Sherry screamed, “You ready?”
“He’s not down here.”
“I think we should see. We’re so close.”
There was silence. Sherry read my thoughts. I knew she understood when I heard her murmur, “Oh,” under her breath. She knew I was terrified. I could go no further. Will was not a factor. Love was not a factor. I could not.
I assumed that was the end of our rescue operation, but Sherry pushed past me and said, “I’m going to try it, then. Will you hold the light on me?”
“Sherry, I don’t think—”
Tilden shouted something from the sky. That distracted me, so the next thing I heard was a splash under the myriad splashing, and Sherry crying, “Oh!” as she hit the cold water.
“Sherry!”
“It’s so fucking COLD! Where’s that light?”
I fumbled around and got the flashlight aimed over the rim of the plunge pool. I trembled with panic. I felt vomit rising in my throat. But when the beam hit the water, making a patch of turbulent brown in the midst of black, I was all right. Sherry was visible and standing. It was only so deep. It was not a hole at the bottom of the world. Panic drained out of me. All I needed was to know what lay beneath. All I needed to know was the farthest one could fall. Sherry was still screeching about the cold while I swept the surface of the pool, trying to find her a way closer to the falls. Her yellow slicker lit up like flame. The water wasn’t deep, but the drop to it was high as a man, and Sherry was soaked all over.
“You OK?”
“Except for dripping wet, yes. It was farther than I thought. A little dizzy.”
“You jumped without knowing how far it was?”
I could see the shoulders of the slicker shrug.
Something loomed out of the darkness and hit the plunge pool with surprisingly little splash. It had said fwooosh all through the air until it said FAAAAASH at the surface of the pool. A limb tossed over the falls by the flood waters eddied for a moment, as if deciding which way to go, then headed downstream, gathering speed as it neared the next set of swollen rapids. We had forgotten that, on top of everything else, we should expect a hail of debris from above. Sherry moved away from the center of the pool. She might be safe.
I said, “Hold on.” She had jumped and not died. I would too. Before I could think more about it, I launched off the ledge, trying to get as close to Sherry as possible, in case she had hit the one spot without a drop-off.
“You’re right. It’s fucking cold—”
“What?”
“COLD!”
Sherry laughed a little tinkling laugh. She swept her arm through the air and said, “Fwoosh,” in imitation of the debris hailing from the brink of the Falls. Triumphantly I’d kept my light above the water, and she said, “Aim it this way. I can see a hole.”
“What?”
“I can see a hole at the side of the Falls. A seam. At the bottom. Must be where the birds go in at night.”
The seam presented as a deeper black inside the black. I aimed the flashlight. The beam burned strong on Sherry, but diminished with distance so that the Falls itself was a dim glimmer of black pearl almost outside the range of light. I began to move toward her, feeling the bottom with my boots for crevasses and monsters. The moon had climbed so that the top of the Falls was aflame with silver. It seemed curious to me that none of that pale fire flowed down the Falls to the bottom, it all seemed so liquid, the water and the moonlight, all so much one intermingling substance.
The water came a little above our waists, but was so turbulent with the storm that wavelets climbed almost to our shoulders sometimes. I never imagined there could be so much unevenness in water, so many lumps. In physics class they say that water tends to the level, but they must be talking about some other water. The pool grew shallower as we neared the bottom of the Falls, probably with shelves of shale broken from the cliff. Every time Sherry slipped on a loose stone she yelped a little yelp. Every time she yelped a yelp, I jumped a foot into the air, sure she’d been seized by something terrible. Once she slipped under the surface, came up spluttering and waving her hands in front of her face as though the water were a buzzing insect. I think this is the way heroes really are, yelping and bitching about the cold, but moving intrepidly toward the dark slit in the dark wall while the rest of us look on.
She waited for me to catch up. We had crossed the pool, and stood at the stony rise leading to the floor of the cave behind the Falls. She began to climb, hand over hand, toward a crumbly ledge visible beyond the door. She reached it. She tried it. It did not crumble. She pulled herself out of the water. The floor looked dry behind the falls. Of course it would be—where would the swifts go if everything were filled with water? I followed her exactly, gingerly up the wet stones. I didn’t know whether she was going to take the next step into the darkness or not.
Sherry waited until she had my attention. She put her flashlight to her face and made a monster face. Then she plunged behind the Falls.
Momentarily I saw her light behind the falls, dim golden and very beautiful, like a dark curtain shaken in a palace. I took a deep breath and followed.
Beyond the water gate lay blackness. Ravens eating licorice in a coal mine black. Pitch black, without a glimmer, roaring, terrible. I squeezed against the rock wall to get all the way in. It was not necessary to squeeze, for the gap was quite big enough once you were on it. Two could have gone in holding hands. But I wanted to keep my hand on the wall. I wanted something solid at the opposite side of all that resounding, horrible black. It was nothingness made into a world. I had never been more afraid. I figured if I pissed myself it would be OK, as I’d have to swim through the plunge pool to get out again.
“Sherry?” I shouted tentatively into the abyss. She made no answer. She couldn’t have heard me anyway in the roar, nor I her. It was like being inside an ear. I moved my hand along the wall. It was not damp. This was surprising. My hand began to hit the bodies of sleeping birds, so I lifted it off the wall and dragged it more lightly along. Feeling the warm backs of the sleeping swifts was better than feeling stone, though also much weirder. I wondered if they felt me, if maybe I entered their sleep as a spirit moving the dark. A few of them stirred or cheeped a little, but mostly I was as impalpable as a dream.
A sensation of openness and fresher air told me I had entered a larger space. I whirled the flashlight around, and though I could see the near wall—indistinct and fuzzy and gently pulsating with the bodies of a million birds—I could not see a roof or a far wall. I did see . . . something . . . I steadied my hand for a systematic investigation, moving tentatively forward in whispering abyss. A rivulet crossed the floor. I doubted it was part of the Falls, but rather a spring welling up from deep inside the cavern. It must flood from time to time, for the space on either side was clear of bird droppings and the bare gray stone shone through, glittering with mica as if with diamond. Beside the rivulet, on a little rise where an exhausted or dying person could lean over and get a drink of water, lay a skeleton. I jumped back, gasping. I dropped the flashlight, then grabbed it before it rolled too close to the bones. I allowed myself to think for one split second what I would have felt had the light gone out.
Over the skeleton, Vinny bent with his face in his hands. His body rocked back and forth. He was so black with muck from the descent only the rocking made you sure he was separate from the black floor of the cave. He rocked back and forth on his knees. You knew he was howling, though the Falls put all of that away.
Raising the flashlight again, I saw Sherry standing behind Vince, her hand on his back, moving with him as he rocked. Behind her the edge of a wall could be discerned, sharp and birdless. Maybe Vinny had scared the birds from that part of the wall.
I shouted to her, “Is he all right?”
She couldn’t hear me. She shrugged and then pointed frantically. I whirled around to see the creeping monster she pointed at, but there was nothing. I realized she was pointing at my flashlight. I look
ed at her carefully. Her mouth said, “Don’t lose the light!”
I crossed the cavern and gathered her in my arms. Somehow Sherry had lost her light and mine was the only illumination in the cave. She must have found Vince by touch, or he had found her when briefly the curtain of the dark wavered at the entrance. She seemed tired, or inert. I pulled her toward the door in the water. Finding the way in that direction was easy because of the cool wind sucking forever and forever from the cave into the air. If you were one of the swifts, all you’d have to do is drop down and let the wind carry you. Sherry was a hard pull because she herself was pulling Vince. He would not yet be budged. He kept turning back to the bones and howling, “I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU THIS TIME,” audible over all the waters of the world.
I couldn’t find a place to stand where I couldn’t see the bones. I was afraid of them. I thought they would keep us from ever leaving the cave. Then Sherry lurched forward. She’d finally yanked Vince free. I aimed the flashlight so the bones would see it one last time and know we would return for them.
I didn’t remember being so strong. Vince and Sherry both were hanging off me as though they were hurt, me praying to God that they weren’t. I dragged them. It was so dark in the cave that night itself seemed a blue blaze, and I dragged them toward that. Stone and wet unfolded into open air.
In the middle of a drama, you forget that things keep happening elsewhere. When the lights went out in the gorge, Tilden feared the worst. He shouted to us for a while, then turned and resolved to run back to the parking lot, hoping that my mother was still there.
None of us understood the immensity of Tilden’s fear of the dark. None of us had known about it at all, for when we were with him in the dark, we were with him, and company helped him get through it. He slept with a nightlight, but habit might be blamed as well as fear. During hikes to the Falls, it was he who usually urged an early return, arguing we should get home before the sun had set, but he was always the one with odd jobs and practice, and we assumed he was guarding his sleep. Alone on the ridge of the gorge, with just the Coleman lantern for protection, he was petrified. The shame of not being able to help us in the descent added to his misery, for if there was one thing worse than simple darkness to his heart, it was darkness added to height, the sheer drop into nothingness, the haunted air on all sides and only a few fingers and a few toes tying one to life.
But if he took the lantern we would have no orientation. We would not know where we were, climbing out of the gorge. Our lights had disappeared—he didn’t know why—and perhaps for us the Coleman was the only illumination in the world. Tilden swiveled his body in every direction to see what shade or monster might be approaching out of the blackness. He set the lantern on an outcrop of stone where its light would penetrate deepest into the abyss. Then he turned and ran. For a few strides the light of the lantern was with him, blazing the grass around him with the diamonds of after-rain. But then the bend, and utter darkness.
Tilden noticed two things at the moment of utter panic. First, that the low, fat chunk of moon still eked out enough pallor that if anything really formidable were hulking toward him through the trees, he could see it. The second was that the night came on fragrant and soft and beautiful, watery silver where the moon lay upon it, velvet and plush where it did not. A rabbit scurried ahead of him on the path. It was clearly panicked, too, so much so that it never thought to dart to the right or the left, but kept on like an arrow, stupid and stunned. Tilden ran so fast that the rabbit, thinking it was the object of the man’s speed, stopped in the path and gave up. It hunkered down, waiting for the fangs at its neck. Tilden leapt over the rabbit and kept running. As he ran he thought of the rabbit, how it had imagined something that was not, how it mistook another drama for its own, how it was never in danger, but crouched panting in the mud, recovering slowly from imagining it was. Tilden recognized himself. Everything that moved in the night moved for its own purpose, and none of it, likely, because of him. The things of the night heard him coming, and were afraid. He too was a dark shape passing in swiftness and power through the thick air. By the time he leapt like a stag over the chain fence around the parking lot, Tilden had become a creature of the night.
Mom still parked there, motor running, lights on—if pointing the wrong way—gospel music coming out of the radio as a fence against the great and terrible night. In one blast of speech, Tilden told as much as was tell-able. Mom whirled back down 414 toward town, to get help. Tilden raced back to the gorge. As he ran, he rejoiced in the darkness. It was not, perhaps the time to do such a thing, but it couldn’t be helped. He threw back his head and laughed out loud. The Coleman was like a star beaming on the edge of the precipice. As Tilden ran toward it, the first pale blue seeped into the mountains at his back, the first tentative footfall of dawn.
There was no good place to rest on the ledge under the Falls. Debris fell with the falling water. We danced to one side and then the other, hoping the Falls’ aim would be off this one night. I dragged Sherry as hard as I could, and she dragged the shape we had brought with us out of the cave. Back down in the water we went, into the roiling plunge pool. It seemed almost warm now, we had been out in the cold so long. The shape Sherry was dragging made a sound—oof!—when it hit the water. He was alive. I whirled with my flashlight and aimed the beam at its face.
“Vinny!”
“Of course ‘Vinny,’ you retard,” Sherry shouted over the waters.
I stalled us in the dangerous pool, looking at Vinny as though I’d never seen him before. It was ludicrous just standing there waiting for someone’s chicken coop to fall on our heads.
Vince said, “I went back for him.”
I responded, like a dumbass, “Oh.”
Suddenly, Vinny took the lead. He moved around us in the pool, still holding Sherry’s hand, so I was at the back. I’d been in favor of just lounging around until the firemen came for us, but Vinny hauled heavily out of the pool, tugging Sherry, she tugging me, up the first shelf of the stone tower.
The burst of decisiveness wore Vinny out. He was weak and tired—you could tell that by the way he stumbled—but he still knew the rock wall better than we did. I moved around Sherry to brace Vinny from behind, to catch him if he fell. Sherry held on to my belt, pushing impatiently if Vinny paused too long, considering the way. Dawn hit the rim of the gorge. It was not that far away, not so far as storm and darkness and fear would make one think. The sun shone so beautiful up there, the rain-pearled ferns become a shivery band of emerald.
Welcome hands pulled us out. The firemen arrived—Andy having pulled them from the duties Dadlez gave them farther up the river—and jumped down to help us the rest of the way. One tried to carry Sherry. I heard her say, about ten feet behind me, “I can manage on my own, thank you very much. Just give me your hand. That’s all I need.”
First thing I saw as we clawed our way over the rim was Chief Dadlez pulling up in his muddy cruiser. He and Officer Big City got out of the cruiser, surveyed the scene, and put their fists on their hips with exactly the same motion at exactly the same time.
“Is somebody going to catch me up?” Dadlez barked, as though everything had gone awry in his absence.
My dad, bless his heart, said, “Found ’em.”
Vinny had not spoken all the way up from the pool. I heard Lucas Mills the volunteer fireman, and my cousin in some complicated way—ask how he was, and Vinny had not answered. Behind my dad, Coach was bent over with his hands on his knees, like he’d been throwing up. Dad had his hand on his back, comforting him. He stood up, Coach did, and began to walk toward his son. Not many people heard what he said, or even knew that he’d said anything.
But I did. He said, “You find what you were looking for?”
Vince nodded.
I lost track of how long they stood there, looking at one another, but at last Coach said, “Son,” and pulled Vince against him so Vince’s face was buried in his shoulder. Vince sagged at the knees and his father he
ld him up. The rain stopped finally, even way out over the green mountains. The men went down for the bones, then, Andy and Lucas and the firemen did, with a stretcher like the bones were still a man. I could see Vince walking a little ahead when the dawn broke, with his dad’s arm across his shoulders. The pack was on his back, the one with the Boy Scout patches, catching the first light sapphire and gold. Vince would abide there and wait for the bones, to be with them in the next part of their journey. We would wait with him until the next thing happened.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
David Brendan Hopes, whose novel The Falls of the Wyona was chosen for Red Hen Press’s 2017 Quill Prize, is a poet, playwright, and painter living in Asheville, North Carolina. Originally from Ohio, Hopes taught at Hiram College, Syracuse University, Phillips Exeter Academy, and is now Professor of English at UNCA. His prize-winning plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Seattle, and London, and his publications have been in venues as diverse as Audubon, the New Yorker, and Best American Poetry, 2016.
Previous full-length publications include The Glacier’s Daughters (Juniper Prize, UMass Press), Blood Rose (Urthona Press), A Dream of Adonis (Pecan Grove Press), and Peniel (Saint Julian Press). Nonfiction publications include: A Sense of the Morning (Milkweed Editions), Bird Songs of the Mesozoic (Milkweed Editions), and A Childhood in the Milky Way (Akron University Press). He has twice received the North Carolina New Play Project Prize, as well as the Holland New Voices Play-writing Award, the Sprenger Foundation Award for Historical Drama, the Desert Star Award for Best Original Writing, the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Award for Playwriting, and the Siena Playwrights’ Prize. Previously in fiction, he has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, the E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award, the Sonora Review Fiction Prize, and the Hohenburg Award in Fiction. Poetry accolades include the Juniper Prize, the Saxifrage Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Prize, and the Utmost Christian Writers Christian Poetry Award.
The Falls of the Wyona Page 17