Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “Who’s Dede seeing?” he asked when Cissy came by during his afternoon session on the porch the day after their latest trip to Atlanta. His whole body communicated frustration and nervous energy that he could not dissipate. The reed was barely inches from Nolan’s lower lip, his desire plain on his face. “She’s not still chasing that Tucker boy, is she?” He put his tongue out, deliberately threading the reed’s moistened fibers. He was trying to be casual.

  “Oh, Nolan.” The tune he had been playing was still sounding in Cissy’s head. Gratefully she shook herself back into the moment, the mundane world of thwarted desire and sexual obsession. Even musicians were subject to the laws of heartbreak. “Give it up. Christ, Dede an’t never gonna go out with you. Even if she wasn’t seeing Billy Tucker, she wouldn’t see you.”

  Nolan rubbed his lower lip with his right thumb. “I know, I know.” His eyes were unfocused, distant, his face without the hope of a smile. “I’m just asking.” He tilted the clarinet and looked down its length as if insight lay in the finish.

  It was no game. He was not pretending. His misery never abated. Every time Dede broke up with another boyfriend, Nolan’s heart caught fire again. He plied Cissy with questions, ran errands for Delia, and searched out gifts that he took by the convenience store—small things like fabric-covered hair ties or padded fingerless bicycle gloves that would protect Dede’s hands when she opened cases of eggs and butter or slit the tops of cartons of jerky.

  “You can’t help who you love,” Nolan told Cissy. He was talking about Brewster but thinking about himself. “Some people are lucky. They find the one for them the first time out. Some never find the right one. Daddy always said Brewster should have stayed married to Aunt Maudy, even if it was like he swore—that she wasn’t his true love. He said true love is rare and a good home life is as much as most can hope for. And then anyway, Aunt Maudy could have kept Brewster a little better focused. He developed sugar diabetes, you know, made it worse drinking. Screwed up his circulation, Daddy said. Almost suicide, if you think about it. Kind of thing didn’t have to happen. Just stupidity, really, and paying yourself no mind. Runs in the family, kind of.” His head dropped.

  “Evolution in action?” Cissy joked, but Nolan glared at her. You could never predict when he was going to get his feelings hurt, she thought. She looked at his fingers on the clarinet, poised delicately and with unfailing precision. Infinitely fragile, immensely strong, a force of nature in his profoundly human body.

  Even before she graduated from high school, Dede had trouble finding a job she could keep. After she got out of high school, her search for work became desperate and ceaseless. Her problem was only partly the limited number of jobs in Cayro. The real obstacles were temperament and aptitude. Most girls came out of Cayro High ready to leave town or work at the electronics firm that had opened in the new industrial park on the Marietta side of town. But Dede did not want to leave Cayro—she claimed that outside the city limits lay chaos and bad drugs—and she definitely did not want to pull a paycheck wiring guidance systems for missiles and pinning her hair back to do it.

  “The pay an’t that good anyway,” Dede complained. “Once you buy enough grass to keep yourself stoned while you’re working that line, you can’t be taking no nice vacations or buying a good car. And hell, I’d rather do my drugs for fun, not just to get myself through God’s own boring workday.” Delia nodded and hid a smile. God’s own boring workday was all most people could expect, after all.

  For a while Dede helped out at Benny Davis’s Cayro Dog Shop, grooming poodles and shih tzus and giving flea and tick treatments to dogs so big Benny no longer had the nerve to face them. It was irregular work and didn’t pay very well, but Benny let her come in when she wanted and didn’t care how she dressed.

  When a group of women brought a case against the Atlanta police department, Dede took an immediate interest in their struggle. The state announced open exams for deputy and traffic-control positions, and Dede tried to sign on for deputy sheriff. When she came in for the application forms, Emmet Tyler sat down on the edge of his desk and stared at her.

  “You want to be a deputy?” He was astonished. “As many times as you’ve almost wound up in jail?”

  Emmet Tyler had taken partial disability after he rolled his cruiser chasing a couple of drunk teenagers on the road to Little Mouth. His left arm was stiff, but he refused to let the doctors mess with him. Since the accident, he’d been working at the courthouse escorting prisoners and filing papers for the traffic judge. On the weekends he was supposed to rest and do his physical therapy, but mostly Emmet hung out near the courthouse or over at the café down from the Bee’s Bonnet.

  “Almost don’t count,” Dede said, “and traffic an’t no never mind. I’m as street-legal as anyone. I got a high school diploma. I got the right attitude.”

  “Girl, you an’t got the right attitude,” Emmet said quietly. He had learned to like Dede the hard way, tangling with her repeatedly since she was fourteen. He knew her temper and admired it, though he prayed never to run full into it in this lifetime. “What would you do if you had to arrest a friend, some boy you dated? Huh? How would you feel then?”

  “Some boys I’ve dated should be arrested.” Dede laughed at the idea. “Others, well, it would be like Judge Winkler when he excused himself from sitting at his cousin’s trial. Can’t everybody have some cases where they excuse themselves?” She was thoughtful, a little frown deepening the line between her eyebrows.

  Emmet pushed his hair back and took a deep breath. “Dede, honey, that number of cases might be more than you could handle.” He raised his palm when her face stiffened, as if to block the protest that was sure to come.

  “You’re smart,” Emmet said. “You are simply one of the sharpest girls I’ve ever known, and you have to see how hard it could get, walking friends of yours from court to jail, putting handcuffs on people you’ve known all your life.” His look held her, open to her anger but firm. “I’ve done it. I know.” His eyes flicked away. “I’ve lost people because of it. Lost people I’ve loved. I wouldn’t want to see that happen to you.”

  Dede gritted her teeth. She knew Emmet was thinking about Delia, who was friendly enough but now refused all his invitations to dinner or a movie. She never mentioned that Emmet had twice arrested Dede—once for speeding and once for possession of a tiny quantity of marijuana—but both of them knew that was why she stopped going out with him. “I can’t date a man put handcuffs on my child,” Delia told M.T. “I don’t care if she was drunk in the middle of the street.”

  Dede frowned again and scowled at Emmet, but when she left she did not take the application forms.

  As he watched her go, Emmet sighed heavily. He had tried not to take Delia’s rejection too hard, and to keep himself busy, but every time he thought about her his heart thudded so hard his throat seemed to close. He would, he knew, have given his soul to lie once more on Delia’s body, to thrust once more as hard as he could and then lie spent on her shoulder—even if it were the last act he was ever allowed. But she was miles away from him, too far to reach in this life. The friendship she gave him was all he would ever get, and he clung to it. He hadn’t asked her out in a long time, just found excuses to stop by and eat his lunch with her when he could. He worked all the hours he was allowed, went to Panama City when he needed a woman. Now and then he helped the park service boys out, posting a sign or two and telling stories the rangers hadn’t heard yet. Some blamed his skills as a storyteller for the fools who kept getting lost at Paula’s.

  “Sometimes you go down into the dark, and sometimes you don’t come back,” Emmet told the youngsters who asked him about the old parties. His tone of voice was bleak, and he nodded, as if his warning should settle the matter for any sane man. He never seemed to see how those boys grinned at each other. He had lost the memory of being young and crazy and eager to jump directly into the dark.

  “Thing is, I want a job driving, and that’s the
job I can’t get. But I’m a great driver. Maybe I could deliver something—something not too heavy. I an’t no fool.” Dede lifted her skinny arms and flapped her fingers, grinning at Cissy. “I know I couldn’t do sodas. No canned goods, no soft drinks. Could you see me handling cases of soup or dog food?”

  Cissy smiled at the notion. At her peak Dede got up to 117 pounds. Mostly she stayed well under that. Bad times, like those months she was alternating uppers and B12, she dropped below 100.

  “Skeletal,” Amanda told Delia. “The girl is skeletal.”

  Cissy agreed but did not say so. There was no use talking about. Dede to Amanda. Maybe Delia, but not Amanda, who spent a solid year hounding Delia to put Dede in the Christian Rehabilitation Center over near Savannah. There was a bad patch when it looked as if Delia was going to do it, but Dede must have caught scent of that. She shifted over to what she called her wholeness regimen, dropping Xanax, ginseng from Siberia, and chelated calcium, and bingeing on a diet of complex carbohydrates and fresh leafy vegetables. She pumped up fast and talked loudly about how satisfying it was to be clean for a change.

  Dede believed in matching her drugs with vitamins, as if good intentions neutralized wild ones, and sometimes Cissy convinced herself that she knew what she was doing. Except for smoking a little grass with Nolan and drinking a few beers after a cave trip, Cissy had no experience with drugs. She knew she couldn’t judge the effects.

  But Cissy did understand what Dede was talking about when she complained about the lack of job opportunity in Cayro. If you didn’t want to style hair with Delia or get line work out at Frito-Lay or the missile-wiring plant, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice, not for a girl with no family money. The last new businesses to be established in Cayro were the motorcycle repair shop near the Marietta highway and the Crafts & Stuff at the Stop ’n’ Go Mall. Both had failed.

  Dede’s abiding desire to steer a big truck around on narrow streets had been a constant since before she got her learner’s permit. Sexy, Dede thought being a driver was sexy—right down to the uniform shirts and pocket patches. Maybe she could deliver something like paper products or baked goods, she told Cissy.

  “Maybe. Angel food cake?” Cissy teased.

  Dede lost her temper when she found out that no paper products came in any truck she could drive. That kind of thing came into the Piggly Wiggly via huge semis, along with canned goods and giant bags of pet food. Even the baked goods came in on a big truck whose driver just laughed at Dede when she tried to talk to him.

  It was a bad summer. Dede holed up in her room doing Dilaudid and megadoses of vitamin C. Cissy found her stretched out on her bed one afternoon, where she talked for an hour about the beneficial effects of vitamin C, how regular it was keeping her. “Better than beer.” She lifted her head and giggled softly. “Thought you were Dan,” she whispered, naming the boy she had been dating the previous month, whom Cissy had not seen in weeks. “Thought you were Dan. That’s a boy needs some C.” Then she closed her eyes and drifted away. Cissy sat and watched her for a while, worrying over whether it was time to get Delia involved. In the end she decided to wait.

  For a while Dede was excited about long-haul driving and dated a couple of short-haul drivers as a way of sneaking up on the notion. One of them had his own truck, and Dede saw immediately that that was the way to go, though, as she told Cissy, it wasn’t likely she could borrow enough to get a truck. And who would trust her with their goods? She did locate a few women drivers, but most were part of a team, married to their partners or doing runs now and then just to keep things running smoothly.

  “Son of a bitch,” Dede cursed as her dreams of driving receded.

  One night she ran a long, complicated fantasy on Cissy. She was going to go down to Atlanta and find work driving a taxi, sleep with somebody or rent a tuxedo and get herself one of those modified hansom rigs at Underground Atlanta. She could cluck to a horse if she couldn’t baby an engine. Her eyes were glassy, and the skin around her nose looked pinched and gray. Cissy watched and worried.

  One early Thursday evening Amanda called the Bonnet to tell Delia there had been a shooting at the convenience store down from Nolan’s house. Two women were sitting under the dryers, big pink and blue curlers steaming under plastic covers.

  “What was it?” MT sounded frightened. “What was it?”

  “Somebody stupid said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

  Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a robbery. It was a boyfriend/ girlfriend thing, and there were drugs involved. Some boy too tanked to take the time to think, some girl too high to care what that boy thought, another boy too glazed to pay attention. Then there was a gun and some craziness no one was too sure about. Nobody could say how it got started, but the boy died and the girl was messed up, blood everywhere and half a finger gone. In the confusion someone went back and rifled the cash register—not, as far as the police could determine, any of the people involved in the shooting.

  Dede was sitting in Steph’s chair examining a newspaper in hopes of finding a company or an idea she hadn’t tried already. “I could have seen that coming,” she said, and got up and walked out the door. There was a new temporary manager putting shelves back up when Dede arrived at the store. The regular manager had quit as soon as the cops drove up. “I an’t working blood,” he had said. “No blood for me.”

  “I got an eye for trouble,” Dede told the new guy. He was holding a split box of ice cream toppings in his hands, small cans of butter-scotch and chocolate. He looked up at her blankly.

  “Very little people can do that I wouldn’t know how to figure,” Dede went on.

  The guy just stared.

  “I could be good.”

  “Good?”

  “This place, this job. This is something I know a little about.”

  “What? You used to hang out at a 7-Eleven till all hours?” He laughed and shoved a few more cans onto the shelf.

  “Well, yeah.” Dede was not belligerent. She was telling the honest truth. Her eyes swept the shelves, the glass storefront, the stand of newspapers and magazines with half the covers obscured by brown paper wrappers.

  “I could handle this.”

  The man put down the box and turned to her. “Girl,” he said, “you are tiny.” He seemed to want to be patient, but his tone was dismissive. “And don’t you know that somebody died here tonight? Somebody got shot.”

  “I an’t gonna get shot.” Dede looked him right in the eye. “I know how to handle myself, and there’s not too much that can stop me when I make up my mind. So, no, I an’t no two-hundred-pound stupid jock, but I can get things done. I could run this place like you cannot imagine.”

  The man was intrigued in spite of himself, but he didn’t know what to say. He tried to wave Dede away, but there was already a sign on the window and a stack of application forms behind the counter. When Dede insisted, he pulled out his manager’s book to see if he could say no. Nothing there helped him. There was no requirement for height or weight. There was an age requirement, but Dede met it—barely.

  She filled out the form and checked back twice to make sure he sent it in to the central office. Nothing would come of it, Delia warned, but all Dede said was “I can handle that job.”

  They put her on days to start, split days, the worst possible schedule. Early morning and early evening were the peak hours. The man who trained Dede didn’t think she would last a week.

  “We get some rude types in here,” he said.

  Dede smiled. “Uh-huh.”

  Delia worried, but Amanda was outraged. “Counter help! That what you want to be? Counter help?”

  “I can do this,” Dede told them both, refusing to be drawn into an argument. Her eyes were bright and clear. She was drinking black coffee and swallowing big iron pills.

  Rude boys, teenagers, almost legal twenty-year-olds with smudged identification cards and bad attitudes. Winos of both sexes. Angry mothers running in from carloads of shrieking
toddlers. No one scared Dede. She could size them up with a glance and predict what they were after. Beer and cigarettes, milk and white bread, peanut butter cookies or gallon containers of Rocky Road. False IDs or fast hands, Dede spotted them before they could become a problem.

  She knew the tricks because she had done more than her share of them. She knew what was possible and how to handle tired, hopeful children. She had a quip or a joke to deflect anger, or a ruthless glare when the little shits needed one. She even stopped the girl who had been palming quarters off the cardboard Cerebral Palsy poster by the ice cream freezer.

  “You don’t want to do that,” she said, and that was the end of it.

  Dede knew the game and she liked it. Maybe steering a big rig would have been better, but this was all right for the time being, she told Delia and Cissy. This was her place now, and it was going to be run right.

  It was six months before her superiors admitted what Cissy knew already. This little spit of a girl had talent, she had control. “She knows her stuff,” the supervisor told Delia. “She’s the best I’ve ever had, and who would have guessed, huh?”

  “I can do this,” Dede said. Her eyes shone with conviction, vitamin E, and beta-carotene.

  She could.

  Chapter 15

  After the expedition with the park ranger, Cissy spent two years collecting monographs on caves, finding only a few mentions of Paula’s Lost but three articles about Little Mouth, all written by competent amateur cavers pursuing expert status, good old boys with night eyes and no fear of close quarters. Caving is a nonlucrative occupation, a pastime for ex-jocks and the kind of intense skinny youths who can be seen doggedly swimming laps or racewalking while others pursue team sports. There are no medals for this hobby, no trophies but the regard of other experts. The monographs on cheap paper, hand-stapled or clipped together and only occasionally published in bound journals, were self-deprecating, matter-of-fact, and full of the kind of understated bombast that develops among a clandestine elite. What did you do this weekend? Crawled head-down through three miles of mud and gravel, mapped a passage where no one has ever been, and, oh yes, cracked a femur against a little old stalagmite. Cissy’s ambition was to write her own such account, to watch Delia or Dede as they discovered her secret life, the Cissy who went down into the dark fearless, competent, and only a little self-consciously proud.