Cavedweller (34 page)

The Saturday after Cissy’s fifteenth birthday, Nolan came over early. “You free?” he asked when Cissy appeared at the back door. He had called the night before and asked the same thing.

“As a bird,” Cissy told him. “What you got in mind?”

“It’s a surprise. A birthday surprise. Did you tell your mama you’re going to spend the day with me?”

“Yeah.” Cissy put on the birthday present Dede had given her, a straw hat shaped like a tractor cap, with a red, white, and green ribbon tied around the brim. “She said to go and be damned.”

“She did?” Nolan was shocked.

“No! Lord, Nolan. It’s a joke. It’s what she would say if she ever said what she was thinking. We an’t getting along too good.”

Nolan was undaunted. “Well, never mind. My cousin Charlie is coming in twenty minutes. He’s going to give us a ride out.”

“Out where?” Cissy was not sure she liked this bossy Nolan.

“Where the surprise is.” Nolan grinned and shook his dark hair back. “Don’t ask questions. Just wait and see.”

Charlie was late picking them up, and not terribly pleasant about making the trip at all. “You’re gonna owe me, cousin,” he said. Nolan nodded and avoided Cissy’s eyes. It was some kind of trade, she could see from the look of concentrated misery on Nolan’s face. Whatever his surprise, he had gone to a lot of trouble. There was a big satchel of gear he had not allowed her to touch, a cooler filled with sandwiches and Cokes, and a blanket that Charlie boasted had been “seasoned by Keenan men for generations,” whatever that meant.

“Pretty damn skinny, an’t she?” Charlie said as Cissy climbed into the truck. She glared at him while Nolan flushed and sweat beads of hot shame.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Nolan said.

“Oh, I won’t hurt your girlfriend’s feelings.” Charlie winked at Cissy. “Hell, son, I’m just proud you finally got one.”

On the Little Mouth Road they stopped to get ice for the cooler, and Nolan apologized to Cissy while Charlie bought cigarettes and gas with money Nolan had given him. “I’ll get my license next year,” Nolan told her. “Daddy said he’d sign for me to get a permit. Then I can start driving us wherever we want to go. Won’t have to put up with Charlie.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Cissy said. “He’s just your cousin. Not your brother. You can’t help it if he’s a damn fool.”

“I got it all planned,” Nolan said. “This is the bad part. Once we get there and Charlie leaves, it will be fine.”

But once they got there, Charlie did not want to leave. He drank two beers while Nolan hauled the cooler and gear into the woods. He kept winking at Cissy and teasing Nolan until Cissy thought her friend was going to lose his temper. Finally, Charlie asked Nolan for another five dollars. He’d be back at sundown, he said, but he was going to be low on gas, and it was better to be on the safe side, didn’t Nolan think? Nolan gave him the money, and Charlie drove away.

“What a pain in the ass,” Cissy said as the truck spit dirt and rock behind the spinning tires.

“Always has been,” Nolan agreed. Then he smiled for the first time in an hour. “Come on,” he said. “I got something to show you.”

It was a hole in the ground, a deep hole in the ground. Cissy leaned over and saw that there was a meandering sort of path along one edge. You would have to hang on to roots and rocks, but you could climb down pretty easily from that side. Nolan pointed out a few places where the incline had been dug out or shored up, making a rough staircase.

“A very rough staircase,” Cissy said.

“Wouldn’t want it to be too easy,” Nolan told her. “There’d be people down there all the time if it was. It’s called Paula’s Lost. We used to own it. My uncles shared the plot, almost two hundred acres.”

“That’s a funny name,” Cissy said.

“Well, it was lost for more than a decade. Found and lost more than a few times, Uncle Tynan used to say. It wasn’t put on the maps until they gave it to the state in the fifties. It’s a reserve now. Too rocky and sandy to be any good for farming. Uncle Tynan got a deal passing it over for taxes, but the cousins have been holding target practice weekends down in here forever. It’s famous. The sheriff keeps coming out and busting up the camp, but the hollow down at the entrance is a great place for shooting. Can’t no bullets go astray and kill nobody down in that hole.”

“Why is it famous?”

“Well, that’s a story.” Nolan wiped his face and beamed. He pulled open the cooler, handed Cissy a Coke and a sandwich, and smiled again.

“It was my uncle Brewster made it famous. He mapped the first three passages and then threw all these parties out here. Strung a set of lights down the hollow. Sent out invitations with detailed maps. Called the parties Lost Weekend Extravaganzas. They were free, and Brewster gave away a lot of beer and marijuana.”,

Cissy took a bite of the sandwich, egg salad with pickles. Nolan knew she liked egg salad. He had really thought ahead, she realized. She hid her smile with a bite of egg salad and watched Nolan enjoy himself telling the story of Paula’s Lost.

Brewster had come home from Vietnam minus most of his teeth, three toes, half the cartilage in his left knee, and more than a few of the bones in his left foot. His buddies tried to cheer him up by sending him back with a large supply of marijuana. The idea was for Brewster to make a little money on that stash, but he was just not the business type. He shared what he had until his supply was gone and never complained when he was not offered much in return.

“Hell, you got to make do with what comes, keep your head level,” Brewster told everyone with a laugh. “What comes around, after all.” He laughed harder after the deputies raided one of the last parties and found none of the killer weed everyone had sworn would be there.

“You shoulda come here last month,” Brewster told Emmet Tyler after the deputy snapped on the cuffs. “You could of put me away for life.”

Emmet grunted but said nothing. He was new on the job and hadn’t wanted to hike so far out in the woods in the first place, and Brewster was just too genial a man to provoke much indignation. There was only a few years’ difference between them, and Emmet could not look at Brewster without feeling grateful that he had not come back from his stint in the army in the same condition—partly crippled and more than partly crazy. The whole raid was a joke anyway. There wasn’t even an underage drinker at the party; and the county had to settle for a vandalism charge to put Brewster out of business. Technically the cave was on state-owned land, and Brewster’s light sconces were hammered into the cave walls.

“Big damn hole in the ground, an’t it, Emmet?” Brewster was cheerful as he was helped into the back of the green and tan cruiser. “How you imagine it was ever lost?”

“Country’s going to hell,” Emmet said. “We could probably lose most anything.” He wiped his neck and waved a mosquito away, looking back at the incline that sloped down to the cave mouth. “There was a bunch of trees and shit here, garbage people had thrown down before the dump opened. It all grew over like this, kudzu and stuff.” He kicked at an exposed clump of red dirt and watched it crumble. Black and silver metal fragments glittered in the harsh light of the lamps.

“You wouldn’t have known there was nothing here. Nothing. Ground’s so ripe, you spit on it and it shoots up green.”

The mystery of how such a large hole in the ground could be forgotten did lend Paula’s Lost a mysterious aura. In the last few years trees had fallen and the entrance seemed to have dropped farther down the slope. The park service had to put up signs warning the curious just how dangerous amateur caving could be—the ground could easily fall in; crevasses full of rock and silt waited for the unwary, particularly people who had heard about Brewster’s old parties and came around to see what remained. Most of them showed up with only a couple of flashlights, a six-pack, and no idea what they were risking when they climbed down into that dark and dangerous hole. The ones who climbed out did so gratefully, sucking clean air and whistling at the muddy depths behind them.

Cissy leaned over the edge again. “How far down does it go?”

“No one knows.” Nolan was opening the satchel. “It goes on quite a ways. People say Paula’s Lost connects to Little Mouth, but no one has found the connection. Little Mouth is bigger, better known. This one is just family.” He pulled out flashlights with clip-on rings that fastened to your belt. He had even brought an extra belt, in case Cissy wasn’t wearing one, and a couple of long-sleeved flannel shirts.

“It’s cool down there,” Nolan said. “Always fifty-eight degrees underground, like air-conditioning left on all the time. As hot as it is up here, it’ll feel nice when we go down, but it gets cold after a while. Makes you tired faster.”

He looked at her with an open smile. “You ready to go?”

T
he rock was loose on the climb down. Cissy almost fell twice, but after a few minutes she learned to handle the rope Nolan had strung from one of the big trees at the top. Good thing I’m a swimmer, she thought when Nolan had her hold on to the rope and wait for him to get a better footing as he went ahead. Her shoulders ached a little by the time they were at the bottom, but climbing was fun. Like swimming, it didn’t depend on anything but your own muscles and nerves.

Cissy lagged behind Nolan. The cave was like nothing she had imagined. She had seen a movie once in which people went exploring in a cave, but they just stepped over a few rocks and walked right in. This was nothing like that. After the descent there was a mouth, a big, wide opening that quickly narrowed down.

“Brewster dug some of this out, Uncle Tynan said.” Nolan kicked at the rough ground. “But the real cave opening is back here.”

It was a narrow slice in the rock. Cissy turned to step through and then had to turn again. After about six feet, the slice took a sideways turn and they had to stoop. Soon they were crawling, holding the flashlights ahead of them. It
was
like swimming, she thought again, using her shoulders and hips and hunching over to keep from hitting her head. Every now and then the rock would open, then close down again. No, it was like nothing Cissy had ever seen.

They were both panting when they climbed through another gap into a little cavern with slanting walls and reddish sand scattered on the rock. Nolan got Cissy down knee to knee with him and produced a canteen. “Have a drink,” he said, “and then we’ll shut off the lights.”

“Shut off the lights?” Cissy took a gulp from the canteen. Nolan was playing his flashlight over the walls. The surfaces of the slanting rock were as broken and rough as the ground. That was the biggest problem, Cissy thought, the rough ground. She had never realized how important a flat walking surface could be. She put her hand on the rock beside her knee. It was cool and smooth, but it felt as if it might break if she hammered on it. Limestone, most of the rock was limestone. Soft, easily shaped by water.

“You ready?” Nolan turned the flashlight up on his face, shining it under his chin so that he looked ghostly. His grin was broad and happy. “Turn yours off.”

Cissy shut her light off. Nolan’s grin got even wider for a moment as he reached to take her right hand in his. Then there was a small click and the dark came in completely.

Lord.

Cissy’s pupils widened to catch any gleam. But the dark was absolute, a blackness that touched her nerves with icy shudders and broke a sweat in the pockets of her body. After a moment, though, there was a reddish shift in the blackness, burning specks in a spectrum of velvet night. Plush. Gorgeous. She could hear Nolan breathing. The air moved past Cissy’s cheek, and she turned her head to follow it. Sparks. Light. Instantly she could feel the open space above her expand as synapses fired and sparked. A bead of colored flame lit as she clenched her teeth. Every sound made color. Sand shifted beneath Cissy, and that sound became a streak of sky, a tiny blue streak of sky. She pulled her legs closer beneath her, and the sand spilled loudly. Cerulean blue passed her in a wave. Cissy turned her head again, and the sound of her breath was a blood-dark ruby moon. She held her breath and a diamond glint of ice yellow bloomed behind her neck. Cissy laughed, pleasure rising in her throat.

“Nice, huh?” Nolan’s hand on Cissy’s arm squeezed once. “I remember when Uncle Tynan brought me here. He made it dark for me. Some people can’t stand it, but for some the dark feels like home. I thought you would like it.”

“I do,” Cissy whispered.

“It’s human to be afraid of the dark.” Nolan’s voice was slightly sharp, and Cissy heard the fear behind the edge, under control but there. The fear was lime green and bitter.

“I’m not scared,” Cissy said, then laughed again. Her words were apple green and false. She was scared, but it was all right. She could master the fear, ride it like the current in the Bowle River, where she liked to swim. Delia complained when Cissy went swimming in the dark. And this was like that, scary but exhilarating. Her laughter sprinkled black on black, like ebony beads on a tuxedo jacket collar.