The Hermit's Story (10 page)

Emerald-bright moss grew around the hole; wild violets formed scattered bouquets, as if someone, or something, had been buried below and was being honored.

“How far down does it go?” Sissy asked.

Russell lay down on his belly and examined the hole. It was barely wider than his shoulders. A yellow butterfly drifted past his face. “There are rungs still hammered into the walls,” he said. “We could climb down and see.”

“Do you think it has a bottom?”

“It has to have a bottom,” he said.

“You go first,” Sissy said. “What do I do if you fall?”

“Crawl back out, and wait for me to climb up,” Russell said.

“Will it be cold or hot down there?” Sissy asked. Russell didn't answer; he was already lowering himself into the hole. It was a tight squeeze and his hips would not quite fit, so that he was stuck already, half in the earth and half out. He strained there for a moment, then wriggled back out.

“Do you mind if I undress?” he asked.

“No,” said Sissy, and watched as he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his shirt, heavy denim jeans, and finally his underwear.

“Tell me why I should go down here with you?” said Sissy.

“You don't have to,” he said, easing into the hole.

She paused, then looked around before slipping out of her own clothes—paused again with her bra and underwear, shock white—the light coming down through the green dappling of leaves felt warmer, different, on her bare skin—and then she slipped out of those as well, folded her clothes neatly next to his rumpled pile, and descended.

“You blocked out the light,” he said, from ten feet below.

She looked up. “It's still there,” she said.

The adit was cool and slick with spring-trickle. The limestone walls were smoothed with years of water-seep, and they felt good against her back and chest. There was not quite room for her to draw her knees up double, and she wondered how Russell could make it, wondered how he had been able to endure his old job, working among men half his size.

Out of nervousness, she wanted to talk as she descended, but it was difficult for him to hear what she was saying; he kept calling “What?” so that she was having to spread her legs and crane her neck and call down to him, as if trying to force the sound waves to sink—like dropping pebbles, she imagined—and in the darkness she could not tell whether he was fifty feet below her or only a few inches. She descended slowly, not wanting to step on his fingers.

Sometimes when she stopped to rest it seemed that the slight curves and tapers of the borehole fit the same curves and tapers of her body, though only in that one resting place; then they would move on, again, descending.

Fantastic paranoias began to plague her as they descended more than one hundred feet. It felt as if they had traveled at least a mile.

The portal of sky above had diminished to less than the size of a penny, and her breath came fast now as she imagined some skulking woodsperson coming upon the telltale scatter of their clothing and finding a boulder to roll over their tomb. She paused and lowered her head to her chest, forced herself to chase the thought from her mind, but there was nowhere for it to go; like a bat, it fled but returned. She felt chilled, and she was seized with the sudden impulse to pee, but held it in.

Fifty feet farther down—moving as slow as a sloth, now—she imagined that they were using up all the air, and another twenty-five feet after that, she imagined that although Russell had been a nice enough young man, a gentleman, on the earth above, the descent and the pressures and swells of the earth would metamorphose him into something awful and raging—that he might at any second seize her ankle and begin eating her raw flesh, gnawing at her from below.

A trickle of urine escaped. She stopped again, clamped down, hoped that he would not distinguish it from the spring water. Despite the coolness, she was sweating, muddy and gritty now.

There came a grunting sound from below her, piglike in nature, and her heart leapt in terror, certain that the transformation had begun.

“Oh, man,” Russell said, “I wish I hadn't eaten so much.”

“Are you stuck?”

“No, I've just got to go.”

“Can you wait?”

“Yeah.”

“How much farther do you think?”

“Any minute. Any time now,” he said.

The penny of light above had disappeared completely.

A little later, a little deeper into the hole, she heard Russell cry out in what sounded initially like fear.

“What is it?”

He was right below her, thrashing and bumping, so that at first she thought he was falling.

“What is it?” she asked again. She felt him climbing up below her, his hands and head up around her ankles, and she scooted up quickly, bumping her knees against the wall.

“Oh Christ,” he said. “It was a shitload of bones down there. A
wad
of bones. Something must have fallen down the hole and gotten stuck there where it narrows. God,” he said, “I was all tangled up in them.”

Sissy was quiet for a long while. “What do you think they are?” she said. “Do you think they're human?”

“I guess I should find out,” Russell said. He descended from her ankles back into silence. A few seconds later, she heard the sticklike clattering of bones as he kicked his way through the nest of them: the brittle snapping of ribs and femurs.
God,
she thought,
I will go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life, I will become a nun, I will...

Russell groped around for the different pieces he could reach. “I heard them land,” he said. “We're almost to the bottom.”

Thank you, Jesus,
Sissy thought, not caring now if they were the pope's bones.

“Careful,” Russell said, “they'll scratch you some, coming down through them.”

“What are they?”

“I don't know,” Russell said, and then a moment later, “Okay, I'm on the bottom.”

After the constriction of the adit, the space around her was divine: open air all around her, and a set of railroad tracks beneath her feet, tunneling laterally through the coal.

She hunkered down and peed. There was too much space in the total blackness; she felt that if they ventured left or right of the adit, with its lightless surface high above, they would never find it again, but Russell said that they would be able to feel the ladder rungs hammered into the wall and would know also where they were by the tangles of bones beneath it.

“What kind are they?” she asked. She had moved nearer to Russell and reached out to touch his shoulder, and kept her hand there, as would a tired swimmer far out in the ocean who found, strangely, one rock fixed and protruding above the waves. Even that close, she could see nothing of him, though she could feel the heat from the mass of his body.

He crouched and began sifting through the bones, sorting them by feel, nearly all of them long and slender, until he found the skull, which he groped in the darkness: felt the ridges above the eyes, the molars, the eye sockets themselves.

“Deer,” he said, and handed her the skull. He could not see where she was, and accidentally pressed the skull into her belly.

She took the skull from him and examined it. The relief that it was not a human seemed to her to give them a freedom, a second chance at something.

“All right,” she said, “I guess we can walk a little ways.” She reached for, and found, his hand.

“Wait here a second,” he said. “I've really got to go.”

He left her standing there and walked down the tracks. He was gone a long time. Sissy sat down and wrapped her arms around her knees and waited. She kept her back to the wall. She kept listening for Russell but could hear nothing. She wondered if he had come to some junction in the tracks and had taken a turn and gotten lost.

She had the adit directly above her, or very near her. She could feel the slight upwelling of breeze, still rising as if to a chimney, though she supposed that at nighttime as the air cooled it would begin to sink back down the adit, falling with an accelerated force that might be exhilarating, deafening.

She called out his name but got no answer. He was too shy. It was possible he would walk a mile, maybe farther, before depositing his spoor, to keep from offending her.

If he got lost, all she had to do was stand up, take hold of the rungs in the darkness, and begin climbing back up.

She called his name again. Not only was there no answer, but there was an emptiness that made it seem certain no ears had heard her call. She stood up and began walking in the direction she was certain he had gone.

She walked for a long time. She kept her right hand on the wall at all times, and stretched her left hand out into space, hoping to feel what might lie out there, though there was always nothing.

She came to another adit, and paused; she peered up it, saw no light, and could not be sure whether she felt a breeze or not. She touched the steel spikes, the rungs hammered into the stone, to see if she could discern any human warmth he might have left climbing up them.

She thought that she might be running out of air, and then felt almost certain that she was. A jag of panic shot through her like a spike of lightning—her heart clenched—and she gripped the rungs and started up.

The farther she climbed—five, then ten minutes—the more she began to understand why perhaps she should not have.

There was no water-trickle coming down this shaft; there was no breeze, no dimness of light above.

Her eyes felt as large as eggs. The shaft was tight all around her, too tight, and she longed for the space below. She stopped, dropped her head in momentary defeat, and then descended. The bare stone and grit beneath her bare feet felt good, once she got back down to the bottom. The tunnel was beginning to feel familiar to her. She started walking again, traveling on in the same direction she had been traveling. She came to what she thought was a dead end—a fallen jumble of timbers and stone—but in her groping found a cave-sized opening, a passage—the only one through which he could have passed, if he had indeed come this way—and she squeezed through it.

It was possible that as she climbed, he had passed back by beneath her, searching for her.

She walked deeper, farther into the darkness, wondering what mountain she was passing beneath: wondering what the shape and size of it was, and what birds lived on it; whether there were the houses and homes of humans perched atop it, or if bears lived on it; wondering if cougars hunted deer on its slopes. Wondering if packs of coyotes ran wild through its woods. Wondering if mossy creeks ran down its folds and crevices, and if there were fish in those creeks, and frogs and salamanders.

She walked right into Russell, coming from the other direction; they collided, bumped chests and heads and knees, and caught each other in a tangle of arms and stinging elbows, grabbed each other from reflex, then yelled at each other and leapt away.

“Russell?” she said.

For a moment he considered not answering her, or saying that he was someone else. But the other language—her hands gripping his arm, her knee against his—was already speaking, and they moved into each other, and together, as easily as if the fit were one they had been searching for all along, as if it were not a chance or random stumbling. They sat down, still coupled, and then lay down to love, sprawled yet clinging to each other on the bed of old crushed rubble and ore, blind to the world, blind to everything except the language of touch—so heightened now by the deprivation of other senses that it seemed possible that when they emerged, if they emerged, they might somehow be able to transfer a similar intensity to all of the other senses, and that in so doing, they might stride the earth as strongly and freely as giants. That there was not any one limited reservoir of feeling, but infinite access to the senses, and that after having thus loved, and emerging transformed, metamorphosed, they would see and hear and taste and scent odors with an almost intolerable fullness.

Afterward—still feeling so huge, so alive, as if they could barely fit in the tunnel—they held hands and walked farther, following the tracks.

“Sometimes there are different layers,” Russell said. “Adits below adits. We have to be careful not to step into one and fall a hundred feet down to some lower level. In the old days you could be working on one level and feel the mountain shaking when a train of ore passed above or below you.”

“How far down do you think this goes?” Sissy asked. “How many layers?”

“It's honeycombed,” Russell said, and laughed. “Hell, maybe it goes all the way.”

The tunnel veered slightly, or so it seemed—as if it were tracing some contour that might be reflected on the slope of the mountain, out in the green bright outside world. They kept coming to various junctions, taking a left or a right based not on any regular or mappable system of order or logic—two lefts and a right, two lefts and a right—but rather based only on how their hearts felt at each juncture.

A dull scent at one intersection, a bright scent at another. A breath, a bare whisper of a breath, of freshness or dampness. A variance—or so it seemed—in the gravity beneath their naked feet. Anything could make up their mind for them, and they had no earthly idea of their reasoning; they were simply being pulled along by the earth. If they got lost or tired of walking they would stop and make love again.

After some time, they came to one of the abandoned pump-jack boxcars—one of the old manually driven ore carts that used to race up and down the tracks, which a single miner could operate by pumping up and down on a central fulcrum, which rose and fell like a seesaw, with hidden intricate gearings below by which great volumes of mass could be moved—slowly at first, but then with increasing power and speed and efficiency.

They stopped and examined with their hands the shape and coolness of the rust-locked vehicle.