When Adriana raised the canteen to drink, she choked on the water. “Can barely swallow,” she whispered, the hoarseness distorting her voice. Diego hardly recognized it.
“The cool air can’t be good for your throat,” Diego said quietly.
“And my neck is so stiff.” She closed her eyes, winced, and rolled her head.
“We can fix that stiff neck.” Diego stepped behind her and gently kneaded the muscles in her shoulders and neck.
He had never felt so helpless.
***
“Thar she blows!” Cutbirth exclaimed, his light shining down the tunnel ahead. The passageway formed a narrow throat that led into a chamber about the size of a tennis court. A strange, terraced mound occupied a space on the far side of the big gallery. The rock formation resembled a layered cake.
“Is that your so-called Birthday Cake?” Diego asked, peering down the tunnel and into the chamber. He shone his own light on the geological marvel.
Cutbirth confirmed that it was.
The chalky-colored limestone formation stood about 20 feet tall. Water spilled onto the configuration from the ceiling and flowed over a series of eight individual terraces, each one bigger than the last.
“It does look like a birthday cake,” Emily observed. She raised a finger and silently counted the tiers. “An eight-layer birthday cake!” She strode quickly past Cutbirth toward the strange mineral formation. Clutching her camera, she said, “I’m going to take a bunch of pictures of it.”
In one quick motion, Cutbirth grabbed Emily by the straps on her backpack. She came to a jarring halt. Her feet actually left the floor for an instant. “Hold on, kid!” Cutbirth’s headlamp lit what should have been the cave floor before them. But there was no floor, only a dark pit separating the end of the tunnel from the large chamber and the Birthday Cake. Another step or two and Emily would have been swallowed alive by the night-black hole.
“Ohmigosh!” Emily said in a small, wan voice, following the beam from her headlamp into the dark emptiness. “Thank…thank you, Mr. Cutbirth.”
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Cutbirth,” Sissy said, taking Emily by the arm and pulling her away from the pit. “Emily….” She wrapped her daughter in a trembling embrace.
“Mom!” Emily groaned. “I can’t…can’t breathe.”
Sissy relaxed the embrace, sighed anxiously, and then ran her hand through Emily’s hair.“Please be more careful.”
They slipped out of their backpacks and examined the 12-foot-wide chasm.
“That is one mother of a hole,” Yong noted, leaning forward, his headlamp glazing the pit walls. He fiddled with one end of Sam’s red scarf.
Diego stepped to the edge of the pit and angled his light downward with a quiet groan. The bottom was invisible in the darkness. Looking into the deep hole made him lightheaded and he stepped back.
“Easy,” Adriana said, taking Diego’s shoulder.
“How deep is it, Cutbirth?” Diego said.
“Deep,” Cutbirth said. “Very deep. That’s the abyss I spoke of last night. You fall in, you don’t come out.” Cutbirth’s light painted the walls of the dark void. “Tricky old gal, Mother Cave. She attracts a spelunker’s eye with that beautiful Birthday Cake and the next thing he knows he’s flying with the bats.”
“Like a trap,” Diego concluded.
“Precisely,” Cutbirth said. “Mother Cave is protecting herself.”
Hidden in the speckled darkness was a rotting log. It stretched across one end of the hole.
“I call that the Bridge to Freedom,” Cutbirth said, shining his light on the gnarly log, which had been stripped of all its branches.
Henry stepped to the edge of the pit, looked in, and then moved back a few paces. He sat on the floor, his back against the wall. He turned off his headlamp and lit a cigarette.
“What’s your theory about the log, Mr. Cutbirth?” Adriana asked.
“This oughta be good,” Henry mocked, the speck of light from his cigarette glowing in the darkness.
“My theory about the log is this,” Cutbirth began. “Once upon a time, long, long, ago a massive flood filled the halls and chambers of this labyrinth, transporting the log from the forest above and depositing it somewhere in this cavern. The good folks who inhabited this place hauled the log to the pit. They needed a way to cross the shaft. Of course, they believed the log was delivered to them from the gods.” He paused. “And who’s to say it wasn’t?”
Henry brought his hands together, the burning speck of tobacco bobbing slightly in the darkness as he gave a round of applause.
Yong said, “If you’re telling me that log is thousands of years old, no way I’m crawling across it.” Yong eyed Cutbirth carefully.
Adriana looked at Yong and in a scratchy voice said, “It’s my guess this cavern was occupied by Native Americans up until just a few hundred years ago,” she said. Sounding tired, she drew a throaty breath. “So that log may not be all that old, relatively speaking.” She cleared her throat.
“Wonderful story, folks,” Henry said from the shadows. “But the question is: Will that log hold a person?”
Cutbirth said it had withstood the cumulative weight of 46 people in his eight previous border crossings, one of whom tipped the scales at more than 250 pounds.
“It doesn’t look too sturdy,” Diego observed.
“Oh, it’s sturdy,” Cutbirth confirmed.
“Then you can go first,” Henry challenged.
“I intend to,” Cutbirth fired back.
Cutbirth pitched his backpack and black gym bag to the other side and crawled up and out onto the log. He hurried across on his hands and knees—he was as agile as an alley cat, Diego observed—sprung to his feet, then turned to face them.
“Ad Man, before each person makes the crossing,” Cutbirth said, “take their backpack and toss it over to me. I don’t want someone’s pack shifting while they’re crawling across. It could cause them to lose their balance.”
“Not good,” Yong muttered, snatching another look into the black hole.
“Emily, think you can crawl across the log?” Cutbirth asked.
“Wait a minute!” Sissy objected. “I don’t want Emily to be first!” She hooked her fingers around one strap of Emily’s backpack. “Let someone else go first. Let Henry go first!”
“I’m not going first,” Henry said uneasily.
Cutbirth said, “In what order would you like Emily to cross?”
“Last,” Sissy said.
“The log might not be as sturdy for the last person as it is for the first,” Cutbirth said.
“I thought you said it had held the weight of 46—”
“That’s true,” Cutbirth interrupted. “But it’s also true that the log will not be as sturdy for the last person as it is for the first. That’s Common Sense 101.”
Sissy chewed on a fresh fingertip (scabs had formed over the ones she had gnawed) and considered Cutbirth’s reasoning.
“It’s perfectly safe, Hummingbird,” Cutbirth said. “She’ll be tethered to me.”
Sissy turned and shone her light back down the tunnel—there were no shadowy figures approaching—gave a nod, then looked at Emily. “Do you think you can do it?”
“Sure, Mom. I did gymnastics before I got this stupid blood thing, remember?” Emily said.
Sissy nodded again. “Okay, just be sure…” Sissy left the thought unsaid.
Emily slid out of her backpack, and Diego tossed it across. Cutbirth plucked it out of the air.
Cutbirth threw one end of his rope to Diego. The other end Cutbirth secured around his shoulders. The tethering was merely a precaution, Cutbirth explained, because the log was, he repeated, sturdy, and the possibility of it buckling was remote. The possibility of someone slipping off the slick, 18-inch-wide log, however, was very real, and the nylon rope would provide some insurance.
Following Cutbirth’s instructions, Diego tied the nylon rope around Emily’s tiny frame, making a loop and pu
lling it under her arms and tightening it at her chest.
“You up to this, young lady?” Diego asked, a quiver of terror arising within him.
“Yes, and I’m not one bit scared,” Emily beamed.
“Good girl,” Diego said, the panic turning over and over inside his head.
“You take it slow, Emily,” Sissy cautioned with an odd, crooked smile.
“Listen to your mother, young lady,” Adriana advised. Diego detected a tremor in Adriana’s raw voice.
A nub of a cigarette smoldering in his hand, Henry had opened his backpack and was taking an inventory.
Emily walked to the edge of the pit, then crawled up and onto the log on her hands and knees, one end of the rope tied in a noose around her torso, the other end stretched across Cutbirth’s massive shoulders. Emily paused for one short moment, and then began to move forward, her camera dangling from her neck.
“Easy baby,” Sissy whispered, the fingers of both hands locked together in a fist, which she held beneath her chin.
Watching Emily intensely, Adriana took Diego’s hand and squeezed it so tight he thought she might break a bone.
The log bowed slightly under Emily’s weight—it was moist and pliable and had buckled even more beneath Cutbirth—and when one foot slipped to the side of the log, Adriana lurched. Sissy gasped, took a step forward, and muttered under her breath. “Please, please, please….”
In a few seconds Emily regained her balance and scurried across to the other side. She jumped down from the log. “Nothing to it!” she sang. Emily pulled the rope over her head and tossed it back across to Diego. “That was fun!”
Sissy was the next to make the crossing, and Diego tossed her backpack across to Cutbirth, then dropped the looped rope around her torso and pulled it tight. Sissy walked to the edge of the pit and shined her headlamp into the dark hole. She inhaled deeply and crawled onto the rotting log. She paused, gulped air again, and then edged slowly across the chasm, the log curving beneath her.
“Want me to take your picture, Mom?” Emily asked.
“Don’t bother your mother, kid,” Cutbirth scolded. “She shouldn’t be distracted.”
“Oh sure.”
In a few moments, Sissy was safely across.
Adriana went next, followed by Yong and Diego.
Despite Cutbirth’s earlier analogy that going first, not last, was safer, Henry insisted he go last. But, perhaps sensing treachery, he didn’t want to separate himself from his orange backpack. He stood a yard or so from the edge of the pit making his case.
“Go ahead and throw your backpack across, Henry,” Yong said. “If you don’t make it, we’ll divide the contents evenly amongst the six of us.”
“You’re as funny as a heart attack,” Henry said. He had lit another cigarette, and he flipped the butt into the hole.
“Listen, Henry,” Cutbirth warned, “if your backpack shifts, you’ll lose your balance. Toss it across. No one’s going to steal your precious backpack. Those stock certificates or bonds or whatever in the hell they are will have no value to you if you’re dead.”
“They’re probably worthless,” Yong goaded.
“Worthless?” Henry laughed. “Hardly.”
“Look,” Cutbirth said, stepping to the lip of the hole and drawing on all his patience, “if you want to cross with that backpack, fine. Just don’t blame me when you lose your balance and take a one-way elevator ride to the bottom floor. And I guarantee it will not be a soft landing.”
The graphic explanation still was not enough to convince Henry; he stepped over to the log, placed both hands flat on the surface of it, and then brought up one knee. He placed his knee on the log and it immediately slipped off. His backpack shifted slightly.
“Whoa!” Cutbirth said. “I’m telling you, Henry, that log—”
“All right, Cutbirth!” Henry snarled, stepping back from the log. “You’ve convinced me!” Henry slipped out of his orange pack and looked across the pit at them. “My backpack and everything in it is private,” he reminded everyone. “I worked very hard for many years to accumulate the contents of this backpack. Some might say it is ill-gotten goods. I say it is my reward for a lifetime of shoveling somebody else’s shit.”
“Get your skinny ass on the log and let’s get out of here,” Yong said.
Adriana said what everyone was thinking. “Those bounty hunters could be close, Henry.”
Henry immediately turned and shone his light back down the tunnel. It was still deserted.
Cutbirth said, “You throw, Henry, I’ll catch.”
Henry shuffled to the edge of the pit, wrapped his fingers of his right hand around the nylon straps—mimicking Diego’s technique—and began swinging the heavy pack to and fro in a small arc. Forward, then back. Forward, back, the arc growing to 180 degrees. When the backpack had gained a high arc and enough forward momentum, Henry released it.
Henry’s release point was all wrong, and the backpack sailed straight up toward the cave ceiling before falling back onto the edge of the pit at Henry’s feet. It balanced there for an instant before toppling into the black hole. Henry made a frantic grab for it, but it was gone.
His eyes filled with absolute terror—the dingy orbits were nearly bulging out of their sockets—Henry Bilderberg stood at the edge of the pit shaking with hysteria, his pale lips trembling. He uttered a deafening “NO!”and then promptly dove into the deep pit, arms extended, fingers clutching at the air desperately.
As Henry’s body disappeared into the darkness, a clamorous shriek arose. It was not Henry. Nor was it Emily. It was Sissy. The scream quickly turned into a gasping, out-of-breath sob. Emily had thrown her arms around Sissy’s waist and buried her face in her mother’s side.
A lonesome silence followed.
“My God,” Diego muttered, “how deep is—?”
The morbid and distant splatter of Henry’s cherished backpack hitting the water resounded from below. In the next instant, a louder, more deadly splash resonated up the pit walls.
No one spoke for several moments.
“The son-of-a-bitch never uttered a sound,” Yong noted, his poisonous relationship with Henry at an end.
Emily looked at her mother through the tears, her hand on her chest. “I can feel my heart—”
“I know, baby,” Sissy said between her sobbing gasps for air. “Mine, too.”
Stepping to the edge of the pit, Diego looked into the carbon-blackness. “Henry!” he yelled.
Diego’s echo came back at them, and Cutbirth said in a very detached manner, “No one could survive that fall.”
Diego had read stories in the Chronicle about people surviving a plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge. Nearly a dozen would-be suicides had survived over the many years. Maybe Henry had been lucky, and Diego yelled his name again.
“He’s gone, Ad Man,” Cutbirth repeated. “Save your breath.”
Diego exhaled a nervous sigh and stepped away from the hole. He was left with the grisly realization that he had just witnessed a man morph from sanity to insanity in the blink of an eye.
24
Latitude 38 Page 29