he would lose his footing and go under again. This time he knew he would inhale and swallow the poisonous waste. He didn’t have enough breath not to. Behind them he heard a shout and a splash, then more splashing, voices and oaths, then quiet again. The Bloods had gained on them. He scoured the tunnel ahead with the flash beam.
Abbott had disappeared.
Easy, Klein instructed himself. Just keep moving. You’re a cool guy. Have some pride. This is chickenshit. Your father celebrated his twentieth birthday with the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal, waiting to be shipped out under fire with six inches of Jap steel in his gut. This is chickenshit. His father had died from two packs of Pall Malls a day a long time before Klein had been sent up. Maybe Klein felt that he shamed his memory by being here. His Dad had fought three months in the jungle whilst he’d spent three hours strolling around a prison in the dark. It’s chickenshit, Klein. But even if it was chickenshit he hoped it made some difference, to somebody, somewhere. Maybe even his father, wherever he was. Klein still couldn’t see Abbott, but he didn’t feel so badly about it any more.
A new tunnel opened to the right up ahead. As Klein splashed towards it he heard Abbott’s humming. This tunnel was the same size as the first one and its floor was maybe four feet above that which Klein was walking on. Abbott appeared in the mouth. Behind him the tunnel ran from the main conduit at an acute angle. Klein passed Abbott the flash and found the edge of the tunnel. He placed his hands and hauled himself up and crawled in. His fingers sank into some unspeakable jelly on the bottom and he knelt upright and scrubbed them in the water. Galindez clambered up behind him.
Klein took the flash back and they trudged on, upstream now, behind Abbott. The water here was only six inches deep and they were able to treble their pace. On the bad news side of things their movement was much noisier and the empty tunnel provided greater amplification.
After a few moments Galindez said, ‘They’re still with us.’
Abbott stopped. Klein’s torch fell on a hole in the wall about four feet in diameter. Abbott shrugged the bag of cement from his shoulder and dumped it in the mouth of the hole.
‘This is it,’ said Abbott. ‘This is where the River ends.’
Klein aimed the beam up this, the last tunnel. It sloped upwards at a forty-five degree angle. Its walls were smooth, the channel at the lowest arc of its circumference coated with brown slime. Despite the flashlight Klein could not see where the tunnel ended.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Klein.
‘This will bring you out in a manhole under the basement of the infirmary. It’s thirty yards long.’
‘That’s a hundred fucking feet.’
‘Almost,’ said Abbott.
If Klein had felt claustrophobic before, he had no word for what he felt now. ‘It’s too fucking steep, it’s covered with slime. We’ll never make it.’
‘You’ll have to. This tunnel ends at the main wall.’
Abbott pointed into the darkness ahead. Klein aimed the flash beam. In the distance he could just make out a grille of thick steel bars set into a granite wall. The water flowed through the grille. There was only backwards, into the Bloods, or up the sloping conduit.
The sounds splashing towards them were getting louder. Abbott pulled the brick hammer from his belt and with half a dozen strokes with the bevelled edge split the bag of cement across the middle. He took one end of the bag in each hand and tore it in half. He tossed the halves, open ends upward, a yard into the sloping tunnel. He took Klein by the shoulder and bent his face close to Klein’s.
Excepting those of his lovers Klein had considered Abbott’s eyes as closely as any he had ever known. Their unvarying opacity had led him into speculations across the length and breadth of his imagination and always they had remained flat and dulled and empty. Now, in the beam of the torch, Abbott’s eyes were alive with an extraordinary, piercing intelligence, an unfathomable internal power without fear or reckoning, beyond good and evil. A tremor ran through Klein from head to foot. His mouth was too dry to swallow.
Abbott had become The Word.
And Klein was looking into the eyes of God.
The pre-religious deity, the ruler of the vast universe that embraced the cells and molecules, the instincts and impulses of this human brain and of this body towering above him, had made good the cleavage between man and God. And Abbott had become The Word.
‘Listen,’ said The Word. ‘You are going to crawl up the tunnel. You will use the cement dust for grip. You are going to crawl up the tunnel. And you are going to do what you are here to do. Just as I, too, will do what I am here to do. Do you hear me?’
Klein couldn’t speak. He nodded. Abbott let go and turned to Galindez. Galindez looked at the hole.
‘I’m smallest,’ he said. ‘I go first.’
The sounds of the gang down the tunnel were loud. The first light of their flash glimmered in the blackness. Galindez clambered up into the tunnel, shoved one of the half-bags of cement forward and crawled after it. Klein turned to Abbott. He suddenly felt a vice of emotion crushing his chest.
‘You’re not coming then,’ he said.
‘They are many and I am one. But the River is mine.’
‘I’ll miss you, goddamn it,’ said Klein.
‘Klein,’ said Abbott.
It was the first time he had ever called him anything other than ‘Doctor’.
‘No man has loved me more than you,’ said Abbott.
Klein wanted to look away but the fiery eyes held him.
‘No man has had a greater friend. You came to me when I was down and you stayed. You healed me.’
Klein felt Abbott’s fingers wrap around his hand and squeeze. He still couldn’t speak. He squeezed Abbott’s hand back as if he would hold onto it forever.
‘Remember that, always,’ said Abbott.
Klein’s throat was constricted.
‘Always,’ he said.
Abbott smiled and again Klein realised it was the first time. He’d never seen a smile on that slab-like face before. His heart felt like it was cracking in pieces. Abbott nodded, as if he knew what was happening inside Klein’s chest.
‘Now go,’ said Abbott.
There were yells of triumph in the conduit and a wavering beam danced over Abbott’s face. There was a dull whistling sound and a thud and Abbott blinked. Klein looked down and saw the hilt of a shiv quivering in Abbott’s left chest. Abbott looked down. He pul
led the knife free and dropped it in the water. He hefted from his belt the ball-peen hammer and stepped out into the centre of the tunnel. He turned and Klein looked into the eyes of God for the last time. Abbott nodded, once, and Klein nodded back. Then he tucked the flash into his pants and scrambled up into the mouth of the tunnel.
As he hauled himself up the first yard Klein remembered asking himself: what sound would echo like the crack of doom from Abbott’s chest if he ever became the God that was himself? A barrage of shouting and taunts, indecipherable, reached him from the conduit beneath. The Bloods were here to collect their debt. Klein fought the impulse to slide back down the tunnel. He told himself he had to go on, to the infirmary, to Devlin and the Frogman.
Then another sound, echoing and vast, suddenly shook the granite stones wedged against Klein’s back.
‘One.’
The word was followed by a whomping sound and a scream of pain. Klein shivered and pushed the bag before him and crawled on. Galindez had scattered the cement across the slime-coated bricks and left a trail of gritty mud behind him. Klein struggled to find the best way of moving. The gradient was too steep and he was too heavy for the friction offered by his hands and knees. He had forty pounds on Galindez and now Galindez had forty feet on him. The torch in his belt dug into his groin and ribs. Klein wriggled over, flat on his back. He bent his legs and shunted himself upwards on his ass. His heels slipped away from under him. He looked down past his toes. He’d made barely six feet. He cursed the stone-masons who’d built these walls with such perfection.
‘Two!’ boomed Abbott.
Another scream reverberated around Klein’s head. This cement shit wasn’t working. He braced the soles of his training shoes and the palms of his hands against the sides of the tube where the bricks were dry and pushed. His ass slid upwards six inches in the slime. Again. Six inches. He pushed and slid, pushed and slid.
‘Three!’
The fucking cement bag wedged into the small of Klein’s back. He hoisted his ass up, pushed, sat on the bag. He pushed again. The bag was under his legs. He remembered climbers using talc and reached his hands down and scooped cement powder onto his palms, rubbing them together to dry up the slime and sweat. He scooped another handful and heaped it on his belly. Down below he heard a flurry of cries and blows, then a great splash and a massed yell of triumph.