“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.
“Can you see ...” Cissy hesitated. Would Nolan think she was weird?
“See what?”
“Colors.” How would she explain? If she tried to see the colors, they burst and faded. They were more to be felt than seen.
“Oh, your eyes will do that, kind of hallucinate. It can get pretty intense. You have to learn to ignore it.” Nolan sounded sure of himself, and Cissy wondered how many times he had been here. She licked her lips and wondered if she would ever learn to ignore the colors. Why would she want to? She shifted slightly in the sand, and her hips felt molten chocolate.
The cave roof was close above them. The sand had been gray and red in the light’s glare before Nolan shut it off. Was it still, or had it flooded with night like her pupils? She imagined the sand with a pearly luster. Her eyes ached, she realized. She had been holding them so wide open that they were dry and strained. She let her lids fall and felt immediate relief, lifted them again and felt the stream of air coming from farther down the shaft.
If white was all the colors, and black none, which one moved across her dry, aching pupils now? She smiled and relaxed. Nothing here would hurt her.
“Listen,” Nolan whispered. “Listen.”
Cissy tilted her head back slightly. Her cranium felt like a drum-head, open to the most subtle strokes, ready to produce the most delicate tones, every note brightened with pigment. She closed her eyes again, and the dry ache ebbed with a purple murmur. She wanted to hum but was too self-conscious. It would have been good, though, to hum deep in her chest, the way Delia did sometimes, to let that sound come up out of her to assume color and shape in the dark. The back of her neck felt open and strong like the sounding board of some giant instrument. A tear ran down Cissy’s cheek from one burning eye to her chin. She wiped it away. The words in her head were white on white: I am safe here. Nothing can find me that I do not want to find me. If I do not move, the dark will fill me up, make me another creature, fearless and whole. This must be what Amanda feels when she prays so hard, like being held close in the hand of God. It certainly felt like God’s country.
Nolan snapped the light on then. Grief flooded Cissy in a scalding sweep. Both of them flinched, and Cissy covered her face. The light was too big, too hot, and too painful. The dark was gone, the great beautiful healing blackness.
“You okay?” Nolan was blinking and peering at her. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Cissy wiped away tears and kept her face expressionless while her eyes cleared.
The flashlights were battery-powered, intense and narrowly focused. Reflected light made a diffuse shadow pool all around them. Cissy was startled when it quickly became obvious that Nolan could not see any better than she could, that she was actually better at judging distance. The blackness and the narrow beams flattened perspective in the cave. You could not tell if there was a gap below you or if a shadow of rock meant a crevasse until you were right on top of it. Everything was close-up or invisible, black and white and relentlessly misleading. But Cissy had learned to judge distance by subtle clues, and instinctively calculated contrasts that served her as well underground as above. They crawled forward steadily, Nolan telling her what he knew of the cavern layout but mostly letting her find her own way.
“That’s a ledge,” she pointed out for Nolan.
“You’re right,” he said, and Cissy barely nodded in acknowledgment. This is my place, she thought. What she wanted at that moment she could not have expressed. She tightened her grip on the rock under her hand and said nothing. She wondered, though. When Nolan led them slowly back to the entrance, Cissy wondered what would happen if she ever came down in the cave alone, shut off her light, and sat with the dark all around her. What would it be like to stay here a while with the back of her neck wide open to whatever might come?
“You were great!” Nolan said when they emerged from the bottom of the cave mouth. He was huffing and panting. Cissy was shivering.
“It was terrific,” she told him. “What a gift!”
Nolan sat in a waning patch of sun. They would rest a minute and then climb up the last bit of the way. There were more sandwiches and sodas and a thermos of tea up there. He spread his arms happily. It had all worked out as he had hoped, except for Charlie. What a bastard, Nolan thought, leaning back on his elbows. He was exhausted.
“It sure is work.” Cissy rolled her shoulders until some of the ache eased. Her eyes were still wide and full of the awe the dark had induced. “Your uncle found this?”
“Found it, lost it. It’s been in the family a while.” Nolan looked up at the fading light. “We should go,” he said. “Up top, I’ll tell you everything I know about Brewster while we wait for Charlie.” He reached to give Cissy a hand, but she was already scrambling toward the rope. She passed him the tag end and started up on her own. She is something, Nolan thought. Just like her sister.
When they were settled by the roadside with their tea, Nolan made good on his promise. “Brewster was married to my aunt Maudy,” he told Cissy, “but it was one of those things didn’t last. They stayed friends, though, even after they separated.” Maudy was Nolan’s daddy’s sister, and she had lived in Cayro all her life until she moved to Arizona two years ago.
“Brewster marry her before or after he was in Vietnam?” Cissy reached into the cooler and brought a damp can of Coke to her forehead, letting the moisture wash away the sweat that had dried beneath her bangs.
“Oh, before. Most of those boys went off to Vietnam right out of high school. Eighteen and gone—one, two, three. Like Brewster’s big brother, but his brother was one of those hard-luck types, dead three months after he got to ’Nam. So then Brewster was an only surviving son, got himself a ticket out. Everybody said he was lucky, but Brewster didn’t see it that way. He married Maudy and started some college, but nothing he took up lasted, not school, not marriage.”
&n
bsp; Nolan paused and cocked his head at the sound of an engine, but when there was no sign of Charlie, he turned back to Cissy happily. Nolan loved to tell his family stories. In his own mind they were like those miniseries on television, where the characters were always revealing some complicated interrelationship, mother of a child that married a man who had a child who grew up and murdered the brother it never knew.
“Everybody is related to somebody,” Nolan would say to Cissy now and then, meaning not that everyone in Cayro was actually related, but that any story you heard was probably like the ones you had not heard, and much closer to your own life than you would want to admit—a tragedy almost surely if you looked at it properly or told it the way it should be told.
“Daddy said Brewster reached a point in his life where he started to think nothing would go right till he did what he had been supposed to do. So he signed up and went. Everybody said he was a lucky man, all right. At least he came back. Lots of Cayro boys never did.”
“Too dumb to keep their heads down.” Cissy thought about Marty Parish and the other boys at Cayro High. She used a pinkie to strain a seed off the top of her tea, then drained the liquid that remained.
“Or too eager. Hot-dog types. Good old boys.” Nolan gave the little nod that meant he knew Cissy would agree with him. “No different from what we got these days.”
“Yeah.” Cissy broke a piece of Styrofoam off her cup. “But it was a different time. Everybody says so. Delia does, anyway. She’s always telling us that people forget what it was like.”
“Oh, your mama’s right. No doubt about it. You should listen to my uncles talk. Hell, you should hear my daddy. For a while there, he even grew his hair out a little. Started playing those Allman Brothers records, talked like only a fool would have volunteered for the army the way Brewster did. As if he hadn’t been all hot to go himself. Aunt Maudy says the only thing kept Daddy home was the herniated disk he got when he rolled his truck.” Nolan rocked the empty thermos on the flat of his thighs and watched Cissy get to her feet.
“Like Clint’s knee.” Cissy picked up a few nubs of Styrofoam and looked down the dirt road. They would have to carry the garbage out. Wouldn’t want to leave it here. “He never had to go ’cause he messed up his knee in an accident out at his daddy’s farm.”
“Yeah, the lucky legion. The crippled and the infirm.” Nolan flashed a wicked smile. “Evolution in action, Aunt Maudy calls it. The truly crazy and the weak-minded, and, yeah, the unlucky. They went early and never came back. The lucky and the messed-up got to hang around to plant the next generation, like my daddy made me and Steve, and yours made you and Amanda and Dede. If things had been a little different, it could have been Brewster’s sons hanging around here and you girls might never have been born.”
“Wouldn’t that have been terrible?” Cissy gave a sour grin. She did not bother to point out Nolan’s error—that Clint Windsor had made Amanda and Dede, but never made her. Unlike Nolan, she had no wish to repeat family legend. Randall had earned his ticket out of the draft with a set of tracks up each arm and the spirited intervention of a record producer whose sole mission had been to keep likely moneymakers out of army green. Clint was like Brewster. He’d have gone to Vietnam if he could. It was a crazy decade. Clint had talked about that time in almost biblical terms: “Everything went back to front. Women fell in love with boys who looked more like girls than the girls did. And real men got treated no better than dogs.”
By the side of the dirt road Cissy could see one of the invitational signs that Baptist Tabernacle had put up all over Cayro. “All are welcome in His house,” it said in red and white paint. She thought about Clint and the way he had talked. “Real men” was one of his magic phrases. Every time he said it, even in his sunken whispery voice, it came out hard and strong. Real Men. Good Women. God and Righteousness. Wages of Sin. What a woman really wants. The phrases resounded like the lyrics of some song sung only by the righteous—Church of God incantations set to a bluegrass melody. In Clint’s exhausted tremolo, the words became staccato and insistent. He knew what he sounded like, his daddy or one of those men who drifted through Cayro with stubbled beards and caps pushed down to hide angry, blasted features. Sometimes he even laughed at himself.
It was as if Clint had split in two, become half the man he had been before his illness, half the man he was trying to be. He would speak those hard words, then snort and say them again in a mocking tone. Sometimes, listening to Amanda, Cissy heard the echo of Clint in her blunt, strong language, the echo of the man he had been that he did not want to be.
“My uncles swear Brewster is buried in one of these caves,” Nolan was saying. “Maybe Little Mouth, maybe Paula’s Lost. Aunt Maudy knows, but she won’t tell me.”
Brewster had taken a bad fall only a few weeks after Emmet Tyler made him pull down his lights and shut down the parties. Drunk and angry, he messed up his injured ankle. He went to the veterans’ hospital for treatment, and the doctors said they could fix him, but with every day Brewster got worse. Nolan’s uncle Tynan went to visit him and discovered that instead of fixing the ankle, the doctors had cut the foot off. Tynan threw a fit and tried to bring Brewster home, but Brewster stopped him. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m not coming home.”
It was the early afternoon, but Brewster’s eyes were red and unfocused, and he could smell whiskey on his breath. “You drinking?” Tynan was shocked and angry.
“You can get anything in here,” Brewster told him in a loud whisper. “Anything. Sometimes you don’t even have to pay for it.” His glance wandered away from Tynan’s face to the next bed, where a half-naked man lay drooling and twitching.
“Oh Lord.” Tynan turned on his heel and left.
Every time anyone from the family came to see Brewster, he told them the same thing. “Leave me alone. I an’t coming home.” With every visit, he was more shriveled, more distant. Always he was stoned or drunk.
“Where you getting the money, boy?” Tynan demanded.
“I got friends,” Brewster said with a grin. “I got friends.”
“Some kind of friends,” Tynan cursed, but there was nothing he could do. No one at the hospital would listen to his complaints.
The doctors swore each operation would be the last, but the gangrene came back and the leg came off in sections. When Maudy finally came to see him, the doctors threw up their hands and said there was nothing more they could do. She lifted the sheet and saw the eight-inch stump where Brewster’s leg had been.
“Oh, Brewster!” Maudy said, but he barely seemed to notice she was there. As Tynan had warned, he was drunk, not just drugged but whiskey-drunk in the middle of the day. “I’m not coming home,” he kept saying. “Not coming home ever again.”
“You’re dying,” Maudy told him, and finally his eyes focused on her.
“Yeah.” Brewster licked his lips and grinned. “Ah, Maudy,” he whispered. “You sure look good.”
“You look awful.”
“Yeah.” He glanced around briefly, as if to make sure no one was watching, and reached to catch her hand. “You got to help me,” he told her. “Maudy, please. Don’t let them bury me here. Take me home to Cayro. Don’t let them put me out under that lawn where sick men will walk on me when I’m dead.”
Brewster squeezed Maudy’s hand. He’s raving, she thought, but she could see the graveyard through his window. It was unfenced, with no headstones, just little markers set down in the grass. Men were walking there, heads lowered as if they were reading the markers, stepping casually from one to the next.
“All right,” Maudy promised.
Brewster’s fingers relaxed in hers. He would be dead before the week was out, and maybe he had been raving, but Maudy brought his body home and buried it in the cave country.
“You think he’s here?” Cissy looked at the slope of pines and dogwood.
“Maybe.” Nolan’s eyes were sad.
“Aunt Maudy said Brewster brought her out here whe
n they were first married, to show her the bats, but they got distracted and forgot to watch at sunset.” Nolan smiled. “It was about the only happy story she ever told me about Brewster. Sounded like she really enjoyed herself with him out here. Think it was his favorite place, and maybe hers for a while there.”
Cissy was looking back down into the pit. The cave was whistling hollowly, tongueless and inarticulate. A cave could not cry warning, but this one seemed to. She stared at the mouth of rock, rigid, eternally wide in its broken, dirt-lipped howl. It breathes, she thought. It breathes like Clint or an old woman with emphysema. She closed her eyes and listened as the sun dropped a little further down the sky.
“Yeah, Brewster sure loved this place,” Nolan said.
Cissy nodded. She could see it, that broken man falling in love with a hole in the ground. It made sense to her.
“It’s marvelous. It’s the best damn birthday I ever had.”
People go caving for no reason anyone can predict. Mountain climbing is more exhilarating. Skydiving offers a better view. Skiing, fencing, or even horseback riding provide just as good a workout. Caving is not a sport but a dare, more a trial than an excursion. A dark, deep, pitched hole is the perfect place to test the nerves, the muscles, the survival instincts, but the risk is awful, the terror primeval. From those first moments lying on her back in the loose shale of Paula’s Lost, Cissy knew she loved it as Brewster had, the dark and the safety, the risk and the unknown depths.
“Can we come back?” she asked. “Can we get some better lights and come back?”
Nolan saw the hunger and the fear in her expression. “Sure,” he told her. “Anytime you want.”
“Soon,” Cissy said. Her heart was racing, and there was a sugary feeling of excitement all through her insides. “Let’s come back soon.”
“All right. We’ll talk to my cousins and get some lights. We’ll come back whenever you want.” He forced himself not to frown. He was thinking about what his daddy had said about Brewster, the sad way he had talked about that boy who wasted his life. Should have known he was crazy, Mr. Reitower said, when he took to climbing around in that cave. It was one thing to throw parties, it was another to sit in a dark hole in the ground all by yourself. He was talking to Aunt Maudy, who nodded at him and spoke the words that stuck in Nolan’s mind.
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